By your eyes’ aid a gentle light I see,
Which but for these mine own would never share;
By your auxiliar feet a load I bear
Which my lame limbs refuse to bear for me.
I, plumeless, yet upon your pinions flee;
When heaven I seek, your soul conducts me there;
Blushes or pallor at your will I wear;
Sun chills and winter warms at your decree.
The fashion of your will prescribeth mine;
My thought hath in your thinking taken birth;
My speech gives voice to your discourse unspoken.
A sunless moon that by herself would shine,
I were without you; only seen on earth
By light of sun that on her dark hath broken.
The roughness of Michael Angelo’s verse was planed down by the first editor, his great-nephew, and the true text has only been retrieved in our time.
Two religious poets stand aloof from the class of Petrarchists, rather by the nature of their themes than the quality of their talent. CELIO MAGNO, a religious poet of Protestant tendencies, produced a hymn to the Almighty which ranks among the best canzoni of the period, and had anticipated Coleridge’s project, which with him as with Coleridge remained a project, for a series of similar compositions. GABRIELE FIAMMA, Bishop of Chioggia, is in general a tame versifier, but in two inspired moments produced two of the most beautiful sonnets in the language: one of which is remarkable for expressing in an ornate style the thought of Heine’s famous lyric, “Mein Herz gleicht ganz dem Meere”; the other, apart from its great beauty, as an instance of a sonnet which, beginning apparently in a commonplace style, is vivified through and through by the last tercet:
Never with such delight the bee in spring,
When the full mead teems with the novel flower,
The sweetness of the honey-burdened bower
Amasses for her cell in wayfaring;
Not with like joy, when glades cease echoing
The baying hound, no more compelled to cower
In covert, doth the hind the forest scour,
Panting for crystal rivulet or spring:
As I the sob acclaim that signifies
Passion of love or awe divinely given,
Or other ecstasy that God endears.
Transported with her bliss the spirit cries;
How vast his rapture who inhabits heaven,
If joy he hath more joyful than these tears!
The Cinque Cento period of Italian poetry, which to the men of that day seemed the ne plus ultra of artistic achievement, has since received less praise and exerted less influence than fairly its due. It was a great thing to have produced works so perfect in form, and to have refined the language in so eminent a degree. The general belief, too, that the Italian poetry of this age was devoid of all but formal excellence involves a great exaggeration. It is true that the literature of the period is overloaded with masses of mechanical and conventional stuff, but Guidiccioni and Casa and Tansillo are capable on occasion of expressing themselves with an energy the more impressive from being restrained within the limits prescribed by a chastened taste, and many Italian sonnets are even better fitted to be breathed from the trumpet than warbled to the lute. A great development in this direction might have been expected, but for the extinction of political and spiritual liberty.
What the Italian lyric might have become we see in Milton, who could have written neither hisLycidas nor his sonnets without Tuscan models. He undoubtedly weighted, without overweighting, both canzone and sonnet with thought to a degree unparalleled in Italy, but how much he owed to Italians appears by a comparison of his sonnets with those of Wordsworth, who neglected the traditions which Milton carefully observed. Wordsworth has even more ripeness of thought and moral elevation than his predecessor; but while Milton’s work is immaculate, Wordsworth’s is full of flaws.
With all its defects, the poetry of the Cinque Cento will survive as a proof that rules of art exist and may be ascertained, and cannot be safely departed from; no less than as an example of the embellishment which even ordinary thoughts may receive from nobility of diction and breadth of style; and as an instance of the great part which a literature not too original or too racy of the native soil may play in moulding and enriching the literatures of neighbouring and less advanced nations. Nor can it be fairly judged by itself as an isolated phenomenon. It was a part, and far from the most important part, of a stupendous artistic movement, which spoke more readily and eloquently with brush and chisel than with pen, and expressed through their medium much that in an age more exclusively literary would have been committed to paper.
CHAPTER XV
HUMOROUS POETRY—THE MOCK-HEROIC
Numerous as are the poets we have briefly passed in review, many more might have been added whom it would have been agreeable to have met in the barren fifteenth century. The Renaissance had by this time entered into the blood of Italy, and produced one of the best effects of impregnation with the classical spirit—a passion for fame. This we find as constantly assigned as a motive of action in public affairs in that day as humanitarian inducements are in ours; and when it is considered that the sincerity of the former motive is much less questionable than that of the latter, it is not clear that the comparison is wholly to the advantage of the nineteenth century. Almost every man of any mark was deeply influenced by it, and it was one of the most potent instruments in stimulating both literary and artistic production. The drawback was that the aspirant to fame was naturally inclined to take the easiest and most fashionable path, and thus the same impulse which braced effort suppressed originality.