Then there is Rucellai, who, under the pontificate of Leo X., came to be Governor of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, and yet has left a poem of fifteen hundred lines devoted to Bees. In his suggestions for the allaying of a civil war among these winged people, he is quite beyond either Virgil or Columella or Mr. Lincoln. "Pluck some leafy branch," he says, "and with it sprinkle the contending factions with either honey or sweet grape-juice, and you shall see them instantly forego their strife":—
"The two warring bands joyful unite,
And foe embraces foe: each with its lips
Licking the others' wings, feet, arms, and breast,
Whereon the luscious mixture hath been shed,
And all inebriate with delight."
So the Swiss,[6] he continues, when they fall out among themselves, are appeased by some grave old gentleman, who says a few pleasant words, and orders up a good stoop of sweet wine, in which all parties presently dip their beards, and laugh and embrace and make peace, and so forget outrage. It may have been the sixteenth-century way of closing a battle.
[6] "Come quando nei Suizzeri si muove
Sedizione, e che si grida a l' arme;
Se qualche nom grave allor si leva in piede
E comincia a parlar con dolce lingua,
Mitiga i petti barbari e feroci;
E intanto fa portare ondanti vasi
Pieni di dolci ed odorati vini;
Ahora ognun le labbra e 'l mento immerge
Ne' le spumanti tazze," etc.
Guarini, with all his affectations, has little prettinesses which charm like the chirping of a bird;—as where he paints (in the very first scene of the "Pastor Fido") the little sparrow flitting from fir to beech, and from beech to myrtle, and twittering, "How I love! how I love!" And the bird-mate ("il suo dolce desio") twitters in reply, "How I love, how I love, too!" "Ardo d' amore anch' io."
Messer Pietro Bembo was a different man from Guarini. I cannot imagine him listening to the sparrows; I cannot imagine him plucking a flower,—except he have some courtly gallantry in hand, perhaps toward the Borgia. He was one of those pompous, stiff, scholastic prigs who wrote by rules of syntax; and of syntax he is dead. He was clever and learned; he wrote in Latin, Italian, Castlian: but nobody reads him; he has only a little crypt in the "Autori Diversi." I think of him as I think of fine women who must always rustle in brocade embossed with hard jewels, and who never win the triumphs that belong to a charming morning déshabillé with only the added improvisation of a rose.
In his "Asolani" Bembo gives a very full and minute description of the gardens at Asolo, which relieved the royal retirement of Caterina, the Queen of Cyprus. Nothing could be more admirable than the situation: there were skirts of mountain which were covered, and are still covered, with oaks; there were grottos in the sides of cliffs, and water so disposed—in jets, in pools inclosed by marble, and among rocks—as to counterfeit all the wildness of Nature; there was the same stately array of cypresses, and of clipped hedges, which had belonged to the villas of Pliny; temples were decorated with blazing frescoes, to which, I dare say, Carpaccio may have lent a hand, if not that wild rake, Giorgione. Here the pretty Queen, with eight thousand gold ducats a year, (whatever that amount may have been,) and some seventy odd retainers, held her court; and here Bembo, a dashing young fellow at that time of seven or eight and twenty, became a party to those disquisitions on Love, and to those recitations of song, part of which he has recorded in the "Asolani." I am sorry to say, the beauty of the place, so far as regards its artificial features, is now all gone. The hall, which may have served as the presence-chamber of the Queen, was only a few years since doing service as a farmer's barn; and the traces of a Diana and an Apollo were still coloring the wall under which a few cows were crunching their clover-hay.
All the gardening of Italy at that period, as, indeed, at almost all times, depended very much upon architectural accessories: colonnades and wall-veil with frescoes make a large part of Italian gardening to this day. The Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore, and the Borghese Garden at Rome, are fair types. And as I recall the sunny vistas of this last, and the noontide loungings upon the marble seats, counting white flecks of statues amid the green of cypresses, and watching the shadow which some dense-topped pine flings upon a marble flight of steps or a marble balustrade, I cannot sneer at the Italian gardening, or wish it were other than it is. The art-life of Italy is the crowning and the overlapping life. The Campagna seems only a bit of foreground to carry the leaping arches of the aqueducts, and to throw the hills of Tivoli and Albano to a purple distance. The farmers (fattori) who gallop across the fields, in rough sheepskin wrappers, and upon scurvy-looking ponies, are more picturesque than thrifty; and if I gallop in company with one of them to his home upon the farther edge of the Campagna, (which is an allowable wet-day fancy,) I shall find a tall stone house smeared over roughly with plaster, and its ground-floor devoted to a crazy cart, a pony, a brace of cows, and a few goats; a rude court is walled in adjoining the house, where a few pigs are grunting. Ascending an oaken stair-way within the door, I come upon the living-room of the fattore; the beams overhead are begrimed with smoke, and garnished here and there with flitches of bacon; a scant fire of fagots is struggling into blaze upon an open hearth; and on a low table bare of either cloth or cleanliness, there waits him his supper of polenta, which is nothing more or less than our plain boiled Indian-pudding. Add to this a red-eyed dog, that seems to be a savage representative of a Scotch colley,—a lean, wrinkled, dark-faced woman, who is unwinding the bandages from a squalling Bambino,—a mixed odor of garlic and of goats, that is quickened with an ammoniacal pungency,—and you may form some idea of the home of a small Roman farmer in our day. It falls away from the standard of Cato; and so does the man.
He takes his twenty or thirty acres, upon shares, from some wealthy proprietor of Rome, whose estate may possibly cover a square mile or two of territory. He sells vegetables, poultry, a little grain, a few curds, and possibly a butt or two of sour wine. He is a type of a great many who lived within the limits of the old Papal territory; whether he and they have dropped their musty sheepskins and shaken off their unthrift under the new government, I cannot say.
Around Bologna, indeed, there was a better race of farmers: the intervening thrift of Tuscany had always its influence. The meadows of Terni, too, which are watered by the Velino, bear three full crops of grass in the season; the valley of the Clitumnus is like a miniature of the Genesee; and around Perugia the crimson-tasselled clovers, in the season of their bloom, give to the fields the beauty of a garden.