The secret of its charm, which, indeed, it shares with earlier Renaissance art in general, is that this yearning after freedom has been felt with rapture, but not fully satisfied. The season of repletion and satiety is distant. Venus Physizoe appears to Francesco Colonna radiant above all powers of heaven or earth, because he is a monk and may not serve her. Had he his whole will, she might have been for him Venus Volgivaga, and he the author of another Puttana Errante. Nor has she yet assumed the earnest mask of science. This element of unassuaged desire, indulged in longings and outgoings of the fancy, this recognition of man's highest good and happiness in nature by one who has forsworn allegiance to the laws of nature, adds warmth to his emotion and penetrates his pictures with a kind of passion. The arts and scholarship, which divide the empire of his soul with beauty, have no less attraction of romance than love itself. Nor are they separated in his mind from nature. Nature and antiquity, knowledge and desire, the reverence for abstract beauty and the instincts of a lover are fused in one enthusiasm. Thus Francesco Colonna makes us understand how Italy used both art and erudition as instruments in the liberation of human energies. For the thinkers and actors of that period, antiquity and the plastic arts were aids to the recovery of a paradise from which man had been exiled. They could not dissociate the conception of nature from studies which revealed their human dignity and freedom, or from arts whereby they expressed their vivid sense of beauty. The work they thus inaugurated, had afterwards to be continued by the scientific faculties.
One word may finally be said about the peculiar delicacy of this book. The Hypnerotomachia is no less an apotheosis of natural appetite than the Amorosa Visione. But it is more sentimental and imaginative, because its author had not Boccaccio's crude experience. It anticipates the art of the great age—the art of Cellini and Giulio Romano, goldsmith-sculptors and palace-builders; but it is more refined and passionate, because its author enjoyed those beauties of consummate craft in reverie instead of practice. It interprets the enthusiasm of Ciriac and Poggio, discoverers of manuscripts, decipherers of epigraphs; but it is more naïf and graceful than their work of erudition, because its author dealt freely with his learning and subordinated scholarship to fancy. In short the Hypnerotomachia is a foreshadowing of the Renaissance in its prime—the spirit of the age foreseen in dreams, embodied in imagination, purged of material alloy, and freed from the encumbrances of actuality.
CHAPTER IV.
POPULAR SECULAR POETRY.
Separation between Cultivated Persons and the People—Italian despised by the Learned—Contempt for Vernacular Literature—The Certamen Coronarium—Literature of Instruction for the Proletariate—Growth of Italian Prose—Abundance of Popular Poetry—The People in the Quattrocento take the Lead—Qualities of Italian Genius—Arthurian and Carolingian Romances—I Reali di Francia—Andrea of Barberino and his Works—Numerous Romances in Prose and Verse—Positive Spirit—Versified Tales from Boccaccio—Popular Legends—Ginevra degli Almieri—Novel of Il Grasso—Histories in Verse—Lamenti—The Poets of the People—Cantatori in Banca—Antonio Pucci—His Sermintesi—Political Songs—Satires—Burchiello—His Life and Writings—Dance-Songs—Derived from Cultivated Literature, or produced by the People—Poliziano—Love-Songs—Rispetti and Stornelli—The Special Meaning of Strambotti—Diffusion of this Poetry over Italy—Its Permanence—Question of its Original Home—Intercommunication and Exchange of Dialects—Incatenature and Rappresaglie—Traveling in Medieval Italy—The Subject-Matter of this Poetry—Deficiency in Ballad Elements—Canti Monferrini—The Ballad of L'Avvelenato and Lord Ronald.
During the fifteenth century there was an almost complete separation between the cultivated classes and the people. Humanists, intent upon the exploration of the classics, deemed it below their dignity to use the vulgar tongue. They thought and wrote in Latin, and had no time to bestow upon the education of the common folk. A polite public was formed, who in the Courts of princes and the palaces of noblemen amused themselves with the ephemeral literature of pamphlets, essays, and epistles in the Latin tongue. For these well-educated readers Poggio and Pontano wrote their Latin novels. The same learned audience applauded the gladiators of the moment, Valla and Filelfo, when they descended into the arena and plied each other with pseudo-Ciceronian invectives. To quit this refined circle, and address the vulgar crowd, was thought unworthy of a man of erudition. Even Alberti, as we have seen, felt bound to apologize for sending his Teogenio in Italian to Lionello d'Este. Only here and there a humanist of the first rank is found who, like Bruni, devoted a portion of his industry to the Italian lives of Dante and Petrarch, or like Filelfo, lectured on the Divine Comedy, or again like Landino, composed a Dantesque commentary in the mother tongue. Moreover, Dante and Petrarch passed for almost classical; and in nearly all such instances of condescension, pecuniary interest swayed the scholar from his wonted orbit. It was want of skill in Latin rather than love for his own idiom which induced Vespasiano to pen his lives of great men in Italian. Not spontaneous inspiration, but the whim of a ducal patron forced Filelfo to use terza rima for his worthless poem on S. John, and to write a commentary upon Petrarch in the vernacular.[279] One of this man's letters reveals the humanist's contempt for the people's language, and his rooted belief in the immortality of Latin. It is worth translating.[280] "I will answer you," he says, "not in the vulgar language, as you ask, but in Latin and our own true speech; for I have ever had an abhorrence for the talk of grooms and servants, equal to my detestation of their life and manners. You, however, call that dialect vernacular which, when I use the Tuscan tongue, I sometimes write. All Italians agree in praise of Tuscan. Yet I only employ it for such matters as I do not choose to transmit to posterity. Moreover, even that Tuscan idiom is hardly current throughout Italy, while Latin is far and wide diffused throughout the habitable world." From this interesting epistle we gather that even professional scholars in the middle of the fifteenth century recognized Tuscan as a quasi-literary language, superior in polish to the other Italian dialects, but not to be compared for dignity and durability with Latin. It also proves that the language of Boccaccio was for them almost a foreign speech.
This attitude of learned writers produced a curious obtuseness of critical insight. Niccolò Niccoli, though he was a Florentine, called Dante "a poet for bakers and cobblers." Pico della Mirandola preferred Lorenzo de' Medici's verses to Petrarch. Landino complained, not, indeed, without good reason in that century, that the vulgar language could boast of no great authors. Filippo Villani, in the proem to his biographies, apologized for his father Matteo, who exerted humble faculties and scanty culture to his best ability. Lorenzo de' Medici defended himself for paying attention to an idiom which men of good judgment blamed for "lowness, incapacity and unworthiness to deal with high themes or grave material." Benedetto Varchi, who lived to be an excellent though somewhat cumbrous writer of Italian prose, gives this account of his early training[281]: "I remember that when I was a lad, the first and strictest rule of a father to his sons, and of a master to his pupils, was that they should on no account and for no object read anything in the vulgar speech (non legesseno cose volgari, per dirlo barbaramente come loro); and Master Guasparre Mariscotti da Marradi, who was my teacher in grammar, a man of hard and rough but pure and excellent manners, having once heard, I know not how, that Schiatta di Bernardo Bagnesi and I were wont to read Petrarch on the sly, gave as a sound rating for it, and nearly expelled us from his school." Some of Varchi's own stylistic pedantries may be attributed to this Latinizing education.
Even when they wrote their mother tongue, it followed that the men of humanistic culture had a false conception of style. Alberti could not abstain from Latinistic rhetoric. Cristoforo Landino went the length of asserting that "he who would fain be a good Tuscan writer, must first be a Latin scholar." The Italian of familiar correspondence was mingled in almost equal quantities with Latin phrases. Thus Poliziano, writing from Venice to Lorenzo de' Medici, employs the following strange maccaronic jargon[282]: