OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
The man of our time to class poetry as a thing very pleasant and useful shall hardly be found. At most the saying will suffer reprint as a quaintness, a freak, or a paradox; and so it has proved. From Prato, dusty little city of mid-Tuscany, and with the impress of its Reale Orfanotrofio (nourisher, it would thus appear, of more Humanities than one) comes an "Opera Nova, nella quale si contengono bellissime historie, contrasti, lamenti et frottole, con alcune canzoni a ballo, strambotti, geloghe, farse, capitoli e bazellette di più eccellenti autori. Aggiuntevi assai tramutationi, villanelle alla napolitana, sonetti alla bergamasca et mariazi alla povana, indovinelli, ritoboli e passerotti"; cosa, this legend goes on to say, molto piacevole et utile. This is, no doubt, rococo, and at best a pitiful, catchfarthing bit of ancientry: yet it looks back to a time when it was indeed the fact that no choice work could be but useful, and when eyes and ears, as conduits to the soul, had that full of consideration we reserve for mouth and nose, purveyors to the belly.
Vasari, Giorgio, he too, bourgeois though he were, and in so far the best of testimony, knew it when he found Luca's blue and white to be "molto utile per la state." We should say that of a white umbrella or suit of flannels; why of earthenware or an adroit strambotto? That marks the cleft, the incurable gulf of difference between a people like the Tuscans with art in their marrow, and our present selves with our touching reliance upon a most unseemly hunger after facts. I suppose I should be stretching a point if I said that Samson Agonistes was cosa molto piacevole ed utile. And yet I name there a great poem and a weighty, whence the general public suck, or claim to suck, no small advantage. Is it more useful to them than Bradshaw? I doubt. But here, in this Opera Nova so furthered, are sixty-three little snatches of Luigi Pulci's, eight lines to the stave, about the idlest of make-believe love affairs, full of such Petrarchisms as "Gl' occhi tuoi belli son li crudel dardi," or
"Tu m' ai trafitto il cor! donde io moro,
Se tu, iddea, non mi dai aiutoro."—
the merest commonplaces of gallantry: called on what account by their contrivers molto utile?
I have urged in my Second Essay that the Tuscans were inveterate weavers of fancy, choosing what came easiest to hand to weave withal. I dared to see such airy spinning in that Spanish Chapel from which Mr. Ruskin has nearly frightened the lovers of Art; I said that the Summa was to the painters there as good vantage ground as any novel of Sacchetti's. I now say that Luigi Pulci and his kindred so treated the love-lore which was solemn mystery to Guinicelli and Lapo and Fazio, or the young Dante shuddering before his lord of terrible aspect. I would add Petrarch's name to this honourable roll if I believed it fitting such a niche; but I find him the greatest equivocator of them all, and owe him a grudge for making a fifteenth-century Dante impossible. It is true, had there been such a poet we should never have had our Milton; but that may not serve the Swan of Vaucluse as justification for being miserable before a looking-glass, that he starved his grandsons to serve ours. Take him then as a poser: give him, for the argument's sake, Boccace to his company, Cino; give him our Pulci, give him Ariosto, give him Lorenzo, Politian; give him Tasso for aught I care; you have no one left but the sugar-cured Guarino. Dante stands alone upon the skyey peaks of his great argument, steadied there and holding his breath, as for the hush that precedes weighty endeavour; and Bojardo (no Tuscan by birth) stands squarely to the plains, holding out one hand to Rabelais over-Alps and another to Boccace grinning in his grave. The fellow is such a sturdy pagan we must e'en forgive him some of his quirks. Italian poesy, poor lady, stript to the smock, can still look honestly out if she have but two such vestments whole and unclouted as the Commedia and the Orlando. Let us look at some of her spoiled bravery. Take up my Opera Nova and pick over Pulci in his lightest mood. I am minded to try my hand for your amusement.
"Let him rejoice who can; for me, I'd grieve.
Peace be with all; for me yet shall be war.
Let him that hugs delight, hug on, and leave
To me sweet pain, lest day my night shall mar.
I am struck hard; the world, you may believe,
Laughs out;—rejoice, my world! I'll pet my scar.
Rogue love, that puttest me to such a pass,
They cry thee, 'It is well!' I sing, 'Alas!'"
Vers de société? No; too rhetorical: your antithesis gives headaches to fine ladies. Euphuist? Not in the applied sense: read Shakespere's sonnets in that manner; or, if you object that Shakespere is too high for such comparisons, read Drummond of Hawthornden. Poetry, which has a soul, we cannot call it. Verse it assuredly is, and of the most excellent. Just receive a quatrain of the pure spring, and judge for yourself:
"Chi gode goda, che pur io stento;
Chi è in pace si sia, ch' io son in guerra;
Chi ha diletto l' habbi, ch' io ho tormento;
Chi vive lieto, in me dolor afferra."
Balance is there. Vocalisation, adjustment of sound, discriminate use of long syllables and short, of subjunctive and indicative moods.[1] Unpremeditated art it is not: indeed it is craft rather than art; for Art demands a larger share of soul-expenditure than Pulci could afford. And of such is the delicate ware which Tuscany, nothing doubting, took for lavoro molto utile. For, believe it or not, of that kind were Delia Robbia's enrichments, Ghirlandajo's frescos, Raphael's Madonnas, and Alberti's broad marble churches: of that kind and of no other; on a level with the painted lady smiling out of a painted window at Airolo, whose frozen lips assure the traverser of the Saint Gothard that he has passed the ridge and may soon smell the olives.
[Footnote 1: More than that: the piece is an excellent example of the skilful use of redundant syllables. It is certain that a study of Italian poetry would help our, too often, tame blank verse to be (however bad otherwise) at least not dull. It might bring it nearer to Milton, as Dante brought Keats. Witness his revision of Hyperion. If the Tuscans overrated the craft in Poetry, we assuredly underrate it.]
Wherein, then, is the use? Why, it is in the art of it. I will convict you out of Alberti's own mouth, or his biographer's, for he spake it truly. "For he was wont to say," thus runs the passage, "that whatever might be accomplished by the wit of man with a certain choiceness, that indeed was next to the divine." To image the divine, you see, you must accomplish somewhat, scrupulously weigh, select and refuse; in short adapt exquisitely your means until they are adequate to your ends. And, keeping the eye steadily on that, you might grow to discard solemn ends, or momentous, altogether, until poetry and painting ceased to be arts at all, and must be classed, at best, with needlework. So indeed it proved in the case of poetry. After Politian (who really did catch some echo of other times, and of manners more primal than his own, and did instil something of it in his Orfeo) no poet of Italy had anything serious to say. I doubt it even of Tasso, though Tasso, I know, has a vogue. I except, of course, Michael Angelo, as I have already said; and I except Boccace and Bojardo. Painting was drawn out of the pit laid privily for her by the sheer necessity of an outlet; and painting, having much to say, became the representative Italian art. Poetry, the most ancient of them all, as she is the most majestic; the art which refuses to be taught, and alone of her sisters must be acquired by self-spenditure (so that before you can learn to string your words in music you must be shaken with a thought which, to your torturing, you must spoil); poetry, at once music and soothsay, knitted to us as touching her common speech, and to the spheres as touching on the same immortal harmonies; poetry such as Dante's was, was gone from Tuscany, and painting, to her own ruining, reigned instead, drawing in sculpture and architecture to share her kingdom and attributes. Which indeed they did, to their equal detriment and our discouragement that read.
When I want to see Death in small-clothes bowing in the drawing-room I turn to my Petrarch and open at Sonnet cclxxxii., where it is written how:—
"It lies with Death to take the beauty of Laura but not the gracious memory of her";
As thus:
"Now hast them touch'd thy stretch of power, O Death;
Thy brigandage hath beggar'd Love's demesne
And quench'd the lamp that lit it, and the queen
Of all the flowers snapped with thy ragged teeth.
Hollow and meagre stares our life beneath
The querulous moon, robb'd of its sovereign:
Yet the report of her, her deathless mien—
Not thine, O churl! Not thine, thou greedy Death!
They are with her in Heaven, the which her grace,
Like some brave light, gladdens exceedingly
And shoots chance beams to this our dwelling-place;
So art thou swallowed in her victory.
Yet on me, beauty-whelmed in very sooth,
On me that last-born angel shall have ruth."
Look in vain for the deep heart-cry that voiced Dante's passion in the tremendous statements of this:—
"Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven,
The kingdom where the angels are at peace;
And lives with them: and to her friends is dead.
Not by the frost of winter was she driven
Away, like others; nor by summer heats;
But through a perfect gentleness instead.
For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead
Such an exceeding glory went up hence
That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire,
Until a sweet desire
Entered Him for that lovely excellence,
So that He bade her to Himself aspire;
Counting this weary and most evil place
Unworthy of a thing so full of grace."
[Footnote: This translation is Rossetti's.]
Now and again it may happen that a poet, ridden by the images of his thought, can "state the facts" and leave the rhyme to chance. The Greeks, to whom facts were rarer and of more significance, one supposes, than they are to us, did it habitually. That is what gives such irresistible import to Homer and to Sophocles. They knew that the adjective is the natural enemy of the verb. The naked act, the bare thought, a sequence of stately- balanced rhythm and that ensuing harmony of sentences, gave their poetry its distinction. They did not wilfully colour their verse, if they did, as I suppose we must admit, their statues. "Now," says Sir Thomas, "there is a musick wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the musick of the spheres; for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony." After the Greeks, Dante, who may have drawn lo bello stile from Virgil, but hardly his great notes, as of a bell, carried on the tradition of directness and naked strength. But Petrarch, and after him all Tuscany, dallied with light thinking, and beat all the images of Love's treasury into thin conventions.
Però, what gentlemen they were, these "ingegni fiorentini," these Tuscan wits! What innate breeding and reticence! What punctilious loyalty to the little observances of literature, of wall-decoration, call it, in the most licentiously minded of them! Lorenzo Magnifico was a rake and could write lewdly enough, as we all know. Yet, when he chose, that is when Art bade him, how unerringly he chose the right momentum. His too was "la mente che non erra." I found this of his the other day, and must needs close up my notes with it. The very notion of it was, in his time, a convention; a series of sonnets bound together by an argument; a Vita nova without its overmastering occasion. Simonetta was dead; whereupon "tutti i fiorentini ingegni, come si conviene in si pubblica jattura, diversamente ed avversamente si dolsono, chi in versi, chi in prosa." The poor dead lady was, in fact, a butt for these sharpshooters. Yet hear Lorenzo.
"Died, as we have declared, in our city a certain lady, whereby all people alike in Florence were moved to compassion. And this is no marvel, seeing that with all earthly beauty and courtesy she was adorned as, before her day, no other under heaven could have been. Among her other excellent parts, she had a carriage so sweet and winsome that whosoever should have any commerce or friendly dealing with her, straightway fell to believe himself enamoured of her. Ladies also, and all youth of her degree, not only suffered no harbourage to unkindly thought upon this her eminence over all the rest, nor grudged it her at all, but stoutly upheld and took pleasure in her loveliness and gracious bearing; and this so honestly that you would have found it hard to be believed so many men without jealousy could have loved her, or so many ladies without envy give her place. So, the more her life by its comely ordering had endeared her to mankind, pity also for her death, for the flower of her youth, and for a beauteousness which in death, it may be, showed the more resplendently than in life, did breed in the heart the smarting of great desire. Therefore she was carried uncovered on the bier from her dwelling to the place of burial, and moved all men, thronging there to see her, to abundant shedding of tears. And in some, who before had not been aware of her, after pity grew great marvel for that she, in death, had overcome that loveliness which had seemed insuperable while she yet lived. Among which people, who before had not known her, there grew a bitterness and, as it were, ground of reproach, that they had not been acquainted with so fair a thing before that hour when they must be shut off from it for ever; to know her thus and have perpetual grief of her. But truly in her was made manifest that which our Petrarch had spoken when he said,
'Death showed him lovely in her lovely face.'"
This is to write like a gentleman and an artist, with ear attuned to the subtlest fall and cadence, with scrupulous weighing of words that their true outline shall hold clear and sharp. It is intarsiatura, skilful and clean at the edges. He goes on to play with his hammered thought, always as delicately and precisely as before.
"Falling, therefore, such an one to death, all the wits of Florence, as is seemly in so public a calamity, lamented severally and mutually, some in rhyme, some in prose, the ruefulness of it; and bound themselves to exalt her excellence each after the contriving of his mind: in which company I, too, must needs be; I, too, mingle rhymes with tears. So I did in the sonnets below rehearsed; whereof the first began thus:
'O limpid shining star that to thy beam.'
"Night had fallen: together we walked, a dear friend and I, together talking of our common sorrow: and so speaking, the night being wondrous clear, I lifted my eyes to a star of exceeding brilliancy, which appeared in the West, of such assured splendour as not alone to excel other stars, but so eagerly to shine that it threw in shadow all the lights of heaven about it. Whereof having great marvel, I turned to my friend, saying—'We ought not to wonder at this sight, seeing that the soul of that most gentle lady is of a truth either re-informed in this, a new star, or conjoined to shine with it. Wherefore there is no marvel in such exceeding brightness; and we who took comfort in her living delights, may even now be appeased by her appearance in a limpid star. And if our vision for such a light is tender and fragile, we should beseech her shade, that is the god in her, to make us bolder by withholding some part of her beam that we may sometimes look upon her, nor sear our eyes. But, to say sooth, this is no over-boldness in her, endowed as she was with all the power of her beauty, that she should strive to shine more excellently than all the other stars, or even yet more proudly with Phoebus himself, asking of him his very chariot, that she, rather, may rule our day. Which thing, if you allow it without presumption in our star, how vilely shows the impertinence of Death to have laid hands upon such loveliness and authority as hers.' And since these my reasonings seemed of the stuff proper for a sonnet, I took leave of my friend and composed that one which follows; speaking in it of the above-mentioned star."
The sonnet is in the right Petrarchian vein, adroit and shallow as you please. With such a preface it could hardly be otherwise—the invocation of the lady's shade, the twitting of Death (making his Mastership jig to suit their occasions who had of late been in his presence) and the naive acceptance of all gifts as "buona materia a an sonetto," In the end he spins four to her memory; then finds another lady and doubles all his superlatives for her. For the star, he remembers, may have been Lucifer; and Lucifer is but herald of the day. To it then! with all the buona materia a un sonetto the dawn can give you. Thus flourished poetry in the Tuscan quattrocento; for Politian was but little more poet than Lorenzo, while he was no less dextrous as a rhymer and fashioner of conceits. Not serious, but piacevole, with an elegantia quædam prope divinum; therefore molto utile. Pen-work in fact, and kin to needlework. Because Tuscany saw choicely-wrought things pleasing, and pleasant things useful, we of to-day can see Florence as an open-air Museum. But we wrap our own Poets in heavy bindings and let them lie on drawing-room tables in company of Whitaker's Almanack and an album of photographs. Well, well! We must teach them to say, Philistia, be thou glad of me, I suppose.