"And where's Luigi Pulci? I saw him." "Oh, in the wood there. Gone, depend upon it, To vent some fancy in his brain—some whim, That will not let him rest till it's a sonnet."
In a letter written to Lorenzo, when the future statesman, then in his seventeenth year, was making himself personally acquainted with the courts of Italy, Pulci speaks of himself as struggling hard to keep down the poetic propensity in his friend's absence. "If you were with me," he says, "I should produce heaps of sonnets as big as the clubs they make of the cherry-blossoms for May-day. I am always muttering some verse or other betwixt my teeth; but I say to myself, 'My Lorenzo is not here—he who is my only hope and refuge;' and so I suppress it." Such is the first, and of a like nature are the latest accounts we possess of the sequestered though companionable poet. He preferred one congenial listener who understood him, to twenty critics that were puzzled with the vivacity of his impulses. Most of the learned men patronised by Lorenzo probably quarrelled with him on account of it, plaguing him in somewhat the same spirit, though in more friendly guise, as the Della Cruscans and others afterwards plagued Tasso; so he banters them in turn, and takes refuge from their critical rules and common-places in the larger indulgence of his friend Politian and the laughing wisdom of Lorenzo.
"So che andar diritto mi bisogna, Ch' io non ci mescolassi una bugia, Che questa non è storia da menzogna; Che come in esco un passo de la via,
Chi gracchia, chi riprende, e chi rampogna: Ognun poi mi riesce la pazzia;
Tanto ch' eletto ho solitaria vita, Che la turba di questi è infinita.
La mia Accademia un tempo, o mia Ginnasia, E stata volentier ne' miei boschetti; E puossi ben veder l' Affrica e l' Asia: Vengon le Ninfe con lor canestretti, E portanmi o narciso o colocasia; E così fuggo mille urban dispetti: Sì ch' io non torno a' vostri Areopaghi, Gente pur sempre di mal dicer vaghi.
I know I ought to make no dereliction From the straight path to this side or to that; I know the story I relate's no fiction, And that the moment that I quit some flat, Folks are all puff, and blame, and contradiction, And swear I never know what I'd be at; In short, such crowds, I find, can mend one's poem, I live retired, on purpose not to know 'em.
Yes, gentlemen, my only 'Academe,' My sole 'Gymnasium,' are my woods and bowers; Of Afric and of Asia there I dream; And the Nymphs bring me baskets full of flowers, Arums, and sweet narcissus from the stream; And thus my Muse escapeth your town-hours And town-disdains; and I eschew your bites, Judges of books, grim Areopagites."
He is here jesting, as Foscolo has observed, on the academy instituted by Lorenzo for encouraging the Greek language, doubtless with the laughing approbation of the founder, who was sometimes not a little troubled himself with the squabbles of his literati.
Our author probably had good reason to call his illustrious friend his "refuge." The Morgante Maggiore, the work which has rendered the name of Pulci renowned, was an attempt to elevate the popular and homely narrative poetry chanted in the streets into the dignity of a production that should last. The age was in a state of transition on all points. The dogmatic authority of the schoolmen in matters of religion, which prevailed in the time of Dante, had come to nought before the advance of knowledge in general, and the indifference of the court of Rome. The Council of Trent, as Crescimbeni advised the critics, had not then settled what Christendom was to believe; and men, provided they complied with forms, and admitted certain main articles, were allowed to think, and even in great measure talk, as they pleased. The lovers of the Platonic philosophy took the opportunity of exalting some of its dreams to an influence, which at one time was supposed to threaten Christianity itself, and which in fact had already succeeded in affecting Christian theology to an extent which the scorners of Paganism little suspect. Most of these Hellenists pushed their admiration of Greek literature to an excess. They were opposed by the Virgilian predilections of Pulci's friend, Politian, who had nevertheless universality enough to sympathise with the delight the other took in their native Tuscan, and its liveliest and most idiomatic effusions. From all these circumstances in combination arose, first, Pulci's determination to write a poem of a mixed order, which should retain for him the ear of the many, and at the same time give rise to a poetry of romance worthy of higher auditors; second, his banter of what he considered unessential and injurious dogmas of belief, in favour of those principles of the religion of charity which inflict no contradiction on the heart and understanding; third, the trouble which seems to have been given him by critics, "sacred and profane," in consequence of these originalities; and lastly, a doubt which has strangely existed with some, as to whether he intended to write a serious or a comic poem, or on any one point was in earnest at all. One writer thinks he cannot have been in earnest, because he opens every canto with some pious invocation; another asserts that the piety itself is a banter; a similar critic is of opinion, that to mix levities with gravities proves the gravities to have been nought, and the levities all in all; a fourth allows him to have been serious in his description of the battle of Roncesvalles, but says he was laughing in all the rest of his poem; while a fifth candidly gives up the question, as one of those puzzles occasioned by the caprices of the human mind, which it is impossible for reasonable people to solve. Even Sismondi, who was well acquainted with the age in which Pulci wrote, and who, if not a profound, is generally an acute and liberal critic, confesses himself to be thus confounded. "Pulci," he says, "commences all his cantos by a sacred invocation; and the interests of religion are constantly intermingled with the adventures of his story, in a manner capricious and little instructive. We know not how to reconcile this monkish spirit with the semi-pagan character of society under Lorenzo di Medici, nor whether we ought to accuse Pulci of gross bigotry or of profane derision." [1] Sismondi did not consider that the lively and impassioned people of the south take what may be called household-liberties with the objects of their worship greater than northerns can easily conceive; that levity of manner, therefore, does not always imply the absence of the gravest belief; that, be this as it may, the belief may be as grave on some points as light on others, perhaps the more so for that reason; and that, although some poems, like some people, are altogether grave, or the reverse, there really is such a thing as tragi-comedy both in the world itself and in the representations of it. A jesting writer may be quite as much in earnest when he professes to be so, as a pleasant companion who feels for his own or for other people's misfortunes, and who is perhaps obliged to affect or resort to his very pleasantry sometimes, because he feels more acutely than the gravest. The sources of tears and smiles lie close to, ay and help to refine one another. If Dante had been capable of more levity, he would have been guilty of less melancholy absurdities. If Rabelais had been able to weep as well as to laugh, and to love as well as to be licentious, he would have had faith and therefore support in something earnest, and not have been obliged to place the consummation of all things in a wine-bottle. People's every-day experiences might explain to them the greatest apparent inconsistencies of Pulci's muse, if habit itself did not blind them to the illustration. Was nobody ever present in a well-ordered family, when a lively conversation having been interrupted by the announcement of dinner, the company, after listening with the greatest seriousness to a grace delivered with equal seriousness, perhaps by a clergyman, resumed it the instant afterwards in all its gaiety, with the first spoonful of soup? Well, the sacred invocations at the beginning of Pulci's cantos were compliances of the like sort with a custom. They were recited and listened to just as gravely at Lorenzo di Medici's table; and yet neither compromised the reciters, nor were at all associated with the enjoyment of the fare that ensued. So with regard to the intermixture of grave and gay throughout the poem. How many campaigning adventures have been written by gallant officers, whose animal spirits saw food for gaiety in half the circumstances that occurred, and who could crack a jest and a helmet perhaps with almost equal vivacity, and yet be as serious as the gravest at a moment's notice, mourn heartily over the deaths of their friends, and shudder with indignation and horror at the outrages committed in a captured city? It is thus that Pulci writes, full no less of feeling than of whim and mirth. And the whole honest round of humanity not only warrants his plan, but in the twofold sense of the word embraces it.