John Addington Symonds

“ Orpheus was the proper hero of Renaissance Italy—the civilizer of a barbarous world by art and poetry, the lover of beauty, who dared to invade Hell and moved the iron heart of Pluto with a song. Long before the composition of Orfeo, Boccaccio had presented the same conception of society humanized by culture in his Ninfale Fiesolano. This was the ideal of the Renaissance; and, what is more, it accurately symbolized the part played by Italy after the dissolution of the middle ages. In the myth of Orpheus the humanism of the Revival became conscious of itself. ”

“ Supreme in Tuscany, fearing no internal feuds, strong in their militia of thirty thousand burghers to repel a rival State, the Florentines had reached the climax of political prosperity. Not as yet had arisen that little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, above Pistoja, which was destined to plunge them into the strife of Blacks and Whites. During that interval of windless calm, in that fair city, where the viol and the lute were never silent through spring-tide and summer, the star of Italian poetry, that "crowning glory of unblemished wealth," went up and filled the heavens with light. ”

“ It is enough for the young Dante to meet Beatrice, to pass her among her maidens in the city-ways, to receive her salute, to admire her moving through the many-colored crowd, to meditate upon her apparition, as of one of God's angels, in the solitude of his chamber. She is a dream, a vision. But it is the dream of his existence, the vision that unfolds for him the universe—more actual, more steeped in emotion, more stimulative of sublime aspiration and virile purpose than many loves which find fruition in long years of intercourse. We feel that the man's true self has been revealed to him ”

“ No one could have been better fitted for the task. Unlike Alberti, Lorenzo was a Florentine of the Florentines, Tuscan to the backbone, imbued with the spirit of his city, a passionate lover of her customs and pastimes, a complete master of her vernacular. His education, though it fitted him for Platonic discussions with Ficino and rendered him an amateur of humanistic culture, had failed to make a pedant of him. Much as he appreciated the classics, he preferred his Tuscan poets; and what he learned at school, he brought to bear upon the study of the native literature. ”

“ When Italian poetry deserted Palermo for the banks of the Arno, it exchanged the Court for the people; the subtleties of decadent chivalry for the genuine impulses of a free community; the pettiness of culture for the humanities of a public conscious of high destinies and educated in a masculine political arena. Here the grand qualities of the Italian genius found an open field. Literature, abandoning imitative elegance, expressed the feelings, thoughts, and aspirations of a breed second to none in Europe for acuteness of intellect, intensity of emotion, and greatness of purpose. ”

“ He is not the precursor but the inaugurator of the era. The smile which plays around his mouth became, though changeful in expression, fixed upon the lips of his posterity—genial in Ariosto, gracious in Poliziano, mischievous in Pulci, dubious in Lorenzo de' Medici, sardonic in Aretino, bitter in Folengo, toned to tragic irony in Machiavelli, impudent in Berni, joyous in Boiardo, sensual in Bandello—assuming every shade of character, Protean, indescribable, until at last it fades from Tasso's brow, when Italy has ceased to laugh except in secret. ”

“ The Latin Camœnæ have neither in ancient nor in modern years evoked the forms of mythic fable from that landscape. Far less is there the touch of Celtic or Teutonic inspiration—the light that never was on sea or land. The nightingales of Sorrento or Nettuno in no poet's vision have
Down the hillsides between Lucca and Pistoja, where the cypresses stand in rows and olives cast their shadows on the gray tilled soil, no lover has dreamed he met Queen Guinevere in spring riding through flowers with Lancelot. ”

“ It might have happened in Rome or Florence or Perugia. Magdalen, the lady of noble blood but famous with ill-fame, fair of person and of heaven-bright countenance, who dresses splendidly and lives with many lovers, spending her days in the pleasure of rich banquets and perfumed baths, delighting her heart with the music of lyres and flutes and the voices of young men, appears before us with a reality that proves how deep a hold upon the poet's fancy her picturesque tale had taken. Martha, her good but commonplace sister, forms a foil to the more impassioned and radiant figure of Magdalen. ”

“ The arts and scholarship, which divide the empire of his soul with beauty, have no less attraction of romance than love itself. Nor are they separated in his mind from nature. Nature and antiquity, knowledge and desire, the reverence for abstract beauty and the instincts of a lover are fused in one enthusiasm. Thus Francesco Colonna makes us understand how Italy used both art and erudition as instruments in the liberation of human energies. For the thinkers and actors of that period, antiquity and the plastic arts were aids to the recovery of a paradise from which man had been exiled. ”

“ Only let him be, and give him enough to live upon, and he will trouble no man, dispute no pretender's claims, raise no inconvenient questions of right and wrong, inflame the world with no far-reaching thoughts, but gild the refined gold of his purest phrases and paint the lilies of his loveliest thoughts in placid ease. Italy has grown old, and Ariosto is the genius of a tired, world-weary, disillusioned age. What is there worth a struggle? At the same time he preserves his independence as a private gentleman. He passes free judgment upon society ”

“ Such then was the joyous living, painted with colors of the fancy by a Tuscan poet, and realized in-58- Florence at the close of that eventful century which placed the city under Guelf rule, in the plenitude of peace, equality, and wealth by sea and land. Distinctions of class had been obliterated. The whole population enjoyed equal rights and equal laws. No man was idle; and though the simplicity of the past, praised by Dante and Villani, was yielding to luxury, still the pleasure-seekers were controlled by that fine taste which made the Florentines a race of artists. ”

“ Therefore Dante found himself at liberty to mingle satire with the hymns of angels; to seek illustrations from vulgar life no less than from nature in her sublimest moods; to delineate the horrible, the painful, the grotesque, and the improbable with the same sincerity as the beautiful, the charming, and the familiar. His dramatic faculty was exercised on themes so varied that to classify them is impossible—on the pathos of Francesca and the terror of Ugolino; the skirmish of the fiends in Malebolge and the meeting of Statius with Virgil; the pride of Farinata and the penitence of Manfred ”

“ Dante loved Beatrice, though she became for him an allegory. The splendid vision of her beauty and goodness attended him through life, assuming the guidance of his soul in all its stages. Difficult as it may be to comprehend this blending of the real and transcendental, we must grasp it if we desire to penetrate the spirit of the fourteenth century in Italy.
The human heart remains unchanged. No metaphysical sophistication, no allegory, no scholastic mysticism, can destroy the spontaneity of instinct in a man who loves, or cloud a poet's vision. ”

“ The Italian genius lacked a something of imaginative potency possessed in overflowing measure by the Northern nations. It required the stimulus of satire, the infusion of idyllic sentiment, the consciousness of art, to raise the romantic epic to the height it reached in Ariosto. Then, and not till then, when the matter of the legend had become the sport of the æsthetic sense, were the inexhaustible riches of Italian fancy, dealing delicately and humorously with a subject which could no longer be apprehended seriously, revealed to the world in a masterpiece of beauty. ”

“ All the defined idealism, the sweetness and the purity of Tuscan portraiture are in these stanzas. Simonetta does not pass by with a salutation in a mist of spiritual glory like Beatrice. She is surrounded with no flames of sensual desire like the Griselda of Boccaccio. She sits for her portrait in a tranquil light, or moves across the canvas with the dignity of a great lady:
It was a rare and fugitive moment in the history of art when Poliziano could paint La Simonetta in these verses, and Lippo Lippi showed her likeness on cathedral walls of Prato. ”

“ He wavers between the psychological realism of romance and the philosophical idealism of allegory. Polia is both too much and too little of a woman. At one time her personality seems as distinct as that of any heroine of fiction; at another we lose sight of her in the mist of symbolism. Granting, again, that she is a metaphor, she lends herself to more than one conception. She is both an emblem of passion, sanctified by nature, and liberated from the bondage of asceticism, and also an emblem of ideal beauty, recovered from the past, and worshiped by a scholar-artist. ”

“ It is, indeed, noteworthy how many of the greatest Italians—Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Alberti, Lionardo, Tasso: men who powerfully helped to give the nation intellectual coherence—were wanderers. They sought their home and saw their spiritual patria in no one abiding-place. [217] Thus, amid the political distractions of the Italian people, rose that ideal of unity to which Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Ferrara contributed, but which owned no metropolis. Florence remained to the last the brain of Italy. ”

“ The popular poetry of the quattrocento is still more interesting than its prose. No period of Italian history was probably more fruitful of songs poured forth from the very heart of the people, on the fields and in the city. The music of these lyrics still lingers about the Tuscan highlands and the shores of Sicily, where much that now passes for original composition is but the echo of most ancient melody stored in the retentive memory of peasants. ”

“ To an unprejudiced student of Italian arts and letters nothing seems more clearly proved than the fact that a certain powerful objective quality—call it realism, call it sensuousness—determines their most genuine productions, sinking to grossness, ascending to sublimity, combining with religious feeling in the fine arts, blending with the definiteness of classic style, but never absent. It is this objectivity, realism, sensuousness, which constitutes the strength of the Italians, and assigns the limitations of their faculty. ”

“ Poliziano incarnated the spirit of his age, and gave the public what satisfied their sense of fitness. The three chief enthusiasms of the fifteenth century—for classical literature, for artistic beauty, and for nature tranquilly enjoyed—were so fused and harmonized within the poet's soul as to produce a style of unmistakable originality and charming ease. Poliziano felt the delights of the country with serene idyllic rapture, not at second hand through the ancients, but with the voluptuous enjoyment of the Florentine who loved his villa. ”

“ The continuous experience of this living person who is at one and the same time a figure of each and every soul that ever breathed, and also the real Dante Alighieri, exile from Florence without blame, sustains as on one thread the medley of successive motives which else might lack poetic unity, gives life to a scheme which else might be too abstract. Expanding to embrace the universe, contracting to a point within one breast, the Commedia combines the general and the particular in an individual commensurate with man. ”

“ In Ferrara, therefore, more than in Florence and Venice, those cities of financiers and traders, could the romance of chivalry be seriously treated by a poet who admired the knightly virtues, and looked back upon the days of Arthur and of Roland as a golden age of honor, far removed but real. While the humanists of Florence indulged their fancy with dreams of Virgil's Saturnian reign, the baron of Ferrara refashioned a visionary world from the wrecks of old romance. ”

“ It is the same ideal as Alberti's. From this background of the modest rural life emerge three splendid visions—the Golden Age, when all was plenitude and peace; Orpheus of the dulcet lyre, evoking harmony from discord in man's jarring life; and Venus rising from the waves to bless the world with beauty felt through art. Such was the programme of human life sketched by the representative mind of his century, in an age when the Italians were summoned to do battle with France, Germany and Spain invasive of their borders. ”

“ Instead of the young contadino willing to mortgage Paradise for his dama, worshiping her with body, will and soul, compelling the morning and the evening star and the lilies of the field and the bells that swing their notes of warning over Rome, to serve the bidding of his passion, we have the scholar-courtier, who touches love with the finger-tips for pastime, and who imitates the gold of the heart with baser metal of fine rhetoric. ”

“ On the walls of church or oratory the sweetness and languor of emotion became as dignified in beauty as the melodies of Pergolese, and its fervor touched at times the sublimity of tragic passion. Not words but plastic forms were ever the noblest vehicle of Italian feeling. Yet each kind of art may be profitably used to illustrate the other, and the simple phrases of the Rappresentazioni are often the best comments on finished works of painting. ”

“ The bourgeois effaces the knight; the Italian of the Renaissance has broken the leading strings of mystical romance. This vision, composed in terza rima, was assuredly not meant to travesty Dante. Still it would be difficult to imagine a more complete inversion of the Dantesque point of view, a more deliberate substitution of an Earthly Paradise for the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy. It is as though Boccaccio, the representative of the new age, in all the fullness of his sensuous naïveté, appealed to the poets of chivalry, and said: "See here how all your fancies find their end in nature!" ”

“ Like the Spanish legend of the Cid, or the climax of the Niebelungenlied, this Song of Roland, in dignity and strength of style, in tragic heroism and passionate simplicity, is worthy to be ranked with a Canto of the Iliad. Like all medieval romantic poetry, it is but a fragment—the portion of a cycle never wrought by intervention of a Homer into epical completeness. But its superiority over Turpin's Chronicle in all the qualities that could inspire a singer is immeasurable. ”

“ This deprived Italian art of that sublimity which needs a grain of the grotesque for its perfection, a touch of the uncouth for its accomplishment. The instinct of poets and artists alike induced them to bring mystery within the sphere of definition, to limit the marvelous by reducing it to actual conditions, and to impoverish the terrible by measuring its boundaries. But since every defect has its corresponding quality, this same instinct secured for the modern age a world of immaculate loveliness in art and undimmed joyousness in poetry. ”