The great qualities of Filicaja are majesty and tenderness. The non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur majestas et amor only applies to him in so far as these gifts, though dwelling in the same breast, are not often found united in the same poem. His canzoni possess amplitude of form and pomp of diction, seldom or never bombastic, or transgressing the limits of good taste. From this the poet was preserved by his deep seriousness, to which anything like tinsel was utterly abhorrent. He strongly felt the obligation to exert his utmost strength when writing on an important theme, as he usually did when he wrote at all. It is his manner to approach his subject from a variety of sides, and make each the topic of a separate poem. Thus his great cycle of odes on the relief of Vienna, perhaps the finest of his works, consists of six separate productions, constituting a grand whole, but any one of which could have stood perfectly well by itself. Such a method of composition implies great deliberation, and Filicaja rarely conveys the impression of a seer or a bard. His thoughts are sometimes trite, but the feeling which gives them birth is always deep and sincere. The same is true of the best of his numerous sonnets, some of which rise to grandeur. By far the finest is the famous Italia, Italia, a cui feò la sorte, which is to Italian literature what Milton’s sonnet on the massacre of the Vaudois is to English:
Italia, O Italia, doomed to wear
The fatal wreath of loveliness, and so
The record of illimitable woe
Branded for ever on thy brow to bear!
Would that less beauty or more vigour were
Thy heritage! that they who madly glow
For that which their own fury layeth low,
More terrible might find thee, or less fair!
Not from thine Alpine rampart should the horde
Of spoilers then descend, or crimson stain
Of rolling Po quench thirst of Gallic steed:
Nor should’st thou, girded with another’s sword,
Smite with a foreign arm, enslavement’s chain,
Victor or vanquished, equally thy meed.
Filicaja, however, did not always compose in this majestic style. He could be light and playful. Some of his sonnets, like those of Tansillo and other writers of the Cinque Cento, strongly bring out the characteristic distinction between the Italian and the English sonnet, which is entirely in favour of the former. The English sonnet, even when dealing with a light theme, is apt to be ponderous. The Italian, even when serious, is tuneful, and buoyant on the wing.
Filicaja fixed the model of the Italian canzone for a long time, for the innovations of his successor ALESSANDRO GUIDI (1650-1712), a protégé of Queen Christina, and one of the founders of the “Arcadia,” had more admirers than imitators. They consisted in the irregularity and sometimes the disuse of rhyme, interesting as experiments, but unfavourable to the stately march of the most dignified form of lyrical composition. Guidi was nevertheless a fine poet, and manifests a peculiar fire and dignity when hymning the glories and tragedies of Rome. He must have been a very ermine among authors, if it be true that he died of disgust at a misprint in one of his books.
Three other poets who did not aspire to the elevation of Filicaja and Guidi, aided to re-enthrone sound taste, and did honour to the end of the seventeenth century. BENEDETTO MENZINI (1646-1704), another protégé of Christina’s, and in some sense a pupil of Redi, wrote caustic satires, graceful Anacreontics, respectable odes, and an Art of Poetry as sound as could be expected from one whose knowledge of modern literature was so limited. To see, more than half a century after Shakespeare, the Solimano and the Torrismondo propounded as the highest modern examples of tragic art certainly inspires cogitation touching the serviceableness of the light within, supposing that light to be darkness. Within his limits, however, Menzini is most judicious, and his own compositions do credit to his maxims; witness the following keen satiric apologue in sonnet form:
A tender slip of laurel I of late
Implanted in fair soil, and Heaven besought
To prosper till it might, to fulness brought,
Enshade the brow august of Laureate;
And Zephyrus to boot did supplicate
To fan with soothing wing, lest harm in aught
By bitter breath of Boreas should be wrought,
Loosed from the cave where Æolus holds state.
Tardy and difficult, full well I know,
The upward striving of Apollo’s spray,
Matched with frail growths that lightly come and go;
Yet chide we not the fortunate delay,
If, when the bay is worthy of the brow,
Brow there be also worthy of the bay.
Carlo Maria Maggi (1630-99), without soaring high, did excellent work in ode, sonnet, and madrigal. Francesco Lemene (1634-1704) was more ambitious, but his tumid religious poetry has fallen into oblivion, and he only lives by his pretty Anacreontics.
As the great questions which had divided the preceding century became settled, and political interests narrowed more and more, the spirit of the age naturally turned to satire. Menzini is its best satirist; but at an earlier period Chiabrera, Soldani, and the impetuous and unequal Salvator Rosa had exercised themselves in this department of literature, and the century’s last literary sensation was the successive appearance of the Latin satires of Sergardi (Sectanus), models of composition, which for nearly a decade kept the reading portion of the Roman public in an uproar. It might have been thought that comedy would have flourished, but some promising beginnings died away, while opera progressed steadily. Tragedies continued to be written on the classical system, but there was no power to breathe life into the old forms, unless the great temporary success of Prospero Bonarelli’s Solimano, which we have seen Menzini parallel with Tasso’s Torrismondo, may be taken to denote an exception. The Phillis of Scyros of Bonarelli’s brother Giudubaldo was the one achievement in pastoral drama. The novelette languished, and chivalric fiction had but one representative in Italy, the Caloandro of Giuseppe Ambrogio Marini, an excellent romance nevertheless, ending with five marriages, where monarchs and warriors play the part of the antiquated knights-errant, and so superior in sanity to the unwieldy fictions of the Clélie type that Caylus thought it worth translating into French in the following century. The Eudemia of J. V. Rossi (Nicius Erythræus), in Latin, is a good specimen of the Argenis class of romances. The same author’s Pinacotheca, in three parts, a most entertaining repertory of biographies, chiefly more or less literary, of the early part of the century, is further remarkable as indicative of a perception of the growing needs of the world, and an unconscious foreshadowing of a culture as yet afar off. And this is broadly the character of the seventeenth century in Italy, a poor and barren time if paralleled with the past, but pregnant with the seeds of future harvests, repressed for a time by ungenial circumstances. Comparing the Italian literature of the seventeenth century with that of England and France, we see that all ran through substantially the same stages, but that, while these are vigorous alike in their aberrations and their reforms, Italian literature is languid in both, a circumstance sufficiently accounted for by its absolute enslavement, and their comparative freedom.