The same series of Pontano's poems may be read with no less profit for their pictures of Neapolitan life.[270] He brings the baths of Baiæ, unspoiled as yet by the eruption from Monte Nuovo, vividly before us; the myrtle-groves and gardens by the bay; the sailors stretched along the shore; the youths and maidens, flirting as they bathe or drink the waters, their evening walks, their little dinners, their assignations; all the round of pleasure in a place and climate made for love. Or we watch the people at their games, crowded together on those high-built carts, rattling the tambourine and dancing the tarantella—as near to fauns and nymphs in shape as humanity well may be.[271] Each mountain and each stream is personified; the genii of the villages, the Oreads of the copses, the Tritons of the waves, come forth to play with men:[272]
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Claudicat hinc heros Capimontius, et de summo Colle ruunt misti juvenes mistæque puellæ; Omnis amat chorus, et juncti glomerantur amantes. Is lento incredit passu, baculoque tuetur Infirmum femur, et choreis dat signa movendis, Assuetus choreæ ludisque assuetus amantum. |
Nor are these personifications merely frigid fictions. The landscape of Naples lends itself to mythology, not only because it is so beautiful, but because human life and nature interpenetrate, as nowhere else in Europe, on that bay. Pontano has a tale to tell of every river and every grove—how Adonis lives again in the orange trees of Sorrento, how the Sebeto was a boy beloved by one of Nereus' daughters and slain by him in anger.[273] His tendency to personification was irresistible. Not content, like Sannazzaro, with singing the praises of his villa, he feigns a Nympha Antiniana, whom he invokes as the Muse of neo-Latin lyric rapture.[274] In the melodious series of love-poems entitled Eridanus, he exercises the same imaginative faculty on Lombard scenery. After closing this little book, we seem to be no less familiar with the "king of rivers," Phaethon, and the Heliades, than with the living Stella, to frame whose beauty in a fitting wreath these fancies have been woven.[275] Even the Elegy, which he used so freely and with so complete a pleasure in its movement, becomes for him a woman, with specific form and habit, and a love tale taken from some Propertian memory of he poet's Umbrian home. To quote Pontano is neither easy nor desirable. Yet I cannot resist the inclination to present Dame Elegia in her Ionian garb in part at least before a modern audience.[276]
That this poet was no servile imitator of Tibullus or Ovid is clear. That he had not risen to their height of diction is also manifest. But in Pontano, as in Poliziano, Latin verse lived again with new and genuine vitality.
If it were needful to seek a formal return from this digression to the subject of my chapter there would be no lack of opportunity. Pontano's Eclogues, the description of his gardens, his vision of the golden age and his long discourse on the cultivation of orange trees, justify our placing him among the strictly pastoral poets.[277] In treating of the country he displays his usual warmth and sensuous realism. He mythologizes; but his myths are the substantial forms of genuine emotion and experience. The Fauns he talks of, are such lads as even now may be seen upon the Ischian slopes of Monte Epomeo, with startled eyes, brown skin, and tangled tresses tossed adown their sinewy shoulders. The Bacchus of his vintage has walked, red from the wine-press, crowned with real ivy and vine, and sat down at the poet's elbow, to pledge him in a cup of foaming must.
While Sannazzaro was exploring Arcadia at Naples, Poliziano had already transferred pastoral poetry to the theater at Mantua. Of the Orfeo and its place in Italian literature, I have spoken sufficiently elsewhere. It is enough to remember, in the present connection, that, while Arcady became the local dreamland of the new ideal, Orpheus took the place of its hero. As the institutor of civil society in the midst of a rude population, he personified for our Italian poets the spirit of their own renascent culture. Arcadia represented the realm of art and song, unstirred by warfare or unworthy passions. Orpheus attuned the simple souls who dwelt in it, to music with his ravishing lyre.
Pastoral representations soon became fashionable. Niccolò da Correggio put the tale of Cephalus and Procris on the stage at Ferrara, with choruses of nymphs, vows to Diana, eclogues between Corydon and Thyrsis, a malignant Faun, and a dea ex machinâ to close the scene.[278] At Urbino in the carnival of 1506 Baldassare Castiglione and his friend Cesare Gonzaga recited amœbean stanzas, attired in pastoral dress, before the Court. This eclogue, entitled Tirsi, deserves notice, less perhaps for its intrinsic merits, though these, judged by the standard of bucolic poetry, are not slight, than because it illustrates the worst vices of the rustic style in its adaptation to fashionable usage.[279] The dialogue opens with the customary lament of one love-lorn shepherd to another, and turns upon time-honored bucolic themes, until the mention of Metaurus reminds us that we are not really in Arcadia but at Urbino. The goddess who strays among her nymphs along its bank, is no other than the Duchess, attended by Emilia Pia and the other ladies of her Court. "The good shepherd, who rules these happy fields and holy lands," is Duke Guidubaldo. Then follow compliments to all the interlocutors of the Cortegiano. Bembo is the shepherd, "who hither came from the bosom of Hadria." The "ancient shepherd, honored by all, who wears a wreath of sacred laurel," is Morello da Ortona. The Tuscan shepherd, "wise and learned in all arts," must either be Bernardo Accolti or else Giuliano de' Medici. And yonder shepherd from the Mincio is Lodovico da Canossa. A chorus of shepherds and a morris-dance relieved the recitation, which was also enlivened by the introduction of one solo, sung by Iola. Thus in this early specimen of the pastoral mask we observe that confusion of things real and things ideal, of past and present, of imaginary rustics and living courtiers, which was destined to prove the bane of the species and to render it a literary plague in every European capital. The radical fault existed in Virgil's treatment of the Syracusan idyl. But each remove from its source rendered the falsehood more obnoxious. In Spenser's Eclogues the awkwardness is greater than in Castiglione's. Before Teresa Maria the absurdity was more apparent than before Elizabeth. At last the common sense of the public could no longer tolerate the sham, and Arcadia, with its make-believe and flattery and allegory, became synonymous with affectation.
It is no part of my programme to follow the development of the pastoral drama through all its stages in Italy.[280] For the end of this chapter I reserve certain necessary remarks upon its masterpieces, the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. At present it will suffice to indicate the fact that, on the stage, as in the eclogue, bucolic poetry followed two distinct directions—the one Arcadian and artificial, the other national and closely modeled on popular forms. The Nencia da Barberino and Beca da Dicomano of Lorenzo de' Medici and Luigi Pulci belong to the latter class of eclogues.[281] Their corresponding forms in dramatic verse are Berni's Catrina and Mogliazzo, together with the Tancia and Fiera of Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger.[282] If it is impossible to render any adequate account of pastoral drama, to do this for bucolic idyls would be no less difficult. Their name in Latin and Italian is legion. Poets so different in all things else as were Girolamo Benivieni, Antonio Tebaldeo, Sperone Speroni, Bernardino Baldi, Benedetto Varchi, and Luigi Tansillo—to mention only men of some distinction—brought Mopsus and Tityrus, Menalcas and Melibæus, Amaryllis and Cydippe, from Virgil's Arcadia, and made them talk interminably of their loves and sheep in delicate Italian.[283] Folengo's sharp satiric wit, as we shall remark in another chapter, finally pursued them with the shafts of ridicule in Baldus and Zanitonella. Thus pastoral poetry completed the whole cycle of Italian literature—expressed itself through dialogue in the drama, adhered to Virgilian precedent in the Latinists and their Italian followers, adopted the forms of popular poetry, and finally submitted to the degradation of Maccaronic burlesque.
We can well afford to turn in silence from the common crowd of eclogue-writers. Yet one poet emerges from the rank and file, and deserves particular attention. Francesco Maria Molza stood foremost in his own day among scholars of ripe erudition and literary artists of accomplished skill. His high birth, his genial conversation, his loves and his misfortunes rendered him alike illustrious; and his Ninfa Tiberina is still the sweetest pastoral of the golden age. Molza was born in 1489 at Modena. Since his parents were among the richest and noblest people of that city, it is probable that he acquired the Greek and Latin scholarship, for which he was in after-life distinguished, under tutors at home. At the age of sixteen he went to Rome in order to learn Hebrew, and was at once recognized as a youth of more than ordinary promise by men like Marcantonio Flamminio and Lilio Giraldi. In 1512 he returned to Modena, where he married according to his rank. His wife brought him four children, and he passed a few years at this period with his family. But Molza soon wearied of domestic and provincial retirement. In 1516 he left home again and plunged into the dissipations of Roman life. From this date forward till his death in 1544 he must be reckoned among those Italians for whom Rome was dearer than their native cities. The brilliance of his literary fame and the affection felt for him by men of note in every part of Italy will not distract attention from the ignobility of his career. Faithless to his wife, neglectful of his children, continually begging money from his father, he passed his manhood in a series of amours. Some of these were respectable, but most of them disreputable. A certain Furnia, a low-born Beatrice Paregia, and the notorious Faustina Mancina are to be mentioned among the women who from time to time enslaved him. In the course of his intrigue with Beatrice he received a stab in the back from some obscure rival, which put him in peril of his life. For Faustina he composed the Ninfa Tiberina. She was a Roman courtesan, so famous for her beauty and fine breeding as to attract the sympathy of even severe natures. When she died, the town went into mourning, and the streets echoed with elegiac lamentations. It is curious that among Michelangelo's sonnets should be found one—not, however, of the best—written upon this occasion. While seeking amusement with the Imperias, who took Aspasia's place in Papal Rome, Molza formed a temporary attachment for a more illustrious lady—the beautiful and witty Camilla Gonzaga. He passed two years, between 1523 and 1525, in her society at Bologna. After his return to Rome, Molza witnessed the miseries of the sack, which made so doleful an impression on his mind that, saddened for a moment, he retired like the prodigal to Modena. Rome, however, although not destined to regain the splendor she had lost, shook off the dust and blood of 1527; and there were competent observers who, like Aretino, thought her still more reckless in vice than she had been before. Molza could not long resist the attractions of the Papal city. In 1529 we find him once more in Rome, attached to the person of Ippolito de' Medici, and delighting the Academies with his wit. Two years afterwards, his father and mother died on successive days of August. Molza celebrated their death in one of the most lovely of his many sonnets. But his ill life and obstinate refusal to settle at Modena had disinherited him; and henceforth he lived upon his son Camillo's bounty. To follow his literary biography at this period would be tantamount to writing the history of the two famous Academies delle Virtù and de' Vignaiuoli. Of both he was a most distinguished member. He amused them with his conversation, recited before them his Capitoli, and charmed them with the softness and the sweetness of his manners. Numbers of his sonnets commemorate the friendships he made in those urbane circles.