After this dedication Vida describes the solace to be found in poetry, and adds some precepts on the preparation of the student's mind.[445] A rapid review of the history of poetry—the decline of Greek inspiration after Homer, and of Latin after Virgil; the qualities of the Silver Age, and the Revival of letters under the Medici at Florence—serves to show how narrow the standard of Italian culture had become between the period of Poliziano, who embraced so much in his sketch of literature, and that of Vida, who confined himself to so little. The criticism is not unjust; but it proves that the refinement of taste by scholarship had resulted in restricting students to one or two models, whom they followed with servility.[446] Having thus established his general view of the poetic art, Vida proceeds to sketch a plan of education. The qualities and duties of a tutor are described; and here we may notice how far Vittorino's and Guarino's methods had created an ideal of training for Italy. The preceptor must above all things avoid violence, and aim at winning the affections of his pupil; it would be well for him to associate several youths in the same course of study, so as to arouse their emulation. He must not neglect their games, and must always be careful to suit his method to the different talents of his charges. When the special studies to be followed are discussed, Vida points out that Cicero is the best school of Latin style. He recommends the early practice of bucolic verse, and inculcates the necessity of treating youthful essays with indulgence. These topics are touched with more or less felicity of phrase and illustration; and though the subject-matter is sufficiently trite, the good sense and kindly feeling of the writer win respect. The first book concludes with a peroration on the dignity and sanctity of poets, a theme the humanists were never weary of embroidering.[447] The second describes the qualities of a good poem, as these were conceived by the refined but formal taste of the sixteenth century. It should begin quietly, and manage to excite without satisfying the curiosity of the reader. Vain displays of learning are to be avoided. Episodes and similes must occur at proper intervals; and a frugal seasoning of humour will be found agreeable. All repetitions should be shunned, and great care should be taken to vary the narrative with picturesque descriptions. Rhetoric, again, is not unworthy of attention, when the poet seeks to place convenient and specious arguments in the mouths of his personages.
It is difficult in a summary to do justice to this portion of Vida's poem. His description of the ideal epic is indeed nothing more or less than a refined analysis of the 'Æneid;' and students desirous of learning what the Italians of the sixteenth century admired in Virgil will do well to study its acute and sober criticism. A panegyric of Leo closes the second book. From this peroration some lines upon the woes of Italy may be read with profit, as proving that the nation, conscious of its own decline, was contented to accept the primacy of culture in exchange for independence:—
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Dii Romæ indigetes, Trojæ tuque auctor, Apollo Unde genus nostrum cœli se tollit ad astra, Hanc saltem auferri laudem prohibete Latinis: Artibus emineat semper, studiisque Minervæ, Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma; Quandoguidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit, Tanta Italos inter crevit discordia reges; Ipsi nos inter sacros distringimus enses, Nec patriam pudet externis aperire tyrannis.[448] |
The third book treats of style and diction. To be clear and varied, to command metaphor and allusion, to choose phrases coloured by mythology and fancy, to suit the language to the subject, to vary the metrical cadence with the thought and feeling, and to be assiduous in the use of the file are mentioned as indispensable to excellence. A peroration on Virgil, sonorous and impassioned, closes the whole poem, which, rightly understood, is a monument erected to the fame of the Roman bard by the piety of his Italian pupil. The final lines are justly famous:—
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O decus Italiæ! lux o clarissima vatum! Te colimus, tibi serta damus, tibi thura, tibi aras; Et tibi rite sacrum semper dicemus honorem Carminibus memores. Salve, sanctissime vates! Laudibus augeri tua gloria nil potis ultra, Et nostræ nil vocis eget; nos aspice præsens, Pectoribusque tuos castis infunde calores Adveniens, pater, atque animis te te insere nostris.[449] |
Vida's own intellect was clear, and his style perspicuous; but his genius was mediocre. His power lay in the disposition of materials and in illustration. A precise taste, formed on Cicero and Virgil, and exercised with judgment in a narrow sphere, satisfied his critical requirements. Virgil with him was first and last, and midst and without end. In a word, he shows what a scholar of sound parts and rhetorical aptitude could achieve by the study and imitation of a single author.
Since I have begun to speak of didactic poems, I may take this opportunity of noticing Fracastoro, who seems to have chosen Pontanus for his model, and, while emulating both Lucretius and Virgil, to have fallen short of Vida's elegance. His work is less remarkable for purity of diction than for massiveness of intellect, gravity of matter, and constructive ability. Jeronimo Fracastoro was born in 1483 at Verona, where he spent the greater portion of his life, enjoying high reputation as a physician, philosopher, astronomer, and poet. During his youth he studied under Pomponazzo at Padua. The strong tincture of materialistic science he there received, continued through life to colour his thought. Among modern Pagans none is more completely bare of Christianity than Fracastoro. As is well known, he chose the new and terrible disease of the Renaissance for his theme, and gave a name to it that still is current. To speak of Fracastoro's 'Syphilis,' dedicated to Bembo, hailed with acclamation by all Italy, preferred by Sannazzaro to his own epic, and praised by Julius Cæsar Scaliger as a 'divine poem,' is not easy now. The plague it celebrates appeared at Naples in 1495, and spread like wildfire over Europe, assuming at first the form of an epidemic sparing neither Pope nor king, and stirring less disgust than dread among its victims.[450] Whether the laws of its propagation were rightly understood in the sixteenth century is a question for physicians to decide. No one appears to have suspected that it differed in specific character from other pestilent disorders; and it is clear, both from contemporary chronicles and from Fracastoro's poem, that the mal franzese, as it was popularly called, suggested to the people of that age associations different from those that have since gathered round it. At the same time more formidable and less loathsome, it was a not more unworthy subject for verse than the plague at Athens described by Lucretius. Treating the disease, therefore, as a curse common to his generation, the scientific poet dared to set forth its symptoms, to prescribe remedies, to discuss the question of its origin, and to use it as an illustration of antagonistic forces, pernicious and beneficent, in the economy of nature. To philosophise his repulsive subject-matter was the author's ambition. His contemporaries admired the poetic graces with which he had contrived to adorn it.
The exordium of the first book states the problem. Whence came this new scourge of humanity? Not, surely, from America, though it is there indigenous. Its diffusion after the disasters of 1494 was too rapid to admit of this hypothesis.[451] To the corruption of the atmosphere must be referred the general invasion of the plague.[452] The theory of infected and putrescent air is stated in a long Lucretian passage, followed by a scientific account of the symptoms of syphilis. At this point the poet diversifies his argument by an episode, narrating the sad death of a young man born on the banks of the Oglio, and leading by gradual transitions to a peroration on the wars and woes of Italy.[453] Over all the poets of this age the miseries of their country hung like a cloud, and, touch the lyre as they may at the beginning of their song, it is certain ere the ending to give forth a dolorous groan. In the second book Fracastoro enters on the subject of remedies. He lays stress on choice of air, abundant exercise, avoidance of wine and heating diet, blood-letting, abstinence from sensual pleasures, fomentations, herbs, and divers minute rules of health. By attention to these matters the disease may be, if not shunned, at least mitigated. The sovereign remedy of quicksilver demanded fuller illustration; therefore the poet introduces the legendary episode of the shepherd Ilceus, conducted by the nymph Liparë to the sulphur founts and lakes of mercury beneath Mount Etna. Ilceus bathed, and was renewed in health. The rigorously didactic intention of Fracastoro is proved by the recipe for a mercurial ointment and the description of salivation that wind up this book.[454] The third opens with an allusion to the discovery of America, and a celebration of the tree Hyacus (Guaiacum). It is noticeable that, with such an opportunity for singing the praises of Columbus, Fracastoro passed him by, nor cared to claim for Italy a share in the greatest achievement of the century. Mingling myth with history, he next proceeds to tell how the Spaniards arrived in the West Indies, and shot birds sacred to the Sun,[455] one of which spoke with human voice, predicting the evils that would fall upon the crew for their impiety. Not the least of these was to be a strange and terrible disease. The natives of the islands flocked to meet the strangers, and some of them were tettered with a ghastly eruption. This leads to the episodical legend of the shepherd Syphilus, who dared to deride the Sun-god, and of the king Alcithous, who accepted divine honours in his stead. The Sun, to requite the insolence of Syphilus, afflicted him with a dreadful sickness. It yielded to no cure until the nymph Ammericë initiated him in the proper lustral rites, and led him to the tree Hyacus. The poem ends with a panegyric of Guaiacum.