The position which Bembo holds in the literature of Italy's golden age is not less singular than prominent. As an historian and poet, a philologist and rhetorician, and as a voluminous writer of official and private letters, he challenges criticism and has gained applause. It is, however, as a reformer of style that his claims have been most freely accorded, and his example held up to general imitation. Following the fashion of his day, he regarded classical, and especially Latin, attainments, as the attribute most needful for an accomplished man. But he went further; and, aware of the coarse and rugged manner into which literature had fallen, sought to correct Latin composition, and to perfect his own tongue, after the purest ancient standards. On this object he spared no pains, till by long and laborious practice he wrote in both with equal precision. He is said to have subjected each of his works to forty separate critical revisions, and no one can read a page without feeling that, as with too many of his countrymen, the manner has occupied quite as much thought as the matter. This naturally tended to an opposite extreme, for the studied structure of his sentences, and the fatiguing recurrence of mythological allusion, are blemishes greatly detracting from the pleasure afforded by his works.[79] Scaliger, accordingly, has scourged his pagan misnomers of divine things, while his "childish heresy" of abject Ciceronian imitation is ridiculed by Lansius and Lipsius. Yet there is justice in the test applied to them by Tiraboschi; for great and wide-spread evils require extreme remedies, and the prevailing laxity of style having been once brought into discredit by his example, those who followed were able to avail themselves of his guidance and taste, without falling into the rigidity and constraint which blemish his compositions. Indeed, notwithstanding these obvious blots, which hero-worship has mistaken for beauties, his History of Venice, his Essay on Imitation, his diplomatic and familiar correspondence, and even his poetry, must, when tried by then-received standards, be allowed a merit entitling them to the general suffrage of contemporaries. It is to his Latin prose that our strictures are most applicable. Forgetting, in his zealous imitation of Cicero, the allowance due to modern themes, principles, and feelings, he so slavishly followed that heathen philosopher's idioms, as to clothe what he meant for Christianity in the words of paganism. Even his letters, running in name of the successor of St. Peter, transmuted the Almighty into a pantheistic generality, our Saviour into a hero, and the Madonna into a goddess of Loreto. It may be feared that this latitudinarianism was not limited to manner, for an anecdote alleges him to have seriously recommended a young divine to avoid reading St. Paul's Epistles, lest they might mar his style.
Compositions conceived and executed in so eclectic a spirit could scarcely avoid falling into coldness and pedantry; and such are prominent faults in his Venetian history, and his tribute to Duke Guidobaldo,—two works especially connected with the subject of these pages. The former is the most important production of his pen, and was begun in 1529, by desire of the Signory, in continuation of Sabellico's narrative, It is comprised in twelve books, extending from 1487 to 1513, where it remained unfinished at his death, but was continued by Paruta. From a contemporary possessing talent, industry, leisure, and high literary reputation, as well as many opportunities of personal observation, very large expectations might be legitimately entertained. But as a churchman, he is said to have been jealously excluded from the Venetian archives, a condition which, in the judgment of Tiraboschi, ought to have disqualified him from the task, and which may account for, if it cannot excuse, the superficial character of the narrative, the poverty of graphic details, and the teasing absence of dates. On the composition, too, his classic mania has left its withering traces. It was his ambition here to rival the Commentaries of Cæsar; and, in perfecting the idiom of a dead language, he has constrained freedom of thought, and polished away the life and spirit of his theme. We have examined his pages, as an indispensable authority upon events which occupy several chapters of our work; but those who read Italian history for pleasure will generally prefer to do so either in the Italian tongue or their own. Conscious probably of this, the author himself translated the work into his vernacular language, and both versions were published soon after his death.
His dissertation on the characters of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino is written in Latin, and exhibits all those blemishes of style to which we have just referred, and which so strangely jar upon the fulsome flattery and elaborate verbiage which he labours to reduce into Ciceronian terseness. Though entitled a "Book," the whole occupies but a hundred pages in the octavo edition of his works (1567), whereof scarcely one third is original matter. It is addressed to Nicolò Tiepolo, a literary gentleman of Venice, and professes to have been committed to writing for the satisfaction of some Venetians who, feeling an interest in Guidobaldo as their former guest, had applied to the father of Bembo for some account of his death. It is thrown into a dialogue between himself, Sadoleto, Filippo Beroaldo the younger, and Sigismondo [Conti?] of Foligno. The last-named personage supplies to their inquiries a narrative of the Duke's closing hours, addressed to Julius II., by Federigo Fregoso, along with the funeral oration pronounced at his obsequies by his preceptor Odasio. The former of these is written in a strain beseeming a heathen philosopher, rather than a Christian dignitary; the latter, which Tiraboschi has detected as very different from the printed oration, is to the full as turgid and tiresome as are most such efforts of Italian adulation; neither of them tell anything of importance that Castiglione has not better given us.
The whole discourse is, as I have had occasion to mention,[80] of but trifling value to the biographer of these personages. Facts are generalised until no substance remains; incidents and traits of character are lost in the multiplicity of epithets; and thus we have, instead of a speaking likeness, a vague and showy picture, overladen with ornaments until individuality is gone. The warmer emotions of the heart could scarcely, perhaps, be happily clothed in the abstractions of a dead tongue, unadapted to the times, and to circumstances which required the outpourings of unaffected grief; at all events, these measured periods and studied phrases give no real pleasure. Bembo was an elegant Latinist, but in such a work the language of nature could alone afford satisfaction. When we seek to know the true characters of his distinguished patrons, we are dismissed with an inflated rhetorical exercise; we are offered bread, and find it a stone. These strictures apply to the long funeral oration, but still more to the dull didactic discourse of the four friends, which wants the fire and feeling of the eulogy, and is soiled by gross details gratuitously introduced on a point at which good taste would have barely glanced. In all respects, the most interesting portion of the work is Fregoso's letter, upon which we have drawn in describing the death-bed of Guidobaldo. On the whole, this production may be dismissed with a doubt whether its prosiness or its pruriency is most offensive. Nor will the perusal of those papal brieves, extended by the same writer, which despoiled of his inheritance the Duke's adopted child, blasphemously ejecting him from the pale of Christendom, give a higher opinion of the sincerity of this ungrateful sycophant.
His other works, having no immediate reference to our subject, may be dismissed with few words. The Prose, a treatise upon rhetoric, intended to fix the standard of pure Italian composition, is a dialogue, to which Giuliano de' Medici and Federigo Fregoso are parties. Gli Asolani, a more juvenile production, was named from the castle of Asolo, at which some youths are represented as discussing the tender passion in all its moods and modifications. This theme, notwithstanding the tedious manner in which it is treated, gave it great popularity over western Europe in the sixteenth century, but the style and substance alike render it unpalatable to modern amateurs of light reading. His Latin treatise De Imitatione is a dull defence of his Ciceronian mannerisms; his essay in the same language upon Virgil and Terence a laboured philological critique; his De Ætna Liber a report of physical observations during an early residence near that volcano. His poetry, both Latin and Italian, enjoyed high reputation at a period when imitations of Petrarch had degenerated into common-place; for he succeeded in brushing away the rust of ages, and restoring much of the bright polish peculiar to the bard of Arqua. Lastly, his very numerous private and official letters have preserved to us a valuable store of facts, and much curious illustration of coeval manners and individual character.
The share of laborious learning voluntarily borne by ladies of the highest birth in the fifteenth century is a singular problem. There was scarcely a sovereign family that could not boast among its daughters some votary of intellectual pursuits, in an age when mental cultivation was of a sort more calculated to overburden genius, than to give wings to fancy in her flight after knowledge. A familiar acquaintance with Latin was then requisite, being the key to modern as well as classic and biblical literature, and also the current language of diplomacy or courtly intercourse.[*81] The abstruse distinctions of ancient philosophy, the complex tenets of dogmatic theology, the fatiguing jargon of scholastic disputation, were all included in the circle of female accomplishments. Such were the graces for which Bianca d'Este, Isotta Nogarolo, and Veronica Gambara were famed; while another Isotta, paramour of the truculent Lord of Rimini, divided contemporary adulation between the beauties of her person and her mind. The vagueness of such eulogies might well justify scepticism as to the profundity of that lore they were intended to vaunt; but in the case of Ippolita Maria Sforza, daughter of Francesco Duke of Milan, and wife of Alfonso King of Naples, chance has afforded us a standard of the knowledge mastered by these learned ladies. It was for this princess that Constantine Lascaris composed the earliest Greek Grammar; and in the convent library of Sta. Croce at Rome there is a transcript by her of Cicero De Senectute, followed by a juvenile collection of Latin apophthegms curiously indicative of her character and studies. The house of Montefeltro could boast a full share of such distinction, in Princess Battista, wife of the wretched Galeazzo Lord of Pesaro, to whose literary celebrity we have elsewhere paid our tribute, and whose progeny we have seen maintaining the prestige of her accomplishments to the third generation. Her great-granddaughter Battista Sforza rivalled her accomplishments, and those of her cousin Ippolita Maria, and, when placed by her marriage at the head of the court at Urbino, contributed much to the literary reputation which it then first obtained. Its two succeeding duchesses of the Gonzaga race, although women of remarkable talent, did not carry so far the cultivation of their natural powers; but we have found, in their relative and associate Emilia Pia, one whose learning was scarcely less notable than her wit.
Such were the examples of female genius which emanated from the courts of Italy, and, spreading to her universities, installed feminine erudition in professorial chairs. Nor was this questionable practice limited within the Italian peninsula. Many Spanish dames were conspicuous in scholarship, and, at the close of the century, Salamanca and Alcala saw their professorships held with applause by ladies equally distinguished for birth and accomplishments.