Character of Italian poetry. 3. The number of versifiers whom Italy produced in the sixteenth century was immensely great. Crescimbeni gives a list of eighty earlier than 1550, whom he selects from many hundred ever forgotten names. By far the larger proportion of these confined themselves to the sonnet and the canzone or ode; and the theme is generally love, though they sometimes change it to religion. A conventional phraseology, an interminable repetition of the beauties and coldness of perhaps an ideal, certainly to us an unknown mistress, run through these productions; which so much resemble each other, as sometimes to suggest to any one who reads the Sceltas which bring together many extracts from these poets, no other parallel than that of the hooting of owls in concert: a sound melancholy and not unpleasing to all ears in its way, but monotonous, unintellectual, and manifesting as little real sorrow or sentiment in the bird as these compositions do in the poet.[768]
[768] Muratori himself observes the tantalising habit in which sonnetteers indulge themselves, of threatening to die for love, which never comes to anything; quella volgare smania che mostrano gl’amanti di voler morire, e che tante volte s’ode in bocca loro, ma non mai viene ad effetto.
Alamanni. 4. A few exceptions may certainly be made. Alamanni, though the sonnet is not his peculiar line of strength, and though he often follows the track of Petrarch with almost servile imitation, could not, with his powerful genius, but raise himself above the common level. His Lygura Pianta, a Genoese lady, the heroine of many sonnets, is the shadow of Laura; but when he turns to the calamities of Italy and his own, that stern sound is heard again, that almost reminds us of Dante and Alfieri. The Italian critics, to whom we must of course implicitly defer as to the grace and taste of their own writers, speak well of Molza, and some other of the smaller poets; though they are seldom exempt from the general defects above mentioned. |Vittoria Colonna.| But none does Crescimbeni so much extol, as a poetess, in every respect the most eminent of her sex in Italy, the widow of the Marquis of Pescara, Vittoria Colonna, surnamed, he says, by the public voice, the divine. The rare virtues and consummate talents of this lady were the theme of all Italy, in that brilliant age of her literature; and her name is familiar to the ordinary reader at this day. The canzone dedicated to the memory of her illustrious husband is worthy of both.[769]
[769] Crescimbeni della Volgar Poesia, vols. ii. and iii. For the character of Vittoria Colonna, see ii. 360. Roscoe (Leo X. iii. 314) thinks her canzone on her husband in no respect inferior to that of Bembo on his brother. It is rather by a stretch of chronology, that this writer reckons Vittoria, Berni, and several more, among the poets of Leo’s age.
Satires of Ariosto and Alamanni. 5. The satires of Ariosto, seven in number, and composed in the Horatian manner, were published after his death in 1534. Tiraboschi places them at the head of that class of poetry. The reader will find an analysis of these satires, with some extracts, in Ginguéné.[770] The twelve satires of Alamanni, one of the Florentine exiles, of which the first edition is dated in 1532, though of earlier publication than those of Ariosto, indicate an acquaintance with them. They are to one another as Horace and Juvenal, and as their fortunes might lead us to expect; one gay, easy, full of the best form of Epicurean philosophy, cheerfulness, and content in the simpler enjoyments of life; the other ardent, scornful, unsparing, declamatory, a hater of vice, and no great lover of mankind, pouring forth his moral wrath in no feeble strain. We have seen in another place his animadversions on the court of Rome; nor does anything in Italy escape his resentment.[771] The other poems of Alamanni are of a very miscellaneous description; eclogues, little else than close imitations of Theocritus and Virgil, elegies, odes, hymns, psalms, fables, tragedies, and what were called selve, a name for all unclassed poetry.
[770] ix. 100-129. Corniani, iv. 55. In one passage of the second satire, Ariosto assumes a tone of higher dignity than Horace ever ventured, and inveighs against the Italian courts in the spirit of his rival Alamanni.
[771] The following lines, which conclude the twelfth and last satire, may serve as a specimen of Alamanni’s declamatory tone of invective, and his bitter attacks on Rome, whom he is addressing.
O chi vedesse il ver, vedrebbe come
Più disnor tu che ’l tuo Luther Martino
Porti a te stessa, e più gravose some;
Non la Germania, nò, ma l’ocio, il vino,
Avarizia, ambition, lussuria e gola,
Ti mena al fin, che già veggiam vicino.
Non pur questo dico io, non Francia sola,
Non pur la Spagna, tutta Italia ancora
Che ti tien d’heresia, di vizi scuola.
E che nol crede, ne dimandi ogn’ora
Urbin, Ferrara, l’Orso, e la Colonna,
La Marca, il Romagnuol, ma più che plora
Per te servendo, che fù d’altri donna.
Alamanni. 6. Alamanni’s epic, or rather romantic poem, the Avarchide, is admitted by all critics to be a work of old age, little worthy of his name. But his poem on agriculture, la Coltivazione, has been highly extolled. A certain degree of languor seems generally to hang on Italian blank verse; and in didactic poetry it is not likely to be overcome. |Rucellai.| The Bees of Rucellai is a poem written with exquisite sweetness of style; but the critics have sometimes forgotten to mention, that it is little else than a free translation from the fourth Georgic.[772] |Trissino.| No one has ever pretended to rescue from the charge of dulness and insipidity the epic poem of the father of blank verse, Trissino, on the liberation of Italy from the Goths by Belisarius. It is, of all long poems that are remembered at all, the most unfortunate in its reputation.