Renaissance in Italy, Volume 4 (of 7) / Italian Literature, Part 1

by John Addington Symonds

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Down the hillsides between Lucca and Pistoja, where the cypresses stand in rows and olives cast their shadows on the gray tilled soil, no lover has dreamed he met Queen Guinevere in spring riding through flowers with Lancelot. Instead of Morgan le Fay, turning men to lichened and mist-moistened stones upon the heath, the Italian witch was ever Locusta, the poison-brewer, or Alcina, the temptress.

This peculiarity of the Italian genius made their architects incapable of understanding Gothic. This deprived Italian art of that sublimity which needs a grain of the grotesque for its perfection, a touch of the uncouth for its accomplishment. The instinct of poets and artists alike induced them to bring mystery within the sphere of definition, to limit the marvelous by reducing it to actual conditions, and to impoverish the terrible by measuring its boundaries. But since every defect has its corresponding quality, this same instinct secured for the modern age a world of immaculate loveliness in art and undimmed joyousness in poetry. If the wonderland of fancy is eliminated, the monstrous and unshaped have disappeared. With the grotesque vanishes disproportion. Humanity, conscious of its own emotion, displaces the shadowy people of the legends. We move in a well-ordered world of cheerfulness and beauty, made for man, where symmetry of parts is music. Ariosto's jocund irony is no slight compensation for the imagery of a Northern mythus.

Returning to the Rappresentazioni, we are forced to admit that the defect of the Italian fancy is more apparent than its quality, in a species of dramatic art which, being childish, needed some magic spell to reconcile an adult taste to its puerility.[447] They were written at the most prosaic moment of the national development, by men who could not afford to substitute the true Italian poetry of irony and idyllic sensuousness for the ancient religious spirit. The bondage of the middle ages was upon them. They were forced to take the extravagance of the monastic imagination for fact. But they did not really believe; and so the fact was apprehended frigidly, prosaically. Instead of poetry we get rhetoric; instead of marvels, gross incredibilities are forced upon us in the lives of men and women fashioned like the folk who crowd the streets we know. Another step in the realistic direction would have transformed all these religious myths into novelle; and then a new beauty, the beauty of the Decameron and Novellino, would have been shed upon them. But it was precisely this step that Castellani and Belcari dared not take, since their purpose remained religious edification. Nay, their instinct led them in the opposite direction. Unable to escape the influence of the novella, which was the truest literary form peculiar to Italy in that age, they converted it into a sacred legend and treated it with the same rhetorical and insincere pietism as the stories of the Saints. From S. Barbara to the third-class Rappresentazioni the transition is easy.

The interest of this group of stories, as illustrating the psychological conditions of the Italian imagination, is great. Stripped of medieval mystery, reduced to the proportions of a novella, but not yet invested with its worldly charm, denuded of the pregnant symbolism or tragic intensity of their originals, these plays reveal the poverty of the fifteenth century, the incapacity of the Florentine genius at that moment to create poetry outside the sphere of figurative art, and in a region where irony and sensuality and natural passion were alike excluded. They might be compared to dead bones awaiting the spirit-breath of mirth and sarcasm to rouse them into life. Teofilo is the Italian Faustus.[448] A devil accuses him to the Bishop he is serving. Outcast and dishonored, he seeks Manovello, a Jewish sorcerer, who takes him to a cross-way and raises the fiend, Beelzebub. Teofilo abjures Christ, adores the devil, and signs a promise to be Satan's bondsman. In return, Beelzebub dispatches a goblin, Farfalletto, to the Bishop, who believes that an angel has come to bid him restore Teofilo to honor. Consequently Teofilo regains his post. But in the midst of his prosperity the renegade is wretched. Stung by conscience, he throws himself upon the mercy of our Lady. She pleads for him with Christ, summons the devil, and wrests from his grasp the parchment given by Teofilo. Poetic justice is satisfied by Manovello's descent to hell. Such is the prosaic form which the Faust legend assumed in Italy. Instead of the lust for power and knowledge which consumed the doctor of Wittenberg, making him exclaim:

Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophilis!

we have this commonplace story of a bishop's almoner, driven by a vulgar trial of his patience to abjure the faith. The intercession of Mary introduces a farcial element into the piece: the audience is amused by seeing the devil's contract snatched from him after a jocular altercation with the Queen of Heaven. Our Mephistophilis is either fantastically grotesque, as in the old prose-legend, or tragically saturnine, as in Marlowe's tragedy. The fiend of this Florentine play is a sort of supernatural usurer, who lends at a short date upon exorbitant interest, and is nonsuited for fraud in the supreme court of appeal. To charge the Italian imagination in general with this dwarfing and defining of a legend that had in it such elements of grandeur, might be scarcely fair. The fault lies more perhaps with Florence of the fifteenth century; yet Florence was the brain of Italy, and if the people there could find no more of salt or savor in a myth like that of Theophilus, this fact gives food for deep reflection to the student of their culture.

In the Rè Superbo we have one of those stories which traveled from the far East in the middle ages over the whole of Europe, acquiring a somewhat different form in every country.[449] The proud king in the midst of his prosperity falls sick. He takes a short day's journey to a watering-place, and bathes. By night an angel assumes his shape, dons his royal robes, summons his folk, and fares homeward to his palace. The king, meanwhile, is treated by the innkeeper as an impudent rascal. He begs some rags to cover his nakedness, and arrives in due time at the city he had left the day before. There his servants think him mad; but he obtains an audience with the angel, who reads him a sermon on humility, and then restores him to his throne. In this tale there lay nothing beyond the scope of the Italian imagination. Consequently the treatment is adequate, and the situations copied from real life are really amusing. The play of Barlaam e Josafat by Bernardo Pulci is more ambitious.[450] Josafat's father hears from his astrologers that the child will turn Christian. Accordingly he builds a tower, and places his son there, surrounded with all things pleasant to the senses and cheering to the heart of man. His servants receive strict orders that the boy should never leave his prison, lest haply, meeting with old age or poverty or sickness, he should think of Christ. On one occasion they neglect this rule. Josafat rides forth and sees a leper and a blind man, and learns that age and death and pain are in store for all. This stirs reflection, and prepares him to receive the message of one Barlaam, who comes disguised as a merchant to the tower. Barlaam offers him a jewel which restores sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and which turns a fool to wisdom. The jewel is the faith of Christ. Josafat is instantly converted and baptized; nor can the persuasions of wise men or the allurements of women overcome his fixed resolve. So firmly rooted is his new faith, so wonderful his eloquence, that he converts his father and the Court, and receives for his great wisdom the crown of his ancestors. Yet an earthly throne savors too much in his eyes of worldly pride. Therefore he renounces it, and lives thenceforth a holy hermit. This legend, it will be perceived, is a dim echo of the wonderful history of Siddârtha, the founder of Buddhism. Beautiful as are the outlines, too beautiful to be spoiled by any telling, Pulci has done his best to draw it from the dream-world of romance into the sphere of prose. At the same time, while depriving it of romance, he has not succeeded in dramatizing it. We do not feel the psychological necessity for the changes in any of the characters; the charm of each strange revolution is destroyed by the clumsy preparation of the motives. We are forced to feel that the playwright was working on the lines of a legend he did not understand and could not vitalize. The wonder is that he thought of choosing it and found it ready to his hand.

Few of the Rappresentazioni are so interesting as S. Uliva.[451] Uliva is no saint of the Catholic calendar but a daughter of world-old romance. Her legend may be read in the Gesta Romanorum, in Philip de Beaumanoir's Roman de la Mannelline, in Ser Giovanni's Pecorone, in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, in Grimm's Handless Maiden, and in Russian and Servian variations on the same theme. It is in truth the relic of some very ancient myth, used by the poets of all ages for the sake of its lesson of patience in affliction, its pathos of persecuted innocence. The form the tale assumed in Italy is this. Uliva, daughter of the Roman Emperor, Giuliano, is begged in marriage by her own father, who says she has more beautiful hands than any other princess. She cuts her hands off, and Giuliano sends her to Britain to be killed. But her murderers take pity on her, and leave her in a wood alone. There the King of Britain finds her and places her under the protection of his queen. After many misfortunes the Virgin Mary restores her hands, and she is married to the King of Castile. She bears him a son; but by this time she has roused the jealousy and hatred of the queen-mother, who takes the opportunity of the king's absence to poison his mind against her by letters, and shortly after drives her forth with her child. Uliva reaches Rome, and lives there twelve years unknown, till her husband, who has discovered and punished his mother's treason, and has sought his wronged wife sorrowing, at last rejoins her and recognizes in her son his heir. The play ends with a reconciliation scene between the Emperor, the King, and Uliva, the Pope pronouncing benedictions on the whole party. It will be seen from this brief abstract of the legend that the Rappresentazione is a chivalrous novella dramatized. Several old pathetic stories have been woven into one, and the heroine has been dignified with the title of saint because of the pity she inspires. Uliva belongs to the sisterhood of Boccaccio's Griselda, Ariosto's Ginevra, and the Queen in our old ballad of Sir Aldingar. The medieval imagination, after creating types of stateliness like Guinivere, of malice like Morgana, of love like Iseult, turned aside and dwelt upon the tender delicacy of a woman, whose whole strength is her beauty, gentleness, and patience; who suffers all things in the spirit of charity; whom the angels love and whom our Lady cherishes; who wins all hearts of men by her goodliness; and who, like Una, passes unscathed through peril and persecution until at last her joy is perfected by the fruition of her lawful love. It was precisely this element of romance that touched the Italian fancy; and the playwright of S. Uliva has shown considerable skill in his treatment of it. Piteous details are accumulated with remorseless pertinacity upon the head of the unfortunate Uliva, in order to increase the pathos of her situation. There is no mitigation of her hardships except in her own innocence, and in the loving compassion wrung by her beauty from her rude tormentors. This want of relief, together with the brusque passage from one incident to another, betrays a lack of dramatic art. But the poet, whoever he was, succeeded in sustaining the ideal of purity and beauty he conceived. He shows how all Uliva's sufferings as well as her good fortune were due to the passions her beauty inspired, and how it was her purity that held her harmless to the end.

Stella is the same story slightly altered, with a somewhat different cast of characters and an evil-hearted step-mother in the place of the malignant queen.[452] If we compare both fables with Grimm's version of the "Handless Maiden," the superiority of the Northern conception cannot fail to strike us. The Italian novella, though written for the people, exhibits the external pomp and grandeur of royalty. All its motives are drawn from the clash of human passions. Yet these are hidden beneath a superincumbent mass of trivialities. The German tale has a background of spiritual mystery—good and evil powers striving for the possession of a blameless soul. When the husband, who has been deceived by feminine malice, takes his long journey without food as a penitent to find his injured wife, how far deeper is the pathos and the poetry of the situation than the Italian apparatus of couriers with letter-bags, chancellors, tournaments, and royal progresses undertaken with a vast parade, can compass! The Northern fancy, stimulated by the simple beauty of the situation, confines itself to the passionate experience of the heart and soul. The Florentine playwright adheres to the material facts of life, and takes a childish pleasure in passing the splendors of kings and princes in review. By this method he vulgarizes the legend he handles. Beneath his touch it ceases to be holy ground. The enchantment of the myth has evanesced.