There is good reason to believe that the year 1472, when the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga returned from Bologna to Mantua, and was received with "triumphs and pomps, great feasts and banquets," was the date of its composition. If so, the Orfeo was written at the age of eighteen. It could not have been played later than 1483, for in that year the Cardinal died. At eighteen Poliziano was already famous for his translation of the Iliad. He had gained the title of Homericus Juvenis, and was celebrated for his powers of improvization.[500] That he should have put the Orfeo together in forty-eight hours is hardly so remarkable as that he should have translated Herodian in the space of a few days, while walking and dictating. For the Orfeo is but a slight piece, though beautiful and pregnant with the germs of many styles to be developed from its scenes. The plot is simple, and the whole play numbers no more than 434 lines.
To do the Orfeo justice, we ought to have heard it with its own accompaniment of music. Viewed as a tragedy, judged by the standard of our Northern drama, it will always prove a disappointment. That mastery over the complex springs of human nature which distinguished the first efforts of Marlowe, is almost wholly absent. A certain adaptation of the language to the characters, in the rudeness of Thyrsis when contrasted with the rustic elegance of Aristæus; a touch of feeling in Eurydice's outcry of farewell; a discrimination between the tender sympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting; a spirited representation of Bacchanalian enthusiasm in the Mænads; an attempt to model the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet conscious of its anguish—these points constitute the chief dramatic features of the melodrama. But where there was the opportunity of a really tragic movement, Poliziano failed. We have only to read the lament uttered by Orpheus for the loss of Eurydice, in order to perceive how fine a situation has been spoiled. The pathos which might have made us sympathize with the lover in his misery, the passion approaching frenzy which might have justified his misogyny, are absent. Poliziano seems to have already felt the inspiration of the Bacchic chorus which concludes the play, and to have forgotten his duty to his hero, whose sorrow for Eurydice is stultified and made unmeaning by the prosaic expression of a base resolve. Yet, when we return from these criticisms to the real merit of the piece, we find in it a charm of musical language, a subtlety of musical movement, which are irresistibly fascinating. Thought and feeling seem alike refined to a limpidity that suits the flow of melody in song. The very words evaporate and lose themselves in floods of sound. Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage. Of character, he can scarcely be said to have anything marked; and his part rises to its height precisely in the passage where the singer has to be displayed. Thus the Orfeo is a good poem only where the situation is less dramatic than lyrical, and its finest scene was, fortunately for the author, one in which the dramatic motive could be lyrically expressed. Before the gates of Hades and the throne of Proserpine, Orpheus sings, and his singing is the right outpouring of a musician-poet's soul. Each octave resumes the theme of the last stanza with a swell of utterance, a crescendo of intonation, that recalls the passionate and unpremeditated descant of a bird upon the boughs alone. To this true quality of music is added the persuasiveness of pleading. Even while we read, the air seems to vibrate with pure sound, and the rich recurrence of the tune is felt upon the opening of each successive stanza. That the melody of this incomparable song is lost, must be reckoned a misfortune. We have reason to believe that the part of Orpheus was taken by Messer Baccio Ugolini, singing to the viol.[501]
Space does not permit me to detach the whole scene in Hades from the play and print it here; to quote a portion of it would be nothing less than mutilation.[502] I must content myself with this Chorus of the Mænads, which contains, as in a kernel, the whole dithyrambic poetry of the Italians:
It remains to speak of the third class of poems which the great scholar and supple courtier flung like wild flowers with a careless hand from the chariot of his triumph to the Capitolian heights of erudition. Small store, indeed, he set by them—these Italian love-songs, hastily composed to please Donna Ippolita Leoncina, the titular mistress of his heart; thrown off to serve the turn of Giuliano and his younger friends; or improvised, half jestingly, to meet the humor of his princely patron, when Lorenzo, quitting the laurel-crowned bust of Plato, or the groves of Careggi, or the audience-chamber where he parleyed with the envoys of the Sforza, went abroad like King Manfred of old with lute and mandoline and viol to serenade the windows of some facile beauty in the twilight of a night of June.[503] Little did Poliziano dream that his learning would pass away almost unreckoned, but that men of after time would gather the honey of the golden days of the Renaissance from these wilding garlands.[504] Yet, however slightly Poliziano may have prized these productions of his early manhood, he proved that the Canzone, the Rispetto, and the Ballata were as much his own in all their multiformity of lyric loveliness, as were the rich sonorous measures of the octave stanza. Expressing severally the depths of tender emotion, the caprices of adoring passion, and the rhythmic sentiment that winds in myriad movements of the dance, these three kinds of poem already belonged to the people and to love. Poliziano displayed his inborn taste and mastery of art in nothing more than in the ease with which he preserved the passionate simplicity of the Tuscan Volkslied, while giving it a place among the lyrics of the learned. We have already seen how that had been achieved by Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and afterwards in a measure by Lorenzo de' Medici. But the problem of writing love-poetry for the people in their own forms, without irony and innuendo, was not now so easy as it had been in the fourteenth century, when no barrier had yet arisen between educated poets and the folk. Nor had even Boccaccio, far less Lorenzo, solved it with the exquisite tact and purity of style we find in all Poliziano's verses. In order to comprehend their charm, we must transfer ourselves to Florence on a summer night, when the prince is abroad upon the streets attended by singing-boys as beautiful as Sandro's angels. The professor's chair is forgotten, and Plato's spheres are left to turn unheeded. Pulci and Poliziano join hands with girls from the workshop and the attic. Lorenzo and Pico figure in the dance with 'prentice-lads and carvers of wood-work or marble. All through the night beneath the stars the music of their lutes is ringing; and when the dancing stops, they gather round some balcony, or hold their own upon the square in matches of improvised melody with the unknown rhymsters of the people. What can be prettier than the ballad of roses made for "such a night," by Angelo Poliziano?[505]
Poliziano's Rispetti are written for the most part in ottava rima. This form alone suffices to mark them out as literary reproductions of the poetry upon which they are modeled. In the Rispetti more than the Ballate we notice a certain want of naïveté, which distinguishes them from the racier inspirations of the popular Muse. That passionate insight into the soul and essence of emotion which rarely fails the peasant in his verse however rude, is here replaced by concetti rounded into pearls of fancy with the daintiest art. Those brusque and vehement images that flash the light of imagination on the movements of the heart, throbbing with intensest natural feeling, yield to carefully selected metaphors developed with a strict sense of economy. Instead of the young contadino willing to mortgage Paradise for his dama, worshiping her with body, will and soul, compelling the morning and the evening star and the lilies of the field and the bells that swing their notes of warning over Rome, to serve the bidding of his passion, we have the scholar-courtier, who touches love with the finger-tips for pastime, and who imitates the gold of the heart with baser metal of fine rhetoric. Still we find in these Rispetti a quality which their rustic models lack. This is the roseate fluency and honeyed rapture of their author—an exquisite limpidity and ease of diction that reveal the inborn gift of art. Language in Poliziano's hand is plastic, taking form like softest wax, so that no effort of composition, no labor of the file can be discerned.
Nec pluteum cædit nec demorsos sapit ungues.
This line of Persius denotes the excellences no less than the faults of his erotic poetry, so charming in its flow, so fit to please a facile ear, so powerless to stir the depth of the soul or wring relenting from reluctant hearts. Compared with the love-poetry of elder poets, these Rispetti are what the artificial epigrams of Callimachus or the Anacreontics of the Alexandrian versifiers were to the ardent stanzas of Sappho, the impassioned scolia of Pindar. While they fail to reflect the ingenuous emotions of youth exulting in the Paradise of love without an afterthought, they no less fail to embody philosophy or chivalrous religion or the tragedy of passions in conflict. They are inspired by Aphrodité Pandemos, and the joys of which they tell are carnal.[506]
What has been said about the detached Rispetti, is true of those longer poems which consist of many octave stanzas strung together with a continuity of pleading rhetoric. The facility bordering on negligence of their construction is apparent. Verses that occur in one, reappear in others without alteration. All repeat the same arguments, the same enticements to a less than lawful love. The code of Florentine wooing may be conveniently studied in the rambling paragraphs, while the levity of their declarations and the fluency of their vows, doing the same service on different occasions, show them to be "false as dicers' oaths," mere verses of the moment, made to sway a yielding woman's heart.[507] Yet who can help enjoying them, when he connects their effusiveness of fervent language with the episodes of the Novelle, illustrated by figures borrowed from contemporary frescoes? Those sinewy lads of Signorelli and Masuccio, in parti-colored hose and tight jackets, climbing mulberry-tree or vine beneath their lady's window; those girls with the demure eyes of Lippo Lippi and Bandello, suspending rope-ladders from balconies to let their Romeo escape at daybreak: those lovers rushing, half-clad in shirt or jerkin, from bower and bed-chamber to cross their swords with jealous husbands at street corners; rise before us and sing their love-songs in these verses of Poliziano, written for precisely such occasions to express the very feelings of these heroes of romance. After all, too, there is a certain sort of momentary sincerity in their light words of love.
Three lyrics of higher artistic intention and of very different caliber mark the zenith of Poliziano's achievement. These are the portrait of the country girl, La brunettina mia; the canzone to La Bella Simonetta, written for Giuliano de' Medici; and the magnificent imitation of Petrarch's manner, beginning Monti, valli, antri e colli.[508] They are three studies in pictorial poetry, transparent, limpid, of incomparable freshness. A woman has sat for the central figure of each, and the landscape round her is painted with the delicacy of a quattrocento Florentine. La Brunettina is the simple village beauty, who bathes her face in the fountain, and crowns her blonde hair with a wreath of wild flowers. She is a blossoming branch of thorn in spring. Her breasts are May roses, her lips are strawberries. The portrait is so ethereally tinted and so firmly modeled that we seem to be looking at a study painted by a lover from the life. Simonetta moves with nobler grace and a diviner majesty[509]: