The age, indeed, determines the tone, the colouring, of the expressions in which friendship clothes itself. In Germany and Denmark, at the end of the eighteenth century, friendship was a sentimental enthusiasm, just as in England and Italy during the sixteenth century it took the form of platonic love. We can clearly discern, however, that the different methods of expression answered to corresponding shades of difference in the emotion itself. The men of the Renaissance gave themselves up to an adoration of friendship and of their friend which is now unknown, except in circles where a perverted sexuality prevails. Montaigne's friendship for Estienne de la Boétie, and Languet's passionate tenderness for the youthful Philip Sidney, are cases in point. The observations concerning friendship in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, 1642 (pp. 98, 99), accord entirely with that of Shakespeare: "I love my friend more than myself, and yet I think that I do not love him enough. In a few months my manifold doubled passion will make me believe that I have not at all loved him before. When I am away from him, I am dead, until I meet him again. When I am together with him, I am not content, but always long for a closer connection with him. United souls are not contented, but wish for being truly identical with each other; and this being impossible, their yearnings are endless and must increase without any possibility of being gratified." But the most remarkable example of a frenzied friendship in Renaissance culture and poetry is undoubtedly to be found in Michael Angelo's letters and sonnets.
Michael Angelo's relation to Messer Tommaso de' Cavalieri presents the most interesting parallel to the attitude which Shakespeare adopted towards William Herbert. We find the same expressions of passionate love from the older to the younger man; but here it is still more unquestionably certain that we have not to do with mere poetical figures of speech, since the letters are not a whit less ardent and enthusiastic than the sonnets. The expressions in the sonnets are sometimes so warm that Michael Angelo's nephew, in his edition of them, altered the word Signiore into Signora, and these poems, like Shakespeare's, were for some time supposed to have been addressed to a woman.[2]
On January 1, 1533, Michael Angelo, then fifty-seven years old, writes from Florence to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a youth of noble Roman family, who afterwards became his favourite pupil: "If I do not possess the art of navigating the sea of your potent genius, that genius will nevertheless excuse me, and neither despise my inequality, nor demand of me that which I have it not in me to give; since that which stands alone in everything can in nothing find its counterpart. Wherefore your lordship, the only light in our age vouchsafed to this worlds having no equal or peer, cannot find satisfaction in the work of any other hand. If, therefore, this or that in the works which I hope and promise to execute should happen to please you, I should call that work, not good, but fortunate. And if I should ever feel assured that—as has been reported to me—I have given your lordship satisfaction in one thing or another, I will make a gift to you of my present and of all that the future may bring me; and it will be a great pain to me to be unable to recall the past, in order to serve you so much the longer, instead of having only the future, which cannot be long, since I am all too old. There is nothing more left for me to say. Read my heart and not my letter, for my pen cannot approach the expression of my good will."[3]
Cavalieri writes to Michael Angelo that he regards himself as born anew since he has come to know the Master; who replies, "I for my part should regard myself as not born, born dead, or deserted by heaven and earth, if your letters had not brought me the persuasion that your lordship accepts with favour certain of my works." And in a letter of the following summer to Sebastian del Piombo, he sends a greeting to Messer Tommaso, with the words: "I believe I should instantly fall down dead if he were no longer in my thoughts."[4]
Michael Angelo plays upon his friend's surname as Shakespeare plays upon his friend's Christian name. These are the last lines of the thirty-first sonnet:—
"Se vint' e pres' i' debb' esser beato,
Meraviglia non è se, nud' e solo,
Resto prigion d'un Cavalier armato."
"If only chains and bands can make me blest,
No marvel if alone and bare I go
An armed knight's captive and slave confessed."
(J. A. Symonds.)
In other sonnets the tone is no less passionate than Shakespeare's —take, for example, the twenty-second:—
"More tenderly perchance than is my due,
Your spirit sees into my heart, where rise
The flames of holy worship, nor denies
The grace reserved for those who humbly sue.
Oh blessed day when you at last are mine!
Let time stand still, and let noon's chariot stay;
Fixed be that moment on the dial of heaven!
That I may clasp and keep, by grace divine—
Clasp in these yearning arms and keep for aye
My heart's loved lord to me desertless given."[5]
(J. A. Symonds.)
In comparison with Cavalieri, Michael Angelo could with justice call himself old. Some critics, on the other hand, have seen in the fact that Shakespeare was not really old at the time when the Sonnets were written, a proof of their conventional and unreal character. But this is to overlook the relativity of the term. As compared with a youth of eighteen, Shakespeare was in effect old, with his sixteen additional years and all his experience of life. And if we are right in assigning Sonnets lxiii. and lxxiii. to the year 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare had then reached the age of thirty-seven, an age at which (among his contemporaries) Drayton in his Idea dwells quite in the same spirit upon the wrinkles of age in his face, and at which, as Tyler has very aptly pointed out, Byron in his swan-song uses expressions about himself which might have been copied from Shakespeare's seventy-third Sonnet. Shakespeare says:—
"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."