St. John Lucas

“ Just as the work of a very young writer changes when, after imitating the whole tribe of modern poets, he discovers at last that he actually possesses an inner voice which says nothing resembling the words of these masters, but yet has a note of startling reality which seems, to his partial ear, to have escaped them utterly, so the poetry of Italy ceased to be an elegant experiment and became a vivid expression of deep feeling. ”

“ Lyric poetry during the first half of the eighteenth century is still dominated by the Arcadians; with Metastasio Italian reaches the climax of melodious utterance, and then dies away in music; the lyric is lost in the opera libretto. His dramas, in spite of all their melodious felicity of diction, really continue the worship of shadows inaugurated by the poets of the Seicento; their aim is to amuse, not to stir the deeper emotions of the audience; they end gently and happily, and their villains are far too mild to horrify even the heart of an Arcadian. ”

“ But the Canzoniere, which he thought quite inferior to his paralysing epic on the Second Punic War, is immortal because it is the first record of all the secret melancholy of a human soul—a soul full of wistful desires and subtle changefulness, with an exquisite feeling for beauty and a poignant sense of the fleeting nature of all fair things—a soul, indeed, possessing all the delicate sensitiveness which we are accustomed to regard as characteristic of modernity. ”

“ The Renaissance was no mere enthusiasm for coins and inscriptions; it was the reawakening of the curiosity of a world.
With this new enthusiasm came scepticism—a distrust of the Church which had darkened counsel for so long, clutching the key of knowledge as tightly as the keys of Heaven and Hell; an ironical toleration of the Popes who were so often masters of all dubious arts. ”

“ Lorenzo and Politian are sophisticated poets, perhaps, and their spirit, when they are themselves and not disciples of Petrarch, is the spirit of Boccaccio—of slightly ironical but quite good-natured realism; but though we may search their poetry in vain for high passion and great emotion, at its best it has a spontaneous gaiety, a keen delight in the comeliness of life and the earth, and, with Politian especially, an unerring tact in expression ”

“ The blood lust, the loves and hates, the arid pedantry, the grim dogma of damnation and salvation, the wild prejudices of a time when men were masters of logic but seldom reasonable, and saints were fiercer than sinners, and Christ's Vicars on Earth went armed in complete steel—all this weltering life is enshrined for ever in the Divine Comedy by one who often judged his age and his fellows, as we may think now, harshly, pedantically, sometimes even cruelly, but who had keener vision and felt more deeply than any one since the great Greek dramatists, and lends us his heart and his eyes. ”

“ Au fond de l'inconnu découvrir le nouveau;
the Classicists were retrogressive in their idea of imposing hard and fast rules on art, progressive in their attempt to enrich and to dignify a language which had been enervated by a century and a half in the air of Arcadia. Eventually the furious combatants were united in a common enthusiasm for the heroic realities of Italy's redemption; the pedants became patriots, and the feudal tyrants beloved of romance were no longer mere lay figures in armour, but incarnate Austria, most thinly disguised. ”

“ The capture of Constantinople by the Turks sent a crowd of Greek scholars to Italy, and the ‘uneasy memories’, in Symonds’ phrase, of Greece and Rome which had haunted the Middle Ages became marvellous reality. The world ceased to be a sombre antechamber of Heaven or Hell; man was no longer merely one of God's silly sheep, but an individual heir of ages of culture, free of will, aroused at last from the long nightmare of priestly or tyrannical authority ”

“ Yet it is well to remember that we may find one, at any rate, of the many keys which 'unlock the heart' of a great poet hidden away amid even the rubbish and lumber left by his predecessors—that a knowledge of the intellectual and artistic tendencies of his age may give us a fuller insight into his own mental processes, enabling us to distinguish between that which is vital in his work and that which is excrescent, and showing us exactly where he broke free from old conventions and became unique. ”

“ The accession of Leo X to the kingdom which had been founded for him by Cesare Borgia and Julius II marks the beginning of an epoch when Italy seems to spend the whole store of her Renaissance capital in a few years; painting reaches its climax in Michelangelo and Raphael; Bembo and Sadoleto are the high priests of the last refinement in scholarship; the Papal Court becomes the home of all elegance and luxury. Machiavelli in Florence, Ariosto and Tasso in Ferrara, are the supreme figures amid the innumerable writers of the Cinquecento.
The lyric poetry of the epoch is, however, disappointing. ”

“ The fond resuscitation of the golden age—the idyllic existence of song and simplicity—is the natural solace of cultivated minds condemned to exist in a world of strife or tyranny; and it was to this enchanted precinct that the poets of Italy fled for refuge in the gloomy closing years of the Cinquecento. ”

“ In the Nencia di Barberino, that most delightful of Quattrocento idylls, the ardours of the rustic lover are revealed to us in his own language, yet seen through the eyes, half ironical, half sympathetic, of the highly cultured citizen of Florence, giving us the first really artistic example of that sense of the burlesque which was afterwards to become so important a factor in Italian poetry. ”

“ In the serenity, the absence of all affectation, of ‘words for words’ sake’, that are the distinctive qualities of his verse, Parini bears a certain resemblance to Wordsworth. Like the English poet, he has a wide love of nature and humanity, his mind is essentially meditative, and his inspiration is certainly the fruit of emotion remembered in tranquillity. ”

“ Napoleon, the god from whom the great miracle of national liberty was expected, has sold Venice to the Austrians; freedom, friendship, love, and life are empty dreams; suicide is the only solution of a hideous tangle of misery. ”

“ In this epoch of unreality and convention the intellectual progress of Italy seems to have halted completely—e pur si muove. The spiritual energy which was denied by force of circumstances to art and letters becomes intense in the philosopher, the scientist, and the historian—in Bruno and Campanella, in Galileo, in Vico and Sarpi—lonely and persecuted figures who are the pioneers of the reaction against all the hideous errors that arise from confused thought, wilfully obscured knowledge, and tyranny masquerading as religion. ”

“ In the midst of a civilization that was content to feed on shams and lies and to stop its ears to the voice of reality they follow the forgotten feet of truth—the truth that is mighty and must prevail at last—probing the secrets of the infinite universe, exploring the infinite labyrinths of the human mind and revealing the God within it. ”

“ The laborious Italian elegance is that of an old and tired person who poses painfully as young; it is wily, not exuberant, and the sensual note that is the chief characteristic of its material has no virile quality. The patriotic enthusiasm that finds its voice in art was dead in Italy; she was already, in Metternich's grim phrase, nothing but a geographical expression. Religious ardour was equally lacking; the base Jesuit sentimentalism spread from the pulpit to the academies; Gesù Bambino was the patron of the Arcadians ”

“ Whilst Dante follows the 'comedy' of the soul's progress towards heavenly wisdom from the selva oscura of ignorance and sensuality, he does not attempt to analyse the actual life of the soul, with its phantom fears and inexplicable yearnings—all that intricate history which every one of us is compiling day by day. Man, for him, is an individual only in the external sense ”

“ Optimists, however, who believe that the art will survive even the rivalry of science and the popular novel, will look with confidence towards Italy—the most beautiful and in a sense the youngest of our neighbours, but one which is dowered with the most ancient and glorious tradition. ”

“ Chiabrera imitated Pindar, the most dangerous of literary divinities, but his pompous odes to successful athletes and other heroes have no real dignity; they are fluent, but quite frigid and colourless. Testi, who was praised so highly by Leopardi, contrives occasionally—the ruscelletto orgoglioso is the best example of his success—to achieve rhetorical vigour, but for the most part his poems are damned by their verbose exuberance, their tortured circumlocutions, their utter lack of simplicity and a sense of the real. ”

“ His minor poems are harmonious expressions of tranquil and beautiful thought, not vivid revelations of a mood; the great personality that is involuntarily self-revealed in the Commedia is far less intense in the Canzoni; for the deep analysis of the mystery of the solitary soul and the noble expression of that analysis we must turn to the poet who stands first in the dawn of the Renaissance—to Petrarch. ”

“ The singers of this popular poetry are not chained in the vicious circle of courtly mannerisms: the whole of life—family, municipal, national—is their province; they are satiric, amorous, obscene, patriotic, burlesque and elegiac; most important of all, they are completely spontaneous. ”

“ His lyric poems are the simple and exactly appropriate expression of his own sensations; he is content to abjure all the tropes and flourishes of the languishing Arcadia and to be completely individual. The Arcadians, like the Matthew Arnold of a famous caricature, were never wholly serious; Parini is always quietly in earnest, and his poetry, with its complete freedom from strained and pompous diction and foolish conceits, is a perfect and dignified protest against the moribund dynasty of the verbose. ”

“ With Alfieri the ironical spirit develops into savage hatred, so that his voice becomes harsh or shrill, and he seems to threaten the tyrants and fools of his world with wild and passionate gestures. He, too, is intensely in earnest about life, about himself—his pride in his own attitude of Prometheus defying the Zeus of despotism is akin to that of Byron. ”

“ The evolutionary view of literature has of late been advanced to painful extremes, for certainly nothing can be drearier than to regard any great work of art as the punctual flower on a particular branch of a vast genealogical tree. ”

“ The union of the Classic and Romantic elements is continued in Carducci, the last great poet of the nineteenth century, whose profound knowledge of his country's literature has made every lover of Italy his debtor. He, at any rate, is a shining example of the fact that it is possible to be a professor without becoming a pedant or ceasing to be a poet ”

“ Dante expresses his time because he has the vision of genius; every aspect of the Middle Ages is of burning interest to him, and he is able to give his idea complete expression in the 'fair new style' which was partially discovered by his almost forgotten forerunners. ”

“ Italian poetry was not born in Rome or Paris or Toulouse, and the development of lyrical art in the thirteenth century was not the sudden cry of a voice which, like the voice of Virgil in Hell, through long silence had grown hoarse. All Italians sing—more or less melodiously—and there was singing in Italy long before the days of Frederick II, but the words ot the songs were not written down; they come to us as fragments quoted by Dante, by Villani, by the religious chroniclers. ”

“ After all, the bias of a poet's mind towards joy or sorrow ultimately matters very little; the important thing is the quality, not the kind, of his poetic emotion; the one thing needful is that he should feel deeply and express his feelings perfectly. ”

“ THE earliest Italian poetry which has come down to us was written in Sicily during the brief but extremely important epoch of culture which was inaugurated by the Emperor Frederick II, himself a poet and an enthusiastic patron of all fine art. ”

“ He has that first necessity of the satirist, the gift of personal detachment, the capacity of keeping his temper, which Alfieri often lacked; he can be at once completely serious and gaily humorous; he sees life steadily, and his hatred of the foreign tyrants never blinds him to certain grave defects in his own countrymen. ”

“ Born at Recanati (south of Ancona) ; educated at home, owing to the prejudices of a too conservative father. An invalid throughout his life, he impaired a weak constitution by assiduous overwork. He escaped from his depressing native place in 1822 and went to Rome, where he met Niebuhr and Bunsen, who appreciated his genius, but he was obliged to return to Recanati. He went to Florence on several occasions, and in 1833 he was able to leave his home finally. Died at Naples in 1837. The greatest modern poet of Italy, and an accomplished scholar and philologist. ”

“ The gregarious instinct that is usually an attribute of feeble natures led them to form various cliques and academies—hotbeds of antitheses, strained metaphors, and mutual admiration, where might be seen grave gentlemen in full-bottomed wigs masquerading as Daphnis and Thyrsis ”

“ Manzoni's patriotism is sincere, but so calm that it almost seems cautious, and fiery confidence in man as an individual is replaced in him by patient trust in the power which produces, controls, and finally abolishes that individual when its purpose is accomplished. ”