f I LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANDtEQO L ^Q > THE UNIVERSITY LIBRAKY WIYER3ITY 6F IALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGi > fr ^^. U JOLLA. CALIFORNIA of ^European iLiteratttre EDITED BY PROFESSOK SAINTSBURY V. THE EAKLIEE EENAISSANCE PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE, EDITED BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY. A COMPLETE AND CONTINUOUS HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT. In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. Price 5s. net each. " The criticism, which alone can much help us for the future is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result." MATTHEW ARNOLD. I. The DARK AGES Professor W. P. KER. II. The FLOURISHING OP ROMANCE AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY . THE EDITOR. [.Ready. III. The FOURTEENTH CENTURY . . F. J. SNELL. [Ready. IV. The TRANSITION PERIOD . G. GREGORY SMITH. (Ready. V. The EARLIER RENAISSANCE . . THE EDITOR. [Ready. VI. The LATER RENAISSANCE . . . DAVID HANNAY. [Ready. VII. The FIRST HALF OF 17TH CENTURY . Professor H. J. C. GRIERSON. VIII. The AUGUSTAN AGES .... OLIVER ELTON. [Ready. IX. The MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . J. H. MILLAR. [Shortly. X. The ROMANTIC REVOLT . . . Professor C. E. VAUGHAH. XI. The ROMANTIC TRIUMPH . . . T. S. OMOKD. (Ready. XII. The LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY THE EDITOR. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON. '/L4^jHAi> U THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE BY GEOEGE SAINTSBUKY, M.A. PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MCMI All Rights reserved PREFACE. OF the difficulties, as regards delimitation of frontiers, in the designing and editing of a History of Euro- pean Literature by periods, none are more obvious beforehand, or more substantial in experience, than those connected with the all-important and interesting time of the Renaissance. To that word in general, and to the signification commonly and generally at- tached to it, no serious objection need be taken, when the possible error of supposing any death, or even suspended animation, in the rich and vigorous litera- ture of the Middle Ages is once guarded against. The effect produced on literature by the revived study of the classics, direct from the originals, is a fact of which it is equally impossible to deny the reality or to contest the importance. But it is no less a fact, though a much more complicated one, that this in- fluence was exerted at different times in different countries, and in different manners at different times VI PREFACE. in the same country. Thus, for instance, some, not without plausibility, have carried the Eenaissance in Italy as far back as Petrarch, if not even as far back as Dante authors dealt with, and necessarily dealt with, not even in the volume preceding this, but in the volume preceding that. 1 Still, one of those exercises of the communis sensus, which are generally right, has regarded the Eenais- sance of Literature in Europe as not practically be- ginning till the fifteenth century was far advanced, nay, till the various but converging influences of the capture of Constantinople, the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the final uprising against the ecclesiastical tyranny of Eome had been successively brought to bear. And without further argument on the point of right, we may say that for the purposes of this book " The Earlier Eenaissance " means the closing years of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth the time when, the study of Greek having previously come to support and correct that of Latin in Italy, the full classical culture was transmitted from Italy herself to France and England, and so helped to install, in forms which cannot even to this day be said to have been wholly antiquated, the two greatest literatures of Europe. It is this process the " Italianation," as the Eliza- bethans called it, of France and of England which forms for History the central interest of the period, 1 See The Fourteenth Century. PREFACE. Vll and therefore of the volume. As regards Italy herself the interest is somewhat less great as are some of the names that have to be mentioned as Italian. Such minority is almost necessarily implied in the mere fact of such influence itself, which is, in ac- cordance with a general law, never fully exerted abroad till the forces producing it have passed their first period of energy at home. Ariosto is great his greatness has been, I think, of late years rather in- sufficiently acknowledged by critics. But it is only necessary to compare him, I do not say with Dante (for the First Three are not in comparison save as standards), but with such a far lower kind of genius as Boccaccio's, to see that the stationary state, if not exactly the age of decadence, has been reached. The poet of the Orlando is, indeed, as much greater in individual gift than Boccaccio as he is lesser than Dante ; but he wants " the wild freshness of morning," the relish of the quest, the closeness to nature and life. His luxuriant imagination turns at times and in parts to the lower, the secondary kinds of literature, to burlesque and grotesque. Compare him again with Spenser, his debtor certainly, though hardly his imi- tator, and the difference of a falling and a rising tide of poetry will be easily seen. Of the other literatures German presents a problem engagingly interesting in character and most conveni- ently limited in extent the problem of discovering why the triple influence of Greek and Latin and Vlli PREFACE. Italian failed to do for her what it did for English and for French ; while the companion but different problem of Spanish has been already dealt with in Mr Hannay's volume. 1 The rest require only very slight treatment. On the other hand, we have in this period, more than in most, the interest of certain general divisions, departments, or kinds of literature which are peculiar to none of the languages, but appear in all. The first of these is the New Drama ; the second, the Eevival of Criticism; the third, that of Latin writing, which is really literature. This last we have here almost for the last time, and in a more considerable degree than in any volume of our history save that dealing with the Dark Ages, when most of the vernaculars were unborn. It may be questioned whether any man of our time, except Ariosto and Rabelais, has the literary value intrinsic as distinguished from influential and symptomatic of Erasmus, and Erasmus is nothing if not a Latinist. The allotment of the first and the longest chapter in the volume to this phenomenon may therefore not seem excessive. The bibliography of the subject is enormous to give it in any detail would quite overload the notes. Almost every recent German writer seems addictus jurare in verba of L. Geiger, Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland. For Italy, the names of Gregorovius, Burckhardt, Villari, and 1 See The Later Renaissance. PREFACE. ix many others need no mentioning, save to those who are not likely to take an interest in them. For France, MM. Darmesteter and Hatzfeldt's Scizieme Siecle en France (Paris, 1878), though it takes the unpretentious form of a collection of extracts for students, with introductions and notes, is one of the very best pieces of literary-historical work that have been produced for many a year and decade. It so happens, however, that as regards great part of the subject we need not go beyond English for text-books of quite exceptional excellence both in information and original power. To Eoscoe, who led the way some century ago with his still famous Leo the Tenth and Lorenzo de' Medici, there is doubtless due the credit not merely of having produced these capital works, but of having stimulated his country- men to follow in his steps. A little later the name of Hallam is to be mentioned with the usual and thoroughly deserved praise for width and co-ordina- tion of knowledge, and for the constant endeavour to maintain a judicial attitude ; but also with the usual caution as to the defects of his qualities, shown in his absence of enthusiasm, his distrust of anything ab- normal or extravagant, and as to his necessary ignor- ance of much that is now easily accessible. Mr Symonds' well - known Renaissance in Italy, nearly half of which is devoted to our subject, is both peccant and virtuous in exactly opposite kinds: his fluency and exuberance of language contrasting with X PREFACE. Hallam's measured dignity as his engouement and excess contrast with Hallam's rigid justice. But I am bound to say that the more I know of the subject, the better, with some important allowances, do I think of The Renaissance in Italy. With regard to France, Mr Arthur Tilley's most promising intro- ductory volume, 1 now sixteen years old, has unfortu- nately never been followed up ; but as an Introduction it is excellent. As for German, Professor Herford's Literary Relations of England and Germany (Cam- bridge, 1886) is one of the most thorough of English literary monographs, and has a far wider bearing on the general subject than its title would necessarily indicate. Mr Fronde's Erasmus, with the usual de- fects which infuriate pedants against its author, has, in measure hardly affected at all by age, that author's qualities of artistic-historic grasp, of vivid presentment, and of admirable style ; while Mr Seebohm's earlier Oxford Reformers has stood the test of examination by more than a generation of specialists with almost unsurpassed success. He who, not being a specialist all round, enters a province so infested with vigorous specimens of the kind, carries his literary life more than usually in his hands. I found, indeed, when I was arranging this series, that more than one actual specialist was too mucli afraid of the others, in the subdivisions of the period not specially his own, to venture upon it. So 1 The Literature of the Fnench Renaissance. Cambridge, 1885. PREFACE. XI it fell to the Editor to undertake the adventure ; let him at least hope to emerge from it an Eckius not too much dedolatus. 1 I should, in conclusion, like, now that the History of which this volume is the seventh has gone so far on its way, to point out, if it be not improper, that neither this volume nor any other of the series to which it belongs aims primarily at being what I have seen its predecessors sometimes called in reviews, a " text - book," a scholastic or academic manual. It is, as was fully explained in its general prospectus, and as should have been evident to any careful reader of any of its volumes, an attempt to do, with the enormous additional material which has accumulated during great part of a century, what Hallam did with the very much smaller resources at his disposal; and to do it by more hands than one, because no single hand could well suffice. It is, in- deed, hoped that, in whole or in part, it may be of service, and very great service, to students of litera- ture in statu pupillari ; but that is not its sole nor even its main purpose. It is principally intended to perform for the educated and intelligent reader the same function which a historical atlas of the better kind performs for him in another department to give a connected, a critical, and a comparative view of the Literature of Europe. And while its several volumes have been planned so as to be reasonably complete in 1 Vide infra, p. 99. Xll PREFACE. themselves, they, like the several maps of such an atlas, are necessarily interdependent, and complemen- tary of each other. I must acknowledge very particularly the assistance I have received in this volume from Mr Gregory Smith, who read my proofs with the greatest profit to me. EDINBURGH, August 1901. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. PAGE Beasons for beginning with this subject, and for the space devoted to it The position and history of Humanism in 1500 The accomplishment of the earlier Humanists in classics Their relation to the vernacular Work of the Humanists of the late Fifteenth century in both Humanism in relation to the North- ern vernaculars Instances of the Colloquies, the Utopia, &c. Distribution of the subject Latin verse in Italy Politian Pontanus Vida Fracastoro Sannazar Bern bo Sadoleto Castiglione Navagero Flanaiuio Molza and others The Quinque Poetce Hetrusci and the Anthology of Ubaldini Transalpine Latin verse : France Johannes Secundus and his imitators Other Latin verse: German English Buchanan His prose The Psalms and their Dedication The De Sphcera The minor poems Later Latin poetry Macaronic verse Folengo His life And minor works The Zanitonella The Baldus or the Macaronea itself Latin Prose-writing Erasmus The Colloquies Their relation to the future novel The Encomium Morice More : the Utopia The EpistolafQb- scurorum Virorum Eckius Dedolatus The Facetiae Letters 1 XIV CONTENTS. CHAPTER II. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. Italian literature, c. 1500 The Italian literary temper Ariosto His life His work : the minor poems The Orlando Its qualities as romance Desultoriness Its sarcasm and licence Brilliancy of style and verse Story-character Of Italian romance generally Italian humour Both as in Ariosto Scenes, persons, and passages Ariosto's rank as poet, and as mirror of his time Ariosto and Rabelais Other epic-romances Lyrics : Sonnets, La Casa Madrigals and Canzoni Ariosto Michelangelo Molza Vittoria Colonna Guidiccioni Italian Didactic and Blank Verse The Capitoli, &c. Prose- writers Machiavelli and Guicciardini Minor historians The Novellieri Bandello Cinthio Firenzuola and Grazzini Straparola Miscellaneous prose : Letters, Dialogues Aretino Miscellanies of Gelli, Firenzuola, Bembo, Varchi, Caro Castiglione and The Courtier ..... 103 CHAPTER III. FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. Some backwardness in the French Renaissance The Rhetoriq-ueur school The artificial forms of poetry The Italian influence Sub-periods Minor writers of the early sixteenth century Collerye, Bouchet, Jehan du Pontalais Clement Marot His life Character and importance of his poetry The Psalms and other work Rabelais The problem of him His life Gar- gantua and Pantagruel Their general form and scheme Fantastic notions on the subject Really a satirical criticism of life Comparative quality of the satire The style Short running commentary General remarks Calvin Value of the Institution in style Minorities of the mid-century Mar- guerite de Valois The Heptameron Bonaventure des Periers The Nouvelles Recreations The Cymbalum Mundi Mellin de Saiut-Gelais Magny, Tahureau, Louise Labe . . 176 CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER IV. THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. Opening and general character of the period in England Causes of these In language, grammar, and metre In prose style In drama More Ely ot Theological polemic Latimer The translators and littirgists Puzzles of their work Its iinsur- passed literary quality The Cambridge prose-men Cheke Wilson His Art of Rhetoric "Ink-horn terms" Ascham The position and work of Wyatt and Surrey Their poetic value Their models and masters Their means and methods The English sonnet The "Poulter's Measure," &c. Blank verse Some others Tusser and Heywood The Proverbs and Epigrams ....... 231 CHAPTER V. THE GERMAN VERNACULAR. Poverty of German not quite intelligible but certain The exploit of Luther General characteristics of his writings His prose His verse Ulrich von Hutten Hans Sachs His literary character The Fabeln und Schwdnke The Fastnachlspiele Miscellaneous light literature Volkslicder Lergreihen Goedeke and Tittmauu's Liederluch . . . 284 CHAPTER VI. THE CHANGES OF EUROPEAN DRAMA. The two influences Their limited working in Italy Early Italian tragedy Early comedy : its distinguished practitioners Bibbiena Aretino Ariosto Machiavelli General style of their plays Grazzini, Cecchi, &c. The artificial Latin play In France Buchanan's tragedies In High and Low Germany Volder's Acolastus Birck's Susanna The^wta and Rebelles of Macropedius Kirchmayer's Pammachius Vernacular XVI CONTENTS. drama hi France Gringore Other drama The farces-r-Mys- teries and moralities Drama in England The interlude John Heywood His pieces Some other interludes John Bale Kyng Johan Its position as first of Chronicle Plays And in itself . 321 CHAPTER VII. THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM. The Middle Ages necessarily uncritical The Benaissance neces- sarily critical but with limitations Character and reasons of these The actual rise and progress of Italian criticism Its far-reaching importance, and connection with the formation of modern literature Upshot of it Vida Lilius Giraldns Giraldi Cinthio J. C. Scaliger His Poetic Castelvetro His ideas on drama and epics ..... 373 CHAPTER VIII. THE MINOR LITERATURES CONCLUSION. . Norse The Danish Ballads Dutch Rederikers The Slavonic lan- guages : Hungarian The age not specially an age of reason The importation of the old and development of the new Other influences East and West The Reformation The great work, the fashioning of the vernaculars : achievements and illustrations In Latin In vernacular Its lack of the highest charm The compensations The chief accomplishment . 399 INDEX 419 THE EAELIER EENAISSANCE, CHAPTEE I. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. REASONS FOR BEGINNING WITH THIS SUBJECT, AND FOR THE SPACE DEVOTED TO IT THE POSITION AND HISTORY OF HUMANISM IN 1500 THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE EARLIER HUMANISTS IN CLASSICS THEIR RELATION TO THE VERNACULAR WORK OF THB HUMANISTS OF THE LATE FIFTEENTH CENTURY IN BOTH HUMAN- ISM IN RELATION TO THE NORTHERN VERNACULARS INSTANCES OF THE 'COLLOQUIES,' THE 'UTOPIA,' ETC. DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT LATIN VERSE IN ITALY POLITIAN PONTANUS VIDA FRACASTORO SANNAZAR BEMBO SADOLETO CASTIGLIONE NAVAGERO FLAMINIO MOLZA AND OTHERS THE ' QUINQUE POET.E HETRUSCI ' AND THE ANTHOLOGY OF UBALDINI TRANS- ALPINE LATIN VERSE : FRANCE JOHANNES SECUNDUS AND HIS IMITATORS OTHER LATIN VERSE : GERMAN ENGLISH BUCHANAN HIS PROSE THE PSALMS AND THEIR DEDICATION THE ' DE SPH^RA' THE MINOR POEMS LATER LATIN POETRY MACARONIC VERSE FOLENGO HIS LIFE AND MINOR WORKS THE ' ZANITON- ELLA' THE 'BALDUS' OR THE 'MACARONEA' ITSELF LATIN PROSE- WRITING ERASMUS THE ' COLLOQUIES ' THEIR RELATION TO THE A 2 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. FUTURE NOVEL THE 'ENCOMIUM MORIjE 5 MORE: THE 'UTOPIA* THE ' EPISTOL.fi OBSCURORUM VIRORUM ' ' ECKIUS DEDOLATUS ' THE ' FACETI.fi ' LETTERS. IN beginning this volume with a chapter on the Latin writings, prose and verse, of the period with which it .Reasons/or deals, not without a certain glance before beginning with and after at other work of the same class, thit subject, and .. . for the space de- it is not necessary to prefix many general voted to it. remarks. But it would be improper to prefix none. In no other of the volumes of this History of European Literature, except the second, has a special chapter been, or will one be, devoted to Latin writing. And here as there, though to a somewhat less degree, an apology is required for the comparative brevity of the treatment of the subject. Not merely a whole volume, but half-a-dozen volumes might very well be devoted to Latin literature from the fifth to the eighteenth century ; for it was not till the latter was far advanced that literature, except of the technical kind or representing the mere pastime of scholars, ceased to be written in the universal language. And it is doubtful whether any one, except some accidental specialist, would now be competent to write them. In fact, Dr Johnson was probably the last great man of letters in any part of Europe who can be said to have been actually fitted for the task. On the other hand, such a book, when written, would, in regard to most of the periods, be very much of a work of super- erogation, or at the best a history of curiosities ; and it would certainly discuss, outside of philosophy arid religion and a few other divisions of the literature of THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 3 knowledge, very few books of really great merit. We have not omitted, and shall not ornit, to notice the greater Latin work, whether in the literature of know- ledge or in that of power, whensoever it presents itself. But the occasions requiring such notice have been and will be few. At the junction of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- turies, however, as at the junction of the twelfth and thirteenth, the case is altered. Here as there, though for different reasons and with different results, a much greater contingent of positive literary genius turned itself into the channel of Latin writing. In each case the original cause was no doubt the existence partly explicable, partly not of an unusual amount and force of this literary genius, which in the earlier period applied itself to hymn -verse, scholastic philosophy, the flower of Latin mediaeval history, stories and mis- cellanies of all sorts, simply because the vernaculars were not ready to receive it fully. In our present period a similar " spate " of genius and of learning found its way into the Latin channel for reasons equally obvious but not quite so simple. The ver- naculars (with the single exception of Italian, unless we add Spanish) were indeed still not quite fully ready, yet they undoubtedly might have been, and perhaps 1 ought to have been, made sufficiently available. But the New Learning had brought about a partly ex- cusable contempt of these vernaculars ; it had pro- 1 I say perhaps, remembering that the practice of Humanists in Latin invariably did much to perfect the vernaculars that they despised. 4 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. vided men with tempting patterns, as they thought, for all the possible literary styles, and in reality for many of them. Besides this, there was the subtle and not dishonourable temptation to appeal, not to the limited audience of a single tongue and country in a fashion which the choicer spirits even of that country would sincerely or affectedly disdain, but to a Euro- pean Areopagus in its own curial speech. There- fore in these two periods, and in that before us most of all, we must pay to modern Latin an attention which would elsewhere be superfluous. Purists in the subject sometimes call attention to the fact (as it seems to them) that by the beginning of the Sixteenth century, if not by the end of the Fifteenth, the work of Humanism proper was nearly or quite done. The work of the labourer generally is done, as far as all but ingathering is concerned, when the harvest comes ; and the caution, though it may be advantageous in some respects, is superfluous in others. Humanism in at least one sense may be taken to mean, on one side the attempt almost to limit literature to Greek and Latin in the past, on the other to employ Latin and even to some extent Greek, always with preference, and sometimes with scorn of anything else, as a vehicle for literary re- daction in the present and for the future. And this Humanism had not, up to nearly the end of the Fifteenth century, produced any original literature of even the slightest importance in combined matter and form. Nobody, I suppose, considers Petrarch's Africa such a work : Boccaccio's De Genealogia Deorum, in its THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 5 later part at anyrate a work of the highest interest in substance, might be in any language for any advantage that it derives from the language it actually uses. As for the Fifteenth century proper, its one great Latin book, the Imitation, is in thought and in form irreconcilably opposed to Humanism : the spirit of both can enter no house of the soul save by casting that of Humanism utterly out. On the other hand, the great books of revived classical Latin, or would-be classical Latin, on the Humanist side the Colloquies, the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum, the Utopia are all books of the Sixteenth century ; and the first half of that century, our own more special period, probably produces more such Latin literature of the first and second class than all other periods from the Fif- teenth century to the Nineteenth put together. The course, therefore, of giving Humanist literature a special place here, and even glancing backwards and forwards a little to make the survey of it complete, has almost every justification. That Italian Humanism, from which all other varieties were to spring more or less immediately, The position draws its fount and origin, as such things IfHn^L go from Petrarch, is an accepted datum of t7ii5oo. literary history which need not be attacked or denied. It is, indeed, necessary here as else- where to repeat the warning (so constantly neglected by literary historians, yet so necessary for the literary historian to keep as a sign upon his hand and as a frontlet between his eyes) that such things never really come from an individual that they are winds of the 6 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. spirit blowing no man knows whence, dews of heaven sinking into the earth and reappearing as streams no man knows how. All that we can in such cases justly say is that one man seems to trim his sail before others to the breeze, to hold his pitcher before others to catch the stream. Petrarch certainly does appear to deserve this credit in the present instance. His Latin work has been considered in some detail in an earlier volume of this History, 1 and we need not repeat the consideration. Boccaccio's, a little later in date, is also rather different in kind. It is much less am- bitious in form and much fuller of fact. But both agreed in that eager and almost ferocious quest for the actual writings of antiquity, as to which all sane critics are agreed that it was the work which Human- ism had to do, and the work which it is chiefly to be thanked for doing. And putting the points in which they agreed together with the points in which they differed that is to say, Plutarch's quest for Latin style and Boccaccio's for Latin and Greek knowledge they may be said between them to have very nearly exhausted all that Humanism had of good in germ if not in fulness, with the exception of the purely critical side, which neither shows. To recover and make sure of the riches of antiquity ; to understand them ; to copy them as far as was possible these were the aims of these two great men. Petrarch at least showed something of the coming folly of despising his mother tongue, or affecting to despise it ; but it was not really possible for the author of the Rime to do 1 The Fourteenth Century, p. 247 sq. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 7 this seriously, and so long as he was the author of the Eime it did not much matter whether he was serious or not. He and Boccaccio between them gloriously continued the work of Dante in verse, while Boccaccio extended it in the direction of prose, so far as the vernacular was concerned. What they also did in reference to the learned languages was therefore pure gain in every respect. Not so much can be said of their successors, the travelling scholars and lecturers who represent the first three-quarters of the Fifteenth century. 1 Although it has been generally admitted that these Humanists of the main body did not, as a rule, deserve very well of their mother tongue, yet their services in assuring, not merely to their own age but to all future time, the possession of the inestimable treasures of antiquity have been justly counted to them as more than counterbalancing righteousness. And they have also appealed to the natural appetite for picturesque contrast, and to other appetites not quite so respect- able. The notion of these scholars wandering first over Italy and then over Europe ; rising by their own efforts from the position of penniless nobodies, destitute in many though not in all cases of birth, breeding, or wealth, to that of the familiar and honoured com- panions of princes and prelates ; marrying beautiful, rich, and well-born damsels; allured from state to state and city to city by golden bribes ; setting out in quest of the buried treasures of learning like knights 1 For their relation to the vernacular see The Transition Period, p. 118 sq. 8 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. of adventure; helping to despatch generation after generation of neophytes, often from half - barbarous nations, to spread learning and the appreciation of beauty all over Europe ; honoured in their deaths with stately monuments, and rewarded by posterity for no few generations not merely as good workers in their day and way, but as men of genius and public bene- factors, all this has excited interest neither unnatural nor ungenerous, though perhaps sometimes a little uncritical. Even their much more questionable vir- tues, and their quite unquestionable vices, have also made them interesting. The ludicrous vanity and the cat-like quarrelsomeness which distinguished most of them have not been disagreeable to that somewhat morbid taste for " curiosities of literature," " quarrels of authors," and the like, which undoubtedly does exist in many persons. It is to be feared that the licence, conventional or sincere, of their sentiments and language has not been without a certain attractive effect in some cases. And the devotees of free-thought have not failed to celebrate them as " champions of the modern spirit," as having " vindicated the rights of the human soul," and all the rest of the well-known cant of anti-cant. We have here, fortunately, nothing to do with free- thought, or the rights of the spirit, or any other of the regalia and paraphernalia of this kind of craft or mystery. We have not much, but something (for it is a distinctly literary feature), to do with the peculi- arities which make the lighter work of Beccadelli and Filelfo, of Politian and Pontanus, so exceedingly THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 9 " curious," in the bibliographical sense of that adjective. With the position of the Humanists in literary history and the value of their work as litera- ture, we have a very great deal to do. It is admitted that till we come to the extreme end of the century, the intrinsic value of Humanist work, vernacular or Latin, is exceedingly small, while its critical attitude to literature shows no advance, and even some falling off, from that of the Middle Ages. In regard to the first head, the Facetiae of Poggio and the Euryalus and Lucretia of ./Eneas Sylvius are not exactly great literature, yet it would be difficult to say what better things the early and middle divisions of the century produced. With regard to the second, Vittorino da Feltre, one of the best of the whole school, is admitted to have been the first, and was apparently for a long time almost the only, teacher who was himself alive, and who endeavoured to make his pupils alive, to the differences of style and kind in the writers of antiquity. But, it is said, they gained the classics for us and made them known. If this were wholly, as it is The accomplish- partly true, and if it were the whole of mentoftheear- fa fc fa fa ^ b jj^j nothing IUT Humanists in classics. more to say. But, in the first place, the actual recovery and publication of MSS. was a small part of the work of the Humanists of 1375-1475 ; in the second, a great deal more was previously known than is sometimes allowed ; in the third, the credit is at least not less, perhaps more, due to the princes and merchant-princes who would have these things, than 10 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. to the scholars, who were often little more than their commercial travellers or collectors ; and in the fourth, considering the general trend of thought in all coun- tries, the thing would pretty certainly have been done if these particular men had not done it. But let us grudge them no possible credit for what they did do in this way. They cannot, it may be feared, be said to have done very much in others. Aided by, and aiding, the fash- ion, they were no doubt sometimes good, and always more or less useful, teachers ; but there are good and useful teachers in all times, and the office, alas ! is seldom more than that of the unprofitable servant, who does but what it is his duty to do. They were not, as a rule, good grammarians, and were scarcely ever good critics ; and if it be said that it is ungener- ous to blame them for this, let it be remembered that if they had spent on real study half the time that they wasted on vain jactation, and idle quarrelling, and the composition of indecent verses, they might have made themselves very good grammarians, and much better critics than they were. 1 But the chief mistake and the greatest error of the 1 I should like to except Laurentius Valla (1406(7)-1457) from most, not all, of the strictures in this context. Valla appears to have had not a few of the defects of character of his congeners, and he has benefited rather plus cequo by the tendency which Heterodoxy even more than Orthodoxy has to justify all her children. But his work on Thucydides cannot but receive high admiration, when the time and circumstances are considered ; his conception of Latin style was far beyond his age, and, for the matter of that, beyond most ages ; and altogether he was a critic and a scholar of no ordinary kind, though, perhaps, not a man of letters in the very best sense. THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 11 Humanists, when tried before the high court of serene' historical criticism, is the enormous waste Their relation tothever- of their energies on Latin translation of Greek. It is true that it was the most paying work that they, as working men of letters, could undertake ; but this excuse, though valid up to a point, is not valid beyond that point. It is true also that though, in the reluctant epigram extorted from a defender of theirs, these translations " were done for the most part by Greeks who had an imperfect know- ledge of Latin and by Italians who had not complete mastery of Greek," it would be really ungenerous to lay much stress on this. The important point, from the literary point of view, is that a translation from Greek into Latin could at most do good to the man who made it by improving his own knowledge of the two lan- guages, was but too likely to hinder the study of Greek itself, and could hardly fail to produce the impression that the matter of Greek, and not its literary beauty, was its title to greatness. This process of translation from Greek, not into the vernacular but into Latin, and the concomitant use of Latin itself for original or quasi-original composition, not only could do little or nothing for the progress of the actual vernacular, but were even antagonistic to that progress. The process resembled in no whit the effect produced on English most of all, and on French and German to some extent, by the age-long practice of translation from Latin, and from modern languages, into the actual living tongue. It is to this process that English in particular owes its extraordinary wealth of 12 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. vocabulary, and the unrivalled splendour and variety which, even more than mere wealth, distinguish it. But Italian remained unenriched by any contributions of the kind. Nor could the additional familiarity with Latin itself fail to weaken as well as to refine Italian. For it was a kind of process of " breeding in and in," of pouring in more water where the water had already choked. The wonderful effect l of the blends of Latin and French, which were unceasingly poured into English between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, and which by the latter date had made it a not much more than recognisable descendant of the language of Caednion and Cynewulf, is paralleled by nothing in Italian. On the contrary, the accomplished Italian of our present period is far thinner and weaker than Dante's own, though it may be more elegant ; nor does the language seem ever to have fortified itself since. The Fifteenth century was the great time of this process of fortification in all other European tongues, and the missing of the opportunity was, at least partly, the fault of the Humanists. It may, however, be urged, with some show of reason, that at the end of the period immediately pre- ceding our own, no small atonement was made - Most assuredl 7 the g reat Flor - century in both, entines and Neapolitans, whose vernac- ular work has been fully noticed in the preceding 1 It is strange that the obstinate refusal to recognise this fact and its consequences should still continue. But some very recent English scholarship of the philological kind seems as hopelessly blind to it as was Guest himself. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 13 volume, 1 JEueas Sylvius, Sannazar, Pontanus, Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandula, and above all Politian, whether they write entirely in Latin, or, like Sannazar and Politian, are masters of either in- strument ; they provide literature of an accomplished kind in both classes of writing; they advance, refine, reform the literary quality. Once more we must not deny the truth of this ; yet once more it will be difficult for even the greatest representatives of Humanism at this time to make good any very much higher claims than those secure and great ones, of having been the channels and the distributors of classical learning to countries and to individuals that could make better use of it than themselves. For throughout in the Utraquists as well as in the Monoglots, in Politian and Sannazar as in Piccolomini and Pontano the fault and the mischief of the Humanist position are seen in the strange unrealities of many kinds, which mar their vernacular and their "regular" work alike. Everything is out of focus. The famous transference of the Pagan ecclesiastical dictionary to Christian use ; the employment of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to designate the divinity whose worshippers, in the very towns where the words were written, had been cast to the lions for refusing to worship the said Jupiter ; the fitting of the whole terminology of Latin ritual into the services of the Christian Church ; the sincere horror, late in our own period, of an equally sincere Christian like Lilius 1 The Transition Period, chaps, iv. and xii. 14 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Giraldus at the person who, si Deo placet I wanted of Sannazar dictionem Christianam id est barbaram ; other well-known and often-quoted things, which it is not necessary to quote again, merely give the results of this mischief in one particular direction. The evil was, in fact, all-pervading in literature. The Latin poets themselves had gone beyond measure, and certainly far beyond the Greeks, in appropriating stock imagery, stock characters, stock phrases, to different literary kinds ; but the Humanists out-aped them twenty-fold. To the practice of this time, and to its criticism a little later (see chapter vii.) are due the " pastoral " frippery which revolted even such a sturdy Latinist and neo-classic as Dr Johnson, and which, to make it quite tolerable, requires the superhuman poetry of a Milton or a Shelley, the tawdry and tumbled finery of the " heroic poem," with its cut-and- dried exordia and invocations, its cut-aud-dried super- natural interferences, its cut-and-dried revolutions, its cut-and-dried everything. In those who did not write Italian the principle and its practice produced at best pastiche; in those who wrote Italian as well, they produced something which was not only pastiche but patchwork. Even the great Politiau, the man who really might, without much absurdity, have echoed Filelfo's absurd boast that he could write as well in Greek as in Latin, and as well in Italian as in either, suffers (at least in some judgments) terribly from this mixture, and from the sense of unreality, of the school exercise, of the copy of verses. And all the others suffer much more. THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 15 The circumstances of the more northern nations in reference to the study and practice of the classical, Humanism in especially the Latin, tongues were remark- r Sorthcrn the abl 7 different. In the first place, no one vernaculars, of them had ready to hand a vernacular of anything like the advancement and polish of Tuscan Italian. Even French, which had not merely the most abundant but the most brilliant literature of all, a literature with which Italian itself could only vie by restricting the competition to the greatest individuals and not admitting mass or variety of work, was still very immature, and had, by the latter part of the fifteenth century, rather gone back than advanced. French prose in particular was behindhand, and simply did not yet exist in any form suited to the majority of modern purposes. The Germans, Low and High, had fallen off still more remarkably from the promise which Middle High German had given of poetic beauty and Middle Low of quaint originality; so that the vernacular German of our present period is, outside Luther, one of the most unliterary tongues in Europe. Indeed Latin of a kind played more of the part of "second vernacular" to Germans in the late Middle Ages than perhaps to any other people. As for English, it had had one poet (as even Italians e.g., Lilius Giraldus knew) of quite the first order, but it could hardly be said to have a second. The prose was behind France, and had only recently gone beyond Germany : the poetry was in a pitiable state of eclipse and disorganisation, and the very language was still in process of formation. The isolated and 16 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. peculiar offshoot of literary Scottish-English was itself a kind of grammatica, an artificial literary tongue, though with strong and racy dialect character. Pro- ven^al was practically dead for literature ; and the remoter Scandinavian had also finished its long and glorious season of productiveness. The languages of the Peninsula stood, in the aspect now being con- sidered, nearly in the position of Italian. Besides, their vernacular literature is dealt with fully else- where, 1 and they supplied few great Humanists. For all the others Latin supplied in- differing de- grees, but really and to their utmost benefit, the aids which, in reference to Italian, were mistakenly and superfluously demanded of it. To all it gave a prose medium infinitely superior, for the miscellaneous pur- poses of prose, to their vernacular, and intelligible to all educated Europeans, as that vernacular could not possibly be. To all (though here the differing measure becomes very important) it supplied vehicles for those kinds of verse for which as yet their vernacular was not polished enough, or not supple enough, or insufficiently supplied with vocabulary. To all it provided models of style of admirable accom- plishment and adaptability, which (even for French to some extent, for the others to a very much greater) had the advantage of being slightly different from the native idiom and construction, and therefore of crossing, blending, strengthening, and varying that idiom's powers. And to all it gave in abundance 1 See The Later Renaissance. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 17 that vocabulary of terms of art, of philosophy, of literature, of business, which they lacked. And so it comes about that while the average fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Latin of the Northern nations is no doubt not at all better in sub- Tnstances of the colloquies, stance, and much worse in form, than the pla> c ' average Humanist Latin of Italy, these countries were justified in using Latin, even for such average purposes, as Italy was not. They were re- warded by sometimes accomplishing in it work which they probably could not have accomplished at all in their own vernaculars, while its circulation would, in these, have been deplorably limited. Let us imagine, but for a moment, the horrible calamity that it would have been to European literature in the strictest sense, as well as to European culture in the widest, if Erasmus had written in Dutch ! This example might be almost sufficient, because everybody can appreciate it. It would not have been quite such a misfortune if he had been a French- man and had written in French, just as it is an im- mense piece of good fortune that men like Rabelais and even Marot did write in French. But French itself would not have fully sufficed for his purposes, which required the language not of Rabelais, not of Calvin, not even of Montaigne, but of Pascal or Descartes at the very earliest that is to say, a language not reached till a full century after his time. And he would have been worse parted still with English. It is (or rather it is not quite) needless B 18 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. to say that More never wrote a line of the Utopia in English. But it is not probable that, if he had so written it or had translated it from his own Latin, or if Ascham or any of his contemporaries had done this, it would be much better than it is in good Master Eichard Eobinson's translation, executed a few years after More's death. Yet those who have only read the English may be excused for sometimes wondering at the reputation of the book, though they may understand it when they read the Latin. In the latter case the instrument of expression is adequate to the thing to be expressed, and if not perfectly, yet sufficiently under the command of the artist. In the other it is not. Compare in a different sphere the Pammachius and its very close English ana- logue Kyng Jokan ; read the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum, and think of what they would have been in even Murner's German. In pure poetry, indeed, the argument fails ; but then in pure poetry no in- telligent critic would ever think of applying it. Pretty, sometimes almost exquisite, as the Basia are, they would have been prettier in Italian, prettier still (Marot has actually made similar things) in French. They would have been prettier in English, and it is just possible that if the author had used his own vernacular, they might, to persons who can taste that language, be prettier in Dutch. But then poetry stands by itself, and as it happens, no vernacular in Europe, except Italian, was very strong in pure poetry at this particular time, so there cannot have been much lost. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 19 But the importance, the general character, and the errors, such as they were, of this Humanist literature Distribution of being thus dealt with, there remains the the subject. difficulty of dealing adequately with itself. Its mass, even if we were to limit ourselves to our strict period, much more if we look before and after, is enormous. To give an example, one of our modern benefactors, who has collected and selected an invalu- able sheaf (v. infra) of the Latin-German poets of the sixteenth century, observes that he thinks he has read about a thousand such. And the volume of miscel- laneous prose must be almost incalculable. Although the newly invented press lent itself with almost too much complaisance to the dissemination of the matter, the chief authorities appear to be agreed that by far the larger part is still in MS. Even of that which was printed much lias never been reprinted, and the original editions, except in public libraries, are made inaccessible to students of moderate means by the entirely unliterary craze for such things on the part of collectors. Yet again it may be pretty freely doubted whether any one but a pure literary hedonist, with a competent fortune and his time to himself, would be justified in devoting this time to the extent necessary for this particular subject. For of almost all divisions of literature, till we come to the mere " book- making" of purely modern days, it is probably that which, in its average development, has least to satisfy not merely the intellect but even the taste. The average Humanist style is confessedly but an imitation of certain few and definite models, and the average 20 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Humanist matter is, as confessedly, quite subordinate to the style. With Cicero and Livy, Virgil and Ovid, actually in our possession, it is surely the tamest of amusements, and the most light-minded of lost labours, to examine whether Henricus Pimpernellus or Johannes Napsius Grseculus Senior has come nearest to or farthest from Ovid or Virgil, Livy or Cicero. And of any story to tell, any solid thesis to prove, any knowledge to convey, even any individual and original fragment of thought to utter, Pimpernellus and Napsius are, as a rule, emulously destitute. Fortunately there are exceptions who can be made representative, not in the sense that their constituents in any but the least degree resemble them, but in the sense that they show at the best what was actually done, and probably at the best or very nearly so what could have been done, what all these constituents would have done if they could. Some of these Erasmus, More, the authors of the EpistolcK Obscurorum are famous ; others are at least known to students ; others have the merit of being accessible with ease or with not much difficulty. It should be possible, by accounts of these varying with their importance, and carefully selected to cover as many departments of literature as possible, to give no inadequate idea of the whole. In two important departments, Criticism and the Drama, to each of which, in consequence of their special eminence in this tract of country, a separate chapter is assigned, it would be in- convenient to disjoin the Latin experts from the THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 21 vernacular, but we shall endeavour to deal with the rest. To deal at all exhaustively with even the Italian verse which resulted from this fancy or fashion not Latin verse quite, as we have seen, so unreasonable in in itui v . j^g origin as unprofitable in its results would require a volume ; 1 but within reasonable space it is possible to note some typical specimens of its producers and their productions. 1 The very Delicice Poctarum Italorum (s.l., 1608), which is the nearest approach to a Corpus of this poetry or poetastry, consists of two enormously thick volumes, one of 1400 the other of 1500 pp. Smaller collections and selections are extremely numerous ; and the odd Italian habit (which Sir Thomas Browne ought to have noticed in the Garden of Cyrus) of arranging them in quincunxes, or at least quintets, may lead to a great deal of confusion. Not merely is the disreputable Quinque Poctarum Lusus in Vencrem quite a different thing from the respectable Quinque Poetarum Hctruscorum Carmina, but the identically same title, Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum, covers two quite different selections that referred to by Mr Symonds (Revival of Learning, p. 337, new ed.), containing Politian, Bembo, Navagero, Castiglione, and Sadoleto ; and an earlier one (Florence, 1552), in which the places of Politian and Sadoleto are taken by Cotta and Flaminio. Pope re-edited a collection (Selecta Poemata Italorum, 2 vols., London, 1740), giving most of Vida and Fracastoro, much of Politian, the curious De Animorum Immortalitate of Aonius Palearius, and plentiful examples of Sannazar and the minors. But perhaps the best book for a reader who does not want to do more than fairly "sample" the subject is the anonymous Poemata Selecta Italorum (Oxford, 1808), which contains the Poetics of Vida, the Syphilis of Fracastoro, the Bcnacus of Bembo, the Ltiocoo'n and Curtius (Oxford should have asked her nodding son, " Why Quintus, sir ? why Quintus 1 ") of Sadolet, with selections from Sannazar, Castiglione, Navagero, Flaminio, Molza, the two Amaltei, Bonfadio, Muretus, and a few minors. Unfortunately, being confined to the sixteenth century, it contains nothing from Politian or Pontanus. 22 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. The two most famous of the poets whom, though directly belonging to the last volume l we borrow for the purposes and under the conventions of this chapter, are Politian (1454-1494) and Pontanus (1426-1503); for it is unnecessary, as it would be unedifying, to do more than glance at the exercitations, more impudent than interesting, of Beccadelli in his Hermaphroditiis. The others, especially Pontanus, may go near to rival him in this respect, but at any rate they have other claims. Politian, indeed, has probably been more fortunate than any writer mentioned in this chapter, except Erasmus, in saving something more than a mere vague general reputation from the devour- PolUian. . ' * . ing efforts of Time on material which was fondly thought proof against the " monster of ingrati- tudes." The Nutricia, the Manto, the Ambra have been praised with discretion and judgment by Mr Symonds in our own day, and it is rather curious that not long after their own they were praised with judg- ment and discretion by Lilius Giraldus, who, as we have just seen, does not always exercise these gifts impeccably. The qualities which helped to restrain the admiration of the sixteenth-century Humanist are not improbably the same which may serve to animate that of the nineteenth or twentieth century critic. Politian's subjects even the most literary are to him the subjects of a real enthusiasm ; and his temper- ament and powers, which, as his vernacular work shows, were both essentially poetic, raise the blood, both of himself and his reader, far above the frigid 1 Vide The Transition Period, chap. iv. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 23 level attained by Naugerius or Bembo. We can always excuse roughness when it is associated with power, and Politian can be both vigorous and sweet. Signor del Lugo's edition 1 (Florence, 1867) containing some unpublished Italian prose and all the extant Latin and Greek verses, presents in more ways than one a striking picture of this typical man of the Italian Renaissance. The word picture is doubly applicable, for it has an actual frontispiece portrait, arresting enough with the wild eyes, the extravagant Eoman nose more of a promontory than even Southey's or Herrick's and the head twisted half round on the wry neck as of one who sees spectres. 2 But the contents of the book speak the author quite as vividly. The sermons actual sermons full of fervour and unction ; the virtuous pedagogic dictations to little Piero de' Medici ; and the graceful courtier - like letters to the Ladies Clarice and Lucrezia (the Italian account of the conspiracy of the Pazzi appears to be a translation by another hand) act in the most startling manner as foils to the unmiti- gated filth and blind fury of the Latin invectives against "Mabilius" the Greek scholar Marullus Politian's successful rival with the beautiful Alessandra Scala. These invectives 3 show not only the worse side of Renaissance manners and morals, but also the worse side from the artistic, not the ethical, point of view, of its imitation of the classics. Politian forgets 1 There is said to be no edition, at once exclusive and complete, of Politian's Latin verse. The fullest seems to be that quoted. 2 Nose and neck did not escape lampooners at the time. 3 Mr Symonds very generously allows them pungency. I fail to see it. 24 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. that even Martial, and still more Catullus, never thought it sufficient to fling at an enemy a mere hand- ful of foul thoughts, swaddled in fouler words that, with the rarest exceptions, they put in wit as well, and generally at least managed to connect, and not merely to combine, obscenity with point. Fortun- ately such things are but a small part of the poet's exercises in " regular " verse ; and in many, if not most, of the others the poetic fire which he assuredly possessed breaks alike through the extraordinary metrical licences of the Greek (which sometimes seems to scan " politically," and not even by the technical accent) and the sometimes prim Virgilisings or Claud- ianisings of the Latin. One may probably be excused the confession of having read very little of the Latin Iliad ; but the Manto and the Ambra, the Rusticus and the Nutricia, can only be missed by any one who can appreciate Latin poetry at all to his great fault and infinite loss, while some of the smaller poems are really nectareous. Pontanus, whose prose is noteworthy as well as his verse, 1 and who wrote constantly in the Pontanus. PTII c T- i learned language, rails short or Politian in poetic quality, but is not destitute of it. The 1 The standard of the verse is the Aldine of 1513. (There is an abundant selection in [Gruter's] Delicice : Pope gives only a few pieces.) I possess a copy of the Lyons edition of the prose a year later. The latter is not of a succulent character, consisting of two Dialogues, Charon and Antonius, both, and especially the latter, con- taining verse as well as prose, and of nearly half a score of moral or political treatises DC Fortitudinc, De Principe, De Liberalitatc, &c. He also wrote History and much else. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM.. 25 error of his Urania, a long astronomical poem in five books, with extensive mythological and other digressions and episodes, is the error of the whole time and kind. It lasted, indeed, so long that there may even seem to some to be a certain impertinence and presumption in calling it an error at all. The errors of his lighter and shorter poems are in the first place the occasional corrupt following of the licence of the ancients less, it would seem, as a matter of hot- blooded sympathy than as a matter of cold-blooded literary convention ; and the less odious mistake of refusing to clothe genuine Italian thought, and cele- brate characteristic Italian scenery, in native Italian verse. But in the Neapolitan, as in the Tuscan poet, there is a certain massiveness and race which we rarely find in their successors, though there is some- thing of it in their younger contemporary Sannazar. 1 Notice of him, however, may be conveniently post- poned in order to discuss first the most solid and characteristic of the Latin verse- writers of our own special time, the poet of the Poetics and the poet of Syphilis. Of the critical value of Vida's 2 celebrated poem we may speak in the chapter specially devoted to criticism. 1 Not only Sannazar, but his rival in pastoral, " Mantuan," Battista Spaguuoli (1436-1516), belongs specially to the last volume, and both have been duly noticed there. The vogue of Mantuan's Latin verse in the sixteenth century was almost incredible. Much as men worshipped Virgil, they did not hesitate to put his modern com- patriot by his side. 2 Marco Girolamo Vida, 1480-1566, born at Cremona, died Bishop of Alba. The Scacchia, Bombyx, and Ars Poctica' appeared, with some hymns, in 1527, the Christmd eight years later. 26 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. But in the case of so famous (if to modern readers, per- haps, rather dimly famous) a person l some- Vida. J . , , thing must be said here about its poetical and literary value. Neither, it is to be feared, even with the amplest allowance which can be made on the general principles of this chapter, can be said to be great. The mere versification of the Poetics leaves a good deal to desire ; the occasional spondaics are not well chosen or adjusted, and though the verses will run trippingly enough for a time, there is generally before long an awkward " pull-up," or a maladroit adjustment of pauses. The phraseology is in one respect a model of the kind, in another a caution against it. It is the very embodiment of the gradus : one seems to move in a sort of snowstorm of minute Virgilian, Ovidian, and other tags, sleeting, like the Lucretian atoms, through a void. For, in truth, Vida's general drift (we still reserve the critical point) is empty enough of really important sense. He invokes the Muses; he addresses Prince Francis at Madrid, is very unhappy that his patron should be in captivity, and suggests that these Poetics may while away the captive's time. There are many kinds of verse ; choose which you like best, only remembering that everybody cannot do everything. The poetic child must be carefully educated, kept from bad language (in the critical sense), taught the poets, but not whipped too much. Emulation is good, but not 1 " Immortal Vida " (Pope) was edited and translated unceasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some half -score French versions are quoted ; the standard English one is Pitt's. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 27 precocity. As he grows up let him try easy subjects first. These commonplaces and their likes fill the first book ; for the contents of the second and third we may refer to a future page. But though there is sometimes common -sense in the meaning, there is never anything but commonplace in the expression. To different tastes (or the same taste in different moods) the Scacchia and the Bovibyx may seem less or more worthy displays of Vida's art, such as it was, than the Poetica ; but this can hardly be the case with the Christiad. This last is an application of his own principles in artificial heroic narrative, (see chap, vii.) to those rebellious subjects on which judges so different in most ways, but so alike in general neo-classic taste, as Boileau and Johnson, agree that the system was inapplicable and im- practicable, and which perhaps went nearer to wrecking Paradise Lost itself than Miltonolaters are always ready to allow. The others are merely exercises in the verse tour de force examples of what the Greek rhetoricians called ecphrasis, elabo- rate and formal description, according to the speci- fications made and provided for such things. The taste for them continued long, and inspired, among other things, Addison's Machines Gesticulantes and Barometer. If not taken too seriously, they are a civil game enough ; and if they be of no great value in themselves, one can only grieve to think that the chief reason of their disuse is the fact that fewer and fewer persons every year go through the practice necessary to appreciate the play. The worst 28 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. of them was that they promoted similar exercises, more or less serious, in the vernacular, which have, to speak frankly, no interest at all. The Cyders and the Arts of Preserving Health and the Fleeces try the catholic spirit in literature perhaps more than any other division of literary production. The once if not now world-famous Syphilis of Fracastoro, 1 belongs partly to this class, but more to another which is also represented in the Fracastoro. . later developments just reterred to the class of pure didactic verse. This, though it is almost demonstrably a bad thing (except as some- times showing that poetry can be poetical in spite of everything), has of course a mighty ancestry from Hesiod in the one great house and Lucretius in the other downwards, and may plead the almost singular claim of having commended itself equally to An- tiquity, the Middle Age, the Renaissance, and the Augustan .period of modernity. The kind of the De Herum Ncdura cannot possibly be stigmatised as a necessarily bad kind; but it is certainly unlike Wisdom, in that it is justified of very few of its children. Fracastoro's poem, if not of the best, is anything but of the worst. What may seem to modern readers the inevitably unsavoury nature of the subject is all but entirely deodorised by the treatment. The disease presented itself to Fracas- 1 Girolamo Fracastoro (1483-1553), Veronese physician and poet. He was a professor at Padua, and also wrote divers Latin treatises on medical and scientific subjects, as well as a remarkable critical Dialogue, Naugcrius, a Joseph in hexameters, and other poems. My copy of his Opera is that in 2 vols., Lugduni, 1591. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 29 toro's contemporaries very mainly, and the poet- physician has himself treated it almost entirely, as a terrible epidemic, if not totally disconnected from any invitation by individual misconduct, yet in at least many cases quite independent of this. He is thus able to treat it, and does treat it, almost exactly as if it were smallpox or scarlet fever; and his setting forth of diagnosis, progress, and treatment is not only purely scientific but void of offence even to non-scientific readers. His medium is a hexameter which has been accused of harshness, but which may seem to some to be rather strong than harsh, and his chief concession to convention is the final story of the shepherd Syphilis (said to be the actual origin of the name). This hero is struck with the disease by the Sun, whose deity he has blasphemed, and cured by the nymph Ammerice (America) with help of the tree Hyacus (Guaiacum). On the whole, the worst thing to be said against the piece is that it could have been done much better in prose. We may now pass to less serious things. Sannazar (1458-1530), who belongs not less, or even more, to the fifteenth century l than to the sixteenth, Sannazar. has received much praise for his Latin poetry. It is certain that he has something of the grace and force of Politian and Pontanus, with some- thing also of the inspiration of the former, when we compare him with the neat prettinesses or the frigid conventions of our actual period. And he is even more "correct." Thus, though he allows himself the 1 See The Transition Period, p. 146 sq. 30 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. lesser licence of the quadrisyllable at the close of a pentameter, he is seldom guilty of the trisyllable, in which some Italians unblushingly wallow ; and his Sapphics are often very agreeable. The Villa Mer- gellina, in particular, is one of the most satisfactory pieces of occasional poetry of the particular class, and almost as much may be said of all the group of poems on the same place and its neighbourhood. For in such pieces, while we admire the grace and skill of the com- position, and are not unpleasantly reminded of our own classical studies, there is neither the tedious length nor the disparate subject of Vida's and Fracastoro's poems to annoy us, nor are we (as in the case of the former's Poetics) likely to be provoked by the contents. In no case does the unreality, which is admittedly the curse of the whole style, strike us less, though it would be rash to say that it does not strike us at all. A fuller acquaintance with San- nazar 1 will riot greatly increase admiration for his Latin poetry. The famous De Partu Virginia is, in spite or because of the enormous pains which he is said to have spent upon it, a frigid production; the almost equally famous Piscatory Eclogues, by a pro- cess which would be ingenious if intended, exhibit, in the very fact of the transposition of scenery and machinery, the defects of the whole style ; and while the severer Epigrams are, even with such inviting subjects as the Borgias, singularly lacking in point, 1 My copy is the useful modern edition opening a series of Mediaeval and Modern Latin Poets, which might have been extended with great advantage (Augsburg, 1833). THE HAHVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 31 few of those dealing with miscellaneous subjects come up to the Mergellina series. I do not think so much can be said of Bembo, 1 the most admired, perhaps, next to Politian, of all these Italian Latinists. His occasional obscenity, whether of the frank or the sniggering kind, need not now much concern us. Little need be said on that vice of the age and country at all here, and what has to be said will be better said in another place. His Latin verse stands accountant to a more strictly literary charge, and one which needs no squearnishness in the discussion of it. There are very many worse poems of the style than the much- admired L'enacus, and perhaps not so very many better ; but hardly any poem shows the weaknesses of the style itself more damningly. It is not very long : the hexameters are for the most part, if not always, fluent and sonorous, and the author shows a real pupilship to Virgil, and not merely the relation of thief to victim, in the skill with which he selects and adjusts the local names of tributary or derived stream and of neighbouring city. But neither the moderate compass, nor the abundant material, nor 1 Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), a Venetian of family. He became the favourite of several popes, a cardinal, Bishop of Bergamo, librarian of St Mark, and historiographer of the State of Venice. His love for Lucrezia Borgia may have been Platonic ; that for his mistress Morosina was certainly not. He was the very Coryphaeus of Ciceronianism, but his Latin prose has faded terribly. He will recur importantly in the next chapter for his vernacular work ; and not his least brilliant connection with literature is the glowing per- oration of the Cortcyiano, in the style of the Phcedrus, which Castig- lione puts in his mouth. 32 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. the tempting scenery, can induce him to describe the latter in a fresh and first-hand way, without dragging in the frippery of gradus and lexicon. It would be cruel and ungallant to object to the Nymphs, but here as elsewhere what do we want with Jupiter ? And even if Jupiter is to be passed, why drag in Bactria, and Scythia, and Thule, and Atlas, and the Caucasus, and the poor Muses once more ? And yet Bembo really loved his native North Italy, could really (as we perceive from his vernacular work) see nature and feel passion. But with him in practice, as with Vida in theory, a literary Monmouth Street is the highway to Parnassus, and nobody can be admitted to the Muses' Court without a Court-dress of old clothes. As one reads this and other poems, an old story comes to mind. There was a schoolboy once who wrote a prize poem on the prescribed subject of Superstition. The head-master a scholar of the old school, now with God, and in his day one of the best of men and scholars admitted that the piece was fair of its kind and duly " crowned " it, as the French would say; but he was not happy. "There's nothing in.it about the sacrifice of Iphigenia," he said mournfully ; " I had expected something about the sacrifice of Iphi- genia." Similar desires were universally prevalent on the part of readers in the sixteenth century, and the writers of Latin verses, to do them justice, were never churlish in gratifying them. The extreme oddity of the Hymn to St Stephen makes it to us a little more piquant, though the contrasts are much the same, and Bembo's elegiacs are not seldom pretty. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 33 With less elegance perhaps, and even with less of the poetical spirit which, as has been said, we can see in Bembo's Italian if not in his Latin, Sadoleto. Sadolet, 1 so often mentioned with the priestly lover of Lucrezia, has a much greater sincerity and depth of tone. The " Laocoon " piece 2 seems to me to deserve rather higher praise than Mr Symonds gives it, and that on Marcus Curtius reinforces the impression given by its companion. Both show not merely a man who is able to think in spheres above those of the mere fribble, the mere voluptuary, or even the mere dilettante, but one who can clothe his thought in words which have a certain quiver and ring in them. That Latin has this timbre there is no question at all ; and it is one of the justest charges to be brought against the Humanists, that, with their far greater command of the language, they so seldom brought out what the hymn -writers of the Middle Ages had not the slightest difficulty in producing. The notable author of the Courtier 3 is another 1 Jacopo Sadoleto of Modena (1477-1547) became secretary to Leo X. and Clement VII., Bishop of Carpentras, and cardinal. He wrote mainly, if not entirely, in Latin, and was one of the best of the Ciceronians, as well as one of the best men of the Italian Renaissance. His Letters are numerous and important. 2 This, like the other shorter pieces in the preceding and following paragraphs, will be found in the Poemata Selccta Italorum noticed above. 3 Baldassaro Castiglione, born at Casatico in 1478. He was a diplomatist of eminence in the papal service, and was much respected by Charles V.; but was long resident at the minor Court of Urbino, which he has made the scene of the Courtier (v. infra, p. 169 sq.) He died at Toledo in 1529. 34 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Latinist in verse of whom we may perhaps think rather better than we have thought of Castiglione. some, and than some have thought of him. He, too, was very fond of subjects taken from or con- nected with Art the " Cleopatra " so called, the " Cupid " of Praxiteles, the Death of Eaphael ; but his best known piece is an elegy on the youthful poet Alcon. This undoubtedly had great influence on suc- ceeding pieces of the kind, including even Lycidas ; but we may, perhaps, incline the parallel between Castiglione and Milton in a somewhat different direc- tion from that which has sometimes been given to it. The weak part both of Alcon and Lycidas is the con- ventional machinery ; but this weakness is not in the Latin poem, as in the English, carried off by the blast and the fire of the poetry. There is more sincerity of personal regret felt or simulated in the Alcon, but the phrasing is mere classical crambe repetita ; and though the hexameters are above the level of the time, they are mere school- work beside " So sinks the day-star," or " Where the great Vision of the guarded mount." Castiglione's prettiest thing seems to me the letter from his wife Hippolyta, which, though of course sug- gested by Ovid, still rings remarkably true among the dead scraps and orts of this verse. The following lines on the absent husband's picture live and breathe most pleasantly, despite that sad arrideo : THE IIAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 35 " Sola tuos vultus referens, Raphaelis imago Picta manu curas allevat usque meas. Huic ego delicias facio, arrideoque jocorque, Alloquor, et tanquam reddere verba queat, Assensu nutuque mihi ssepe ilia videtur Dicere velle aliquid, et tua verba loqui." l Naugerius or Navagero 2 is perhaps best known for the saying, transferred by Dryden. from Martial to Statius, that he burnt a copy of the Ko- Navagero. . . man epigrammatist every year to Virgil s manes. If he did so, it only proved that he was a very silly fellow ; for not only is Martial a model and captain in his own style, but that style is not in the least comparable to the style of epic, and neither the merits nor the drawbacks of any performances in the two could be arranged in competition or contrast. But the story is at least interesting as a contribution to the history of the Virgil-mania of the time. It is also fair to Navagero to say that, though he has nothing like Martial's point, his strength, or the irre- sistibly sly and sudden wit which not seldom deserves the more honourable name of humour, he has other qualities which at least distinguish him very favour- ably from the run of modern Latin poets. The Lusus, which open the collection of his Poems in the Floren- tine Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum (1552), almost hide their artificiality by the extraordinary 1 Op. cit., p. 40. 2 Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), born at Venice, which he repre- sented diplomatically. He preceded Bembo in the librarianship of St Mark. Catullus, not Virgil, seems to have been his real idol. 36 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. grace which has been justly compared rather to the Greek than to the Latin Anthology. It is still all Pan and Faunus and Amyntas, and offerings of violets to Venus, and barkings of Hylax and the like ; but for once the poet has " got the atmosphere," and we are not tormented by any sense of incongruity. The longer pieces in elegiacs and hexameters Aeon, Daphnis, Tolas are able to carry their length ; and though Navagero is not, I think, quite Sannazar's equal at sapphics, he is often very happy with the miscellaneous lyrical metres, especially in the chori- ambics of " Jam cseli reserat fores," and in divers hendecasyllabic essays. Nearly two-thirds of the volume just referred to is tilled with the work of Marcantonio Flaminio, 1 of whom a very much smaller but fairly Flaminio. . J representative selection will also be found in the Oxford Anthology above quoted. Flarainio's poems are chiefly, though not quite wholly, addresses to persons probably the majority of the celebrated Italian men and women of the time figure in his list and they are mainly, though again not wholly, couched in Horatian metres. He can hardly be said to possess in perfection any of the qualities which have been praised as at least occasionally existing in some of his contemporaries the descriptive elegance 1 Flaminio (1498-1550) was, unlike the writers just mentioned, merely a man of letters. He wrote a good deal on subjects both sacred and divine, and had a father and brother whose work in verse was published with his at Paris in 1743. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 37 of Saimazar, the grave fire of Sadoleto, the veracity and nature of Castiglione, the antique grace of Nava- gero ; but he is a fair adept in all these respects. His phrase is sometimes awkward ; for instance " Nunc mulgere mea ruauu capellam Lacteoque liquore membra sicca Irrigare per sestum," doubtless means that he drank the milk. But it liter- ally suggests the singular picture of a person watering his dry limbs with goat's milk as a shop-boy waters the pavement in front of his master's shop. Flaminio is seen at his best in the panegyrical epicede on Vittoria Colonna to Turrianus: nor, despite the un- lucky suggestion in the passage just quoted, has Mr Symonds exaggerated his pleasant love of the country and the pictures which it induces him to draw for us. Nor is he unhappy at more trifling things, such as the felicitation of himself on his verses being sung by Marguerite of Valois the second Marguerite, less gifted than her aunt and less beautiful than her niece of the same name, but, like them, a patroness of men of letters. The somewhat effeminate and morbid, but luscious, muse of Molza l shows herself not much otherwise in 1 Francesco Maria Molza of Modena (1489-1544), a man not free from vices which are reflected in his verse, but of a temper, it would seem, almost as sweet as that verse itself. He had a very learned and poetical granddaughter (1542-1617). The rest of the writers mentioned in this paragraph can be afforded no more biographical notice than their dates. The Amaltei belonged to a family specially prolific in men of letters, some half-dozen between 1460 and 1603 being noticed in even summary biographical dictionaries. 38 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Latin than in Italian dress, though the more masculine Moiza and language does not admit quite such a sleepy others. ripeness as its daughter. Its best example in the older tongue is undoubtedly the poem, " In His Sickness to His Friends," and this l would be better if it were shorter. The Alcaics of Arco (1479-1546) and Capilupo (1511-1580) display not ill the idiosyncrasy of that curious metre which is very rarely achieved in the supremest manner, but in which the execution, un- less it is quite detestable, always rewards the poet for the trouble he takes with it. Giovanni Gotta 2 is very much less successful with it, and is also a special sinner with the trisyllable at the end of a pentameter. But the Vicus Gazanus of Bonfadio (1501-1559), con- nected in subject, and no doubt composed to some extent in rivalry, with the Benacus of Bembo, is a better piece of description than its pattern, though not perhaps a better piece of metre. Nothing in the whole kind was much more popular during the neo-classic time than the De A cone et Lconilla of Girolamo Amalteo (1506-1574), which is therefore worth quoting, as it is only a quatrain: "Lumine Aeon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro ; Et potis est forma vincere uterque deos. Blande puer, lumen, quod habes, concede sorori ; Sic tu csecus Amor, sic erit ilia Venus." Nor could, perhaps, that prettiness, with a touch of triviality, which is the note of so much of this verse, be better shown. Girolamo's Alcaics would be better if 1 Vide Carmina V. 111. Poet. (Florence, 1552), p. 85. 2 1479-1510 (?). THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 39 he did not rather frequently stumble over that rock of offence the third line ; but his brother, Giovanbattista (1525-1573), has left an lollas in very flowing senarii. The facility of Muretus in the same metre has ob- tained access for him to anthologies, but he will be better treated in the dramatic chapter. The abundance of Latin verse in Italy at this period may be illustrated from two volumes x which appeared in successive years just about the end of it, and which, The Quinque ranging exactly together in print and size, 2*SZ! and ^11 but exactly in set of page, are logyofubaidini. sometimes found together in contemporary binding. The first is the second quincunx noted above, and contains work by Vintha, Segni, Berni, Accolti, and Varchi. 2 The other contains an anthology from no less than forty different poets, including a few of those already named, but for the most part drawn from fresh sources. No very long poems are admitted, nor is there any hard-and-fast scheme of subject, so that the nearly two hundred pages of the first volume and the nearly a hundred leaves of the second must probably contain a good thousand of pieces eclogues and elegies and epigrams, odes and addresses and epistles, the entire supellex of the occasional poet. One of the longest and most ambitious of the contents 1 Carmina V. Hctruscorum Poctarum (Florentine apud Juntas, 1562) and Carmina Poctarum Nobilium Jo. Pauli Ubaldini studio conquisita (Mediolani ap. Ant. Antonianuni, 1563). 2 For Berni and Varchi see next chapter. Pabio Segni was the poet ; the better known historian was Bernardo. Cardinal Accolti (the "Cardinalis" is in the book) lived under Julius II. Of Vintha I know little or nothing. 40 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. of the miscellany is Molza's elegant, and for the writer unusually vigorous, expostulation from Catharine of Arragon to Henry VIII. This has some two hundred lines; not a few of the epitaphs content themselves with the consecrated distich. From such a range of authors, subjects, and styles it is possible to make a judgment of the whole class of composition not less accurate, and much more clearly cut, than when the judgment is dis- tracted and the memory made blunt by turning over scores or hundreds of volumes, though the latter process is no doubt essential to the ratifica- tion of the verdict. The perusal, however, may only strengthen the inevitable reflection on all this work, that itself does not possess the " inevitableness " assigned, sternly but not unjustly, to poetry in "Wordsworth's saying. Much of it is more than passable; some of it is distinctly good. But the second quality is rare, and even the first not abundant, in the work of Francesco Vintha, who takes liberties with the order of words, abuses the trisyllabic ending disgracefully in his elegiacs, and achieves neither the pointedness of the Latin nor the unlaboured elegance of the Greek epigram. He shows, perhaps as badly as any one, the tendency of the poet of this class to become a mere copy-of- verses man, and not even to turn out his copies of verse in good condition. Fabio Segni, if not much better in matter, is far superior in form, and now and then is really elegant, especially in choriambic metres. It may seem likely to be much more interesting to THE HARVEST- TIME OF HUMANISM. 41 pass from these respectable nonentities to a real poet like Berni, and see what he can do in Latin. But the hope will be disappointed. Neither the vigour of some of his Italian things (such especially as the famous onslaught on Aretino, which would have done very well in the tongue of Catullus) nor the grace of others appears here, and Berni is particu- larly unlucky in attempts to imitate the Catullian diminutives, and the habit which the great poet of Verona has of " turning the word " and playing on it in a fashion of quasi - refrain. 1 The few epigrams of Benedetto Accolti (1497-1549) are conventional to desperation on Pan and the Nymphs, on Innocence and Sleep, on stock fancy personages, or rather names, like Lycoris and Lycon. Of the quintet the best appearance is made, as might perhaps have seemed likely, by the variously tried literary craftsmanship of Varchi, which approves itself here also very fairly; yet even here it is difficult to single out any one piece for special praise. The more numerous and more selectly represented contents of Ubaldini's book promise better entertain- ment. The elegiacs of Annibale della Croce have some merit. But why should a man, if the whole style did not tempt to triviality, think it worth while to turn " Donee gratus eram " into a longer metre, changing the names and a few of the words, but keeping as much as possible ? 2 Aonio Paleario, who is better 1 See especially De Glyce, Carm. V. ffetr. Poet., p. 127. 2 See Carm. Poet. Nobil., f. 6, Horatiana Imitatio (Criiceii et Lyccs Dialogus). The metre is elegiac. 42 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. known for mystic strains, attempts l an epithalamium for Niccolo Marino and Luisa Mendoza, and hashes up the old cliclits of the subject with the utmost coolness; indeed much of this and his other work is mere cento. There is a touch of poetry, though no great correctness, in Antonio Marino's 2 iambic di- meters to the Evening Star ; but Tebaldeo of Ferrara (f. 25, v.) oversteps the bounds of the most indul- gent Humanism in his echo-verses. Some of these may excite a momentary terror as one thinks what would have been the results, not so long ago, to the English schoolboy if he had ventured to send up such lines as " ^Estus non facit hoc spes moriens 1 Oriens," or " Orem animo exanimi pestiferam 1 ^-Estiferarn," which is near nonsense without the context, and not very much farther off with it. The "Aeon and Leonilla" epigram quoted above is here given (f. 29, v.) to Basilio Zanoni of Bergamo. Molza's coaxing verses of consolation (f. 37) to the Spanish courtesan Bea- trice on the loss of her hair are exceedingly pretty, though rather for their good-natured and affectionate tone than for any great neatness of execution. The fine poem to Henry VIII. above noticed, and the 1 See Carm. Poet. NobiL, f. 17. Antonio della Paglia or Aonius Palearius ( ?-1570) was one of the school of Italian semi-Pro- testants, but escaped the fate of some of them. His chief work is also in our kind, the long Latin poem De Immortalitate Animorum t which appears in Pope's collection, and has been praised rather beyond its deserts. a Ibid., f. 25 v. 24. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 43 still finer Ad Sodales, also referred to, give him by far the best position in the whole volume. This last- mentioned piece, written in his last days, with its regrets at the absence from his death-bed of the wife whom he had himself deserted, and its resigned and modest hope of some memory, is really touch- ing. The Odes of Capilupo ' " intend " rather more than they achieve, and the verses of Geronimo Salina to the luckless Juana of Aragon apply the " Spanish ampulla" with more freedom than success. The verses of La Casa, which hold with Molza's the chief place in the book, surpass them in elegance, though the enigmatic bishop does not, like Molza, show in his Latin verse the same qualities as in his Italian. But La Casa is here very inadequately represented. From him, however, and from his countrymen we must pass northwards to take a glance, since we cannot give more, at the Latin versification Transalpine Latin verse of more inclement climes. 1 Two writers, born not merely beyond the Alps but on the shores of the Northern Sea, long divided, and one still deserves, the repute of surpassing any Italian of their own time in skill of this kind. France had no poets of the class as yet to pit against Buchanan (who was indeed almost a Frenchman by domicile) and Johannes Secundus ; but she could not lack versifiers, 1 The almost appalling industry of Gruter followed up the Ddic. Poet. Ital. (i: supra) with 3 vols. of Gallic (1609), 6 of German (1612), and 4 of Belgic (1614) poets in Latin. One of the German vols. has 1700 pp. 44 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. and some of them were of note. The unlucky printer- lexicographer Etienne Dolet (1509-1546), whose ex- cellent biographer, the late Mr Christie, has made him better known in England than, save by Mr Christie's own means, he would have been to his own country, wrote verse of some merit in his general Car- mina (Lyons, 1538) and the Genethliacum Claudii Fili next year ; Theodore Beza (1519-1605), a Burgundian by birth, if a Swiss by enforced residence, owes a some- what parti-coloured fame to his Juvenilia (Paris, 1548) ; and Daurat ( ?-1588), a star of the Pldiade itself, darted Latin rays rather more willingly and success- fully than French, while the list might be very largely extended. But the seventeenth rather than the six- teenth century was the palmy day of French Latin verse. The most graceful beyond all question of Renaissance Latin writing is to be found in the famous and widely imitated Basia^ of Johannes Nicolaus Secun- Johannes Secun- dusandhis dus. These are thought to have been ad- dressed to a Spanish beauty between 1534 and the author's death two years later, and they appeared in 1539. The learned pains which have been spent on tracing their strain afar off to the Greek Anthology and Catullus, and more immediately to 1 The recent handy edition of the Basia, with a few of the immediate originals and imitations, by Herr Elliuger (Berlin, 1899), is a monu- ment of German industry in its discussion of parallelisms, &c., but also a less admirable model of German abstinence from criticism proper, and even from an account, however succinct, of the author. The other work of Secundus, which will be found in the Delicitz Poetarum Belgicorum, iv. 147 sq., is mostly inferior to the Basia. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 45 Beroaldus and others, might have been spared. The lips of Netera were probably quite sufficient to inspire her lover. But he has put the universalities of the subject with such a combination of scholarship and fire that no doubt he was imitated. There has been an occasional tendency, especially of late years, to sneer at the Basia as frigid and vapid. They are really nothing of the sort. A Dutchman, writing in the ghost of a language, was not likely to attain to quite the vividness in different ways of his contemporary Marot's En la laisant, or of some of our own Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline pieces in the next generation or the next century. But the verses of Secundus are not mere literary exercises ; flesh and blood as well as ink and paper have taken part in their production. Though quite decent, as the author, for once violating decency, himself protests, they are not in the least dull ; and the way in which these things should, contrasted with the way in which they should riot, be written about may be seen very well by contrasting almost any one of the Basia with La Casa's Capitolo del Bacio, one of the least offensive of its class. The splendid conclusion of the Eighth " O vis superba formae ! " is not quite equally led up to ; indeed the Anacre- ontic in Latin is apt to take a kind of staccato touch. But the hendecasyllabics of the Fifth " Dum me mollibus hinc et hinc lacertis "- are quite delightful, while they are remarkably free 46 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. from cliches, " lubricus vultus " being almost the only importunate reminiscence. The opening piece " Cum Venus Ascanium super alta Cythera tulisset," though very pretty and possessing that pictorial quality in which the better Latin poetry of the time often sets a good example to the rising vernaculars, has less individual quality ; and the metre of the second, Horatian though it be, is not so well suited to the subject as some others ; while the third, aiming at quasi-epigrammatic form, shows us the poet rather "stumbling in paths of alien art." But the Seventh " Centum Basia centies " again sets tune and words in perfect accordance, and its subject-conceit (the quarrel of the eyes and lips because the eyes cannot see what the lips are kissing) is carried out with the daintiest and most suitable ripple of rhythm and phrase. The Alcaic stanza of the Ninth is rather too stately for these delicate transports : the elegiacs of the following piece, and of others, are far more in harmony. But tempting though it be, one must not mention all, where almost all are good. It is, however, quite worth while to turn over the examples and imitations which Herr Ellinger has subjoined in order to see what a prince of his class was this poet whom the gods took ere Nesera's kisses were dry. The Osculum Panthice of Filippo Beroaldo (1453-1505), which some would have to be his original, is long, verbose, frigid, and stuffed with classical -dictionary matter. The THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 47 Ad Ncceram of Petrus Crinitus, though better, has none of the liquid fire of Johannes, nor has Sannazar's Nina. Among the imitators Buchanan is simply riot to be mentioned; and though Bone- fonius deserves a little better of his Pancharis and Muretus of his Margaret, Secundus is left without another second. For German-Latin verse of our period two recent volumes l will give us an excellent text. There was, other Latin as has been already hinted, no subject for verse-German. wn i c h ^Q new Latin was more used, nor was there any perhaps for which it was better suited, than for occasional poetry. The second of the volumes cited contains a selection of "poems of places," the chief devoted to Nuremberg and em- bellished with interesting " cuts " by or after Diirer ; the first is a more varied selection from a much vaster body of amatory and miscellaneous lyric. Eobanus Hessus, who has sometimes been regarded as the best poet of this class, figures in both, and in the Lyrics appear Euricius Cordus and others of the " Erfurt poets," who had so much to do with the rally of German Humanism in the JEpistolce Obscurorum. But what of the results ? That they are much easier and (in a sense) pleasanter to read than the rough German of the time is of course perfectly true ; that men like Hessus and Cordus had infinitely more sense of literature, more criticism, more of other 1 Deutsche Lyrikcr des IGten Jahrhunderts. Ed. Ellinger (Berlin, 1893). Eobani Hcssi Noriberga Ittustrata, &c. Ed. Neff (Berlin, 1896). 48 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. things, than such a man as Hans Sachs, is almost a truism. And yet the whole has the not unpleasant but faint and pale scent and look of pot-pourri as compared, not exactly with a brier-rose, but at anyrate with ragged -robin and meadow-sweet. The hexa- meters of the Noriberga are capital things of their kind nervous enough and smooth enough, their cadence varied with a good deal of skill, the de- scription by no means lacking in vividness, and the diction by no means too full of the curse of modern Latin, gradus-epithets and " tags." Among the Lyrics the same author's admiring Elegiacs to and on Luther combine spirit and polish ; the Eclogue of Cordus, Silvius and Polypheme, has a good flow ; the Dream of Melanchthon, in which Ajax and Christ figure, is vigorous and effective; Mynsinger's Sapphic hymn on the Ascension is neat ; and among the erotic and Anacreontic poems, though nothing comes up to Jo- hannes Secundus, the Quisquis tela Cupidinis of Bruno Seidelius, the pieces to Eosina of Paulus Melissus, and the Suspiria of Tobias Scultetus, though these latter would not commend themselves to a severely Ovidian form-master, are thoroughly agreeable to read. Also Sebastian Schefferus is scandalous but amusing in his " Nine Skins of Women," and dis- tinctly ingenious in the epigram which explains why sheepish boys look at the ground while lively girls look at young men. But always less or more, except in forms and tones for which the vernaculars were not yet sufficiently accomplished, there is the sense of bastardy, of sterility, of mere imitation and echo as THE HAHVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 49 regards the past, and of want of promise and germ for the future. The production of England in this branch during the Tudor time was abundant in quantity the mere dedicatory and complimentary verses pre- fixed to books, English as well as Latin in text, would make a very large collection. At the very beginning the Latin verse of More (see note, infra, p. 87) at once attained European re- cognition. At the end the Epigrams of John Owen (1560-1622) had an even greater vogue on the Con- tinent, and served, in England itself, as a sort of centre to a very large body of epigrammatic writing, in English and Latin, which extends from Heywood at the beginning of the sixteenth century to Tom Brown at the end of the seventeenth, and which would be well worth collection and study. Yet the laureate of Great Britain in these alien bays during this time was no Englishman but a Scot. Not the least notable or characteristic name in the present chapter is that of George Buchanan (1506-82), 1 who at one time earned for his native Buchanan. country or Scotland the credit of possessing the best Latinist living in Europe, a possession long considered as implying that of the foremost of European men of letters. This point of view is unlikely to be 1 The standard edition of Buchanan's Latin works is the fine one of Ruddiman, 2 vols. folio, Edinburgh, 1715 : of his English, that of Mr Hume Brown for the Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, 1892. Another signal instance of Buchanan's fame is that Rapin, a century later, in spite of all national, political, and ecclesiastical grudges, allows him "Odes worthy of Antiquity." D 50 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. recovered ; but the fact that it was once taken by a man like Dr Johnson, to whom Buchanan's nationality was, to say the least, not a cause of attraction, and to whom both his principles and his character were in the strongest degree repulsive, would of itself give him a place here. Fortunately we can afford to dismiss those principles and that character, as well as the life which exhibited them, with the remark that the principles may commend themselves to those who agree with them, and that the character may seem excusable to those who hold the principles. But the works are not so to be dismissed ; and with the exception of the Detectio Marice it is easy, and even in that case not impossible, to a trained critical intelligence to examine them with due impartiality. It is fortunate, that while in the case of Erasmus, to whose place, though not to whose gifts in prose, Buchanan succeeded, and whom he actually surpassed by his skill in verse, we possess no vernacular compo- sitions to assist us in our view of his Latin books, Buchanan has left us vernacular work of unmistak- able power. The most famous and the best of it, the violent diatribe against Maitland of Lethington, known as the Cameleon, is perhaps intentionally as well as unintentionally embroiled and obscure in style. The weapon is neither rapier, nor broadsword, nor even club ; but a sort of morgenstern or ghisarm, as compli- cated as it is clumsy. Yet the swashing-blow is of formidable sharpness as well as force. For such elegance as Buchanan possessed we must look to his verse, which is also the only part of his THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 51 Latin \vork that possesses any interest, except for the historian. The Detectio itself, the Ees His Prose. Scoticcc,, and the De Jure Megm, as well as the Letters, exhibit to the full the study and the practice of a diligent scholar and imitator of Cicero and of Livy. But they have no other literary interest, and this is itself but small. Even in Cicero himself the prevalence of the same forms of speech and phrase, the set rhetoric, the method as of cloisonnd enamel, the carefully wrought and curiously selected diction, are found, by some readers at least, more curious than delightful, and more tedious than curious. In a Scotsman writing at the most burning, if not the most shining, crisis of Scottish history, the tagging of stale shreds and thrums becomes inexpressibly unreal and almost positively offensive, quite apart from the matter. And it contrasts curiously with the senti- ment expressed years before by Ascham on the other side of the Border, that it was time to " write English matters in the English tongue for English men." Let us turn, however, to the verses, 1 of which a Scotophobe, a Tory, a hater of Republicans, and a severe critic like Dr Johnson, said that their author was " the only man of genius his country ever pro- duced," that he was not merely " a very fine poet," but " a great poetical genius." It was the dedication to Queen Mary, Nymplia Caledonice, which (though he did not illustrate it therefrom) elicited from the dictator the observation that all the modern languages 1 These are obtainable separately in more than one pocket form. My copy of this is the edition of Wetstein (Amsterdam, 1687). 52 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. could not furnish such melody as Latin verse an observation which of course simply means that Johnson's ear, by nature or training, or both, could appreciate " Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida sylvas," and could not appreciate " But tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky" ; or " Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro " ; or " Un doux nenni avec un doux sourire " ; or " So diu blomen uz dem grase dringent." The Nympha Caledonice is certainly a piece of very smooth elegiacs ; and as everybody has not Buchanan The Psaims ^ n their hands nowadays, we may give it, and their leaving readers to find matter of piquancy, Dedication. ... . or matter of disgust, in the remembrance that the poet not long afterwards discovered this paragon of her sex, this honour to her ancestors, this pattern of virtue, this blessing to her country, to be a pest to her country, a reproach to her sex, an incarnation of all the vices, and a scandal to her race : " Nympha Caledoniae quse nunc feliciter orae Missa per innumeros sceptra tueris avos : Quse sortem antevenis meritis, virtutibus annos, Sexum animis, rnorum nobilitate genus, Accipe (sed facilis) cultu donata Latino Carmina, fatidici nobile regis opus. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 53 Ilia quidem, Cirrha procul et Permesside lympha, Pcene sub Arctoi sidere nata poli : Nou tamen ausus eram male natum exponere foetum, Ne mihi displiceant quce placuere tibi. Nam quod ab ingenio domini sperare nequibant, Debebunt genio forsitan ilia tuo." The verses are certainly of the neatest, and Ovid would, I think, have gladly signed the italicised pentameter. For the spirit and its sequel, we may re- member that the pedant is generally by turns syco- phant and lampooner, and that the same person is not seldom the recipient of his absolute impartiality in the discharge of these functions. It is less easy to share the admiration, which was once, no doubt, sincere, was for a long time fashionable, at least with scholars, and is even now in a dim sort of way traditionally existent, in regard to the version of the Psalms to which these lines serve as Intro- duction. That they are sufficiently elegant Latin is quite true ; x but then elegant Latin is about the last kind of medium suitable to Hebrew poetry. It is almost impossible to describe, but it is worth while to recommend actual experience of, the curious shock of the contrast which strikes one between the fragments of the Vulgate which, as usual, head the versions, and the first lines in the same, or nominally the same, language which follow. Nor is this the only shock of the kind. Johnson, whose liking for and acquaintance with modern Latin verse gave him probably a greater 1 Porson, I think, is said to have found false quantities in Buch- anan ; but they are certainly not numerous, and are probably, as a rule, rather false readings. 54 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. right to speak than any one now possesses, specially commended Buchanan for his freedom from mere cento-work. This freedom may be comparative, but is certainly not positive. For instance, the 4th Psalm (Cum Invocareni) begins " O Pater, o hominum divumque seterna potestas." It is impossible that this "hominum divumque po- testas " should not have been suggested to Buchanan by, and that it should not in turn suggest to any tolerable Latinist, not merely the actual phrase in Virgil, but also a certain " hominum divumque volup- tas " ; equally impossible that the contrast should not strike one as damaging in respect of poetry, and slightly ludicrous in point of context and subject. For the longer and more descriptive psalms Buchanan has sometimes selected the continuous hexameter, which has no ill effect in its way ; and he is also not sparing of the dimeter and trimeter couplet, which is also tolerable. But the more definitely lyric metres, especially the Alcaic and the various choriambic ar- rangements, are equally incongruous in sound and in association, while the skip of the Latin Sapphic, so different (at least as usually ordered) from the Greek, is still more out of keeping. David might have danced before the ark to that measure, but he certainly very seldom sings to it. Perhaps the chief historic interest of Buchanan's Psalter is that its production and popularity not im- probably helped that disastrous process of translating the great mediaeval hymns which was carried on THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 55 during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which ultimately deprived the metrical portions of the Breviary of a very great part, if not of all, of the ineffable music and charm of those wonderful com- positions. Even if the work of a heretic cannot be supposed to have had much direct influence in this way, it is none the less significant as a symptom. The tragedies, translated and original, will receive their best notice in the chapter on drama; the De Sphcera and the miscellaneous poems concern us here. Not much need be said of the De Sphcera, where the poet has endeavoured to treat a Lucre tian subject in a Virgilian manner, and has at least succeeded in accomplishing, with extraordinary diligence The De Sphaera. . , and cleverness, an exercise which was not worth accomplishing at all by any one who had emerged from the status pupillaris. To have written such a description of the planets, for instance, as that in the Second Book (p. 129 of the folio, p. 429 duodec.) would not merely be creditable to any undergraduate and an extraordinary feat in any schoolboy, but it would argue in both the acquisition of faculties in literature which could almost certainly be turned to uses both of profit and delight, and of intellectual habits service- able in every relation of life. As a pastime of maturer years it would be liberal and refreshing. But as forming part of a serious and adult performance in some thousands of lines, treating a subject which requires prose, and had best be done in vernacular prose, it is not much more than naught. The long satire of the Franciscanus weakens its 56 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. satire on priestcraft and monkery by a profusion of detail which never once collects itself in one of the true Juvenalian onslaughts ; while in the epigrams of the Fratres Fraterrimi we look equally in vain for the salt of Martial, though not in vain for his ribaldry. So that the results of a rather tedious reading are, first the conviction that most of the things are impossible to quote, and then the consolation that not one of them is worth quoting. The Elegies are very much better. Of no metre was Buchanan such a master as of this, and the wide range of his Ovidian and Propertian models allowed him a The minor certain apparent unconventionally even in poems. kjg conventions. The woes of a Professor of Humanity at Paris, leaving his bed at five o'clock to wield the tawse in one hand and the Virgil in the other, correcting and flogging all day, open the series with no feigned note. And though the succeeding poems mostly display the artificiality and sometimes the licence of Latin, they are always pleasant to read for mastery of metre and phrase, not interfered with by too great length on the one hand, by brevity without point on the other, or by radical unsuitableness of subject on both. Even where he is both prolix and trivial (as he can be), the complete absence of effort and the easy flow of the verse produce a certain soothing effect. The Sylvce, exclusively hexametrical, supply the (to us) bitter irony of the Epithalamium of King Francis and Queen Mary, and the more genial, though equally obvious, satire of the birthday poem for the British Solomon. For this kind of artificial THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 57 work no language is so well suited as Latin, and none disguises the essential hollo wness better. Some of the hendecasyllables addressed to Nesera are really pretty, and seem now and then to throb with something more like blood than the ink (or rather the neat gall) which usually runs in Buchanan's pedant veins. Those on the famous diamond heart which Mary sent to Eliza- beth only just miss, and perhaps do not entirely miss, a great success. The conventional scurrility of most of the so-called Iambics is, as before, relieved with little wit ;' but the more varied subjects and greater bulk of the three books of Epigrams and the one of Miscellanies may seem almost certain to give better results. They do, as a matter of fact, display Buchanan as an artifex to some advantage. Leonora and Neaera are still contrasted with an odd mixture of conven- tion and sincerity; for though much of the abuse of Leonora is mere copy of Horace in his more vulgar moods, the continual iteration of the complaint that she admits the love of coqui seems to correspond to something actual. Indeed it is natural that the tutor should be jealous of the chef. But the complimentary addresses, sometimes to persons of real merit and interest such as Ascham and Jewel; the emblematic poems, and some of the epitaphs and other pieces, once more show us capitally the singular suitability of classical Latin for the " occasional " verse. There is, perhaps, not a happier instance anywhere of orthodox but not cut -and -dried expression of the pedagogic spirit than the Sapphics Ad Juventutem Burdigalensem (which juventus, by the way, included, among others, 58 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Montaigne). On the whole, while we shall seek with- out finding that " great poetic genius " which Johnson's different interpretation of the words enabled him (perhaps on his own standard truly) to find in Buchanan, we shall be able to allow him in his Latin verse the praise, lesser but not small, of having ac- complished that which he set himself to perform. But we shall scarcely find in him much cause for mitigation of the judgment which has to be pronounced on this whole class of work, and which may be thus summed up : The modern Latin poet, except in the cases when his own vernacular was at the time of writing too unaccomplished in itself or too limited in its diffusion, always sins by neglecting to adorn the Sparta to which he owes allegiance. Even then the things that he can do better in Latin are mostly things that need not be done. Taking Buchanan's prose and verse together, it may even be doubted whether he had very much literary faculty beyond vigour and the knack of copying the ancients. In other words, both the heaviest curses of the rhetori- cian are on him ; for if he had some skill in making the worse appear the better reason, he was still more often occupied in giving an appearance of existence and even of beauty to what had no reason to exist, and no right to be beautiful. In the later volumes of this History there will in all probability be little room for noticing books Later written in Latin, and especially little for Latin poetry, fae later fruits of Latin verse. We may therefore, without impropriety, take a foreshortened THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 59 view of these. During the rest of the sixteenth century, and during the greater part of the seven- teenth, the language of the Eepublic of Letters held its place, and something more than its place. Nor were the results of its exercise, as they have been called by a rather unworthy sneer, a literature de collfye only. Enough has been said already of the limitations and drawbacks to which this literature was inevitably exposed. But it had still a real, though always a diminishing, reason for existence. That this existence was partly due to delusion must indeed be acknowledged. The Baconian notion (de- rived or partly derived from Cheke, v. infra) that the modern languages would "play the bankrupt" with books had no solid foundation, and was founded in part on the unjust contempt with which the Renaissance regarded the inestimable vernacular pro- ducts of the Middle Ages, in part on a hard-driven metaphor. And it has been punished as it sinned by the equally unjust neglect which for full a century past has come upon modern Latin literature itself. But the notion of a general European audience in- stead of a merely national one was not in itself ignoble; and to such an audience in the political and social circumstances of the time no vernacular not even Italian could hope to present itself. At the same time a critic who could have raised himself to a kind of " Pisgah sight " of literature would even then have distrusted Latin as a literary medium. Almost before the end of the sixteenth century, and with increasing decision during the 60 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. beginning of the seventeenth, it came to be best written in the smaller and less important nations in those, too, which had dwindling or not yet adult vernaculars. The Scots, the Dutch, the Poles, the Germans, were great at Latin ; the French, the Eng- lish, the Spaniards, the very Italians themselves, grew less and less expert in it, though some of these latter translated their works into Latin in order to cater for the larger auditory. Tor some fifty years after the stricter limits of the present volume have closed we still find Latin competing, both in verse and prose, as a general literary medium with every language on its own ground. But the books in it which have lived in general literary history are few, and among the bilingual writers the vernacular works, as in the case of Bruno (1549-1600), have always carried it over the " regular " ; while of those who mainly or wholly wrote in Latin, such as Campanella (1569-1639) the memory has become dim and second-hand. In the first half of the seventeenth century two admirable Latin verse-writers, Arthur Johnstone (1587-1641) 1 and Casimir Sarbiewski (1595-1640), compel the admira- tion of scholars, if they are hardly known to the general reader ; but the one represents a vernacular which, after a short but brilliant flourishing time, was about to drop into the state of a dialect, and the other one which had not yet attained to anything like majority among the languages of Europe. A 1 Johnstone was part editor, and in much greater part author, of the Dclicicc Poetarum Scotorum (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1637). THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 61 group or succession of groups of brilliant French hymn-writers, of whom the brothers Santeuil (1630- 1697; 1628-1674) are the chief, puts in some little excuse for the persevering efforts of the Koman curia to emasculate and " restore " the exquisite hymnaries of the Middle Ages. In England poets or men of letters of the greatest distinction in successive genera- tions Milton, Addison, Johnson cling to the tra- dition of verse-writing, and Pope edits a collection of Humanist poetry. But even those who take most delight in Latin poetry will hardly admire with warmth the Epitaphium Damonis when they think of Lycidas, the Epigrammata and even the Elegies when they think of the Sonnets. If the Baronutri Descriptio, and the Sphceristerium, and the Machince Gesticulantes, and qui canoro blandius Orpheo, can be read with much less distraction, this is due, first, to the fact that Addison was not, in English, a great poet at all, that his poetical gifts were much more adequate to his actual occupation ; and, secondly, to the fact that all these poems frankly range them- selves under the class of the " copy-of-verses," the kind of poem which is not inevitable at all, and does not pretend to be so. And this is increasingly the case with the Latin poems of Johnson, with the version of the Messiah, the Urbane nullis fesse Idboribus, and the pieces on Skye. If it is not so with some of his short religious epigrams and ejacu- lations, that is precisely because the form and the thought are here indissolubly married, and the memory of Vexilla Eegis and Dies Irce carries Summe dator mice 62 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. and Eterne rerum conditor under the shadow of its wing. The writer of these pages would be more chagrined than by any other possible misunderstanding if it were to be supposed that these remarks, or any that have been made in this chapter, rank him in the society of those who regard the practice of Latin and Greek verse as mischievous or superfluous in youth, and as trivial in age. Experience intrenches him impreg- nably in the belief that the disuse of composition in the classical tongues, and especially in their verse, is the greatest and most fatal mistake of recent edu- cational reforms, and is more responsible than any- thing else for the decline, at once of elegance and of vigour, in vernacular English compositions during the last two or three decades. As for later exercises in either harmony, they possess the double character of all worthy pastimes, that of giving at once pleasure and exercise itself. But excellence as discipline and excellence as pastime are quite different things from the substantive excellence of literature. Whensoever a language has attained to such a position of import- ance, and to such a faculty of expression that it is adequate to the conveying of literary matter that is worth the conveyance, then for a man of genius, or even a man of talent, to write in another language, dead or foreign, for any other purpose than mere amuse- ment and display of his versatility, is /io'^tfo? Tre/Hcrcro? Kovfyovovs r' evijOia. This was not the case with Erasmus or even with the authors of the Epistolce THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 63 Obscurorum Virorum, and they were accordingly justi- fied, and their books have lived. It was dubiously the case with More. It was quite certainly not the case with Ariosto or with Molza, with La Casa, or later with Milton. Yet when all is said, how venial (except in the case of the very greatest men, whose every word in their proper medium is priceless) are transgressions of this sort ! How near to virtues they come when we com- pare them with the slovenly facilities of the vernacular, wherewith in ever-increasing measure we have been afflicted for these last three centuries ! To these Latin works, even to the merest exercises among them, and the least successful of these, there went some knowledge, some pains, even some rudimentary exer- tion of judgment and taste, and some special selection of subject, language, form. He who seeks similar monuments in vernacular literature had need to be much more circumspect. Before passing to the Latin prose in some cases so much more brilliant which also distinguishes our Macaronic time, I have thought it allowable, and per- haps on the whole most convenient, to notice the singular freaks in what is called "Maca- ronic." For these are closely connected both with the popularity of the Latin and the immaturity of the vernaculars, and they contribute to European litera- ture work but a little below the best of the period in power. There is no more curious figure (in the best sense of 64 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. the adjective) to be found during our period than that of Girolamo Folengo, 1 or Teofilo, or Mer- Folengo. . Imus Coccams, or Limerno Pitocco, or Triperuno, of which abundant sheaf of aliases the first is his proper name and surname, the second Christian name that which he assumed in cloister life, and the third, fourth, and fifth the various appellations with which he subscribed different parts of his eccentric but far indeed from negligible work. As has been suggested in the note, Folengo is very much " for thoughts " to those who are not happy unless they can connect literature with philosophy, sociology, religion, and the like outside things ; but his purely literary interest is amply sufficient and in one sense unique. What celebrity he has enjoyed of late years has been very mainly due to the fact of his being to some extent a creditor of Eabelais, who 1 Most conveniently accessible in Signer Attilio Portioli's edition of all but the late and (it is said) negligible divine poems (3 vols., Mantua, 1883-89). This contains not merely the Baldus, but the ZanitoneUa, the Moscheis, the Italian Orlandino, and the very remarkable, though more than enigmatic Coos. This last, of which even Mr Symonds, a warm admirer of Folengo, says nothing (probably because in its great rarity before this reprint he had not come across it), is a partly Italian, partly Macaronic medley of prose and verse, where figure three of Folengo's female relations his mother Paola, his sister Corona, and his niece Livia the poet himself under his various noms de guerre, and divers abstractions. It is in part an apology for his youthful errors, in part a philosophico-religious allegory of the kind not uncommon in Italy between the days of Francesco Colonna and those of Bruno. For that very puzzling history of Italian thought at the time, which, despite the pains and genius which have been spent on it, has never been fully cleared up, it has probably not a little importance. But it scarcely belongs, like its fellows, to the text as literature. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 65 refers to him as Merlinus Coccaius, and who may not at all improbably have borrowed from him not merely something of Panurge (who is in parts very like the Coccaian Cingar), but even something of the whole notable Gargantuan and Pantagruelian Odyssey. He is, however, far indeed from being obliged to rely on the calling in of this lent splendour. In three respects as the chief, without like or second, of Macaronic poetry, as a master of expression in Latin, Macaronic, and Italian, and as a satiric realist of re- markable force, with an amount of imagination to which the realist does not often attain he deserves a place only below the very greatest of the period. In a History of European Literature the first claim is not the least. The scorn with which Macaronics are frequently, if not always, spoken of is not the least unwise of scorns which is saying a good deal. It is true that the word has several senses. In its widest it is applied to a deliberately mixed jargon of different languages Greek and Latin, Latin and modern of various kinds the words being used in each case according to their own grammar, and as they would have been used in continuous work of their own languages. Examples of this may be found (not to mention Cicero's constant introduction of Greek words into his letters) in Ausonius (especially in the Epistle to Paulus) and in many of the popular Latin poems of the Middle Ages. It not seldom produces an amusing effect in a short piece, but would be very tiresome in a long one. The stricter Macaronic dia- lect is formed by the admixture of pure Latin words E 66 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. with words in some modern language formed and inflected as if they were Latin. The Macaronic writer of this stricter school would never have been in any danger of offending Dr Johnson by making Carteret a dactyl, though he might have taken the liberty of scanning " Carteretus " " Carteretus," or " Carteretus," according as he was writing hendeca- syllabics or hexameters. Macaronics of this sort were written, during and after the Humanist period, in most European lan- guages, the inducements being the familiarity of writers and educated readers with both tongues, and the amusing effect that most jargon has till it gets wearisome. But, for reasons the most obvious, no language offered such facilities for the practice as Italian. Not only did the words assume forms very similar to those which they probably, if not certainly, held during the obscure passage of Latin into Italian itself, but it is by no means certain that divers of the Italian terms now hatted and booted with Latin garb had not actually existed in the vernacular speech of Italy during classic times. It is not rash to say that some of Folengo's own Mantuan patois may very possibly have been familiar, in much the same form, to Virgil as a boy. Accordingly an Italian, and specially North Italian, school of Macaronic poets had arisen long before Folengo. 1 By these, however, Macaronic had been 1 On the chiefs of this, Tifi Odassi, Alione d'Asti, &c., see Symonds* Italian Literature, chap. xiv. But those who can should consult Delepierre's Macarondana (Paris, 1852, published also at THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 67 chiefly used for burlesque novelle, comic scenes and characters of a detached kind, and sometimes for local or other satire. It was reserved for Folengo to use it as an engine of imitative attack on the two most popular and considerable forms of verse in the Italy of the early sixteenth century, the Epic and the Pastoral. Folengo resembled his great follower in being for most of his life a self-unfrocked monk ; but, unlike Kabelais, he was of noble birth. He was His life born at Cipada, the village which he has drawn so freely in Bcddus, was a student at Bologna, a pupil of Pomponazzo, and seems to have been driven to take the cowl by the wildness of his conduct. He joined the Benedictines at Brescia, and took Teofilo for his " name of religion " ; but after a few years, in 1515, Brighton; there is a second part, London, 1862, which I do not possess), and the Italian collection of Cinque Pocte (the usual five) Maccheronei (Milan, 1864). The contents, however, require a rather strong stomach, and a brain agile in the interpretation of jargon, from the reader. They confirm the existence of a sort of gallimaufry of Romance, older and younger, connected with hybrid French -Italian romances of the Carlovingian cycle, and they show how a person of genius can raise the basest of styles and lingos to or near litera- ture. Perhaps it may be well here to take notice of another jargon, which is sometimes called the liiiyua pcdantcsca, and opposed for- mally to Macaronic as substituting a Latinised Italian for an Italian- ated Latin. It is found to some extent in the Hypncrotomachia, (see The Transition Period, p. 393), and still more eminently, it is said, in some smaller, rarer, and less noteworthy productions which I have not thought it necessary to hunt up. For it seems to me a mistake to isolate this " pedantesque." It is, as Mr Gregory Smith hints in loc. cit., simply the Italian variety of that "aureate," rhetoriqueur, "ink-horn" jargon which overflowed all Europe in the fifteenth century, and for which Italian naturally offered peculiar facility. 68 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. when he was not five-and- twenty, fled from his con- vent with a certain Girolama Dieda, with whom he seems to have been passionately in love, and who long accompanied him, it is said, in the wanderings about Italy, then necessary to a man living by his wits. He was still quite young when the long Baldus or Macaronea par excellence appeared, and he seems to have remained eleven years a wanderer. But after the Orlandino he wrote the repentant Caos in 1527, was taken back with the ease which still governed ecclesiastical things (though it was on the point of being exchanged for the severity of the Roman Cath- olic Eeaction), accomplished certain pious works, and died, still in middle age, in 1544. There is, however, a good deal of uncertainty about all these events. He is thought by some to have glanced severely at La Dieda in the Baldus ; but the reference seems to me of the most doubtful character, and a passage in Caos, which contains her name in an unmistakable acrostic and is animated with equally unmistakable affection, is years later. That his verse is often ex- tremely severe on love and on women is true ; but he was a monk, and an Italian, and a satirist. He was also something very like a man of genius ; and savage as he can be now and then, coarse as And minor he is too often, his work seldom or never works. leaves that "bad taste in the mouth" which is too frequently the consequence of reading Italian of this time when it is indecorously amusing, or that inclination to cover a yawn with a " bravo ! " which comes on us when it is decorously rhetorical. THE HAEVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 69 His talent shows better in the Macaronic pieces than in the vernacular Orlandino, and better in the Baldiis and the Zanitonella than in the Moscheis. This last, though not unamusing, is only one of the numerous imitations of the Batrachomyomacliia. The Orlandino may be open to the charge of linguistic and metrical shortcomings ; my own Italian is not choice enough to make these teasing to me. But it is certainly open to one far more formidable from the literary point of view, the charge which was once put in the question : "X., what is the good of throwing your clumsy half-bricks, when Y. has just been shooting his beauti- ful silver arrows ? " With Pulci or Politian (Folengo seems to have believed in Politian's authorship) long before, with the great Orlando Furioso itself just out, and with Berni's rehandling of the Innamorato com- ing, Italian hardly wanted a thing like the Orlandino, which is not only a fragment but a fragment of un- certain purpose, now burlesquing the romances, now violently attacking the monks, and now adding to this attack something like an open display of Luther- anism. It is, however, full of vigour: and there is little doubt that Eabelais knew it, as well as the Macaronea. Before coming to this latter we must devote a little space to the Zanitonella, where Folengo is very clever The and almost good-humoured. The absur- zanitoneiia. Cities of the conventional pastoral, and the crudities of the real, are displayed in a most suitable medium. The cruelty of Giovanina (Zanina in Lombardo-Venetian), the sufferings of Tonello, the 70 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. good advice in vain of his friend Salvigno, and the final revolt of the injured swain, are all told in a series of Eclogues, Sonolegie, and Strambottolcgie, in elegiacs or hexameters, where the quaint lingo suits itself to the purpose singularly well. The Baldus tries a higher flight, and (though Folengo was, in fact, anticipating most of the critics) observes, with what looks like intentional irrever- The Baldus or . ence, all the conditions which tor two cen- turies were to exercise the mind of critical Europe about a "heroic poem": the noble origin of the hero, his early struggles, his friends and enemies, the deorum ministeria, the visit to the infernal regions, and the rest. It is also in uniform hexameters, which sometimes observe fairly classical Latin for a batch of lines together and then break off, only the more amusingly, into the grotesque, but spirited and by no means always unmusical, jargon of Macaronic proper. Erom more than one feature in his work Folengo would seem to have been of those who, sometimes not The Macaronea i n the least from poverty of imagination, itself. like O re p ea t an( j re- work their motives. The earlier cantos of the Macaronea exhibit this fea- ture, both in reference to the Orlandino, which, though published later, was we know written earlier, and to the Zanitonella. The birth and parentage of Baldus and Orlandino are extremely similar, and many points of the Zanitonella repeat themselves with a difference in the earlier Macaronea. It is only after the Tenth Canto, when the hero is freed from prison by the devices of Cingar, that the poem rises higher THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 71 than village and domestic quarrels. Baldus, Cingar, the giant Fracassus, and the dog-man Falchettus set out on a series of adventurous travels, in which they are joined by others, from the Virgin Knight Leonardo (who is slain by bears because he will not yield to the blandishments of a sorceress) down to miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells. 1 They suffer a great tempest wherein Cingar's terrors furnished the model to those of Pan- urge 2 they visit the stars, they study the sciences, they have difficulties with pirates. But the later books settle down into a curious battle between Baldus and his " barons " on the one hand and the community of witches and warlocks on the other. They first encounter the above-mentioned sorceress, Muselina, and then the Queen of the Witches, Smyrna Culfora (Mr Symonds reads (rulfora), in her capital, which Fracassus destroys, while Baldus and the rest make a murder grim and great of the queen and her courtiers. Emboldened by this success, they visit the infernal regions themselves in the last three books; and the poem closes half abruptly, half properly, in the depths of an enormous gourd, the destined region of vain poets in Hell, where they lose teeth and grow them again perpetually in punishment for their lies. 1 It is worth observing that at the outset of the voyage Folengo brings in, as an already known and settled thing, the hatred between peasants and soldiers, which, beginning no doubt still earlier, is BO evident in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which serves as a motive as late as the Simplicissimus of Grimmelshausen, and perhaps later still. a As the adventure of the sheep had previously done. Rabelais, however, improves on both most remarkably. 72 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Now Merlinus Coccaius himself is a false poet : there- fore he will be detained in the gourd : therefore he can go no farther. Nothing can be more logical. The respectable folk who think that everything has an explanation, and are miserable till they have got this explanation into a condition satisfactory to them- selves, have not meddled much with Folengo ; indeed, for centuries past he has been very little read. But it is obvious that the Delilah of interpretative allegory would have not the slightest difficulty in spreading her snares for his readers; in fact, Mr Symonds all but falls into them, and wrenches himself out with a kind of effort. Those who are content to understand with- out explaining, and to appreciate without hypothesis, will have no great difficulty in untwining, if they care to do so, the various strands which at least may have made up the fantastic rope of Folengo's thought. It is one of the main glories of Romance that burlesques of it always end by glorifying and illustrating the charms of the Muse of Romance herself, and Folengo is no exception. Baldus is a burlesque romance of adven- ture, no doubt, but it is a romance of adventure all the same. The wayward ex-monk availed himself of what has been called the glorious Romantic freedom to hunt many subordinate hares, and bring a vast amount of miscellaneous oddities into his treasure-house. Lucian was a particularly popular author at this time, and the influence of The True History and perhaps other pieces is clear. The character-sense was being much developed, and Cingar is one of the earliest very am- bitious and elaborate exercises of it in modern times. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 73 In wit and a certain pereuniality and universality he is not the equal of Panurge at his best ; but he is a rather better fellow, more practically ingenious, and perhaps truer to the comic side of specially Latin nature. Baldus, like most heroes, is rather colourless ; and his anger at finding that his wife Berta, whom he has practically deserted, has married somebody else, is more natural than reasonable ; while Berta herself, though quite flesh and blood in her battles with her sister and her pranks on the amorous Tognazzo, dis- appears early, reappearing but dimly as a witch. The witchcraft episodes are certainly very curious in con- nection with the extraordinary outburst of fanaticism on that subject in the hundred or hundred and fifty years following. It is not at all improbable that the semi - Protestantism which is unmistakable in the Orlandino, and which may hide itself under the mystical circumlocutions of the Coos, counts for some- thing in the Macaronea itself. And though Italy was never (her sons always having been well educated in a manner) bitten with the education-mania to the same extent as Germany, France, and England, this also appears. But on the whole Folengo exhibits, in a singularly suitable medium, the quaint waywardness of a soul et vitiis et virtutibus impar, not quite fortunate in its surroundings at any time, having lost its way in so far as any coherent scheme of life is concerned, but generous, instructed, aspiring. No Italian writer of his time is more affected by Dante, which is in itself a mighty quality. None speaks more generously of Ariosto, his own contemporary, and to some extent 74 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. the subject of his ironic exercises. His s washing - blows in the combat of Lombard v. Tuscan are thoroughly good-humoured ; and his Macaronic dialect itself is a sort of sneering concession to the general Italian refusal to recognise an Illustrious Vulgar, and to the endless naggings -and nigglings of philological pedants. His hatreds of the French, who were the curse of Italy throughout his life ; of the monks, his sojourn with whom had proved so intolerable ; of the landlords, with whom he had also had difficulties in his resourceless wanderings are never bad-blooded, and always relieved by humour. 1 And as for his lingo, whosoever does not perceive the charm of parlatus in "Et sic parlatus subito discedit ab illis" will never perceive it, and whoso does will perceive it at once. 2 To pass from the artificial verse of the Eenaissance, 1 There are indeed ugly exceptions which remind us that we have, after all, to do with an Italian of the sixteenth century. The worst of these under the rubric, it is true, of " Atroce supplicio," but related with perfect coolness and apparently no kind of disgust at the torturers is the story of the horrible mutilations inflicted, without despatching him, but leaving him to be eaten alive by gadflies, on the wretched Podesta, not merely by Baldus, who thinks himself a peas- ant's son, and though a brave is a decidedly brutal champion through- out, not merely by Cingar, who is a peasant, and of a ruthless and cowardly nature, but by the stainless knight, Leonardo. a Better still, perhaps, as a single line is the description of the third kind of wine furnished by the abominable hosts " Et qui dum bibitur ventris penetralia raspat," where the sudden barbarism after the orderly Latin of the first six words gives the real comic surprise. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 75 and from the less really than apparently unnatural Latin Prose- Macaronic, to the Latin Prose-writing of the writing. time, is not merely, in the old parallel, to step from a conservatory into a garden, but to pass from a museum of dried plants into the natural wealth of fields and woods. Here, though we may a little regret in some cases that the writers did not vise the vernaculars, there is hardly any loss in their doing so. The language which they use was as easy to them as the vernacular itself, and in most cases much better suited to their purpose. Accordingly we have, in the literature to which we are coming, more than one or two of the really great books of the world on any fairly wide estimate of greatness. Yet, neglecting the charge of paradox, we may add that the prose needs less elaborate handling than the verse, for two reasons. First, because the much greater detail which will be given to the best examples of it carries a representative treatment of the rest ; and secondly, because a very great deal of it in fact by far the greatest part is not really literature at all, but mere journey-work and business communication. The most unsuccessful writer of the most trivial or inelegant Latin verse was at anyrate trying to be a man of letters ; in the majority of cases the user of Latin prose was using it merely as he might have used a plate or a spoon, a chair or a table, to carry on the ordinary occupations of life. But the Colloquies, the Utopia, the Epistolce Olscurorum Virorurn, these will give us texts of in- terest hardly distinguishable from that attaching to the greatest vernacular writings, the Orlandos and 76 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. the Pantagruels, of our time. And we shall be able to notice a few minor books and some important classes, incidents, and aspects of literature generally. The pathetic story of the hapless and technically lawless loves of Gerard and Margaret father and mother of Desiderius Erasmus has been Erasmus. embellished and preserved by the genius of not the least of English novelists. 1 Erasmus was born at Rotterdam in 1467, and after a life even more wandering than that of the average Humanist, died at Basle in 1536. He was educated by the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, took (but only provisionally) Augustinian vows, was or- dained priest, finished his studies at the sordid Col- lege de Montaigu at Paris, the butt of all Northern Humanists ; spent much time in repeated visits to England, where he learnt Greek at Oxford and taught it at Cambridge; lived in Italy and in the Nether- lands, but was in his later years constantly gravitating towards the place of his final sojourn and death. Basle was the home of the great printer Frobenius and the place of publication of Erasmus's own edition of the New Testament, 1516, to which, by common consent, all modern Scriptural study owes its new start. These later years were passed in the controversies, natural at a time of the most violent and revolutionary intel- lectual excitement, between a man too moderate in temper, too cool in judgment, and too wide-ranging in erudition to be a thorough partisan. Erasmus, though nobody of competence failed to regard him as the 1 In The Cloister and the Hearth. THE IIAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 77 head of European letters, was the object of abuse from Luther and Hutten as being a Pelagian and not a Protestant ; from the extreme and more ped- antic defenders of the papacy as being an op- ponent of Scholastic philosophy, an innovator in Scriptural studies, and a leaner towards heresy ; and from Scaliger and others as a satirist of the absurd Ciceronianism which marked the decadence of the Humanist epoch. Besides the Greek Testament just noted, which requires no further comment here, Erasmus produced a very large amount of work l entirely in Latin, and almost entirely (as far as value is concerned, though he wrote verse like other people 2 ) in prose. Besides his extensive Correspondence, part of which was published in 1529 and reprinted with additions by himself, and the Colloquies and Encomium Morice, which will be fully noticed in a moment, his chief productions are two large collections of Adagia (1508) and Apophtheg- mata (1532? 3?), which had immense influence in their own time, but are now chiefly curiosities. They 1 The fullest edition is that of Leclerc, Lyons, 1703-1706, in ten volumes. Lives of him, down to that of Mr Froude, which has been noticed supra in the Preface, are very numerous, the material afforded by the Letters being tempting. The separate works are in most cases only obtainable in old editions. But the Adagia (especially in abridg- ments) and the Apophthcgmata were very often reprinted. The Colloquia and the Encomium, Morice occur consecutively in two volumes of the little Tauchuitz classical library, and will be found one of the best of pocket-book companions for a lifetime. Erasmus should never be read in any language but his own Latin, which is a perfectly living tongue and as easy as possible. 2 There are some seventy pages of it in the Deliciee Poetarum Belgicorum. 78 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. contain an enormous collection, constantly enlarged and revised by the author, of stories, sayings, maxims, proverbs, &c., of all times, but especially of ancient times, digested into a sort of moral and intellectual vadc inecum. The Adagia in particular were epitom- ised in a still voluminous form, 1 and served as a Thesaurus of literary and general culture for some two centuries. So did the Apophthegmata. 1 These books show the point of view of the Eenaissance admirably, but have not the living and intrinsic literary quality of the Colloquies. The Ciceronianus, above referred to, is later, and shows us Erasmus from another side, but always with the same innate and constantly maintained good sense, the same quiet but bright and dramatic humour, taking part against the abuse and caricature of that scholarship which, more sensibly used, was one of his own great titles to fame, and seemed to his contemporaries to be his greatest. The Colloquies rank among the books which every- body is supposed to have read, though it might perhaps be interesting to test the reality of this supposition in any chance society of well-educated people. The Colloquies. _ T J J . However this may be, the book is one of those which can sustain their reputation, and which, read over and over again for many years, at longer or shorter intervals, and in the most diverse conditions of age and knowledge and circumstance, must always please fit readers. It is, indeed, rather an odd book. 1 Of the epitomised Adagia I use the Oxford ed. of 1666, which has more than 800 pp. of small and close print. Of the Apophthey- mata, that of Ravenstein (Amsterdam, 1671). THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 79 One seldom finds the true key to anything in its Ad Lectorem ; and the elaborate apology, De Utilitate Col- loquiorum, which the author thought fit to append, though itself by no means devoid either of use or of interest, tells nothing like the whole story. To tell that story might have consisted with the modesty of Erasmus, which, though considerably greater than that of the average Renaissance scholar, was not his strongest quality ; but he could hardly have gone far enough from his own work, or regarded it from a sufficient height, to appreciate its true character and excellence. For it is, as may have been said elsewhere, one of the best mirrors of the time, and with the Utopia, the Epistolcv Obscurorum, and Garyantua and Pantagmel, one of the four books of the Manual of the Renaissance out of Italy. In it, as in the others, with the exception of a gleam or two in Rabelais (too often missed by his readers, or at anyrate denied by his critics), we find, indeed, nothing of romance or of poetry the busy eagerness of the time left little room for such things except in Italy itself, where circum- stances infected both either with a sensual and erudite superficiality or with a touch of burlesque. But of the prose, the actual life and business of the time, even of its aspirations beyond mere business in some respects, we find an astonishingly faithful mirror in the Colloquies. Of philosophy there is again little ; but then the time, out of Italy once more, was not one of abstract philosophising. But there is abundant religion, and of a very good kind. Erasmus has been too often spoken of in this respect, as though he were of the 80 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. race of Facing-both-ways, if not even of that of By-ends. He must have been a most accomplished hypocrite if this be true, and if, nevertheless, he was the author of the Pietas Puerilis and the Puerpera, to name no others. For healthy and at the same time amiable morality we may open the book almost at random ; while it yields, almost as universally, that cheerful and intelligent interest in humanity and things human which is the best side of the whole movement and period. One may well sigh though knowing all the time that the Might-have-Been is simply the Might-not-have-Been to think that this combination of qualities, at once delightful and estimable, should have had to give way to the coarse and earthy partisanship of Luther, to the sour fanaticism of Calvin, and to the reactionary Machiavelism of the Jesuits, in the contest for the position of ruling spirits of the time. And English- men Anglicans at least will be a little comforted by the thought that in no part of the Christian Church has so much of the spirit of Erasmus been preserved as in the Church of England. Indeed his only draw- backs here are a slight touch, not by any means a strong one, of Puritanism, in which the Church of England fortunately did not follow him, and an almost unreasoning though not unreasonable detestation of monachism, for which indeed there were many excuses, but which he, like Rabelais and others, carried much too far. The Colloquies, intended as they are for popular reading, do not exhibit the excellent quality of his erudition to quite such an extent as some of his other THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 81 work ; yet we have it in the Convivia, in the Synodus Grammaticorum and others. In all these we see the enemy at once of the barbarous and of the exclusively Ciceronian, the wide reader, the patient yet not merely or meticulously philological scholar, and even now and then the seeker after a kind of critical appreciation which had been almost unknown in mediaeval, and not too common in classical, times. But all these things are still somewhat in the out- skirts, in the applied departments of literature proper. As regards its most central and purest functions, the Colloquies make a great book still. Their admirable expression throughout the gift which makes their Latin the most living and accomplished of its kind, at once neither slavishly classical nor barbarously modern is a very great matter. That Erasmus comes third, and by no means a bad third, to Plato and Lucian in the use of the dialogue, is perhaps even a greater. Nor should he lack the highest praise for his adaptation of motive and material. The legend of St Thais, and perhaps Hroswitha's play of Paphnutius, founded on it, 1 left him, for instance, not much to do in regard to the donnde of the Adolescens et Scortum ; yet how ad- mirably has he presented the old matter ! Perhaps, however, his very greatest merit is one which has not been very commonly allowed him. This lies Their relation * n ^ e i mmense strides which his Colloquies, to the future universally popular as they were, made in the direction of the two great literary kinds wherein modern literature was to make progress as com- 1 Conrad Celtes had printed Hroswitha in 1501. F 82 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. pared with ancient the drama and the novel. The first point needs no labouring : many passages of the less didactic Colloquies, and some of them even as wholes, are stage-play ready made, and of the modern much more than of the ancient kind. But the experiments and advances in the direction of the novel made by the Colloquies are even more remarkable. The story, especially the short story, had of course been one of the chief, though the most haphazard, triumphs of the Middle Ages; but in this, as well as elsewhere, the mediaeval shortcomings in respect of Character, and the rudimentary, though distinct, conception of its dramatic faculty, had made themselves felt. Erasmus, though choosing to speak " by personages," writes what are really finished novel-scenes. Everybody ought to know the way in which the failing but still admirable art of Scott has turned, with the slightest possible alteration, the famous account of the German inns in the Diversoria into a vivid chapter of Anne of Geier- stein; and very many people know how Charles Eeade wrought this afresh, and many other passages of the Colloquies for the first time, into The Cloister and the Hearth. But it would require far less skill than that of the author of Waverley, or the author of It is Never too Late to Mend, to perform this process. Colloquy after colloquy, in whole or part, gives example to the fit artist how to manage original matter in the same way. A batch of four running, the Procus et Puella, the Virgo Misogamos, the Virgo Pcenitens, and the Conjugium, are simply novel-chapters; the clumsiest novelist could hardly spoil them in turning them into THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 83 the narrative form, while any practitioner of spirit and gift could not but have been guided by them, if the novel-writing spirit had been at all abroad. The vividness of the Naufrayium is admitted arid incon- testable : Defoe himself not improbably borrowed from it. The Miles et Carthusianus is rather satire or satirical drama than novel, but it would give a hint. And the Convivium Poeticum, with the stock but freshly adapted part of the grumbling gouvernante Margaret, is a " Scene of Literary Life " three hundred years older than the nineteenth century. As much may be said, in its different kind, of the Colloquium Senile, all the parts of which would bear expansion into Tales, and of the Franciscani, where, by the way, Erasmus is far less rabid against the friars than is usual with him and with his fellows. This cannot be said of the Pereyrinatio Religionis ergo, one of the best known of the whole, and one of the most interesting to English readers. But its novel- quality, in the description both of place and per- formance at Walsingham and Canterbury, is simply unmistakable. There are similar touches in the curious medley of the Ichthyologia and elsewhere ; but the chief loci for the purpose of the novelist have been noted, and we must not allow this historical, or rather prophetic, interest of the book too much to obscure its in- trinsic excellences consummate felicity of expression, and an extraordinarily vivid presentation of the real ways, thoughts, wishes of men. The writer is not thinking of the rules ; he is not thinking of copying 84 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE anybody, except, perhaps, Lucian now and then; he is not aiming at stock allegory, or stock anything else. He is simply holding up the mirror to life as steadily and as adroitly as he can, and now and then preach- ing, with sincerity, geniality, and good sense not too constantly found in sermons. The Encomium Morice (loll), which is usually printed with the Colloquies, though a rather famous The Encomium book, is inferior to the best of them, but still not unamusing in parts. To carry off the ironic handling at this length a stronger, not to say a fiercer, satire than Erasmus could, or would, apply is necessary : we want Master Francis or the Dean, not the amiable Desiderius. Strength, indeed, is at no time this pleasant and invaluable writer's eminent quality. He is astonishingly fertile, erudite, deft, accomplished, even in a way original, but he some- what lacks intensity. And this is why, no doubt, he was in a sense, and for a time, something of a failure, why he seems even something of a faineant among the martial Martins and the swaggering Scali- gers of his time. Violence was required just then, both to take, and to save from storm, the kingdom of heaven ; and Erasmus could never be violent. Of the scholar, however, he is an admirable type, one hardly less admirable of the man of letters, and one not to be despised of man simply as man. Some vanity, some disposition, half-arrogant, half-cringing, to be a pensioner on great men's bounty rather than an independent, or nearly independent, professional THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 85 person, and a certain vagabondage connected with this, were ingrained in the average Humanist ; and Erasmus displays them all, though not malignantly. But the comparison of him to Voltaire, though no doubt meant as a compliment, and with some colour from the merely literary side, is grossly unfair to Erasmus in more ways than one. Of Voltaire's spite, of his sniggering and semi-virile indecency, of his cheap cynicism and free- thought, of his smattering erudition, there is no trace in Erasmus : on the contrary, the opposite of each of these things is among his honourable distinctions. If it be true (as a critic, himself a scholar, M. Nisard, put it) that he is now " only a great writer for the learned," this is only a proof of the degeneration of European culture. Except in very few cases where a glossary may be required, Erasmus is perfectly intelligible to any decently educated schoolboy of fourteen : he wrote in the language which he himself no doubt spoke al- most exclusively for ordinary purposes ; and to this day the absence of " deadness " about it is one of its most remarkable characteristics. On the other hand, it had, as has been so often insisted, the quality of suppleness and adaptation to tbe special literary purpose which no vernacular, not even Italian, possessed, or was to possess for some years to come. Had he written in his native language he would now be really " dead," the plaything and privilege of the few persons who give themselves the trouble to learn a secondary modern tongue. And it would not be the least cogent of a O O thousand arguments against the disuse of classical 86 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. education that it would make Erasmus as inaccessible as if he had actually written in Dutch. 1 As a man of letters, More, who will be noticed again in the English chapter, is a much lesser man than More: the Erasmus, and the Utopia is a much lesser Utopia. book than the Colloquies. The place which it has sometimes enjoyed in English literature is absurd, for, as pointed out above, it is really not English at all except as a translation, while it cannot as such pretend to any such place as is enjoyed, for the mere merit of the English, by the Froissart of Berners or the Montaigne of Florio, the jfflneid of Dryden or the Iliad of Pope. To us, however, who are considering European literature, it belongs most properly, and even by a double title. It is in the first place a capital example of the cosmopolitan use of Latin, which at this time reached its zenith, and henceforward began, though not at first rapidly, to descend. In the second it exhibits the ^Renaissance tendency to a curious hybrid perfectibilism half Pagan, half Christian on the one side, half Science, 1 A note may be the best place for a capital example of a class of literature now ostensibly defunct Melanchthon's Declamations (re- printed in parts, ed. Hartfelder, Berlin, 1891-94). There are not, to my knowledge, any better examples extant of those " promotion " or graduation addresses, which were once universal (and which are still retained in the Scottish universities, though in the English they are chiefly confined to the honorary graduates) than Melanchthon's orations DC Gradibus and DC Ordine Diccndi, while those De Rcstitucndis Scholis, De Studiis Linyuce Grcecce, are discourses of the first import- ance on two of the most important subjects of the time. Nor are those DC Artibus Libcralibus and De Miscriis Pccdayoyorum less than very neat harpiugs on very old tunes. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 87 half Romance on the other and the Renaissance en- thusiasm for education. Not merely written in a for- eign language, but published abroad, it was addressed very much more to Europe than to England, and it was from men like Erasmus that More hoped for his chief welcome and acceptance. Indeed, save some slight adaptation to the special economic and historical circumstances of our island, there is nothing specially English about it. The effects of the discovery of America, the new Platonic imaginings, even that kind of desire for moderate reformation in religion which commended itself to Erasmus himself, and which perhaps might have been carried out if there had been no Luther, no Calvin, and (best of all) no Human Nature all appear. The Utopia 1 appears to have been written in the 1 It must be repeated that the book ought to be read in Latin : though for those who cannot or will not do this, Mr Arber's well- known edition in his Reprints is very useful. My copy is the Basle edition of 1563, with other Latin works of the author, Proyymnasmata (not in the rhetorical meaning of the word, but emulative trans- lations of classical verse by More and Lilly), Epigrams, Lucianic trans- lations, exercises, and Letters. The Letters will be noticed with their kind. The verses (for " Epigrams " is even according to the widest in- terpretation of that word too narrow) are of some considerable extent, and even where they show no great poetical power, sometimes though not always exhibit already in prosodic respects that superiority to Continental versification in Latin on which English scholarship has since justly prided itself. The In Anglum Gallicce linguae affectatorem (the bete noire of all good English students at this time, from More to Ascham), the fine thoughtful In Hujus Vitce Vanitatem " Damnati et morituri in terrse claudimur omnes Careers " the Ad se gcsticntem Lcetitia in the same sense, and the pleasant pieces to his old love and to his children, show More at his best here, and deserve no mean place in the general Anthology, which has yet worthily to be made, of this Renaissance verse in Latin. 88 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. winter and spring of 1515-16, and being first printed at Louvain in this latter year, went rapidly through three other editions, with revision by the author and his friends. These, like the first, were Continental at Paris in the spring of 1518, at Basle in November of the same year, and at Vienna in 1519. It was also translated into foreign vernaculars long before it ap- peared in English, and it gave both its author and his country a very high standing with foreign Humanists. Perhaps on the whole the deserved reputation of More for character, his hapless fate, and the various traits in him which represent the Englishman of all but the very best type, have conciliated an undue amount of admiration to the book. More's humour shows excellently. The grave banter of the Introduction on the different reports of travellers respecting the breadth of the river Anyder, the localisation of Utopia, and the attempts of some to make a "key" to the book and identify its characters with individuals is not unworthy of a country which had already Chaucer to its credit, and was to produce Shakespeare before so very long, not to mention Swift and Fielding, Peacock and Thackeray later. And this tone is kept up in the beginning of the book itself the presentment of Master Raphael Hythlodaeus or Hythlodaye,and the con- versation at Cardinal Morton's table. Nor are counsels wise and witty on divers points of politics and man- ners to seek throughout the text. But on the whole a political student may be justly doubtful about the mixture of the arbitrary and the unpractical in the scheme of Utopian economy : while the purely literary THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 89 critic, admitting it to be a good book, will hardly, from the literary point of view, admit it to be a masterly one. It is probably the case that all invented polities neglect human nature, unless (as Swift had the wit to see) their builders make them purely negative and satirical. But Plato can enchant us as critics even while we shake our heads as politicians : More hardly does as much. All this, however, does not affect the fact that the book is a highly representative book. The dissatis- faction of the Renaissance with things existing, its harking back to old models, and its hankering after an elaborate, more or less socialist, system of state-educa- tion, state-interference, and state-management of every- thing its tendency, in short, to despotism, whether of the monarchic, the aristocratic, or the democratic kind, appears eminently. Nothing it is no news to students can be a greater mistake than to present the spirit of the Renaissance as a spirit of liberty ; it was only a spirit of violent resistance to authority, which was used to make it do or believe what it did not like, and which prevented it from enforcing what it liked upon other people. And this, though religious toleration nominally exists in Utopia, is really the motto of Amaurot and its dependencies. The spirit of Erasmus, reinforced with a stronger if less delicate humour and a more definite partisanship, . _^ .. appears in a famous book where he himself The Epistolae rr obscurorum figures not unfrequently by reference, and at least once as an actual interlocutor. I believe that superior persons, for the last generation 90 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. or two, have made up their minds that the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum 1 are not really very amusing; and it is pretty certain that (as is the case with other less notable books of the period) they have dropped out of the reading of the average educated man. He cannot too soon return to them. The whole book is the result of many additions and afterthoughts. The Defensio Joannis Pepericorni, with its endless testi- monials from universities, and the so-called Lamen- tationes Obscurorum Virorum, need only be read by those who wish to consider the thing from more than a me.rely literary point of view, though one or two things in the Lamentations are amusing. Nor has the third volume of the Epistles proper the pith and grace of its predecessors. These and the Dialogus Mire Festivus, in which Erasmus himself, Reuchlin, and Faber Stapulensis (Le Fevre d'Etaples) are brought face to face with three protagonists of the Obscuri, contain the root of the matter. The book took its origin, as is not uncommonly the case with such things, from a long and rather vague quarrel, brought to a head by a particular incident. The Humanists in Germany, during the later part of the fifteenth century, had gained a considerable hold of the universities, and were known by the honour- able if not honourably bestowed nickname of " poets," from their new-fangled attention to metrical rules instead of to the old Latin rhythmed doggerel, and their enthusiasm for Virgil and others. They had 1 I use the Teubner ed., 2 vols. sextodecimo, Leipsic, 1869. Bock- ing's Hutten (v. infra) gives the best commentary. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 91 raised among the monastic Orders and the older sort of University Masters, who had been brought up on logic and mediaeval manuals, a spirit of opposition both bitter and dogged. This grew, both in bitterness and in doggedness, by the identification of the Ee- forming element in its earlier stages with the studies of the Poets, and was further envenomed by re- sentment at the Humanist enormity not merely of reforming the study of Latin, not merely of adding thereto the troublesome novelty of Greek, but of actually proposing to pile Hebrew also on the hapless shoulders of the average magisternoster. About the year 1510, a converted Jew named Pfefferkorn, with the usual real or feigned trop de z&le of the neophyte, distinguished himself by declaring all Hebrew writings, except the Bible itself, to be anti-Christian and fit only for the flames. The great scholar Eeuchlin (1455-1522) entered the lists against him, and the matter became a sort of duel between the Faculty of Theology at Cologne, which was ultra-conservative, and Eeuchlin, to whose assistance came a group of young scholars from the younger University of Erfurt. Ulrich von Hutten, the best known of these (see chap, v.), does not seem to have contributed any of the best of the Epistolce (first issued 1515) which were mainly written by Crotus Eubianus (said to be the chief spirit), by the much-extolled Latin versifier Eobanus Hessus, and by a Canon of Gotha, Conrad Mutianus, who was a sort of minor Maecenas to the crew. They pitched upon a certain Ortuinus Gratius of Deventer, long a favourite theological teacher at Cologne, making 92 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. him a friend (for reasons none too honourable) of Pfef- ferkorn and Pfefferkorn's wife, a mortal enemy of Eeuchlin, and a holder towards the minor Obscur- antists of the whole of Germany of much the same position which Mutianus actually occupied towards the Erfurt " poets." These " Obscuri Viri " accordingly address to Ortuin letters, sometimes definitely and almost always indirectly touching on the Reuchlin- Pfefferkorn dispute, scarcely ever missing a fling at Humanism, Biblical study, and the rest of the New Learning, but incidentally, and at great length, revealing their own ignorance, immorality, and general slovenliness of life and thought. The most obvious source of the fun (one which has seldom been neglected even by the greatest humourists) is the fantastic nomen- clature of the Obscuri a nomenclature judiciously varied by quite ordinary designations, such as Conrad of Zwickau and Johannes Arnold, but constantly di- verging into the grotesque, from the moderate and probable appellations of Thomas Langschneyderius and Bernhardus Plumilegus, to the more farcical fancies of Cornelius Fenestrifex and Paulus Dauben- giggle. The next lowest, but still moderately used and ingeniously controlled, is the reliance on sheer coarseness of situation and language. In this the Erfurt men do not come near the common indul- gence of the fifteenth century in most countries, or the recrudescence of the same thing in the mouths of the Eeformers ; but they are sometimes pretty free. Very much more respectable and more literary, is the delectable dog-Latin a little but not much THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 93 further caninised from the later mediaeval pseudo- vernacular in which the Obscuri write, and which, in the Dialogus Mire Festivus, is contrasted with the fairly Ciceronian and Terentian style of Erasmus and Eeuchlin. But above and beyond all these things are the genuine humour, the command of character, the mastery of that crowning satiric gift the gift of making the enemy make himself ridiculous, the range of subject and circumstance, the access (as obvious as in the Colloquies themselves) to the as yet all but undis- covered and very rarely utilised stores of the matter and means of novel and drama. These latter good things are absent from very few pages either of the original Epistles or of the Epistolce NOVCB (1517). Sometimes, as in the very opening letter of the first batch and the thirteenth of the second, we have mock-solemn accounts of scholastic discussions of a certain kind : Whether you ought to say Nostermagistrandus or magisternostrandus, Whether it is possible, seeing that one member cannot belong to more than one body, for a man to be a member of more than one university. This last aporia, put by Thomas Klorbius, a humble doctor of theology (" Parcatis mihi," he dares to say to the great Ortuinus, " sed vos estis in- congruus "), is perhaps one of the very best and most characteristic of the whole. Elsewhere 1 there is the parlous case of a short-sighted scholar who has mis- taken the black garments of a Jew for academical dress and has made obeisance to the Hebrew: of another 2 who has got into difficulties by drinking too many 1 Ep. 2. 2 Ep. 3. 94 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. canthari of cerevisia and then using the cantharus itself for purposes military and not civil. Bachelor NIC. Caprirnulgius excuses himself 1 for the practice ^convenient, no doubt) of writing " lady's Greek with- out the accents," by the example of the great Ortuinus, and others match Latin doggerel against the pedantic " metres " of the " poets " or quote impossible books, the twentieth ^neid, the fifteenth of the Ethics. Our reverend Master Conrad of Zwickau, with a sort of innocent impudence, admits 2 that he himself has not the gift of continence, but tenderly remonstrates with Ortuinus for unkind conduct to his fair friend nay, more, he is mildly contumacious when Ortuin an- nounces his own repentance. Here 3 we have the wicked deeds of an intruder who lectured on Pliny and other poets, and scoffed at those who knew nothing but Peter the Spaniard and the Parva Logicalia ; who, in fact, was such a fifth wheel to the coach, or rather such a thorn in the side of his uni- versity, that the rector had him sent down -for ten years. There 4 the inestimable Conrad of Zwickau intimates his latest flame for a certain Dorothea, who plays him evil tricks ; but for whom, to beat the poets at their own weapons, he composes a beautiful copy of elegiacs after this fashion " O pulchra Dorothea quam ego elegi amicam Fac mihi etiam sic qualiter ego tibi." Most affecting is the tale 5 of the affection of Mammo- trectus Buntemantellus, Master in the Seven Arts, for 1 Ep. 6. a Ep. 9. 3 Ep. 17, 4 Ep. 21. 6 Ep. 33. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 95 the bellringer's daughter, Margaret; mosb agreeable the argument 1 of a certain Antonius, doctor in medicine, who dared to maintain to the great Erasmus his face that Ceesar could not have written the Commentaries, because so busy a man could have had no time to learn Latin. And, indeed, we have seen authors deprived of their books in these very days on not much better grounds. The long account 2 by Magister Wilhelmus Lamp of his journey to Eome, with a com- rade whose conduct was far from becoming, is a most admirable piece of narrative, worthy, mutatis mutandis, of Defoe. And the same good person's subsequent 3 discussion on points of prosody with an important member of the Eoman Curia is worthy of it, though perhaps not quite so pleasing as another letter * from Eome about the wonderful ways and sad death of the Pope's elephant, the beast that Emmanuel of Portugal gave to Leo the Tenth. Among the most masterly touches is the picture 5 drawn by Henri cus Schluntz of the mighty Ortuinus in his library. He is sending his master a book, but fears it may be ill taken. Sed possetis dicere, Quare tails mihi mittit taleni librum ? Credit quod non met habeo libros satis ? Eespondeo quod non facio propterea. Et quando putatis quod misi vobis talem librum propterea, tune facilis mihi injuriam quia feci cum bona opinione. Et non debetis credere quod parvi- pendo vos quod habetis paucos libros; quia scio quod habetis multos libros. Quia vidi bene quando fui in stufia 1 Ep. 42. 2 Ep. Nov. 12. 3 Ep. Nov. 35. 4 Ep. Nov. 48. 6 Ep. Nov. 52. 96 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIEK RENAISSANCE. vestra Colonise, quod habuistis multos libros in magna et in parva forma. Et aliqui fuerunt ligati in asseribus, aliqui in bergamenibus. Et aliqui fuerunt per totum cum corio rubeo et viridi et nigro, aliqui pro dimidio supertracti. Et vos sedistis habens flabellum in manu ad purgandum pulveres abinde. And it further seems that Ortuinus told his pupil that you might always know whether a man is learned or not by the care he takes of his books a sentiment not discreditable to the coryphceus of the Obscuri, despite the disgraceful insinuation that his books might have been in danger of gathering dust for all the reading he gave them. The etymological line is taken up elsewhere, 1 the most ingenious example being the explanation of latus clavus as nomen diynitatis, derived from the practice of military tribunes throwing a metal clava or mace into the ranks of the enemy, the recovery of which was valiantly sought by the soldiers. Magister Abraham Isaac de stirpe Aminadab (evidently an analogue of Pfefferkorn) declares, 2 with as evident sincerity, that he would rather have a living of a hundred florins and a simple damsel of twelve years old, at Deventer in his dear native land, than one of thirty florins and a cunning gouvernante of sixty in the High Germany. Marcolf Sculteti inquires 3 of John Bimperlenbumpum (who doubtless gave his name to a certain " powder of Pimperlimpimp ") what on earth is the meaning of this "Gabala" that they talk about, and which ap- pears neither in the Catholicon nor in the Gemma 1 Ep. Nov. 56. 2 Ep. Nov. 66. 8 Ep. Nov. 69. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 97 Gcmmarum. And for a final touch 1 : " Ars dicitur a Graeco artos, id est panis : quia omnes qui sciunt artem aliquem possunt acquirers panem et potum et amictum." We learn, too, that the University of Erfurt, like all our universities in all our times, " meo tempore fuit in flore," and then had nothing to do with fantastic "poesy," but consisted of sound Aris- totelians and good Realists, with a famous notion of getting the better of Nominalism in argument. I have given this flying sketch of some, but only a very small part, of the more amusing matter of the Epistolce, in order to throw some light on their most remarkable literary character. It will, I think, almost by itself (though all persons who love humour are most earnestly exhorted to have recourse to the original) show how well that original deserves the name in ref- erence to modern literature, not merely by the impetus administered to the elaboration of the great new kinds of drama and novel, but by the display of a variety of comedy which is itself essentially modern. In this last respect the Epistolce are a good deal in advance even of the Colloquia ; and it is not a little remarkable, and shows no small genius in the person concerned (whoever he was, Crotus Eubianus or another), that this spirit should be shown first in Germany. For the humour of Germany has always tended and at this particular time tended more, perhaps, than at any one other towards violent horseplay, extravagant coarseness, the " humour of the stick." That of the Obscuri Viri, on the other hand, is partly Lucianic 1 See the Commentum Mag. Nost. Schluntz, ed. cit., p. 409. G 98 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. and so not original. But it acquires originality by a considerable admixture of the fun of mere nonsense, to which, except in the Old Comedy, ancient wit, even in its most consummate exhibitions, was unluckily and unwisely averse. The differentia of modern from ancient literature is also well seen in the peculiar glancing or lambent divagation of the fun. The Epistolers are almost always coursing several hares at once, yet there is no real confusion. The Reuchlin- Pfefferkorn quarrel is never left long alone ; but it is dropped constantly, for the moment, in order to attack monkery, or the older and more obscurantist fashions of University life, or the mere and sheer degradation of scholarship by sensuality and sluttishness, or other things suited by their vivacity and reality to enliven the general picture. If we compare the book with such representatives of almost contemporary French and Italian humour as Gargantua ami Pantayruel and Mer- linuB Coccaius, we can but be surprised to find that by far the most uncouth nation has turned out by far the most refined fun, relying the least on mere extrava- ganza and burlesque, and, if more limited than either, more academic than either likewise. Nothing could, perhaps, better show the enormous harm done (whether with or without compensation does not at the moment matter) by the controversies of the ^Reformation in general, and in particular by the temper of the chief Reformed controversialists. Sometimes, however, even Eeforination pamphlets in Latin show something better than black gall and choler. There can be few livelier following in the THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 99 footsteps of the Epistolce than the dialogue, or almost Eckms drama, entitled Eckius Dedolatus, 1 and pub- Dedoiatus. lished aboufc 1530 ( che first e( jition has no date), as a song of triumph on the Protestant side over the champion of Rome who had been, as the Protestants thought, so thoroughly unhorsed by Luther. It takes, as has been said, the dialogic- dramatic not the epistolary form, and nothing shows more forcibly that influence of Lucian which has been mentioned. The action is much livelier than that of any of the Colloquies; and the author, whoever he was, allows himself not only considerable licences of language but a good deal of fancy in his incident. In fact the thing shows more concentrated literary talent than any work of the time on the same side except Kirchmayer's (v. infra, chap, vi.), while its Rabelaisian and uproarious humour contrasts remark- ably with the grim intensity of the Pammachius. The story is that Eck, writhing under his defeat, and finding that copious libations (which are supplied by his Boy with asides of comic abuse) do him no good, sends for his friends, and, at their advice, to Leipsic for help. The messenger is the witch Canidia, who travels on her speediest he-goat, and by the same vehicle brings back Rubeus and a surgeon in woful plight. The surgeon declares that only the most heroic remedies, and the actual knife, can save Eckius, and that he had better "make his soul" before the operation ; but the confessional scene is more curious 1 Ed. Szamatolski, Berlin, 1891. The ascription of the authorship to Pirkheimer seems not proven. 100 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. than edifying. Then the unfortunate patient is strapped down, purged, blistered, bled, and subjected to more alarming operations still, in order to clear him of his evil humours and corruptions of all kinds the mildest remedy being a severe thrashing (dcdolatio) and the severest one requiring delicate and distant allusion. The effect however is good, the naughtiness being effectually taken out of the papal champion, and the piece ends with one of the odd fasciculi of scraps epigrams, orations, &c., common at the time. It is full of classical, even Greek, quotation, and obviously written by a scholar for scholars : but the authorship seems entirely a matter of guess. It so happens, too, that though the much earlier Facetiae of Poggio deserve the praise, such as it is, of putting these things to the credit of Hu- The Facetiae. * mamsm, the chiet examples or sixteenth- century Facetice 1 that we possess are German. Ger- man stories had already taken, in such vernacular work as Tyll Eulenspieyel and the Kalendbcryer? a 1 The cominentatory literature of the great story-collections, Latin aud vernacular, is enormous, and in regard to the earlier ones it is barely necessary to name Wright, Loiseleur Deslongchamps, Oesterley, Couiparetti, one scholar from each of the great literary countries. On this present subject special assistance will be found, by those who desire it, in that excellent book of Professor Herford's, which I have to mention always with honour, often with indebtedness, The Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century. There is a neat little collection of the Facetice of Bebel and Frischlin, with additions from others, starting with Poggio himself (Amsterdam, 1660). It may be observed here that the Grobianv* literature is reserved for the chapter on German Vernacular. 2 See The Transition Period, pp. 401-403. THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 101 tincture of sheer nastiness which surpasses even that of the French Fabliaux themselves. Edification, there- fore, is much more to seek than to find in the work of Bebel, of Frischlin, and of others in Latin, not to mention Schimpf und Ernst and other things in German. The pieces are indeed sometimes of some importance as preserving and handing on useful literary subjects and motives. In face, however, of the great development of the vernacular novella and conte in Italy from the Decameron to the Hecatommithi, and in France from the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles to the Heptameron, the importance of these Latin stories is considerably lessened; nor has their more or less classical style the interest of the barbarous but piquant Latinity of their predecessors. For all the gros sel that he allows himself, it is curious to contrast the comparative stolidity of Bebel with the piquancy constantly given by Erasmus to much less auto- matically laugh-provoking subjects. It would be improper to close this long chapter (which should, however, have been longer still in order to do justice to the subject) without Letters. a slight further reference to the Latin correspondence which forms so important a part of the literature of the time. In the case of many of the great men mentioned or to be mentioned Erasmus, More, Bembo, Sadolet, and others in the case, indeed, of almost every man of importance in our special period, letters written in Latin form a more or less important part of his literary work, besides supplying data almost more important for 102 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. his own biography and the history of the time. A considerable part of these letters, indeed, consists of barren formalisms and compliments, couched in an artificial would-be Ciceronian style, and of no more pith or substance than the declamations of the School lihetoric. But a great part also is as vivid and as interesting as any one can reasonably desire, par- ticularly in the case of Erasmus. Yet even in this department the handwriting on the wall appears, as where, for instance, we find Ascham beginning his career as a letter-writer in Latin, even when he is writing to ladies, and ending it in English, even when he is writing on public business. Such a fact speaks for itself, and what it says is Mcnc, Tekel. It may still suit Barclay, nearly a hundred years later, to write even the Argenis, the first of " novels with a purpose," in Latin. It may, after another century and a half, still seem more proper and even easier to Johnson to state in Latin to his doctor the par- ticulars of the paralytic stroke from which he has hardly rallied. But these are survivals. The kingdom of Latin is passing and to pass* to the despised vernaculars. 103 CHAPTER II. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. ITALIAN LITERATURE, C. 1500 THE ITALIAN LITERARY TEMPER ARIOSTO HIS LIFE HIS WORK: THE MINOR POEMS THE 'ORLANDO' ITS QUALITIES AS ROMANCE DESULTORINESS ITS SARCASM AND LICENCE BRILLIANCY OP STYLE AND VERSE STORY-CHARACTER OF ITALIAN ROMANCE GENERALLY ITALIAN HUMOUR -BOTH AS IN ARIOSTO SCENES, PERSONS. AND PASSAGES ARIOSTO's RANK AS POET, AND AS MIRROR OF HIS TIME ARIOSTO AND RABELAIS OTHER EPIC-ROMANCESLYRICS : SONNETS, LA CASA MADRIGALS AND CANZONI ARIOSTO MICHELANGELO MOLZA VITTORIA COL- ONNA GUIDICCIONI ITALIAN DIDACTIC AND BLANK VERSE THE 'CAPITOLI,' ETC. PROSE-WRITERS MACHIAVELLI AND GUICCIAR- DINI MINOR HISTORIANS THE " NOVELLIERI " BANDELLO CINTHIO FIRENZUOLA AND GRAZZINI STRAPAROLA MISCELLANE- OUS PROSE: LETTERS, DIALOGUES ARETINO MISCELLANIES OF GELLI, FIRENZUOLA, BEMBO, VARCHI, CARO CA8TIGLIONE AND 'THE COURTIER.' IT is perhaps barely necessary to repeat the caution of the Preface that, as regards the subject of the present Italian utera- chapter, though of that only, the title of the ture, c. 1500. present volume is a frank and self-confessed misnomer. The first half of the sixteenth century, with in some cases, perhaps, a very few years at the 104 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. end of the fifteenth, undoubtedly constitutes the period of the Early Eenaissance in general European Litera- ture. But that period in Italian Literature hardly even falls within the limits of the volume which has preceded this. For Italy, as luck or ill-luck would have it, has always, and necessarily, stood in a dislo- cated position in regard to general European culture. One is sometimes almost tempted to say that Italy has no mediaeval period. The precinct of the ancient capital of the world, the patrimony of the modern Church, passed almost without a gap of twilight from Darkness to Renaissance. The latest of all European countries to achieve a real literature in the vernacular, Italy was by far the earliest to revive the study of the ancient tongues ; and this revival, notwithstanding that it brought about a more unintelligent and pedan- tic undervaluation of the vernacular itself than any- where else, ripened this vernacular at the very same time. When France and Germany already had a brilliant national literature, Italy had only a cluster of dialects, with little more than folk-song to serve them for record ; yet within a century at most she had far outstripped the rivals that had had so great a start of her. In the middle of the thirteenth century the rich and varied literature of France, the exquisite lyrics and wild or polished epics of Germany, were confronted, south of the Alps, by a beggarly array of formal poetry imitated from Provencal, of non-formal poetry that was mere folk-song. By the middle of the fourteenth, Italy, besides not a few minors, had three writers, one of whom was of the greatest of all THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 105 time, while the three together had brought Italian, in prose and verse, to a pitch of accomplishment which no other European language could rival for at least two hundred years to come. It is, perhaps, not wholly philosophical to put down the comparative falling off at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, as has often been done, to the encroachments of humanist pedantry. This, no doubt, had something to do with the matter; but not all, nor even very much. The burst of the Trecento, in fact, did for Italy in two or three generations what was done for the rest of Europe in two or three centuries, and the falling off after it was simply the phenomenon corresponding to the com- parative decadence and sterility of all Europe during the same fifteenth century. But the Italian dead season lasted for a shorter time, and broke once more into spring and summer with a brighter though briefer luxuriance, for reasons connected partly with the character of the earlier flourishing itself, partly with the occupation of the interval. The period from Dante to Boccaccio had been too short to exhaust the literary faculty of the nation ; and the attention bestowed upon the classics by the Humanists had inevitably if unwillingly reacted upon the equipment of the vernacular. When there began that wonderful after -bloom of seventy or eighty years, the later period of which falls to our lot here, the Italians settled once more to the production of literature, with advantages in all but one respect far superior to those possessed by any other nation whatsoever. To take 106 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Politian or Pulci in the earlier, Ariosto or Machiavelli in the later half, and compare them with Eabelais or Ronsard, with Surrey or even with Spenser, far later than the latest whom we notice, is almost like com- paring a modern astronomer with the possessor of an astrolabe. The Italians had a language somewhat lacking indeed in strength, but already tuned and tempered to the utmost possible pitch of melody and music. All important metrical problems were con- quered for them ; their grammar, if not formally, was practically fixed ; their vocabulary was as wide as they wanted. Prose, which was struggling into being in England, and still much unformed in France, had with them already reached comparative perfection. They were rather behindhand in drama, but in every other kind they were ahead, and in tale-telling very much ahead, of all other peoples. Lastly, they had been acquainted for a hundred years and more with a very large portion, and for a considerable time with practically the whole, of the Classics, whence they could derive at once instruction and example. Mean- while the Frenchman to some extent, the Englishman to a much greater, had to struggle with something like a complete change of language, with prosody never fully formed, and rendered almost useless by the change of language itself, with an unconstructed grammar, with a vocabulary which still wanted feed- ing up to the utmost in every department of thought and matter. Before we can, as has been so often and for the most part so unsatisfactorily done, attempt to compare Ariosto and Spenser, we must remember that THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 107 while the Italian is not more original than the Eng- lishman in point of matter, his inherited advantages in point of form are to us almost inconceivable. He has everything ready to his hand language, metre, gram- mar, fashions of handling. Spenser has to do almost everything for himself to forge the very tools that he uses, to cut down the very trees with which he builds. It is possible that in his admirable Italian Litera- ture Mr Symonds, perhaps from less acquaintance The Italian with the other parts of the subject, has not li^ry te^r. quite fully a n owe( j f or t h e enormous ad- vantages possessed by the Italians of this time. But he has not allowed one whit too much for the literary character of the Italian temper, its sense of beauty, its eye for proportion and harmony, its wide range and acute power of selection, its inherited justness of con- ception and expression. These qualities are so strik- ing, so unmistakable, that one cannot be surprised at the rank which, not at one time or in one country only, has been allowed to the Italian Literature of the Cinquecento. Yet of its defects there cannot now be much denial. That the eighteenth century, and even to some extent the earlier nineteenth, regarded Italy as the home of Romance, came of course only from the fact that, not entirely by their own fault, the men of those times did not know what Romance was. Of the three great elements of that great thing Variety, Mystery, Passion the Italians indeed possessed the first in amplest measure ; and if they were a little deficient in the third, they made by no means a bad 108 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. substitute for it out of that sublimated sensuality which is really a sort of naughty twin-sister of Pas- sion herself, an Anteros not wholly opposed to the better Cupid. But of Mystery they knew nothing, though they were quite aware, and very fond, of its caricature, Marvel. The Romans themselves had had very little sense of the mysterious ; even the Greeks can hardly be said to show it strongly ; and the whole course of Italian civilisation, especially the fatal familiarity of the Italians with a debased official Christianity, had served as a preventive to the impor- tation of the most precious of gifts from the North. Even in Dante it can hardly be said to be present in any other sense than this that as the greatest poetry is universal, it penetrates this region also. The dread countries of his voyage are all countries of mystery, of dream, yet the commonest of criticisms is, that though he never makes them prosaic he always makes them practical, real, objective. The very Beatific Vision is hardly vague, the descent on the wings of Geryon has the precision of a lift. He can do this without ever even approaching prose ; but others cannot, even in his time, much more two hundred years afterwards. If there is a touch of mystery anywhere in the Italian Eenaissance, it is in the ffypnerotomachia, which is but a survival of mediaeval allegory. The Italian poet of all times, more or less, of this time particularly, can sing exquisitely, say con- summately, see unerringly ; but he cannot dream. " On a work so well known, and so universally read, as the Orlando Furioso any observations would now be THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 109 superfluous." So wrote Eoscoe a century ago, and if he was right then, they might seem likely Ariosto. to be plusquam superfluous now. But Eoscoe was not writing an ostensibly literary history ; he was merely citing such aspects of Italian litera- ture as he thought likely to illustrate the story of his actual subject, Leo the Tenth, and likely also to re- quire expounding to his readers. Moreover, there are very good grounds for doubting whether the Orlando at the present moment is exactly "well known" and " universally read." That every educated person knows of it may be assumed, and some at least of its famous episodes the island of Alcina, the journey of Astolfo to the moon, and a few more, are no doubt vaguely known to everybody. Yet a person of very good education, not ignorant of Italian, has been known to confuse Alcina and Armida ; and I should rather like to try an intellectual company after dinner with such questions as, " What was the second heap of rubbish which Astolfo found ? " " What dress had Alcina on when she came to visit Ruggiero ? " not to mention such minuter and more recondite ones as, " What were the different fates of the sons of Marganorre ? " or " What was Eodomoute's reply to the novella of Giocondo ? " However this may be, the propriety of " making observations on the Orlando " here will hardly be contested, and if they seem voluminous in proportion to the size of the book or the chapter, there is, as in the case of Eabelais, a very complete answer ready. Not only are these two writers the greatest writers of their time from the point of view of world-literature, 110 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. but their books happen to be quite extraordinarily representative of that time, and, moreover, to supple- ment each other in the most extraordinary degree. There is hardly more than one important feature of the Renaissance, the singular combination of voluptuousness and melancholy, that they miss. All the rest its seriousness and its irony, its hopes and its cynical conviction of their folly, its freethinking and its enthusiasm for humanity, its reaction against asceticism, and its passionate love of visible, audible, degustable, odorous, tangible beauty, all are in these two. Lodovico Ariosto, a Ferrarese by extraction and education, and member of a more than respectable family, was actually born at Eeggio, of which His life. J J his father was governor, in 1474. He was intended for the law, but, like many others, left it for literature, a desertion which seemed likely to have awkward consequences when, at the age of six-and- twenty, he found himself left with a rather small independence and a family of nine brothers and sisters to provide for. He discharged this duty most credit- ably, however. Everybody who was anybody in the small states of Italy in those days expected some State provision, and received it to an extent which is still rather puzzling when one remembers that Italy has never been a rich country. Ariosto's first endowment, the Captainship of Cauossa, was more interesting from its associations than on quarter-day ; and when he was nearly thirty he became a confidential officer of Cardinal Ippolito of Este, brother of the Duke of THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. Ill Ferrara. It seems that he might have had good benefices if he would have taken orders beyond the lower degrees. Ippolito has had the usual ill-luck of the great when they happen to be served by the greater that of being extravagantly flattered by his servant and extravagantly abused by posterity. He seems to have been a very typical Italian prince of the time, with no morals, quite ready to put his brother's eyes out because a lady thought them handsomer than his own, and exceedingly unlikely to think of anybody else's interests unless it was quite convenient to himself. In two agreeable quali- ties, bravery and good looks, he also resembled his class ; in a third, which they not uncommonly pos- sessed, he seems to have been rather deficient. But we cannot all be good critics, and it is on the whole desirable that if a man does not like a thing he should say so. At any rate, whether Ippolito uttered the famous query l about the Orlando or not, he probably got the copyright secured to the author, and even, as Mr Symonds says pleasantly, bought a copy himself for one whole lira marchesana. After being in the service of the Cardinal for some fifteen years, Ariosto transferred himself to that of Ippolito's brother, Duke Alfonso. He had to travel 1 "Dove diavolo, messer Ludovico, avete trovato [or piyliato] tante ' and then what ? The sentence is traditionally completed iu three dif- ferent forms, all expressing "rubbish," "rot," but ranging in coarse- ness from coglionerie through minchioncric to cabettcrie. Roscoe, with the robustness of his generation, gives the usual (I can hardly say the consecrated) form ; Mr Symonds drops diavolo, and takes in one place one, in another the other, of the milder substantives. 112 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. now and then, but for the most part resided at Ferrara, with a good salary and handsome allowances. In 1522 he was made governor of the Garfagnana, an out-of-the-way and brigand -infested district, which office he held, to his great discomfort, for three years. Then he returned to Ferrara, married (somewhere about 1525) a widow, Alessandra Strozzi, whom he had long loved, revised the Orlando unceasingly, and died of consumption, June 6, 1533. Personally he seems to have been extremely amiable and agreeable, and was (by his own and his natural son Virginio's testi- mony) fond of turnips. Ariosto's work 1 falls into three well-marked divi- sions : the minor poems, epistles, satires, capitoli, &c. ; niswork.-The the plays; and the Orlando. The plays miHorpoems. w j^ |- )e d ea it w it n J Q t ne general chapter on the European Drama of the period. The minor poems have been extolled as extremely important for Ariosto's biography and private character. One would, of course, rather that he had not in them grumbled at the patron whom in full dress he went out of his way to load with fulsome praise; but this is unluckily very natural and very usual. Elsewhere the tone of these poems, though as amusing as we should expect, seems to me, I confess, to be rather conventional. From Horace and Persius downward there have been two satiric manners.: one that of 1 Editions very numerous. I use of the Orlando, which was first printed at Ferrara in 1516, a 4to containing likewise Dante, Petrarch, ami Tasso, dedicated to Goethe at Leipsic in 1826 ; of the Opere Minori, Lemonnier's, Florence, 2 vols., 1894. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 113 the easy well-bred or would-be well-bred man of the world who suspends everything on the adunc nose and occasionally scratches with still more adunc claws; the other that of the indignant moralist reproving the corruptions of the time. Both have produced good work, and Ariosto has contributed" not a little of it, mainly in the former key, but once or twice in the latter. But there is something, as usual, of the histrionic in either manner. The best passage is also the best known, that in which the poet describes his interview with Leo X. after the Pope's elevation to the Holy See. They had, it seems, been intimate friends and almost brothers before the Wheel of For- tune had carried Leo to the very top. Nor did the Pope, like some bad men, forget his friend. On the contrary, when Ariosto went to see him at home, he kissed him on both cheeks, pressed his hand, granted his request for securing his copyright, let him off half the fees (but some say this was for some small beni- fice, and we are usually told that Ippolito had got him the printing rights earlier), and permitted him to walk down in the rain to his inn and eat his supper there. This is quite admirably told, and the excuses which the poet makes for the Pope are consummate morsels; but it is a pity that he allows the passage to tail off into the stock copy-book reflections that honours and riches do not bring tranquillity of mind. To be esteemed an honest man is true honour. Most trite if most true. And from Messer Ludovico, of all people, we do not expect ignoring of the fact that it is not absolutely impossible to possess honours H 114 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. and riches with tranquillity of mind ; that you cer- tainly do not secure this by not possessing them ; and that it is quite as easy for an honest man to enjoy his honesty plus dryness and a good supper at the Pope's table as to wrap it in a wet cloak and feed it with the food of inns at his own expense. His vexa- tion, or the conventional obligation of the form, has here and elsewhere made him succumb to an evil influence from which he is generally free enough the influence of Cant. In his great work, whatever other objections may be made to it, this malign goddess is most conspicu- ously absent, while nobody pretends that The Orlando. J . , the minor poems, satirical or other, display a tithe of the poetical power which reigns in the great romance. To it, therefore, let us turn. It may, de- spite what has been said above, be assumed without much rashness that readers are aware of the fact that it is a continuation of the great and long strangely undervalued poeni of Boiardo on the same subject. And as Boiardo himself has been fully treated in the last volume, there is no need to do more than repeat that the Orlando Innamorato, though nothing like so accomplished a poem as the Furioso, displays a truer spirit of Komance. On the other hand, in adjusting the story rather to " an arioso key " our poet has avoided the extreme burlesque of Pulci (v. also as above). Although he sometimes shaves the burlesque very close, he never actually touches it, and of the enormous body of verse which Italy has composed on the ultimate base of the French Carlovingian epos, THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 115 with a strong draft upon the Arthurian legend and the miscellaneous adventure - pieces, his essay tran- scends all others. Critics of that ancient school, still too numerously attended, which regards it as the first of critical duties its qualities as to construct elaborate classifications, to Romance. copy their subdivisions upon labels, to stick the labels on, and to exhibit the result to the world as criticism, have decided that there are, in Italian at least, five kinds of epic, romance, or narrative poetry, to wit: Eomantic proper, Epic or Heroic proper, Burlesque, Heroi- Comic, and Satiric. And they gravely tag to the Orlando the epithet Romantic, without, it may be allowed, the slightest danger of contradiction, but also, it must be regret- fully added, with the least possible illustrative or informative result. Of course the Orlando is a Romance in any and every form and sense of that scarcely univocal word, though in some senses more than others. But what we may legitimately and advantageously investigate is the further question, What kind of a Romance is it, not by label, but in quality ? The unprejudiced but not unintelligent reader who has a fair acquaintance with Romances already will probably, before he has got far in his read- Desultoriness. . m *. ' ** i i *. ing of the Orlando, begin to make up his niind that, whatever else it is, it is an exceedingly desultory one, and he will, at least possibly, not change his opinion when he gets to the end. But here again he will be taken up by some at least of the 116 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. critics, who will assure him that for all its apparent vagaries the Orlando has really one main plot never lost sight of, in the bringing together of Ruggiero and Bradamante as fabulous ancestors of the House of Este ; that additional plots or, as Chaucer would say, " knots " (they confess that they are less pervading) are provided by the Siege of Paris at Paynini hands and (now and then) by the title-incident ; and that violently as the action appears to waver and see-saw between different adventures in East and West, the transitions are really managed with consummate skill. It is possible that on these points some such readers may remain unconvinced. They will say that the ancestor-legend, though a recognised commonplace of " regular " epic poetry subsequent to Virgil, is a poor thing at best, and that it here is nothing more than a sort of extended Dedication by which the obligatory flattery of patrons, instead of being concentrated in one place, is spread over the whole work ; and that though Bradamante certainly does displace Angelica as heroine (so far as there is a heroine), Ruggiero, till close before the end, can only be called a hero because he is rather oftener on the stage than any one else. Of the Siege of Paris they will say that it is a mere occasion for striking episodes the best of them the famous single-handed incursion of Rodomonte and that the poet cannot, and evidently does not, expect us to take interest in it as much more than a back- ground. The Madness of Orlando they will not merely pronounce episodic, but deny it much in- terest, except at the beginning (where the effect THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 117 of the ever -new discoveries of the name of his rival, coupled with Angelica's, is very finely and powerfully imagined and described) and at the end in the rescue-operations of Astolfo. But most of all, perhaps, they will demur to the praise bestowed upon the transitions. Nay, without blaming Ariosto in the least for adopting the method which he chose to adopt, and which has given a charming result, they may refuse the name of transition altogether to what is in reality a mere sandwiching (generally without so much as butter and mustard to make a kind of cement to the parts of the sandwich) of Levantine and Ponen- tine adventures. They may even contrast the way in which Spenser effects his intertwinings of the different strands of his story, to the very great advantage of the English poet. And those who take this line need not despair of Ariosto's own approbation, for he himself never seems to take the subject seriously. However this may be, it is certain that some at least of those who enjoy the Orlando most keenly, and not least critically, do not care one jot whether Ruggiero marries Bradamaute or not, and are only interested in the Siege of Paris, on the sportsmanlike principle of backing your own side. And the attraction, to them, can be quite critically accounted for. If Ariosto took only a business-like and courtier-like interest in his general story, he took the keenest, the most craftsmanlike, the most masterly interest in the particular stories which he grafted upon it. In such a case, and with such a person, one can never be entirely sure how far the poem as it exists is 118 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. the result of any definite plan. When Ariosto took up the unfinished story of Orlaiido from Boiardo's hands, we are not necessarily to suppose him actuated by any cut -and -dried scheme. These things shape themselves in the hands of men of genius even more than they are shaped by them. But it may be said, " How about the sarcastic inten- tion of the Orlando?" To which, perhaps, the best answer is, that we shall do well to con- Its sarcasm , . , sider the sarcastic expression rather than the sarcastic intention. The common fallacy of sup- posing that a man who sees the ludicrous side of a thing or person necessarily despises and probably dislikes that person or thing, has worked ill in this instance also. That Angelica, at once the cynosure and the prize of the world, after being doted on by, and playing with, the most peerless of peers, should throw herself into the arms of a good-looking nobody, is hardly even severe " criticism of life." The thing is life : the only thing to be said about it is that the poet has been exceedingly kind to his coquette, and that few Angelicas are lucky enough to find such unobjec- tionable Medoros. That Orlando's prowess should lead to nothing but jealousy and madness, only not com- monplace because they are in excess, and that he should be brought to his senses, or rather his senses to him, with the aid of physical punishment and subjec- tion, is not bitter satire. It is simply acknowledgment of quite usual fact, consistent with the highest concep- tion of the romantic. That Ariosto himself had this highest conception THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 119 need not be contended would, indeed, be absurd to contend. As an Italian of the later though and licence. , --> i II-ITII not latest .Renaissance, he could hardly have had it. Tyranny and profligacy in the upper classes of the State, servility and profligacy in the lower, cor- ruption and unbelief in the Church, hardly made an atmosphere genial for a quest of the Sangreal or even for a Court of Gloriana. But his view is not by any means such a low view as it is sometimes taken to be. Even his much - talked - of immorality may seem (though it is always dangerous to take up the cudgels for a defendant on this score) to have been not a little exaggerated. Let it be remembered that even Spenser himself shocks the pudibund nowadays, though Spenser's morality and his religious fervour are absolutely beyond question or suspicion. Of course Ariosto goes beyond Spenser, who would certainly not have given admission to novelle like that of Giocondo, and would have considered the young person a little more, if not in the history of Alcina and Euggiero, at any rate in that of Eicciardetto and Fiordispina. But it may be strongly contended that the Ariosto of the great poem has here found but an ill friend in the Ariosto of the clever comedies. That they are tainted with an always disagreeable and sometimes disgusting moral or immoral tone, need not be denied for one moment. But the Orlando itself seldom goes beyond the mildly naughty, and not often beyond the simply voluptuous. In particular it must be again strongly urged that the most offensive characteristics of Italian licence, the positive nastiness and the admixture of 120 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. cruelty with lust, are all but entirely absent from the Orlando. Its Venus may be of the earth earthy, but she is never of the mud or of the Devil ; al- though she may have too much of Pandemos, she has nothing of Pandemonium. Lastly (for one may justly love to get objections over), the charge of flat- tery may be at once admitted, deplored, and dismissed to come up for judgment when called on. It is very disgusting that great poets should flatter Augustus or Alfonso, Ippolito or Cromwell, and they are the worse men for doing it. But they are by no means neces- sarily the worse poets, and it is as a poet that we are dealing with the author of the matters in -erie, which so did surprise Ippolito himself. To pass to the merits. In the very first place has to be put the extraordinary attraction of Ariosto's Brilliancy of style and versification. Of his mere lan- ttyle and verse. guage j fc ig no doubt besfc leffc ^ Italians to speak. They have been (not, of course, without right, considering their history) among the most punctilious of European nations on this head, and while it would hardly become any foreigner to enter the lists with them on such questions, it is an important fact that in regard to none of their great writers has there been such an agreement as in regard to Ariosto. There have been times when even Dante, even Boccaccio, did not meet the severe requirements of Italian Academic prudery : Petrarch has, in native taste to some extent, and still more in foreign, escaped criticism chiefly on the dangerous ground of " fault- lessness " ; with Tasso we are to some extent already THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 121 in the presence of decadence. But Ariosto, Ferrarese as he. was, has very nearly united all suffrages at home, and practically all abroad. Moreover, strictures on Patavinity are almost proverbially barren. With style proper, and still more with versification, we come to more interesting and safer ground, for here the orbis terrarum is the secure judge. When purists in England tell us that Chaucer might have selected a better dialect than he did, that Shakespeare's English is not quite correct, that Dryden wants a stricter and purer grammar, we say, if we are wise, " Perhaps," and pass on. The style of all these admits no question, nor does Ariosto's. Its excellence must be apparent to any one who can appreciate style at all, as soon as he has acquired Italian enough to understand, even not yet in minutiae, the mere words of the poem. Not Virgil, not Racine, not Addison, produces the effect of complete and easy mastery more thoroughly: and there is something in Ariosto which does not appear in any of the three. To say that he is never prosaic, would indeed only be true from a special point of view, but no other limitation is possible even prima facie. The ease, the variety, the interesting quality of his narrative manner have probably never been surpassed. But to some tastes at anyrate it is the excellence of his versification, that articulus stantis aut cadentis poeseos, which is his greatest charm. The Italian hendecasyllable has many merits ; but some at least of these are derived from a quality which hovers con- stantly on the border of defect. Even in its strict form with the feminine rhyme, and still more when 122 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. that rhyme is extended to the sdrucdolo variety, it is just a little too skipping it has a constant tendency to reduce itself from a five- to a four-footed line by sinking intermediate syllables, or if it takes the five accents, not to charge them with quite sufficient gravity. And this is specially the case when it is arranged in stanzas that terminate with a couplet. Among the almost innumerable evidences, major and minor, of Dante's poetical supremacy is his adoption (his invention possibly, but it really does not matter) of the terza rima, from this special point of view. The rhymes recur as the whole nature of the language de- mands that they should ; but the constant break in their recurrence arrests the skip and pirouette the slight "tumble" even which is natural to them, and at least assists the poet to achieve his unsurpassed and seldom matched gravity, resonance, and echo. So the sonnet and the sestine, to take Petrarch's most suc- cessful forms, arrest the " tumble " by a still greater intricacy of recurrence. And though in the canzone the rhyme in pairs is strongly present, yet it is not single as in the ottava its effect is largely conditioned by the varying length of the lines, and the much greater length of the stanza. Yet it may be doubted, with infinite submission to Dante's expressed judgment, whether the peculiarity 011 which we are commenting is not a slight blot on the supremacy of the canzone itself. 1 1 It was probably some unconscious consciousness of this defect of the henclecasyllabic couplet which made the Italians prefer the form of sonnet which does not end with it. As no similar defect attends THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 123 However this may be, the ottava of hendecasyllables, with all its merits, undoubtedly does fall short, in sincerity and gravity, of the forms most natural to compare with it the English Rhyme Royal and Spenserian. This last, as has been shown not merely by its inventor but by poets so different as Thomson, Shelley, and Tennyson, is probably the greatest stanza in the world for serious poetry, though it also may have the opposite defects of its opposite qualities. Ehyme Royal is inferior to both in com- pass, and very greatly inferior to the Spenserian in power; but it has its own merits, and in what has been called " plangency " has no superior. Ariosto, however, was almost bound by custom to use the ottava, was, like Dryden and some other very great poets, not a man to take the trouble of inventing when a good thing was ready to his hand, and, more- over, was by nature thoroughly disposed to the lighter touch and motion which this stanza invites. Yet it never tempts him (as it had tempted Pulci, and has tempted Pulci's English and French imitators), to give a merely burlesque touch to his verse. The undulating movement of the lines, whether in individual verses or in the octaves, is so exactly suited to his purposes, that there is hardly any tone, among those that he the English decasyllabic couplet, the objection which applies to Italian does not apply to English. Had this consideration been present to the minds of those critics who, one after another, depreciate the Shakespearian form to exalt the Petrarch ian, and even go to thft preposterous length of refusing to the former the name of sonnet at all, they might have been saved from an absurdity which has found only too docile following. 124 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. wants to give, that he cannot give to it. He never does want to rise to Dante's highest or even to his higher levels, yet such passages as the immortal " Vattene in pace alma beata e bella," the epipkonema to the chaste spirit of the self-martyred Isabel, show that, with a different purpose and a very little more effort, he might have come much nearer to Dante himself. While as to his manage- ment of verse in the lighter keys there are practically no deniers. In ordinary l description, in mere narrative, in gravely sly innuendo, he is admittedly supreme. As regards the individual line we have the advantage of being able to compare all the four greatest poets of Italy ; as regards the octave, a comparison of Ariosto with Tasso will suffice. As compared with Dante we shall find that Ariosto's line is very much more " enjambed," so that, while it loses gravity, it attains swiftness. It may be said that it is not fair to com- pare the inscription on Hell-gate to anything in such a poein as the Orlando, yet the passage quoted above on Isabella's death is not so entirely out of keeping with it as to be incomparable. Of the nine lines of the Inscription 2 not one really runs on, three end with full stops, five with lesser stops but with full comple- tion of sense, and the ninth (1. 7) with no stop, but in- 1 One must add "ordinary." Spenser beats him easily in his greatest efforts here, and many who have never read or perhaps heard of Lessing's quarrel with the portrait of Alcina, must have anticipated the German critic. 2 See Dr Moore's ed., Oxford, 1897. Variations in others are trifling. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 125 eluding a proposition in itself complete. In the eight lines of the apostrophe to Isabella's soul, the second, third, and fifth are " enjambed," and only three end with a real break. Nor, I think, would the contrast fail, however often it were applied ; while it applies almost equally to the central pauses. The contrast with Petrarch is something of the same kind, though Petrarch is more prodigal of " enjambed " lines than Dante. It is, moreover, complicated by a fresh feature., resulting partly no doubt from the difference in subject, for it appears much less in the Trionfo than in the Eime. This is Petrarch's occasional nay, frequent addic- tion to an antithetical arrangement o verse, in which the second half balances the first or returns upon it, 1 instead of the resistless and unbroken march of Dante's line, or the undulating progress of Ariosto's. But the contrast of the versification of the Orlando and that of the Cfcrusalemme is specially interesting, because it is double, in stanza and in line, because the subjects of the poems are so similar, and because there is no great, if there be any appreciable, difference in the age and stamp of the language. These things should make for a great resemblance, and do actually make for some. But the differences are almost as remarkable, if not quite so staring, as the resemblance. To say that Tasso's verse drags, would be not only uncompli- mentary but false. I have amused myself by opening the two poems alternately at a venture in divers pairs of places, and comparing the first lines of successive 1 How great the effect of this was on Elizabethan poetry all students of that poetry should know. 126 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. batches of stanzas. Over and over again you will find in Ariosto stanza after stanza in which the first line runs straight and pauseless from beginning to end, very likely with not even a stop at the end itself. This may be sometimes found of course in Tasso also, but far less frequently ; and even when it does occur, the lines move slower than Ariosto's. And this is all the more remarkable, that Tasso avails himself more frequently than his great predecessor of the licence of running one stanza into another ; so that it is clearly not intentional. The characteristics thus indicated, and others interesting but* too long to trace result in a poetic medium which for its special purpose simply cannot be surpassed. Ariosto does not attempt to hobble or check the skip, even the pirouette above referred to, nor does he try to disguise it by running the stanzas on. But by keeping it well in hand he gives to both line and stanza the freest action, an agile grace of movement which is inexpressibly pleasing. With him, as with all the greatest poetic masters, however much one may enjoy the meaning, it is a constant delight from time to time to let the meaning take care of itself, and to listen to the music of the verse as one listens to running water or rustling trees, allowing the cadences to shape rather our own dreams than anything that they have to tell us. But for those who do not feel this charm, as well as for those who do, he has story enough to tell. Those who, even more unreasonable than Mrs Martha Buskbody at the end of Old Mortality, are uncomfort- THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 127 able unless they know not merely what happens to the Guse Gibbies of a tale after its end, but what happened to them from the date of their appearance in this world up to the beginning of the fable, may indeed require to be referred to the Innamorato or to some analysis of it ; others need not be so particular. It will be sufficient for them to know certain general outlines if even those and then to abandon them- selves to the poet's guidance. Great pains have been spent on the origin of what we can hardly call the Italian cycle of Eomance it is too late, too unoriginal, and too irregularly Story-character. furnished for that but may call the trans- formation or travesty of the Charlemagne story, on which so many great Italian wits exercised them- selves. In Dante's time the far greater Arthurian Legend seems still to have had the chief attention in Italy, if indeed it was not Dante's own unerring wit and poetical enthusiasm which made him write, not merely the Francesca and Paolo passage in the In- ferno, but the less generally known reference in the De Vulyari Eloquio. But Arthurian matters were rather too high for the Italians ; and it is certain that at a very early date poems of the Carlovingian cycle had not merely been known in Italy, but had actually (v. supra, p. 67) assumed a sort of Macaronic form between French and Italian. The controversy, if there ever was one, between the two " matters " of France and of Britain had been settled by the date of the Reali di Francia (v. The Transition Period, pp. 388- 390). Thenceforward the Italians half borrowed, half 128 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. shaped for themselves a new "matter," in which the various stories of invasion of Spain and Italy by the Emperor a la barbe florie and his Paladins, together with the not particularly dutiful behaviour of those Paladins to Charlemagne himself, the treason of the house of Mayence, and the almost independent position of that of Montglane in resistance to the Saracens, were combined with elements borrowed from the Romans d'Aventure l rather than from the Chansons de Gfestes or the Arthurian stories. Further, in this new, rather sophisticated, and even bastard, but ingenious development, there appeared two new features, one perhaps su^sjested, Of Italian * Romance the other certainly original. The first of these was that multiplication of mere wonders which is noticeable in the Amadis cycle, 2 and which was not impossibly suggested to the Spaniards and Portuguese by their Eastern inter- course. The popular connection of giants, witches, dragons, enchantments, and the like with romance is due to the fact that, from the sixteenth century onwards, the true old romances became mainly un- known, and for some three centuries in France and England the Italian rococo substitute was held to be the standard. In the chansons de geste the miraculous element is purely religious, and in the Arthurian story it is always more or less connected with the Legend of the Graal. There is hardly a trace of the 1 See The Flourishing of Romance, chaps, iii., iv., vii., and The Four- teenth Century, chap. i. 2 See The Later Renaissance, p. 127 sq. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 129 kind of conjurer's supernatural, the Jack-the-Giant- Killer wonders, which are rife in the Amadis and the Italians, and which, from them and from other late fifteenth-century work, affected Spenser to some extent. The new element, which is found nowhere pre- viously, is the peculiar and rather bourgeois comedy, the Voltairian touch, as we may call it proleptically, which is flagrant in Pulci, present even to some ex- tent in Boiardo (though less in him than in any one), incessant, though quietly managed in Ariosto himself, and pushed to various degrees of avowed burlesque and grotesque in writers like Berni, Folengo, and Forti- guerra. This, we say, is quite new. There is much more comedy in the Chansons de Geste than those who have not read them suspect ; but it is of the hard Teutonic order. The "japes" of Sir Dinadan and others in the Arthurian story are not frequent, and are always of the simple, almost childish, mediaeval kind ; while Amadis and Palmerin are guiltless of humour. The Italians, on the other hand, thrust in their own peculiar variety of the humorous at almost every moment. Appreciation of this quality may vary. It may well seem, for instance, to some even of those who can thoroughly and pretty equally appre- Itcdian humour. * ./ 1_ ciate Aristophanes and Lucian, Erasmus and the Obscuri, Eabelais and Moliere, Swift and Fielding and Thackeray, that the much -vaunted Margutte passages of Pulci are a little rudimentary in conception and a little exaggerated in execution ; I 130 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. and that while work like Folengo's is of course only to be judged according to its own rules, it can never receive a very high place. But in Ariosto we have this narqiwis tone adjusted as nearly to good taste as it ever can be, and never pushed to a mere sneer, much less to a mere guffaw. That Messer Ludovico definitely intended to satirise Romance, that he had even as much anti- romantic intention as Cervantes (who had not very much), is more than doubtful. His position, allowing for difference of time, nation- ality, and the like, resembles that of Chaucer in Sir Thopas, but is one of more complexity and refine- ment. In so far as he is a satirist at all in the Orlando, he is satirising much rather those generous but also half-witless and impossible impulses of human nature, of which the Romance is a delightful expres- sion, than that expression itself. The universally known opening distich is perfectly valid : he does sing, and sing without any perfidious intention, ladies, and knights, and arms, and loves, and courtesies, and deeds of bold emprise only, as he sings, the seamy side of it somehow occurs to him, and he lets us know that it does, and how it does, by certain masterly side- touches. Universally known as they may be, however, it may be doubted whether sufficient attention has really been Both a in P a id to these two lines. For they indicate, Ariotto. an( j indicate justly, the desultory character of the work itself. It has been pointed out above that there is very little evidence of really sustained pur- pose: it is much if the poet's great art can hide the THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 131 pillar-lo-post character of his story. But, as we have seen, it does hide that character, and that is quite sufficient. In perusing the book the reader will derive very little assistance from the so-called argomenti. These inscriptions are much longer than Spenser's much-ridiculed doggerel quatrains, and not nearly so quaint ; but they are considerably less in- forming a fact, no doubt, partly due to the much greater length of the Ariostian canto. There is, how- ever, perhaps, some intention in the way in which, in the first two cantos, the attention of the reader is skil- fully shifted from Angelica, the practically dethroned heroine of the Innamorato, to her successor, Brada- mante. The flight of the former from Kinaldo and her adventures in the forest are mere ordinary roman- d'aventures work ; the defeat of Pinabel, his treason to Bradamante, and her consequent introduction to the wonders of the tomb of Merlin and to the future of her own race, are real business, promising at least some connected thread of story. And it is worth observing that Ariosto handles his frequent introductions of con- temporary personages and history with a skill which distinguishes him from almost all other poets. The second-rate part which Orlando plays is largely re- deemed by the vigour and splendour of the passages where he does appear. Mr Symonds has rightly dwelt on the singular skill with which the two different battles with the Ore are managed, though one may doubt about going with him to the full extent of admiring ^Ariosto's elaborate similes. These things 132 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. always have the drawback of suggesting a deliber- ate following of Homer, and, as a rule, this is the only way in which they do suggest Homer. But the simile is the superstition of the critic, who wishes sometimes, if not always, to remember the ancients. Again, in regard to Ruggiero, the poet has sur- mounted, with that usual and curious felicity of his, the natural tendency of intelligent man- Persons, . kind to hate a successful hero. Euggiero is, indeed, not the most interesting of the knights on either side, of that more presently, but we never dislike him. His entanglement with Alcina, his designs on Angelica, excite in us none of the feel- ings of contemptuous loathing which the dealings of ^neas with Dido excite in every generous breast ; and if Marfisa had not turned out to be his sister, we could, in spite of Bradamante, have tolerated his philanderings with her. On the other side, Rodomonte is perhaps less sympathetic than Turnus, as he is infinitely less grand than Milton's Satan. But he clearly did not mean (if he had known what he was about) to cut off Isabella's head, and there is some- thing refreshingly sensible as well as just in his rally against the commonplace slander of the Host's Tale. It is more effective, though less genial, than the anonymous English excuse "Some be lewd, and some be shrewd, Yet all they be not so." And this brings us to the enshrined novelle, which THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 133 are such noteworthy features of the poem. They have too often shocked the grave and the precise: they are too often incapable of adaptation as furniture of books for the young. But they are sometimes very amusing, sometimes really pathetic, and almost always quite admirably told. Whether introduced as episodes or frankly thrown in as mere told tales, the passages which are suggested by the names of Giocondo, Fiordispina, Genevra, Lidia, Marganorre, and many others, display the author's powers of narrative verse at their very highest. One is, indeed, almost tempted to say that they, even more than the rest of the poem, put him at the very head of all poets "as a mere raconteur. No doubt a poet ought to be much more than this ; no doubt Ariosto might with advantage be much more than this oftener than he is. But this he is, and without losing sight of poetry a thing that can be said of few. It is difficult, where there is so much to charm, to fix upon the most charming passages, but many of them have already been indicated in pass- aiul passages. . . . mg. I do not think that Ariosto shows at his very best in fights : it seems to be generally acknowledged, even by his greatest admirers, that he has nothing in this way equal to the great duel of Orlando and Agricane in Boiardo. Nor, unless we give it very great odds for its originality, will the island of Alcina obtain advantage, or even bear the comparison, when contrasted with Tasso's garden of Arrnida or Spenser's Palace of Acrasia. In the former case the poet's heart does not seem to have 134 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. been enough in the matter, for Ariosto was never a practical soldier, while in the latter he is not quite dreamy enough. Now the dream -element is of the very first importance in such descriptions, both in sav- ing the ornamental from the touch of the tawdry, and in saving the voluptuous from the smirch of the indecent. Morpheus is unabashedly sensual ; but he has some strange charm against the obscene. On the other hand, in the general description of enchanted palaces and castles, hippogriff- rides and the like, Ariosto is quite infallible. His irony, while it is never tedious and teeth - on - edge - setting, entirely saves situations of this kind from mere childishness in the first place, from the too businesslike and so dull detail of the Amadis cycle, and from the third danger of " overdoing it," into which his great follower, Spenser, has been often led, partly by his devotion to Allegory and partly by a following of such originals as Arthur of Little Britain. On the whole, however, we may probably return to the Thirty-fourth Canto, with the matter belonging to Ariosto- s rank it at the end of the Thirty-third, as the as poet, finest, though not the most beautiful pas- sage of the poem ; to the loves of Angelica and Medoro as the most beautiful, or, at least, the most exquisitely pretty ; to the epitaph on Isabella as the noblest and least tainted with either worldliness or cant ; and to Eodomonte in Paris as the most ambitious on stock lines ; reserving the Giocondo story as the farce of the pentalogy, and claiming for it the excuses and licences of that position. And, for some at least, the first THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 135 named may be pointed out as probably the greatest of all. It has character Astolfo is much more of a per- son than most of the knights sufficient but not exces- sive purpose, criticism of life in quantity and force enough to satisfy the veriest devotee of that test of poetry, a magnificent and quintessential power of adapting style and verse to subject, and, last of all, that peculiar blend of laughter, seriousness, and some- thing as nearly approaching tears as an Italian of the Eenaissance could feel, which constitutes Humour. Now, humorous poetry, if equal stress be honestly laid on the substantive and on the adjective, is one of the very rarest of kinds, and when it is found in quintessence there is perhaps no reason for refusing it rank among the greatest. As, then, Ariosto has at least in this supremacy ; as he is very nearly if not quite supreme in more than one other respect ; as it may almost be said that he never fails, and that this freedom from failure is not due to tame faultlessness or a cowardly abstinence from the most difficult attempts, it will go hard but we must rank him, at lowest, just below the very greatest of all. Such a place is, I believe, his right, even on the calculus of those who refuse the historic estimate, or and as mirror at least admit it with grudging ; but for his- ofhis time. j. orv jj e nag eyen more c l a i m s and interests. It has been said that with Rabelais he represents the greatest literature of his time, penetrated most fully by the extra-literary as well as the literary character- istics of that time ; and it may be added not merely that few times have been so thoroughly represented, 136 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. but that few have ever so thoroughly lent themselves to representation. The Renaissance is of those periods which are not at all simple and which are also not exactly genuine, resembling in this respect rather the society of the Roman Empire or that of the present day than that of Greece or of the Middle Ages. Its typical man was distracted by many preoccupations. His so-called paganism and his still real though some- times rebellious submission to Christianity; his enthu- siasm for classical literature and philosophy and his scorn for things mediseval ; his vague sense of the won- derful gains that science and discovery and commerce might bring; his religious and political restlessness; his educational fury all these things pulled him this way and that way, and left him no definite or single course. But they were all derived, to a great extent, from literature, taken "from a printed book," and therefore the printed book could reproduce them. Ariosto and Rabelais naturally does the reproduction Rabelais. under different conditions from those which act upon Ariosto : he is fresher, more unsophisticated, less troubled about the beautiful, and more about the good, an enthusiastic believer in humanity, and (in a way which for very good reasons he is careful not to define too closely) a believer in God. Ariosto has upon him the polish and the pressure of a much older civilisation, and especially of a much older culture, while the miserable conditions in Church and State which had so long affected Italy could not fail to affect him: yet though he displays little or no enthusiasm except for things lovely to see, and soft to touch, THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 137 and sweet to taste and hearing and smell, this most genuine passion of the Renaissance makes him at least no pessimist. He laughs at humanity, but he quite tolerates it ; some readers can see no active or aggres- sive free -thought in him. His motto is, "Enjoy"; and he does not seem to doubt that there is ample enjoyment for everybody, at least everybody about whom an educated gentleman need trouble himself, in sight and in sound, in book and in picture, 1 in wine and in meat, in the beauty of woman, the amuse- ment of adventure, the good things generally of the universe. He will even heighten the possibilities of amusement with Ores to fight and Hippogriffs to ride, with magic rings and horns and lances to give variety and range, just as he added " vinegar and wine sauce" 2 to his beloved turnips. For the expression of the less aspiring but more elaborately enjoying mood of the period in such verse as he has given us we may be most profoundly thank- ful even the grave and precise may surely say Vctt- tene in pace to his soul. He has not, like Rabelais, mixed with his expression elements which puzzle or revolt the ordinary reader; even his much-talked-of immorality needs, as has been said, a Pecksniff or a Podsnap to make very much fuss about it. He is eminently uncontroversial : save on the moral ground just mentioned, a man must be suffering from litigious 1 Let it be remembered that he definitely mentions both the writers and the painters of his time in elaborate passages. 3 This may seem an odd mixture : it was probably a sort of sauce au lieu. Those with whom turnips do not disagree should try it ; and if it makes them write more Orlandos so much the better. 138 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. monomania ] who picks a quarrel with Ariosto about anything. And so it happens, with a pleasant poetical justice, that he whose creed was this, " Enjoy," has actually provided, for reading posterity to all time, perhaps the maximum of unmixed enjoyment that any poet has ever succeeded in offering. This examination of by far the greatest of the Italian chivalrous romances or neither to urge the other epic- word controversially nor to omit it with romances. & SUS pj c i on O f purpose epics, when taken in connection with those given of the fifteenth- cen- tury poems in The Transition Period and of Tasso in The Later Renaissance, may probably dispense us from minute criticism of any other. The second place in our special period is undoubtedly occupied by the Orlando Innamorato of Berni, a rifacimento (and not the only one) of Boiardo's poem, which long usurped the place of the original. Francesco Berni, who was born at the classic spot of Larnporecchio in 1490 and died in circumstances of some mystery in 1536, will appear more than once in this chapter. The characteristic which gave his name to a special style of burlesque is sufficiently obvious in the poem ; but the ignobility of the travesty hangs about it, and it is by no means certain that we have not re- ceived it in a garbled condition. Bernardo Tasso of Bergamo (1493-1569) should have had the privilege 1 It must, however, be sorrowfully admitted that this disease seems to be rather common, when one sees even the late Mr Symonds drawing a face of nineteenth-century horror at Ariosto for allowing his armed and charmed heroes to butcher so many peasants and Saracens. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 139 (so common in poems of our kind) of seeing his posterity in a magic glass. He might then have thought it wiser to rely on his son for his place in poetical history. He was a gentleman and a man of worth in every way, with a talent for versification which he used only too freely. But his enormous Amadigi, in which, for the space of some 60,000 lines, he turned into verse the Amadis story, rather as it appears in Herberay's French form (indeed he wrote it at Paris) than in the original, and added some sprouts of his own brain, is but with the Africas and the Pucdles. Gian-Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550) cannot be said to have added much of an additional hold on literature to his Sophonisba (v. chap, vi.), his critical work (y. chap, vii.), and his publication in the vernacular of the De Vulgari Eloquio, by his ambitious Italia Libcrata da' Goti, blank in verse and blank in interest. The Florentine Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556), who also will recur, was a better poet than Bernardo Tasso or than the author of the Sophonisba ; but his // Giron Cortcse and Avarchide, the first of which versifies one of the best, but far from the best known, of the later incrustations on the Arthurian cycle, are not more original and much heavier than the Coltivazione (v. infra, p. 148 sq.). The names, for- gotten in this connection at any rate, of Brusantini, Pescatore, and others too many to mention, 1 are con- nected with the expression of different incidents in the accepted Orlando series, or the appending of 1 For some of them see Dr Garnett's Italian Literature (London, 1898), p. 153. 140 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. continuations, or the prefixing of introductions to it, in measure probably as abundant as the innumerable jointings of the original gestes themselves. Even the Ricciardctto of the already mentioned Fortiguerra or Forteguerri (1674-1735), nearly two hundred years after our time, may possibly not close the endless series in which, if any hero or heroine of Boiardo or Ariosto has missed any possible development of his or her career, he or she may justly complain of unjust neglect. It is both natural and interesting to turn from Epic to Lyric, and there is, as it happens, an excellently Lyrics. Sonnets, representative collection l of the so-called lyrical work of twelve famous poets of the sixteenth century, including such names of the first class as Ariosto, Michelangelo, and Tasso ; of the second, as Bembo, Molza, Vittoria Colonna, La Casa, Guarini; and of some others, ranging from Annibal Caro downwards. There is here a very large propor- tion of exquisitely accomplished work, and not a very small one of work that may be called exquisite, without any dubious addition. Of the Sonnets, of which it is very largely composed, it is of course difficult to speak too highly. Those of Michelangelo are now well known in England ; those of Giovanni della Casa (1503-1556) less so, in spite of the high and perfectly well-deserved praise which Mr Symonds has given them. If the 1 Lirici del Secolo xvi. Milan : Sonzogno, 1879. For thorough- ness, the selections must of course be supplemented by the complete works of the writers, but these are easily accessible. No country has cheaper editions of her classics than Italy. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 141 student of literature were not from his very freshman- ship broken to the eternal contrasts of humanity, it might seem incredible that the author of the niggling and sniggering obscenity of the Capitolo del Forno could also be the author of the great Sleep Sonnet " O Sonno, o della queta, umida, ombrosa " which was probably the direct ancestor of the divers beautiful things on the same theme that our own Elizabethan sonneteers composed ; of that beginning "Mentre fra valle paludose ed ime"; and of, perhaps, the best of all, as it is the best known " O dolce selva solitaria, arnica " to which not a few others out of no great total might be added. Of \\\e furor arduus of Michelangelo's com- positions in this kind there is no need to speak ; but throughout, these poets are well at the height of this, their own and their greatest poetical invention as a form. Even merely pretty talents like that of Caro can extract the ultimate prettiness from it, as others almost the ultimate grandeur ; and even the rather scholastic and rhetorical elegance of Bembo acquires some touch of nature as it celebrates that crin d'oro crespo of Lucrezia, a tress of which is said still to be in existence irradiating Bembo's manuscripts. But Sonnets, as the strictest critics have always contended, and as all but the loosest must admit, are dubiously and by allowance lyrics, if they are lyrics at all. And when we turn from them to the more strictly 142 EUHOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. lyrical constituents of the volume, the Madrigals and Madrigals and the Canzoni, it is here that we find some- canzoni. thing want i ng Outside of Michelangelo (who here, as elsewhere, " sways as he thinks fit The universal monarchy of wit ") the burden, if not exactly the curse, of the artificial is over all. The Italian Canzone, with all its merits, is, like all very elaborate and largely planned lyrical forms, especially liable to this, and few of the authors now under consideration escape it, though they may show it in different ways. The elaborate art of Bembo, that first Tuscan outside Tuscany, reveals to us, through its veil of rather thin perfection of form, the excessive Atticism which the story alleges to have been detected in the non-Attic Theophrastus, the quality in the Latin of Livy which is thought to have constituted its Patavinity in the eyes of Pollio. Ariosto was a much greater poet than Bembo, but the very quality of his greatness might prepare us to expect some disappointment in his lyric work. He could not but be smooth, and in his madrigals is often not merely smooth but light. These are good qualities in lyric, but they are not the highest : they make the butterflies, not the eagles and the birds of Paradise of the lyric tribe. Still less do his sonnets attain to perfection. The chief thing noticeable in them is the anadiplosis, the repetition of the same word or words in successive lines or at more or less regular intervals, which was eagerly caught up by our Italianising Elizabethans, and which indeed THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 143 seems something of a genuine Italian device, inas- much as it is found in Lucilius two thousand years ago. Michelangelo has been mentioned more than once, and it is now pretty fully and pretty generally re- cognised that he escapes the faults of his Michelangelo. contemporaries. That even those contem- poraries should have seen the real greatness of his " uncouth " verses (as, surely with some exaggeration of " correctness," they have been called) is perhaps even more an honour to those contemporaries than to himself. But one may be permitted to doubt whether the state of those foreigners who hardly perceive the uncouthness, but do perceive the poetry, is not more gracious. This nearest approach to a universal master of the Higher Fine Arts (for Eossetti did not add sculpture or architecture to painting and poetry) has as a poet that quality of poetical sound which forces itself upon the appreciation almost independently of the meaning, but in increasing measure as the mean- ing is felt. A hasty retort may be made : " Is not that simply because of the natural music in Italian ? " but this would entirely miss the point. Nearly all Italian poetry is smooth and musical, but the poetical music which has just been referred to is of quite a different kind, and, in particular, is quite independent of mere smoothness ; nor is it by any means common even in the greater Italian poets. Dante has it, of course, pre-eminently, and, to descend a very long way from Dante, it is present in those 144 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. sonnets of La Casa which have been referred to. In the lighter keys Ariosto has it pretty constantly, in the graver very seldom, and it is by no means universal in Petrarch or in Tasso. Probably the Madrigal " Come puo esser ch'io non sia piu mio ? " 1 would be ranked among the uncouthnesses by the purists, yet this very first line, rough as it is, gives the poetic password at once. Such things transform the commonplaces of erotic into the uncomrnonplaces of poetry, as here " Quella pietosa alita Che teco adduci con gli sguardi insieme, Perle mie parti estreme Sparge dal cuor gli spirti della vita." The thing is not new; it has been said a thousand times before and since, but here it is said consum- mately. The Sonnets, which are more generally known, ex- hibit the same quality. One of the secrets of this form is the mysterious opportunity it gives to the practitioner of striking as it were in the very first line a key-note which rings all through the piece. No other language has ever caught this so well as English. Our great sixteenth -century practitioners of the sonnet mastered it almost at once ; it is even present to some extent in the experiments of Surrey 1 This phrase is a favourite one with the poet. It recurs in another ardent piece of the kind, that beginning " Un nume in una donna, anzi uno Dio. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 145 -and Wyatt, unmistakable in Sidney and Spenser, and carried to its very highest possibilities by Shakespeare. Michelangelo at his best has it excellently in "Non so figura alcuna immaginarmi." The last word explodes, with a sort of double effect of sound and light, all over the sonnet-scene. Not much of this will be found in the far less mas- culine luxuriance of Molza (1489-1544), the laureate of the Ninfe Tiberine courtesans of Rome 5 Molza. , but his sonnets have at least sufficient sweetness and a prettiness which is perhaps the most intense and peculiar to be found in the class. Gener- ally the sonnet is either something much more than pretty or something a good deal less ; but the " sugar- candy" effect which is sometimes (more irreverently than untruly) ascribed to Italian can suffer this trans- formation also. And there are few prettier sonnets with a touch of that real pathos, which almost makes one repent of using the word " pretty," than Molza's on his dead mistress "La mia Fenice ha gia spiegate 1' all." The pathos and the prettiness are not absent from his canzoni, but these more ambitious and elaborate com- positions require (as Dante, their great eulogist and almost creator, had seen and said) something more than these amiable qualities. In the collection of Lyric poets which for con- venience sake we have taken as text, only two of the very numerous poetesses of the time, Vittoria K 146 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Colonna and Gaspara Stampa, find admission ; but rutoria a third, Veronica Gambara, with a more coionna. copious representation of the two just named, appears in another volume of the same collection, the Rime di Tre Gentildonne. 1 Even the amiable " weight for sex," which all critics who are not curmudgeons concede, has not given Gaspara (who died for love), or Veronica, any very prominent or permanent place in poetry. But Vitto- ria Colonna (1490-1549), partly by borrowed, but also by authentic, light must always shine. Her beauty, her rank, her touching fidelity to an idol which was certainly not quite worthy of her worship, the adora- tion with which she was regarded by some of the greatest of men, her character, acknowledged to be without stain, not merely in one of the most profli- gate, but in one of the most libellous ages of the world all these things have swelled, and justly swelled, her fame. But it would not be small if it rested on her poetry alone. If not entirely religious, it is very mainly so, or else devoted to the memory of her husband, always invoked under some metaphor or synonym of "light" (lume, Sol, jiamma), and so of a religious turn. The fitness of the sonnet for this purpose is unquestioned, and Vittoria's sonnets are perhaps superior to those of any other poetess except Miss Christina Rossetti. The rather abundant work of Giovanni Guidiccioni (1500-1541), a correspondent of Molza and of most men of letters of the time, does not rise much above 1 Milan, Sonzogno, 1882. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 147 the average; but he is sometimes happy in the fan- tastic treatment of commonplaces, which Guidiccioni. . . . . this style permits with advantage. This little madrigal, for instance, is certainly what all have thought, but what not many have expressed so tersely and so lightly : " Veramente in amore Si prova ogni dolore. Ma tutti gli altri avanza, Goder solo una volta, e perder poi Tutti i diletti suoi, E viver sempre nmi fuor de speranza." Economy and completeness of phrase, joined to a certain accompaniment of rueful-playful music, could not be achieved much better. But his sonnets are too full of cliches: in hardly any instance, I think, does he achieve that opening detonation of plangent or splendid promise which has been noted ; and he is irritatingly prone to that " stopped beginning," as we may call it, which Milton himself adopted rather too freely, and which some of our modern sonneteers abuse still more. The qualities which have been praised in La Casa's Sonnets are not absent in his Canzoni. In one the always difficult subject of senile, or at least not youthful, love is treated with singular force, and in almost all there is blood in the heart, and not merely wind in the pipe. The accusations of unreality and artificiality brought against the " Pe- trarchists " of the sixteenth century cannot be wholly put out of court ; but there are large and splendid exceptions to be made. 148 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. A little collection of the Italian didactic poets of this and the next age, 1 containing the Coltivazione of Alainanni, 2 the Api of Eucellai, 3 the Italian Didactic l and Blank Podere of Tansillo, 4 and the Orto of Baldi, verse. w >jj ^ TQ ug a g OO( j ^xt ^Q^ f or noticing this class of poetry as it shows itself at this time and in this country, and also for saying a few words on Blank Verse in Italian all the poems mentioned, except Tansillo's (which is in terza rima), being in versi sciolti. We cannot, on reading the Coltivazione and its fellows, be very grateful to their composers. That such pieces should be written was an inevitable result both of the general style and trend of Italian critical thought, and of the ever-increasing idolatry of Virgil. For had not the ancients in general, from their admittedly second - oldest poet downwards, allowed and practised the style ? And had not Virgil written the Gcorgics ? Therefore it is very 1 Venice, 1786, with extremely pretty engravings in the French style. 2 Alamanni, besides the epics noted above, and some dramatic work, performed, like almost all the Italian writers of this time, poetical exercises of the usual miscellaneous kind, from sonnet to elegy and from epitaph to hymn. 3 Giovanni Rucellai (latinised as Oricellarius) was born at Florence in 1475 and died fifty years later. He will reappear in the dramatic chapter. 4 Luigi Tansillo, 1510-1 068, was a Neapolitan. He began at an early age with a " poetic licence," the Vendemmiatorc, and ended, according to etiquette, with a Lagrime di San Pictro. He was a dramatist of some merit, and wandered in didactic poetry not merely to the farm but to the nursery (in La llalia). 6 Bernardino Baldi, a little later than the rest (1553-1617), was an abbate, a linguist of some merit, and a hardened didactic poet, original and translating. THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 149 probable that even if the Italians had been backward, the other literary nations would, all the same, have engaged themselves in the path which leads to poems on the Sugar-cane and " Come, Muse, let's sing of rats." One may therefore turn over these Georgics with a certain languid interest, and can allow a livelier feeling at the skill with which Alamanni in particular (who takes his subject most seriously and allows him- self most room) emulates, and sometimes approaches, the ornamental digressions of his pattern. The style adds a distinct feature to the literary presentment of the time. It is also valuable as exhibiting what no incompetent hands (for Alamanni and Tansillo at least were among the most accomplished verse-smiths of their day, and Kucellai must have had a touch of originality in him to enable him to launch the long series of "Eosmunda" tragedies) could do in Italian with a form of verse capable of accomplishing such magnificent results in other languages. It will probably, however, not take long before even a cautious critic will be tempted to ejaculate, "This will not do ! " In the first place, the mind forebodes, and the ear soon confirms the foreboding, that the iambic - trochaic hendecasyllable is not suited for rhymeless verse. It is true that the Latin hendeca- syllable is a very delightful thing ; but then the cadence of Latin is not the cadence of Italian any more than the cadence of Anglo-Saxon is the cadence of English, and the central dactyl of the Latin verse gives it a spring and throb where the sameness of the Italian feet can only lollop or crawl. In the second 150 EUROPEAN LITERATURE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. place, and more damagingly still (for the genius of the right poet might cure this defect), another and an almost insuperable one occurs in the shape of that uniformity of termination which makes Italian rhyme at once peculiarly easy and peculiarly necessary. 1 Whether the effect is the same to the native as it is to the foreign ear one would not attempt to say or judge. But to the latter this effect is that not merely of a teasing tangle of incomplete and accidental rhymes, but (which is much worse) of a positive debris of rhyme that is attempted. Every now and then (as an example taken haphazard from Book II. of the Cultivations, p. 49 of the edition cited, will show) it is that of a completed tercet, with first and third rhyming all right, but with second left "in the air" with nothing in the succeeding to answer to it : " Che 1' soverchio aspettar soverchio offende : Parte