One beautiful story, borrowed from the annals of their own city, was treated by the two Sienese novelists, Illicini and Sermini. The palm of excellence, however, must be awarded to the elder of these authors.
Of Bernardo Lapini, surnamed Illicini or Ollicino, very little is known, except that he served both Gian Galeazzo Visconti and Borso da Este in the capacity of physician, and composed a commentary on the _Trionfi_ of Petrarch. His _Novella_ opens with a conversation between certain n.o.ble ladies of Siena, who agreed that the three most eminent virtues of a generous nature are courtesy, grat.i.tude, and liberality.
An ancient dame, who kept them company on that occasion, offered to relate a tale, which should ill.u.s.trate these qualities and raise certain fine questions concerning their exercise in actual life. The two Sienese families De" Salimbeni and De" Montanini had long been on terms of coldness; and though their ancient feuds were pa.s.sing into oblivion, no treaty of peace had yet been ratified between their houses, when Anselmo Salimbeni fell deeply in love with Angelica the only sister of Carlo Montanini. Anselmo was wealthy; but to Carlo and his sister there only remained, of their vast ancestral possessions, one small estate, where they lived together in retirement. Delicacy thus prevented the rich Anselmo from declaring his affection, until an event happened which placed it in his power to be of signal service to the Montanini. A prosperous member of the Sienese government desired to purchase Carlo"s house at the price of one thousand ducats. Carlo refused to sell this estate, seeing it was his sister"s only support and future source of dowry. Thereupon the powerful man of state accused him falsely of treason to the commonwealth. He was cast into prison and condemned to death or the forfeit of one thousand ducats.
Anselmo, the very night before Carlo"s threatened execution, paid this fine, and sent the deed of release by the hands of a servant to the prison. When Carlo was once more at liberty, he made inquiries which proved beyond doubt that Anselmo, a man unknown to him, the member of a house at ancient feud with his, had done him this great courtesy. It then rushed across his mind that certain acts and gestures of Anselmo betrayed a secret liking for Angelica. This decided him upon the course he had to take. Having communicated the plan to his sister, he went alone with her at night to Salimbeni"s castle, and, when he had expressed his grat.i.tude, there left her in her lover"s power, as the most precious thing he could bestow upon the saviour of his life.
Anselmo, not to be surpa.s.sed in this exchange of courtesies, delivered Angelica to the women of his household, and afterwards, attended by the train of his retainers, sought Carlo in his home. There he made a public statement of what had pa.s.sed between them, wedded Angelica with three rings, dowered her with the half of his estates, and by a formal deed of gift a.s.signed the residue of his fortune to Carlo. This is a bare outline of the story, which Illicini has adorned in all its details with subtle a.n.a.lyses of feeling and reflections on the several situations. The problem proposed to the gentlewoman is to decide which of the two men, Anselmo or Carlo, showed the more perfect courtesy in their several circ.u.mstances. How they settled this knotty point, may be left to the readers of _Novelle_ to discover.
Bandello more than adequately represents the Lombard group of novelists; and since his works have been already discussed, it will suffice to allude briefly to three collections which in their day were highly popular. These are _I Proverbi_ of Antonio Cornazano, _Le Piacevoli Notti_ of Straparola, and Giraldi"s _Hecatommithi_.[128]
Cornazano was a copious writer both in Latin and Italian. He pa.s.sed his life at the Courts of Francesco Sforza, Bartolommeo Colleoni, and Ercole I. of Ferrara. One of his earliest compositions was a Life of Christ. This fact is not insignificant, as a sign of the conditions under which literature was produced in the Renaissance. A man who had gained reputation by a learned or religious treatise, ventured to extend it by jests of the broadest humor. The _Proverbi_, by which alone Cornazano"s name is now distinguished, are sixteen carefully-wrought stories, very droll but very dirty. Each ill.u.s.trates a common proverb, and pretends to relate the circ.u.mstances which gave it currency. The author opens one tale with a simple statement: "From the deserts of the Thebaid came to us that trite and much used saying, _Better late than never_; and this was how it happened." Having stated the theme, he enters on his narrative, diverts attention by a series of absurdities which lead to an unexpected climax. He concludes it thus: "The abbot answered: "It is not this which makes me weep, but to think of my misfortune, who have been so long without discovering and commending so excellent an usage." "Father," said the monk, "_Better late than never_."" There is considerable comic vigor in the working of this motive. Our sense of the ridiculous is stimulated by a studied disproportion between the universality of the proverb and the strangeness of the incidents invented to account for it.
[Footnote 128: None of them are included in the Milanese _Novellieri Italiani_. The editions I shall use are _Proverbii di Messer Antonio Cornazano in Facetie_, Bologna, Romagnoli, 1865; _Le Piacevoli Notti_, in Vinegia per Comin da Trino di Monferrato, MDLI.; _Gli Hecatommithi di M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, n.o.bile Ferrarese_, in Vinegia, MDLXVI., Girolamo Scotto, 2 vols.]
Straparola breaks ground in a different direction. The majority of his novels bear traces of their origin in fairy stories or _Volksmarchen_.
Much interest attaches to the _Notti Piacevoli_, as the literary reproduction of a popular species which the Venetian Gozzi afterwards rendered famous. Students of folk-lore may compare them with the Sicilian fables recently committed to the press by Signor Pitre.[129]
The element of bizarre fancy is remarkable in all these tales; but the marvelous has been so mingled with the facts of common life as to give each narrative the true air of the conventional _Novella_. One in particular may be mentioned, since it is written on the same motive as Machiavelli"s _Belphegor_. The rubric runs as follows: "The Devil, hearing the complaints of husbands against their wives, marries Silvia Ballastro, and takes Gasparino Boncio for gossip of the ring, and forasmuch as he finds it impossible to live with his wife, enters into the body of the Duke of Melphi, and Gasparino, his gossip, expels him thence." Between Straparola"s and Machiavelli"s treatment of this subject, the resemblance is so close as to justify the opinion that the former tale was simply modeled on the latter, or that both were drawn from an original source. In each case it is the wife"s pride which renders life unendurable to her demon husband, and in both he is expelled from the possessed person by mistaking a bra.s.s band in full play for the approach of his tumultuous consort. But Straparola"s loose and careless style of narrative bears no comparison with the caustic satire of Machiavelli"s meditated art.[130] The same theme was treated in Italian by Giovanni Brevio; and since Machiavelli"s novel first appeared in print in the year 1549, Straparola"s seeing the light in 1550, and Brevio"s in 1545, we may reasonably conclude that each version was an adaptation of some primitive monastic story.[131]
[Footnote 129: _Fiabe, Novelle, Racconti_, Palermo, Lauriel, 1875, 4 vols. I may here take occasion to notice that one _Novella_ by the Conte Lorenzo Magalotti (_Nov. It._ vol. xiii. p. 362), is the story of Whittington and his Cat, told of a certain Florentine, Ansaldo degli Ormanni, and the King of the Canary Islands.]
[Footnote 130: John Wilson"s play of _Belphegor_, Dekker"s _If it be not good the Divel is in it_, and Ben Jonson"s _The Devil is an a.s.s_, were more or less founded on Machiavelli"s and Straparola"s novels.]
[Footnote 131: Dunlop in his _History of Fiction_, vol. ii. p. 411, speaks of a Latin MS. preserved in the library of S. Martin at Tours which contained the tale, but he also says that it was lost at "the period of the civil wars in France."]
On the score of style alone, it would be difficult to explain the widespread popularity of Giraldi Cinthio"s one hundred and ten tales.[132] The _Hecatommithi_ are written in a lumbering manner, and the stories are often lifeless. Compared with the brilliancy of the Tuscan _Novelle_, the point and sparkle of _Le Cene_, the grace and gusto of Sermini, or Firenzuola"s golden fluency, the diction of this n.o.ble Ferrarese is dull. Yet the _Hecatommithi_ were reprinted again and again and translated into several languages. In England, through Painter"s _Palace of Pleasure_, they obtained wide circulation and supplied our best dramatists, including Shakspere and Fletcher, with hints for plays. It is probable that they owed their fame in no small measure to what we reckon their defects. Giraldi"s language was more intelligible to ordinary readers of Italian than the racy Tuscan of the Sienese authors. His stories had less of a purely local flavor than those of the Florentines. They enjoyed, moreover, the singular advantage of diffusion through the press of Venice, which then commanded the book-market of Europe. But, if we put this point of style aside, the vogue of Cinthio in Italy and Europe becomes at once intelligible. There is a ma.s.sive force and volume in his matter, which proclaims him an author to be reckoned with. The variety of scenes he represents, the tragic gravity of many of his motives, his intimate acquaintance with the manners and customs of a cla.s.s that never fails to interest the vulgar, combined with great sagacity in selecting and multiplying instances of striking crime, stood him in the stead of finer art with the special public for whom _Novelle_ were composed.[133] Compared even with Boccaccio, the prince of story-tellers, Cinthio holds his own, not as a great dramatic or descriptive writer but as one who has studied, a.n.a.lyzed, dissected, and digested the material of human action and pa.s.sion in a vast variety of modes. His work is more solid and reflective than Bandello"s; more moralized than Il Lasca"s. The ethical tendency both of the tales and the discussions they occasion, is, for the most part, singularly wholesome. In spite, therefore, of the almost revolting frankness with which impurity, fraud, cruelty, violence, and b.e.s.t.i.a.l l.u.s.t are exposed to view, one rises from the perusal of the _Hecatommithi_ with an unimpaired consciousness of good and evil. It is just the negation of this conscience which renders the ma.s.s of Italian _Novelle_ worse than unprofitable.
[Footnote 132: The t.i.tle leads us to expect one hundred tales; but counting the ten of the Introduction, there are one hundred and ten.
When the book first circulated, it contained but seventy. The first edition is that of Monte Regale in Sicily, 1565. My copy of the Venetian edition of 1566 is complete.]
[Footnote 133: The ten novels of the Introduction deal exclusively with the manners of Italian prost.i.tutes. Placed as a frontispiece to the whole repertory, they seem intended to attract the vulgar reader.]
The plan of the _Hecatommithi_ deserves a pa.s.sing notice, if only because it ill.u.s.trates the more than ordinary force of brain which Cinthio brought to bear upon his light material. He begins with an elaborate description of the Sack of Rome. A party of men and women take refuge from its horrors of rape, pestilence and tortures in one of the Colonna palaces. When affairs have been proved desperate, they set sail from Civita Vecchia for Ma.r.s.eilles, and enliven their voyage with story-telling. A man of mature years opens the discussion with a long panegyric of wedded love, serving as introduction to the tales which treat of illicit pa.s.sion. From this first day"s debate the women of the party are absent. They intervene next day, and upon this and the following nine days one hundred stories are related by different members of the party upon subjects selected for ill.u.s.tration. Each novel is followed by a copious commentary in the form of dialogue, and songs are interspersed. Cinthio thus adhered, as closely as possible, to the model furnished by Boccaccio. But his framework, though ingeniously put together, lacks the grace and sweetness of the Decameron. Not a few of the novels are founded upon facts of history.
In the tenth tale of the ninth decade, for example, he repeats the legend of the Borgia family--the murder of the Duke of Gandia, Alexander"s death by poison, and Cesare"s escape. The names are changed; but the facts, as related by Guicciardini, can be clearly discerned through the transparent veil of fiction.
In concluding this chapter on the _Novelle_, it may be repeated that the species of narrative in question was, in its ultimate development, a peculiar Italian product. Originally derived through the French _fabliaux_ from medieval Latin stories, the _Novella_ received in Italy more serious and more artistic treatment. It satisfied the craving of the race for such delineation of life and manners as a great literature demands; and it did this for reasons which will be explained in the next chapter, with more originality, more adequacy to the special qualities of the Italian people, than even their comedies.
What De Quincey wrote concerning our theater in the age of Elizabeth and James, might almost be applied to the material which the _Novellieri_ used: "No literature, not excepting even that of Athens, has ever presented such a multiform theater, such a carnival display, mask and anti-mask of impa.s.sioned life--breathing, moving, acting, suffering, laughing:
"Quicquid agunt homines--votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus."
But, when we quit material to think of form, the parallel fails. De Quincey"s further description of our dramas, "scenically grouped, draped, and gorgeously colored," is highly inapplicable to the brief, careless, almost pedestrian prose of the _Novelle_. In spite of their indescribable wealth of subject-matter, in spite of those inexhaustible stores of plots and situations, characters and motives, which have made them a mine for playwrights in succeeding ages, they rarely rise to the height of poetry, nor are they ever dramas. The artistic limitations of the Italian _Novelle_ are among the most interesting phenomena presented by the history of literature.
CHAPTER XI.
THE DRAMA.
First attempts at Secular Drama--The _Orfeo_ and _Timone_--General Character of Italian Plays--Court Pageants and Comedies borrowed from the Latin--Conditions under which a National Drama is formed--Their absence in Italy--Lack of Tragic Genius--Eminently Tragic Material in Italian History--The Use made of this by English Playwrights--The Ballad and the Drama--The Humanistic Bias in Italy--Parallels between Greek and Italian Life--Il Lasca"s Critique of the Latinizing Playwrights--The _Sofonisba_ of Trissino--Rucellai"s _Rosmunda_--Sperone"s _Canace_--Giraldi"s _Orbecche_--Dolce"s _Marianna_--Transcripts from the Greek Tragedians and Seneca--General Character of Italian Tragedies--Sources of their Failure--Influence of Plautus and Terence over Comedy--Latin Comedies acted at Florence, Rome, Ferrara--Translations of Latin Comedies--Manner of Representation at Court--Want of Permanent Theaters--Bibbiena"s _Calandra_--Leo X. and Comedy at Rome--Ariosto"s Treatment of his Latin Models--The _Ca.s.saria_, _Suppositi_, _Lena_, _Negromante_, _Scolastica_--Qualities of Ariosto"s Comedies--Machiavelli"s Plays--The _Commedia in Prosa_--Fra Alberigo and Margherita--The _Clizia_--Its Humor--The _Mandragola_--Its sinister Philosophy--Conditions under which it was Composed--Aretino disengages Comedy from Latin Rules--His Point of View--The _Cortegiana_, _Marescalco_, _Talanta_--Italy had innumerable Comedies, but no great Comic Art--General Character of the _Commedia Erudita_--Its fixed Personages--Gelli, Firenzuola, Cecchi, Ambra, Il Lasca--The Farsa--Conclusion on the Moral Aspects of Italian Comedy.
Contemporaneously with the Roman Epic, the Drama began to be a work of studied art in Italy. Boiardo by his _Timone_ and Poliziano by his _Orfeo_ gave the earliest specimens at Ferrara and Mantua of secular plays written in the vulgar tongue. The _Timone_ must have been composed before 1494, the date of Boiardo"s death; and we have already seen that the _Orfeo_ was in all probability represented in 1472. It is significant that the two poets who were mainly instrumental in effecting a revival of Italian poetry, should have tried their hands at two species of composition for the stage. In the _Orfeo_ we find a direct outgrowth from the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_. The form of the Florentine religious show is adapted with very little alteration to a pagan story. In substance the _Orfeo_ is a pastoral melodrama with a tragic climax. Boiardo in the _Timone_ followed a different direction.
The subject is borrowed from Lucian, who speaks the prologue, as Gower prologizes in the _Pericles_ of Shakspere. The comedy aims at regularity of structure, and is written in _terza rima_. Yet the chief character leaves the stage before the end of the fifth act, and the conclusion is narrated by an allegorical personage, Lo Ausilio.[134]
[Footnote 134: "Comedia de Timone per el Magnifico Conte Matheo Maria Boyardo Conte de Scandiano traducta de uno Dialogo de Luciano.
Stampata in Venetia per Georgio di Rusconi Milanese, del MDXVIII. ad iii di Decembre." From the play itself we learn that it must have been represented on a double stage, a lower one standing for earth and a higher one for heaven. The first three acts consist chiefly of soliloquies by Timon and conversations with celestial personages--Jove, Mercury, Wealth, Poverty. In the fourth act we are introduced to characters of Athenians--Gnatonide, Phylade, Demea, Trasycle, who serve to bring Timone"s misanthropy into relief; and the fifth act brings two slaves, Syro and Parmeno, upon the scene, with a kind of underplot which is not solved at the close of the play. The whole piece must be regarded rather as a Morality than a Comedy, and the characters are allegories or types more than living persons.]
These plays, though generally considered to have been the first attempts at secular Italian dramatic poetry, were by no means the earliest in date, if we admit the Latin plays of scholars.[135]
Besides some tragedies, which will afterwards be mentioned, it is enough here to cite the _Philogenia_ of Ugolino Pisani (Parma, 1430), the _Philodoxius_ of Alberti, the _Polissena_ of Leonardo Bruni, and the _Progne_ of Gregorio Corrado. It is therefore a fact that, in addition to religious dramas in the mother tongue, the Italians from an early period turned their attention to dramatic composition. Still the drama never flourished at any time in Italy as a form of poetry indigenous and national. It did not succeed in freeing itself from cla.s.sical imitation on the one hand, or on the other from the hampering adjuncts of Court-pageants and costly entertainments. Why the Italians failed to develop a national theater, is a question easier to ask than to answer. The attempt to solve this problem will, however, serve to throw some light upon their intellectual conditions at the height of the Renaissance.
[Footnote 135: To determine the question of priority in such matters is neither easy nor important. Students who desire to follow the gradual steps in the development of Italian play-writing before the date of Ariosto and Machiavelli may be referred to D"Ancona"s work on the _Origini del Teatro_.]
Plays in Italy at this period were either religious _Feste_ of the kind peculiar to Florence, or Masks at Court, or Comedies and Tragedies imitated by men of learning from cla.s.sical models, or, lastly, Pastorals combining the scenic attractions of the Mask with the action of a regular drama. None of these five species can be called in a true sense popular; nor were they addressed by their authors to the ma.s.ses of the people. Performed in private by pious confraternities or erudite academies, or exhibited on state occasions in the halls of princely palaces, they were not an expression of the national genius but a highly-cultivated form of aristocratic luxury.
When Heywood in his prologue to the _Challenge for Beauty_ wrote:
Those [_i.e._ plays] that frequent are In Italy or France, _even in these days_, _Compared with ours_, are rather jigs than plays:
when Marlowe in the first scene of _Edward II._ made Gaveston, thinking how he may divert the pleasure-loving king, exclaim:
Therefore I"ll have Italian masks by night, Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows:
both of these poets uttered a true criticism of the Italian theater.
Marlowe accurately describes the scenic exhibitions in vogue at the Courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and Rome, where the stage was reckoned among the many instruments of wanton amus.e.m.e.nt. Heywood, by his scornful phrase _jigs_, indicates their mixed nature between comedies and ballets, with interludes of pageantry and accompaniment of music. The words italicized show that the English playwrights were conscious of having developed a n.o.bler type of the drama than had been produced in Italy. In order to complete the outline sketched by Heywood and Marlowe, we must bear in mind that comedies adapted from the Latin, like the _Suppositi_ of Ariosto, or constructed upon Latin principles, like Machiavelli"s _Mandragola_ or the _Calandra_ of Bibbiena, were highly relished by a society educated in humanistic traditions. Such efforts of the scholarly muse approved themselves even in England to the taste of critics like Sir Philip Sidney, who shows in his _Defense of Poesy_ that he had failed to discern the future greatness of the national drama. But they had the fatal defect of being imitations and exotics. The stage, however learnedly adorned by men of scholarship and fancy, remained within the narrow sphere of courtly pastime. What was a mere _hors d"oeuvre_ in the Elizabethan age of England, formed the whole dramatic art of the Italians.
If tragedy and comedy sprang by a natural process of evolution from the medieval Mystery, then the Florentines should have had a drama. We have seen how rich in the elements of both species were the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_; and how men of culture like Lorenzo de" Medici, and Bernardo Pulci deigned to compose them. But the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ died a natural death, and left no heritage. They had no vital relation to the people, either as a source of amus.e.m.e.nt or as embodying the real thoughts and pa.s.sions of the race. Designed for the edification of youth, their piety was too often hypocritical, and their extravagant monastic morality stood in glaring opposition to the ethics of society. We must go far deeper in our a.n.a.lysis, if we wish to comprehend this failure of the Italians to produce a drama.
Three conditions, enjoyed by Greece and England, but denied to Italy, seem necessary for the poetry of a nation to reach this final stage of artistic development. The first is a free and sympathetic public, not made up of courtiers and scholars, but of men of all cla.s.ses--a public representative of the whole nation, with whom the playwright shall feel himself in close _rapport_. The second is, a center of social life: an Athens, Paris or London: where the heart of the nation beats and where its brain is ever active. The third is a perturbation of the race in some great effort, like the Persian war or the struggle of the Reformation, which unites the people in a common consciousness of heroism. Taken in combination, these three conditions explain the appearance of a drama fitted to express the very life and soul of a puissant nation, with the temper of the times impressed upon it, but with a truth and breadth that renders it the heritage of every race and age. A national drama is the image created for itself in art by a people which has arrived at knowledge of its power, at the enjoyment of its faculties, after a period of successful action. Concentrated in a capital, gifted with a common instrument of self-expression, it projects itself in tragedies and comedies that bear the name of individual poets, but are in reality the spirit of the race made vocal.[136]
[Footnote 136: I have enlarged on these points in my Essay on Euripides (_Greek Poets_, Series i.). I may take occasion here to say that until Sept. 1879, after this chapter was written, I had not met with Professor Hillebrand"s _etudes Italiennes_ (Paris, Franck, 1868).]
These conditions have only twice in the world"s history existed--once in the Athens of Pericles, once in the London of Elizabeth. The measure of greatness to which the dramas of Paris and Madrid, though still not comparable with the Attic and the English, can lay claim, is due to the partic.i.p.ation by the French and Spanish peoples in these privileges. But in Italy there was no public, no metropolis, no agitation of the people in successful combat with antagonistic force.
The educated cla.s.ses were, indeed, conscious of intellectual unity; but they had no meeting-point in any city, where they might have developed the theater upon the only principles then possible, the principles of erudition. And, what was worse, there existed no enthusiasms, moral, religious or political, from which a drama could arise. A society without depth of thought or seriousness of pa.s.sion, highly cultured, but devoid of energy and aspiration, had not the seed of tragedy within its loins. In those polite Italian Courts and pleasure-seeking coteries, the idyl, the _Novella_, and the vision of a golden age might entertain men weary with public calamities, indulgent to the vice and crime around them. From this soil the forest-trees of a great drama could not spring. But it yielded an abundant crop of comedies, an undergrowth of rankly sprouting vegetation. It was, moreover, well adapted to the one original production of the Italian stage. Pastoral comedy, attaining perfection in Ta.s.so"s _Aminta_ and Guarini"s _Pastor Fido_, and bearing the germs of the Opera in its voluptuous scenes, formed the climax of dramatic art in Italy.
Independently of these external drawbacks, we find in the nature of the Italian genius a reason why the drama never reached perfection.
Tragedy, which is the soul of great dramatic poetry, was almost uniformly wanting after Dante. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, Boiardo, Ariosto, Ta.s.so, are pathetic, graceful, polished, elevated, touching, witty, humorous, reflective, radiant, inventive, fanciful--everything but stern, impa.s.sioned, tragic in the true heroic sense. Even the Florentines, who dallied sometimes with the thoughts of Death and Judgment in bizarre pageants like the show of h.e.l.l recorded by Villani, or the Mask of Penitence designed by Piero di Cosimo, or the burlesque festivals recorded in the life of Rustici by Giorgio Vasari--even the Florentines shrank in literature from what is terrible and charged with anguish of the soul. The horrors of the _Novelle_ are used by them to stimulate a jaded appet.i.te, to point the pleasures of the sense by contrast with the shambles and the charnel-house. We are never invited to the spectacle of human energies ravaged by pa.s.sion, at war with destiny, yet superior to fate and fortune and internal tempest in the strength of will and dignity of heroism. It is not possible to imagine those _liete brigate_ of young men and maidens responding to the fierce appeal of Marston"s prologue:
Therefore we proclaim, If any spirit breathes within this round, Uncapable of weighty pa.s.sion-- As from his birth being hugged in the arms And nuzzled twixt the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of happiness-- Who winks, and shuts his apprehension up From common sense of what men were, and are, Who would not know what men must be; let such Hurry amain from our black-visaged shows: We shall affright their eyes. But if a breast Nailed to the earth with grief, if any heart Pierced through with anguish pant within this ring, If there be any blood whose heat is choked And stifled with true sense of misery, If aught of these strains fill this consort up, They arrive most welcome.
Sterner, and it may be gloomier conditions of external life than those which the Italians enjoyed, were needed as a preparation of the public for such spectacles. It was not on these aspects of human existence that a race, accustomed to that genial climate and refined by the contemplation of all-golden art, loved to dwell in hours of recreation. The _Novella_, with its mixture of comedy and pathos, license and satire, gave the tone, as we have seen, to literature. The same quality of the Italian temperament may be ill.u.s.trated from the painting of the sixteenth century, which rarely rises to the height of tragedy. If we except Michelangelo and Tintoretto, we find no masters of sublime and fervid genius, able to conceive with intensity and to express with force the thrilling moods of human pa.s.sion. Raphael marks the height pf national achievement, and even the more serious work of Raphael found no adequate interpreters among his pupils.
The absence of the tragic element in Italian art and literature is all the more remarkable because the essence of Italian history, whether political or domestic, was eminently dramatic. When we consider what the nation suffered during the civil wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, under the tyranny of monsters like Ezzelino, from plagues that swept away the population of great cities, and beneath the scourge of sinister religious revivals, it may well cause wonder that the Italian spirit should not have a.s.sumed a stern and tragic tone instead of that serenity and cheerfulness which from the first distinguished it. The Italians lived their tragedies in the dynasties of the Visconti and the Sforzas, in the contests of the Baglioni and Manfredi, in the persons of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta and Cesare Borgia, in the murders, poisonings, rapes and treasons that form the staple of the annals of their n.o.ble houses. But it was the English and not the Italian poets who seized upon this tragic matter and placed it with the light of poetry upon the stage.[137] Our Elizabethan playwrights dramatized the legends of Oth.e.l.lo and Juliet, the loves of Bianca Capello and Vittoria Accoramboni, the tragedies of the d.u.c.h.ess of Amalfi and the Duke of Milan. There is something even appalling in the tenacity with which poets of the stamp of Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Ma.s.singer and Tourneur clung to the episodes of blood and treachery furnished by Italian stories. Their darkest delineations of villainy, their subtlest a.n.a.lyses of evil motives, their most audacious pictures of vice, are all contained within the charmed circle of Italian history. A play could scarcely succeed in London unless the characters were furnished with Italian names.[138] Italy fascinated the Northern fancy, and the imagination of our dramatists found itself at home among her scenes of mingled splendor and atrocity. Nowhere, therefore, can a truer study of Italian Court-intrigue be found than in the plays of Webster. His portraits, it may be allowed, are painted without relief or due gradation of tone. Flamineo and Bosola seem made to justify the proverb--_Inglese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato_. Yet after reading the secret history of the Borgias, or estimating the burden on Ferdinand"s conscience when he quaked before the French advance on Naples, who can say that Webster has exaggerated the bare truth? He has but intensified it by the incubation of his intellect. Varchi"s account of Lorenzino de" Medici, affecting profligacy and effeminacy in order to deceive Duke Alessandro, and forming to his purpose the ruffian Scoronconcolo from the dregs of the prisons, furnishes a complete justification for even Tourneur"s plots. The snare this traitor laid for Alessandro, when he offered to bring his own aunt to the duke"s l.u.s.t, bears a close resemblance to Vendice"s scheme in the _Revenger"s Tragedy_; while the inconsequence of his action after the crime, tallies with the moral collapse of Duke Ferdinand before his strangled sister"s corpse in the last act of the _d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_.
[Footnote 137: Exception must be made in favor of some ancient quasi-tragedies, which seem to prove that before the influences of Boccaccio and the Renaissance had penetrated the nation, they were not deficient in the impulse to dramatize history. The _Eccerinis_ of Albertino Mussato (_c._ 1300), half dialogue and half narration, upon the fate of Ezzellino da Romano, composed in the style of Seneca; the dialogue upon the destruction of Cesena (1377) falsely attributed to Petrarch; Giovanni Mangini della Motta"s poem on the downfall of Antonio della Scala (1387), Lodovico da Vezzano"s tragedy of Jacopo Piccinino; though far from popular in their character, and but partially dramatic, were such as under happier auspices might have fostered the beginnings of the tragic theater. Later on we hear of the _Fall of Granada_ being represented before Cardinal Riario at Rome, as well as the _Ferrandus Servatus_ of Carlo Verradi (1492).]
[Footnote 138: See the first cast of Jonson"s _Every Man in his Humor_.]
The reality of these acted tragedies may have been a bar to their mimic presentation on the stage in Italy. When the Borgias were poisoning their victims in Rome; when Lodovico Sforza was compa.s.sing his nephew"s death at Pavia; when the Venetians were decapitating Carmagnuola; when Sixtus was plotting the murder of the Medici in church, and Grifonetto Baglioni was executing _il gran tradimento_; could an Italian audience, in the Court or on the Piazza, have taken a keen pleasure in witnessing the scenic presentment of barbarities so close at hand? The sense of contrast between the world of fact and the work of art, which forms an essential element of aesthetic pleasure, would have been wanting. The poets turned from these crimes to comedy and romance, though the politicians a.n.a.lyzed their motives with impartial curiosity. At the same time, we may question whether the Despots would have welcomed tragic shows which dramatized their deeds of violence; whether they would have suffered the patriotism of Brutus, the vengeance of Virginius, the plots of Catiline, or the downfall of Seja.n.u.s to be displayed with spirit-stirring pomp in theaters of Milan and Ferrara, when conspiracies like that of Olgaiti were frequent. It was the freedom of the English public and the self-restraint of the English character, in combination with the profound appet.i.te for tragic emotion inherent in our Northern blood, which rendered the Shaksperian drama possible and acceptable.
In connection with this inapt.i.tude of the Italians for tragedy, it is worth noticing that their popular poetry exhibits but rare examples of the ballad. It abounds in love ditties and lyrics of the inner life.
But references to history and the tragedies of n.o.ble families are comparatively scarce.[139] In Great Britain, on the contrary, while our popular poetry can show but few songs of sentiment, the Border and Robin Hood ballads record events in national history or episodes from actual domestic dramas, blent with the memories of old mythology.
These poems prove in the unknown minstrels who produced them, a genuine appreciation of dramatic incident; and their manner is marked by vigorous objectivity. The minstrel loses himself in his subject and aims at creating in his audience a vivid sense of the action he has undertaken to set forth. The race which could produce such ballads, already contained the germs of Marlowe"s tragedy. It would be interesting to pursue this subject further, and by examining the ballad-literature of the several European nations to trace how far the capacities which in a rude state of society were directed to this type of minstrelsy, found at a later period their true sphere of art in the drama.[140]
[Footnote 139: See above, Part I, p. 276, where one ballad of the Border type is discussed.]