|
Tanto d'ogni altrui dono poco si cura Questa vaga angioletta umile e pura. |
My passion weighs upon me as love weighed on Aristæus. He forgot his flocks, his herds, his gardens, even his beehives for Eurydice. His heartache made him mad, and he pursued her over field and forest. She fled before him, but he followed:[290]
|
La sottil gonna in preda a i venti resta, E col crine ondeggiando addietro torna: Ella più ch'aura, o più che strale, presta Per l'odorata selva non soggiorna; Tanto che il lito prende snella e mesta, Fatta per paura assai più adorna: Fende Aristeo la vagha selva anch'egli, E la man parle aver entro i capegli. Tre volte innanzi la man destra spinse Per pigliar de le chiome il largo invito; Tre volte il vento solamente strinse, E restò lasso senza fin schernito: Nè stanchezza però tardollo o vinse, Perchè tornasse il pensier suo fallito; Anzi quanto mendico più si sente, Tanto s'affretta, non che il corso allente. |
The story of Eurydice occupies twenty-nine stanzas, and with it the poem ends abruptly. It is full of carefully-wrought pictures, excessively smooth and sugared, recalling the superficial manner of the later Roman painters. Even in the passage that describes Eurydice's agony, just quoted, the forest is odorata or vagha. Fear and flight make the maiden more adorna. The ruffian Aristæus gets tired in the chase. He, too, must be presented in a form of elegance. Not the action, but how the action might be made a groundwork for embroidery of beauty, is the poet's care. We quit the Ninfa Tiberina with senses swooning under superfluity of sweetness—as though we had inhaled the breath of hyacinths in a heated chamber.
Closely allied to bucolic stands didactic poetry. The Works and Days of Hesiod and the Georgics of Virgil—the latter far more effectually, however, than the former—determined this style for the Italians. We have already seen to what extent the neo-Latin poets cultivated a form of verse that, more than any other, requires the skill of a great artist and the inspiration of true poetry, if it is to shun intolerable tedium.[291] The best didactic poems written in Latin by an Italian are undoubtedly Poliziano's Sylvæ, and of these the most refined is the Rusticus.[292] But Poliziano, in composing them, struck out a new line. He did not follow his Virgilian models closely. He chose the form of declamation to an audience, in preference to the time-honored usage of apostrophizing a patron. This relieves the Sylvæ from the absurdity of the poet's feigning to instruct a Memmius or Augustus, a Francis I. or Charles V., in matters about which those warriors and rulers can have felt but a frigid interest. Pontano's Urania and De Hortis Hesperidum are almost free from the same blemish. The former is addressed to his son Lucius, but in words so brief and simple that we recognize the propriety of a father giving this instruction to his child.[293] The latter is dedicated to Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, who receives complimentary panegyrics in the exordium and peroration, but does not interfere with the structure of the poem. Its chief honors are reserved, as is right and due, for Virgil:[294]—
|
Dryades dum munera vati Annua, dum magno texunt nova serta Maroni, E molli violâ et ferrugineis hyacinthis, Quasque fovent teneras Sebethi flumina myrtos. |
Pontano's greatness, here as elsewhere, is shown in his mytho-poetic faculty. The lengthy dissertation on the heavens and the lighter discourse on orange-cultivation are adorned and enlivened with innumerable legends suggested to his fertile fancy by the beauty of Neapolitan scenery. When we reach the age of Vida and Fracastoro, we find ourselves in the full tide of Virgilian imitation[295]; and it is just at this point in our inquiry that the transition from Latin to Italian didactic poetry should be effected.
Giovanni Rucellai, the son of that Bernardo, who opened his famous Florentine Gardens to the Platonic Academy, was born in 1475. As the author of Rosmunda, he has already appeared in this book. When he died, in 1526, he bequeathed a little poem on Bees to his brother Palla and his friend Gian Giorgio Trissino. Trissino and Rucellai had been intimate at Florence and in Rome. They wrote the Sofonisba and Rosmunda in generous rivalry, meeting from time to time to compare notes of progress and to recite their verses. An eye-witness related to Scipione Ammirato how "these two dearest friends, when they were together in a room, would jump upon a bench and declaim pieces of their tragedies, calling upon the audience to decide between them on the merits of the plays."[296] Trissino received the MS. of his friend's posthumous poem at Padua, and undertook to see it through the press. The Api was published at Venice in 1539.[297] What remained to be said or sung about bees after the Fourth Georgic? Very little indeed, it must be granted. Yet the Api is no mere translation from Virgil; and though the higher qualities of variety invention and imagination were denied to Rucellai, though he can show no passages of pathos to compete with the Corycius senex, of humor to approach the battle of the hives, no episode, it need be hardly said, to match with Pastor Aristæus, still his modest poem is a monument of pure taste and classical correctness. It is the work of a ripe scholar and melodious versifier, if not of a great singer; and its diction belongs to the best period of polite Italian.
The same moderate praise might be awarded to the more ambitious poem of Luigi Alamanni, entitled Coltivazione, but for its immoderate prolixity.[298] Alamanni resolved to combine the precepts of Hesiod, Virgil and Varro, together with the pastoral passages of Lucretius, in one work, adapting them to modern usage, and producing a comprehensive treatise upon farming. With this object he divided his poem into six books, the first four devoted to the labors of the several seasons, the fifth to gardens, and the sixth to lucky and unlucky days. On a rough computation, the whole six contain some 5,500 lines. La Coltivazione is dedicated to Francis I., and is marred by inordinate flatteries of the French people and their king. Students who have the heart to peruse its always chaste and limpidly flowing blank verse, will be rewarded from time to time with passages like the following, in which the sad circumstances of the poet and the pathos of his regrets for Italy raise the style to more than usual energy and dignity:[299]