A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

A recent French writer,[186] having translated into prose Vittoria's poetical epistle to her husband, adds that she has been "obliged to veil and soften certain passages which might damage the writer's poetical character in the eyes of her fair readers, by exhibiting her as more woman than poet in the ardent and 'positive' manner, in which she speaks of her love." Never was there a more calumnious insinuation. It is true indeed that the Frenchwoman omits, or slurs over some passages of the original, but as they are wholly void of the shadow of offence, it can only be supposed that the translator did not understand the meaning of them.

There is no word in Vittoria's poetry which can lead to any other conclusion on this point, than that she was, in her position and social rank, an example, rare at that period, not only of perfect regularity of conduct, but of great purity and considerable elevation of mind. Such other indications as we have of her moral nature are all favourable. We find her, uninfluenced by the bitter hereditary hatreds of her family, striving to act as peacemaker between hostile factions, and weeping over the mischiefs occasioned by their struggles. We find her the constant correspondent and valued friend of almost every good and great man of her day. And if her scheme of moral doctrine, as gatherable from that portion of her poems which we have not yet examined, be narrow,—as how should it be otherwise,—yet it is expressive of a mind habitually under the influence of virtuous aspiration, and is more humanising in its tendencies, than that generally prevalent around her.

PESCARA'S CHARACTER.

Such was Vittoria Colonna. It has been seen what her husband Pescara was. And the question arises,—how far can it be imagined possible that she should not only have lavished on him to the last while living, all the treasures of an almost idolatrous affection; not only have looked back on his memory after his death with fondness and charitable, even blindly charitable, indulgence; but should absolutely have so canonised him in her imagination as to have doubted of her own fitness to consort hereafter with a soul so holy! It may be said, that Vittoria did not know her husband as we know him; that the few years they had passed together had no doubt shown her only the better phases of his character. But she knew that he had at least doubted whether he should not be false to his sovereign, and had been most infamously so to his accomplices or dupes. She knew at least all that Giovio's narrative could tell her; for the bishop presented it to her, and received a sonnet in return.

But it is one of the most beautiful properties of woman's nature, some men say, that their love has power to blind their judgment. Novelists and poets are fond of representing women whose affections remain unalterably fixed on their object, despite the manifest unworthiness of it; and set such examples before us, as something high, noble, admirable, "beautiful;" to the considerable demoralisation of their confiding students of either sex. There is a tendency in woman to refuse at all risks the dethroning of the sovereign she has placed on her heart's throne. The pain of deposing him is so great, that she is tempted to abase her own soul to escape it; for it is only at that cost that it can be escaped. And the spectacle of a fine nature "dragged down to sympathise with clay," is not "beautiful," but exceedingly the reverse. Men do not usually set forth as worthy of admiration—though a certain school of writers do even this, in the trash talked of love at first sight—that kind of love between the sexes, which arises from causes wholly independent of the higher part of our nature. Yet it is that love alone which can survive esteem. And it is highly important to the destinies of woman, that she should understand and be thoroughly persuaded, that she cannot love that which does not merit love, without degrading her own nature; that under whatsoever circumstances love should cease when respect, approbation, and esteem have come to an end; and that those who find poetry and beauty in the love which no moral change in its object can kill, are simply teaching her to attribute a fatally debasing supremacy to those lower instincts of our nature, on whose due subordination to the diviner portion of our being all nobleness, all moral purity and spiritual progress depends.

POETICAL PLATONISM.

Vittoria Colonna was not one whose intellectual and moral self had thus abdicated its sceptre. The texture of her mind and its habits of thought forbid the supposition; and, bearing this in mind, it becomes wholly impossible to accept the glorification of her "bel sole," which makes the staple of the first half of her poems, as the sincere expression of genuine feeling and opinion.

She was probably about as much in earnest as was her great model and master, Petrarch, in his adoration of Laura. The poetical mode of the day was almost exclusively Petrarchist; and the abounding Castalian fount of that half century in "the land of song" played from its thousand jets little else than Petrarch and water in different degrees of dilution. Vittoria has no claim to be excepted from the "servum pecus," though her imitation has more of self-derived vigour to support it. And this assumption of a mighty, undying, exalted and hopeless passion, was a necessary part of the poet's professional appurtenances. Where could a young and beautiful widow, of unblemished conduct, who had no intention of changing her condition, and no desire to risk misconstruction by the world, find this needful part of her outfit as a poet, so unobjectionably as in the memory of her husband, sanctified and exalted by the imagination to the point proper for the purpose.

For want of a deeper spiritual insight, and a larger comprehension of the finer affections of the human heart and the manifestations of them, with the Italian poets of the "rénaissance," love-poetry was little else than the expression of passion in the most restricted sense of the term. But they were often desirous of elevating, purifying, and spiritualising their theme. And how was this to be accomplished? The gratification of passion, such as they painted, would, they felt, have led them quite in a different direction from that they were seeking. A hopeless passion therefore, one whose wishes the reader was perfectly to understand were never destined to be gratified—better still, one by the nature of things impossible to be gratified—this was the contrivance by which love was to be poetised and moralised.

The passion-poetry, which addressed itself to the memory of one no more, met the requirements of the case exactly; and Vittoria's ten years despair and lamentations, her apotheosis of the late cavalry captain, and longing to rejoin him, must be regarded as poetical properties brought out for use, when she sat down to make poetry for the perfectly self-conscious, though very laudable purpose of acquiring for herself a poet's reputation.