John Addington Symonds

“ Bibbiena's Calandra is a farce, obscene but not malignant. Ariosto's comedies are studies of society from the standpoint of the middle class. If he is too indulgent to human frailty, too tolerant of vice, we never miss in him the wisdom of a genial observer. Machiavelli's Mandragola casts the dry light of the intellect on an abyss of evil. Nothing but the brilliance of the poet's wit reconciles us to his revelation of perversity. Aretino, by the animation of his sketches, by his prurient delight in what is vile, makes us comprehend that even the Mandragola was possible. ”

“ There was no national tragedy; therefore there could be no great comedy. The best work of the age, typified by Ariosto's epic, was so steeped in irony that it offered no vantage-ground for humorous counterpoise. There was nothing left but to exaggerate its salient qualities, and to caricature its form. Such exaggeration was burlesque; such caricature was parody. In like manner, satire found no adequate sphere. The nation's life was not on so grand a scale as to evolve the elements of satire from the contrast between faculties and foibles. ”

“ In putting this dream-world of his fantasy upon the canvas, Ariosto showed the power of an accomplished painter. This is the secret of the Furioso's greatness. This makes it in a deep sense the representative poem of the Italian Renaissance. All the affinities of its style are with the ruling art of Italy, rather than with sculpture or with architecture; and the poet is less a singer uttering his soul forth to the world in song, than an artist painting a multitude of images with words instead of colors. His power of delineation never fails him. ”

“ How much of tragedy is due to horror the soul alone can gauge; how much of romance depends upon a sense of mystery and unexplored capacities in natural things; how much of the sublime consists of incorporeal vagueness, need not here be insisted on. The sensuousness of the Italians, simpler and less finely tempered with spiritual substance than that of the Greeks, while it gave them so much of serene beauty and intelligible form, denied them those high and rare touches which the less evenly balanced genius of the Northern races can command at will. ”

“ Evil is good for its own sake also in his eyes. Having tasted all its fruits, he revels in recalling his sensations, just as Casanova took pleasure in recording his debaucheries. His knowledge of society is that of an upstart, who has risen from the lowest ranks by the arts of the bully, flatterer and pander. We never forget that he began life as a lackey, and the most valuable quality of his comedies is that they depict the great world from the standpoint of the servants' hall. Aretino is too powerful and fashionable to be aware of this. He poses as the sage and satirist. ”

“ The rustic fable is but a veil, through which the everlasting lineaments of love are shown. Arcadia, stripped of pedantry and affectation, has become the ideal world of sentiment. Like amber, it incloses in its glittering transparency the hopes and fears, the pains and joys, which flit from heart to heart of men and women when they love. The very conventionality of the pastoral style assists the lyrical utterance of real feeling. For it must be borne in mind that both Aminta and the Pastor Fido are essentially lyrical. The salt and savor of each play are in their choruses and monologues. ”

“ The style is the man; and Machiavelli's style was the mirror of his mind and character. While the literary world echoed to the cry of Art for Art, he followed Science for the sake of Science. Occupied with practical problems, smiling at the supra-mundane aspirations of the middle ages, scorning the æsthetical ideals of the Renaissance, he made the political action of man, l'homme politique, the object of exclusive study. ”

“ From the interchange, indeed, of occasional poems between such men as Molza, Soranzo, Gandolfo, Caro, Varchi, Guidiccioni, and La Casa, the materials for forming a just conception of he inner life of men of letters at that epoch must be drawn. They breathe a spirit of gentle urbanity, enlivened by jests, and saddened by a sense, rather uneasy than oppressive, of Italian disaster. The moral tone is pensive and relaxed; and in spite of frequent references to a corrupt Church and a lost nation, scarcely one spark of rage or passion flashes from the dreamy eyes that gaze at us. ”

“ All the men of the Renaissance died in the odor of piety; and Molza, as many of his sonnets prove, had true religious feeling. He was not a bad man, though a weak one. In the flaccidity of his moral fiber, his intellectual and æsthetical serenity, his confused and yet contented conscience, he fairly represents his age.
It would be difficult to choose between Molza's Latin and Italian poems, were it necessary to award the palm of elegance to either. Both are marked by the same morbidezza, the same pliancy, as of acanthus leaves that feather round the marble of some Roman ruin. ”

“ Here I sit when I am tired; when I am hungry, eat; when I feel the inclination, sleep; and all the hours are obedient to my will." [501] He revels in the sense of his own freedom. "My sincerity, and my virtue, which never could stomach the lies that bolster up the Court of Rome, nor the vices that reign in it, have found favor in the eyes of all the princes of the world. Emperors, thank God, are not Popes, nor Kings Cardinals! Therefore I enjoy their generosity, instead of courting that hypocrisy of priests, which acts the bawd and pander to our souls. ”

“ He does not really believe in chivalry; where Boiardo is in earnest, Ariosto jests. It is not that, like Cervantes, he sought to satirize the absurdities of romance, or that he set himself, like Folengo, to burlesque the poems of his predecessors; but his philosophy inclined him to watch the doings of humanity with a genial half-smile, an all-pervasive irony that had no sting in it. A poet who stands thus aside and contemplates the comedy of the world with the dry light of a kindly and indulgent intellect, could not treat the tales of Paladins and giants seriously. ”

“ Their first and foremost gift to nations who had scourged and slain them, was a new and radiant conception of humanity. This conception externalized itself in the creation of a common mental atmosphere, in the expression of the modern spirit by fine art and literature, in the diffusion of all that is contained for us in culture. They wrought, thought, painted, carved and built with the antique ideal as a guiding and illuminative principle in view. This principle enabled them to elevate and harmonize, to humanize and beautify the coarser elements existing in the world around them. ”

“ To trace the continuity of civilization through the labyrinths of chance and error and suspended energy, apparent to a superficial glance or partial knowledge, but on closer observation and a wider sweep of vision found to disappear, is the highest aim of the historian. The germ of this new notion of man's life upon our planet was contained in the cardinal intuition of the Renaissance, when the ancient and the modern worlds were recognized as one. It assumed the dignity of organized speculation in the German philosophies of history, and in the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte. ”

“ Italy offered elements of greatness only to a prophet or a satirist. She found her prophet in Michelangelo. But what remained for a poet like Ariosto, without Dante's anger or Swift's indignation, without the humor of Cervantes or the fire of Juvenal, without Tasso's piety or Shakspere's England, yet equal as an artist to the greatest singers whom the world has known? ”

“ In Venice there was greater liberty both of life and speech than elsewhere at that time in Italy. So long as a man refrained from politics and offered no cause of suspicion to the State, he might do and publish pretty much what he chose, without fear of interference and without any serious peril from the Inquisition. For a filibuster of Aretino's type, Venice offered precisely the most advantageous harbor, whence he could make sallies and predatory excursions, and whither he might always return to rest at ease beneath the rampart of a proud political indifference. ”

“ Had his genius been equal to his enterprise, he might have effected a decisive revolution. But Trissino was a man of sterling parts and sound judgment rather than a poet: a formulator of rules and precepts rather than a creator. His bent of mind was critical; and in this field he owed his success more to coincidence with prevalent opinion than to originality. Though he fixed the type of Italian tragedy by his Sofonisba, and tied comedy down to Latin models by his Simillimi, we cannot rate his talents as a playwright very high. ”

“ Why should we, for example, not put equal faith in Poliziano, Lorenzo de' Medici, Francesco Diaceto, and others who are Tuscan too, and possibly of no less learning and discretion than were Petrarch and Boccaccio? However, there are certain scrupulous persons abroad nowadays, who make a religion and ineffable mystery of their Tuscan tongue, frightening those who listen to them, to the length of preventing many noble and lettered men from opening their lips, and forcing them to admit they do not know how to talk the language they learned from their nurses in the cradle. ”

“ The negation of chivalry, mysticism, asceticism, is accomplished. After traversing the cycle of comedy, romance, satire, burlesque poetry, the plastic arts, and invading every province of human thought, the Italian reaction against the middle ages assumes a final shape of hitherto unapprehended loveliness in the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. They complete and close the Renaissance, bequeathing in a new species of art its form and pressure to succeeding generations. ”

“ But Machiavelli and Aretino paint humanity as simply bad. The palm of success is awarded to unscrupulous villainy. An incapacity for understanding the immutable power of moral beauty was the main disease of Italy. If we seek the cause of this internal cancer, we must trace the history of Italian thought and feeling-193- back to the age of Boccaccio; and we shall probably form an opinion that misdirected humanism, blending with the impieties of a secularized Papacy, the self-indulgence of the despots, and the coarse tastes of the bourgeoisie, had sapped the conscience of society. ”

“ The supreme artist of his age obeyed a right instinct when he undertook a work which required no sublime motive, and which left him free for the production of a masterpiece of beauty. In this sphere the defects of his nature were not felt, and he became the mouthpiece of his age in all that still remained of greatness to his country.
In like manner we can explain to ourselves Ariosto's choice of Boiardo's unfinished theme. He was not a poet with something irresistible to say, but an artist seeking a fit theater for the exercise of his omnipotent skill. ”

“ During the middle ages truth had seemed to descend as by a sort of inspiration upon man from an extra-mundane God. During the first and second periods of the Renaissance the human intellect repudiated this transcendentalism, but yielded itself, a willing victim, to the authority of books, Plato or Aristotle, and their commentators. Now the mind of man stands face to face with nature, and knows that there, and there alone, is inspiration. ”

“ There is a massive architecture, as of masonry, in Roman writing, which Italian almost always misses.
If it were permissible to venture here upon a somewhat bold hypothesis, we might ask whether the Italic races now displayed themselves as they might have been without the centralizing and controlling genius of Rome? In the history of the Italian peninsula can we regard the ascendancy of Rome as a gigantic episode? Rome bound the various tribes together in a common system, formed one language, and used Italy as the throne of world-wide empire. ”

“ In like manner Machiavelli discerned the weaknesses of the Renaissance without escaping from its enthusiasms. He despised the æsthetical ideal of his age. He was willing to sacrifice form, beauty, rhythm, the arts of culture and learned leisure, to stern matters of fact and stringent discipline. Yet he believed as firmly as any humanist, that the regeneration of his country must proceed from a revival of the past. It is the loss of antique virtues that has enervated our character, he cries. It is the neglect of historical lessons that renders our policy so suicidal. ”

“ The two essentials of dramatic art, action evolved before the eyes of the spectators, and what Goethe called the motiviren of each incident, are conspicuous by their absence. The would-be tragic poet was too mindful of rules—his unities, his diction, his connection of scenes that should occupy the stage without interruption, his employment of the Chorus in harmony with antique precedent—to conceive intensely or to express vividly. In form the Sofonisba is a fair imitation of Attic tragedy, and the good taste of its author secures a certain pale and frigid reflection of classical simplicity. ”

“ Taken in combination, these three conditions explain the appearance of a drama fitted to express the very life and soul of a puissant nation, with the temper of the times impressed upon it, but with a truth and breadth that renders it the heritage of every race and age. A national drama is the image created for itself in art by a people which has arrived at knowledge of its power, at the enjoyment of its faculties, after a period of successful action. ”

“ Willing to live and let live, with a never-failing fund of drollery, and with a sincere dislike for work of any sort, he lounged through existence, an agreeable, genial and witty member of society. If this were all we should not need to write about him now. But with this easy-going temperament he combined a genius for poetry so peculiar and delicate, that his few works mark an epoch in Italian literature.
The best description of Berni is contained in the burlesque portrait of himself, which forms part of his Boiardo Innamorato. ”

“ Silvia's kisses in Aminta, Mirtillo's kisses in Pastor Fido, introduce a new refinement of enervation. Marino with his Adone is not distant. But, while we recognize in both these poems—the one perfumed and delicate like flowers of spring, the other sculptured in pure forms of classic grace—evident-245- signs of a civilization sinking to decay; though we almost loathe the beauty which relaxes every chord of manhood in the soul that feels it; we are bound to confess that to this goal the Italian genius had been steadily advancing since the publication of the Filocopo. ”

“ The gravity of La Casa's sonnets, wrenched from an uneasy and unwilling conscience, the sublimity of Michelangelo's Platonic mysticism, the patriotic indignation of Guidiccioni's laments for Italy enslaved and sunk in sensual sloth, must rank as luminous exceptions. In the romantic epic, chivalry, the ideal of an earlier age, is turned to gentle ridicule. Honor is sneered at or misunderstood. The absurd, the marvelous, the licentious are mingled in a form of incomparable artistic suavity. Tasso's graver epic belongs to another epoch. Trissino's heroic poem is unreadable. ”