The Oxford book of Italian verse/Introduction III
III
To the lover of lyric poetry the seventeenth century in Italy is almost destitute of interest. The extinction of political liberty under the Spaniard and the swift development of priestcraft that was the sequel of the Council of Trent combined to produce an atmosphere fatal to real poetic impulse; and the swarm of little writers who followed in the flowery path where Marini led the way with his sugared Adone found a substitute for inspiration in every possible refinement of vile taste. The gregarious instinct that is usually an attribute of feeble natures led them to form various cliques and academies—hotbeds of antitheses, strained metaphors, and mutual admiration, where might be seen grave gentlemen in full-bottomed wigs masquerading as Daphnis and Thyrsis; writing odes to Alexis and to Christina of Sweden; declaiming panegyrics on French chocolate and the General of the Jesuits. They assumed the most remarkable names—apatisti, malinconici, negletti, gelati—but they were never poets; their verses, at best, have only the mild charm that belongs to frivolous pedantry. At their worst, they have an indefinable nastiness which afflicts the nerves like stale scent, or the paintings of Carlo Dolci, or the stucco rotundities of Baroque cherubs. Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.
The excesses of the Seicento have been regarded by various writers as another aspect of the literary movement which produced Euphuism in England. But the conceits of Euphues and Loves Labour's Lost possess, even when most absurd, a certain quality of youthfulness, a hearty joy in the delightful exercise of testing the resources of a newly discovered medium of expression to its uttermost limit, which we look for vainly in Marini and his satellites. The laborious Italian elegance is that of an old and tired person who poses painfully as young; it is wily, not exuberant, and the sensual note that is the chief characteristic of its material has no virile quality. The patriotic enthusiasm that finds its voice in art was dead in Italy; she was already, in Metternich's grim phrase, nothing but a geographical expression. Religious ardour was equally lacking; the base Jesuit sentimentalism spread from the pulpit to the academies; Gesù Bambino was the patron of the Arcadians; even Chiabrera, who at least possessed a power of language and a poetic ambition that were denied to his complacent contemporaries, stooped to the most miserable depths in his religious poetry.[1] Meanwhile, Galileo was persecuted, Campanella was tortured by the Spaniards, and Giordano Bruno was burnt alive—ut quam clementissime et citra sanguinis effusione puniretur—after seven years' imprisonment in the dungeons of the Holy Office.
The Arcadia was founded in 1690 as a protest against bad taste in general and the Marinesque absurdities in particular; unfortunately, its founders, with the exception of Gravina, were persons of mediocre intelligence, and the hand of the Jesuits was heavy on the new society from the moment of its birth. The bombastic fustian of Marini and his tribe, whose one burning aim was to astonish their unfortunate admirers, gave place to the emasculated prettiness of Maggi, of Frugoni, of Zappi—the sentimental Zappi who yearned so ardently to be the lap-dog of his mistress—to all the celebratissima letteraria fanciullaggine that Baretti loathed so heartily. To reproach the poor Arcadians, however, for their lack of all poetical qualities would be as foolish as to fly into a passion over the morals of the later Caesars; they were the result, and not the cause, of the general corruption of taste in Italy; they did no good, but very little harm, and when their countrymen awoke once more to reality they retired gracefully into oblivion.
Three names only are eminent above the dead level of the epoch, but they belong to writers who were masters of rhetoric rather than lyric poets. Chiabrera imitated Pindar, the most dangerous of literary divinities, but his pompous odes to successful athletes and other heroes have no real dignity; they are fluent, but quite frigid and colourless. Testi, who was praised so highly by Leopardi, contrives occasionally—the ruscelletto orgoglioso is the best example of his success—to achieve rhetorical vigour, but for the most part his poems are damned by their verbose exuberance, their tortured circumlocutions, their utter lack of simplicity and a sense of the real. Filicaia was more successful in breaking free from the bonds of garish ornament, but he, too, has a fatal fluency; all his rhetorical thunder is apt to fail suddenly—to change into the feeblest kind of falsetto; he ‘cracks a weak voice on too lofty a note’. Even in the vigorous, though slightly forced canzone which has a place in this volume he breaks off to address the ‘vero Giove’ in this strain:—
Che s'egli è pur destino,
E ne' volumi eterni ha scritto il fato,
Che deggia un dì all'Eusino
Servir l'ibera e l'alemanna Teti
E 'l suol cui parte l'Appenin gelato,
A' tuoi santi decreti
Pien di timore e d'umiltà m'inchino.
Vinca, se così vuoi,
Vinca lo Scita, e 'l glorioso sangue
Versi l'Europa esangue
Da ben mille ferite. I voler tuoi
Legge son ferma a noi:
Tu sol se' buono e giusto...
From the point of view of piety, of course, such a sentiment is admirable, but it is perhaps slightly inappropriate to a patriotic poem. No doubt it pleased the Jesuits; it is in their best manner. Filicaia's sonnets are far finer than his attempts in larger forms, though many of them are marred by his irritating habit of asking half a dozen rhetorical questions in as many lines.
In this epoch of unreality and convention the intellectual progress of Italy seems to have halted completely—e pur si muove. The spiritual energy which was denied by force of circumstances to art and letters becomes intense in the philosopher, the scientist, and the historian—in Bruno and Campanella, in Galileo, in Vico and Sarpi—lonely and persecuted figures who are the pioneers of the reaction against all the hideous errors that arise from confused thought, wilfully obscured knowledge, and tyranny masquerading as religion. In the midst of a civilization that was content to feed on shams and lies and to stop its ears to the voice of reality they follow the forgotten feet of truth—the truth that is mighty and must prevail at last—probing the secrets of the infinite universe, exploring the infinite labyrinths of the human mind and revealing the God within it. To contemplate reality, reverently but without fear, unbiassed by superstition and tradition, was the aim of these uomini nuovi; the method applied to the exact sciences by Galileo and his followers was identical with the method employed by Descartes in his metaphysical researches; observation and experiment were their instruments; fantastic hypothesis was contemptuously discarded. Ignorance of self and ignorance of life were the two supreme evils; the wise man was the deliverer of a world:—
S'ei vive, perdi, e s'ei muore, esce un lampo
Di Deità dal corpo per te scisso,
Che le tenebre tue non han più scampo.
Lyric poetry during the first half of the eighteenth century is still dominated by the Arcadians; with Metastasio Italian reaches the climax of melodious utterance, and then dies away in music; the lyric is lost in the opera libretto. His dramas, in spite of all their melodious felicity of diction, really continue the worship of shadows inaugurated by the poets of the Seicento; their aim is to amuse, not to stir the deeper emotions of the audience; they end gently and happily, and their villains are far too mild to horrify even the heart of an Arcadian. They are still pleasant to read, but the note of reality is entirely absent from their pages. After 1750, however, there are many signs of a general recrudescence of mental vigour in Italy. Her people began to mix more freely with other nations—to share the general spirit of unrest that was beginning to agitate Europe. They read Voltaire and Condillac, Locke and Pascal. Baretti returned from London a Shakespearian enthusiast; Cesarotti translated poor discredited Ossian; Young's melancholy Night Thoughts were greatly admired. Besides these foreign influences, there was a revival of interest in Dante, whom the Arcadians had voted vulgar; a fierce literary strife raged about the Divina Commedia, of which Gaspare Gozzi was the most redoubtable protagonist. The great dramatists of France and the earliest poets of the Romantic revival in England became popular, and at last, fostered by influences as different from each other as those of Molière and Thomson, reality revives in the comedy of Goldoni and Gozzi and the poetry of Parini.
In the serenity, the absence of all affectation, of ‘words for words’ sake’, that are the distinctive qualities of his verse, Parini bears a certain resemblance to Wordsworth. Like the English poet, he has a wide love of nature and humanity, his mind is essentially meditative, and his inspiration is certainly the fruit of emotion remembered in tranquillity. Like Wordsworth, too, he occasionally descends to the commonplace. He has no quality, however, resembling the deep sense of tragedy that we find, for instance, in The Affliction of Margaret, nor does the natural loveliness of the world haunt him ‘like a passion’; in compensation, he has a remarkable power of wise irony which shines in Il Giorno like an accusing light amid the dull artificialities that made up the life of a Milanese giovanotto of his time. His lyric poems are the simple and exactly appropriate expression of his own sensations; he is content to abjure all the tropes and flourishes of the languishing Arcadia and to be completely individual. The Arcadians, like the Matthew Arnold of a famous caricature, were never wholly serious; Parini is always quietly in earnest, and his poetry, with its complete freedom from strained and pompous diction and foolish conceits, is a perfect and dignified protest against the moribund dynasty of the verbose.
With Alfieri the ironical spirit develops into savage hatred, so that his voice becomes harsh or shrill, and he seems to threaten the tyrants and fools of his world with wild and passionate gestures. He, too, is intensely in earnest about life, about himself—his pride in his own attitude of Prometheus defying the Zeus of despotism is akin to that of Byron.
Tiene il Ciel da' ribaldi, Alfier da' buoni.
The tranquillity of mind and all-embracing sympathy of a Shakespeare or a Molière were denied him; the artist in him is again and again lost in the fanatic; so that his dramas, the first tragedies in Italy, too often become special pleas against priests and oppressors, and the intricate action of character on character had little interest for his impatient soul. But his defects as a dramatist were his strength as a lyric poet; his intense, one-sided individualism finds true expression in his shorter verses, and the melancholy which seems forced and unnatural in the plays becomes real and profound. He has been reproved by professors of literature for his style, but as de Sanctis, a very wise professor, has pointed out, the asperity of his diction is exactly appropriate to the surging fury of emotion that it releases; it is convulsive, harsh, and intensely full of vitality. His epigiam against the pedants who derided his verses is the conclusion of the whole matter:—
Vi paion strani?
Saran Toscani.
Son duri duri,
Disaccentati...
Non son cantati.
Stentati, oscuri,
Irti, intralciati...
Saran pensati.
Monti, the student and imitator of Dante, is in every respect the opposite of Alfieri. He possesses an extra-ordinary power of language, but mentally he is the plaything of every wind that blows, and, though he is the enthusiast of liberty, his formula for that desirable gift of Heaven changes incessantly. His Bassvilliana, which assails France with every species of vituperation, is followed by panegyrics on Napoleon, and, when Napoleon falls, the restored Austrian government in Italy becomes the target for his adulatory shafts. Critics of Italian literature unite in affirming that this master of the palinode was sincere in all his startling changes of attitude, and continued to worship liberty under many dubious aspects. At any rate, he had a remarkable gift of expression and infused new life into various outworn forms of verse. He reflects faithfully the mental oscillations of a people in travail; whether or no an individual should sway in this manner is a question that does not concern us here.
- ↑ Cf. his description of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, where he invokes the Muses to sing the praises of the Saint:—
Tendete, Arciere d'ammirabil canto,
Musici dardi al saettato Santo.