The priest was compelled to disgorge his prey, and the fame of the boy's achievement went abroad through Sutri. Rainero thereupon sent for Griffarosto, and treated the Abbot to such a compendious abuse of monks in general as would have delighted a Lutheran.[402] Griffarosto essayed to answer him with a ludicrous jumble of dog Latin; but the Governor requested him to defer his apology for the morrow. The description of Griffarosto's study in the monastery, where wine and victuals fill the place of books, his oratory consecrated to Bacchus, the conversation with his cook, and the ruse by which the cook gets chosen Prior in his master's place, carry on the satire through fifty stanzas of slashing sarcasm. The whole episode is a pendent picture to Pulci's Margutte. Then, by a brusque change from buffoonery to seriousness, Folengo plunges into a confession of faith, attributed to Rainero, but presumably his own.[403] It includes the essential points of Catholic orthodoxy, abjuring the impostures of priests and friars, and taking final station on the Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith and repentance. Idle as a dream, says Folengo, are the endeavors made by friars to force scholastic conclusions on the conscience in support of theses S. Paul would have rejected. What they preach, they do not comprehend. Their ignorance is only equal to their insolent pretension. They are worse than Judas in their treason to Christ, worse than Herod, Anna, Caiaphas, or Pilate. They are only fit to consort with usurers and slaves. They use the names of saints and the altar of the Virgin as the means of glutting their avarice with the gold of superstitious folk. They abuse confession to gratify their lusts. Their priories are dens of dogs, hawks, and reprobate women. They revel in soft beds, drink to intoxication, and stuff themselves with unctuous food. And still the laity intrust their souls to these rogues, and there are found many who defraud their kith and kin in order to enrich a convent![404]
It would not be easy to compose an invective more suited to degrade the objects of a satirist's anger by the copiousness and the tenacity of the dirt flung at them. Yet the Orlandino was written by a monk, who, though he had left his convent, was on the point of returning to it; and the poem was openly printed during the pontificate of Clement VII. That Folengo should have escaped inquisitorial censure is remarkable. That he should have been readmitted to the Benedictine order after this outburst of bile and bold diffusion of heretical opinion, is only explicable by the hatred which subsisted in Italy between the rules of S. Francis and S. Benedict. While attacking the former, he gratified the spite and jealousy of the latter. But the fact is that his auditors, whether lay or clerical, were too accustomed to similar charges and too frankly conscious of their truth, to care about them. Folengo stirred no indignation in the people, who had laughed at ecclesiastical corruption since the golden days of the Decameron. He roused no shame in the clergy, for, till Luther frightened the Church into that pseudo-reformation which Sarpi styled a deformation of manners, the authorities of Rome were nonchalantly careless what was said about them.[405] An atrabilious monk in his garret vented his spleen with more than usual acrimony, and the world applauded. Ha fatto un bel libro! That was all. Conversely, it is not strange that the weighty truths about religion uttered by Folengo should have had but little influence. He was a scribbler, famous for scurrility, notoriously profligate in private life. Free thought in Italy found itself too often thus in company with immorality. The names of heretic and Lutheran carried with them at that time a reproach more pungent and more reasonable than is usual with the epithets of theological hatred.[406]
In the Orlandino, Ariosto's irony is degraded to buffoonery. The prosaic details he mingled with his poetry are made the material of a new and vulgar comedy of manners. The satire he veiled in allegory or polite discussion, bursts into open virulence. His licentiousness yields to gross obscenity. The chivalrous epic, as employed for purposes of art in Italy, contained within itself the germs of this burlesque. It was only necessary to develop certain motives at the expense of general harmony, to suppress the noble and pathetic elements, and to lower the literary key of utterance, in order to produce a parody. Ariosto had strained the semi-seriousness of romance to the utmost limits of endurance. For his successors nothing was left but imitation, caricature, or divergence upon a different track. Of these alternatives, Folengo and Berni, Aretino and Fortiguerra, chose the second; Tasso took the third, and provided Tassoni with the occasion of a new burlesque.
While the romantic epic lent itself thus easily to parody, another form of humorous poetry took root and flourished on the mass of Latin literature produced by the Revival. Latin never became a wholly dead language in Italy; and at the height of the Renaissance a public had been formed whose appreciation of classic style insured a welcome for its travesty. To depreciate the humanistic currency by an alloy of plebeian phrases, borrowed from various base dialects; to ape Virgilian mannerism while treating of the lowest themes suggested by boisterous mirth or satiric wit; was the method of the so-called Maccaronic poets. It is matter for debate who first invented this style, and who created the title Maccaronea. So far back as the thirteenth century, we notice a blending of Latin with French and German in certain portions of the Carmina Burana.[407] But the two elements of language here lie side by side, without interpenetration. This imperfect fusion is not sufficient to constitute the genuine Maccaronic manner. The jargon known as Maccaronic must consist of the vernacular, suited with Latin terminations, and freely mingled with classical Latin words. Nothing should meet the ear or eye, which does not sound or look like Latin; but, upon inspection, it must be discovered that a half or third is simple slang and common speech tricked out with the endings of Latin declensions and conjugations.[408] In Italy, where the modern tongue retained close similarity to Latin, this amalgamation was easy; and we find that in the fifteenth century the hybrid had already assumed finished form. The name by which it was then known, indicates its composition. As maccaroni is dressed with cheese and butter, so the maccaronic poet mixed colloquial expressions of the people with classical Latin, serving up a dish that satisfied the appetite by rarity and richness of concoction. At the same time, since maccaroni was the special delicacy of the proletariate, and since a stupid fellow was called a Maccherone, the ineptitude and the vulgarity of the species are indicated by its title. Among the Maccaronic poets we invariably find ourselves in low Bohemian company. No Phœbus sends them inspiration; nor do they slake their thirst at the Castalian spring. The muses they invoke are tavern-wenches and scullions, haunting the slums and stews of Lombard cities.[409] Their mistresses are of the same type as Villon's Margot. Mountains of cheese, rivers of fat broth, are their Helicon and Hippocrene. Their pictures of manners demand a coarser brush than Hogarth's to do them justice.
Before engaging in the criticism of this Maccaronic literature, it is necessary to interpolate some notice of a kindred style, called pedantesco. This was the exact converse of the Maccaronic manner. Instead of adapting Italian to the rules of Latin, the parodist now treated Latin according to the grammatical usages and metrical laws of Italian. A good deal of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is written in lingua pedantesca. But the recognized masterpiece of the species is a book called I Cantici di Fidentio Glottogrysio Ludimagistro. The author's real name was Camillo Scrofa, a humanist and schoolmaster of Vicenza. Though more than once reprinted, together with similar compositions by equally obscure craftsmen, his verses are exceedingly rare.[410] They owe their neglect partly to the absurdity of their language, partly to the undisguised immorality of their subject-matter. Of the stilo pedantesco the following specimen may suffice. It describes a hostelry of boors and peasants:[411]
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Pur pedetentim giunsi ad un cubiculo, Sordido, inelegante, ove molti hospiti Facean corona a un semimortuo igniculo. Salvete, dissi, et Giove lieti e sospiti Vi riconduca a i vostri dolci hospitii! Ma responso non hebbi; o rudi, o inhospiti! Io che tra veri equestri e tra patritii Soglio seder, mi vedi alhor negligere Da quegli huomini novi et adventitii. Non sapea quasi indignabundo eligere Partito; pur al fin fu necessario Tra lor per calefarmi un scanno erigere. Che colloquio, O Dii boni, empio e nefario Pervenne a l'aure nostre purgatissime, Da muover nausea a un lenone a un sicario! |
One of the most famous and earliest, if not absolutely the first among the authors of Maccaronic verse, was Tifi Odassi, a Paduan, whose poems were given to the press after his death, in at least two editions earlier than the close of the fifteenth century.[412] He chose a commonplace Novella for his theme; but the interest of his tale consists less in its argument than in its vivid descriptions of low town-life. Odassi's portraits of plebeian characters are executed with masterly realism, and the novelty of the vehicle gives them a singularly trenchant force. It is unfortunately impossible to bring either the cook-shop-keeper or his female servant, the mountebank or the glutton, before modern readers. These pictures are too Rabelaisian.[413] I must content myself with a passage taken from the description of a bad painter, which, though it is inferior in comic power, contains nothing unpardonably gross.[414]
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Quodsi forte aliquem voluit depingere gallum, Quicunque aspiciat poterit jurare cigognam; Depinxitque semel canes in caza currentes, Omnes credebant natantes in æquore luzos; Sive hominem pingit, poteris tu credere lignum In quo sartores ponunt sine capite vestes; Seu nudos facit multo sudore putinos, Tu caput a culo poteris dignoscere nunquam; Sive facit gremio Christum retinere Mariam, Non licet a filio sanctam dignoscere matrem; Pro gardelinis depingit sepe gallinas, Et pro gallinis depingit sepe caballos: Blasfemat, jurat, culpam dicit esse penelli, Quos spazzaturas poteris jurare de bruscho; Tam bene depingit pictorum pessimus iste, Nec tamen inferior se cogitat esse Bellino. |
It will be seen from this specimen that Italian and Latin are confounded without regard to either prosody or propriety of diction. The style, far from being even pedestrian, is reptile, and the inspiration is worthy of the source imagined by the poet.[415] As Odassi remarks in his induction: