Renaissance in Italy Volume IV Part 19

[353] _Ibid._ pp. 99, 105.

[354] See Child's _English and Scottish Ballads_, vol. ii. pp. 244, _et seq._

[355] Bolza, _Canz. Pop. Comasche_, No. 49. Here is the Scotch version from Lord Donald:

What will ye leave to your true-love, Lord Donald, my son?

What will ye leave to your true-love, my jollie young man?

The tow and the halter, for to hang on yon tree, And lat her hang there for the poisoning o' me.

[356] This is the Scotch version, with the variant of Lord Randal:

What gat ye to your dinner, Lord Randal, my son?

What gat ye to your dinner, my handsome young man?

I gat eels boiled in broo; mother, make my bed soon, For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down.

What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randal, my son?

What became of your bloodhounds, my handsome young man?

O, they swelled and they died; mother, make my bed soon, For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down.

[357] In Pa.s.sano's _I Novellieri Italiani in Verso_ I find, at p. 20, the notice of a poem, in octave stanzas, which corresponds exactly to the _Heir of Lynn_. Published at Venice, 1530, 1531, 1542, it bears this t.i.tle: "Essempio dun giovane ricchissimo; qual consumata la ricchezza: disperato a un trave si sospese. Nel qual il padre previsto il suo fatalcorso gia molti anni avanti infinito tesoro posto havea, et quello per il carico fraca.s.sato, la occulta moneta scoperse." The young man's name is Fenitio. I have not seen this poem, and since it is composed in _ottava rima_ it cannot be cla.s.sed exactly with the _Avvelenato_. Pa.s.sano also catalogues the _Historia di tre Giovani disperati e di tre fate_, and the _Historia di Leon Bruno_, which seem to contain ballad elements.

CHAPTER V.

POPULAR RELIGIOUS POETRY.

The Thirteenth Century--Outburst of Flagellant Fanaticism--The _Battuti_, _Bianchi_, _Disciplinati_--Acquire the name of _Laudesi_--Jacopone da Todi--His Life--His Hymns--The _Corrotto_--Franciscan Poetry--Tresatti's Collection--Grades of Spiritual Ecstasy--Lauds of the Confraternities--Benivieni--Feo Belcari and the Florentine Hymn-writers--Relation to Secular Dance-songs--Origins of the Theater--Italy had hardly any true Miracle Plays--Umbrian _Divozioni_--The Laud becomes Dramatic--Pa.s.sion Plays--Medieval Properties--The Stage in Church or in the Oratory--The _Sacra Rappresentazione_--A Florentine Species--Fraternities for Boys--Names of the _Festa_--Theory of its Origin--Shows in Medieval Italy--Pageants of S. John's Day at Florence--Their Machinery--Florentine _Ingegnieri_--Forty-three Plays in D'Ancona's Collection--Their Authors--The Prodigal Son--Elements of Farce--Interludes and Music--Three Cla.s.ses of _Sacre Rappresentazioni_--Biblical Subjects--Legends of Saints--Popular _Novelle_--Conversion of the Magdalen--a.n.a.lysis of Plays.

The history of popular religious poetry takes us back to the first age of Italian literature and to the discords of the thirteenth century. All Italy had been torn asunder by the internecine struggle of Frederick II.

with Innocent III. and Gregory IX. The people saw the two chiefs of Christendom at open warfare, exchanging anathemas, and doing each what in him lay to render peace and amity impossible. Milan resounded to the shrieks of _paterini_, burned upon the public square by order of an intolerant pontiff. Padua echoed with the groans of Ezzelino's victims, doomed to death by hundreds and by thousands in his dungeons, or cast forth maimed and mutilated to perish in the fields. The southern provinces swarmed with Saracens, whom an infidel Emperor had summoned to his aid against a fanatical Pope. It seemed as though the age, which had witnessed the a.s.sertion of Italian independence and the growth of the free cities, was about to end in a chaos of bloodshed, fire and frantic cruelty. The climax of misery and fury was reached in the Crusade launched by Alexander IV. against the tyrants of the Trevisan Marches.

When Ezzelino died like a dog in 1259, the maddened populace believed that his demon had now been loosed from chains of flesh, and sent forth to the elements to work its will in freedom. The prince of darkness was abroad and menacing. Though the monster had perished, the myth of evil that survived him had power to fascinate, and was intolerable.

The conscience of the people, crazed by the sight of such iniquity and suffering, bereft of spiritual guidance, abandoned to bad government, made itself suddenly felt in an indescribable movement of religious terror. "In the year 1260," wrote the Chronicler of Padua,[358] "when Italy was defiled by many horrible crimes, a sudden and new perturbation seized at first upon the folk of Perugia, next upon the Romans, and lastly on the population of all Italy, who, stung by the fear of G.o.d, went forth processionally, gentle and base-born, old and young, together, through the city streets and squares, naked save for a waist-band round their loins, holding a whip of leather in their hands, with tears and groans, scourging their shoulders till the blood flowed down. Not by day alone, but through the night in the intense cold of winter, with lighted torches they roamed by hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands, through the churches, and flung themselves down before the altars, led by priests with crosses and banners. The same happened in all villages and hamlets, so that the fields and mountains resounded with the cries of sinners calling upon G.o.d. All instruments of music and songs of love were hushed; only the dismal wail of penitents was heard in town and country."

It will be noticed that this fanaticism of the Flagellants began among the Umbrian highlands, the home of S. Francis and the center of pietistic art, where the pa.s.sions of the people have ever been more quickly stirred by pathos than elsewhere in Italy. The _Battuti_, as they were called, formed no mere sect. Populations of whole cities, goaded by an irresistible impulse, which had something of the Dionysiac madness in it, went forth as though a migration of the race had been initiated. Blind instinct, the intoxication of religious frenzy, urged them restlessly and aimlessly from place to place. They had no Holy Land, no martyr's shrine, in view. Only the ineffable horror of a coming judgment, only the stings of spiritual apprehension, the fierce craving after sympathy in common acts of delirium, the allurements of an exaltation shared by thousands, drove them on, lugubrious herds, like Maenads of the wrath of G.o.d. This insurgence of all cla.s.ses, swelling upward from the lowest, gaining the middle regions, and confounding the highest in the flood of one promiscuous mult.i.tude, threatened the very fabric of society.[359] Repentance and compunction, exhibited upon a scale of such colossal magnitude, attended by incidents of such impa.s.sioned frenzy, a.s.sumed the aspect of vice and of insanity. Florence shut her gates to the half-naked _Battuti_. At Milan the tyrants of the Della Torre blood raised 600 gibbets as a warning. Manfred drew a military cordon round his southern States to save them from contagion.

The revival was diagnosed by cold observers as an epidemic, or as a craving akin to that which sets in motion droves of bisons on a trackless plain. It needed drastic measures of Draconian justice to curb a disease which threatened the whole nation. Gradually, the first fury of this fanatical enthusiasm subsided. It was but the symptom of moral and intellectual bewilderment, of what the French would call _ahuriss.e.m.e.nt_, in a race of naturally firm and patient fiber. Yet, when it pa.s.sed, durable traces of the agitation remained. Lay fraternities were formed, not only in Umbria and Tuscany, but in almost all provinces of the peninsula, who called themselves _Disciplinati di Gesu Cristo_.

These societies aimed at continuing the ascetic practices of the Flagellants, and at prolonging their pa.s.sion of penitence in a more sober spirit. Scourging formed an essential part of their observances, but it was used with decency and moderation. Their const.i.tution was strictly democratic, within limits sanctioned by the clergy. They existed for the people, supplementing and not superseding the offices of the Church. From the date of their foundation they seem to have paid much attention to the recitation of hymns in the vernacular. These hymns were called _Laude_. Written for and by the people, they were distinguished from the Latin hymns of the Church by greater spontaneity and rudeness. No limit of taste or literary art was set to the expression of a fervent piety. The Lauds dwelt chiefly on the Pa.s.sion of our Lord, and were used as a stimulus to compunction. In course of time this part of their system became so prominent that the _Battuti_ or _Disciplinati_ acquired the milder t.i.tle of _Laudesi_.[360]

From the _Laudesi_ of the fourteenth century rose one great lyric poet, Jacopone da Todi, whose hymns embrace the whole gamut of religious pa.s.sion, from tender emotions of love to somber antic.i.p.ations of death and thrilling visions of judgment. Reading him, we listen to the true lyrical cry of the people's heart in its intolerance of self-restraint, blending the language of erotic ecstasy with sobs and sighs of soul-consuming devotion, aspiring to heaven on wings sped by the energy of human desire. The flight of his inebriated piety transcends and out-soars the strongest pinion of ecclesiastical hymnology. Such lines as--

Fac me plagis vulnerari, Cruce hac inebriari Ob amorem filii--

do but supply the theme for Jacopone's descant. Violently discordant notes clash and mingle in his chords, and are resolved in bursts of ardor bordering on delirium. He leaps from the grotesque of plebeian imagery to pictures of sublime pathos, from incoherent gaspings to sentences pregnant with shrewd knowledge of the heart, by sudden and spontaneous transitions, which reveal the religious sentiment in its simplest form, unspoiled by dogma, unstiffened by scholasticism. None, for example, but a true child of the people could have found the following expression of a desire to suffer with Christ[361]:

O Signor per cortesia Mandame la malsania A me la freve quartana la contina e la terzana, la doppia cottidiana Colla grande ydropesia.

A me venga mal de dente Mal de capo e mal de ventre, a lo stomaco dolor pungente en canna l'asquinantia.

Mal de occhi e doglia de fianco e la postema al lato manco tyseco me ionga enalco e omne tempo la frenesia.

Agia el fegato rescaldato la milza grossa el ventre enfiato, lo polmone sia piagato Con gran tossa e parlasia.

In order to understand Jacopone da Todi and to form any true conception of the medium from which his poems sprang, it is necessary to study the legend of his life, which, though a legend, bears upon its face the stamp of truth. It is an offshoot from the Saga of S. Francis, a vivid utterance of the times which gave it birth.[362] Jacopone was born at Todi, one of those isolated ancient cities which rear themselves upon their hill-tops between the valleys of the Nera and the Tiber, on the old post-road from Narni to Perugia. He belonged to the family of the Benedetti, who were reckoned among the n.o.blest of the district. In his youth he followed secular studies, took the degree of Doctor of Laws, and practiced with a keen eye for gain and with not less, his biographer hints, than the customary legal indifference for justice. He married a beautiful young wife, whom he dressed splendidly and sent among his equals to all places of medieval amus.e.m.e.nt. She was, however, inwardly religious. The spirit of S. Francis had pa.s.sed over her; and unknown to all the crowd around her, unknown to her husband, she practiced the extremities of ascetic piety. One day she went, at her husband's bidding, to a merry-making of the n.o.bles of Todi; and it so happened that "while she was dancing and taking pleasure with the rest, an accident occurred, fit to move the greatest pity. For the platform whereupon the party were a.s.sembled, fell in and was broken to pieces, causing grievous injury to those who stood upon it. She was so hurt in the fall that she lost the power of speech, and in a few hours after died. Jacopo, who by G.o.d's mercy was not there, no sooner heard the sad news of his wife than he ran to the place. He found her on the point of death, and sought, as is usual in those cases, to unlace her; but she, though she could not speak, offered resistance to her husband's unlacing her. However, he used force and overcame her, and unlaced and carried her to his house. There, when she had died, he unclothed her with his own hands, and found that underneath those costly robes and next to her naked flesh she wore a hair-shirt of the roughest texture. Jacopone, who up to now had believed his wife, since she was young and beautiful, to be like other women, worldly and luxurious, stood as it were astonished and struck dumb when he beheld a thing so contrary to his opinion.

Wherefore from that time forward he went among men like to one who is stunned, and appeared no longer to be a reasonable man as theretofore.

The cause of this his change to outward view was not a sudden infirmity of health, or extraordinary sorrow for the cruel death of his wife, or any such-like occurrence, but an overwhelming compunction of the heart begotten in him by this ensample, and a new recognition of what he was and of his own wretchedness. Wherefore turning back to his own heart, and reckoning with bitterness the many years that had been spent so badly, and seeing the peril in which he had continued up to that time, he set himself to change the manner of his life, and even as he had lived heretofore wholly for the world, so now he resolved to live wholly for Christ."

Jacopone's biographer goes on to tell us how, after this shock, he became an altered man. He sold all his goods and gave away his substance to the poor, retaining nothing for himself, but seeking by every device within his power to render himself vile and ridiculous in the eyes of men. At one time he stripped himself naked, and put upon his back the trappings of an a.s.s, and so appeared among the gentles of his earlier acquaintance. On another occasion he entered a company of merry-making folk in his brother's house without clothes, smeared with turpentine and rolled in feathers like a bird.[363] By these mad pranks he acquired the reputation of one half-witted, and the people called him Jacopone instead of Messer Jacopo de' Benedetti. Yet there was a keen spirit living in the man, who had determined literally to become a fool for Christ's sake. A citizen once bought a fowl and bade Jacopone carry it to his house. Jacopone took the bird and placed it in the man's family vault, where it was found. To all remonstrances he answered with a solemnity which inspired terror, that _there_ was the citizen's real home. At the end of ten years spent in self-abas.e.m.e.nt of this sort, Jacopone entered the lowest rank of the Franciscan brotherhood. The composition of a Laud so full of spiritual fire that its inspiration seemed indubitable, won for the apparent madman this grace. There was something n.o.ble in his bearing, even though his actions and his utterance proved his brain distempered. No fear of h.e.l.l nor hope of heaven, says his biographer, but G.o.d's infinite goodness and beauty impelled him to embrace the monastic life and to subject himself to the severest discipline. Meditating on the Divine perfection, he came to regard himself as "entirely hideous, vile and stinking, beyond the most abominable carrion." It was part of his religious exaltation to prove this to himself by ghastly penances, instead of seeking to render his body a fit temple for G.o.d's spirit by healthy and clean living. He had a carnal partiality for liver; and in order to mortify this vile affection he procured the liver of a beast and hung it in his cell. It became putrid, swarmed with vermin, and infected the convent with its stench.

The friars discovered Jacopone rejoicing in the sight and odor of this corruption. With sound good sense they then condemned him to imprisonment in the common privies; but he rejoiced in this punishment, and composed one of his most impa.s.sioned odes in that foul place. Still, though he was clearly mad, he had the soul of a Christian and a poet.

His ecstasies were not always repugnant to our sense of delicacy.

Contemplating the wounds of Christ, it entered into his heart to desire all suffering which it could be possible for man to undergo--the pangs of all the souls condemned to purgatory, the torments of all the d.a.m.ned in h.e.l.l, the infinite anguish of all the devils--if only by this bearing of the pains of others he might be made like Christ, and go at length, the last of all the world, to Paradise. Not only the pa.s.sion but the love of Jesus inflamed him with indescribable raptures. He spent whole days in singing, weeping, groaning, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. "He ran," says the biographer, "in a fury of love, and under the impression that he was embracing and clasping Jesus Christ, would fling his arms about a tree."

It is not possible to imagine more potent workings of religious insanity in a distempered and at the same time n.o.bly-gifted character. That obscene antipathy to nature which characterized medieval asceticism, becomes poetic in a lunatic of genius like Jacopone. Nor was his natural ac.u.men blunted. He discerned how far the Papacy diverged from Christianity in practice, and a.s.sailed Boniface VIII. with bitterest invectives. Among other prophetic sayings ascribed to him, we find this, which corresponds most nearly to the truth of history: "Pope Boniface, like a fox thou didst enter on the Papacy, like a wolf thou reignest, and like a dog shalt thou depart from it." For his free speech Boniface had him sent to prison; and in his dungeon, rejoicing, Jacopone composed the finest of his Canticles.

Such was the man who struck the key-note of religious popular poetry in Italy, and whose Lauds may be regarded as the germ of a voluminous literature. Pa.s.sing from his life to his writings, it will suffice to give a few specimens of those hymns which are most characteristic of his temper. We have already seen how he brought together the most repulsive details of disease, in order to express his desire to suffer with Christ.[364] Here is the beginning of a canticle in praise of the madness he embraced with a similar object[365]:

Senno me pare e cortesia empazir per lo bel messia.

Ello me fa s gran sapere a chi per dio vol empazire en parige non se vidde ancor si gran phylosofia.

These words found an echo after many years in Benivieni's even more hysterical hymn upon divine madness, which was subst.i.tuted in Savonarola's Carnivals for the _Trionfi_ of Lorenzo de' Medici.

A trace of the Franciscan worship of poverty gives some interest to a hymn on the advantages of pauperism. The theme, however, is supported with solid arguments after the fashion of Juvenal's _vacuus viator_[366]:

Povertate muore en pace, nullo testamento face, la.s.sa el mondo como jace e la gente concordate.

Non a judice ne notaro a corte non porta salaro, ridese del omo avaro che sta en tanta anxietate.

Truer to the inebriation of Jacopone's piety are the following stanzas, incoherent from excess of pa.s.sion, which seem to be the ebullition of one of his most frenzied moments[367]:

Amore amore che si mai ferito altro che amore non posso gridare, amore amore teco so unito altro non posso che te abbracciare, amore amore forte mai rapito lo cor sempre si spande per amore per te voglio pasmare: Amor ch'io teco sia amor per cortesia: Fammi morir d'amore.

Amor amor Jesu so gionto aporto amor amor Jesu tu m'ai menato, amor amor Jesu damme conforto amor amor Jesu si m'ai enflammato, amor amor Jesu pensa lo porto fammete star amor sempre abracciato, con teco trasformato: En vera caritate en somma veritate: De trasformato amore.

Amor amore grida tuttol mondo amor amore omne cosa clama, amore amore tanto se profondo chi piu t'abraccia sempre piu t'abrama, amor amor tu se' cerchio rotondo con tuttol cor chi c'entra sempre t'ama, che tu se' stame e trama: chi t'ama per vestire cusi dolce sentire: Che sempre grida amore.

Amor amor Jesu desideroso amor voglio morire a te abracciando, amor amor Jesu dolce mio sposo amor amor la morte l'ademando, amor amor Jesu si delectoso tu me t'arendi en te transformando, pensa ch'io vo pasmando: Amor non so o me sia Jesu speranza mia: Abyssame en amore.

A still more mysterious depth is sounded in another hymn in praise of self-annihilation--the Nirvana of asceticism[368]:

Non posso esser renato s'io en me non so morto, anichilato en tucto el esser conservare, del nihil glorioso nelom ne gusta fructo, se Dio non fal conducto che om non cia que fare, o glorioso stare en nihil quietato, lontellecto posato e laffecto dormire.

Ciocho veduto e pensato tutto e feccia e bruttura pensando de laltura del virtuoso stato, nel pelago chio veggio non ce so notatura faro somergitura del om che anegato sommece inarenato nonor de smesuranza vincto de labundanza del dolce mio sire.

One of Jacopone's authentic poems so far detaches itself in character and composition from the rest, and is so important, as will shortly be seen, for the history of Italian dramatic art, that it demands separate consideration.[369] It a.s.sumes the form of dialogue between Mary and Christ upon the cross, followed by the lamentation of the Virgin over her dead Son. A messenger informs the Mother that Christ has been taken prisoner:

Donna del Paradiso, Lo tuo figliolo e priso, Jesu Cris...o...b..ato.

Accurre, donna, e vide Che la gente l'allide; Credo che llo s'occide, Tanto l'on flagellato.

Attended by the Magdalen, whom she summons to her aid, Mary hurries to the judgment-seat of Pilate, and begs for mercy:

O Pilato, non fare 'L figlio mio tormentare, Ch'io te posso mostrare Como a torto e accusato.