[772] Roscoe’s Leo, iii. 351. Tiraboschi, x. 85. Algarotti, and Corniani (v. 116), who quotes him, do not esteem the poem of Rucellai highly.
Berni. 7. A very different name is that of Berni, partly known by his ludicrous poetry, which has given that style the appellation of Poesia Bernesca, rather on account of his excellence than originality, for nothing is so congenial to the Italians,[773] but far more by his rifaccimento, or remoulding of the poem of Boiardo. The Orlando Innamorato, an ill-written poem, especially to Tuscan ears, had been encumbered by the heavy continuation of Agostini. Yet if its own intrinsic beauties of invention would not have secured it from oblivion, the vast success of the Orlando Furioso, itself only a continuation, and borrowing most of its characters from Boiardo’s poem, must have made it impossible for Italians of any curiosity to neglect the primary source of so much delight. Berni, therefore, undertook the singular office of writing over again the Orlando Innamorato, preserving the sense of almost every stanza, though every stanza was more or less altered, and inserting nothing but a few introductory passages, in the manner of Ariosto, to each canto.[774] The genius of Berni, playful, satirical, flexible, was admirably fitted to perform this labour; the rude Lombardisms of the lower Po gave way to the racy idiom of Florence; and the Orlando Innamorato has descended to posterity as the work of two minds, remarkably combined in this instance; the sole praise of invention, circumstance, description, and very frequently that of poetical figure and sentiment, belonging to Boiardo: that of style, in the peculiar and limited use of the word, to Berni. The character of the poem, as thus adorned, has sometimes been misconceived. Though Berni is almost always sprightly, he is not, in this romance, a burlesque or buffoon poet.[775] I once heard Foscolo prefer him to Ariosto. A foreigner, not so familiar with the peculiarities of language, would probably think his style less brilliant and less pellucid; and it is in execution alone that he claims to be considered as an original poet. The Orlando Innamorato was also remoulded by Domenichi in 1545; but the excellence of Berni has caused this feeble production to be nearly passed over by the Italian critics.[776]
[773] Corniani, iv. 252. Roscoe, iii. 323.
[774] The first edition of the Rifaccimento is in 1541, and the second in 1542. In that of 1545, the first eighty-two stanzas are very different from those that correspond in former editions; some that follow are suspected not to be genuine. It seems that we have no edition on which we can wholly depend. No edition of Berni appeared from 1545 to 1725, though Domenichi was printed several times. This reformer of Boiardo did not alter the text nearly so much as Berni. Panizzi, vol. ii.
[775] Tiraboschi, vii. 195, censures Berni for “motti e racconti troppo liberi ed empi, che vi ha inseriti.” Ginguéné exclaims, as well he may, against this imputation. Berni has inserted no stories; and unless it were the few stanzas that remain at the head of the twentieth canto, it is hard to say what Tiraboschi meant by impieties. But though Tiraboschi must have read Berni, he has here chosen to copy Zeno, who talks of “il poema di Boiardo, rifatto dal Berni, e di serio trasformato in ridicolo, e di onesto in iscandoloso, e però giustamente dannato dallo chiesa.” (Fontanini, p. 273). Zeno, even more surely than Tiraboschi, was perfectly acquainted with Berni’s poem: how could he give so false a character of it? Did he copy some older writer? And why? It seems hard not to think that some suspicion of Berni’s bias towards Protestantism had engendered a prejudice against his poem, which remained when the cause had been forgotten, as it certainly was in the days of Zeno and Tiraboschi.
[776] “The ingenuity,” says Mr. Panizzi, “with which Berni finds a resemblance between distant objects, and the rapidity with which he suddenly connects the most remote ideas; the solemn manner in which he either alludes to ludicrous events or utters an absurdity; the air of innocence and naïveté with which he presents remarks full of shrewdness and knowledge of the world; that peculiar bonhommie with which he seems to look kindly and at the same time unwillingly on human errors or wickedness; the keen irony which he uses with so much appearance of simplicity and aversion to bitterness; the seeming singleness of heart with which he appears anxious to excuse men and actions, at the very moment that he is most inveterate in exposing them; these are the chief elements of Berni’s poetry. Add to this the style, the loftiness of the verse contrasting with the frivolity of the argument, the gravest conception expressed in the most homely manner; the seasonable use of strange metaphors and of similes sometimes sublime, and for this very reason the more laughable, when considered with relation to the subject which they are intended to illustrate, form the most remarkable features of his style.” P. 120.
“Any candid Italian scholar who will peruse the Rifaccimento of Berni with attention, will be compelled to admit that, although many parts of the poem of Boiardo have been improved in that work, such has not always been the case; and will moreover be convinced that some parts of the Rifaccimento, besides those suspected in former times, are evidently either not written by Berni, or have not received from him, if they be his, such corrections as to be worthy of their author.” P. 141. Mr. P. shows in several passages his grounds for this suspicion.
Spanish poets. 8. Spain now began to experience one of those revolutions in fashionable taste, which await the political changes of nations. Her native poetry, whether Castilian or Valencian, had characteristics of its own, that placed it in a different region from the Italian. The short heroic, amatory, or devotional songs, which the Peninsular dialects were accustomed to exhibit, were too ardent, too hyperbolical for a taste which, if not correctly classical, was at least studious of a grace not easily compatible with extravagance. But the continual intercourse of the Spaniards with Italy, partly subject to their sovereign, and the scene of his wars, accustomed their nobles to relish the charms of a sister language, less energetic, but more polished than their own. |Boscan. Garcilasso.| Two poets, Boscan and Garcilasso de la Vega, brought from Italy the softer beauties of amorous poetry, embodied in the regular sonnet, which had hitherto been little employed in the Peninsula. These poems seem not to have been printed till 1543, when both Boscan and Garcilasso were dead, and their new school had already met with both support and opposition at the court of Valladolid. The national character is not entirely lost in these poets; love still speaks with more impetuous ardour, with more plaintive sorrow, than in the contemporary Italians; but the restraints of taste and reason are perceived to control his voice. An eclogue of Garcilasso, called Salicio and Nemoroso, is pronounced by the Spanish critics to be one of the finest works in their language. It is sadder than the lament of saddest nightingales. We judge of all such poetry differently in the progressive ages of life.
Mendoza. 9. Diego Mendoza, one of the most remarkable men for variety of talents whom Spain has produced, ranks with Boscan and Garcilasso as a reformer of Castilian poetry. His character as a soldier, as the severe governor of Siena, as the haughty minister of Charles at the court of Rome and the council at Trent, is notorious in history.[777] His epistles, in an Horatian style, full of a masculine and elevated philosophy, though deficient in harmony and polish, are preferred to his sonnets; a species of composition where these faults are more perceptible; and for which, at least in the style then popular, the stern understanding of Mendoza seems to have been ill adapted. “Though he composed,” says Bouterwek, “in the Italian manner with less facility than Boscan and Garcilasso, he felt more correctly than they or any other of his countrymen the difference between the Spanish and Italian languages, with respect to their capabilities for versification. The Spanish admits of none of those pleasing elisions, which, particularly when terminating vowels are omitted, render the mechanism of Italian versification so easy, and enable the poet to augment or diminish the number of syllables according to his pleasure; and this difference in the two languages renders the composition of a Spanish sonnet a difficult task. Still more does the Spanish language seem hostile to the soft termination of a succession of feminine rhymes, for the Spanish poet, who adopts this rule of the Italian sonnet, is compelled to banish from his rhymes all infinitives of verbs, together with a whole host of sonorous substantives and adjectives. Mendoza therefore availed himself of the use of masculine rhymes in his sonnets; but this metrical licence was strongly censured by all partizans of the Italian style. Nevertheless, had he given to his sonnets more of the tenderness of Petrarch, it is probable that they would have found imitators. Some of them, indeed, may be considered as successful productions, and throughout all the language is correct and noble.”[778]
[777] Sadolet, in one of his epistles dated 1532 (lib. vi. p. 309 edit. 1554), gives an interesting character of Mendoza, then young, who had visited him at Carpentras on his way to Rome; a journey undertaken solely for the sake of learning.