"Or duro, acerbo, ora pieghevol mite.
Irato sempre e non maligno mai,
La mente e il cor meco in perpetua lite,
Per lo più mesto, e tal or lieto assai,
Or stimandomi Achille, ed or Tersite;
Uom, se' tu grande o vii? Muori, e il saprai."[51]
"Thou lofty mirror, Truth, let me be shown
Such as I am, in body and in mind.
Hair plainly red, retreating now behind;
A stature tall, a stooping head and prone;
A meagre body on two stilts of bone;
Fair skin, blue eyes, good look, nose well design'd;
A handsome mouth, teeth that are rare to find,
And pale in face, more than a king on throne.
"Now harsh and crabbed, mild and pleasant soon;
Always irascible, no malignant foe;
My head and heart and I never in tune;
Sad for the most part, then in such a flow
Of spirits, I feel now hero, now buffoon;
Man, art thou great or vile?—die, and thou 'It know."
[MONTI]
1754-1828.
Monti is, without question, the greatest Italian poet that has appeared since the golden days of its poetry: he alone emulates his predecessors in the higher flights of the imagination. It has been pronounced of Dryden, that if each of the princes of poetry surpassed him in their peculiar vein, yet his fire and originality give him a near place beside them. Thus Monti has not the sublimity of Dante, nor the tenderness of Petrarch; neither the inventive flow of Ariosto, nor Tasso's epic conception and voluptuous grace: but he has a fervour, a power of imagery, an overflowing and redundance of ideal thought, that mark the genuine poet.
He came to revive the languid and unnatural style that flourished under the reign of the Arcadians. Some few real poets had sprung up in Italy in the interval between Ariosto and Monti: they are recorded in this volume. Chiabrera and Filicaja are the chief. These men found in the inspiration of their own minds the power that led them to adopt a style of their own, and to bestow originality—which, in one shape or another, is the vivifying soul of composition,—on their productions. Metastasio carried clearness and grace of expression to a great perfection, but he wanted strength and daring: Alfieri had not a trace of that sunshiny and rainbow-like (so to speak) colour-giving power of fancy, without which there is no real poetry. For the rest, the poets of those days were Arcadians; the very word seems to express volumes of inane affectation, and turgid, yet soulless, language. It is thus that a clever Italian critic of the present day speaks of them:—"To the hyperboles and conceits of the seicentisti, succeeded the follies and pastorals of the Arcadians. The subject treated by these poets were restrained in narrow limits; they were all futile, trite, vulgar, or silly,—adulatory, or false. A new-married pair, a nun,—the new-born babe of some sovereign or noble,—the election of a cardinal, or a bishop, or even of an abbé—a funeral or a feigned love; such were the favourite themes of the Arcadians. Was a marriage in question,—Hymen was adjured to bring its chains to link two hearts; and a new Hercules or Achilles was prognosticated as the future result of the union. If a girl shut herself up in the cloister, the poets expatiated on her happiness; they described the heavenly bridegroom as descending and stretching out his hand to her, while the mischievous Cupid angrily threw away his golden quiver; a censurable mixture of sacred and profane imagery was thus introduced, and their ideas were steeped in two fountains, in contradiction one to the other, the Bible and mythology. The most shameless flattery blotted their pages, as they praised one another, and depicted themselves on the heights of Parnassus,—beside the waters of Hypocrene,—in the company of Apollo and the Muses; and the wonders of Orpheus and Amphion were renewed, to express the charms of each other's verses. No Arcadian dared imagine himself enamoured of a human being: she was no mortal woman, but a goddess,—a Venus sprung on the instant from the foam of the sea: lips, and eyes, and hair, had all their appropriate, still-repeated epithets: did their lady sigh, or did one word escape the paling of her ivory teeth,—tempests fled, the winds were stilled, and Jove was again tempted to transform himself into a bull for her sake."[52]
Men can do strange things when they associate in companies, and keep each other in countenance by a wide-spread folly, that bars out the wholesome fear of ridicule. Thus, the Arcadians had colonies all over Italy. They gave feigned names to each other; they lauded, and celebrated, and crowned each other. Good sense and good taste were sacrificed in the emulation each felt to transcend his rivals in a sonorous and turgid system of words, in which neither passion nor thought appeared.[53] A new genius was wanted to trample on this overgrowth of vanity or folly, and to gift the tamed and chained language of Dante and Bojardo with wings and liberty. Such was the poet, the incidents of whose life we now proceed to detail.