A certain lord who on a journey went, Called unto him each of his serving men, And of his goods gave them arbitrament: To one he dealt five talents, to one ten, To another two, to try their heart"s intent, And see how far they should be careless; then Unto the last he left but one alone: According to their powers, he charged each one.
And when he had departed, instantly That servant unto whom he gave the five, Went forth, and laboring with much industry, Increased them, and therewith so well did thrive That other five he gained immediately, To render when his master should arrive; He who received but twain, did even so, And added to his sum another two.
But he on whom one talent was bestowed, Went forthwith and concealed it in the soil: Careless, unthankful for the debt he owed, While he hath peace, he seeks but strife and toil: Called like his fellows in that lord"s abode, He answers not, but doth himself despoil; And, as a worthless steward, hides away The money of his master day by day.
Woe to thee, slothful servant and remiss, That hast thy talent buried in the ground!
When reckoning comes, thou"lt yield account for this Nay, think how stern and rigorous he"ll be found!
Weep, then, in time for what thou"st done amiss, Before the trumpets of the judgment sound: O soul, I tell thee thou hast gone astray, Hiding thy talent in the earth away!
He who on earth sets his affections still, Forgetful of the promised heavenly treasure; He who loves self more than his Maker"s will, And in ill-doing finds continual pleasure; He who remembers not that sin must kill, Nor thinks how h.e.l.l will plague him above measure; He who against himself makes fast heaven"s gate; Hideth in earth his talent till too late.
He who loves father, mother, more than G.o.d, Not reckoning His great gifts bestowed on man; He who the path of worldly gain hath trod, Publishes for himself d.a.m.nation"s ban: Woe, woe to that bad servant sunk in fraud, Who leaves the good and doth what ill he can!
He who on this world seeks his joy to find, His talent hides in earth, perversely blind.
He who is grasping, proud, discourteous, base, Who dreameth not that he may come to want, Who seeks for flattery, praise, and pride of place, Lording it with high airs and arrogant; Who to the world gives all, and still doth chase Delight in songs and pomps exorbitant; Who in this life is fain to rest and sleep-- His talent in the earth lies hidden deep.
Woe for that servant who through negligence Hath hearkened not to the command divine!
Yea, he shall hear the dreadful doom: Go hence!
Go forth, accursed, in endless fire to pine!
There shall be then no time for penitence: Bound hand and foot with punishment condign, He shall abide among lost souls beneath, Where is great weeping and great gnashing of teeth.
O soul, so full of sins, what shalt thou do?
Of all thy countless crimes abominable, Look to the end! Look to it! h.e.l.l for you Lies open, with d.a.m.ned folk innumerable!
Whence thou shalt never issue, ever rue In vain remorse and pangs intolerable!
Weep, soul, ah weep for thy most vile estate, Now that repentance need not come too late!
Seek in this life to feel sincere contrition, Before the judge so just and so severe Summons thee to his throne, for inquisition Into each sin, each thought that wandered here; There shalt thou find no merciful remission, But justice shall be dealt with truth austere; And he who fails shall go to burn with shame For ever, ever, in eternal flame.
Quis ex vobis centum oves habens, Si forte unam ex illis perdiderit, Nonne nonagintas novem dimittens Et illam querit, donec ipsam invenerit?
Et c.u.m invenerit, in humeros ponens, Gaudens, in domum suam cito venerit, And calls his kinsfolk and his friends to make Festival for the new-found wanderer"s sake?
The soul, she is that lost and wandering sheep; Eternal G.o.d is the true shepherd: He Seeks her, lest on his lamb the wolf should leap, The fiend, who slays with guile and treachery.
He spends his life, her safe to seek and keep, And leaves those ninety-nine in bliss to be; And when he finds her, makes great joy in heaven, With all the angelic host, o"er one forgiven.
There was a father who had children twain; The younger son began to speak and pray That he might take his share, for he was fain, Furnished therewith, from home to wend his way: The father gently urged him to remain, But at the last was bounden to obey: Far, far away he roamed, and spent his all, Sad wretch, on carnal joys and prodigal.
But when he came to want, repenting sore, Unto his father, all ashamed, he knelt; His father clothed him with new robes, and bore Even more tender love than first he felt: So doth high G.o.d, who lives for evermore, Unto the souls that with repentance melt; Let them but seek his love with contrite will, He is most merciful, and pardons still.
Soul, thou hast wounded many hearts, I wis, Dwelling in delicate and vain delight; With many a lover thou wouldst toy and kiss And art o"erfull of evil appet.i.te; Thy heart is big with strifes and jealousies: Turn unto me; I wait to wash thee white; That with the rest thy talent thou mayst double, And dwell with them in heaven secure from trouble.
After the blessing of Jesus, Magdalen, weeping, and with her head covered, can have no rest for the great confusion that she felt; and all the people wept, and in great astonishment were waiting agaze to see what should ensue.
_O alma peccatrice, che farai?_--Christ"s voice with its recurrences of gravely sweet persuasion melts Magdalen"s heart. She may not speak one word, until her sister has led her home and comforted her a s.p.a.ce. Then she answers:
Deh, priega Iddio che m"allumini il core!
After this, left alone with her own soul, awakened to the purer consciousness that Christ has stirred, she takes the box of ointment, and, despoiled of all her goodly raiment, with her hair disheveled, goes to the house of the Pharisee. There at last, with the breaking of the alabaster, she dissolves in tears, and her heart finds peace. In these scenes, if anywhere, we have the stuff from which the drama might have been evolved. Magdalen is a living woman, such as Palma might have painted; and Christ is a real man gifted with power to penetrate the soul.
The _Figliuol Prodigo_ ill.u.s.trates the same effort on the poet"s part to steep an old-world story in the vivid colors of to-day.[427] In the Prodigal himself we find a coa.r.s.e-hearted villain, like Hogarth"s Idle Apprentice--vain, silly, l.u.s.tful, gluttonous, careless of the honor and love that belong to him in his father"s home. The scenes with the innkeeper, the gamblers, and the ruffians, among whom he runs to ruin, portray the vulgar dissipations of Florence, and justify the common identification of taverns with places of ill-fame.[428] There is a touch of true pathos at the end of the play in the grief of the father who has lost his son. The conflict of feelings in the heart of the elder brother, vexed at first with the prodigal"s reception, but melting into love and pity at the fervor of his penitence, is also not without dramatic spirit. At the very end "a boy with the lyre" enters and "speaks the moral of the parable."[429]
The movement of these two plays is not impeded by the sanct.i.ty of the subject. When, however, the legend belongs more immediately to the narrative of Christ"s life, the form of the Representation is more severe. This is especially true of Castellani"s _Cena e Pa.s.sione_, where the incidents of the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, the trials before Pilate and Caiaphas, the Flagellation, and the Crucifixion are narrated with reverential brevity.[430] In reading these scenes, we must summon to our memory Luca della Robbia"s ba.s.s-reliefs or the realistic groups of the Lombard Sacri Monti. The colored terra-cotta figures in those chapels among the chestnut trees above the Sesia are but Castellani"s poetry conveyed in tableaux, while the Florentine actors undoubtedly aimed at presenting by their grouping, dresses and att.i.tudes a living image of such plastic work. But the peculiar pathos of the Italians found finer expression in picture or fresco--in Luini"s "Flagellation" at S. Maurizio or the pallid anguish of Tintoretto"s women sunk beneath the Cross in the Scuola di San Rocco--than in the fluent stanzas of the sacred playwrights. On the walls of church or oratory the sweetness and languor of emotion became as dignified in beauty as the melodies of Pergolese, and its fervor touched at times the sublimity of tragic pa.s.sion. Not words but plastic forms were ever the n.o.blest vehicle of Italian feeling. Yet each kind of art may be profitably used to ill.u.s.trate the other, and the simple phrases of the _Rappresentazioni_ are often the best comments on finished works of painting. Here, for example, is Raphael"s _Lo Spasimo_ in words[431]:
Oime, figliuol, e questo il viso Ch"era tanto formoso e tanto bello?
Ome, dove si specchia el paradiso Oggi e percosso in tanto gran flagello!
Io vengo a morte, figliuol mio diletto, Se non ti tengo nelle braccia stretto.
Mary faints, and the Magdalen supports her, weeping[432]:
Ome, che per dolor Maria vien meno: Noi perderem la madre col figliuolo.
Pallido e il volto gia tanto sereno, Quale e tutto mutato pel gran duolo.
El polso manca, e nel sacrato seno El cuor suo resta respirante solo.
Soccorso, aiuto; ognun gli dia conforto, Sendo aghiacciato il corpo e quasi morto.
The hearts of these rude poets were very tender for Mary, Mother of our Lord. There is a touching pa.s.sage in the _Disputa al Tempio_, when Joseph and the Virgin are walking toward the temple with the boy who is to them a sacred charge[433]:
_Iosef._ I" guido e son guidato, e reggo quello Che regge me, e muovo chi mi muove: Pastor mi fo di quel ch"io son agnello; O quanta grazia in questo servo piove!
_Maria._ S"i" alzo gli occhi alquanto per vederlo, Contemplo nel mirar cose alte e nuove.
Per la virtu di sua divina forma L"amante ne l"amato si trasforma.
Something artless and caressing in these words brings before us Luini"s Joseph with his golden-brown robes and white hair, Mary in her blue and crimson with the beautiful braided curls of gold. The Magdalen, again, moves through all these solemn scenes with a grace peculiar to her story. The poet, like the painter, never forgets that her sins were forgiven _quia multum amavit_. She who in Luini"s fresco at Lugano kneels with outstretched arms and long fair rippling loosened hair, beneath the Cross, is shown in the _Resurrezione di Gesu Cristo_ upon her knees before the gardener whose one word tells her that she sees her risen Lord.[434] It is a scene from Fra Angelico, a touch of tenderness falling like a faint soft light athwart the ma.s.s of orthodox tradition.
The sympathy between these shows and the plastic arts may be still further traced in Belcari"s _D del Giudizio_.[435] After the usual prologue an angel thrice blows the trumpet blast that wakes the dead, crying aloud _Surgite!_ Minos a.s.sembles his fiends, and Christ bids the archangel separate the good from the bad.[436] Michael, obedient to this order, seeks a hypocrite hidden among the just and sets him on the left hand, while Trajan is taken from the d.a.m.ned and placed among the saved.
Solomon rises alone,[437] and remains undecided in the middle s.p.a.ce, till Michael, charging him with carnal sin, forces him to take his station with the goats. S. Peter now disputes with wicked friars who think to save themselves by pointing to their cowls and girdles. The poor appeal to S. Francis, but he answers that poverty is no atonement for a sinful life. Magdalen refuses help to women who have lived impenitent. Christ and Mary reply that the hour of grace is past. Then the representatives of the seven deadly sins step forth and reason with the virtuous--the proud man with the humble, the glutton with the temperate. Sons upbraid their fathers for neglect or evil education.
Others thank G.o.d for the discipline that saved them in their youth. At the last Christ awards judgment, crying to the just: "Ye saw me hungry and ye fed me, naked and ye clothed me!" and to the unjust: "I was hungry and ye fed me not, naked and ye clothed me not." Just and unjust answer, as in Scripture, with those words whereof the double irony is so dramatic. The d.a.m.ned are driven off to h.e.l.l, and angels open for the blessed the doors of Paradise.
The _Rappresentazioni_ of the second cla.s.s offer fewer points of interest; almost the sole lesson they inculcate being the superiority of the monastic over the secular life. S. Anthony leaves the world in which he has lived prosperous and wealthy, incarcerates his sister in a convent, and becomes a hermit.[438] Satan a.s.sembles the hosts of h.e.l.l and makes fierce war upon his resolution; but the temptation is a poor affair, and Anthony gets through it by the help of an angel. The play ends with an a.s.sault of the foiled fiend of Avarice upon three rogues--Tagliagambe, Scaramuccia, and Carabello--who cut each other"s throats over their ill-gotten booty. _S. Guglielmo Gualtero_, like S.
Francis, sells all that he possesses, embraces poverty, and becomes a saint.[439]. _S. Margaret_ subdues the dragon, and is beheaded by a Roman prefect for refusing homage to the pagan deities.[440] _SS.
Giovanni e Paolo_ are Latin confessors of the conventional type.[441]
The legends of the _Seven Sleepers_, _S. Ursula_, and _S. Onofrio_ are treated after a like fashion. _S. Eufrasia_ still further ill.u.s.trates the medieval ideal of monastic chast.i.ty.[442] She leaves her betrothed husband and her mother to enter a convent. Nothing befalls her, and her life is good for nothing, except that she exhales the odor of conventual sanct.i.ty and dies. _S. Teodora_ is a variation on the same theme.[443]
She refuses Quintiliano, the governor of Asia, in marriage; and is sent to a bad house, whence Eurialo, a Christian, delivers her. Both are immediately dispatched to execution. It is probable that the two last-mentioned plays were intended for representation within the walls of a nunnery. _S. Barbara_ presents the same motive, with a more marked theological bias.[444] Dioscoro, the father of the saint, hears from his astrologers that she is fated to set herself against the old G.o.ds of his worship. To avert this calamity, he builds a tower with two windows, where he shuts her up in the company of orthodox pagan teachers. Barbara becomes learned in her retirement, and refuses, upon the authority of Plato, to pay homage to idols. Faith, instead of Love, finds this new Danae, in the person, not of Zeus, but of a priest dispatched by Origen from Alexandria to convert her to Christianity. The princess learns her catechism, is baptized, and adds a third window to her tower, in recognition of the Trinity. It only remains for her father to torture her cruelly to death.
The outline of these stories is often singularly beautiful, and capable of poetic treatment. Remembering what Ma.s.singer and Decker made of the _Virgin Martyr_, we turn with curiosity to _S. Teodora_ or _S. Ursula_.
Yet we are doomed to disappointment. The ingenuous charm, again, which painters threw over the puerilities of the monastic fancy, is absent from these plays. Sodoma"s legend of S. Benedict in fresco on the walls of Monte Oliveto, Carpaccio"s romance of S. Ursula painted for her Scuola at Venice, are touched with the grace of a child"s fairy-story.
The _Rappresentazioni_ eliminate all elements of mystery and magic from the fables, and reduce them to bare prose. The core of the myth or tale is rarely reached; the depths of character are never penetrated; and still the wizardry of wonderland is gone. In the hands of these Italian playwrights the most pregnant story of the Orient or North a.s.sumed the thin slight character of ordinary life. Its richness disappeared. Its beauty evanesced. Nothing remained but the dry bones of a _novella_.
Indeed, the prose legends of the fourteenth century are far more fascinating than these dramatized tales of the Renaissance, which might be used to prove, if further proof were needed, that the Italian imagination is not in the highest sense romantic or fantastic, not far-reaching by symbol or by vision into the depths of nature human and impersonal. The sense of infinity which gives value to Northern works of fancy, is unknown in Italy. Sir Thomas Mallory wrote of Arthur"s pa.s.sage into dreamland[445]: "And when they were at the water"s side, even fast by the banke hoved a little barge with many faire ladies in it, and among them all was a queene, and all they had blacke hoods, and they wept and shriked when they saw King Arthur." The author of the _Tavola Ritonda_ makes the event quite otherwise precise[446]:
E stando per un poco, ed ecco per lo mare venire una navicella, tutta coperta di bianco ... e la nave s"accost allo re, e alquante braccia uscirono della nave che presono lo re Artu, e visibilemente il misono nella nave, e portarollo via per mare ... si crede che la fata Morgana venisse per arte in quella navicella, e portllo via in una isoletta di mare; e quivi mor di sue ferite, e la fata il sopell in quella isoletta.
This anxiety after verification and distinctness is almost invariable in Italian literature. The very devil becomes a definite and oftentimes prosaic personage. External Nature is credited with no inner spirit, reaching forth from wood or wave or cloud to touch the soul of man in reverie or trance, or breaking on his charmed senses in the form of gnome or water-sprite or fairy. Men and women move in clear sunlight, disenchanted of the gloom or glory, as of star-irradiate vapor, which a Northern mytho-poet wraps around them, making their humanity thereby more poignant.
Those who care to connect the genius of a people with the country of their birth, may find the source of these mental qualities in the n.o.bly beautiful, serene and gracious, but never mystical Italian land. The Latin Camoenae have neither in ancient nor in modern years evoked the forms of mythic fable from that landscape. Far less is there the touch of Celtic or Teutonic inspiration--the light that never was on sea or land. The nightingales of Sorrento or Nettuno in no poet"s vision have
Charmed magic cas.e.m.e.nts, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Down the hillsides between Lucca and Pistoja, where the cypresses stand in rows and olives cast their shadows on the gray tilled soil, no lover has dreamed he met Queen Guinevere in spring riding through flowers with Lancelot. Instead of Morgan le Fay, turning men to lichened and mist-moistened stones upon the heath, the Italian witch was ever Locusta, the poison-brewer, or Alcina, the temptress.
This peculiarity of the Italian genius made their architects incapable of understanding Gothic. This deprived Italian art of that sublimity which needs a grain of the grotesque for its perfection, a touch of the uncouth for its accomplishment. The instinct of poets and artists alike induced them to bring mystery within the sphere of definition, to limit the marvelous by reducing it to actual conditions, and to impoverish the terrible by measuring its boundaries. But since every defect has its corresponding quality, this same instinct secured for the modern age a world of immaculate loveliness in art and undimmed joyousness in poetry.
If the wonderland of fancy is eliminated, the monstrous and unshaped have disappeared. With the grotesque vanishes disproportion. Humanity, conscious of its own emotion, displaces the shadowy people of the legends. We move in a well-ordered world of cheerfulness and beauty, made for man, where symmetry of parts is music. Ariosto"s jocund irony is no slight compensation for the imagery of a Northern mythus.