This is the proper occasion for resuming what has to be said about the Roman ruins, and the feeling for them shown in the Renaissance period.
We have already listened to Poggio"s lamentations over their gradual decay through wanton injury and lapse of time.[397] Pius II., who had a strong taste for topographical studies, endeavoured to protect the Roman monuments from depredation by a Bull in 1462. But his successors were less scrupulous. Even the scholarly Nicholas V. had shown more zeal for building modern Rome afresh than true regard for the imperial city. He levelled large portions of the wall of Servius Tullius, and quarried the Temple of Peace for his own edifices. In his days Blondus wrote that his life was embittered by the wholesale waste of ancient reliques. That Paul II. should have used the stone wall of the Coliseum for the Palace of S. Marco; that Sixtus IV. should have pulled down the circular Temple of Hercules, and destroyed the oldest bridge across the Tiber to make cannon b.a.l.l.s; that Innocent VIII.
should have empowered his architects to take what antique masonry they pleased--excites in us no wonder; these Popes were acting according to the spirit that was in them. Nor can it be denied that for some of their acts of Vandalism the excuse of utility or even of necessity might have been pleaded. It is, however, singular that no steps were taken to preserve in Rome the bas-reliefs and sculptures of the monuments thus overthrown. Everyone who chose laid hands upon them.
Poggio sc.r.a.ped together what he could; Pomponius Laetus formed a museum; Lorenzo de" Medici and the Rucellai employed agents to select and ship to Florence choicer fragments. At last the impulse to collect possessed the Popes themselves. The Capitol Museum dates from 1471.
The pretty statue of the boy pulling a thorn from his foot, the group of the lion clinging to a horse, the urn of Agrippina, and the bronze Hercules from the Forum Boarium formed the nucleus of this collection.
Soon afterwards the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was unearthed and placed where it now stands. The Vatican Museum was founded in 1523, when Julius II. erected the Apollo on a marble basis near the entrance to the gardens of the Belvedere. It had been discovered some years earlier at Porto d"Anzo, and was bought by Giuliano della Rovere before he was made Pope. The Laoc.o.o.n came to light in 1506 among the ruins of the Baths of t.i.tus in the vineyard of Felix de Fredis. How Giuliano di San Gallo and Michael Angelo heard of it, and walked abroad to see it disinterred, may still be read in the letter of Francesco, nephew of the former. Julius bought this group for six hundred golden crowns, and placed it in the Vatican. He also purchased the statue of the sleeping Ariadne, which then pa.s.sed for Cleopatra,[398] together with the torso of Hercules, found near the Palazzo Pio, and the statue of Commodus dug up in the Campo Fiore. Leo X. further enriched the collection by the reclining statues of the Nile and Tiber, found among the ruins of the Iseum near S. Stefano in Caco, and the so-called Antinous discovered in the Baths of Trajan.
[Footnote 397: See above, p. 111.]
[Footnote 398: See Castiglione"s verses.]
The feeling of professed scholars for these masterpieces of cla.s.sic art appears in Sadoleto"s and Castiglione"s poems, while a pa.s.sage of Ghiberti"s Commentary expresses the enthusiasm of technical sculptors.
After describing an Hermaphrodite he saw in Rome, the Florentine sculptor adds: "To express the perfection of learning, mastery, and art displayed in it is beyond the power of language. Its more exquisite beauties could not be discovered by the sight, but only by the touch of the hand pa.s.sed over it." Of another cla.s.sic marble at Padua he says: "This statue, when the Christian faith triumphed, was hidden in that place by some gentle soul, who, seeing it so perfect, fashioned with art so wonderful, and with such power of genius, and being moved to reverent pity, caused a sepulchre of bricks to be built, and there within buried the statue, and covered it with a broad slab of stone, that it might not in any way be injured. It has very many sweet beauties, which the eyes alone can comprehend not, either by strong or tempered light; only the hand by touching finds them out."[399] Meanwhile a genuine sentiment for the truth and beauty of antique art pa.s.sed downwards from the educated cla.s.ses to the people.
Like all powerful emotions that affect the popular imagination at epochs of imperfect knowledge and high sensibility, it took the form of fable. The beautiful myth of Julia"s Corpse is our most precious witness to this moment in the history of the Revival.[400] At the same time the real intention of cla.s.sic statuary was better understood.
Donatello had not worked in vain for a public, finely tempered to receive aesthetic influences, and cultivated by two centuries of native art. The hors.e.m.e.n of Monte Cavallo ceased to be philosophers. Menander and Poseidippus were no longer reckoned among the saints. In the age of Leo, Carlo Malatesta could not have thrown Virgil"s statue into the Mincio;[401] nor would the republic of Siena have buried their antique Venus by stealth in the Florentine territory, hoping thereby to transfer to their foes the curse of heathenism.[402] The effect produced on less impressionable natures by the Belvedere statues transpires in a curious doc.u.ment penned by a Venetian amba.s.sador to Rome in 1523.[403] It is so valuable for ill.u.s.trating the average culture of the Italians at that epoch, that I may allow myself the pleasure of rendering a full account of it.
[Footnote 399: _Terzo Commentario del Ghiberti, Frammenti Inediti_, in Le Monnier"s Vasari, vol. i. pp. xi.-xiii. I have paraphrased rather than translated the original, which is touching by reason of its navete.]
[Footnote 400: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 17.]
[Footnote 401: See Rosmini"s _Vittorino da Feltre_, p. 63, note.]
[Footnote 402: See Ghiberti"s _Commentario_, in Le Monnier"s Vasari, vol. i. p. xiv.]
[Footnote 403: Alberi, _Relazioni Venete_, serie ii. vol. iii. p. 114, &c.]
Adrian VI., soon after his accession, had walled up eleven of the twelve doors, leading to the Belvedere. The Venetian envoys, however, received permission to visit this portion of the Vatican palace, and the single entrance was unlocked for them. After describing the beauty of the gardens, their cypresses and orangeries, the greenness of their lawns and the stately order of their paved avenues, the writer of the report arrives at the statues. "In the midst of the garden are two very large men of marble, facing one another, twice the size of life, who lie in the att.i.tude of sleep. One of these is the Tiber, the other the Nile, figures of vast antiquity; and from beneath them issue two fair fountains. On the first entrance into the garden, on the left hand, there is a kind of little chapel let into the wall, where, on a pedestal of marble, stands the Apollo, famous throughout the world, a statue of incomparable beauty and dignity, of life size and of finest marble. Somewhat farther on, in a similar alcove and raised on a like pedestal to the height of an altar from the ground, opposite a well of most perfect fashion, is the Laoc.o.o.n, celebrated throughout the world, a statue of the highest excellence, of size like a natural man, with hairy beard, all naked. The sinews, veins, and proper muscles in each part are seen as well as in a living body; breath alone is wanting. He is in a posture between sitting and standing, with his two sons, one on either hand, both, together with himself, twined by the serpents, as Virgil says. And herein is seen so great merit of the artist, that better could not be; the languishing and dying are manifest to sight, and one of the boys on the right side is most tightly clipped by the snake twice girdled round him; one of the coils crossing his b.r.e.a.s.t.s and squeezing his heart, so that he is on the point of dying. The other boy on the left side is also girdled round by another serpent.
While he seeks to drag the raging worm from his leg with his little arm, and cannot help himself at all, he raises his face, all tearful, crying to his father, and holding him with his other hand by the left arm. And seeing his unhappy father more deadly struck than he is, the double grief of this child is clear to view, the one for his own coming death, the other for his father"s helplessness; and he so faints withal, that nothing remains for him but to breathe his last.
It is impossible that human art can arrive at producing so great and so natural a masterpiece. Every part is perfect, except that Laoc.o.o.n"s right arm is wanting. He seems about forty years of age, and resembles Messer Girolamo Marcello of S. Tommaso; the two boys look eight and nine respectively. Not far distant, and similarly placed, is a very beautiful Venus of natural size, naked, with a little drapery on her shoulder, that covers a portion of the waist; as very fair a figure as can be imagined by the mind; but the excellence of the Laoc.o.o.n makes one forget this and the Apollo, who before was so famous."
A systematic plan for exploring the monuments of old Rome, excavating its ruins, and bringing its buried treasures of statuary to light was furnished by Raphael in 1518. Leo had made him master of the works at S. Peter"s and general superintendent of antiquities.[404] For some time previously he had been studying Vitruvius in the Italian translation prepared for his use by Fabio Calvi of Ravenna. How enthusiastically he followed in the traces of the ancients, the arabesques of the Loggie, imitated from the frescoes of the Baths of t.i.tus, amply prove. He now, not long before his death, laid down a ground-plan of the city, divided into fourteen regions, and set forth his project in a memorable letter to the Pope. This epistle, written in choice old Italian, has more than once been printed: it will be found in Pa.s.savant"s Life of the painter. Raphael begins by describing the abandonment and desolation of the city, and by characterising its several styles of architecture--cla.s.sical, Lombard, Gothic, and modern.[405] Some phrases that occur in this exordium deserve to be cited for the light they cast upon the pa.s.sion which inspired those early excavators. "Considerando la divinitate di quelli animi antichi ... vedendo quasi il cadavere di quest"alma n.o.bile cittate, che e stata regia del mondo, cos miseramente lacerato ... quanti pontefici hanno permesso le ruine et disfacimenti delli templi antichi, delle statue, delli archi et altri edificii, gloria delli lor fondatori!
Quanti hanno comportato che solamente per pigliare terra pozzolana si siano scavati i fondamenti! Onde in poco tempo li edificii sono venuti a terra. Quanta calcina si e fatta di statue e d"altri ornamenti antichi! che ardirei dire che tutta questa nova Roma, che hor si vede, quanto grande ch"ella vi sia, quanto bella, quanto ornata di pallazzi, di chiese et di altri edificii, sia fabricata di calcina fatta di marmi antichi."[406] He then observes that during his twelve years"
residence in Rome the Meta in the Via Alexandrina, the arches at the entrance to the Baths of Diocletian and the Temple of Ceres in the Via Sacra, part of the Foro Transitorio, and the larger portion of the Basilica del Foro have been destroyed. Therefore he prays Leo to arrest this work of the new Vandals, and, by pursuing a well-considered scheme of operations, to lay bare and to protect what still remains of antique monuments in the Eternal City.
[Footnote 404: By a brief dated Aug. 27, 1515.]
[Footnote 405: It may be observed that he calls the round-arched buildings of the Middle Ages Gothic; the pointed style German.]
[Footnote 406: "When we reflect upon the divinity of those intellects of the old world ... when we see the corpse of this n.o.ble city, mother and queen of the world, so piteously mangled ... how many Pontiffs have allowed the ruin and defacement of ancient temples, statues, arches, and other buildings, the glory of their founders! How many have suffered their foundations to be undermined for the mere sake of quarrying _pozzolana_, whereby in a short time the buildings themselves have fallen to earth! How much lime has been made of statues and other antique decorations! I should not hesitate to say that the whole of this new Rome which now meets the eye, great as it is, and fair, and beautified with palaces and churches and other buildings, has been cemented with lime made from antique marbles."]
Raphael"s own death followed close upon the execution of the first part of a Roman map designed by him. Great interest had been excited in the world of letters by his undertaking; and its failure through his untimely end aroused the keenest disappointment. The epigrams quoted below in a footnote express these feelings with more depth of emotion than scholarly elegance.[407] How Raphael"s design would have been carried out it is impossible to guess. Archaeological zeal is impotent to stay the march of time, except by sacrifice of much that neglect alone makes venerable; and it may fairly be questioned whether it is wise to lay the hand of the restorer on these relics of the past. We at least, who during the last few years have seen the Coliseum and the Baths of Caracalla stripped of their romantic vegetation, the Palatine ruins fortified with modern masonry, and the dubious guesses of antiquaries placarded upon sign-posts for the instruction of Sunday visitors, may feel, perhaps, that a worse fate than slow decay or ruthless mutilation was still in store for the majestic corpse of ancient Rome. Nothing, in truth, is less sublime or more pitiful than a dismantled brick wall, robbed of its marbles and mosaics, naked of the covering of herbs that nature gave it, patched with plaster, propped with stonework, bound by girders, and smeared over with the trail of worse than snails or blindworms--pedants bent on restoration.
[Footnote 407:
Tot proceres Romam, tam longa struxerat aetas, Totque hostes et tot saecula diruerant; Nunc Romam in Roma quaerit reperitque Raphael; Quaerere magni hominis, sed reperire Dei est.
Celio Calcagnini.
Quod lacerum corpus medica sanaverit arte, Hippolytum Stygiis et revocarit aquis, Ad Stygias ipse est raptus Epidaurius undas; Sic pretium vitae mors fuit artifici.
Tu quoque dum toto laniatam corpore Romam Componis miro, Raphael, ingenio, Atque urbis lacerum ferro, igne, armisque cadaver Ad vitam antiquum jam revocasque decus, Movisti Superum invidiam; indignataque mors est Te dudum extinctis reddere posse animam, Et quod longa dies paullatim aboleverat, hoc te Mortali spreta lege parare iterum.
Sic miser heu prima cadis intercepte juventa: Debere et morti nostraque nosque mones.
Balda.s.sare Castiglione.]
The immediate and most important consequence of these antiquarian pursuits was the adoption of cla.s.sic forms by architects and artists.
Fresco-painters imitated the newly-discovered _grotteschi_ in their arabesques.[408] Sculptors abandoned Christian subjects for antique mythology, or gave the attributes of heroes to the saints of the Catholic Church. The principles of Vitruvius were applied as strictly as possible to modern buildings, and the free decoration of the earlier Renaissance yielded to what pa.s.sed for purely cla.s.sic ornaments. It would be incorrect to maintain that this reproduction of antiquity in art only dated from the age of Leo. Alberti and Brunelleschi, Bramante and Mich.e.l.lozzo, had, each in his own way, striven to a.s.similate to modern use the style of Roman architecture.
Donatello and Michael Angelo at Florence had carved statues in the cla.s.sic manner; nor are the arabesques of Signorelli at Orvieto, of Perugino at Perugia, less fanciful than those of Raphael in the Loggie. What really happened was that the imitation of the ancients grew more puristic and precise through the formation of a common taste that imposed itself with the weight of authority on artists. Giulio Romano"s Palazzo del Te at Mantua may be cited as the most perfect production of this epoch, combining, as it does, all forms of antique decoration and construction with the vivid individuality of genius.
Giulio Romano comprehended the antique, and followed it with the enthusiasm of a neophyte. But his very defects prevented him from falling into the frigid formalism of Palladio.
[Footnote 408: See Benvenuto Cellini, i. 31.]
The causes of Roman pre-eminence in this last age of humanism are not far to seek. By the policy of Alexander and Julius the Papal See had become the chief power in Italy. Venice never publicly encouraged literature, nor was the ambition of her n.o.bles fixed on anything so much as the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of the Republic. In the beginning of the sixteenth century their energy was needed no longer for the extension of Venetian rule, but for its preservation under the attack of Europe leagued against the city of the sea. Florence, divided between the parties of the Piagnoni and the Ottimati, reserved her failing vigour for the great struggle of 1529. The Medici, after absorbing what remained of mental force into their own circle, had transferred the Florentine traditions of culture with Giovanni and Giulio to Rome. At Naples the Aragonese dynasty had been already shaken to its foundation by the conspiracy of the Barons and by the conquest of Charles VIII.
Ferdinand the Catholic and Louis XII. were now intent upon dividing the southern provinces of Italy between them. Little opportunity was left, if inclination had remained, for patronising men of letters at a Court suspicious of its aristocracy and terrified by foreign interference. Milan, first among the towns of Lombardy, was doomed to bear the brunt of French, and Swiss, and German armies. To maintain the semblance of their dukedom taxed the weakness of the Sforzas to the utmost, while the people groaned beneath the fiendish cruelty of Spanish governors. The smaller princ.i.p.alities had been destroyed by Cesare Borgia and Julius. Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino, at the beginning of the century, alone continued the traditions of the previous age.
Rome, meanwhile, however insecure the Papal rule might be, still ranked among the Powers of Europe, pursuing a policy on equal terms with France and Spain. In Rome money abounded; nor had the sacred city of Christendom felt as yet the scourge of war, that broke the spirit of the Northern capitals. It was but natural, therefore, that the political and intellectual energies of the Italians should find their centre here.
Sad times, however, were in store for Rome. When Leo"s successor read the Latin letters of the Apostolic secretaries, he cried, "_Sunt litterae unius poetae_;" and after walking through the Belvedere Gallery, he gave vent to his feelings in the famous exclamation, "_Sunt idola antiquorum_." The humanists had nothing to expect from such a master. The election of Giulio de" Medici restored the hope that Rome might once more be as it had been beneath the sway of Leo.
Yet for Clement VII. was reserved the final bitterness of utter ruin.
In the fourth year of his papacy happened the catastrophe that closed one period of Italian history, and opened a new era for Rome and for the nation. The tale of the sack has been already told.[409] A fitting conclusion for this chapter may be found in Valeriano"s discourse upon its consequences to the literary society a.s.sembled by the Medici at the Papal Court.
[Footnote 409: Vol. I., _Age of Despots_, App. V.]
Valeriano"s dialogue "De Literatorum Infelicitate" opens with a description of Rome in the pontificate of Leo.[410] Never since the downfall of the Empire, he says, had letters flourished so freely or had men of learning found more generous patronage. Of that brilliant company Valeriano was himself an ornament. The friend of Egidius and the favourite of Leo, he spent his time in the composition of Latin poems, panegyrical and satiric, and in the exploration of antiquities.
Afterwards he became the protonotary of Clement, and supervised the education of the Medicean b.a.s.t.a.r.ds Alessandro and Ippolito. His good fortune carried him to Piacenza in the fatal year of 1527. On his return to Rome after the siege, he looked in vain for his old comrades and a.s.sociates. "Good G.o.d!" he exclaims in the dialogue before us, "when first I began to inquire for the philosophers, orators, poets, and professors of Greek and Latin literature, whose names were written on my tablets, how great, how horrible a tragedy was offered to me! Of all those lettered men whom I had hoped to see, how many had perished miserably, carried off by the most cruel of all fates, overwhelmed by undeserved calamities: some dead of plague, some brought to a slow end by penury in exile, others slaughtered by a foeman"s sword, others worn out by daily tortures; some, again, and these of all the most unhappy, driven by anguish to self-murder." John Goritz, captured by his countrymen, had ransomed himself with the sacrifice of all his wealth, and now was dying of despair at Verona. Colocci had seen his house, with its museums and MSS., burned before his eyes. Angelo Cesi, maltreated by the Spanish soldiers on a sick bed, died of his injuries before the year was out. Marone, the brilliant improvisatore, stripped of everything and deprived of his poems, the acc.u.mulated compositions of years spent in Leo"s service, breathed his last in a miserable tavern. Marco Fabio Calvi, Raphael"s friend and teacher, succ.u.mbed to sickness in a hospital. Julia.n.u.s Camers, maddened by the sight of the torments inflicted on his servants, had thrown himself from a window in his house, and was killed. Baldus, the professor, after watching his commentary upon Pliny used to light the camp fires of the soldiery, had died himself of hunger. Casanova, the poet, fell a victim to the plague. Paolo Bombasi, another poet, was murdered in the streets of Rome. Cristoforo Marcello had been tortured by the Spaniards. Exposed naked on a tree, his nails were daily drawn from his fingers by these human fiends; he only escaped their clutches to die of his injuries at Gaeta. Laomedon Tardolus and John Bonifacius Victor suffered similar indignities and torments. Francesco Fortunio and John Valdes slew themselves. To enumerate all the scholars who succ.u.mbed to fear, plague, famine, torture, and imprisonment in this fatal year; to relate how numbers left Rome, robbed of everything, to wander over Italy, and die of hunger by the wayside, or of fever in low hovels; to describe the losses of their MSS., their madness, beggary, mysterious disappearances, and deaths by hands of servants or of brigands on the high roads, would occupy more s.p.a.ce than I have left at my command. The ghastly muster roll is told with terrible concision by Valeriano, who adds divers examples, unconnected with the sack, of early deaths by over-study, lingering illnesses, murders by poison or the knife, and accidents of every kind, attributable more or less directly to the shifting career of students at that time in Italy.
[Footnote 410: Printed at Venice, 1620.]
Though the wars in Lombardy proved scarcely less fatal to men of letters than the siege of Rome, those disasters fell singly and at intervals. The ever-memorable stage of the Eternal City was reserved for the crowning tragedy of arts and letters. Whatever vicious seeds had been sown in Italy by the humanists had blossomed and borne fruit in Rome; and there the Nemesis of pride and insolence, and G.o.dlessness of evil living, fell upon them like a bolt from heaven. In essays, epistles, and funeral orations they amply recognised the justice of their punishment. A phrase of Hieronymus Niger"s in a letter to Sadoleto--"Rome, that is the sink of all things shameful and abominable"--might serve as the epitome of their conscience-stricken Jeremiads.[411] All Italy re-echoed with these lamentations; and though Clement VII. and Paul III. did their best to repiece the ruins of Leo"s golden house of fame, the note of despair and anguish uttered by the scholars in 1527 was never destined to be drowned by chorus hymeneal or triumphal chant again. What remained of humanism among the Italians a.s.sumed a different form, adapted to the new rule of the Spaniards and the new att.i.tude of the Church. To the age of the Humanists succeeded the age of the Inquisitors and Jesuits.
[Footnote 411: "Quod Romae, hoc est in sentina omnium rerum atrocium et pudendarum deprehensi fuerimus." Quoted by Gregorovius, _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. p. 598, note 3.]
CHAPTER VIII
LATIN POETRY
Special Causes for the Practice of Latin Versification in Italy -- The Want of an Italian Language -- Mult.i.tudes of Poetasters -- Beccadelli -- Alberti"s "Philodoxus" -- Poliziano -- The "Sylvae" -- "Nutricia", "Rusticus", "Manto", "Ambra" -- Minor Poems -- Pontano -- Sannazzaro -- Elegies and Epigrams -- Christian Epics -- Vida"s "Christiad" -- Vida"s "Poetica" -- Fracastoro -- The "Syphilis" -- _Barocco_ Flatteries -- Bembo -- Immoral Elegies -- Imitations of Ovid and Tibullus -- The "Benacus" -- Epitaphs -- Navagero -- Epigrams and Eclogues -- Molsa -- Poem on his own Death -- Castiglione -- "Alcon" and "Lycidas" -- Verses of Society -- The Apotheosis of the Popes -- Poem on the Ariadne of the Vatican -- Sadoleto"s Verses on the Laoc.o.o.n -- Flaminio -- His Life -- Love of the Country -- Learned Friends -- Scholar-Poets of Lombardy -- Extinction of Learning in Florence -- Decay of Italian Erudition.
The history of this last period of the Revival would be incomplete without a survey of its Latin poetry. I shall have failed to convey a right notion of the tendencies of humanism, if I have not shown that the Italians were seeking not merely to acquire a knowledge of ancient literature, but also to effect a resuscitation of antiquity in their own writings. Regarding themselves as the heirs of Rome, separated from the brilliant period of Latin civilisation by ten centuries of ignorance, they strove with all their might to seize the thread of culture at the very point where the poets of the Silver Age had dropped it. In the opinion of Northern races it might seem unnatural or unpatriotic to woo the Muses in a dead language; but for Italians the Camoenae had not died; on the hills of Latium, where they fell asleep, they might awake again. Every familiar sight and sound recalled "the rich Virgilian rustic measure" of the "Georgics" and "Bucolics." Nature had not changed, nor did the poets feel the influence of Christianity so deeply as to find no meaning in the mythic phraseology of Fauns and Nymphs.
Latin, again, was far less a language of the past for the Italians than for other European nations. What risk the Tuscan dialect ran, when Dante wrote the first lines of the "Divine Comedy" in Latin, and when Petrarch a.s.sumed the laurel crown by right of his "Africa", is known to every student. The serious efforts of the greatest writers were for centuries devoted to Latin composition, because they believed that the nation, in the modern as in the ancient world, might freely use the speech of Cicero and Virgil. Their _volgari cose_ they despised as trifles, not having calculated the impotence of scholars or of kings to turn the streams of language from their natural courses. Nor was this blindness so inexplicable as it seems to us at first sight. Italy possessed no common dialect; Dante"s "Italiano Ill.u.s.tre," or "Cortegiano", was even less native to the race at large, less universal in its use, than Latin.[412] Fashioned from the Tuscan for literary purposes, selected from the vocabulary of cultivated persons, stripped of vernacular idioms, and studied in the works of a few standard authors, it was itself, upon the soil that gave it birth, a product of high art and conscious culture. The necessity felt soon after Dante"s death for translating the "Divine Comedy" into Latin, sufficiently proves that a Latin poem gained a larger audience than the masterpiece of Italian literature. While the singer of a dialect, however n.o.ble, appealed to his own fellow-citizens, the Latin poet gave his verses _urbi et orbi_. If another proof of the artificiality of Italian were needed, we should find it in the fact that the phrases of Petrarch are not less obsolete now than in the fourteenth century.
The English require a glossary for Chaucer, and even Elizabethan usages are out of date; in other words, the language of the people has outgrown the style of its first poets. But Italian has undergone no process of transformation and regeneration according to the laws of organic growth, since it first started. The different districts still use different dialects, while writers in all parts of the peninsula have conformed their style as far as possible to early Tuscan models.
It may be questioned whether united Italy, having for the first time gained the necessary conditions of national concentration, is not now at last about to enter on a new phase of growth in literature, which, after many years, will make the style of the first authors more archaic than it seems at present.
[Footnote 412: Cf. Filelfo, quoted in a note to the next chapter, who says,"Tuscan is hardly known to all Italians, while Latin is spread far and wide throughout the whole world."]
The foregoing observations were requisite in order to explain why the cultivation of Latin poetry was no mere play-work to Italian scholars.
The peculiar direction given by Petrarch to cla.s.sical studies at the outset must also be taken into account. We have seen that he regarded rhetoric and poetry as the two chief aims of humanism. To be either a poet or an orator was the object of all students who had slaked their thirst at the Castalian springs of ancient learning. Philology and poetry, accordingly, went hand in hand through the periods of the Revival; and to this first impulse we are perhaps justified in tracing back the prominence a.s.signed to Latin verse in our own school studies.