CHAPTER XIV. BURLESQUE POETRY AND SATIRE.

Relation of Satiric to Serious Literature—Italy has more Parody and Caricature than Satire or Comedy—Life of Folengo—His Orlandino—Critique of Previous Romances—Lutheran Doctrines—Orlando's Boyhood—Griffarosto—Invective against Friars—Maccaronic Poetry—The Travesty of Humanism—Pedantesque Poetry—Glottogrysio Ludimagistro—Tifi Odassi of Padua—The Pedant Vigonça—Evangelista Fossa—Giorgio Alione—Folengo employs the Maccaronic Style for an Epic—His Address to the Muses—His Hero Baldus—Boyhood and Youth—Cingar—The Travels of the Barons—Gulfora—Witchcraft in Italy—Folengo's Conception of Witchcraft—Entrance into Hell—The Zany and the Pumpkin—Nature of Folengo's Satire—His Relation to Rabelais—The Moscheis—The Zanitonella—Maccaronic Poetry was Lombard—Another and Tuscan Type of Burlesque—Capitoli—Their Popular Growth—Berni—His Life—His Mysterious Death—His Character and Style—Three Classes of Capitoli—The pure Bernesque Manner—Berni's Imitators—The Indecency of this Burlesque—Such Humor was Indigenous—Terza Rima—Berni's Satires on Adrian VI. and Clement VII.—His Caricatures—His Sonnet on Aretino—The Rifacimento of Boiardo's Orlando—The Mystery of its Publication—Albicante and Aretino—The Publishers Giunta and Calvi—Berni's Protestant Opinions—Eighteen Stanzas of the Rifacimento printed by Vergerio—Hypothesis respecting the Mutilation of the Rifacimento—Satire in Italy.

In all classical epochs of literature comedy and satire have presented their antithesis to ideal poetry, by setting the actual against the imagined world, or by travestying the forms of serious art. Thus the Titanic farce of Aristophanes was counterposed to Æschylean tragedy; and Molière portrayed men as they are, before an audience which welcomed Racine's pictures of men as the age conceived they ought to be. It is the mark of really great literature when both thesis and antithesis, the aspiration after the ideal and the critique of actual existence, exhibit an equality of scale. The comic and satiric species of poetry attain to grandeur only by contact with impassioned art of a high quality, or else by contrast with a natural greatness in the nation that produces them. Both mask and anti-mask reveal the mental stature of the people. Both issue from the conscience of society, and bear its impress.

If so much be admitted, we can easily understand why burlesque poetry formed the inevitable pendent to polite literature in Italy. There was no national tragedy; therefore there could be no great comedy. The best work of the age, typified by Ariosto's epic, was so steeped in irony that it offered no vantage-ground for humorous counterpoise. There was nothing left but to exaggerate its salient qualities, and to caricature its form. Such exaggeration was burlesque; such caricature was parody. In like manner, satire found no adequate sphere. The nation's life was not on so grand a scale as to evolve the elements of satire from the contrast between faculties and foibles. Nor again could a society, corrupt and satisfied with corruption, anxious to live and let live, apply the lash with earnestness to its own shoulders. Facit indignatio versus, was Juvenal's motto; and indignation tore the heart of Swift. But in Italy there was no indignation. All men were agreed to tolerate, condone, and compromise. When vices come to be laughingly admitted, when discords between practice and profession furnish themes for tales and epigrams, the moral conscience is extinct. But without an appeal to conscience the satirist has no locus standi. Therefore, in Italy there was no great satire, as in Italy there was no great comedy.

The burlesque rhymsters portrayed their own and their neighbors' immorality with self-complacent humor, calling upon the public to make merry over the spectacle. This poetry, obscene, equivocal, frivolous, horribly sincere, supplied a natural antithesis to the pseudo-platonic, pedantic, artificial mannerism of the purists. In point of intrinsic value, there is not much to choose between the Petrarchistic and the burlesque styles. Many burlesque poets piqued themselves with justice on their elegance, and clothed gross thoughts in diction of elaborate polish. Meanwhile they laid the affectations, conventions and ideals of the age impartially under contribution. The sonneteers suggested parodies to Aretino, who celebrated vice and deformity in women with hyperboles adapted from the sentimental school.[384] The age of gold was ridiculed by Romolo Bertini.[385] The idyl found its travesty in Berni's pictures of crude village loves and in Folengo's Zanitonella. Chivalry became absurd by the simple process of enforcing the prosaic elements in Ariosto, reducing his heroes to the level of plebeian life, and exaggerating the extravagance of his romance. The ironical smile which played upon his lips, expands into broad grins and horse-laughter. Yet, though the burlesque poets turned everything they touched into ridicule, these buffoons were not unfrequently possessed of excellent good sense. Not a few of them, as we shall see, were among the freest thinkers of their age. Like Court jesters they dared to utter truths which would have sent a serious writer to the stake. Lucidity of intellectual vision was granted at this time in Italy to none but positive and materialistic thinkers—to analysts like Machiavelli and Pomponazzi, critics like Pietro Aretino, poets with feet firmly planted on the earth like Berni and Folengo. The two last-named artists in the burlesque style may be selected as the leaders of two different but cognate schools, the one flourishing in Lombardy, the other in Florence.

Girolamo Folengo was born in 1491 of noble parents at Cipada, a village of the Mantuan district. He made his first studies under his father's roof, and in due time proceeded to Bologna. Here he attended the lectures of Pomponazzi, and threw himself with ardor into the pleasures and perils of the academical career. Francesco Gonzaga, a fantastical and high-spirited libertine from Mantua, was the recognized leader of the students at that moment. Duels, challenges, intrigues and street-quarrels formed the staple of their life. It was an exciting and romantic round of gayety and danger, of which the novelists have left us many an animated picture. Folengo by his extravagant conduct soon exhausted the easy patience of the university authorities. He was obliged to quit Bologna, and his father refused to receive him. In this emergency he took refuge in a Benedictine convent at Brescia. When he made himself a monk, Folengo changed his Christian name to Teofilo, by which he is now best known in literature. But he did not long endure the confinement of a cloister. After six years spent among the Benedictines, he threw the cowl aside, and ran off with a woman, Girolama Dieda, for whom he had conceived an insane passion.[386] This was in the year 1515. During the next eleven years he gave himself to the composition of burlesque poetry. His Maccaronea appeared at Venice in 1519, and his Orlandino in 1526. The former was published under he pseudonym of Merlinus Cocaius, compounded of a slang word in the Mantuan dialect, and of the famous wizard's title of romance.[387] The latter bore the nom de plume of Limerno Pitocco—an anagram of Merlino, with the addition of an epithet pointing to the poet's indigence. These works brought Folengo fame but little wealth, and he was fain to return at last to his old refuge.[388] Resuming the cowl, he now retired to a monastery in the kingdom of Naples, visited Sicily, and died at last near Padua, in the convent of S. Croce di Campese. This was in 1544. The last years of his life had been devoted to religious poetry, which is not read with the same curiosity as his burlesque productions.

Teofilo Folengo, or Merlinus Cocaius, or Limerno Pitocco, was, when he wrote his burlesque poems, what the French would call a déclassé. He had compromised his character in early youth and had been refused the shelter of his father's home. He had taken monastic vows in a moment of pique, or with the baser object of getting daily bread in idleness. His elopement from the convent with a paramour had brought scandal on religion. Each of these steps contributed to place him beyond the pale of respectability. Driven to bay and forced to earn his living, he now turned round upon society; and spoke his mind out with a freedom born of bile and cynical indifference. If he had learned nothing else at Bologna, he had imbibed the materialistic philosophy of Pomponazzi together with Gonzaga's lessons in libertinage. Brutalized, degraded in his own eyes, rejected by the world of honest or decorous citizens, but with a keen sense of the follies, vices and hypocrisies of his age, he resolved to retaliate by a work of art that should attract attention and force the public to listen to his comments on their shame. In his humorous poetry there is, therefore, a deliberate if not a very dignified intention. He does not merely laugh, but mixes satire with ribaldry, and points buffoonery with biting sarcasm. Since the burlesque style had by its nature to be parasitical and needed an external motive, Folengo chose for the subject of his parody the romance of Orlando, which was fashionable to the point of extravagance in Italy after the appearance of the Furioso. But he was not satisfied with turning a tale of Paladins to ridicule. He used it as the shield behind which he knew that he might safely shoot his arrows at the clergy and the princes of his native land, attack the fortresses of orthodoxy, and vent his spleen upon society by dragging its depraved ideals in the mire of his own powerful but vulgar scorn.

Folengo has told us that the Orlandino was conceived and written before the Maccaronea, though it was published some years later. It is probable that the rude form and plebeian language of this burlesque romance found but little favor with a public educated in the niceties of style. They were ready to accept the bastard Latin dialect invented for his second venture, because it offended no puristic sensibilities. But the coarse Italian of the Orlandino could not be relished by academicians, who had been pampered with the refinements of Berni's wanton Muse.[389] Only eight cantos appeared; nor is there reason to suppose that any more were written, for it may be assumed that the fragment had fulfilled its author's purpose.[390] That purpose was to satirize the vice, hypocrisy and superstition of the clergy, and more particularly of the begging friars. In form the Orlandino pretends to be a romance of chivalry, and it bears the same relation to the Orlando of Boiardo and Ariosto as the Secchia Rapita to the heroic poems of Tasso's school. It begins with a burlesque invocation to Federigo Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, in which the poet bluntly describes his poverty and begs for largess. Then Folengo passes to an account of his authorities and to the criticism of his predecessors in romantic poetry. He had recourse, he says, to a witch of Val Camonica, who mounted him upon a ram, and bore him to the country of the Goths. There he found forty decades of Turpin's history among the rubbish of old books stolen from Italy. Of these, three decades had already been discovered and translated by Boiardo; but, after versifying a large portion of the second, the poet left the rest of it to Ariosto. The sixth was stolen from him by Francesco Bello. The last he gave with his own hands to Poliziano, who put it into rhyme and allowed Pulci to have the credit of his labors.[391] Folengo himself took a portion of the first decade, and thus obtained material for treating of the birth and boyhood of Orlando. This exordium is chiefly valuable as a piece of contemporary criticism:

Queste tre Deche dunque sin quà trovo Esser dal fonte di Turpin cavate; Ma Trebisonda, Ancroia, Spagna, e Bovo Coll'altro resto al foco sian donate: Apocrife son tutte, e le riprovo Come nemiche d'ogni veritate; Boiardo, l'Ariosto, Pulci, e'l Cieco Autenticati sono, ed io con seco.

If we may accept this stanza as expressing the opinion of Italians in the sixteenth century relative to their romantic poets, we find that it almost exactly agrees with that of posterity. Only the Mambriano of Bello has failed to maintain its place beside the Morgante and Orlando.

Embarking upon the subject of his tale, Folengo describes the Court of Charlemagne, and passes he Paladins in review, intermingling comic touches with exaggerated imitations of the romantic style. The peers of France preserve their well-known features through the distorting medium of caricature; while humorous couplets, detonating here and there like crackers, break the mock-heroical monotony. Gano, for example, is still the arch-traitor of the tribe of Judas:

Figliuol non d'uomo, nè da Dio creato, Ma il gran Diavol ebbelo cacato.

The effect of parody is thus obtained by emphasizing the style of elder poets and suddenly breaking off into a different vein. Next comes the description of Berta's passion for Milone, with a singularly coarse and out-spoken invective against love.[392] Meanwhile Charlemagne has proclaimed a tournament. The peers array themselves, and the Court is in a state of feverish expectation. Parturiunt montes: instead of mailed warriors careering upon fiery chargers, the knights crawl into the lists on limping mules and lean asses, with a ludicrous array of kitchen-gear for armor. The description of this donkey-tournament, is one of Folengo's triumphs.[393] When Milone comes upon the scene and jousts beneath his lady's balcony, the style is heightened to the tone of true romance, and, but for the roughness of the language, we might fancy that a page of the Orlando were beneath our eyes. A banquet follows, after which we are regaled with a Court-ball, and then ensues the comic chain of incidents which bring Milone and Berta to the fruition of their love. They elope, take ship, and are separated by a series of mishaps upon the open sea. Berta is cast ashore alone in Italy, and begs her way to Sutri, where she gives birth to Orlando in a shepherd's cabin. During the course of these adventures, Folengo diverts his readers with many brilliant passages and bits of satire, at one time inveighing against the license of balls, at another describing the mixed company on board a ship of passage; now breaking off into burlesque pedigrees, and then again putting into Berta's mouth a string of Lutheran opinions. Though the personages are romantic, the incidents are copied with realistic fidelity from actual life. We are moving among Italian bourgeois in the masquerade of heroes and princesses.

Berta's prayer when she found herself alone upon the waters in an open boat, is so characteristic of Folengo's serious intention that it deserves more than a passing comment.[394] She addresses herself to God instead of to any Saints:

A te ricorro, non a Piero, o Andrea, Chè l'altrui mezzo non mi fa mestiero: Ben tengo a mente che la Cananea Non supplicò nè a Giacomo nè a Piero.

It is the hypocrisy of friars, Folengo says, who sacrifice to Moloch, while they use the name of Mary to cloak their crimes—it is this damnable hypocrisy which has blinded simple folk into trusting the invocation of Saints. Avarice is the motive of these false priests: and lust moves them to preach the duty of confession:

E quì trovo ben spesso un Confessore Essere più ruffiano che Dottore.

Therefore, cries Berta, I make my confession to God alone and from Him seek salvation, and vow that, if I escape the fury of the sea, I will no more lend belief to men who sell indulgences for gold. So far the poet is apparently sincere. In the next stanza he resumes his comic vein:

Cotal preghiere carche d'eresia Berta facea, mercè ch'era Tedesca; Perchè in quel tempo la Teologia Era fatta Romana e fiandresca; Ma dubito ch'alfin nella Turchia Si troverà vivendo alla Moresca; Perchè di Cristo l'inconsutil vesta Squarciata è sì che più non ve ne resta.

The blending of buffoonery and earnestness in Folengo's style might be illustrated by the bizarre myth of the making of peasants, where he introduces Christ and the Apostles:[395]

Transibat Jesus per un gran villaggio Con Pietro, Andrea, Giovanni, e con Taddeo; Trovan ch'un asinello in sul rivaggio Molte pallotte del suo sterco feo. Disse allor Piero al suo Maestro saggio: En, Domine, fac homines ex eo. Surge, Villane, disse Cristo allora; E 'l villan di que' stronzi saltò fora.

His fantastic humor, half-serious, half-flippant, spares nothing sacred or profane. Even the Last Judgment receives an inconceivably droll treatment on the slender occasion of an allusion to the disasters of Milan.[396] Folengo has just been saying that Italy well deserves her title of barbarorum sepultura.[397]

Chè veramente in quell'orribil giorno Che in Giosafatto suonerà la tromba, Facendosi sentire al mondo intorno, E i morti salteran fuor d'ogni tomba, Non sarà pozzo, cacatojo, o forno, Che mentre il tararan del ciel ribomba, Non getti fuora Svizzeri, Francesi, Tedeschi, Ispani, e d'altri assai paesi; E vederassi una mirabil guerra, Fra loro combattendo gli ossi suoi: Chi un braccio, chi una man, chi un piede afferra; Ma vien chi dice—questi non son tuoi— Anzi son miei—non sono; e sulla terra Molti di loro avran gambe di buoi, Teste di muli, e d'asini le schiene, Siccome all'opre di ciascun conviene.

The birth of Orlando gives occasion for a mock-heroic passage, in which Pulci is parodied to the letter.[398] All the more amusing for the assumption of pompous style, is the ensuing account of the hero's boyhood among the street-urchins of Sutri. When he is tall enough to bestride a broomstick, Orlandino proves his valor by careering through the town and laughing at the falls he gets. At seven he shows the strength of twelve:

Urta, fracassa, rompe, quassa, e smembra; Orsi, leoni, tigri non paventa, Ma contro loro intrepido s'avventa.

The octave stanzas become a cataract of verbs and nouns to paint his tempestuous childhood. It is a spirited comic picture of the Italian enfant terrible, stone-throwing, boxing, scuffling, and swearing like a pickpocket. At the same time the boy grows in cunning, and supports his mother by begging from one and bullying another of the citizens of Sutri:—

Io v'addimando per l'amor di Dio Un pane solo ed un boccal di vino; Officio non fu mai più santo e pio Che se pascete il pover pellegrino: Se non men date, vi prometto ch'io, Quantunque sia di membra si piccino, Ne prenderò da me senza riguardo; Chè salsa non vogl'io di San Bernardo. Cancar vi mangi, datemi a mangiare, Se non, vi butterò le porte giuso; Per debolezza sentomi mancare, E le budella vannomi a riffuso. Gente devota, e voi persone care Che vi leccate di buon rosto il muso, Mandatemi, per Dio, qualche minestra, O me la trate giù dalla finestra.

In the course of these adventures Orlandino meets Oliver, the son of Rainero, the governor, and breaks his crown in a quarrel. This brings about the catastrophe; for the young hero pours forth such a torrent of voluble slang, mixed with imprecations and menaces, that Rainero is forced to acknowledge the presence of a superior genius.[399] But before the curtain falls upon the discovery of Orlandino's parentage and his reception into the company of peers, Folengo devotes a canto to the episodical history of the Prelate Griffarosto.[400] The name of this Rabelaisian ecclesiastic—Claw-the-roast—sufficiently indicates the line of the poet's satire.

Whatever appeared in the market of Sutri fit for the table, fell into his clutches, or was transferred to the great bag he wore beneath his scapulary. His library consisted of cookery books; and all the tongues he knew, were tongues of swine and oxen.[401] Orlandino met this Griffarosto fat as a stalled ox, one morning after he had purchased a huge sturgeon:

La Reverenzia vostra non si parta; Statemi alquanto, prego, ad ascoltare. Nimis sollicita es, O Marta, Marta, Circa substantian Christi devorare. Dammi poltron, quel pesce, ch'io 'l disquarta, Per poterlo in communi dispensare, Nassa d'anguille che tu sei, lurcone; E ciò dicendo dagli col bastone.

The priest was compelled to disgorge his prey, and the fame of the boy's achievement went abroad through Sutri. Rainero thereupon sent for Griffarosto, and treated the Abbot to such a compendious abuse of monks in general as would have delighted a Lutheran.[402] Griffarosto essayed to answer him with a ludicrous jumble of dog Latin; but the Governor requested him to defer his apology for the morrow. The description of Griffarosto's study in the monastery, where wine and victuals fill the place of books, his oratory consecrated to Bacchus, the conversation with his cook, and the ruse by which the cook gets chosen Prior in his master's place, carry on the satire through fifty stanzas of slashing sarcasm. The whole episode is a pendent picture to Pulci's Margutte. Then, by a brusque change from buffoonery to seriousness, Folengo plunges into a confession of faith, attributed to Rainero, but presumably his own.[403] It includes the essential points of Catholic orthodoxy, abjuring the impostures of priests and friars, and taking final station on the Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith and repentance. Idle as a dream, says Folengo, are the endeavors made by friars to force scholastic conclusions on the conscience in support of theses S. Paul would have rejected. What they preach, they do not comprehend. Their ignorance is only equal to their insolent pretension. They are worse than Judas in their treason to Christ, worse than Herod, Anna, Caiaphas, or Pilate. They are only fit to consort with usurers and slaves. They use the names of saints and the altar of the Virgin as the means of glutting their avarice with the gold of superstitious folk. They abuse confession to gratify their lusts. Their priories are dens of dogs, hawks, and reprobate women. They revel in soft beds, drink to intoxication, and stuff themselves with unctuous food. And still the laity intrust their souls to these rogues, and there are found many who defraud their kith and kin in order to enrich a convent![404]

It would not be easy to compose an invective more suited to degrade the objects of a satirist's anger by the copiousness and the tenacity of the dirt flung at them. Yet the Orlandino was written by a monk, who, though he had left his convent, was on the point of returning to it; and the poem was openly printed during the pontificate of Clement VII. That Folengo should have escaped inquisitorial censure is remarkable. That he should have been readmitted to the Benedictine order after this outburst of bile and bold diffusion of heretical opinion, is only explicable by the hatred which subsisted in Italy between the rules of S. Francis and S. Benedict. While attacking the former, he gratified the spite and jealousy of the latter. But the fact is that his auditors, whether lay or clerical, were too accustomed to similar charges and too frankly conscious of their truth, to care about them. Folengo stirred no indignation in the people, who had laughed at ecclesiastical corruption since the golden days of the Decameron. He roused no shame in the clergy, for, till Luther frightened the Church into that pseudo-reformation which Sarpi styled a deformation of manners, the authorities of Rome were nonchalantly careless what was said about them.[405] An atrabilious monk in his garret vented his spleen with more than usual acrimony, and the world applauded. Ha fatto un bel libro! That was all. Conversely, it is not strange that the weighty truths about religion uttered by Folengo should have had but little influence. He was a scribbler, famous for scurrility, notoriously profligate in private life. Free thought in Italy found itself too often thus in company with immorality. The names of heretic and Lutheran carried with them at that time a reproach more pungent and more reasonable than is usual with the epithets of theological hatred.[406]

In the Orlandino, Ariosto's irony is degraded to buffoonery. The prosaic details he mingled with his poetry are made the material of a new and vulgar comedy of manners. The satire he veiled in allegory or polite discussion, bursts into open virulence. His licentiousness yields to gross obscenity. The chivalrous epic, as employed for purposes of art in Italy, contained within itself the germs of this burlesque. It was only necessary to develop certain motives at the expense of general harmony, to suppress the noble and pathetic elements, and to lower the literary key of utterance, in order to produce a parody. Ariosto had strained the semi-seriousness of romance to the utmost limits of endurance. For his successors nothing was left but imitation, caricature, or divergence upon a different track. Of these alternatives, Folengo and Berni, Aretino and Fortiguerra, chose the second; Tasso took the third, and provided Tassoni with the occasion of a new burlesque.

While the romantic epic lent itself thus easily to parody, another form of humorous poetry took root and flourished on the mass of Latin literature produced by the Revival. Latin never became a wholly dead language in Italy; and at the height of the Renaissance a public had been formed whose appreciation of classic style insured a welcome for its travesty. To depreciate the humanistic currency by an alloy of plebeian phrases, borrowed from various base dialects; to ape Virgilian mannerism while treating of the lowest themes suggested by boisterous mirth or satiric wit; was the method of the so-called Maccaronic poets. It is matter for debate who first invented this style, and who created the title Maccaronea. So far back as the thirteenth century, we notice a blending of Latin with French and German in certain portions of the Carmina Burana.[407] But the two elements of language here lie side by side, without interpenetration. This imperfect fusion is not sufficient to constitute the genuine Maccaronic manner. The jargon known as Maccaronic must consist of the vernacular, suited with Latin terminations, and freely mingled with classical Latin words. Nothing should meet the ear or eye, which does not sound or look like Latin; but, upon inspection, it must be discovered that a half or third is simple slang and common speech tricked out with the endings of Latin declensions and conjugations.[408] In Italy, where the modern tongue retained close similarity to Latin, this amalgamation was easy; and we find that in the fifteenth century the hybrid had already assumed finished form. The name by which it was then known, indicates its composition. As maccaroni is dressed with cheese and butter, so the maccaronic poet mixed colloquial expressions of the people with classical Latin, serving up a dish that satisfied the appetite by rarity and richness of concoction. At the same time, since maccaroni was the special delicacy of the proletariate, and since a stupid fellow was called a Maccherone, the ineptitude and the vulgarity of the species are indicated by its title. Among the Maccaronic poets we invariably find ourselves in low Bohemian company. No Phœbus sends them inspiration; nor do they slake their thirst at the Castalian spring. The muses they invoke are tavern-wenches and scullions, haunting the slums and stews of Lombard cities.[409] Their mistresses are of the same type as Villon's Margot. Mountains of cheese, rivers of fat broth, are their Helicon and Hippocrene. Their pictures of manners demand a coarser brush than Hogarth's to do them justice.

Before engaging in the criticism of this Maccaronic literature, it is necessary to interpolate some notice of a kindred style, called pedantesco. This was the exact converse of the Maccaronic manner. Instead of adapting Italian to the rules of Latin, the parodist now treated Latin according to the grammatical usages and metrical laws of Italian. A good deal of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is written in lingua pedantesca. But the recognized masterpiece of the species is a book called I Cantici di Fidentio Glottogrysio Ludimagistro. The author's real name was Camillo Scrofa, a humanist and schoolmaster of Vicenza. Though more than once reprinted, together with similar compositions by equally obscure craftsmen, his verses are exceedingly rare.[410] They owe their neglect partly to the absurdity of their language, partly to the undisguised immorality of their subject-matter. Of the stilo pedantesco the following specimen may suffice. It describes a hostelry of boors and peasants:[411]

Pur pedetentim giunsi ad un cubiculo, Sordido, inelegante, ove molti hospiti Facean corona a un semimortuo igniculo. Salvete, dissi, et Giove lieti e sospiti Vi riconduca a i vostri dolci hospitii! Ma responso non hebbi; o rudi, o inhospiti! Io che tra veri equestri e tra patritii Soglio seder, mi vedi alhor negligere Da quegli huomini novi et adventitii. Non sapea quasi indignabundo eligere Partito; pur al fin fu necessario Tra lor per calefarmi un scanno erigere. Che colloquio, O Dii boni, empio e nefario Pervenne a l'aure nostre purgatissime, Da muover nausea a un lenone a un sicario!

One of the most famous and earliest, if not absolutely the first among the authors of Maccaronic verse, was Tifi Odassi, a Paduan, whose poems were given to the press after his death, in at least two editions earlier than the close of the fifteenth century.[412] He chose a commonplace Novella for his theme; but the interest of his tale consists less in its argument than in its vivid descriptions of low town-life. Odassi's portraits of plebeian characters are executed with masterly realism, and the novelty of the vehicle gives them a singularly trenchant force. It is unfortunately impossible to bring either the cook-shop-keeper or his female servant, the mountebank or the glutton, before modern readers. These pictures are too Rabelaisian.[413] I must content myself with a passage taken from the description of a bad painter, which, though it is inferior in comic power, contains nothing unpardonably gross.[414]

Quodsi forte aliquem voluit depingere gallum, Quicunque aspiciat poterit jurare cigognam; Depinxitque semel canes in caza currentes, Omnes credebant natantes in æquore luzos; Sive hominem pingit, poteris tu credere lignum In quo sartores ponunt sine capite vestes; Seu nudos facit multo sudore putinos, Tu caput a culo poteris dignoscere nunquam; Sive facit gremio Christum retinere Mariam, Non licet a filio sanctam dignoscere matrem; Pro gardelinis depingit sepe gallinas, Et pro gallinis depingit sepe caballos: Blasfemat, jurat, culpam dicit esse penelli, Quos spazzaturas poteris jurare de bruscho; Tam bene depingit pictorum pessimus iste, Nec tamen inferior se cogitat esse Bellino.

It will be seen from this specimen that Italian and Latin are confounded without regard to either prosody or propriety of diction. The style, far from being even pedestrian, is reptile, and the inspiration is worthy of the source imagined by the poet.[415] As Odassi remarks in his induction:

Aspices, lector, Prisciani vulnera mille Gramaticamque novam, quam nos docuere putane.

The note struck by Odassi was sustained by his immediate imitators. Another Paduan author used this parody of humanistic verse to caricature a humanist, whom he called Vigonça.[416] Like Odassi, he invoked Venus Volgivaga; and like Odassi's, very little of his verse is quotable. The following extracts may be found acceptable for their humorous account of a Professor's inaugural lecture in the university of Padua.[417] Vigonça announces the opening of his course:

Ipse ante totis facit asavere piacis, Et totis scolis mandat bolletina bidelis, Quæ bolletina portabant talia verba: "Comes magnificus cavalerius ille Vigonça, Patricius Patavus comesque ab origine longa, Vos rogat ad primam veniatis quisque legendam; Qui veniet, magnum fructum portabit a casa." Omnes venturos sese dixere libenter; Promissit comes, capitaneus atque potestas, Et paduani vechi juvenesque politi. Lux promissa aderat, qua se smatare Vigonça Debebat, atque suam cunctis monstrare matieram. Ille tamen totam facit conçare la scolam, De nigro totam facit conzare cathedram, In qua debebat matus sprologare Vigonça; Cetera fulgebant banchalis atque thapetis, Et decem in brochis dicit spendidisse duchatos.

After narrating how the whole town responded to Vigonça's invitation, and how the folk assembled to hear his first address, the poet thus describes the great occasion:[418]

Sed neque bastabat ingens intrantibus ussus; Rumpebant cupos parietes atque fenestras, Inque ipso multos busos fecere parete. Tunc ibi bidelus cunctos ratione pregavit, Et sibi cavavit nigrum Vigonça biretum, Et manicas alzans dedit hic sua verba de mato, Et començavit sanctam faciendo la crucem. "Magnifice pretor, pariter generose prefecte, Tu facunde comes auri portando colanam, Magnus philosophus, lingua in utraque poeta, Tu primicerius, Venete spes alma paludis, Et vos doctores, celeberrima fama per orbem, Vos cavalerii multum sperone dorati, Vosque scolares, cives, charique sodales! Non ego perdivi tempus futuendo putanas, Non ego zugando, non per bordella vagando; Non ego cum canibus lepores seguendo veloces, Non cum sparveris, non cum falconibus ipse; Non ego cum dadis tabulam lissando per ullam; Non ego cum chartis volui dissipare dinaros, Qualiter in Padue faciunt de nocte scolares. Quum jocant alii, stabat in casa Vigonça Et studiabat guardando volumina longa."

This Paduan caricature may be reckoned among the most valuable documents we possess for the illustration of the professorial system in Italy during the ascendancy of humanism. Some material of the same kind is supplied by the Virgiliana of Evangelista Fossa, a Cremonese gentleman, who versified a Venetian Burla in mock-heroic Latin. He, too, painted the portrait of a pedant, Priscianus:[419]

Est mirandus homo; nam sunt miracula in illo, Omnes virtutes habet hic in testa fichatas ... Nam quicquid dicit, semper per littera parlat, Atque habet in boccham pulchra hæc proverbia semper.... Est letrutus nam multum, studiavit in omni Arte, fuit Padoe, fuit in la citta de Perosa, Bononie multum mansit de senno robando.

But Fossa's Virgiliana, while aiming at a more subtle sort of parody than the purely maccaronic poems, misses their peculiar salt, and, except for the Hudibrastic description of the author on horseback,[420] offers nothing of great interest.

Brief notice also may be taken of Giovan Giorgio Alione's satire on the Lombards. Alione was a native of Asti, and seasoned his maccaroni with the base French of his birthplace. For Asti, transferred to the House of Orleans by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, was more than half a French city and its inhabitants spoke the Gallic dialect common to Piedmont.[421] Alione is proud of this subjection, and twits the Lombards of Milan and Pavia with being unworthy of their ancient origin no less than of their modern masters.[422] Unlike the ordinary run of burlesque poems, his Macharonea is virulently satirical. Animated by a real rage against the North Italians, Alione paints them as effeminate cowards, devoid of the sense of honor and debased by the vices of ill-bred parvenus. The opening of a Novella he relates, may be cited as a fair specimen of his style:[423]

Quidam Franzosus, volens tornare Parisum, Certum Mìlaneysum scontravit extra viglianam Sine capello docheti testa bagnatum: Et cum ignoraret Gallicus hic unde fuisset Dixit vulgariter estes vous moglie mon amicus? Ille qui intelligit a la rebusa, respondit Sy sy mi che ho mogle Milani et anca fiolos. Gallus tunc cernens Lombardum fore loquela, Et recordatus quod tempore guerre Salucis Alixandrini fecerant pagare menestram Scutumque sibi sgrafignarant de gibesera, Sfodravit ensem dicens o tretre ribalde Rendez moy sa mon escu, sy non a la morte spazat.

The end of the story is far too crude to quote, and it is probable that even the most curious readers will already have had enough of Alione's peculiar gibberish.

The maccaronic style had reached this point when Folengo took possession of it, stamped it with his own genius, and employed it for one of the most important poems of the century. He is said to have begun a serious Latin epic in his early manhood, and to have laid this aside because he foresaw the impossibility of wresting the laurels from Virgil. This story is probably a legend; but it contains at least an element of truth. Folengo aimed at originality; he chose to be the first of burlesque Latin poets rather than to claim the name and fame of a Virgilian imitator.[424] In the proemium to his Moscheis he professes to have found the orthodox Apollo deaf to his prayers:

Illius heu frustra doctas captare sorores Speravi ac multa laude tenere polos.

The reason of the god's anger was that his votary had sullied the clear springs of Hippocrene:

Nescio quas reperi musas, turpesve sorores, Nescio quas turpi carmina voce canunt. Limpida Pegasidum vitiavi stagna profanus, Totaque sunt limo dedecorata meo.

The exordium to the Maccaronea introduces us to these vulgar Muses, grossæ Camœnæ, who fill their neophytes with maccaronic inspiration:

Jam nec Melpomene, Clio, nec magna Thalia, Nec Phœbus grattando lyram mihi carmina dictet, Qui tantos olim doctos fecere poetas; Verum cara mihi foveat solummodo Berta, Gosaque, Togna simul, Mafelina, Pedrala, Comina. Veridicæ Musæ sunt hæ, doctæque sorellæ; Quarum non multis habitatio nota poetis.

The holy hill of Folengo's Muses is a mountain of cheese and maccaroni, with lakes of broth and rivers of unctuous sauces:

Stant ipsæ Musæ super altum montis acumen, Formajum gratulis durum retridando foratis.

Here he seeks them, and here they deign to crown him poet:[425]

Ergo macaronicas illic cattavimus artes, Et me grossiloquum vatem statuere sorores.

We have seen already that the maccaronic style involved a free use of plebeian Italian, imbedded in a mixed mass of classical and medieval Latinity. Folengo refined the usage of his predecessors, by improving the versification, adopting a more uniformly heroic tone, and introducing scraps of Mantuan dialect at unexpected intervals, so that each lapse into Italian has the force of a surprise—what the Greeks called παρὰ προσδοκιαν. The comic effect is produced by a sustained epical inflation, breaking irregularly into the coarsest and least pardonable freaks of vulgarity. It is as though the poet were improvising, emulous of Virgil; but the tide of inspiration fails him, he falls short of classical phrases to express his thoughts, and is forced in the hurry of the moment to avail himself of words and images that lie more close at hand. His Pegasus is a showy hack, who ambles on the bypaths of Parnassus, dropping now and then a spavined hock and stumbling back into his paces with a snort. His war-trumpet utters a sonorous fanfaronnade; but the blower loses breath, and breaks his note, or suffers it to lapse into a lamentable quaver.

Tifi Odassi, who may be regarded as Folengo's master in this species of verse, confined the Maccaronic Muse to quaintly-finished sketches in the Dutch style.[426] His pupil raised her to the dignity of Clio and composed an epic in twenty-five books. The length of this poem and the strangeness of the manner render it unpalatable to all but serious students at the present time. Its humor has evaporated, and the form itself strikes us as rococo. We experience some difficulty in sympathizing with those readers of the sixteenth century, who, perfectly acquainted with Latin poetry and accustomed to derive intellectual pleasure from its practice, found exquisite amusement in so cleverly constructed a parody. Nor is it possible for Englishmen to appreciate the more delicate irony of the vulgarisms, which Folengo adopted from one of the coarsest Italian dialects, and cemented with subtle skill upon the stately structure of his hexameters. Still we may remember that the Maccaronea was read with profit by Rabelais, and that much of Butler's humor betrays a strong affinity to this antiquated burlesque.

In substance the Maccaronea begins with a rehandling of the Orlandino. Guido, peerless among Paladins, wins the love of his king's daughter, Baldovina of France. They fly together into Italy, and she dies in giving birth to a son at Cipada, near Mantua. Guido disappears, and the boy, Baldus, is brought up by a couple of peasants. He believes himself to be their child, and recognizes the rustic boor, Zambellus, for his brother. Still the hero's nature reveals itself in the village urchin; and, like the young Orlando, Baldus performs prodigies of valor in his boyhood:

Non it post vaccas, at sæpe caminat ad urbem, Ac ad Panadæ dispectum praticat illam; In villam semper tornabat vespere facto, Portabatque caput fractum gambasque macatas.

When he goes to school, he begins by learning his letters with great readiness. But he soon turns away from grammar to books of chivalry:

Sed mox Orlandi nasare volumina cœpit: Non vacat ultra deponentia discere verba, Non species, numeros, non casus atque figuras, Non Doctrinalis versamina tradere menti: Fecit de norma scartazzos mille Donati Inque Perotinum librum salcicia coxit. Orlandi solum, nec non fera bella Rinaldi Aggradant; animum faciebat talibus altum: Legerat Ancrojam, Tribisondam, gesta Danesi, Antonæque Bovum, mox tota Realea Francæ, Innamoramentum Carlonis et Asperamontem, Spagnam, Altobellum, Morgantis facta gigantis.

And so forth through the whole list of chivalrous romances, down to the Orlando Furioso and the Orlandino. The boy's heart is set on deeds of daring. He makes himself the captain of a band of rogues who turn the village of Cipada upside down. Three of these deserve especial notice—Fracassus, Cingar, and Falchettus; since they became the henchmen of our hero in all his subsequent exploits. Fracassus was descended in the direct line from Morgante:

Primus erat quidam Fracassus prole gigantis, Cujus stirps olim Morganto venit ab illo, Qui bachiocconem campanæ ferre solebat Cum quo mille hominum colpo sfracasset in uno.

Cingar in like manner drew his blood from Pulci's Margutte:

Alter erat Baldi compagnus, nomine Cingar, Accortus, ladro, semper truffare paratus; Scarnus enim facie, reliquo sed corpore nervis Plenus, compressus, picolinus, brunus, et atrox, Semper habens nudam testam, rizzutus et asper. Iste suam traxit Marguti a sanguine razzam, Qui ad calcagnos sperones ut gallus habebat Et nimio risu simia cagante morivit.

Falchettus boasted a still stranger origin:[427]

Sed quidnam de te, Falchette stupende, canemus? Tu quoque pro Baldo bramasti prendere mortem. Forsitan, o lecor, quæ dico, dura videntur, Namque Pulicano Falchettus venit ab illo Quem scripsere virum medium, mediumque catellum; Quapropter sic sic noster Falchettus habebat Anteriora viri, sed posteriora canina.

It would be too long to relate how Baldus received knightly education from a nobleman who admired his daring; how, ignorant of his illustrious blood, he married the village beauty Berta; and how he made himself the petty tyrant of Cipada. The exploits of his youth are a satire on the violence of local magnates, whose manners differed little from those of the peasants they oppressed. In course of time Baldus fell under the displeasure of a despot stronger than himself, and was shut up in prison.[428] In the absence of his hero from the scene, the poet now devotes himself to the exploits of Cingar among the peasants of Cipada. Without lowering his epic tone, Folengo fills five books with whimsical adventures, painting the manners of the country in their coarsest colors, and introducing passages of stinging satire on the monks he hated.[429] Cingar, finding himself on one occasion in a convent, gives vent to a long soliloquy which expresses Folengo's own contempt for the monastic institutions that filled Italy with rogues:

Quo diavol, ait, tanti venere capuzzi? Nil nisi per mundum video portare capuzzos: Quisquam vult fieri Frater, vult quisque capuzzum Postquam giocarunt nummos, tascasque vodarunt, Postquam pane caret cophinum, celaria vino, In Fratres properant, datur his extemplo capuzzus. Undique sunt isti Fratres, istique capuzzi. Qui sint nescimus; discernare nemo valeret Tantas vestitum foggias, tantosque colores: Sunt pars turchini, pars nigri, parsque morelli, Pars albi, russi, pars gialdi, parsque bretini. Si per iter vado telluris, cerno capuzzos: Si per iter pelagi, non mancum cerno capuzzos; Quando per armatos eo campos, cerno capuzzos; Sive forum subeo, sive barcam, sive tabernam, Protinus ante oculos aliquem mihi cerno capuzzum.

There will soon be no one left to bear arms, till the fields, or ply the common handicrafts. All the villains make themselves monks, aspiring to ecclesiastical honors and seeking the grade of superiority denied them by their birth. It is ambition that fills the convents:

Illic nobilitas sub rusticitate laborat, Ambitio quoniam villanos unica brancat.

This tirade is followed by the portrait of Prae Jacopinus, a village parson whose stupidity is only equaled by his vices. Jacopino's education in the alphabet is a masterpiece of Rabelaisian humor, and the following passage on his celebration of the Mass brings all the sordidness of rustic ceremonial before our eyes:[430]

Præterea Missam foggia dicebat in una, Nec crucis in fronte signum formare sciebat. Inter Confiteor parvum discrimen et Amen Semper erat, jam jam meditans adjungere finem; Incipiebat enim nec adhuc in nomine Patris, Quod tribus in saltis veniebat ad Ite misestum.

From generalities Folengo passes to particulars in the following description of a village Mass:[431]

Inde Jacopinus, chiamatis undique Pretis, Cœperat in gorga Missam cantare stupendam; Subsequitant alii, magnisque cridoribus instant. Protinus Introitum spazzant talqualiter omnem, Ad Chyrios veniunt, quos miro dicere sentis Cum contrappunto, veluti si cantor adesset Master Adrianus, Constantius atque Jachettus. Hic per dolcezzam scorlabant corda vilani Quando de quintis terzisque calabat in unam Musicus octavam noster Jacopinus et ipsas Providus octavas longa cum voce tirabat. Gloria in excelsis passat, jam Credo propinquat; Oh si Josquinus Cantorum splendor adesset!

Meanwhile Baldus has been left in prison, and it is time for Cingar to undertake his rescue. He effects this feat, by stripping two Franciscan monks, and dressing himself up in the frock he had just filched from one of them, while he coaxes the unfortunate Zambellus to assume the other. Then he persuades the people of Mantua that he has seen himself assassinated on the high road; gains access to Baldus in the dungeon, on the plea of hearing his confession; and contrives to leave Zambellus there in the clothes of Baldus, after disguising his friend in one of the friar's tunics. The story is too intricate for repetition here.[432] Suffice it to say that Baldus escapes and meets a knight errant, Leonardus, at the city gate, who has ridden all the way from Rome to meet so valorous a Paladin. The swear eternal friendship. The three henchmen of the hero muster round the new comrades in arms; and the party thus formed set forth upon a series of adventures in the style of Astolfo's journey to the moon.

This part of the epic is a close copy of the chivalrous romances in their more fantastic details. The journey of the Barons, as they are now invariably styled, is performed in a great ship. They encounter storms and pirates, land on marvelous islands, enter fairy palaces, and from time to time recruit their forces with notable rogues and drunkards whom they find upon their way. The parody consists in the similarity of their achievements to those of knight-errantry, while they are themselves in all points unlike the champions of chivalry. One of their most cherished companions, for example, is Boccalus, a Bergamasque buffoon, who distinguishes himself by presence of mind in a great storm:[433]

Ille galantus homo, qui nuper in æquora bruttam Jecerat uxorem, dicens non esse fagottum Fardellumque homini plus laidum, plusque pesentum Quam sibi mojeram lateri mirare tacatam Quæ sit oca ingenio, quæ vultu spazzacaminus.

The tale of adventures is diversified, after the manner of the romantic poets, by digressions, sometimes pathetic, sometimes dissertational. Among these the most amusing is Cingar's lecture on astronomy, in which the planetary theories of the middle ages are burlesqued with considerable irony.[434] The most affecting is the death of Leonardus, who chooses to be torn in pieces by bears rather than yield his virginity to a vile woman. This episode suggests one of the finest satiric passages in the whole poem. Having exhibited the temptress Muselina, the poet breaks off with this exclamation:[435]

Heu quantis noster Muselinis orbis abundat!

He then enumerates their arts of seduction, and winds up with a powerful dramatic picture, painted from the life, of a mezzana engaged in corrupting a young man's mind during Mass-time:

Dum Missæ celebrantur, amant cantonibus esse, Postque tenebrosos mussant chiachiarantque pilastros; Ah miserelle puer, dicunt, male nate, quod ullam Non habes, ut juvenes bisognat habere, morosam!... Numquid vis fieri Frater Monachusve, remotis Delitiis Veneris, Bacchi, Martisque, Jovisque, Quos vel simplicitas, vel desperatio traxit?... Nemo super terram sanctus; stant æthere sancti: Nos carnem natura facit, quo carne fruamur.

As the epic approaches its conclusion, Baldus discovers his true father, Guido, under the form of a holy hermit, and learns that it is reserved for him by destiny, first to extirpate the sect of witches under their queen Smirna Gulfora, and afterwards to penetrate the realms of death and hell. The last five books of the Maccaronea are devoted to these crowning exploits. Merlin appears, and undertakes the guidance of the Barons on their journey to Avernus.[436] But first he requires full confession of their sins from each; and this humorous act of penitence forms one of the absurdest episodes, as may be easily imagined, in the poem. Absolved and furnished with heroic armor, the Barons march to the conquest of Gulfora and the destruction of her magic palace. Folengo has placed it appropriately on the road to hell; for under Gulfora he allegorizes witchcraft. The space allotted to Smirna Gulfora and the importance attached to her overthrow by Baldus and his Barons, call attention to the prevalence of magic in Italy at this epoch.[437] It may not, therefore, be out of place, before engaging in this portion of the analysis, to give some account of Italian witchcraft drawn from other sources, in order to estimate the truth of the satire upon which Folengo expended his force.

"Beautiful and humane Italy," as Bandello calls his country in the preface to one of his most horrible Novelle, was, in spite of her enlightenment, but little in advance of Europe on the common points of medieval superstition. The teaching of the Church encouraged a belief in demons; and the common people saw on every chapel wall the fresco of some saint expelling devils from the bodies of possessed persons, or exorcising domestic utensils which had been bewitched.[438] Thus the laity grew up in the confirmed opinion that earth, air, and ocean swarmed with supernatural beings, whom they distinguished as fiends from hell or inferior sprites of the elements, called spiriti folletti.[439] While the evil spirits of both degrees were supposed to lie beneath the ban of ecclesiastical malediction, they lent their aid to necromancers, witches and wizards, who, defying the interdictions of the Church, had the audacity to use them as their slaves by the employment of powerful spells and rites of conjurations. There was a way, it was believed, of taming both the demons and the elves, of making them the instruments of human avarice, ambition, jealousy and passion. Since all forms of superstition in Italy lent themselves to utilitarian purposes, the necromancer and the witch, having acquired this power over supernatural agents, became the servants of popular lusts. They sold their authority to the highest bidders, undertaking to blast the vines or to poison the flocks of an enemy; to force young men and maidens to become the victims of inordinate appetites; to ruin inconvenient husbands by slowly-wasting diseases; to procure abortion by spells and potions; to confer wealth and power upon aspirants after luxury; to sow the seeds of discord in families—in a word, to open a free path for the indulgence of the vain desires that plague ill-regulated egotisms. A class of impostors, half dupes of their own pretensions, half rogues relying on the folly of their employers, sprang into existence, who combined the Locusta of ancient Rome with the witch of medieval Germany. Such was the Italian strega—a loathsome creature, who studied the chemistry of poisons, philtres, and abortion-hastening drugs, and while she pretended to work her miracles by the help of devils, played upon the common passions and credulities of human kind.[440] By her side stood her masculine counterpart, the stregone, negromante or alchimista, who plays so prominent a part in the Italian comedies and novels.

Witchcraft was localized in two chief centers—the mountains of Norcia, and the Lombard valleys of the Alps.[441] In the former we find a remnant of antique superstition. The witches of this district, whether male or female, had something of the classical Sibyl in their composition and played upon the terrors of their clients. Like their Roman predecessors, they plied the trades of poisoner, quack-doctor and bawd. In Lombardy witchcraft assumed a more Teutonic complexion. The witch was less the instrument of fashionable vices, trading in them as a lucrative branch of industry, than the hysterical subject of a spiritual disease. Lust itself inflamed the victims of this superstition, who were burned by hundreds in the towns, and who were supposed to hold their revels in the villages of Val Camonica. Like the hags of northern Europe, these Lombard streghe had recourse to the black art in the delirious hope of satisfying their own inordinate ambitions, their own indescribable desires. The disease spread so wildly at the close of the fifteenth century that Innocent VIII., by his Bull of 1484, issued special injunctions to the Dominican monks of Brescia, Bergamo and Cremona, authorizing them to stamp it out with fire and torture.[442] The result was a crusade against witchcraft, which seems to have increased the evil by fascinating the imagination of the people. They believed all the more blindly in the supernatural powers to be obtained by magic arts, inasmuch as this traffic had become the object of a bloody persecution. When the Church recognized that men and women might command the fiends of hell, it followed as a logical consequence that wretches, maddened by misery and intoxicated with ungovernable lusts, were tempted to tamper with the forbidden thing at the risk of life and honor in this world and with the certainty of damnation in the other. After this fashion the confused conscience of illiterate people bred a formidable extension of this spiritual malady throughout the northern provinces of Italy. Some were led by morbid curiosity; others by a vain desire to satisfy their appetites, or to escape the consequences of their crimes. A more dangerous class used the superstition to acquire power over their neighbors and to make money out of popular credulity.

Born and bred in Lombardy at the epoch when witchcraft had attained the height of popular insanity, Folengo was keenly alive to the hideousness of a superstition which, rightly or wrongly, he regarded as a widespread plague embracing all classes of society. It may be questioned whether he did not exaggerate its importance. But there is no mistaking the verisimilitude of the picture he drew. All the uncleanliness of a diseased imagination, all the extravagances of wanton desire, all the consequences of domestic unchastity—incest, infanticide, secret assassination, concealment of births—are traced to this one cause and identified by him with witchcraft. The palace of the queen Gulfora is a pandemonium of lawless vice:

Quales hic reperit strepitus, qualemque tumultum, Quales mollities turpes, actusque salaces, Utile nil scribi posset, si scribere vellem.

Her courts are crowded with devils who have taken human shape to gratify the lusts of her votaries:

Leggiadros juvenes, bellos, facieque venustos, Stringatos, agiles, quos judicat esse diablos, Humanum piliasse caput moresque decentes, Conspicit, innumeras circum scherzare puellas, Quæ gestant vestes auri brettasque veluti.

The multitude is made up of all nations, sexes, ages, classes:

Obstupet innumeros illic retrovare striones, Innumerasque strias vecchias, modicasque puellas. Non ea medesimo generatur schiatta paeso; At sunt Italici, Græci, Gallique, Spagnoles, Magnates, poveri, laici, fratresque, pretesque, Matronæ, monighæ per forzam claustra colentes.

Some of them are engaged in preparing love-potions and poisonous draughts from the most disgusting and noxious ingredients. Others compound unguents to be used in the metamorphosis of themselves on their nocturnal jaunts. Among these are found poets, orators, physicians, lawyers, governors, for whose sins a handful of poor old women play the part of scapegoats before the public:

Sed quia respectu legis prævertitur ordo, Namque solent grossi pisces mangiare minutos, Desventuratæ quædam solummodo vecchiæ Sunt quæ supra asinos plebi spectacula fiunt, Sunt quæ primatum multorum crimina celant, Sunt quæ sparagnant madonnis pluribus ignem.

Some again are discovered compiling books of spells:

Quomodo adulterium uxoris vir noscere possit, Quomodo virgineæ cogantur amare puellæ, Quomodo non tumeat mulier cornando maritum, Quomodo si tumuit fantinum mingat abortum, Quomodo vix natos vitient sua fascina puttos, Quomodo desiccent odiati membra mariti.

The elder witches keep a school for the younger, and instruct them in the secrets of their craft. Among these Baldus recognizes his own wife, together with the principal ladies of his native land.

It is clear that under the allegory of witchcraft, in which at the same time he seems to have believed firmly, Folengo meant to satirize the secret corruption of society. When Gulfora herself appears, she holds her court like an Italian duchess:

Longa sequit series hominum muschiata zibettis, Qui cortesanos se vantant esse tilatos, Quorum si videas mores rationis ochialo, Non homines maschios sed dicas esse bagassas.

The terrible friar then breaks into a tirade against the courtiers of his day, comparing them with Arthur's knights:

Tempore sed nostro, proh dii, sæcloque dadessum, Non nisi perfumis variis et odore zibetti, Non nisi, seu sazaræ petenentur sive tosentur, Brettis velluti, nec non scufiotibus auri, Auri cordiculis, impresis, atque medallis, Millibus et frappis per calzas perque giupones, Cercamus carum merdosi germen amoris.

Baldus exterminates the whole vile multitude, while Fracassus pulls Gulfora's palace about her ears. After this, the Barons pursue their way to Acheron, and call upon Charon to ferry them across. He refuses to take so burdensome a party into his boat; but by the strength of Fracassus and the craft of Cingar they effect a passage. Their entry into hell furnishes Folengo with opportunities for new tirades against the vices of Italy. Tisiphone boasts how Rome, through her machinations, has kept Christendom in discord. Alecto exults in her offspring, the Guelph and Ghibelline factions:

Unde fides Christi paulatim lapsa ruinet, Dum gentes Italæ bastantes vincere mundum Se se in se stessos discordant, seque medesmos Vassallos faciunt, servos, vilesque famejos His qui vassalli, servi, vilesque fa meji Tempore passato nobis per forza fu ere.

After passing the Furies, and entering the very jaws of Hades, Baldus encounters the fantasies of grammarians and humanists, the idle nonsense of the schoolmen, all the lumber of medieval philosophy mixed with the trifles of the Renaissance.[443] He fights his way through the thick-crowding swarm of follies, and reaches the hell of lovers, where a mountebank starts forward and offers to be his guide. Led by this zany, the hero and his comrades enter an enormous gourd, the bulk of which is compared to the mountains of Val Camonica. Within its spacious caverns dwell the sages of antiquity, with astrologers, physicians, wizards, and false poets. But, having brought his Barons to this place Merlinus Cocajus can advance no further. He is destined to inhabit the great gourd himself. Beyond it he has no knowledge; and here, therefore, he leaves the figments of his fancy without a word of farewell:

Nec Merlinus ego, laus, gloria, fama Cipadæ, Quamvis fautrices habui Tognamque Gosamque, Quamvis implevi totum macaronibus orbem, Quamvis promerui Baldi cantare batajas, Non tamen hanc zuccam potui schifare decentem, In qua me tantos opus est nunc perdere dentes, Tot, quot in immenso posui mendacia libro.

With this grotesque invention of the infernal pumpkin, where lying bards are punished by the extraction of teeth which never cease to grow again, Folengo breaks abruptly off. His epic ends with a Rabelaisian peal of laughter, in which we can detect a growl of discontent and anger.

Laying the book down, we ask ourselves whether the author had a serious object, or whether he meant merely to indulge a vein of wayward drollery. The virulent invectives which abound in the Maccaronea, seem to warrant the former conclusion; nor might it be wholly impossible to regard the poem as an allegory, in which Baldus should play the part of the reason, unconscious at first of its noble origin, consorting with the passions and the senses, but finally arriving at the knowledge of its high destiny and defeating the powers of evil.[444] Yet when we attempt to press this theory and to explain the allegory in detail, the thread snaps in our hands. Like the romances of chivalry which it parodies, the Maccaronea is a bizarre mixture of heterogeneous elements, loosely put together to amuse an idle public and excite curiosity. If its author has used it also as the vehicle for satire which embraces all the popular superstitions, vices and hypocrisies of his century; if, as he approaches the conclusion, he assumes a tone of sarcasm more sinister than befits the broad burlesque of the commencement; we must rest contented with the assumption that his choleric humor led him from the path of comedy, while the fury of a soul divided against itself inspired his muses of the cook-shop with loftier strains than they had promised at the outset.[445] Should students in the future devote the same minute attention to Folengo that has been paid to Rabelais, it is not improbable that the question here raised may receive solution. The poet is not unworthy of such pains. Regarded merely as the precursor of Rabelais, Folengo deserves careful perusal. He was the creator of a style, which, when we read his epic, forces us to think of the seventeenth century; so strongly did it influence the form of humorous burlesque in Europe for at least two hundred years. On this account, the historian of modern literature cannot afford to neglect him. For the student of Italian manners in Lombardy during the height of the Renaissance, the huge amorphous undigested mass of the Maccaronea is one of the most valuable and instructive documents that we possess. I do not hesitate, from this point of view, to rank it with the masterpieces of the age, with the Orlando of Ariosto, with Machiavelli's comedies, and with the novels of Bandello.

Folengo used the maccaronic style in two other considerable compositions. The one entitled Moscheis is an elegant parody of the Batrachomyomachia, relating the wars of ants and flies in elegiac verse. The other, called Zanitonella, celebrates the rustic loves of Zanina and Tonello in a long series of elegies, odes and eclogues. This collection furnishes a complete epitome of parodies modeled on the pastorals in vogue. The hero appears upon the scene in the following Sonolegia, under which title we detect a blending of the Sonnet and the Elegy:[446]

Solus solettus stabam colegatus in umbra, Pascebamque meas virda per arva capras. Nulla travajabant animum pensiria nostrum, Cercabam quoniam tempus habere bonum. Quando bolzoniger puer, o mea corda forasti; Nec dedit in fallum dardus alhora tuus. Immo fracassasti rationis vincula, quæ tunc Circa coradam bastio fortis erat.

The lament is spun out to the orthodox length of fourteen verses, and concludes with a pretty point. Who the bolzoniger puer was, is more openly revealed in another Sonolegia:[447]

Nemo super terram mangiat mihi credite panem Seu contadinus, seu citadinus erit, Quem non attrapolet Veneris bastardulus iste, Qui volat instar avis, cæcus, et absque braga.

To follow the poet through all his burlesques of Petrarchistic and elegiac literature, Italian or Latin, would be superfluous. It is enough to say that he leaves none of their accustomed themes untouched with parody. The masterpiece of his art in this style is the sixth Eclogue, consisting of a dialogue between two drunken bumpkins—interloquutores Tonellus et Pedralus, qui ambo inebriantur.[448]

The maccaronic style was a product of North Italy, cultivated by writers of the Lombard towns, who versified comic or satiric subjects in parodies of humanistic poetry. The branch of burlesque literature we have next to examine, belonged to Tuscany, and took its origin from the equivocal carnival and dance songs raised to the dignity of art by Lorenzo de' Medici. Its conventional meter was terza rima, handled with exquisite sense of rhythm, but degraded to low comedy by the treatment of trivial or vulgar motives. The author of these Capitoli, as they were called, chose some common object—a paint-brush, salad, a sausage, peaches, figs, eels, radishes—to celebrate; affected to be inspired by the grandeur of his subject; developed the drollest tropes, metaphors and illustrations; and almost invariably conveyed an obscene meaning under the form of innuendoes appropriate to his professed theme. Though some exceptions can be pointed out, the Capitoli in general may be regarded as a species of Priapic literature, fashioned to suit the taste of Florentines, who had been accustomed for many generations to semi-disguised obscenity in their vernacular town poetry.[449] Taken from the streets and squares, adopted by the fashionable rhymsters of academies and courtly coteries, the rude Fescennine verse lost none of its license, while it assumed the polish of urbane art. Were it not for this antiquity and popularity of origin, which suggests a plausible excuse for the learned writers of Capitoli and warns us to regard their indecency as in some measure conventional, it would be difficult to approach the three volumes which contain a selection of their poems, without horror.[450] So deep, universal, unblushing is the vice revealed in them.

To Francesco Berni belongs the merit, such as it is, of having invented the burlesque Capitoli. He gave his name to it, and the term Bernesque has passed into the critical phraseology of Europe. The unique place of this rare poet in the history of Italian literature, will justify a somewhat lengthy account of his life and works. Studying him, we study the ecclesiastical and literary society of Rome in the age of Leo X. and Clement VII.

Francesco Berni was born at Lamporecchio, in the Val di Nievole, about the end of the fifteenth century.[451] His parents were poor; but they were connected with the family of the Cardinal Bibbiena, who, after the boy's education at Florence, took him at the age of nineteen to Rome. Upon the death of this patron in 1520, Berni remained in the service of Bibbiena's nephew, Agnolo Dovizio. Receiving no advancement from these kinsmen, he next transferred himself, in the quality of secretary, to the household of Giammatteo Giberti, Bishop of Verona, who was a distinguished Mecænas of literary men. This change involved his taking orders. Berni now resided partly at Rome and partly at Verona, tempering the irksome duties of his office by the writing of humorous poetry, which he recited in the then celebrated Academy of the Vignajuoli. This society, which numbered Molza, Mauro, La Casa, Lelio Capilupi, Firenzuola, and Francesco Bini among its members, gave the tone to polite literature at the Courts of Leo and Clement.

Berni survived the sack of 1527, which proved so disastrous to Italian scholars; but he lost everything he possessed.[452] Monsignor Giberti employed him on various missions of minor importance, involving journeys to Venice, Padua, Nice, Florence, and the Abruzzi. After sixteen years of Court-life, Berni grew weary of the petty duties, which must have been peculiarly odious to a man of his lazy temperament, if it is true, as he informs us, that the Archbishop kept him dancing attendance till daylight, while he played primiera with his friends. Accordingly, he retired to Florence, where he held a canonry in the cathedral. There, after a quiet life of literary ease, he died suddenly in 1535. It was rumored that he had been poisoned: and the most recent investigations into the circumstances of his death tend rather to confirm this report. All that is known, however, for certain, is that he spent the evening of May 25 with his friends the Marchionesse di Massa in the Palazzo Pazzi, and that next morning he breathed his last. His mysterious and unexplained decease was ascribed to one of the two Medicean princes then resident in Florence. A sonnet in Berni's best style, containing a vehement invective against Alessandro de' Medici, is extant. The hatred expressed in this poem may have occasioned the rumor (which certainly acquired a certain degree of currency) that Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici attempted to use the poet for the secret poisoning of his cousin, and on his refusal had him murdered. Other accounts of the supposed assassination ascribe a like intention to the Duke, who is said to have suggested the poisoning of the Cardinal to Berni. Both stories agree in representing his tragic end as the price paid for refusal to play the part of an assassin. The matter remains obscure; but enough suspicion rests upon the manner of his death to render this characteristic double legend plausible; especially when we remember what the customs of Florence with respect to poisoning were, and how the Cardinal de' Medici ended his own life.[453]

Such is the uneventful record of Berni's career. He was distinguished among all the poets of the century for his genial vein of humor and amiable personal qualities. That he was known to be stained with vices which it is not easy to describe, but which he frankly acknowledged in his poetical epistles, did not injure his reputation in that age of mutual indulgence.[454] Willing to live and let live, with a never-failing fund of drollery, and with a sincere dislike for work of any sort, he lounged through existence, an agreeable, genial and witty member of society. If this were all we should not need to write about him now. But with this easy-going temperament he combined a genius for poetry so peculiar and delicate, that his few works mark an epoch in Italian literature.

The best description of Berni is contained in the burlesque portrait of himself, which forms part of his Boiardo Innamorato.[455] This has been so well translated by an English scholar, the late W.S. Rose, that I cannot do better than refer the student to his stanzas. They convey as accurate a notion of the Bernesque manner as can be derived from any version in a foreign language.[456] The character he there has given to himself for laziness is corroborated by his extant epistles in prose. Berni represents himself as an incurably bad correspondent, pleased to get letters, but overcome with mortal terror when he is obliged to answer them.[457] He confides to his friend Francesco Bini that the great affair in life is to be gay and to write as little as possible:[458] "A vivere avemo sino alla morte a dispetto di chi non vuole, e il vantaggio è vivere allegramente, come conforto a far vio, attendando a frequentar quelli banchetti che si fanno per Roma, e scrivendo sopra tutto manco che potete. Quia hæc est victoria, quæ vincit mundum." The curse has been laid upon him of having to drive his quill without ceasing:[459] "O ego lævus, che scrivo d'ogni tempo, e scrivo ora che ho una gamba al collo, che ieri tornando dalla Certosa mi ruppe la mia cavalla, cascandomivi sopra. Sono pure un gran coglione!" So his pen runs on. The man writes just as he spoke, without affectation, mixing his phrases of Latin with the idiom of common life. The whole presents an agreeable contrast to the stilted style of Bembo, La Casa's studied periods, and the ambitious epistolary efforts of Aretino. Sometimes he breaks into doggrel:[460] "S'io avessi l'ingenio del Burchiello, Io vi farei volentier un sonetto, Che non ebbi giammai tema e subietto, Più dolce, più piacevol, nè più bello." When his friends insist upon his writing to them, rhyme comes to his aid, and he affects a comic fit of rage:[461]

Perchè m'ammazzi con le tue querele, Priuli mio, perchè ti duole a torto, Che sai che t'amo più che l'orso il miele, etc.

Importuned to publish the poems he recited with so much effect in private circles, he at last consents because he cannot help it:[462] "Compare, io non ho potuto tanto schermirmi che pure m'è bisognato dar fuori questo benedetto Capitolo e Comento della Primiera; e siate certo che l'ho fatto, non perchè mi consumassi d'andare in stampa, nè per immortalarmi come il cavalier Casio, ma per fuggire la fatica mia, e la malevolenza di molti che domandandomelo e non lo avendo mi volevano mal di morte." Nor were these the ordinary excuses of an author eager to conceal his vanity. The Capitolo upon the game of primiera was the only poem which appeared with his consent.[463] He intended his burlesque verses for recitation, and is even said to have preserved no copies of them, so that many of his compositions, piratically published in his lifetime, were with difficulty restored to a right text by Il Lasca in 1548. This indifference to public fame did not imply any carelessness of style. Mazzuchelli, who had seen some of his rough copies, asserts that they bore signs of the minutest pains bestowed upon them. The melody of versification, richness of allusion, refinement of phrase, equality and flowing smoothness, which distinguish Berni's work from that of his imitators confirm the belief that his Capitoli and sonnets, in spite of their apparent ease, were produced with the conscientious industry of a real artist.

Berni's theory of poetry revealed a common-sense and insight which were no less rare than commendable in that age of artificial literature. He refused to write at command, pleading that spontaneity of inspiration is essential to art, and quoting Vida's dictum:

Nec jussa canas, nisi forte coactus Magnorum imperio regum.

Notwithstanding his avoidance of publication and parsimony of production, Berni won an almost unique reputation during his lifetime, and after his death was worshiped as a saint by the lovers of burlesque.[464] In one of his drollest sonnets he complains that poets were wont to steal their neighbors' verses, but that he is compelled to take the credit of more than he ever wrote:[465]

A me quei d'altri son per forza dati, E dicon tu gli arai, vuoi o non vuoi.

A piece of comic prose or verse cannot appear but that it is at once ascribed to him:

E la gente faceta Mi vuole pure impiastrar di prose e carmi, Come s'io fussi di razza di marmi: Non posso ripararmi; Come si vede fuor qualche sonetto, Il Berni l'ha composto a suo dispetto. E fanvi su un guazzetto Di chiose e di sensi, che rinnieghi il cielo, Se Luter fa più stracci del Vangelo.

One of the glosses referred to in this coda, lies before me as I write. It was composed by Gianmaria Cecchi on Berni's sonnet which begins "Cancheri e beccafichi." The sonnet is an amusing imprecation upon matrimony, written in one paragraph, and containing the sting of the epigram in its short coda of three lines.[466] But it did not need a commentary, and Cecchi's voluminous annotations justify the poet's comic anger.

Berni's Capitoli may be broadly divided into three classes. The first includes his poetical epistles, addressed to Fracastoro, Sebastian del Piombo, Ippolito de' Medici, Marco Veneziano, and other friends. Except for the peculiar humor, which elevates the trivial accidents of life to comedy, except for the consummate style, which dignifies the details of familiar correspondence and renders fugitive effusions classical, these letters in verse would scarcely detach themselves from a mass of similar compositions. As it is, Berni's personality renders them worthy companions of Ariosto's masterpieces in a similar but nicely differentiated branch of literature. It remains for the amateurs of autobiographical poetry to choose between the self-revelation of the philosophizing Ferrarese poet and the brilliant trifling of the Florentine. The second class embraces a number of occasional poems—the Complaint against Love, the Deluge in Mugello, the Satire upon Adrian VI., the Lamentation of Nardino—descriptive or sarcastic pieces, where the poet chooses a theme and develops it with rhetorical abundance. The third class may be regarded as the special source and fountain of the Bernesque manner, as afterwards adopted and elaborated by Berni's imitators. Omitting personal or occasional motives, he sings the praises of the Plague, of Primiera, of Aristotle, of Peaches, of Debt, of Eels, of the Urinal, of Thistles, and of other trifling subjects. Here his burlesque genius takes the most fantastic flight, soaring to the ether of absurdity and sinking to the nadir of obscenity, combining heterogeneous elements of fun and farce, yet never transgressing the limits of refined taste. These Capitoli revealed a new vehicle of artistic expression to his contemporaries. Penetrated with their author's individuality, they caught the spirit of the age and met its sense of humor. Consequently they became the touchstones of burlesque inspiration, the models which tempted men of feebler force and more uncertain tact to hopeless tasks of emulation. We still possess La Casa's Capitolo on the Oven; Molza's on Salad and the Fig; Firenzuola's on the Sausage and the Legno Santo; Bronzino's on the Paint-brush and the Radish; Aretino's on the Quartan Fever; Franzesi's on Carrots and Chestnuts; Varchi's on Hard Eggs and Fennel; Mauro's on Beans and Priapus; Dolce's on Spittle and Noses; Bini's on the Mal Franzese; Lori's on Apples; Ruscelli's on the Spindle—not to speak of many authors, the obscurity of whose names and the obscenity of the themes they celebrated, condemn them to condign oblivion. Not without reason did Gregorovius stigmatize these poems as a moral syphilis, invading Italian literature and penetrating to the remotest fibers of its organism. After their publication in academical circles and their further diffusion through the press, simple terms which had been used to cloak their improprieties, became the bywords of pornographic pamphleteers and poets. Figs, beans, peaches, apples, chestnuts acquired a new and scandalous significance. Sins secluded from the light of day by a modest instinct of humanity, flaunted their loathsomeness without shame beneath the ensigns of these literary allegories. The corruption of society, hypocritically veiled or cynically half-revealed in coteries, expressed itself too plainly through the phraseology invented by a set of sensual poets. The most distinguished members of society, Cardinals like Bembo, prelates like La Casa, painters like Bronzino, critics like Varchi, scholars like Molza, lent the prestige of their position and their talents to the diffusion of this leprosy, which still remains the final most convincing testimony to the demoralization of Italy in the Renaissance.[467]

To what extent, it may be asked, was Berni responsible for these consequences? He brought the indecencies of the piazza, where they were the comparatively innocuous expression of coarse instincts, into the close atmosphere of the study and the academical circle, refined their vulgarisms, and made their viciousness attractive by the charm of his incomparable style. This transition from the Canto Carnascialesco to the Capitolo may be observed in Berni's Caccia di Amore, a very licentious poem dedicated to "noble and gentle ladies." It is a Carnival Song or Canzone a Ballo rewritten in octave stanzas of roseate fluency and seductive softness. A band of youthful huntsmen pay their court in it to women, and the double entendre exactly reproduces the style of innuendo rendered fashionable by Lorenzo de' Medici. Yet, though Berni is unquestionably answerable for the obscene Capitoli of the sixteenth century, it must not be forgotten that he only gave form to material already sufficiently appropriated by the literary classes. With him, the grossness which formed the staple of Mauro's, Molza's, Bini's, La Casa's and Bronzino's poems, the depravities of appetite which poisoned the very substance of their compositions, were but accidental. The poet stood above them and in some measure aloof from them, employing these ingredients in the concoction of his burlesque, but never losing the main object of his art in their development. A bizarre literary effect, rather than the indulgence of a sensual imagination, was the aim he had in view. Therefore, while we regret that his example gave occasion to coarser debaucheries of talent, we are bound to acknowledge that the jests to which he condescended, do not represent his most essential self. This, however, is but a feeble apology. That without the excuse of passion, without satirical motive or overmastering personal proclivity, he should have penned the Capitolo a M. Antonio da Bibbiena, and have joked about giving and taking his metaphorical peaches, remains an ineradicable blot upon his nature.[468]

The Bernesque Capitoli were invariably written in terza rima, which at this epoch became the recognized meter of epistolary, satirical, and dissertational poetry throughout Italy.[469] Thus the rhythm of the Divine Comedy received final development by lending itself to the expression of whims, fancies, personal invectives and scurrilities. To quote from Berni's masterpieces in this style would be impossible. Each poem of about one hundred lines is a perfect and connected unity, which admits of no mutilation by the detachment of separate passages. Still readers may be referred to the Capitolo a Fracastoro and the two Capitoli della Peste as representative of the poet's humor in its purest form, without the moral deformities of the still more celebrated Pesche or the uncleanliness of the Orinale.

At the close of the Capitolo written on the occasion of Adrian VI.'s election to the Papacy, Berni declared that it had never been his custom to speak ill of people:

L'usanza mia non fu mai di dir male; E che sia il ver, leggi le cose mie, Leggi l'Anguille, leggi l'Orinale, Le Pesche, i Cardi e l'altre fantasie: Tutte sono inni, salmi, laudi ed ode.

We have reason to believe this declaration. Genial good humor is a characteristic note of his literary temperament. At the same time he was no mean master of caricature and epigram. The Capitolo in question is a sustained tirade against the Fleming, who had come to break the peace of polished Rome—a shriek of angry lamentation over altered times, intolerable insults, odious innovations. The amazement and discomfiture of the poet, contrasted with his burlesque utterance, render this composition comic in a double sense. Its satire cuts both ways, against the author and the object of his rage. Yet when Adrian gave place to Giulio de' Medici, and Berni discovered what kind of a man the new Pope was, he vented nobler scorn in verse of far more pungent criticism. His sonnet on Clement is remarkable for exactly expressing the verdict posterity has formed after cool and mature inquiry into this Pope's actions. Clement's weakness and irresolution must end, the poet says, by making even Adrian seem a saint:[470]

Un Papato composto di rispetti, Di considerazioni e di discorsi, Di più, di poi, di ma, di sì, di forsi, Di pur, di assai parole senza effetti; Di pensier, di consigli, di concetti, Di congetture magre per apporsi D'intrattenerti, purchè non si sborsi, Con audienze, risposte, e bei detti: Di piè di piombo e di neutralità, Di pazienza, di dimostrazione, Di Fede, di Speranza e Carità, D'innocenza, di buona intenzione; Ch'è quasi come dir, semplicità. Per non le dare altra interpretazione, Sia con sopportazione, Lo dirò pur, vedrete che pian piano Farà canonizzar Papa Adriano.

The insight into Clement's character displayed in this sonnet, the invective against Adrian, and the acerbity of another sonnet against Alessandro de' Medici:

Empio Signor, che de la roba altrui Lieto ti vai godendo, e del sudore:

would gain in cogency, could we attach more value to the manliness of Berni's utterances. But when we know that, while he was showering curses on the Duke of Cività di Penna, he frequented the Medicean Court and wrote a humorous Capitolo upon Gradasso, a dwarf of Cardinal Ippolito, we feel forced to place these epigrammatic effusions among the ebullitions of personal rather than political animosity. There was nothing of the patriot in Berni, not even so much as in Machiavelli, who himself avowed his readiness to roll stones for the Signori Medici.

As a satirist, Berni appears to better advantage in his caricatures of private or domestic personages. The portrait of his housekeeper, who combined in her single person all the antiquities of all the viragos of romance:

Io ho per cameriera mia l'Ancroja Madre di Ferraù, zia di Morgante, Arcavola maggior dell'Amostante, Balia del Turco e suocera del Boja:

Alcionio upon his mule:

Quella che per soperchio digiunare Tra l'anime celesti benedette Come un corpo diafano traspare:

Ser Cecco who could never be severed from the Court, nor the Court from Ser Cecco:

Perch'ambedue son la Corte e ser Cecco:

the pompous doctor:

l'ambasciador del Boja, Un medico, maestro Guazzaletto:

Domenico d'Ancona, the memory of whose beard, shorn by some Vandal of a barber, draws tears from every sympathetic soul:

Or hai dato, barbier, l'ultimo crollo Ad una barba la più singolare Che mai fosse descritta in verso o 'n prosa:

these form a gallery of comic likenesses, drawn from the life and communicated with the force of reality to the reader. Each is perfect in style, clearly cut like some antique chalcedony, bringing the object of the poet's mirth before us with the exact measure of ridicule he sought to inflict.[471]

This satiric power culminates in the sonnet on Pietro Aretino.[472] The tartness of Berni's more good-humored pasquinades is concentrated to vitriol by unadulterated loathing. He flings this biting acid in the face of one whom he has found a scoundrel. The sonnet starts at the white heat of fury:

Tu ne dirai e farai tante e tante, Lingua fracida, marcia, senza sale.

It proceeds with execration; and when the required fourteen lines have been terminated, it foams over into rage more voluble and still more voluble, unwinding the folds of an interminable Coda with ever-increasing crescendo of vituperation, as though the passion of the writer could not be appeased. The whole has to be read at one breath. No quotation can render a conception of its rhetorical art. Every word strikes home because every word contains a truth expressed in language of malignant undiluted heartfelt hate. That most difficult of literary triumphs, to render abuse sublime, to sustain a single note of fierce invective without relaxing or weakening the several grades that lead to the catastrophe, has been accomplished. This achievement is no doubt due in some measure to the exact correspondence between what we know of Pietro Aretino and what Berni has written of him. Yet its blunt fidelity to fact does not detract from the skill displayed in the handling of those triple series of rhymes, each one of which descends like a lash upon the writhing back beneath:

Ch'ormai ogni paese Hai ammorbato, ogn'uom, ogn'animale, Il ciel e Dio e 'l diavol ti vuol male. Quelle veste ducale, O ducali accattate e furfantate, Che ti piangono addosso sventurate, A suon di bastonate Ti saran tratte, prima che tu muoja, Dal reverendo padre messer boja, Che l'anima di noja, Mediante un capestro, caveratti, E per maggior favore squarteratti; E quei tuoi leccapiatti, Bardassonacci, paggi da taverna, Ti canteranno il requiem eterna. Or vivi e ti governa, Bench'un pugnale, un cesso, overo un nodo Ti faranno star cheto in ogni modo.

From this conclusion the rest may be divined. Berni paid dearly for the satisfaction of thus venting his spleen. Aretino had found more than his match. Though himself a master in the art of throwing dirt, he could not, like Berni, sling his missiles with the certainty of gaining for himself by the same act an immortality of glory. This privilege is reserved for the genius of style, and style alone. Therefore he had to shrink in silence under Berni's scourge. But Aretino was not the man to forego revenge if only an opportunity for inflicting injury upon his antagonist, full and effectual, and without peril to himself, was offered. The occasion came after Berni's death; and how he availed himself of it, will appear in the next paragraphs.

Though the Capitoli and sonnets won for their author the high place he occupies among Italian poets, Berni is also famous for his rifacimento or remodeling of the Orlando Innamorato. He undertook this task after the publication of the Furioso; and though part was written at Verona, we know from references to contemporary events contained in the rifacimento, that Berni was at work upon it in the last years of his life at Florence. It was not published until some time after his death. Berni subjected the whole of Boiardo's poem to minute revision, eliminating obsolete words and Lombard phrases, polishing the verse, and softening the roughness of the elder poet's style. He omitted a few passages, introduced digressions, connected the episodes by links and references, and opened each canto with a dissertation in the manner of Ariosto. Opinions may vary as to the value of the changes wrought by Berni. But there can be no doubt that his work was executed with artistic accuracy, and that his purpose was a right one. He aimed at nothing less than rendering a noble poem adequate to the measure of literary excellence attained by the Italians since Boiardo's death. The Innamorato was to be made worthy of the Furioso. The nation was to possess a continuous epic of Orlando, complete in all its parts and uniformly pure in style. Had Berni lived to see his own work through the press, it is probable that this result would have been attained. As it happened, the malignity of fortune or the malice of a concealed enemy defeated his intention. We only possess a deformed version of his rifacimento. The history, or rather the tragedy, of its publication involves some complicated questions of conjecture. Yet the side-lights thrown upon the conditions of literature at that time in Italy, as well as on the mystery of Berni's death, are sufficiently interesting to justify the requisite expenditure of space and time.

The rifacimento appeared in a mutilated form at Venice in 1541, from the press of the Giunti, and again in 1542 at Milan from that of Francesco Calvo. These two issues are identical, except in the title and tail pages. The same batch of sheets was in fact divided by the two publishers. In 1545 another issue, called Edizione Seconda, saw the light at Venice, in which Giunta introduced a very significant note, pointing out that certain stanzas were not the work of "M. Francesco Berni, but of one who presumptuously willed to do him so great an injury."[473] This edition, differing in many respects from those of 1541 and 1542, was on the whole an improvement. It would seem that the publishers, in the interval between 1541 and 1545, regretted that Berni's copy had been tampered with, and did their best, in the absence of the original, to restore a correct text. Still, as Giunta acknowledged, the rifacimento had been irretrievably damaged by some private foe.[474] The introductory dedication to Isabella Gonzaga, where we might have expected an allusion to Boiardo, is certainly not Berni's; and the two lines,

Nè ti sdegnar veder quel ch'altri volse Forse a te dedicar, ma morte il tolse,

must be understood to refer to Berni's and not to Boiardo's death. Comparison of the two editions makes it, moreover, clear that Berni's MS. had been garbled, and the autograph probably put out of the way before the publication of the poem.

Who is to be held responsible for this fraud? Who was the presumptuous enemy who did such injury to Berni? Panizzi, so far back as 1830, pointed out that Giovanni Alberto Albicante took some part in preparing the edition of 1541-2. This man prefixed sonnets written by himself to the rifacimento; "whence we might conclude that he was the editor."[475] Signor Virgili, to whose researches attention has already been directed, proved further by references to Pietro Aretino's correspondence that this old enemy of Berni had a hand in the same work. Writing to Francesco Calvo from Venice on February 16, 1540, Aretino approaches the subject of the rifacimento in these words:[476] "Our friend Albicante informs me, with reference to the printing of Orlando defamed by Berni, that you are good enough to meet my wishes, for which I thank you.... You will see that, for the sake of your own modesty, you are bound either not to issue the book at all, or else to purge it of all evil-speaking." He then states that it had been his own intention "to emend the Count of Scandiano's Innamoramento, a thing in its kind of heroic beauty, but executed in a trivial style, and expressed with phrases at once plebeian and obsolete." This task he renounced upon reflection that it would bring him no fame to assume the mask of a dead man's labors. In another letter to the same Calvo, dated February 17, 1542, Aretino resumes the subject. Sbernia (so he chooses to call Berni) has been "overwhelmed beneath the ruins he pulled down upon himself by his undoing of the Innamoramento."[477] Now, it is certain that the ruin proclaimed by Aretino did really fall on Berni's labors. In 1545 Lodovico Domenichi published a second rifacimento, far inferior in style to that of Berni, and executed with the slovenliness of a literary hack. But this was several times reprinted, whereas Berni's remained neglected on the shelves of the librarians until the year 1725, when it was republished and welcomed with a storm of exaggerated enthusiasm.

We have therefore reached this conclusion, that Aretino, aided by Albicante, both of them notable literary brigands, contrived to send a mutilated version of the rifacimento to press, with a view of doing irreparable mischief to Berni's reputation.[478] We have also seen that there was something dangerous in Berni's work, described by Aretino as maldicentia, which he held as a threat over the Milanese publisher. Lastly, Giunta recognized too late that he had made himself the party to some act of malice by issuing a garbled copy. Aretino had, we know, a private grudge to satisfy. He could not forget the castigation he received at Berni's hands, in the sonnet which has been already described. The hatred subsisting between the two men had been further exasperated by the different parts they took in a literary duel. Antonio Broccardo, a young Venetian scholar, attacked Pietro Bembo's fame at Padua in 1530, and attempted to raise allies against the great dictator. Aretino took up the cudgels for Bembo, and assailed Broccardo with vehement abuse and calumny. Berni ranged himself upon Broccardo's side. The quarrel ended in Broccardo's death under suspicious circumstances in 1531 at Padua. He was, indeed, said to have been killed by Aretino.[479] Berni died mysteriously at Florence four years later, and Aretino caused his rifacimento, "purged of evil-speaking," to be simultaneously published at Venice and Milan.

The question still remains to be asked how Aretino, Berni's avowed enemy, obtained possession of the MS. Berni had many literary friends. Yet none of them came forward to avert the catastrophe. None of them undertook the publication of his remains. His last work was produced, not at Florence, where he lived and died, but at Venice; and Albicante, Aretino's tool, was editor. In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to answer this question authoritatively. Considerable light, however, is thrown upon the mystery by a pamphlet published in 1554 by the heretic Vergerio. He states that Berni undertook his rifacimento with the view of diffusing Protestant doctrines in a popular and unobtrusive form; but that the craft of the devil, or in other words the policy of the Church, effected its suppression at the very moment when it was finished and all but printed.[480] Here, then, we seem to find some missing links in the dark chain of intrigue. Aretino's phrase maldicentia is explained; his menace to Francesco Calvo becomes intelligible; the silence of Berni's friends can be accounted for; and the agency by which the MS. was placed in Albicante's hands, can be at least conjectured. As a specimen of Berni's Lutheran propaganda, Vergerio subjoins eighteen stanzas, written in the poet's purest style, which were addressed to Battista Sanga, and which formed the induction to the twentieth Canto. This induction, as it stands in Berni's Innamorato, is reduced to seven stanzas, grossly garbled and deformed in diction. Very few of the original lines have been retained, and those substituted are full of vulgarisms.[481] From a comparison of the original supplied by Vergerio with the mutilated version, the full measure of the mischief practiced upon Berni's posthumous work can be gauged. Furthermore, it must be noticed that these compromising eighteen stanzas contained the names of several men alive in Italy, all of whom were therefore interested in their suppression, or precluded from exposing the fraud.

The inference I am inclined to draw from Signor Virgili's researches, combined with Vergerio's pamphlet, is that the Church interfered to prevent the publication of Berni's heretical additions to Boiardo's poem. Berni's sudden death, throwing his affairs into confusion at the moment when he was upon the point of finishing the business, afforded an excellent occasion to his ecclesiastical and personal opponents, who seem to have put some pressure on his kinsmen to obtain the MS. or the sheets they meant to mutilate.[482] The obnoxious passages may have been denounced by Aretino; for we know that he was intimate with Vergerio, and it is more than probable that the verses to Sanga were already in circulation.[483] Aretino, strange to say, was regarded in clerical quarters as a pillar of the Church. He therefore found it in his power to wreak his vengeance on an enemy at the same time that he posed as a defender of the faith. That he was allowed to control the publication, appears from his letters to Calvo; and he confided the literary part of the business to Albicante. His threats to Calvo have reference to Berni's heresy, and the maldicentia may possibly have been the eighteen stanzas addressed to Sanga. The terror of the Inquisition reduced Berni's friends to silence. Aretino, even if he had not denounced Berni to the Church, had now identified himself with the crusade against his poem, and he was capable of ruining opponents in this unequal contest by charges they would have found it impossible to refute. The eighteen stanzas were addressed to a secretary of Clement VII.; and men of note like Molza, Flamminio, Navagero, Fondulo, Fregoso, were distinctly named in them. If, then, there is any cogency in the conclusions I have drawn from various sources, Berni's poem, and perhaps his life, was sacrificed to theological hatred in combination with Aretino's personal malice. The unaccountable inactivity of his friends is explained by their dread of being entangled in a charge of heresy.[484]

Enough has been already said about Berni's imitators in the burlesque style. Of satire in the strict sense of the term, the poets of the sixteenth century produced nothing that is worth consideration. The epistolary form introduced by Ariosto, and the comic caprices rendered fashionable by Berni, determined the compositions of Pietro Aretino, of Ercole Bentivoglio, of Luigi Alamanni, of Antonio Vinciguerra, of Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara, of Cesare Caporali, and of the minor versifiers whose occasional poems in terza rima, seasoned with more or less satirical intention, are usually reckoned among the satires of the golden age.[485] Personal vituperation poured forth in the heat of literary quarrels, scarcely deserves the name of satire. Else it might be necessary in this place to mention Niccolò Franco's sonnets on Pietro Aretino, or the far more elegant compositions of Annibale Caro directed against his enemy Castelvetro.[486] Models for this species of poetical abuse had been already furnished by the sonnets exchanged between Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco in a more masculine age of Italian literature.[487] It is not, however, incumbent upon the historian to resuscitate the memory of those forgotten and now unimportant duels. The present allusion to them may suffice to corroborate the opinion already stated that, while the Italians of the Renaissance were ingenious in burlesque, and virulent in personal invective, they lacked the earnestness of moral conviction, the indignation, and the philosophic force that generate real satire.