When Poliziano composed Le Stanze he was nearly twenty-four years of age.[492] He had steeped himself in the classic literatures. Endowed with a marvelous memory, he possessed their spirit and their substance. Not less familiar with Tuscan poetry of the fourteenth century, he commanded the stores of Dante's, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's diction. Long practice in Greek and Latin composition had given him mastery over the metrical systems of the ancient languages.[493] The daily habit of inditing songs for music to please the ladies of the Medicean household, had accustomed him to the use of fluent Italian. The translation of the Iliad, performed in part before he was eighteen, had made him a faithful imitator, while it added dignity and fullness to his style.[494] Besides these qualifications for his future task of raising Italian to an equality with Latin poetry, he brought with him to this achievement a genius apt to comprehend the spirit of the Renaissance in its pomp and liberty and tranquil loveliness. The noble and yet sensuous manner of the great Venetian painters, their dignity of form, their luxury of color, their boldness and decision, their imperturbable serenity of mundane joy—the choicer delicacy of the Florentine masters, their refinement of outline, selection of type, suggestion of restrained emotion—the pure design of the Tuscan sculptors, the suavity and flexibility of the Lombard plasticatori—all these qualities of Italian figurative art appear, as it were in bud, in the Stanze. Poliziano's crowning merit as a stylist was that he knew how to blend the antique and the romantic, correct drawing with fleshly fullness. Breadth of design and harmony of color have rarely been produced in more magnificent admixture. The octave stanza, which in the hands of Boccaccio was languid and diffuse, in the hands of Lorenzo harsh, in the hands of Pulci rugged, became under Poliziano's treatment an inexhaustible instrument of varying melodies. At one time, beneath his touch, the meter takes an epic dignity; again it sinks to idyllic sweetness, or mourns with the elegy, or exults with the ode. Its movement is rapid or relaxed, smooth or vibrating, undulatory or impetuous, as he has chosen. When we reflect how many generations of poets it required to bring the Sonnet to completeness, we may marvel at this youth, in an age when scholarship absorbed inventive genius, who was able at one stroke to do for the octave stanza what Marlowe did for our Blank Verse. Poliziano gave to Ariosto the Italian epical meter perfected, and established a standard of style amid the anarchy which threatened the literature of Italy with ruin.
Yet it must be confessed that, after all, it is chiefly the style of Poliziano that deserves praise. Like so much else of Renaissance work—like the Farnesina frescoes in Rome, or Giulio Romano's luxuriant arabesques at Mantua, or the efflorescence of foliage and cupids in the bass-reliefs of palace portals at Venice—there is but little solid thought or serious feeling underneath this decorative richness. Those who cannot find a pleasure in form for its own sake, independent of matter, will never be able to do Poliziano justice. This brings us to the subject of the Stanze. They were written to celebrate the prowess of Giuliano de' Medici, Lorenzo's brother, in a tournament held at Florence in the beginning of the year 1478. This fact is worth consideration. The poem which opened a new age for Italian literature, had no nobler theme than a Court pageant. Dante had been inspired to sing the epic of the human soul. Petrarch finished a portrait of the life through love of an impassioned man. Boccaccio bound up in one volume a hundred tales, delineating society in all its aspects. Then the Muse of Italy fell asleep. Poliziano aroused her with the full deep intonations of a golden instrument. But what was the burden of his song? Giuliano de' Medici loved the fair Simonetta, and bore away the prize in a toy-tournament.
This marks the change effected by a century of prince-craft. Henceforth great poets were to care less for what they sang than for the style in which they sang. Henceforth poetry in Italy was written to please—to please patrons who were flattered with false pedigrees and absurd mythologies, with the imputation of virtues they never possessed, and with the impudent palliation of shame apparent to the world. Henceforth the bards of Ausonia deigned to tickle the ears of lustful boys and debauched cardinals, buying the bread of courtly sloth—how salt it tasted let Tasso and Guarini tell—with jests or panegyrics. Liberty could scarcely be named in verse when natives and strangers vied together in enslaving Italy. To praise the great deeds of bygone heroes within hearing of pusillanimous princes, would have been an insult. Even satires upon a degraded present, aspirations after a noble future, prophecies of resurrection from the tomb—those last resorts of a national literature that retains its strength through evil days—were unknown upon the lips of the Renaissance poets. Art had become a thing of pleasure, sometimes infamous, too often nugatory. The fault of this can scarcely be said to have rested with one man more than with another; nor can we lay the blame on Poliziano, though he undoubtedly represented the class who were destined to continue literature upon these lines. It was the combined result of scholarship, which for a whole century had diverted the minds of men to the form and words of literature; of court-life, which had enfeebled the recipients of princely patronage; of tyranny, which encouraged flattery, dissimulation, and fraud; of foreign oppression, which already was beginning to enervate a race of slaves; of revived paganism, which set the earlier beliefs and aspirations of the soul at unequal warfare with emancipated lusts and sensualities; of indolence, which loved to toy with trifles, instead of thinking and creating thought; of social inequalities, which forced the poet to eat a master's bread, and turned the scholars of Italy into a crowd of servile and yet arrogant beggars. All these circumstances, and many more of the same kind, were slowly and surely undermining the vigor of the Italian intellect. Over the meridian splendor of Le Stanze we already see their influences floating like a vaporous miasma.
Italy, though never so chivalrous as the rest of Europe, yet preserved the pompous festivities of feudalism. Jousts were held in all great cities, and it was reckoned part of a courtier's business to be a skillful cavalier. At Florence the custom survived of celebrating the first of May with tournaments, and on great occasions the wealthy families spent large sums of money in providing pastimes of this sort. February 7, 1468, witnessed a splendid spectacle, when Lorenzo de' Medici, mounted successively on chargers presented to him by the Duke of Ferrara and the King of Naples, attired in armor given by the Duke of Milan, bearing the fleurs de lys of France conferred upon the Medici by Louis XI., and displaying on his pennon for a motto Le Tems revient, won the prize of valor before the populace assembled in the square of S. Croce. Luca Pulci, the descendant of an ancient house of Tuscan nobles, composed an adulatory poem in octave stanzas on this event. So changed were the times that this scion of Florentine aristocracy felt no shame in fawning on a despot risen from the people to enslave his city. Yet the spectacle was worthy celebration. Lorenzo, the banker's son, the Platonist, the diplomatist and tyrant, charging in the lists of feudalism beneath Arnolfo's tower, with the lilies of France upon his shield and the device of the Renaissance on his banner—this figured symbol of the meeting of two ages in a single man was no mean subject for a poem!
From Poliziano's Stanze we learn no such characteristic details concerning Giuliano's later tournament. Though the poem is called La Giostra, the insignificant subject disappears beneath a wealth of illustration. The episodes, including the pictures of the Golden Age and of the garden and palace of Venus, form the real strength of a masterpiece which blent the ancient and the modern world in a work of art glowing with Italian fancy. That La Giostra has no subject-matter, no theme of weight to wear the poet thin through years of anxious toil, no progress from point to point, no chain of incidents and no romantic evolution, is a matter of little moment. When Giuliano de' Medici died before the altar by the hand of an assassin on April 26, 1478, Poliziano laid down his pen and left the Stanze unfinished.[495] It cannot be said that the poem suffered, or that posterity lost by this abrupt termination of a work conceived without a central thought. Enough had been already done to present Italy with a model of the style she needed; and if we ask why La Giostra should have become immediately popular in spite of its peculiar texture and its abrupt conclusion, the answer is not far to seek. Poliziano incarnated the spirit of his age, and gave the public what satisfied their sense of fitness. The three chief enthusiasms of the fifteenth century—for classical literature, for artistic beauty, and for nature tranquilly enjoyed—were so fused and harmonized within the poet's soul as to produce a style of unmistakable originality and charming ease. Poliziano felt the delights of the country with serene idyllic rapture, not at second hand through the ancients, but with the voluptuous enjoyment of the Florentine who loved his villa. He had, besides, a sense of form analogous to that possessed by the artists of his age, which guided him in the selection and description of the scenes he painted. Again, his profound and refined erudition enabled him "to shower," as Giovio phrased it, "the finest flowers of antique poetry upon the people." Therefore, while he felt nature like one who worshiped her for her own sake and for the joy she gave him, he saw in her the subjects of a thousand graceful pictures, and these pictures he studied through a radiant haze of antique reminiscences. Each stanza of La Giostra is a mimic world of beauty, art, and scholarship; a painting where the object stands before us modeled with relief of light and shade in finely modulated hues; a brief anthology of daintily-culled phrases, wafting to our memories the perfume of Greece, Rome, and Florence in her prime. These delicate little masterpieces are, turn by turn, a picture of Botticelli, a fresco by Giulio Romano, an engraving of Mantegna, a bass-relief of young Buonarroti, or a garden-scene of Gozzoli, expressed in the purest diction of all literatures by a poet who, while imitating, never ceased to be original.[496] Nothing more was needed by a nation of idyllic dreamers, artists and scholars.
What Poliziano might have achieved, if he had found a worthy theme for the employment of his powers, it would be idle to ask. It is perhaps the condemnation of the man and of his age that the former did not seek heroic subjects for song, and the latter did not demand them—in a word that neither poet nor public had in them anything heroic whatsoever. The fact is undeniably true; but this does not deprive Poliziano of the merit of such verses as the following:
A somewhat earlier composition than La Giostra was La Favola di Orfeo, a dramatic poem similar in form to the Sacra Rappresentazione, with a classical instead of a religious subject.[497] To call it a tragedy would be to dignify it with too grand a title. To class it with pastorals is equally impossible, though the songs of the shepherds and wood-nymphs may be said to have anticipated the style of Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido. Nor again is it properly speaking an opera, though it was undoubtedly meant for music. The Orfeo combined tragedy, the pastoral, and the opera in a mixed work of melodramatic art, which by its great popularity inspired the poets of Italy to produce specimens of each kind, and prepared the public to receive them.[498] Still, in form and movement, it adhered to the traditions of the Sacra Rappresentazione, and its originality consisted in the substitution of a Pagan for a Christian fable.
Unerring instinct guided Poliziano in the choice of his subject. Orpheus was the proper hero of Renaissance Italy—the civilizer of a barbarous world by art and poetry, the lover of beauty, who dared to invade Hell and moved the iron heart of Pluto with a song. Long before the composition of Orfeo, Boccaccio had presented the same conception of society humanized by culture in his Ninfale Fiesolano. This was the ideal of the Renaissance; and, what is more, it accurately symbolized the part played by Italy after the dissolution of the middle ages. In the myth of Orpheus the humanism of the Revival became conscious of itself. This fable was the Mystery of the new age, the allegory of the work appointed for the nation. Did we dare to press a metaphor to the verge of the fantastic, we might even read in the martyrdom of Orpheus by the Mænads a prophecy of the Italian doom. Italy, who had aroused Europe from lethargy with the voice of poetry and learning, who had inaugurated a new age of civil and social refinement, who thought she could resist the will of God by arts and elegant accomplishments, after triumphing over the rude forces of nature was now about to violate the laws of nature in her vices, and to fall a victim to the Mænads of incurrent barbarism, inebriate with wine and blood, indifferent to the magic of the lyre, avengers blindly following the dictates of a power that rules the destinies of nations. Of this Italy, Poliziano, the author of Orfeo, was himself the representative hero, the protagonist, the intellectual dictator.[499]
The Orfeo was sent with a letter of dedication to Messer Carlo Canale, the obsequious husband of that Vannozza, who bore Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia to the Pope Alexander VI. Poliziano says that he "wrote this play at the request of the Most Reverend the Cardinal of Mantua, in the space of two days, among continual disturbances, and in the vulgar tongue, that it might be the better comprehended by the spectators." He adds: "This child of mine is of a sort to bring more shame than honor on its father."