BOOKS.
THE LITERATURE OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.* WITH these two volumes Mr. Symonds brings to a close his great work on the Italian Renaissance, a work of which it is no exaggeration to say that, in its own class, it is absolutely without a rival in our literature. It may be added, in respect of this section of the work in particular, that it has a psy- chological interest of its own ; • it marks the maturing of art intellect, and the mellowing of an imagination, of a singularly high and yet thoroughly English order. There was a time when there was a decided danger of Mr. Symonds being carried away, by his enthusiasm for art and beauty in all their forms, into some of the extravagances of the " Sensuous School." The•" publication of these volumes shows that this danger has passed away. Perhaps, in Mr. Symonds' case, "years have brought : the philosophic mind" that gives high honour to that art only which "applies ideas to life." Perhaps his studies in
• Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature. In Two Parte. By John Addington- Symonds. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1282. Italian literature have given him a surfeit of ethics of the (lido- quid agunt homines order, and in the eloquent and dignified concluding chapter of this work, he defends himself with perfect success against those who maintain that the study of the liter- ature of the Renaissance implies the recommendation of its imitation. So far from Mr. Symonds being now, even to appearance, open to the charge once preferred against him of being "a patron of licentious art," he seems inclined to go to the extreme of Puritan, or, at least, of Wordsworthian austerity. He lashes the vices of the period with which he deals in the spirit if not of Jeremy Collier, certainly of Byron's
"Holy man, That looked, not lovingly, on that divan."
His detestation of the morale of Machiavelli's play, La Mandra- gola, almost blinds him to the merits of that extraordinary man as one of the founders of the scientific school of historians. Besides, although the plot of La Mandragola is licentious and unsavoury, it is certainly not a whit more so than that of many of the Restoration comedies, we shall not say of Wycherley, but of Dryden. There is this difference, moreover, between the two sinners, that while Machiavelli knew no better, and simply photographed the manners of his time and country, Dryden sinned against the clearest light—the light of conscience and of history—and deliberately hardened his heart, to gratify what he knew to be the passing mood of a naturally solid and decor- ous nation. But it is in style that Mr. Symonds' advance is most distinctly and easily perceptible. It was always rich, and sometimes threatened to become florid. Even in his new volumes, there are sentences that recall Bedford Park Estate and Mr. Burnand, if not Mr. Oscar Wilde, such as this on Lorenzo de Medici :—" He wandered alone and meditated on the sunflower, playing delightfully unto himself with thoughts • of Life and Death." Such effiorescences are rare, however, and it might almost be said of Mr. Symonds, as he himself says of Poliziano, "The three chief enthusiasms of the fifteenth century —for classical literature, for artistic beauty, and for Nature tranquilly enjoyed—were so fused and harmonised within his soul as to produce a style of unmistakable originality and charming ease." And it would be but a slight exaggeration— if exaggeration at all—to add from the same passage, " His pro- found and refined erudition enabled him to shower,' as Giotto phrased it, the finest flowers of antique poetry upon the people.' Therefore, while he felt Nature like one who worshipped her for her own sake, and for the joy she gave him, he saw in her the subject of a thousand graceful pictures, and these pictures he studied through the radiant haze of antique reminiscences." It is this combination of " unmistakable originality and charm- ing ease," with "profound and refined erudition," which gives Mr. Symonds, within his own lines, an almost unique position as a writer. Within these lines, we are inclined to place him as second among English authors of the present day to Mr. Raskin alone. Moreover, Mr. Raskin frequently writes, when his thoughts have not been, in Sainte-Beuve's phrase, "suffi- ciently long in bottle." That is an error which Mr. Symonds never commits.
In the preface to this, the last and most important section of his great work, Mr. Symonds explains the method of the whole. In the three first parts, he dealt in succession with " The Age of the Despots," "The Revival of Learning," and "The Fine Arts." They prepared the way for the volumes on that marvel- lous literature in which the Italy of the Renaissance found its fullest voice. This method was, perhaps, the only one which Mr. Symonds could have adopted under the circumstances, yet his adoption of it has exposed his readers and himself to certain inconveniences. For one thing, some of the leading spokes. men and representatives of the Renaissance are, so to speak, broken up into fragments ; and it is only by obtaining the head in one volume, the trunk in a second, and the limbs in a third, and piecing them together as best you may that you can get a complete body. In other words, the same writer's Latin or humanist and Italian or verna- cular works are treated of in different sections ; and if he is a historian as well as a poet, his writings in that char- acter will have to be looked for in a third. Moreover, it is obvious, even to a hasty and superficial reader, that Mr. Symonds has not been able, from first to last, to adhere to one particular theory of the Renaissance. He has evidently been hampered with the phrase ; he started with the idea of proving that the movement known by the name was a new birth, in the sense that it was the whole transition from the middle-ages to
the modern world, a revolt, in particular, against "the dogma, and authority, and scholasticism of the Church," as well as against the Papal tyranny and the feudal system, which em- bodied them and made them dominant and fruitful to a. pernicious extent in the world of action, no less than of thought. It would be incorrect, in all probability, to say that Mr.. Symonds has, towards the close of his work, consciously abandoned this theory,—he has only held it more loosely. In other words, he has written his last volumes. in a more truly scientific spirit, for every movement which re- sults in the upbuilding of a great literature must itself be the result of a number of " con-causes," and can only in a figura- tive sense be considered in any way as an organised effort.
The period of Italian literature with which Mr. Symonds here deals, closes about 1530, and indirectly covers about two centuries and a half. The plan which he follows may be easily understood when we mention that he divides this period into three sub-periods, the mediaeval, the humanist, and the renascent. The first is closed with the death of Boccaccio, and the second with the birth of Lorenzo de Medici. The third, or Renaissance proper, covers the eighty years between 1450 and 1530, and the wealth and variety of the literature crowded. into it are indicated by such names as Ariosto, Pulci, Machiavelli, Berni, and Aretino. Mr. Symonds' preliminary sketch of " the Triumvirate," consisting of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, is marked by his wonted "thoughtful and refined.
erudition;" and his elucidation of the intensely practical andl realistic side of Dante, and, indeed, of the genius of Italian poetry generally, may help to give an adequate explanation of the singular fact, that while Italy gave England no inconsider- able share of the literary and even moral materials that were worked up into the unrivalled Elizabethan drama, she pro- duced but an indifferent drama herself. Of " the Trium- virate," however, Boccaccio is regarded by Mr. Symonds as the true herald or pioneer of the Renaissance, in his love of freedom and of beauty for their own sakes, and whatever their tendencies and developments. Mr. Symonds' criticism of Boccaccio extends over the whole of his works, and should be carefully read, by all who are inclined to judge him entirely from the Decameron. After Boccaccio there was a deluge of inferior but popular poetry, which was, however, not yet wholly secularised, as the curious verses of the half mad Fm Jacopone- prove. With Lorenzo de Medici, who marks " the fusion between the love lyric handed down by Petrarch and the realistic genius of the age of Ghirlando " and Poliziano, we find ourselves in a higher literary air ; what they did for the idyll and the lyric, Boiardo in the Orlando Innancoralo, and Ariosto in the Orlando Furies°, did for the epic. Mr. Symonds' estimate. of Ariosto is probably the best in the English language ; and by many it will be considered the ablest piece of criticism we have yet had from him. We give a portion of it :—
" In putting this dream-world of his phantasy upon the canvas, Ariosto showed the power of an accomplished painter. This is the- secret of the Furioso's greatness. This makes it in a deep sense the representative poem of the Italian Renaissance. All the affinities of its style are with the ruling art of Italy, rather than with sculpture- or with architecture; and the poet is less a singer uttering his soul forth to the world in song, than an artist painting a multitude of images with words instead of colours. His power of delineation never fails him. Through the lucid medium of exquisitely chosen language we see the object as clearly as he saw it. We scarcely seem to see it with his eyes so much as with our own, for the poet stands aloof from his handiwork and is a spectator of his pictures like ourselves. So authentic is the vision that, while he is obliged by his subject to treat the same situations—in duels, battles, storms, love-passages- he never repeats himself. A fresh image has passed across the camera obscure of his brain, and has been copied in its salient features. For the whole of this pictured world is in movement, and. the master has the art to seize those details which convey the very- truth of life and motion. We sit in a dim theatre of thought, and watch the motley crowd of his fantastic personages glide across the stage. They group themselves for a moment ere they flit away ; and then the scene is shifted, and a new procession enters ; fresh tableaux vivanta are arranged, and when we have enjoyed their melodies of form and colour, the spell is once more broken and new actors enter.. The stage is never empty ; scene melts into scene without breathing- space or interruption ; but lest the show should weary by its con- tinuity, the curtain is let down upon each canto's closing, and the wizard who evokes these phantoms for our pleasure, stands before it for a moment and discourses wit and wisdom to his audience. It is this all-embracing universally illuminating faculty of vision that justifies Galileo's epithet of the DIVINE for Ariosto. This renders his title of the Italian Homer intelligible. But we must remember that these high-sounding compliments are paid him by a nation in whose genius the art of painting holds the highest rank ; and it may well happen that critics less finely sensitive to pictorial delineation shall contest them both. As in Italian painting, so in Ariosto's poetry, deep thought and poignant passion are not suffered to interrupt the calm unfolding of a world where plastic beauty reigns supreme. N. o thrilling cry from the heart of humanity is heard ; no dreadful in- sight into mortal woe disturbs the rhythmic dance. Tragedy is drowned and swallowed in a sea of images ; and if the deeper chords of pathos are touched here and there, they are so finely modulated and bleat with the pervading melody that a harsh note never jars upon our ears. A nation in whom the dramatic instinct is paramount, an audience attuned to Hamlet or King Lear, will feel that something essential to tho highest poetry has been omitted. The same imperious pictorial faculty compels Ariosto to describe what more dramatic poets are contented to suggest. Where Dante conveys an image in one pregnant line, be employs an octave for the exhibition of a finished picture. Thus our attention is withdrawn from the main object to a multitude of minor illustrations, each of which is offered to us with the same lucidity. The daodal labyrinth of exquisitely modelled forms begins to cloy, and in our tired ingratitude we wish the artist had left something to our own imagination. It is too much to be forced to contemplate a countless number of highly-wrought compositions. We long for something half-seen, indicated, shyly revealed by lightning flashes and withdrawn before it has been fully shown. When Lessing in Laocoon censured the famous portrait of Alcina, this was, in part at least, the truth of his complaint. She wearies us by the minuteness of the touches that present her to our gaze ; and the elaboration of each detail prevents us from forming a complete conception of her beauty. But the Italians of the sixteenth century, accustomed to painted forms in fresco and in oils, and edu- cated in the descriptive traditions of Boccaccio's school, would not have recognised the soundness of this criticism. For them each studied phrase of Ariosto was the index to an image, summoned by memory from the works of their own masters, or from life. His method of delineation was analogous to that of figurative art. In a word, the defect pointed out by the German critic is the defect of Ariosto's greatest quality, the quality belonging to an age and race in which painting was supreme."
After Ariosto, we have the Novellieri, the Novellatori or novelists, the dramatists, the writers of pastoral and didactic, burlesque and satiric poetry ; and, in conclusion, the historians and philosophers of whom Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Pom- ponazzi are among the chief. It is with the Novellatori, the dramatists, and the other comic writers of the Quicquid agunt Amines school, that Mr. Symonds' chief difficulty, as a writer who must, in the first place, consider the tastes of an English public, makes its appearance. He overcomes it with perfect success, however. He does not conceal or deny the inherent moral coarseness of the materials which the comic literary artists of the Renaissance used, but neither, on the other hand, does he deny or refrain from pointing out the beauty of the forms which they created. The greatest of these artists is the shameless, debased, enormously clever, and enormously successful, Pietro Aretino. Surely, Aretino is the very Napoleon of literary piccaroons. To an energy like Defoe's, and a mockery of life and hatred of mankind like Swift's, this man united a personal power in Europe which no mere soldier of the pen ever swayed, till Voltaire fulminated against L'Infelme from Ferney. This singular man makes, after Ariosto, the best portrait in Mr. Symonds' gallery; and is, perhaps, the most singular personality of the Renaissance, Machiavelli himself not excepted. As he is but little known in this country, we make an extract from the chapter which Mr. Symonds devotes to him :— "It would fatigue the patience of the reader to furnish forth a complete list of the presents made to Aretino and acknowledged by him in his correspondence. Chains, jewels, horses, pictures, costly stuffs, cups, mirrors, delicacies of the table, wines—nothing came amiss to him ; and the more he received, the more he cried continually ` Give, give, give !' There was hardly a reigning prince in Europe, hardly a noble of distinction In Italy, who had not sent some offering to his shrine. The Sultan Soliman, the pirate Barbarossa, the Pope, the Emperor, were among his tributaries. The Empress gave him a golden collar worth three hundred crowns. Philip, Infante of Spain, presented him with another worth four hundred. Francis I. bestowed on him a still more costly chain, wrought of pure gold, from which hung a row of red enamelled tongues, bearing the inscription, 'Lingua ejus loquetur mendacium! Aretino received these presents from the hands of ambassadors, and wore them when he sat to Titian or to Tintoretto for his portrait. Instead of resenting the equivocal com- pliment of the French king's motto, he gloried in it. Lies, no less than flattery, were among the openly-avowed weapons of his armoury. Upon the medals struck in his honour he styled himself 'Bit:us P. Aretinus Flagellum Principum," the Divine Pietro Aretino, Scourge of Princes.' Another inscription ran as follows,—'I Principi tributati ctai Popoli, it Servo lore tributano'—` Princes who levy tribute from their people, bring tribute to their servant.' And there is Aretino seated on a throne, with noble clients laying golden vases at his feet. It is incredible that arrogrance so palpable should have been tole- rated, inconceivable how such a braggart exercised this fascination. What had Emperors and Kings to gain or lose by Aretino's pen ? What was the secret of his power ? No satisfactory answer has yet been given to these questions. The enigma does not, indeed, admit of solution. We have to deal in Aretino's case with a blind more. anent among the better vulgar,' expressing itself as fashion; and nothing is more difficult to fathom than the fashion of a bygone age. The prestige which attached itself to people like Cagliostro, or St. Germains, or Beau Nash is quite incalculable. Yet some account may be rendered of what seems to have been Aretino's method. He assiduously cultivated a reputation for reckless freedom of speech. He loudly trumpeted his intention of speaking evil when and and where it pleased him. Ho proclaimed himself the champion of veracity, asserted that nothing was so damnatory as the truths he had to tell, and announced himself the Censor of the world,' the foe of vice, the defender of virtue. Having occupied the ear of society by these preliminary fanfaronnades, he proceeded to satirise the Courts in general, and to vilify the manners of princes, without men- tioning any in particular. It thus came to be believed that Aretino was a dangerous person, a writer it would be wiser to have upon one's side, and who, if he were not coaxed into good humour, might say something eminently disagreeable. There was pungency enough in his epigrams, in the slashing, coarse, incisive brutality of his style, to make his attack formidable. People shrank from it, as they now shrink from articles in certain libellous weekly papers. Aretino was recognised as a Cerberus, to whom sops should be thrown What, then, it may finally be asked, was Aretino's merit as an author ? Why do we allude to him at all in writing the history of sixteenth-century literature ? The answer can be given in two words : —originality and independence. It was no vain boast of Aretino that he trusted only to nature and mother-wit. His intellectual dis- tinction consisted precisely in this confidence and self-reliance, at a moment when the literary world was given over to pedantic scruples and the formalities of academical prescription. Writing without the fear of pedagogues before his eyes—seeking, as he says, relief, ex- pression, force, and brilliancy of phrase, he produced a manner at once singular and attractive, which turned to ridicule the pretensions of the purists. He had the courage of his personality, and stamped upon his style the very form and pressure of himself. As a writer, he exhibited what Machiavelli demanded from the man of action— viral., or the virility of self-reliance. That was the secret of his suc- cess. The same audacity and independence characterise all his utterances of opinion--his criticisms of art and literature—his appre- ciation of natural beauty. In some of the letters written to painters and sculptors, and in a description of a Venetian sunset already quoted in this book, we trace the dawninge of a true and natural school of criticism, a forecast of the spontaneity of Diderot and Henri Beyle. The naturalness of expression did not save Aretino from glaring bad taste. His letters and his dedicatory introductions abound in confused metaphors, extravagant concetti, and artificial ornaments. It seems impossible for him to put pen to paper without inventing monstrous and ridiculous periphrases. Still, the literary impropriety, which would have been affectation in any one else, and which became affectation in his imitators, was true to the man's nature. He could not be true to himself without falseness of utter- ance, because there was in him an inherent insincerity, and this was veiled by no scholastic accuracy or studied purity of phrase."
The production of such a work as this is a hopeful sign for the future of Italian, no less than of English literature. Mr. Symonds acknowledges that the authorities he has consulted are, with some essentially insignificant exceptions, Italian writers, who are bringing the modern spirit of scientific investi- gation, and, perhaps, also the energy which the unification and nationalisation of their country have set free, to bear on the his- tory of its literature. The names of some of these are known to English students, such as Pasquale Villari, the historian of the Florence of Savonarola, and of Machiavelli. The majority, however, must be taken at Mr. Symonds' valuation, which he expresses in the emphatic declaration that "the historian of the Renaissance must feel that his work, when soundest, may be doomed to be superseded; and when freshest, will ere long seem. antiquated. So rapid is the intellectual movement now taking place in Italy." This may be but the exaggeration of a gener- ous enthusiasm. But there is reason to believe that a second Renaissance is at hand in Italy,—a Renaissance which will not be associated, like the first, with moral debasement and political enslavement, but with well-ordered freedom, with national self- control, and with individual self-respect.
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