Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 11

Nothing but the brilliance of the poet's wit reconciles us to his revelation of perversity. Aretino, by the animation of his sketches, by his prurient delight in what is vile, makes us comprehend that even the _Mandragola_ was possible. Machiavelli stands outside his subject, like Lucifer, fallen but disdainful. Aretino is the Belial who acknowledges corruption for his own domain. Ariosto and Machiavelli are artists each in his kind perfect. Aretino is an _improvvisatore_, clever with the pen he uses like a burin.

It would be difficult to render an account of the comedies produced by the Italians in the sixteenth century, or to catalogue their authors. A computation has been made which reckons the plays known to students at several thousands. In spite of this extraordinary richness in comic literature, Italy cannot boast of a great comedy. No poet arose to carry the art onward from the point already reached when Aretino left the stage. The neglect that fell on those innumerable comedies, was not wholly undeserved. It is true that their scenes suggested brilliant episodes to French and English playwrights of celebrity. It is true that the historian of manners finds in them an almost inexhaustible store of matter. Still they are literary lucubrations rather than the spontaneous expression of a vivid nationality. Nor have they the subordinate merit of dealing in a scientific spirit with the cardinal vices and follies of society. We miss the original plots, the powerful modeling of character, the philosophical insight which would have reconciled us to a _Commedia erudita_.

When we examine the plays of Firenzuola, Cecchi, Ambra, Gelli, Il Lasca, Doni, Dolce, we find that a hybrid form of art had been established by the practice of the earlier playwrights. This hybrid implied Plautus and Terence as a necessary basis. It adopted the fusion of Latin arguments with Italian manners which was so ably realized by Ariosto and Machiavelli. It allowed something for the farce traditions which the Rozzi made fashionable at Rome. It a.s.sumed ingredients from the _Burle_ and _Novelle_ of the marketplace, reproduced the language of the people, and made use of current scandals to give piquancy to its conventional plots. But notwithstanding the admixture of so many modern elements, the stereotyped Latinism of its form rendered this comedy unnatural.

Ingenious _contaminatio_, to use a phrase in vogue among Roman critics, was always more apparent than creative instinct.

The _Commedia erudita_ presented a framework ready-made to the playwright, and easily accepted on the strength of usage by the audience he sought to entertain. At the same time it left him free, within prescribed limits, to represent the manners of contemporary life. The main object of a great drama "to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," is thrust into the second rank; and the most valuable portions of these clever works of skill are their episodes--such scenes, for example, as those which in the _Aridosio_ of Lorenzino de' Medici reveal the dissoluteness of conventual customs in a scholastic _rifacimento_ of the _Adelphi_ and the _Mostellaria_.[226] Had the fusion of cla.s.sical and modern elements been complete as in the _Epicoene_ of Jonson, or had the character-drawing been masterly as in Moliere's _Avare_, we should have no cause for complaint. But these are just the qualities of success missed by the Italian playwrights. Their studies from nature are comparatively slight. Having exhibited them in the presentation of the subject or introduced them here and there by way of interludes, they work the play to its conclusion on the lines of Latinistic convention.[227]

[Footnote 226: _Lorenzino de' Medici_, Daelli, Milano, 1862.]

[Footnote 227: The pseudo-cla.s.sical hybrid I have attempted to describe is a.n.a.logous in its fixity of outline to the conventional framework of the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_, which allowed a playwright the same subordinate liberty of action and saved him the trouble of invention to a like extent. It may here be noticed that the Italians in general adopted stereotyped forms for dramatic representation.

Harlequin, Columbine, and Pantaloon, the Bolognese doctor, the Stenterello of Florence, the Meneghino of Milan, and many other dramatic types, recognized as stationary, yet admitting of infinite variety in treatment by author or actor, are notable examples. In estimating the dramatic genius of Italy this tendency to move within defined and conventional limits of art, whether popular or literary, must never be forgotten.]

Such being the form of _cinque cento_ comedy, it follows that its details are monotonous. The characters are invariably drawn from the ranks of the rich burgher cla.s.ses; and if we may trust the evidence furnished by the playwrights, the morality of these cla.s.ses must have been of an almost inconceivable baseness. We survey a society separated from the larger interests than elevate humanity, without public ambition or the sense of national greatness, excluded from the career of arms, dead to honor, bent upon sensual enjoyment and petty intrigues. The motive which sustains the plot, is illicit love; but in its presentation there is no romance, nothing to cloak the animalism of an unchecked instinct. The young men who play the part of _primi amorosi_, are in debt or without money. It is their object to repair their fortunes by a rich marriage, to secure a maintenance from a neighbor's wife they have seduced, to satisfy the avarice of a greedy courtesan, or to conceal the results of an intrigue which has brought their mistress into difficulties. From the innumerable scenes devoted to these elegant and witty scapegraces, it would be difficult to glean a single sentence expressive of conscience, remorse, sense of loyalty or generous feeling. They submit to the most odious bargains and disreputable subterfuges, sacrificing the honor of their families or the good fame of the women who depend upon them, to the attainment of some momentary self-indulgence.[228] Without respect for age, they expend their ingenuity in robbing their parents and exposing their fathers to ridicule.[229] Nor is it possible to feel much sympathy for the elders, who are so brutally used. The old man of these comedies is either a superannuated libertine, who makes himself ridiculous by his intrigues with a neighbor's wife, or a parsimonious tyrant, or else an indulgent rake, who acts the pander for his good-for-nothing rascal of a son.[230] Mere simpletons like Machiavelli's Nicia, or Aretino's Messer Maco, furnish another type of irreverent age, unredeemed by the comic humor of Falstaff or the gigantic l.u.s.ts of Sir Epicure Mammon.

Between son and father the inevitable servant plays the part of clever rogue. It is he who weaves the meshes of the intrigue that shall cut the purse-strings of the stingy parent, blind the eyes of the husband to his wife's adultery, or cheat the creditor of his dues. Our sympathy is always enlisted on the side of the schemers; and however base their tricks may be, we are invited to applaud the success which crowns them. The girls are worthy of their lovers. Corrupted by nurses; exposed to the contaminating influences of the convent; courted by grooms and servants in their father's household; tampered with by infamous duennas; betrayed by their own mothers or intrusted by their fathers to notorious prost.i.tutes; they accept the first husband proposed to them by their parents, confident in the hope of continuing clandestine intrigues with the neighbor's son who has seduced them.[231] The wives are such as the _Novelle_ paint them, yielding to the barest impulses of wantonness, and covering their debauchery with craft that raises a laugh against the husbands they have cozened. Such are the main actors, the conventional personages, of the domestic comedy. The subordinate characters consist of parasites and flatterers; ignorant pedants and swaggering _bravi_; priests who ply the trade of pimps; astrologers who thrive upon the folly of their clients; doctors who conceal births; prost.i.tutes and their attendant bullies; compliant go-betweens and rapacious bawds; pages, street urchins, and officers of justice. The adulterous intrigue required such minor persons as instruments; and it often happens that scenes of vivid comic humor, dialogues of the most brilliant Tuscan idiom, are suggested by the interaction of these puppets, whose wires the clever valet and the _primo amoroso_ pull.

[Footnote 228: Cinthio's conduct towards Emilia in the _Negromante_ is a good instance.]

[Footnote 229: See above, p. 163, note, for Cleandro in the _Mandragola_; and compare Alamanno's conversation with his uncle Lapo, his robbery of his mother's money-box, and his reflections on the loss he should sustain by her re-marriage, in Gelli's _La Sporta_ (act iii.

5; ii. 2). Camillo's allusions to his father's folly in Gelli's _Errore_ (act iv. 2) are no less selfish and heartless. Alamanno's plot to raise a dower by fraud (_La Sporta_, iv. 1) may be compared with Fabio's trick upon his stepmother in Cecchi's _Martello_. In the latter his father takes a hand.]

[Footnote 230: Ghirigoro in Gelli's _Sporta_, Gherardo in Gelli's _Errore_, Girolamo in Cecchi's _Martello_. It is needless to multiply examples. The a.n.a.lyses of Machiavelli's comedies will suffice.]

[Footnote 231: It would be easy to ill.u.s.trate each of these points from the comedies of Ariosto, Cecchi, Machiavelli, Lorenzino de'

Medici; to which the reader may be referred _pa.s.sim_ for proof.]

The point of interest for contemporary audiences was the _burla_--the joke played off by a wife upon her husband, by rogues upon a simpleton, by a son upon his father, by a servant on his master's creditors, by a pupil on his pedantic tutor. Accepting the conditions of a comedy so constructed, and eliminating ethical considerations, we readily admit that these jokes are infinitely amusing. The scene in Gelli's _Sporta_ where Ghirigoro de' Macci receives the confidences of the youth who has seduced his daughter, under the impression that he is talking about his money-box, is not unworthy of Moliere's _Avare_.

Two scenes in Gelli's _Errore_, where Gherardo Amieri, disguised as an old woman, is tormented by a street urchin whom his son has sent to teaze him, and afterwards confronted by his angry wife, might have adorned the _Merry Wives of Windsor_.[232] Cecchi's comedies in like manner abound in comical absurdities, involving exquisitely realistic pictures of Florentine manners.[233] For the student of language, no less than for the student of Renaissance life, they are invaluable.

But the similarity of form which marks the comedies of the _cinque cento_, renders it impossible to do justice to their details in the present work. I must content myself with the foregoing sketch of their structure derived from the perusal of such plays as were accessible in print, and with the further observation that each eminent dramatist developed some side of the common heritage transmitted by their common predecessors. Thus Firenzuola continued the Latin tradition with singular tenacity, adapting cla.s.sical arguments in his _Lucidi_ and _Trinuzia_ to modern themes with the same inimitable transparency of style he had displayed in his _rifacimento_ of the _Golden a.s.s_.[234]

Gelli adapted the _Aulularia_ in his _Sporta_, and closely followed the _Clizia_ in his _Errore_. The devotion professed for Machiavelli by this playwright, was yielded by Cecchi to Ariosto; and thus we notice two divergent strains of tradition within the circle of Florentine art.[235] Cecchi was a voluminous dramatic writer. Besides his comedies in _sdrucciolo_ and _piano_ verse, he composed _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ and plays of a mixed kind derived from a free handling of that elder form.[236] While Gelli and Cecchi severally followed the example of Machiavelli and Ariosto, Il Lasca attempted to free the Italian drama from the fetters of erudite convention.[237]

His comedies are exceedingly witty versions of _Novelle_, forming dramatic pendants to his narratives in that style. Yet though he strove to make the stage a mirror of contemporary customs, he could not wholly escape from the mannerism into which the dramatic art had fallen. Nor was it possible, now that the last gleam of liberty had expired in Italy, when even Florence accepted her fate, and the Inquisition was jealously watching every new birth of the press, to create what the earlier freedom of the Renaissance had missed. The drama was condemned to trivialities which only too faithfully reflected the political stagnation, and the literary trifling of a decadent civilization.[238]

[Footnote 232: _Opere di Gio. Battista Gelli_ (Milano, 1807), vol.

iii.]

[Footnote 233: _Commedie di Giovan Maria Cecchi_, 2 vols., Lemonnier.]

[Footnote 234: _Opere di Messer Agnolo Firenzuola_ (Milano, 1802), vol. v.]

[Footnote 235:

E 'l divino Ariosto anco, a chi cedono Greci, Latini e Toscan, tutti i comici.

Prologue to _I Rivali_.

Ma che dir di te, spirito ill.u.s.tre, Ariosto gentil, qual lode fia Uguale al tuo gran merto, al tuo valore?

Cede a te nella comica palestra Ogni Greco e Latin, perche tu solo Hai veramente dimostrato come Esser deve il principio, il mezzo e 'l fine Delle comedie, etc.

_Le Pellegrine_, Intermedio Sesto, published by Barbera, 1855.]

[Footnote 236: See the "Esaltazione della Croce," _Sacre Rappresentazioni_, Lemonnier, vol. iii. Compare those curious hybrid plays, _Il Figliuolo Prodigo_, _La Morte del Re Acab_, _La Conversione della Scozia_, in his collected plays (Lemonnier, 1856). _Lo Sviato_ may be mentioned as another of his comedies derived from the _Sacre Rappr._ with a distinctly didactic and moral purpose.]

[Footnote 237: See Prologue to _La Strega_, and above, p. 124.]

[Footnote 238: I reserve for another chapter the treatment of the Pastoral, which eventually proved the most original and perfect product of the Italian stage.]

It is worthy of notice, as a final remark upon the history of the comic stage, that at this very moment of its ultimate frustration there existed the germ of a drama a.n.a.logous to that of England, only waiting to be developed by some master spirit. That was the _Farsa_, which Cecchi, the most prolific, original and popular of Florentine playwrights, deigned to cultivate.[239] He describes it thus: "The _Farsa_ is a new third species between tragedy and comedy. It enjoys the liberties of both, and shuns their limitations; for it receives into its ample boundaries great lords and princes, which comedy does not, and, like a hospital or inn, welcomes the vilest and most plebeian of the people, to whom Dame Tragedy has never stooped. It is not restricted to certain motives; for it accepts all subjects--grave and gay, profane and sacred, urbane and rude, sad and pleasant. It does not care for time or place. The scene may be laid in a church, or a public square, or where you will; and if one day is not long enough, two or three may be employed. What, indeed, does it matter to the _Farsa_? In a word, this modern mistress of the stage is the most amusing, the most convenient, the sweetest, prettiest country-la.s.s that can be found upon our earth."[240] He then goes on to describe the liberty of language allowed in the _Farsa_, rounding off a picture which exactly applies to our Elizabethan drama. The _Farsa_, in the form it had a.s.sumed when Cecchi used it, was, in fact, the survival of an ancient, obscure species of dramatic art, which had descended from the period of cla.s.sical antiquity, and which recently had blent with the traditions of the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_. Had circ.u.mstances been favorable to the development of a national drama in Italy, the popular elements of the Pagan farce and the medieval Mystery would have naturally issued through the _Farsa_ in a modern form of art a.n.a.logous to that produced in England. But the Italians had, as we have seen, no public to demand the rehabilitation of the _Farsa_; nor was Cecchi a Shakspere, or even a Marlowe, to prove, in the face of Latinizing playwrights, that the national stage lay in its cradle here. It remained for the poets of a far-off island, who disdained Italian _jigs_ and owed nothing to the _Fa.r.s.e_ of either Florentine or Neapolitan contemporaries, acting by instinct and in concert with the sympathies of a great nation, to take this "sweetest, prettiest country-la.s.s" by the hand and place her side by side with Attic Tragedy and Comedy upon the supreme throne of art.

[Footnote 239: The t.i.tles of his _Fa.r.s.e_ given by D'Ancona are _I Malandrini_, _Pittura_, _Andazzo_, _Sciotta_, _Romanesca_.]

[Footnote 240: Prologue to the _Romanesca_, Firenze, Cenniniana, 1874.]

The Italian comedies offer an even more startling picture of social vice than the _Novelle_.[241] To estimate how far they represent a general truth, is difficult; especially when we remember that they were written in a conventional style, to amuse princes, academicians, and prelates.[242] Comparing their testimony with that of private letters and biographical literature (the correspondence, for example, of Alessandra degli Strozzi, Alberti's treatise on the Family, and statements gleaned from memoirs and _Ricordi_), we are justified in believing that a considerable difference existed at the commencement of this epoch between public and domestic manners in Italy; between the Court and the home, the piazza and the fireside, the diversions of fashionable coteries and the conversation of friends and kinsmen. The family still retained some of its antique simplicity. And it was not as yet vitiated by the inst.i.tution of Cicisbeism. But the great world was incredibly corrupt. Each Court formed a nucleus of dissolute living. Rome, stigmatized successively by men so different as Lorenzo de' Medici, Pietro Aretino, Gian-Giorgio Trissino, and Messer Guidiccioni, poisoned the whole Italian nation. Venice entertained a mult.i.tude of prost.i.tutes, and called them _benemeritae_ in public acts.

Since, therefore, these centers of aristocratic and literary life drew recruits from the burgher and rural cla.s.ses, the strongholds of patriarchal purity were continually being sapped by contact with fashionable uncleanliness. And thus in the sixteenth century a common standard of immorality had been subst.i.tuted for earlier severity of manners. The convulsions of that disastrous epoch, following upon a period of tranquillity, during which the people had become accustomed to luxury, submerged whole families in vice. "Wars, famines, and the badness of the times," wrote Aretino, "inclining men to give themselves amus.e.m.e.nt, have so debauched all Italy (_imputtanita tutta Italia_), that cousins and kinsfolk of both s.e.xes, brothers and sisters, mingle together without shame, without a shadow of conscience."[243] Though it is preposterous to see Aretino posing as a censor of morals, his acuteness was indubitable; nor need we suppose that his acquaintance with the disease rendered him less sagacious in detecting its causes. What Corio tells us about Lodovico Sforza's capital, what we read about the excess of luxury into which the n.o.bles of Vicenza and Milan plunged, amid the horrors of the French and Spanish occupation, confirms his testimony.[244] After the Black Death, described by Matteo Villani, the Florentines consoled themselves for previous sufferings by an outburst of profligate and reckless living. So now they sought distraction in unbridled sensuality. Society was in dissolution, and men lived for the moment, careless of consequences. The immorality of the theater was at once a sign and a source of this corruption. "O times! O manners!" exclaims Lilius Giraldus:[245] "the obscenities of the stage return in all their foulness. Plays are acted in every city, which the common consent of Christendom had banned because of their depravity. Now the very prelates of the faith, our n.o.bles, our princes, bring them back again among us, and cause them to be publicly presented. Nay, priests themselves are eagerly ambitious of the infamous t.i.tle of actors, in order to bring themselves into notoriety, and to enrich themselves with benefices."

[Footnote 241: Dolce in the Prologue to his _Ragazzo_ says that, immodest as a comedy may be, it would be impossible for any play to reproduce the actual depravity of manners.]

[Footnote 242: What I have already observed with regard to the _Novelle_--namely, that Italy lacked the purifying and enn.o.bling influences of a real public, embracing all cla.s.ses, and stimulating the production of a largely designed, broadly executed literature of human nature--is emphatically true also of her stage. The people demand greatness from their authors--simplicity, truth, n.o.bleness.

They do not shrink from grossness; they tolerate what is coa.r.s.e. But these elements must be kept in proper subordination. Princes, petty coteries, academies, drawing-room patrons, the audience of the antechamber and the boudoir, delight in subtleties, _doubles entendre_, scandalous tales, Divorce Court arguments. The people evokes Shakspere; the provincial Court breeds Bibbiena.]

[Footnote 243: _Cortigiana_, act ii. sc. 10.]

[Footnote 244: See Corio, quoted in _Age of the Despots_, p. 548, note 1. For Milanese luxury, Bandello, vol. i. pp. 219 _et seq._; vol. iv.

p. 115 (Milan edition, 1814). For Vicenza, Morsolin's _Trissino_, p.

291.]

[Footnote 245: _De Poet. Hist._ Dial. 8. Giraldi may have had men like Inghirami, surnamed "Phaedra," and Cardinal Bibbiena in view.]

It must not be supposed that the immorality of the comic stage consists in the license of language, incident or plot. Had this been all, we should hardly be justified in drawing a distinction between the Italians of the Renaissance and our own Elizabethan playwrights.

It lies far deeper, in the vicious philosophy of life paraded by the authors, in the absence of any didactic or satirical aim. Moliere, while exposing evil, teaches by example. A canon of goodness is implied, from which the deformities of sin and folly are deflections.

But Machiavelli and Aretino paint humanity as simply bad. The palm of success is awarded to unscrupulous villainy. An incapacity for understanding the immutable power of moral beauty was the main disease of Italy. If we seek the cause of this internal cancer, we must trace the history of Italian thought and feeling back to the age of Boccaccio; and we shall probably form an opinion that misdirected humanism, blending with the impieties of a secularized Papacy, the self-indulgence of the despots, and the coa.r.s.e tastes of the _bourgeoisie_, had sapped the conscience of society.

CHAPTER XII.

PASTORAL AND DIDACTIC POETRY.

The Idyllic Ideal--Golden Age--Arcadia--Sannazzaro--His Life--The Art of the _Arcadia_--Picture-painting--Pontano's Poetry--The Neapolitan Genius--Baiae and Erida.n.u.s--Eclogues--The Play of _Cefalo_--Castiglione's _Tirsi_--Rustic Romances--Molza's Biography--The _Ninfa Tiberina_--Progress of Didactic Poetry--Rucellai's _Api_--Alamanni's _Coltivazione_--His Life--His Satires--Pastoral Dramatic Poetry--The _Aminta_--The _Pastor Fido_--Climax of Renaissance Art.

The transition from the middle ages to the Renaissance was marked by the formation of a new ideal, which in no slight measure determined the type of Italian literature. The faiths and aspirations of Catholicism, whereof the _Divine Comedy_ remains the monument in art, began to lose their hold on the imagination. The world beyond the grave grew dim to mental vision, in proportion as this world, through humanism rediscovered, claimed daily more attention. Poliziano's contemporaries were as far removed from Dante's apprehension of a future life as modern Evangelicals from Bunyan's vivid sense of sin and salvation. This parallel, though it may seem strained, is close enough to be serviceable. As the need of conversion is taken for granted among Protestants, so the other world was then a.s.sumed to be real. Yet neither the expectation of heavenly bliss nor the fear of purgatorial pain was felt with that intense sincerity which inspired Dante's cantos and Orcagna's frescoes. On both emotions the new culture, appearing at one moment as a solvent through philosophical speculation, at another as a corrosive in the skeptical and critical activity it stimulated, was acting with destructive energy. The present offered a distracting tumult of antagonistic pa.s.sions, harmonized by no great hope. The future, to those inexperienced pioneers of modern thought, was dim, although the haze, through which the vision came to them, seemed golden. Thus it happened that the sensibilities of men athirst for some consoling fancy, took refuge in the dream of a past happy age. Virgil's description of Saturn's reign:

Au reus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat, Necdum etiam audierant inflari cla.s.sica, necdum Impositos duris crepitare incudibus enses:

fascinated their imagination, and they amused themselves with the fiction of a primal state of innocence. Hesiod and the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Idyls of Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues, legends of early Greek civility, and romances of late Greek literature contributed their several elements to this conception of a pastoral ideal. It blent with Biblical reminiscences of Eden, with medieval stories of the Earthly Paradise. It helped that transfusion of Christian fancy into cla.s.sic shape, for which the age was always striving.[246] On one side the ideal was purely literary, reflecting the artistic instincts of a people enthusiastic for form, and affording scope for their imitative activity. But on the other side it corresponded to a deep and genuine Italian feeling. That sympathy with rustic life, that love of nature humanized by industry, that delight in the villa, the garden, the vineyard, and the grove, which modern Italians inherited from their Roman ancestors, gave reality to what might otherwise have been but artificial. Vespasiano's anecdote of Cosimo de' Medici pruning his own fruit-trees; Ficino's description of the village feasts at Montevecchio; Flamminio's picture of his Latin farm; Alberti's tenderness in gazing at the autumn fields--all these have the ring of genuine emotion. For men who felt thus, the Age of Gold was no mere fiction, and Arcady a land of possibilities.

[Footnote 246: See above, Part i. p. 170, for the Golden Age in the _Quadriregio_.]