Francis Henry Cliffe

“ Still, it cannot be denied that Machiavelli is anything but a sympathetic figure. We admire the keenness of his intellect as we admire the keenness of a sharp-edged sword; but where is the love of humanity, the enthusiasm for great ideals, the indignation of a noble mind at the iniquities of an evil age? Wonderful is the penetration of his remarks; unrivalled his insight; above praise the clearness and precision of his thoughts. No historian has ever surpassed him in unrolling a panorama of past events. No politician has ever laid down more sagacious rules for attaining an object in view. ”

“ On the whole it would be harsh to deny that he has done justice to his subject, and in one respect he deserves the highest praise: he imparts a human interest and an air of reality to his characters that cannot be too highly extolled. Ariosto often treats his characters merely as puppets, and is himself the first to laugh at them. Very different is the attitude of Tasso towards his creations. He believes in them with unshaken sincerity, and he loves them because he believes in them. Erminia, Sophronia, Armida, Rinaldo, Goffredo, Tancredi, all stand before us in the life, moving and breathing. ”

“ His Autobiography gives us a vivid picture of the Italy of the Eighteenth Century, of its torpor and frivolity. He reveals himself with a complete absence of reserve, and his Life is the only work in which he gives us vivid descriptions, all his other productions being rather colourless from the lack of descriptions.
Want of colour is, indeed, the great defect of his poetry, as well as of his prose. He had little eye for the beauties of Nature, and less for the beauties of Art. He has nothing of the sweetness of Metastasio; he has none of the exquisite details of Parini. ”

“ The melody of his sonnets and the splendour of his odes are unrivalled in the literature of his country, nor did any Italian lyrist rise to an equal height until in the Nineteenth Century Leopardi combined inspiration no less ardent with a style more natural, simple and direct. Petrarch is one of those poets who present nothing to their readers in a sharp and graphic style, but everything involved in a rich haze of trope and metaphor. From this tendency, it cannot be denied, he becomes occasionally artificial and forced, but he is far more frequently soul-stirring and magnificent. ”

“ That a solitary city should produce brave and distinguished men, and even, aided by wealth and courage, establish settlements in remote countries, is not wonderful; Carthage and Tyre did so at an earlier period, Venice and Genoa did so in times nearer the present; but that a solitary city should play a part reserved apparently only for a great nation, should draw to itself, as in a magic circle, all Italy, should conquer Gaul, Greece, Africa, Spain, Britain, Asia Minor, and even threaten Persia and India, is indeed marvellous. ”

“ Leopardi had every characteristic of a great lyric poet. If his pessimism is sometimes too pronounced for many readers, it must be admitted that the evils of life are sufficiently numerous to justify his elegies; and he atones for any excess of gloom by the most exquisite pictures of nature and of love. The world appears more beautiful, though more terribly and darkly beautiful, in his poems than in reality. He has a rare power of musical diction which delights the ear even in his most melancholy passages. ”

“ Turning from the man to his works, we find both his prose and his poetry characterized by a noble spirit of repose. There is nothing stormy or angry in his writings, for there was nothing to disturb or to embitter his mind. He resemble Goethe in the cloudless serenity of his intellect, though he may not equal him in the rarer attributes of genius. It was probably this very repose that militated against his success as a dramatist, for if they did not present so faithful a picture of an historical epoch, his two tragedies would hardly deserve the attention they received. ”

“ In Italy, as elsewhere, the extreme popularity of the novel has overshadowed every other branch of literature. To enumerate the various authors and their works would be like counting the sands of [Pg 282] the sea-shore and the stars of the Heavens, suffice it to observe that everywhere skill and ingenuity are manifest, and if some authors become repulsive from excess of realism, others, and those the most recent, have, in emulation of Gabriele d'Annunzio, thrown over their realism the garb of fancy and imagination, thus presenting a happy augury for the future. ”

“ There is nothing low, nothing vile, in his works. He bids us ascend, not grovel. Every line in his Tragedies was written with the desire of inspiring freedom and patriotism. He hated oppression and he loved justice, and for that he deserves honour and glory, and for that his Tragedies will ever hold their own in the annals of literature, even though their creator does not give us characters as human and varied as those of Shakespeare, or compositions as perfect and splendid as those of Sophocles. ”

“ Unhappily, the horrors and crimes of the French Revolution rudely dispelled these pleasing visions and produced a reaction, the effects of which threw back the progress of humanity for many generations. It is heart-breaking to think how different the development of Europe might have been, had the extreme section of the French Republicans been kept in subordination and had Roland guided the destinies of France instead of Robespierre.
The conquests of Napoleon completed what the Reign of Terror had begun. Old abuses were swept away, but only to make way for tyranny more hopeless and relentless. ”

“ Nor was it only as a man of science that he claimed the admiration of the world. As a writer, he stands foremost in his age. His prose is clear, unaffected, graceful, and occasionally eloquent and impressive. His scientific treatises are models of lucidity. He himself, when praised for that quality, attributed it in a large measure to his constant perusal of the works of Ariosto. Clearness, indeed, is the especial merit of that great poet. In his youth he wrote an essay to prove the superiority of Ariosto to Tasso. He said Tasso gave us words, and Ariosto, realities. ”

“ Precocious as he was in the manifestation of brilliant genius, his father was anxious that such powers should be cultivated to the utmost, and Torquato was sent to study law at Padua. But the law was little to his taste. His Rinaldo procured him immense renown, and he found it more agreeable to bask in the sunshine of the brilliant society that courted him in the dawn of his celebrity, than to spend laborious hours in the [Pg 77] pursuit of a dry and distasteful science. No poet at so early an age ever had so brilliant a prospect of renown and fortune before him. ”

“ In this History of Italian Literature I have endeavoured, to the best of my ability, to trace its progress and development. That it has progressed, cannot, I think, be denied. Poetry has freed itself from conventionality. Prose has given birth to works which former ages could not even have conceived. ”

“ Only one nation, though politically enslaved, remained intellectually free. Greece had produced poets so sublime, philosophers so profound, historians so brilliant, that even in the darkest hour of degradation, even when Memmius was despoiling Corinth of the works of the greatest of statuaries, even when Sulla was slaughtering the helpless inhabitants of Athens, she had the satisfaction of seeing the master minds of Rome coming as humble disciples to the sources of art and wisdom that took their origin only on her soil. ”

“ Probably the most eminent man of letters of the last ten years of the Seventeenth Century was Crescimbeni, the historian of Italian poetry, and the founder of the Arcadian Academy, still flourishing in Rome. He was a writer of great talent and judgment, and he was more alive than his contemporaries to the evils resulting from the exaggerated metaphors and wild hyperboles introduced by the followers of Marino. ”

“ You will see that in all Italy, and I may say in all Europe, no other person of my rank and even younger than I am, and perhaps with intellectual gifts inferior to mine, could be found who would show one-half of the circumspection, abstinence from all the pleasures of youth, obedience and submission to his parents that I have shown. However poor your opinion may be of the few talents that Heaven has bestowed upon me, you cannot altogether refuse to credit the many estimable and famous men who have passed the judgement upon me which you know and which it is not for me to repeat. ”

“ Vincenzo Gonzaga took him to Mantua, where he passed the time immediately following his release. But the re-action, after so long a period of wretchedness, was too trying for his enfeebled frame. He forsook the brilliant circles of Mantua for a quieter retreat at Bergamo with some of his relatives. Here he finished his tragedy of Torrismondo, begun many years previously, but thrown aside, at first because he was engaged on the arduous task of his great epic, and then because his own life drifted into a tragedy far transcending the mimic sorrows of the stage. ”

“ This is partly to be-accounted for by their search for ingenious conceits, which prevents them from being as flowing and natural as the contemporaries of Ariosto and Tasso. Their style, too, is more cumbrous. They are fonder of long and complicated periods than the poets of the Sixteenth Century. But they have many compensating qualities. Their very fault of being too artificial in thought and imagery argues the possession of no little imagination and fertility. A man cannot pervert into strange and fantastic forms his thoughts and conceptions without being at considerable pains to do so. ”

“ The Pastor Fido is a work of much skill and ingenuity; but it is tainted with that fondness for quibbles and conceits which disfigures so much of the literature of the Seventeenth Century, not only in Italy, but also in other countries. If Italy had her Marino, Spain had her Gongora, France her Benserade, and England her Lyly, Donne, and Cowley. It is curious to remark how a literary fashion spreads from one country to another, and in that age of scanty travel and difficult communication, it is doubly curious. ”

“ Leo X had underrated the importance of the Reformation, but his successors made up for the error by exercising unceasing vigilance over their spiritual subjects. The only rising in favour of freedom was that of Masaniello in Naples, which was rather a riot than a rebellion. Still, some great minds pined for happier things, and the finest flashes of poetry in the Century were kindled by the fire of patriotism.
It has always been the policy of despots to supply their subjects with plenty of amusements. ”

“ There is a peculiar fitness in the circumstance that a poet, so singled out for misfortune, was not destined to wear the wreath of a conqueror. Peaceful after so much agitation, calm after such bitter resentment, he sank to rest in that secluded monastery, and for thirteen years he lay in the Church adjoining the quiet cloisters without a stone to mark his resting-place, until Cardinal Bonifazio Bevilacqua raised a noble monument to his memory, which may still be seen by the visitor who wends his way to Sant' Onofrio to pay the tribute of a sigh to so much glory linked to so much misfortune. ”

“ The poet sometimes has an unfortunate tendency only to hint at the histories of the spirits he meets, so that we are indebted to his commentators rather than to himself for stories worthy to be chronicled in immortal verse. His style is not always free from coarseness on the one hand, and from obscurity on the other. But in so noble an achievement it would be mean to dwell on occasional blemishes, instead of being grateful to the poet who has presented us with a work, perhaps [Pg 19] in many respects, the noblest production of the human mind. ”

“ In all these works, lyric, epic, and dramatic, Tasso's style, though sweet and flowing in the earlier productions, is strangely devoid of originality, and, therefore, of colour; and no writer was more deeply imbued with the conventional phraseology of the poetry of his age. Thought and style are alike devoid of those vivid touches that command admiration and ensure immortality. We are left under the impression that the poet is not fixing all his powers of mind on his verse, and [Pg 96] that his attention is largely engaged elsewhere. ”

“ Cardinal Bembo was a writer fastidiously elegant. He is reported to have possessed forty portfolios, in the first of which he put the first draft of his works; in the second, the second; and so on until the fortieth revision reached the fortieth receptacle, after which alone would he suffer the work to see the light. His productions are such as might be expected from a man so minutely laborious. He is more intent upon words than upon realities. His poetry is modelled on Petrarch, his prose on Boccaccio. ”

“ He is often conventional and turgid, sometimes heavy and awkward. He has not Chiabrera's technical skill, nor has he the vivacity of lighter poets. Hallam complained of a want of sunshine in his verse, and in truth his elegies are occasionally doleful where they ought to be tragic. The man seems to have been greater than his works; but when a chord of his lyre touches his heart, he breaks forth into song so noble and impassioned that he fully deserves to be acclaimed the greatest Italian poet in the Seventeenth Century. ”