Campanella’s claims as a vernacular writer rest entirely upon his poems, of which there are said to have been seven books. With the exception of some extracted from the documents of his trial by the diligence of Signor Amabile, all that remain are the sonnets printed in Germany by his disciple, Tobias Adami, in 1622, and forgotten until their republication by Orelli, in 1834. But for these pieces we should not know the real Campanella, whom they exhibit in a more favourable light, even as a thinker, than does the brilliant intuition, chequered with gross credulity, of his professedly philosophical writings. Like Michael Angelo’s, they are rather hewn than written—the utterances of a powerful intellect and a passionate heart seeking to express themselves through a medium but imperfectly mastered, hence vehement, abrupt, contorted even to the verge of absurdity, but full of substance, and as remote as possible from the polished inanity which is so frequently a reproach to the Italian sonnet. Addington Symonds, wrestling with Campanella as Campanella wrestled with his own language, has produced excellent translations, accompanied by a careful commentary. “That this sonnet,” he says of the following, “should have been written by a Dominican monk, in a Neapolitan prison, in the first half of the seventeenth century, is truly noteworthy:”
The people is a beast of muddy brain
That knows not its own force, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein.
One kick would be enough to break the chain;
But the beast fears, and what the child demands
It does; nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! with its own hand it ties
And gags itself—gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not, and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
Some of Campanella’s other sonnets are very striking, especially his impassioned remonstrance with the free Swiss for hiring themselves out to Italian despots. His religious pieces are characterised by a devout tone, and an unshakeable reliance upon Providence. His creed, like Bruno’s, is pantheistic. The same is the case with another Neapolitan thinker of less importance, GIULIO CESARE VANINI (1585-1626), whose misunderstood pantheism caused him to be burned at Toulouse, the most intolerant city in France. His writings are in Latin, but so characteristically Italian in spirit as to deserve the attention of Italian students. Out of many which he composed, only two were printed. The Amphitheatre is, in the opinion of Mr. Owen (Sceptics of the Italian Renaissance), decidedly orthodox, the Dialogues are as decidedly free-thinking, but it is not always quite clear how far the author is speaking in his own person.
While these adventurous speculators were infusing a ferment into the quiescent thought of their day, the edifice of modern jurisprudence was receiving important additions from Alberico Gentili, a Protestant exile, happily in safety at Oxford, whose works, nevertheless, belong rather to moral science than to literature. Much at the same time prose literature was enriched by the ethical prolusions of the most distinguished poet of the age. Though suffering from delusions sometimes amounting to frenzy, Tasso’s brain was clear on all subjects to which these delusions did not extend. He could reason powerfully and gracefully on any question of taste or morals, arrange his ideas with symmetry, and support his views with appropriate quotations. The form which he adopted was the dialogue, requiring not only judgment and memory, but an accurate discrimination between the interlocutors, which he always maintains. Even the discourse with his familiar spirit, although composed in the hospital for lunatics, and containing many fantastic notions, is consecutive and rational. It is perhaps the most interesting of any, from its close relation to the writer; although almost as much may be said for the Gonzaga, in which Tasso celebrates the noble conduct of his father in preferring public duty to private interest; and the Paterfamilias, in which he describes a personal adventure. His other dialogues, all models of elegance and urbanity, usually treat of those virtues which enter most especially into the character of a gentleman, and his own bad success at courts does not discourage him from tendering advice to courtiers.
A more powerful intellect if a less accomplished pen than Tasso’s forms a connecting link between the science, alike moral and physical, and the historical erudition of the age. PIETRO SARPI (1552-1623) would in our day have been a great natural philosopher; and in fact, notwithstanding his profound knowledge both of theology and canon law, his reputation long principally rested upon his experiments and researches in optics, anatomy, and other natural sciences. Paul the Fifth’s aggression upon Sarpi’s native Venice in a matter of ecclesiastical jurisdiction summoned the modest friar to public life, and after the triumphant issue of the controversy in which he had borne the chief part, he turned to write the history of the momentous assembly which had so deeply affected the character of the Church of Rome for good and ill—the Council of Trent. As a liberal thinker, whose creed approached without quite attaining the Protestant standpoint, he was naturally hostile to a convocation which had stereotyped so many corruptions; while as an ecclesiastical statesman he was well able to penetrate the worldly motives which had actuated its conveners from first to last. The substantial truth of his view of it is generally admitted; it remains a question how far he has dealt conscientiously with his materials. The equitable Ranke subjects both him and the antagonistic historian, Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, to a close scrutiny, and finds himself unable to entirely acquit or condemn either of them. Both have frequently displayed a praiseworthy fairness under strong temptation to garble the documents before them, but neither has always resisted the inducement to magnify or minimise evidence in accordance with his prepossessions. Sarpi’s main fault is a disposition to interpret every document in the light of his own times, when the pretensions of the Papacy had greatly risen, and its spirit had become more inflexible and despotic. This, however it may detract from the value of his history, was pardonable in one who had taken a leading part in resisting the most arrogant of the Popes, and had been left for dead by assassins, suborned, as generally believed, by the Papal court. As an advocate, Sarpi is far superior to his verbose though often ingenious antagonist; as an historian, Ranke places him immediately after Machiavelli. As a man, he appears sublimed by study and suffering into an incarnation of pure intellect, passionless except in his zeal for truth and freedom and his devotion to the Republic. “Let us,” he nobly said when the Pope hurled his interdict at Venice—“let us be Venetians first and Christians afterwards.”
The secular historians of the period are very numerous, but, with the exception of the Latinist Strada, only two have attained a durable celebrity. Enrico Caterino Davila (1576-1631), who had become well acquainted with French affairs by military service in the wars of religion, wrote the history of these contests from 1558 to 1598 “with Venetian sagacity and soldierly brevity.” He wants few of the qualifications of an excellent historian, and his history is placed not far below that of Guicciardini, to which, indeed, it is preferred by Macaulay. He is accused, however, of affecting more penetration than he possessed into the secret counsels of princes. Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio’s history of the revolt of the Low Countries against the Spaniards (1558-1609) is necessarily defective as coming from the wrong side. Such a history could not be adequately written without sympathy with its heroes and comprehension of the principles involved, neither of which could be expected from a Papal nuncio. Bentivoglio nevertheless writes with reasonable impartiality, and is well informed on the exterior of the transactions he records, though utterly blind to their real significance. His style is most agreeable. His relation of his mission as nuncio, with speculations on the possibility of suppressing the Reformation in England and elsewhere, is perhaps more intrinsically valuable than his history; and his memoirs of his own career at the Papal court, though necessarily worded with great reserve and caution, are both entertaining and instructive. He was born in 1577, and died in conclave in 1644, just as he seemed about to be elected Pope; done to death, Nicius Erythræus affirms, by the snoring of the Cardinal in the next cell, which deprived him of sleep for eleven successive nights.
All the authors we have mentioned, though for the most part writing in the seventeenth century, were born in the sixteenth. The seventeenth century was far advanced towards its close ere it had produced a single prose-writer of literary importance, although some of its numerous penmen were interesting for their characters or the circumstances of their lives. Bartoli’s History of the Society of Jesus is badly executed, but important from its subject. GREGORIO LETI was the most representative figure, personifying the spirit of revolt against tyranny spiritual and political. Born at Milan in 1630, he emigrated to Geneva, became a Protestant, and, after a roving life, eventually settled at Amsterdam, where he died historiographer of the city in 1701. He had already constituted himself a historiographer and biographer general, writing the lives of kings, princes, and governors, and depicting the rise and fall of states, as fast as bookseller could commission, or printer put into type. Yet he is not a hack writer, but has an individuality of his own, and although his works are devoid of scientific worth, they served a useful purpose in their day by asserting freedom of speech. Their value is in proportion to the degree in which they subserve this purpose; the most important, therefore, are his lives of Sixtus V. and of Innocent the Tenth’s rapacious and imperious niece, Olimpia Maldachini. Ranke has clearly shown that the former, which has done more than any other book to determine popular opinion regarding Sixtus, is mainly derived from MS. authorities of little value; which proves that Leti did not invent, but also that he did not discriminate.
Several other writers approached Leti’s type, of whom Tomasi, the author of a very uncritical life of Cæsar Borgia, may be taken as a specimen. Two emigrant Italians, Siri and Marana, ministered successfully to the growing appetite for news and political criticism, soon to engender regular journalism; the former by his Mercurio, published irregularly from 1644 to 1682; the latter by his ingenious Turkish Spy. Ferrante Pallavicino enlivened the general dulness by his Divorzio Celeste, a conception worthy of Lucian, though not worked out as Lucian would have wrought it, and other satires which eventually cost him his life. TRAJANO BOCCALINI, nearer the commencement of the century, had treated political as well as literary affairs with freedom in his News from Parnassus, in which he professed to impart information respecting transactions in the kingdom of Apollo. The fiction was greatly admired in its day, translated into most European languages, and probably exerted considerable influence upon Quevedo, Swift, and Addison. Boccalini also distinguished himself as a commentator on Tacitus, a writer much studied at this epoch of general gloom and discouragement, and as the author of an exposure of the weakness of the Spanish monarchy, which is said to have occasioned his assassination.
The one writer, however, whom it is possible to admire without qualification, and who has preserved his freshness to our own day, is a traveller, PIETRO DELLA VALLE, who between 1614 and 1626 explored Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Persia, and part of India. Apart from the prejudices inevitable in his age and country, Della Valle is the model of an observant and sagacious voyager, and the letters in which his observations are recorded form most delightful reading. Later in the century excellent letters on scientific subjects were written by Magalotti and Redi. The illustrious naturalists who in some measure redeemed the intellectual barrenness of the epoch, do not fall within the domain of literary history, which, except for some poets, is one of ever-augmenting inanity and insipidity, culminating in absolute sterility. A second Greece had been enslaved, but this time the fierce conqueror refused to be himself led into captivity. Spain and the Papacy and their victim were equally useless to culture, which would have perished from the earth had it still been confined to the fair land
Begirt by wall of Alp and azure sea,
And cloven by the ridges Apennine.