But as the tale of chivalry decayed, the old metal was transmuted into the pure gold of the poetry of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. The claim to reality was abandoned and the poet quite frankly conjured up a fantastic, fairy world, full of giants and wizards and enchantments and hippogryphs, and knights of incredible pugnacity who rescue damsels of miraculous beauty. Well might the Italian, before Luther and Loyola came to take the joy out of life, lose himself in the honeyed words and the amorous adventures of the hero who went mad for love. Another generation, and {693} Tasso must wind his voluptuous verses around a religious epic. Edmund Spenser, the Puritan and Englishman, allegorized the whole in such fashion that while the conscience was soothed by knowing that all the knights and ladies represented moral virtues or vices, the senses were titillated by mellifluous cadences and by naked descriptions of the temptations of the Bower of Bliss. And how British that Queen Elizabeth of England should impersonate the principal virtues!
Poetry was in the hearts of the people; song was on their lips. The early spring of Italy came later to the northern latitudes, but when it did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers, some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest of singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and the rimes were mostly of "love, whose month is always May." Each songster poured forth his heart in fresh, frank praise of his mistress's beauty, or in chiding of her cruelty, or in lamenting her unfaithfulness. There was something very simple and direct about it all; nothing deeply psychological until at the very end of the century Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets" gave his "private friends" something to think about as well as something to enjoy.
[Sidenote: Wit]
If life could not be all love it could be nearly all laughter. Wit and humor were appreciated above all things, and Satire awoke to a sense of her terrible power. Two statues at Rome, called Pasquino and Marforio, were used as billboards to which the people affixed squibbs and lampoons against the government and public men. Erasmus laughed at everything; {694} Luther and Murner belabored each other with ridicule; a man like Peter Aretino owed his evil eminence in the art of blackmailing to his wit.
[Sidenote: Rabelais, c. 1490-1553]
But the "master of scoffing," as Bacon far too contemptuously called him, was Rabelais. His laughter is as multitudinous as the ocean billows, and as wholesome as the sunshine. He laughed not because he scorned life but because he loved it; he did not "warm both hands" before the fire of existence, he rollicked before its blaze. It cannot be said that he took a "slice of life" as his subject, for this would imply a more exquisite excision than he would care to make; rather he reached out, in the fashion of his time, and pulled with both hands from the dish before him, the very largest and fattest chunk of life that he could grasp. "You never saw a man," he said of himself, "who would more love to be king or to be rich than I would, so that I could live richly and not work and not worry, and that I might enrich all my friends and all good, wise people." Like Whitman he was so in love with everything that the mere repetition of common names delighted him. It took pages to tell what Pantagruel ate and still more pages to tell what he drank. This giant dressed with a more than royal lavishness and when he played cards, how many games do you suppose Rabelais enumerated one after the other without pausing to take breath? Two hundred and fourteen! So he treated everything; his appetite was like Gargantua's mouth. This was the very stamp of the age; it was gluttonous of all pleasures, of food and drink and gorgeous clothes and fine dwellings and merry-making without end, and adventure without stint or limit. Almost every sixteenth-century man was a Pantagruel, whose lust for living fully and hotly no satiety could cloy, no fear of consequences {695} dampen. The ascetic gloom and terror of the Middle Ages burned away like an early fog before the summer sun. Men saw the world unfolding before them as if in a second creation, and they hurled themselves on it with but one fear, that they should be too slow or too backward to garner all its wonder and all its pleasure for themselves.
[Sidenote: Tales of vagabonds]
And the people were no longer content to leave the glory of life to their superiors. They saw no reason why all the good things should be preserved like game for the nobles to hunt, or inclosed like commons, for the pasturage of a few aristocratic mutton-heads. So in literature they were quite content to let the fastidious gentry read their fill of poetry about knights wandering in fairy-lands forlorn, while they themselves devoured books about humbler heroes. The Picaresque novel in Spain and its counterparts, Till Eulenspiegel or Reinecke Vos in the north, told the adventures of some rascal or vagabond. Living by his wits he found it a good life to cheat and to gamble, to drink and to make love.
[Sidenote: Plays]
For those who could not concentrate on a book, there was the drama. From the Middle Ages, when the play was a vehicle of religious instruction, it developed in the period of the Renaissance into a completely secular mirror of life. In Italy there was an exquisite literary drama, turning on some plot of love or tale of seduction, and there was alongside of this a popular sort of farce known as the Commedia dell' Arte, in which only the outline of the plot was sketched, and the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, his Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill in the dialogue and such comic "business" as tickled the fancy of the audience.