_I Beoni_ is a plebeian poem of a different and more displeasing type.
Written in _terza rima_, it distinctly parodies the style of the Divine Comedy, using the same phrases to indicate action and to mark the turns of dialogue; introducing similes in the manner of Dante, burlesquing Virgil and Beatrice in the disgusting Bartolino and Nastagio.[478] The poem might be called The Paradise of Drunkards, or their h.e.l.l; for it consists of a succession of scenes in which intoxication in all stages and topers of every caliber are introduced. The tone is coldly satirical, sardonically comic. The old man of Tennyson"s "Vision of Sin"
might have written _I Beoni_ after a merry bout with the wrinkled ostler. When Lorenzo composed it, he was already corrupt and weary, sated with the world, worn with disease, disillusioned by a life of compromise, hypocrisy, diplomacy, and treason to the State he ruled. Yet the humor of this poem has nothing truly sinister or tragic. Its brutality is redeemed by no fierce Swiftian rage. If some of the descriptions in Lorenzo"s earlier work remind us of Dutch flower and landscape-painters, Breughel or Van Huysum, the scenes of _I Beoni_ recall the realism of Dutch tavern-pictures and Kermessen. It has the same humor, gross and yet keen, the same intellectual enjoyment of sensuality, the same animalism studied by an acute aesthetic spirit.[479]
To turn from _I Beoni_ to Lorenzo"s Lauds, written at his mother"s request, and to the sacred play of _S. Giovanni e Paolo_, acted by his children, is to make one of those bewildering transitions which are so common in Renaissance Italy. Without rating Lorenzo"s sacred poetry very high, either for religious fervor or aesthetic quality, it is yet surprising that the author of the _Beoni_ and the Platonic sage of Careggi should have caught so much of the pietistic tone. We know that _S. Giovanni e Paolo_ was written when he was advanced in years[480]; and the latent allusions to his illness and the cares of state which weighed upon him, give it an interest it would not otherwise excite.
This couplet,
Spesso chi chiama Costantin felice Sta meglio a.s.sai di me e "l ver non dice,
seems to be a sigh from his own weariness. Lorenzo may not improbably have envied Constantine, the puppet of his fancy, at the moment of abdication. And yet when Savonarola called upon him ere his death to deal justly with Florence, the true nature of the man was seen. Had he liked it or not, he could not then have laid down the load of care and crime which it had been the business of his whole life to acc.u.mulate by crooked ways in the enslavement of Florence and the perdition of his soul"s peace. The Lauds, which may be referred to an earlier period of Lorenzo"s life, when his mother ruled his education, and the pious Bishop of Arezzo watched his exemplary behavior in church with admiration, have here and there in them a touch of profound feeling[481]; nor are they in all respects inferior to the average of those included in the Florentine collection of 1863. The men of the Renaissance were so const.i.tuted that to turn from vice, and cruelty, and crime, from the deliberate corruption and enslavement of a people by licentious pleasures and the persecution of an enemy in secret, with a fervid and impa.s.sioned movement of the soul to G.o.d, was nowise impossible. Their temper admitted of this anomaly, as we may plainly see in Cellini"s Autobiography. Therefore, though it is probable that Lorenzo cultivated the Laud chiefly as a form of art, we are not justified in a.s.suming that the pa.s.sages in which we seem to detect a note of ardent piety, are insincere.
The versatility of Lorenzo"s talent showed itself to greater advantage when he quitted the uncongenial ground of sacred literature and gave a free rein to his fancy in the composition of _Ballate_ and Carnival songs. This species of poetry offered full scope to a temperament excessive in all pleasures of the senses.[482] It also enabled him to indulge a deeply-rooted sympathy with the common folk. Nor must it be supposed that Lorenzo was following a merely artistic impulse. This strange man, in whose complex nature opponent qualities were harmonized and intertwined, made his very sensuality subserve his statecraft. The Medici had based their power upon the favor of the proletariate. Since the days of the Ciompi riot they had pursued one line of self-aggrandizement by siding with the plebeians in their quarrels with the oligarchs. The serious purpose which underlay Lorenzo"s cultivation of popular poetry, was to amuse the crowd with pageantry and music, to distract their attention from State concerns and to blunt their political interest, to flatter them by descending to their level and mixing freely with them in their sports, and to acquire a popularity which should secure him from the aristocratic jealousies of the Acciaioli, the Frescobaldi, the Salviati, Soderini, and other ancestral foemen of his house. The frontispiece to an old edition of Florentine carnival songs shows him surrounded with maskers in quaint dresses, leading the revel beneath the walls of the Palazzo, while women gaze upon them from the windows.[483] That we are justified in attributing a policy of calculated enervation to Lorenzo is proved by the verdict of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, both of whom connect his successful despotism with the pageants he provided for the populace,[484] and also by this pa.s.sage in Savonarola"s treatise on the Government of Florence: "The tyrant, especially in times of peace and plenty, is wont to occupy the people with shows and festivals, in order that they may think of their own pastimes and not of his designs, and, growing unused to the conduct of the commonwealth, may leave the reins of government in his hands."[485] At the same time he would err who should suppose that Lorenzo"s enjoyment of these pleasures, which he found in vogue among the people, was not genuine. He represented the worst as well as the best spirit of his age; and if he knew how to enslave Florence, it was because his own temperament shared the instincts of the crowd, while his genius enabled him to clothe obscenity with beauty.
We know that it was an ancient Florentine custom for young men and girls to meet upon the squares and dance, while a boy sang with treble voice to lute or viol, or a company of minstrels chanted part-songs. The dancers joined in the refrain, vaunting the pleasures of the May and the delights of love in rhythms suited to the _Carola_. Taking this form of poetry from the people, Lorenzo gave it the dignity of art. Sometimes he told the tale of an unhappy lover, or pretended to be pleading with a coy mistress, or broke forth into the exultation of a pa.s.sion crowned with success. Again, he urged both boys and girls to stay the flight of time nor suffer the rose-buds of their youth to fade unplucked. In more wanton moods, he satirized the very love he praised, or, casting off the mask of decency, ran riot in base b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. These _Canzoni a Ballo_, though they lack the supreme beauty of Poliziano"s style, are stylistically graceful. Their tone never rises above sensuality. Not only has the gravity of Dante"s pa.s.sion pa.s.sed away from Florence, but Boccaccio"s sensuous ideality is gone, and the _navete_ of popular erotic poetry is clouded with gross innuendoes. We find in them the aeesthetic immorality, the brilliant materialism of the Renaissance, conveyed with careless self-abandonment to carnal impulse.
The name of Lorenzo de" Medici is still more closely connected with the _Canti Carnascialeschi_ or Carnival Songs, of which he is said to have been the first author, than with the _Ballate_, which he only used as they were handed to him. In Carnival time it was the custom of the Florentines to walk the streets, masked and singing satiric ballads.
Lorenzo saw that here was an opportunity for delighting the people with the magnificence of pageantry. He caused the Triumphs in which he took a part to be carefully prepared by the best artists, the dresses of the maskers to be accurately studied, and their chariots to be adorned with ill.u.s.trative paintings. Then he wrote songs appropriate to the characters represented on the cars. Singing and dancing and displaying their costumes, the band paraded Florence. Il Lasca in his introduction to the Triumphs and Carnival Songs dedicated to Don Francesco de" Medici gives the history of their invention[486]: "This festival was invented by the Magnificent Lorenzo de" Medici. Before his time, when the cars bore mythological or allegorical masks, they were called _Trionfi_; but when they carried representatives of arts and trades, they kept the simpler name of _Carri_." The lyrics written for the Triumphs were stately, in the style of antique odes; those intended to be sung upon the _Carri_, employed plebeian turns of phrase and dealt in almost undisguised obscenity. It was their wont, says Il Lasca, "to go forth after dinner, and often they lasted till three or four hours into the night, with a mult.i.tude of masked men on horseback following, richly dressed, exceeding sometimes three hundred in number and as many men on foot with lighted torches. Thus they traversed the city, singing to the accompaniment of music arranged for four, eight, twelve, or even fifteen voices, supported by various instruments."
Lorenzo"s fancy took the Florentine mind. From his days onward these shows were repeated every year, the best artists and poets contributing their genius to make them splendid. In the collection of songs written for the Carnival, we find Masks of Scholars, Artisans, Frog-catchers, Furies, Tinkers, Women selling grapes, Old men and Young wives, Jewelers, German Lansknechts, Gypsies, Wool-carders, Penitents, Devils, Jews, Hypocrites, Young men who have lost their fathers, Wiseacres, d.a.m.ned Souls, Tortoisesh.e.l.l Cats, Perfumers, Masons, Mountebanks, Mirror-makers, Confectioners, Prudent persons, Lawyers, Nymphs in love, Nuns escaped from convent--not to mention the Four Ages of Man, the Winds, the Elements, Peace, Calumny, Death, Madness, and a hundred abstractions of that kind. The tone of these songs is uniformly and deliberately immoral. One might fancy them composed for some old phallic festival. Their wit is keen and lively, presenting to the fancy of the student all the humors of a brilliant bygone age. A strange and splendid spectacle it must have been, when Florence, the city of art and philosophy, ran wild in Dionysiac revels proclaiming the luxury and license of the senses! Beautiful maidens, young men in rich clothes on prancing steeds, showers of lilies and violets, triumphal arches of spring flowers and ribbons, hail-storms of comfits, torches flaring to the sallow evening sky--we can see the whole procession as it winds across the Ponte Vecchio, emerges into the great square, and slowly gains the open s.p.a.ce beneath the dome of Brunelleschi and the tower of Giotto. The air rings with music as they come, ba.s.s and tenor and shrill treble mingling with the sound of lute and cymbal. The people hush their cheers to listen. It is Lorenzo"s Triumph of Bacchus, and here are the words they sing:
Fair is youth and void of sorrow; But it hourly flies away.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
This is Bacchus and the bright Ariadne, lovers true!
They, in flying time"s despite, Each with each find pleasure new; These their Nymphs, and all their crew Keep perpetual holiday.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
These blithe Satyrs, wanton-eyed, Of the Nymphs are paramours: Through the caves and forests wide They have snared them mid the flowers.
Warmed with Bacchus, in his bowers, Now they dance and leap away.-- Youths and maids enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
These fair Nymphs, they are not loth To entice their lovers" wiles.
None but thankless folk and rough Can resist when Love beguiles.
Now enlaced with wreathed smiles, All together dance and play.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
See this load behind them plodding On the a.s.s, Silenus he, Old and drunken, merry, nodding, Full of years and jollity; Though he goes so swayingly, Yet he laughs and quaffs alway.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
Midas treads a wearier measure: All he touches turns to gold: If there be no taste of pleasure, What"s the use of wealth untold?
What"s the joy his fingers hold, When he"s forced to thirst for aye?-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
Listen well to what we"re saying; Of to-morrow have no care!
Young and old together playing, Boys and girls, be blithe as air!
Every sorry thought forswear!
Keep perpetual holiday.-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
Ladies and gay lovers young!
Long live Bacchus, live Desire!
Dance and play, let songs be sung; Let sweet Love your bosoms fire; In the future come what may!-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.
On rolls the car, and the crowd closes round it, rending the old walls with shattering hurrahs. Then a corner of the street is turned; while soaring still above the hubbub of the town we hear at intervals that musical refrain. Gradually it dies away in the distance, and fainter and more faintly still the treble floats to us in broken waves of sound--the echo of a lyric heard in dreams.
Such were the songs that reached Savonarola"s ears, writing or meditating in his cloister at S. Marco. Such were the sights that moved his indignation as he trod the streets of Florence. Then he bethought him of his famous parody of the Carnival, the bonfire of Vanities and the hymn in praise of divine madness sung by children dressed in white like angels.[487] Yet Florence, warned in vain by the friar, took no thought for the morrow; and the morrow came to all Italy with war, invasion, pestilence, innumerable woes. In the last year of Pier Soderini"s Gonfalonierato (1512) it seemed as though the Italians had been quickened to a consciousness of their impending ruin. The siege of Brescia, the battle of Ravenna, the League of Cambray, the ma.s.sacres of Prato, the sack of Rome, the fall of Florence, were all imminent. A fascination of intolerable fear thrilled the people in the midst of their heedlessness, and this fear found voice and form in a strange Carnival pageant described by Vasari[488]: "The triumphal car was covered with black cloth, and was of vast size; it had skeletons and white crosses painted upon its surface, and was drawn by buffaloes, all of which were totally black: within the car stood the colossal figure of Death, bearing the scythe in his hand; while round him were covered tombs, which opened at all the places where the procession halted, while those who formed it, chanted lugubrious songs, when certain figures stole forth, clothed in black cloth, on whose vestments the bones of a skeleton were depicted in white; the arms, breast, ribs, and legs, namely, all which gleamed horribly forth on the black beneath. At a certain distance appeared figures bearing torches, and wearing masks presenting the face of a death"s head both before and behind; these heads of death as well as the skeleton necks beneath them, also exhibited to view, were not only painted with the utmost fidelity to nature, but had besides a frightful expression which was horrible to behold. At the sound of a wailing summons, sent forth with a hollow moan from trumpets of m.u.f.fled yet inexorable clangor, the figures of the dead raised themselves half out of their tombs, and seating their skeleton forms thereon, they sang the following words, now so much extolled and admired, to music of the most plaintive and melancholy character. Before and after the car rode a train of the dead on horses, carefully selected from the most wretched and meager animals that could be found: the caparisons of those worn, half-dying beasts were black, covered with white crosses; each was conducted by four attendants, clothed in the vestments of the grave; these last-mentioned figures, bearing black torches and a large black standard, covered with crosses, bones, and death"s heads. While this train proceeded on its way, each sang, with a trembling voice, and all in dismal unison, that psalm of David called the Miserere. The novelty and the terrible character of this singular spectacle, filled the whole city, as I have before said, with a mingled sensation of terror and admiration; and although at the first sight it did not seem well calculated for a Carnival show, yet being new, and within the reach of every man"s comprehension, it obtained the highest encomium for Piero as the author and contriver of the whole, and was the cause as well as commencement of numerous representations, so ingenious and effective that by these things Florence acquired a reputation for the conduct of such subjects and the arrangement of similar spectacles such as was never equaled by any other city."
Of this Carnival song, composed by Antonio Alamanni, I here give an English version.
Sorrow, tears, and penitence Are our doom of pain for aye; This dead concourse riding by Hath no cry but Penitence.
Even as you are, once were we: You shall be as now we are: We are dead men, as you see: We shall see you dead men, where Naught avails to take great care After sins of penitence.
We too in the Carnival Sang our love-song through the town; Thus from sin to sin we all Headlong, heedless, tumbled down; Now we cry, the world around, Penitence, oh penitence!
Senseless, blind, and stubborn fools!
Time steals all things as he rides: Honors, glories, states, and schools, Pa.s.s away, and naught abides; Till the tomb our carca.s.s hides, And compels grim penitence.
This sharp scythe you see us bear, Brings the world at length to woe; But from life to life we fare; And that life is joy or woe; All heaven"s bliss on him doth flow, Who on earth does penitence.
Living here, we all must die; Dying, every soul shall live, For the King of kings on high This fixed ordinance doth give: Lo! you all are fugitive Penitence, cry penitence!
Torment great and grievous dole Hath the thankless heart mid you: But the man of piteous soul Finds much honor in our crew; Love for loving is the due That prevents this penitence.
These words sounded in the ears of the people, already terrified by the unforgotten voice of Savonarola, like a trump of doom. The pageant was, indeed, an acted allegory of the death of Italy, the repentance after judgment of a nation fallen in its sins. Yet a few months pa.s.sed, and the same streets echoed with the music of yet another show, which has also been described by Vasari.[489] If the Car of Death expressed the uneasy dread that fell on the Italians at the opening of the century, the shows of 1513 allegorized their mad confidence in the fortune of the age, which was still more deeply felt and widely shared. Giovanni de"
Medici had just been elevated to the Papal Chair, and was paying a holiday visit to his native city. Giuliano de" Medici, his brother, the Duke of Nemours, was also resident in Florence, where he had formed a club of n.o.ble youths called the Diamond. Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the t.i.tular chief of the house, presided over a rival Company named Il Broncone--with a withered laurel-branch, whence leaves were sprouting, for its emblem. The Diamond signified the constancy of Casa Medici; the withered branch their power of self-recovery. These two men, Giuliano and Lorenzo, are the same who now confront each other upon their pedestals in Michelangelo"s Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. Both were doomed to an untimely death; but in the year 1513, when Leo"s election shed new l.u.s.ter on their house, they were still in the heyday of prosperity and hope. Giuliano resolved that the Diamond should make a goodly show.
Therefore he intrusted the invention and the poems to Andrea Dazzi, who then held Poliziano"s chair of Greek and Latin literature. Dazzi devised three Cars after the fashion of a Roman triumph. For the construction of each chariot an excellent architect was chosen; for their decoration the painter Pontormo was appointed. In the first rode beautiful boys; in the second, powerful men; in the third, reverend grandsires. Lorenzo, in compet.i.tion with his uncle, determined that the Laurel branch should outrival the Diamond. He applied to Jacopo Nardi, the historian of Florence and translator of Livy. Nardi composed a procession of seven chariots to symbolize the Golden Age, and wrote appropriate poems for each, which are still extant. In the first car rode Saturn and Ja.n.u.s, attended by six shepherds of goodly form, naked, on horses without harness. In the second sat Numa Pompilius, surrounded by priests in antique raiment. The third carried t.i.tus Manlius, whose consulship beheld the close of the first Punic war. In the fifth Augustus sat enthroned, accompanied by twelve laureled poets. The horses that drew him, were winged. The sixth carried Trajan, the just emperor, with doctors of the law on either side. All these chariots were adorned with emblems painted by Pontormo. The seventh car held a globe to represent the world. Upon it lay a dead man in a suit of rusty iron armor, from the cloven plates of which emerged a living child, naked and gilt with glistering leaf of gold. This signified the pa.s.sing of the Iron, and the opening of the Golden Age--the succession of the Renaissance to feudalism--the fortunes of Italy reviving after her disasters in the sunlight of the smiles of Leo. _Magnus saeclorum nascitur ordo!_ "The world"s great age begins anew; the golden years return!" Thus the artists, scholars, and poets of Florence symbolized in a Carnival show the advent of the Renaissance. The boy who represented the Golden Age, died of the sufferings he endured beneath his gilding; and his father, who was a baker, received ten scudi of indemnity. A fanciful historian might read in this little incident the irony of fate, warning the Italians that the age they welcomed would perish for them in its bloom.
In the year 1513 Luther was already thirty years of age, and Charles V.
in the Low Countries was a boy of thirteen, acc.u.mulating knowledge under the direction of the future Adrian VI. Whatever destiny of gold the Renaissance might through Italy be offering to Europe, it was on the point of pouring blood and fastening heavier chains on every city of the sacred land.
In my desire to bring together these three representative festivals--Lorenzo"s Triumph of Bacchus, Alamanni"s Car of Death, and Pontormo"s Pageant of the Golden Age--marking three moments in the Florentine Renaissance, and three diverse moods of feeling in the people--I have transgressed the chronological limits of this chapter. I must now return to the year 1464, when a boy of ten years old, destined to revive the glories of Italian literature with far greater l.u.s.ter than Lorenzo, came from Montepulciano to Florence, and soon won the notice of the Medicean princes. Angelo Ambrogini, surnamed Poliziano from his home above the Chiana, has already occupied a prominent place in this work.[490] It is not, therefore, needful to retrace the history of his uneventful life, or again to fix his proper rank among the scholars of the fifteenth century. He was the greatest student, and the greatest poet in Greek and Latin, that Italy has produced. In the history of European scholarship, he stands midway between Petrarch and Erasmus, taking the post of honor at the moment when erudition had acquired ease and elegance, but had not yet pa.s.sed on into the final stage of scientific criticism. What concerns us here, is Poliziano"s achievement as an Italian poet. In the history of the vulgar literature he fills a place midway between Petrarch and Ariosto, corresponding to the station of distinction I have a.s.signed to him in humanistic culture.
Of few men can it be said that they have held the same high rank in poetry and learning; and had the moral fiber of Poliziano, his intellectual tension and his spiritual aim, been at all commensurate with his twofold ability, the Italians might have shown in him a fourth singer equal in magnitude to their greatest. As it was, the excellence of his work was marred by the defect of his temperament, and has far less value for the general reader than for the student of versification.
Lorenzo de" Medici could boast of having restored the mother tongue to a place of honor among the learned. But he was far from being the complete artist that the age required. "That exquisite flower of sentiment we call good taste, that harmony of intellect we call judgment, lies not within the grasp of power or riches."[491] A man was needed who should combine creative genius with refined tact in the use of language; who should be competent to carry the tradition of Italian poetry beyond the point where Boccaccio dropped it, while giving to his work the polish and the splendor of a cla.s.sic masterpiece. It was further necessary that this new dictator of the literary commonwealth should have left the Middle Age so far behind as not to be aware of its stern spirit. He must have acquired the erudition of his eminently learned century--a century in which knowledge was the pearl of great price; not the knowledge of righteousness; not the knowledge of nature and her laws; but the knowledge of the life that throbbed in ancient peoples, the life that might, it seemed, yet make the old world young again. Moreover, he must be strong enough to carry this erudition without bending beneath its weight; dexterous enough to use it without pedantry; exuberant enough in natural resources to reduce his stores of learning, his wealth of fancy, his thronging emotions, to one ruling harmony--fusing all reminiscences in one style of pure and copious Italian. He must be gifted with that reverent sense of beauty, which was the sole survivirg greatness of his century, animating the imagination of its artists, and justifying the proud boast of its students. This man was found in Angelo Poliziano. He, and only he, was destined, by combining the finish of the cla.s.sics with the freshness of a language still in use, to inaugurate the golden age of form. Faustus, the genius of the middle ages, had wedded Helen, the vision of the ancient world. Their son, Euphorion, the inheritor of all their gifts, we hail in Poliziano.
When Poliziano composed _Le Stanze_ he was nearly twenty-four years of age.[492] He had steeped himself in the cla.s.sic literatures. Endowed with a marvelous memory, he possessed their spirit and their substance.
Not less familiar with Tuscan poetry of the fourteenth century, he commanded the stores of Dante"s, Petrarch"s and Boccaccio"s diction.
Long practice in Greek and Latin composition had given him mastery over the metrical systems of the ancient languages.[493] The daily habit of inditing songs for music to please the ladies of the Medicean household, had accustomed him to the use of fluent Italian. The translation of the _Iliad_, performed in part before he was eighteen, had made him a faithful imitator, while it added dignity and fullness to his style.[494] Besides these qualifications for his future task of raising Italian to an equality with Latin poetry, he brought with him to this achievement a genius apt to comprehend the spirit of the Renaissance in its pomp and liberty and tranquil loveliness. The n.o.ble and yet sensuous manner of the great Venetian painters, their dignity of form, their luxury of color, their boldness and decision, their imperturbable serenity of mundane joy--the choicer delicacy of the Florentine masters, their refinement of outline, selection of type, suggestion of restrained emotion--the pure design of the Tuscan sculptors, the suavity and flexibility of the Lombard _plasticatori_--all these qualities of Italian figurative art appear, as it were in bud, in the _Stanze_.
Poliziano"s crowning merit as a stylist was that he knew how to blend the antique and the romantic, correct drawing with fleshly fullness.
Breadth of design and harmony of color have rarely been produced in more magnificent admixture. The octave stanza, which in the hands of Boccaccio was languid and diffuse, in the hands of Lorenzo harsh, in the hands of Pulci rugged, became under Poliziano"s treatment an inexhaustible instrument of varying melodies. At one time, beneath his touch, the meter takes an epic dignity; again it sinks to idyllic sweetness, or mourns with the elegy, or exults with the ode. Its movement is rapid or relaxed, smooth or vibrating, undulatory or impetuous, as he has chosen. When we reflect how many generations of poets it required to bring the Sonnet to completeness, we may marvel at this youth, in an age when scholarship absorbed inventive genius, who was able at one stroke to do for the octave stanza what Marlowe did for our Blank Verse. Poliziano gave to Ariosto the Italian epical meter perfected, and established a standard of style amid the anarchy which threatened the literature of Italy with ruin.
Yet it must be confessed that, after all, it is chiefly the style of Poliziano that deserves praise. Like so much else of Renaissance work--like the Farnesina frescoes in Rome, or Giulio Romano"s luxuriant arabesques at Mantua, or the efflorescence of foliage and cupids in the ba.s.s-reliefs of palace portals at Venice--there is but little solid thought or serious feeling underneath this decorative richness. Those who cannot find a pleasure in form for its own sake, independent of matter, will never be able to do Poliziano justice. This brings us to the subject of the _Stanze_. They were written to celebrate the prowess of Giuliano de" Medici, Lorenzo"s brother, in a tournament held at Florence in the beginning of the year 1478. This fact is worth consideration. The poem which opened a new age for Italian literature, had no n.o.bler theme than a Court pageant. Dante had been inspired to sing the epic of the human soul. Petrarch finished a portrait of the life through love of an impa.s.sioned man. Boccaccio bound up in one volume a hundred tales, delineating society in all its aspects. Then the Muse of Italy fell asleep. Poliziano aroused her with the full deep intonations of a golden instrument. But what was the burden of his song?
Giuliano de" Medici loved the fair Simonetta, and bore away the prize in a toy-tournament.
This marks the change effected by a century of prince-craft. Henceforth great poets were to care less for what they sang than for the style in which they sang. Henceforth poetry in Italy was written to please--to please patrons who were flattered with false pedigrees and absurd mythologies, with the imputation of virtues they never possessed, and with the impudent palliation of shame apparent to the world. Henceforth the bards of Ausonia deigned to tickle the ears of l.u.s.tful boys and debauched cardinals, buying the bread of courtly sloth--how salt it tasted let Ta.s.so and Guarini tell--with jests or panegyrics. Liberty could scarcely be named in verse when natives and strangers vied together in enslaving Italy. To praise the great deeds of bygone heroes within hearing of pusillanimous princes, would have been an insult. Even satires upon a degraded present, aspirations after a n.o.ble future, prophecies of resurrection from the tomb--those last resorts of a national literature that retains its strength through evil days--were unknown upon the lips of the Renaissance poets. Art had become a thing of pleasure, sometimes infamous, too often nugatory. The fault of this can scarcely be said to have rested with one man more than with another; nor can we lay the blame on Poliziano, though he undoubtedly represented the cla.s.s who were destined to continue literature upon these lines. It was the combined result of scholarship, which for a whole century had diverted the minds of men to the form and words of literature; of court-life, which had enfeebled the recipients of princely patronage; of tyranny, which encouraged flattery, dissimulation, and fraud; of foreign oppression, which already was beginning to enervate a race of slaves; of revived paganism, which set the earlier beliefs and aspirations of the soul at unequal warfare with emanc.i.p.ated l.u.s.ts and sensualities; of indolence, which loved to toy with trifles, instead of thinking and creating thought; of social inequalities, which forced the poet to eat a master"s bread, and turned the scholars of Italy into a crowd of servile and yet arrogant beggars. All these circ.u.mstances, and many more of the same kind, were slowly and surely undermining the vigor of the Italian intellect. Over the meridian splendor of _Le Stanze_ we already see their influences floating like a vaporous miasma.
Italy, though never so chivalrous as the rest of Europe, yet preserved the pompous festivities of feudalism. Jousts were held in all great cities, and it was reckoned part of a courtier"s business to be a skillful cavalier. At Florence the custom survived of celebrating the first of May with tournaments, and on great occasions the wealthy families spent large sums of money in providing pastimes of this sort.
February 7, 1468, witnessed a splendid spectacle, when Lorenzo de"
Medici, mounted successively on chargers presented to him by the Duke of Ferrara and the King of Naples, attired in armor given by the Duke of Milan, bearing the _fleurs de lys_ of France conferred upon the Medici by Louis XI., and displaying on his pennon for a motto _Le Tems revient_, won the prize of valor before the populace a.s.sembled in the square of S. Croce. Luca Pulci, the descendant of an ancient house of Tuscan n.o.bles, composed an adulatory poem in octave stanzas on this event. So changed were the times that this scion of Florentine aristocracy felt no shame in fawning on a despot risen from the people to enslave his city. Yet the spectacle was worthy celebration. Lorenzo, the banker"s son, the Platonist, the diplomatist and tyrant, charging in the lists of feudalism beneath Arnolfo"s tower, with the lilies of France upon his shield and the device of the Renaissance on his banner--this figured symbol of the meeting of two ages in a single man was no mean subject for a poem!
From Poliziano"s _Stanze_ we learn no such characteristic details concerning Giuliano"s later tournament. Though the poem is called _La Giostra_, the insignificant subject disappears beneath a wealth of ill.u.s.tration. The episodes, including the pictures of the Golden Age and of the garden and palace of Venus, form the real strength of a masterpiece which blent the ancient and the modern world in a work of art glowing with Italian fancy. That _La Giostra_ has no subject-matter, no theme of weight to wear the poet thin through years of anxious toil, no progress from point to point, no chain of incidents and no romantic evolution, is a matter of little moment. When Giuliano de" Medici died before the altar by the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin on April 26, 1478, Poliziano laid down his pen and left the _Stanze_ unfinished.[495] It cannot be said that the poem suffered, or that posterity lost by this abrupt termination of a work conceived without a central thought. Enough had been already done to present Italy with a model of the style she needed; and if we ask why _La Giostra_ should have become immediately popular in spite of its peculiar texture and its abrupt conclusion, the answer is not far to seek. Poliziano incarnated the spirit of his age, and gave the public what satisfied their sense of fitness. The three chief enthusiasms of the fifteenth century--for cla.s.sical literature, for artistic beauty, and for nature tranquilly enjoyed--were so fused and harmonized within the poet"s soul as to produce a style of unmistakable originality and charming ease. Poliziano felt the delights of the country with serene idyllic rapture, not at second hand through the ancients, but with the voluptuous enjoyment of the Florentine who loved his villa. He had, besides, a sense of form a.n.a.logous to that possessed by the artists of his age, which guided him in the selection and description of the scenes he painted. Again, his profound and refined erudition enabled him "to shower," as Giovio phrased it, "the finest flowers of antique poetry upon the people." Therefore, while he felt nature like one who worshiped her for her own sake and for the joy she gave him, he saw in her the subjects of a thousand graceful pictures, and these pictures he studied through a radiant haze of antique reminiscences. Each stanza of _La Giostra_ is a mimic world of beauty, art, and scholarship; a painting where the object stands before us modeled with relief of light and shade in finely modulated hues; a brief anthology of daintily-culled phrases, wafting to our memories the perfume of Greece, Rome, and Florence in her prime. These delicate little masterpieces are, turn by turn, a picture of Botticelli, a fres...o...b.. Giulio Romano, an engraving of Mantegna, a ba.s.s-relief of young Buonarroti, or a garden-scene of Gozzoli, expressed in the purest diction of all literatures by a poet who, while imitating, never ceased to be original.[496] Nothing more was needed by a nation of idyllic dreamers, artists and scholars.
What Poliziano might have achieved, if he had found a worthy theme for the employment of his powers, it would be idle to ask. It is perhaps the condemnation of the man and of his age that the former did not seek heroic subjects for song, and the latter did not demand them--in a word that neither poet nor public had in them anything heroic whatsoever. The fact is undeniably true; but this does not deprive Poliziano of the merit of such verses as the following:
After such happy wise, in ancient years, Dwelt the old nations in the age of gold; Nor had the font been stirr"d of mothers" tears For sons in war"s fell labor stark and cold; Nor trusted they to ships the wild wind steers, Nor yet had oxen groaning plowed the wold; Their houses were huge oaks, whose trunks had store Of honey, and whose boughs thick acorns bore.
Nor yet, in that glad time, the accursed thirst Of cruel gold had fallen on this fair earth: Joyous in liberty they lived at first; Unplowed the fields sent forth their teeming birth: Till fortune, envious of such concord, burst The bond of law, and pity banned and worth; Within their b.r.e.a.s.t.s sprang luxury and that rage Which men call love in our degenerate age.