Bembo was a model man of letters, to whom in this capacity the Italian language and Italian culture are infinitely beholden. As a poet he is perhaps best characterised by the forty drawers through which he is said to have successively passed his sonnets, making some alteration for the better in every one of them. If there had been any originality in any of them, this would hardly have survived the twentieth drawer, but there never had been, and since the polish was always meant to be the merit, there hardly could be too much polishing. Bembo’s poetry at all events serves to refute the heresy which identities genius with industry; and if we admit with Roscoe that “any person of good taste and extensive reading might, by a due portion of labour, produce works of equal merit,” we must nevertheless allow that it will probably be long ere such a capacity for labour reappears. He entirely fulfilled the requirements of his own age, by which he was simply idolised. The quintessence of his contemporaries’ admiration is concentrated in Vittoria Colonna’s humble yet dignified remonstrance with him for having failed to celebrate the death of her husband:
Unkind was Fate, prohibiting the rays
Of my great Sun your kindling soul to smite;
For thus in perpetuity more bright
Your fame had been, more glorious his praise.
His memory, exalted in your lays,
That ancient times obscure, and ours delight,
Had 'scaped in fell Oblivion’s despite
The second death, that on the spirit preys.
If in your bosom might infusèd be
My ardour, or my pen as yours inspired,
Great as the dead should be the elegy.
But now I fear lest Heaven with wrath be fired;
Toward you, for overmuch humility;
Toward me, who have too daringly aspired.
Bembo’s Latin poetry, of which charming specimens may be seen in Symonds’sRenaissance, is better than his Italian, for it does not disappoint. The fame of FRANCESCO MARIA MOLZA (1489-1544) was in his day hardly second to Bembo’s, and was based on much the same grounds. Like Bembo, he was an elegant Latin poet, who carried the maxims appropriate for composition in a dead language into a living one. Like Bembo’s, his vernacular poems, with one remarkable exception, are models of diction as inexpressive as harmonious—a perpetual silvery chime which soothes the ear, but conveys nothing to the mind. The exception is a poem in which the usual vagueness and emptiness of sentiment assumes substance from its pastoral setting. TheNinfa Tiberina, in which one of Molza’s innumerable light loves is idealised as a shepherdess, is just such a piece of mosaic as Gray’s Elegy. The author has amassed all the commonplaces of pastoral poetry, and, without adding a single idea of his own, has combined them into so rich and glowing a picture that he may well claim to have superseded the entire school of pastoral versifiers, the few excepted who have derived their inspiration from Nature, like his predecessor Politian. “Molza is to Politian,” says Symonds, “as the rose to the rosebud.” He was born at Modena, but lived chiefly at Rome, leaving his wife and family in his native city. They would indeed have been much in the way, for he was continually involved in some amour, and his irregular ties ultimately proved fatal to him. He was a leading member of the brilliant literary circles of Rome and Florence, and as a companion and a man of letters his contemporaries have nothing but praise for him.
Petrarch is a poet as much within the scope of imitation as beyond the pursuit of rivalry. The swarms of Petrarchists stun the ear and darken the light of the period: Tansillo might well say that every hillock had grown a Parnassus. They may be found in the thesaurus of Dolce, a series whose continuous publication for so many years at all events affords proof that this appetite for imitative verse was not factitious. Some few stand forth from the crowd by some exceptional characteristics, and it is of these only that we can speak. The first of these in chronological order is BERNARDO TASSO (1493-1568), whom we have already met as the author of theAmadigi. In his lyrical as in his epical attempts, Tasso is one of those provoking poets who are always trembling on the verge of excellence, ever good, hardly ever quite good enough. Even the famous sonnet on his renunciation of his lady, which, Dolce tells us, thrilled Italy, is less eminent for the beauty of the poetry than the nobility of the sentiment. Once, however, straying within the domain of pastoral poetry, he found and polished a gem worthy of the Greek Anthology:
The herb and floweret of my verdant shore,
Shepherd, thy pasturing flock’s possession be;
And thine the olive and the mulberry
That mantle these fair hillocks o’er and o’er.
But be my fountain’s fresh and sparkling store
Of gushing waters undisturbed by thee,
For they are vowed to Muses’ ministry,
And whoso drinks is poet evermore.
Solely for these and for Apollo fit,
And Loves and Nymphs the sacred stream doth burst,
Or haply some fair swan may drink of it;
But thou, if not a swain untutored, first
Thy dues to Love in melody acquit,
Then with the bubbling coolness quench thy thirst.
Another poet of the time vies with Bernardo Tasso in nobility of character, evinced in his case by the fervour of his patriotism. The bulk of the verse of GUIDO GUIDICCIONI, Bishop of Fossombrone (1500-41), consists of insipid love-strains in the style of Bembo and Molza; but when he touches upon the wrongs and misfortunes of his country he becomes inspired, and speaks in tones of alternate majesty and pathos, to which the following sonnet superadds the charms of fancy:
The Arno and the Tiber and the Po
This sad lament and heavy plaint of mine
I hear, for solely I my ear incline,
Accompany with music sad and low.
No more Heaven’s light on sunny wave doth glow,
No more the dwindled lamps of virtue shine;
Dark western tempests, dank and foul with brine,
Have swept the meads and laid the flowerets low.
The myrtle, Rivers, and the laurel-spray,
Delight and diadem of chosen souls,
And sacred shrines the blast hath borne away;
No more unto the sea your torrent rolls
Exulting, or your Naiades display
Their snowy breasts and shining aureoles.
If other Italian poets felt like Guidiccioni, they shunned to give their sentiments utterance. The chief original poem of ANNIBALE CARO (1507-66), the accomplished translator of Virgil and Longus, and one of the best letter-writers of his age, was a panegyric on the house of Valois—Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro (“Hither, where spread the golden fleurs-de-lis”). A few years later, with equal genius and equal insensibility to the part that became an Italian, Caro turned to celebrate the Spanish conqueror. Whatever may be thought of the theme of his poem, it is in execution one of the great things of Italian poetry:
Here the Fifth Charles reposes, at whose name
Eyes of superbest monarchs seek the ground,
Whom Story’s tongue and Honour’s trump resound,
Quelling all loudest blasts of meaner fame.
How hosts and legioned chiefs he overcame,
Kings, but for him invincible, discrowned,
Swayed realms beyond Imagination’s bound,
And his own mightier soul did rule and tame—
This knows the admiring world, and this the Sun,
That did with envy and amazement see
His equal course with equal glory run
Wide earth around; which now accomplished, he,
From heaven observant of the world he won,
Smiling inquires, 'And toiled I thus for thee?'
GIOVANNI DELLA CASA (1500-56) emulated Caro in the nobility of his style, which would scarcely have been expected, considering the licentious character of some of his verse and his ecclesiastical profession. He does, however, sometimes attain a dignity and gravity which, apart from the beauty of his diction, lift him high out of the crowd of Petrarchists; nor are his themes invariably amorous. HisGalateo, a treatise on politeness, has earned him the name of the Italian Chesterfield. He would have attained greater eminence as a man of letters but for the distractions of politics and business, which he deplores in the following sonnet: