Since the composition and publication of such letters formed a main branch of literary industry in the period we have reached,[317] it will be well to offer some examples of Bembo's epistolary style; and for this purpose, the correspondence with Lucrezia Borgia may be chosen, not only because of the interest attaching to her friendship with the author, but also because the topics treated display the refinement of his nature in a very agreeable light.[318] In one of these, written upon the occasion of her father's death, he calls Alexander VI. quel vostro così gran padre. In a second, touched with the deepest personal feeling, he announces the death of his own brother Carlo, mio solo e caro fratello, unico sostegno e sollazzo della vita mia.[319] In a third he thanks her for her letters of condolence: Le lagrime alle quali mi scrivete essere stata constretta leggendo nelle mei lettere la morte del mio caro e amato fratello M. Carlo, sono dolcissimo refrigerio stato al mio dolore, se cosa dolce alcuna m'è potuta venire a questo tempo. In a fourth he turns this graceful compliment: Pregherei eziandio il cielo, che ogni giorno v'accrescerebbe la bellezza; ma considero che non vi se ne può aggiungere. In a fifth he congratulates Lucrezia upon the birth of a son and heir, and in a sixth condoles with her upon his early death. Then another boy is born, just when the Duke of Urbino dies; and Bembo mingles courtly tears with ceremonious protestations of his joy. It would be impossible to pen more scholarly exercises upon similar occasions; and through the style of the professed epistolographer we seem to feel that Bembo had real interest in the events he illustrates so elegantly. The fatal defect of his letters is, that he is always thinking more of his manner than of his matter. Like the humanists from whom he drew his mental lineage, he labored for posterity without reckoning on the actual demands posterity would make. Success crowned his efforts in the pleasure he afforded to the public of his day; but this was a success comparable with that of Bernardo Accolti or Tibaldeo of Ferrara, whom he scorned. He little thought that future students would rate an annalist of Corio's stamp, for the sake of his material, at a higher value than the polished author of the Lettere. Yet such is the irony of fame that we could willingly exchange Bembo's nicely-turned phrases for a few solid facts, a few spontaneous effusions.
Bembo was a power in literature, the exact force of which it is difficult to estimate without taking his personal influence into consideration. Distinguished by great physical beauty, gifted with a noble presence, cultivated in the commerce of the best society, he added to his insight and his mental energy all the charm that belongs to a man of fashion and persuasive eloquence in conversation. He was untiring in his literary industry, unfailing in his courtesy to scholars, punctual in correspondence, and generous in the use he made of his considerable wealth. At Urbino, at Venice, at Rome, and at Padua, his study was the meeting-place of learned men, who found the graces of the highest aristocracy combined in him with genial enthusiasm for the common interests of letters. Thus the man did even more than the author to promote the revolution he had at heart. This is brought home to us with force when we consider the place assigned to him in Castiglione's Cortegiano—a masterpiece of composition transcending, in my opinion, all the efforts made by Bembo to conquer the difficulties of style. Castiglione is no less correct than the dictator strove to be; but at the same time he is far more natural. He treats the same topics with greater ease, and with a warmth of feeling and conviction which endears him to the heart of those who read his golden periods. Yet Castiglione gives the honors of his dialogue to the author of the Asolani, when he puts into the mouth of Bembo that glowing panegyric of Platonic love, which forms the close and climax of his dialogue upon the qualities of a true gentleman.[320]
The crowning merit of the Cortegiano is an air of good breeding and disengagement from pedantic prejudices. This urbanity renders it a book to read with profit and instruction through all time. Castiglione's culture was the result of a large experience of men and books, ripened by intercourse with good society in all its forms. His sense and breadth of view are peculiarly valuable when he discusses a subject like that which forms the topic of the present chapter. There is one passage in his book, relating to the problem of Italian style, which, had it been treated with the attention it deserved, might have saved his fellow-countrymen from the rigors of pedagogical despotism.[321]
Starting from his cardinal axiom that good manners demand freedom from all affectation, he deprecates the use in speech or writing of those antiquated Tuscan words the purists loved. As usual, he hits the very center of the subject in his comments on this theme. "It seems to me, therefore, exceedingly strange to employ words in writing which we avoid in all the common usages of conversation. Writing is nothing but a form of speaking, which continues to exist after a man has spoken, and is, as it were, an image or rather the life of the words he utters. Therefore in speech, which, as soon as the voice has issued from the mouth, is lost, some things may be tolerated that are not admissible in composition, because writing preserves the words, subjects them to the criticism of the reader, and allows time for their mature consideration. It is consequently reasonable to use greater diligence with a view to making what we write more polished and correct, yet not to do this so that the written words shall differ from the spoken, but only so that the best in spoken use shall be selected for our composition." After touching on the need of lucidity, he proceeds "I therefore should approve of a man's not only avoiding antiquated Tuscan phrases, but also being careful to employ such as are in present use in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, provided they have a certain grace and harmony."[322] At this point another interlocutor in the dialogue observes that Italy possesses no common language. In the difficulty of knowing whether to follow the custom of Florence or of Bergamo, it is desirable to recognize a classical standard of style. Petrarch and Boccaccio should be selected as models. To refuse to imitate them is mere presumption. Here Castiglione states the position of the school he combats. In his answer to their argument he makes Giuliano de' Medici, one of the company, declare that he, a Tuscan of the Tuscans as he is, should never think of employing any words of Petrarch or Boccaccio which were obsolete in good society. Then the thread of exposition is resumed. The Italian language, in spite of its long past, may still be called young and unformed. When the Roman Empire decayed, spoken Latin suffered from the corruptions introduced by barbarian invaders. It retained greater purity in Tuscany than elsewhere. Yet other districts of Italy preserved certain elements of the ancient language that have a right to be incorporated with the living tongue; nor is it reasonable to suppose that a modern dialect should at a certain moment have reached perfection any more than Latin did. The true rule to follow is to see that a man has something good to say. "Making a division between thoughts and words is much the same as separating soul and body. In order, therefore, to speak or write well, our courtier must have knowledge; for he who has none, and whose mind is void of matter worthy to be apprehended, has naught to say or write." He must be careful to clothe his thoughts in select and fitting words, but above all things to use such "as are still upon the lips of the people." He need not shun foreign phrases, if there be a special force in them above their synonyms in his own language. Nor is there cause to fear lest the vulgar tongue should prove deficient in resources when examined by grammarians and stylists. "Even though it be not ancient Tuscan of the purest water, it will be Italian, common to the nation, copious and varied, like a delicious garden full of divers fruits and flowers." Here Castiglione quotes the precedent of Greek, showing that each of its dialects contributed something to the common stock, though Attic was recognized as sovereign for its polish. Among the Romans likewise, Livy was not tabooed because of his patavinity, nor Virgil because the Romans recognized a something in him of rusticity. "We, meanwhile, far more severe than the ancients, impose upon ourselves certain newfangled laws that have no true relation to the object. With a beaten track before our eyes, we try to walk in bypaths. We take a willful pleasure in obscurity, though our language, like all others, is only meant to express our thoughts with force and clearness. While we call it the popular speech, we plume ourselves on using phrases that are not only unknown to the people, but unintelligible to men of birth and learning, and which have fallen out of conversation in every district of the land." If Petrarch and Boccaccio were living at our epoch, they would certainly omit words that have fallen out of fashion since their days; and it is mere impertinence for a purist to tell me that I ought to say Campidoglio instead of Capitolio and so forth, because some elder Tuscan author wrote it, or the peasants of the Tuscan district speak it so. You argue that only pride prevents our imitating Petrarch and Boccaccio. But pray inform me whom they imitated? To model Latin poems upon Virgil or Catullus is necessary, because Latin is a dead language. But since Italian is alive and spoken, let us write it as we use it, with due attention to artistic elegance. "The final master of style is genius, and the ultimate guide is a sound natural judgment." Do we require all our painters to follow one precedent? Lionardo, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgione have struck out different paths of excellence in art. Writers should claim the same liberty of choice, the same spontaneity of inspiration. "I cannot comprehend how it should be right, instead of enriching Italian and giving it spirit, dignity and luster, to make it poor, attenuated, humble and obscure, and so to pen it up within fixed limits as that every one should have to copy Petrarch and Boccaccio. Why should we, for example, not put equal faith in Poliziano, Lorenzo de' Medici, Francesco Diaceto, and others who are Tuscan too, and possibly of no less learning and discretion than were Petrarch and Boccaccio? However, there are certain scrupulous persons abroad nowadays, who make a religion and ineffable mystery of their Tuscan tongue, frightening those who listen to them, to the length of preventing many noble and lettered men from opening their lips, and forcing them to admit they do not know how to talk the language they learned from their nurses in the cradle."[323]
If the Italians could have accepted Castiglione's principles, and approached the problem of their language in this liberal spirit, the nation would have been spared its wearisome, perpetually recurrent quarrel about words. But the matter had already got into the hands of theorists; and local jealousies were inflamed. The municipal wars of the middle ages were resuscitated on the ground of rhetoric and grammar. Unluckily, the quarrel is not over; adhuc sub judice lis est, and there is no judge to decide it. But in the nineteenth century it no longer rages with the violence that made it a matter of duels, assassinations and lifelong hatreds in the sixteenth. The Italians have recently secured for the first time in their history the external conditions which are necessary to a natural settlement of the dispute by the formation of a common speech through common usage. The parliament, the army, the newspapers of United Italy are rapidly creating a language adequate to all the needs of modern life; and though purists may still be found, who maintain that Passavanti's Specchio is a model of style for leading articles in Fanfulla, yet the nation, having passed into a new phase of existence, must be congratulated on having exchanged the "golden simplicity of the trecento" for a powerful and variously-colored instrument of self-expression.
To stir the dust of those obsolete controversies on the language of Italy—to make extracts from Varchi's, Sperone's or Bembo's treatises upon the Tongues—to set Tolommei's claims for Tuscan priority in the balance against Muzio's more modest pleas in favor of Italian[324]—to describe how one set of scholars argued that the vernacular ought to be called Tuscan, how another dubbed it Florentine or Sienese, and how a third, more sensible, voted for Italian[325]—to enumerate the blasts and counterblasts of criticism blown about each sentence in Boccaccio and Petrarch[326]—to resuscitate the orthographical encounters between Trissino and Firenzuola on the matter of the letter K—is no part of my present purpose. It must suffice to have noted that these problems occupied the serious attention of the literary world, and to have indicated by extracts from Sperone and Castiglione the extreme limits of pedantry and sound sense between which the opinion of the learned vibrated. The details of the quarrel may be left to the obscurity of treatises, long since doomed to "dust and an endless darkness."
Much unprofitable expenditure of time and thought upon verbal questions of no vital interest was encouraged by the Academies, which now began to sprout like mushrooms in all towns of Italy.[327] The old humanistic societies founded by Cosimo de' Medici, Pomponius Lætus, Pontano, and Aldo for the promotion of classical studies, had done their work and died away. Their successor, the Umidi of Florence, the Pellegrini of Venice, the Eterei of Padua, the Vignaiuoli of Rome, professed to follow the same objects, with special attention to the reformation of Italian literature. Yet their very titles indicate a certain triviality and want of manly purpose. They were clubs combining conviviality with he pursuit of study; and it too frequently happened that the spirit of their jovial meetings extended itself to the dicerie, cicalate and capitoli recited by their members, when the cloth was drawn and the society sat down to intellectual banquets. At the same time the Academies were so fashionable and so universal that they gave the tone to literature. It was the ambition of all rising students to be numbered with the more illustrious bodies; and when a writer of promise joined one of these, he naturally felt the influence of his companions. Member vied with member in producing sonnets and rhetorical effusions on the slenderest themes; for it was less an object to probe weighty matters or to discover truth, than to make a display of ingenuity by clothing trifles in sonorous language. Surrounded by a crowd of empty-pated but censorious critics, exercised in the minutiæ of style and armed with precedents from Petrarch, the poet read his verses to the company. They were approved or rejected according as they satisfied the sense of correctness, or fell below the conventional standard of imitative diction. To think profoundly, to feel intensely, to imagine boldly, to invent novelties, to be original in any line, was perilous. The wealth of the Academies, the interest of the public in purely literary questions, and the activity of the press encouraged the publication and circulation of these pedantic exercises. Time would fail to tell of all the poems and orations poured forth at the expense of these societies and greedily devoured by friends prepared to eulogize, or rival bodies eager to dissect and criticise. Students who are desirous of forming some conception of the multitudes of poets at this period, must be referred to the pages of Quadrio with a warning that Tiraboschi is inclined to think that even Quadrio's lists are incomplete. All ranks and conditions both of men and women joined in the pursuit. Princes and plebeians, scholars and worldlings, noble ladies and leaders of the demi-monde, high-placed ecclesiastics and penniless Bohemians aspired to the same honors; and the one idol of the motley crowd was Petrarch. There is no doubt that the final result of their labors was the attainment of a certain grace and the diffusion of literary elegance. Yet these gains carried with them a false feeling about poetry in general, a wrong conception of its purpose and its scope. The Italian purists could scarcely have comprehended the drift of Milton's excursion, in his "Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty," upon the high vocation of the prophet-bard. They would have been no less puzzled by Sidney's definition of poetry, and have felt Shelley's last word upon the poetic office, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," to be no better than a piece of pardonable lunacy.
In this thick-spreading undergrowth of verse, where, as Tiraboschi aptly remarks, "beneath the green and ample foliage we seek in vain for fruit," it is difficult to see the wood by reason of the trees. Poet so closely resembles poet in the mediocrity of similar attainment, that we are forced to sigh for the energy of Michelangelo's unfinished sonnets, or the crudities of Campanella's muse. Yet it is possible to make a representative selection of writers, who, while they belonged to the school of the purists and were associated with the chief Academies of the day, distinguished themselves by some originality of style or by enduring qualities of literary excellence. Foremost among these may be placed Monsignore Giovanni della Casa. He was born in 1503 of noble Florentine parents, his mother being a member of the Tornabuoni family. Educated at Bologna, he entered the service of the Church, and already in 1538 had reached the dignity of Apostolic Clerk. Rome was still what Lorenzo de' Medici had called it, "a sink of all the vices," and very few ecclesiastics escaped its immoralities. La Casa formed some permanent connection, the fruit of which was his acknowledged son Quirino.[328] In 1540 he was sent on a special mission to Florence with the title of Apostolic Commissary; and in 1544 he was raised to the Archbishopric of Benevento, and soon afterwards appointed Nuncio at Venice. During the pontificate of Julius III., finding himself out of favor with the Vatican, he continued to reside at Venice, employing his leisure in literary occupations. Paul IV. recalled him to Rome, and made him Secretary of State. But though he seemed upon the point of touching the highest ecclesiastical dignity, La Casa was never promoted to the Cardinalate. It is difficult to find a reason for this omission, unless we accept the traditional belief that the scandal of his Capitolo del Forno barred La Casa's entrance to the Sacred College.[329] This burlesque poem, at any rate, supplied the Protestants with a weapon which they used against the Church. The legend based upon its audacious obscenities was credited by Bayle, and in part refuted by the Antibaillet of Ménage. Though by no means more offensive to good taste than scores of similar compositions, the high rank of its author and the offices of trust he had discharged for the Papal Curia, emphasized its infamy, and caused La Casa to be chosen as the scapegoat for his comrades. He died in 1556.
La Casa's name is best known in modern literature by his treatise on the manners of the finished gentleman. In his short essay, entitled Galateo, he discusses the particulars of social conduct, descending to rules about the proper use of the drinking-glass at table, the employment of the napkin, the dressing of the hair, and the treatment of immodest topics by polite periphrases.[330] Galateo is recommended not to breathe hard in the face of the persons he is speaking to, not to swear at his servants in company, not to trim his nails in public, not to tell indecent anecdotes to girls, and so forth. He is shown how to dress with proper pomp, what ceremonies to observe, and which to omit as servile or superfluous, how to choose his words, and how to behave at dinner. The book is an elaborate discourse on etiquette; and while it never goes far below the surface, it is full of useful precepts based upon the principles of mutual respect and tolerance which govern good society. We might accept it as a sequel to the Courtier; for while Castiglione drew the portrait of a gentleman, La Casa explained how this gentleman should conduct himself among his equals. The chief curiosity about the book is, that a man of its author's distinction should have thought it worthy of his pains to formulate so many rules of simple decency. From the introduction it is clear that La Casa meant the Galateo to be a handbook for young men entering upon the world. That it fulfilled this purpose, seems proved by the fact that its title passed into a proverb. "To teach the Galateo" is synonymous in Italian with to teach good manners.