CHAPTER VI. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI AND POLIZIANO.

Period from 1470 to 1530—Methods of treating it—By Chronology—By Places—By Subjects—Renascence of Italian—At Florence, Ferrara, Naples—The New Italy—Forty Years of Peace—Lorenzo de' Medici—His Admiration for and Judgment of Italian Poetry—His Privileges as a Patron—His Rime—The Death of Simonetta—Lucrezia Donati—Lorenzo's Descriptive Power—The Selve—The Ambra—La Nencia—I Beoni—His Sacred Poems—Carnival and Dance Songs—Carri and Trionfi—Savonarola—The Mask of Penitence—Leo X. in Florence, 1513—Pageant of the Golden Age—Angelo Poliziano—His Place in Italian Literature—Le Stanze—Treatment of the Octave Stanza—Court Poetry—Mechanism and Adornment—The Orfeo—Orpheus, the Ideal of the Cinque Cento—Its Dramatic Qualities—Chorus of Mænads—Poliziano's Love Poems—Rispetti—Florentine Love—La Bella Simonetta—Study and Country Life.

In dealing with the mass of Italian literature between the dates 1470 and 1530, several methods suggest themselves, each of which offers certain advantages, while none is wholly satisfactory. In the first place we might adopt a chronological division, and arrange the chief authors of whom we have to treat, by periods. Lorenzo de' Medici, Poliziano, Luigi, Pulci, Boiardo, and Sannazzaro would be the leading names in the first group. In the second we should place Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and the minor historians of Florence. Bembo would lead a third class, including Castiglione, La Casa, and the Petrarchistic poets of the Academies. A fourth would be headed by Pietro Aretino, and would embrace the burlesque writers and minor critical prosaists of the decadence. The advantage of this method is that it corresponds to a certain regular progression in the evolution of Italian genius during that brief space of brilliant activity. Yet the chronological stages are not sufficiently well marked to justify its exclusive adoption. The first group is separated from the rest by a real interval, since the men who compose it died, with one exception, before the close of the fifteenth century, about the year of Charles VIII.'s entrance into Italy.[459] But the authors of the second, third, and fourth groups lived almost contemporaneously, covering the whole period of Italy's greatest literary glory and deepest national discomfiture, and witnessing the final extinction of her liberty in the settlement effected by the policy of Charles V.[460] Nor, again, can we trace in the several phases of literature they represent, so clear a process of expansion as may be detected in the successive stages of artistic or humanistic development. When the work effected by the first group was accomplished, both the language and the literature of Italy became in a true sense national, and the cultivated classes of all districts, trained in the common discipline of humanistic studies, set themselves with one accord and simultaneously to the task of polishing the mother tongue. This fact in the history of Italian literature suggests a second method of classification. We might take the three chief centers of renascence at the close of the fifteenth century—Florence, Ferrara, Naples—and show how the local characteristics of these cities affected their great writers. Rome during the pontificate of Leo X.; Urbino under the rule of Guidubaldo Montefeltre; Milan in the days of the last Sforzas; Venice at the epoch of Aldo's settlement; might next be chosen to illustrate the subsequent growth of Italian culture, when it ceased to be Tuscan, Neapolitan, and Ferrarese. Yet though this local method of arrangement offers many advantages, and has the grand merit of fixing the attention upon one important feature of intellectual life in Italy—its many-sidedness and diversity, due to the specific qualities of cities vying with each other in a common exercise of energy—still it would not do for the historian of Italian culture at one of its most brilliant moments to accentuate minor differences, when it ought to be his object to portray the genius of the people as a whole. In a word, this classification has the same defect as the treatment of the arts by Schools.[461] Moreover, it cannot fail to lead to repetition and confusion; for though the work we have to analyze was carried on in several provinces, yet each Court and each city produced material of the same general character. Novels, for example, were written at Florence as well as Milan. Rome saw the first representation of comedies no less than Ferrara. The romantic epic was not confined to the Court of the Estensi, nor dissertations on the gentle life to that of Urbino. We are led by the foregoing considerations to yet a third method of arrangement. Would it not be scientific to divide the literature of the Renaissance into its chief branches, and to treat of the romantic epic, the novella, the stage, the idyll, lyric verse, essays in prose, histories, and so forth, under separate chapters? Undoubtedly there is much to say for such a treatment of the subject. Yet when we consider that it necessitates our bringing the same authors under review in several successive sections, confuses chronology, and effaces local distinctions, it will be seen that to follow this system exclusively would be unwise. It is too strictly analytical for our purpose. That purpose is to draw a portrait of the Italian spirit as expressed in the vernacular literature of about seventy years of exceptional splendor; and perhaps it will be conceded by the student that instinct, conscious of the end in view, conscious also of these several methods, but unwilling to be hampered by any one of them too rigorously followed out, will be a safer guide than formal accuracy.

I therefore propose in the remaining chapters of this book to adopt a mixed method, partaking of the chronological in so far as I shall attempt to show a certain process of evolution from the renascence led by Lorenzo de' Medici to the decadence typified in Pietro Aretino, insisting upon local peculiarities where it can be clearly proved that these contributed an important element to the total result, and relying on the classification by subjects for bringing scattered details under general consideration. Five men of the highest eminence mark stages in the history we have to review. These are Poliziano, Ariosto and Machiavelli, Bembo and Pietro Aretino. Chronologically, they represent four moments of development—the initial, the consummate, the academical, and the decadent. But if we discard chronology and regard their intellectual qualities alone, we might reduce them to three. Merging Poliziano and Bembo in Ariosto, retaining Machiavelli and Pietro Aretino, we obtain the three prominent phases of Renaissance culture in Italy—firstly, serene, self-satisfied, triumphant art, glorying in the beauty of form for form's sake, and aiming at perfection in style of sunny and delightful loveliness; secondly, profound scientific analysis, taking society for its object, dissecting human history and institutions without prejudice or prepossession, unqualified by religious or ethical principles, pushing its logical method to the utmost verge of audacity, and startling the world with terror by the results of its materialistic philosophy; thirdly, moral corruption unabashed and unrestrained, destitute of shame because devoid of conscience, boldly asserting itself and claiming the right to rule society with cynical effrontery. Round Ariosto are grouped the romantic and idyllic poets, the novelists and comic playwrights, all the tribe of joyous merry-makers, who translated into prose and verse the beauty found in painting of the golden age. With Machiavelli march the historians and political philosophers, the school of Pomponazzi and the materialistic analysts, who led the way for a new birth of science in the Baconian speculations of the Cosentine academy. Aretino is the coryphæus of a multitude of scribes and courtiers, literary gladiators, burlesque authors of obscene Capitoli, men of evil character, who used the pen for poniard, and were the fit successors of invective-writers.

If we turn from men to cities, and seek to define the parts played by the several communities in this work of creating an Italian literature, we shall find that Florence fixes the standard of language, and dominates the nation by the fame of her three poets of the fourteenth century. Florence, moreover, gives birth to Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the political theorists who form a group around them. Florentine wit and humor lend a certain pungency to all the products of the golden age. Naples adds the luxury of southern color, felt in Sannazzaro's waxen paragraphs and Pontano's voluptuous hendecasyllables. Ferrara develops the chivalrous elements of the romantic epic, shelters Ariosto, and produces the pastoral drama, that eminently characteristic product of the late Renaissance. Milan is the home of Bandello, who takes the first rank among the novelists and leads a school of Lombard writers in that style. Rome does little for the general culture of the nation, except that in the age of Leo the Papal Court formed a center for studious men of all classes and qualities. Her place in literature is therefore analogous to that she occupies in art and scholarship.[462] Aretino chooses the city of the lagoons for his retreat, not without a certain propriety; for Venice had become the Paris of the sixteenth century, and here the press was more active than elsewhere in Italy. His instinct led the master of lampoon, the prince of pamphleteers, to the city which combined the utmost license of printing with the most highly developed immorality of manners. Thus, seen from many points of view and approached with different objects of study, men, places, and matter alike furnish their own pivots for treatment. Italy, unlike England and France, has no political and intellectual metropolis, no London and no Paris, where the historian may take his stand securely to survey the manifold activities of the race as from a natural center. He must be content to shift his ground and vary his analytic method, keeping steadily in mind those factors which by their interaction and combination determine the phenomena he has in view.

We are now at length upon the threshold of the true Renaissance. The division between popular literature and humanistic culture is about to end. Classic form, appropriated by the scholars, will be given to the prose and poetry of the Italian language. The fusion, divined and attempted, rather than accomplished by Alberti, will be achieved. Men as great as Machiavelli and Ariosto henceforth need not preface their cose volgari with apologies. The new literature is no longer Tuscan, but Italian—national in the widest and deepest sense of the word, when Venetian Bembo, Neapolitan Sannazzaro, Ariosto from Reggio, Boiardo Count of Scandiano, Castiglione the Mantuan and Tasso the Bergamasque vie with Tuscan Pulci and Poliziano, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in the creation of the golden age.

The renascence of Italian took place almost simultaneously in three centers: at Florence under the protection of the Medici, at Ferrara in the castle of the Estensi, and at Naples in the Aragonese Court. Rome from the pontificate of Innocent VIII. to that of Leo X. was almost dumb and deaf to literature. Venice waited till the period of the press. Milan produced nothing. It was but gradually that the wave of national culture reached the minor states. The three cities to which Italy owed the resurrection of her genius were ruled by princes, and the new literature felt the influence of Courts from the commencement. Indeed, the whole conditions of Italy had been altered since the death of Boccaccio in 1375. The middle ages had been swept away. Of their modes of thought, religious beliefs, political ideals, scholastic theories, scarcely a vestige remained. Among the cities which had won or kept their independence during the fourteenth century, only one remained free from a master's yoke; and even Venice, though she showed no outward signs of decadence, had reached the utmost verge of her development. The citizens who had fought the battles of the Communes round their banners and their sacred cars, were now quiet burghers, paying captains of adventure to wage mimic warfare with political or commercial rivals in neighboring States. A class of professional diplomatists corresponding to these mercenary war-contractors had arisen, selected from the ranks of the scholars for their rhetorical gifts and command of Latin style. The humanists themselves constituted a new and powerful body, a nation within the nation, separated from its higher social and political interests, selfish, restless, greedy for celebrity, nomadic, disengaged from local ties, conscious of their strength, and swaying with the vast prestige of learning in that age the intellectual destinies of the race. Insolent and ambitious in all that concerned their literary pretensions, these men were servile in their private life. They gained their daily bread by flatteries and menaces, hanging about the Courts of petty despots, whose liberality they paid with adulation or quickened with the threat of infamy in libels. At the same time the humanists, steeped in the best and worst that could be extracted from the classics, confounding the dross of Greek and Roman literature with its precious metal in their indiscriminate worship of antiquity, and debarred through want of criticism from assimilating the noblest spirit of the pagan culture, had created a new mental atmosphere. The work they accomplished for Italy, though mixed in quality, had two undeniable merits. Not only had they restored the heritage of the past and broken down the barrier between the ancient and the modern world, bringing back the human consciousness from the torpor of the middle ages to a keen and vivid sense of its own unity; but they so penetrated and imbued each portion of the Italian nation with their enthusiasm, that, intellectually at least, the nation was now one and ready for a simultaneous progress on the path of culture.[463]

It so happened that at this very moment, when the unity of Italy in art and scholarship had been achieved, external quiet succeeded to the discords of three centuries. The ancient party-cries of Emperor and Church, of Guelf and Ghibelline, of noble and burgher, of German and Latin ingredients within the body politic had gradually ceased and been forgotten. The Italic element, deriving its instincts from Roman civilization, triumphed over the alien and the feudal; and though this victory was attended with the decay of the Communes that had striven to achieve it, yet the final outcome was a certain homogeneity of conditions in all the great centers of national life. Italy became a net-work of cultivated democracies, ruled by tyrants of different degrees. The middle of the fifteenth century witnessed the commencement of that halcyon period of forty years' tranquillity, destined to be broken by the descent of Charles VIII., in 1494, upon which Machiavelli and Guicciardini from amid the tempests of the next half century looked back with eyes of wonder and of envy. Constantinople fell, and the undoubted primacy of the civilized races came to the Italians. Lorenzo de' Medici was regarded as the man who, by his political ability and firm grasp of the requisite conditions for maintaining peace in the peninsula, had established and secured the equilibrium between mutually jealous and antagonistic States. Whether the merit of that repose, so fruitful of results in art and literature for the Italians, was really due to Lorenzo's sagacity, or whether the shifting forces of the nation had become stationary for a season by the operation of circumstances, may fairly be questioned. Yet there is no doubt that the unprecedented prosperity of the people coincided with his administration of Florence, and ended when he ceased to guide the commonwealth. It was at any rate a singular good fortune that connected the name of this extraordinary man with the high-tide of material prosperity in Italy and with the resurrection of her national literature.

The figure of Lorenzo de' Medici has more than once already crossed the stage of this history.[464] Whether dealing with the political conditions, or the scholarship, or the fine arts of the Renaissance, it is impossible to omit his name. There is therefore now no need to sketch his character or to inquire into the incidents of his Florentine administration. It will suffice to remind the readers of this book that he finally succeeded in so clinching the power of the Casa Medici that no subsequent revolutions were able to destroy it. The part he played as a patron of artists and scholars, and as a writer of Italian, was subordinate to his political activity in circumstances of peculiar difficulty. While controlling the turbulent democracy of Florence and gaining recognition for his tyranny from jealous princes, he still contrived to lead his age in every branch of culture, deserving the magnificent eulogium of Poliziano, who sang of him in the Nutricia [465]:

Tu vero æternam, per avi vestigia Cosmi Perque patris (quis enim pietate insignior illo?), Ad famam eluctans, cujus securus ad umbram Fulmina bellorum ridens procul aspicit Arnus, Mæoniæ caput, o Laurens, quem plena senatu Curia quemque gravi populus stupet ore loquentem Si fas est, tua nunc humili patere otia cantu Secessusque sacros avidas me ferre sub auras. Namque, importunas mulcentem pectine curas, Umbrosæ recolo te quondam vallis in antrum Monticolam traxisse deam: vidi ipse corollas Nexantem, numerosque tuos prona aure bibentem.... Quodque alii studiumque vocant durumque laborem, Hìc tibi ludus erit: fessus civilibus actis, Huc is emeritas acuens ad carmina vires. Felix ingenio! felix cui pectore tantas Instaurare vices, cui fas tam magna capaci Alternare animo, et varias ita nectere curas!

Lorenzo de' Medici was the last apologist for the mother speech, as he was the first and chief inaugurator of the age when such apologies were no longer to be needed. He took a line somewhat different from Alberti's in his defense of Italian, proving not merely its utility but boldly declaring its equality with the classic languages. We possess a short essay of his, written with this purpose, where he bestows due praise on Dante, Boccaccio and Guido Cavalcanti, and affirms in the teeth of the humanists that Petrarch wrote better love-poems than Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus or Propertius.[466] Again, in his epistle to Federigo of Aragon, sent with a MS. volume containing a collection of early Tuscan poetry, he passes acute and sympathetic judgments on the lyrists from Guittone of Arezzo to Cino da Pistoja, proving that he had studied their works to good purpose and had formed a correct opinion of the origins of Italian literature.[467] Lorenzo does not write like a man ashamed of the vernacular or forced to use it because he can command no better. He is sure of the justice of his cause, and determined by precept and example and by the prestige of his princely rank to bring the literature he loves into repute again.

No one could have been better fitted for the task. Unlike Alberti, Lorenzo was a Florentine of the Florentines, Tuscan to the backbone, imbued with the spirit of his city, a passionate lover of her customs and pastimes, a complete master of her vernacular. His education, though it fitted him for Platonic discussions with Ficino and rendered him an amateur of humanistic culture, had failed to make a pedant of him. Much as he appreciated the classics, he preferred his Tuscan poets; and what he learned at school, he brought to bear upon the study of the native literature. Consequently his style is always idiomatic; whether he seeks the elevation of grave diction or reproduces the talk of the streets, he uses language like a man who has habitually spoken the words which he commits to paper. His brain was vigorous, and his critical faculty acute. He lived, moreover, in close sympathy with his age, never rising above it, but accurately representing its main tendencies. At the same time he was sufficiently a poet to delight a generation that had seen no great writer of verse since Boccaccio. Though his work is in no sense absolutely first rate, he wrote nothing that a man of ability might not have been pleased to own.

Lorenzo's first essays in poetry were sonnets and canzoni in the style of the trecento. It is a mistake to classify him, as some historians of literature have done, with the deliberate imitators of Petrarch, or to judge his work by its deflection from the Petrarchistic standard of pure style. His youthful lyrics show the appreciative study of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti no less than of the poet of Vaucluse; and though they affect the conventional melancholy of the Petrarchistic mannerism, they owe their force to the strong objective spirit of the fifteenth century. Lorenzo's originality consists in the fusion he effected between the form of the love-lyric handed down from Petrarch and the realistic genius of the age of Ghirlandajo. This is especially noticeable in the sonnets that describe the beauties of the country. They are not penetrated with emotion permeating and blurring the impressions made by natural objects on the poet's mind. His landscapes are not hazy with the atmosphere, now luminous, now somber, of a lover's varying mood. On the contrary, every object is defined and classified; and the lady sits like a beautiful figure in a garden, painted with no less loving care in all its details than herself.[468] These pictures, very delicate in their minute and truthful touches, affect our fancy like a panel of Benozzo Gozzoli, who omits no circumstance of the scene he undertakes to reproduce, crowds it with incidents and bestows the same attention upon the principal subjects and the accessories. The central emotion of Lorenzo's verse is scarcely love, but delight in the country—the Florentine's enjoyment of the villa, with its woods and rivulets, the pines upon the hillsides, the song-birds, and the pleasures of the chase.

The following sonnet might be chosen as a fair specimen of the new manner introduced into literature by Lorenzo. Its classical coloring, deeply felt and yet somewhat frigid, has the true stamp of the quattrocento [469]:

Leave thy belovèd isle, thou Cyprian queen; Leave thine enchanted realm so delicate, Goddess of love! Come where the rivulet Bathes the short turf and blades of tenderest green! Come to these shades, these airs that stir the screen Of whispering branches and their murmurs set To Philomel's enamored canzonet: Choose this for thine own land, thy loved demesne! And if thou com'st by these clear rills to reign, Bring thy dear son, thy darling son, with thee; For there be none that own his empire here. From Dian steal the vestals of her train, Who roam the woods at will, from danger free, And know not Love, nor his dread anger fear.

That Lorenzo was incapable of loving as Dante or Petrarch or even Boccaccio loved, is obvious in every verse he wrote. The spirit in him neither triumphs over the flesh nor struggles with it, nor yet submits a willing and intoxicated victim. It remains apart and cold, playing with fancies, curiously surveying the carnival of lusts that hold their revel in the breast whereof it is the lord. Under these conditions he could take the wife his mother found for him at Rome, and record the fact in his diary[470]; he could while away his leisure with venal beauties or country girls at his villas; but of love in the poet's sense he had no knowledge. It is true that, nurtured as he was in the traditions of fourteenth-century verse, he thought it necessary to establish a titular mistress of his heart. The account he gives of this proceeding in a commentary on his own sonnets, composed after the model of the Vita Nuova, is one of his best pieces of writing. He describes the day when the beautiful Simonetta Cattaneo, his brother Giuliano's lady, was carried to her grave with face uncovered, lying beneath the sunlight on her open bier. All Florence was touched to tears by the sight, and the poets poured forth elegies. The month was April, and the young earth seemed to have put on her robe of flowers only to make the pathos of that death more poignant. Then, says Lorenzo: "Night came; and I with a friend most dear to me went communing about the loss we all had suffered. While we spoke, the air being exceedingly serene, we turned our eyes to a star of surpassing brightness, which toward the west shone forth with such luster as not only to conquer all the other stars, but even to cast a shadow from the objects that intercepted its light. We marveled at it a while; and then, turning to my friend, I said: 'There is no need for wonder, since the soul of that most gentle lady has either been transformed into yon new star or has joined herself to it. And if this be so, that splendor of the star is nowise to be wondered at; and even as her beauty in life was of great solace to our eyes, so now let us comfort ourselves at the present moment with the sight of so much brilliance. And if our eyes be weak and frail to bear such brightness, pray we to the god, that is to her deity, to give them virtue, in order that without injury unto our sight we may awhile contemplate it.' ... Then, forasmuch as it appeared to me that this colloquy furnished good material for a sonnet, I left my friend and composed the following verses, in which I speak about the star aforesaid:

"O lucid star, that with transcendent light Quenchest of all those neighboring stars the gleam, Why thus beyond thine usage dost thou stream, Why art thou fain with Phœbus still to fight? Haply those beauteous eyes, which from our sight Death stole, who now doth vaunt himself supreme, Thou hast assumed: clad with their glorious beam, Well mayst thou claim the sun-god's chariot bright. Listen, new star, new regent of the day, Who with unwonted radiance gilds our heaven, O listen, goddess, to the prayers we pray! Let so much splendor from thy sphere be riven That to these eyes, which fain would weep alway, Unblinded, thy glad sight may yet be given!"

From that moment Lorenzo began to write poems. He wandered alone and meditated on the sunflower, playing delightfully unto himself with thoughts of Love and Death. Yet his heart was empty; and like Augustine or Alastor, he could say: "nondum amabam, sed amare amabam, quærebam quod amarem amans amare." When a young man is in this mood it is not long before he finds an object for his adoration. Lorenzo went one day in the same spring with friends to a house of feasting, where he met with a lady lovelier in his eyes even than La Simonetta. After the fashion of his age, he describes her physical and mental perfections with a minuteness which need not be enforced upon a modern reader.[471] Suffice it to say that Lucrezia Donati—such was the lady's name—supplied Lorenzo with exactly what he had been seeking, an object for his literary exercises. The Sonetti, Canzoni, and Selve d'Amore were the fruits of this first passion.

Though Lorenzo was neither a poet nor a lover after the stamp of Dante, these juvenile verses and the prose with which he prefaced them, show him in a light that cannot fail to interest those who only know the statesman and the literary cynic of his later years. There is sincere fervor of romantic feeling in the picture of the evening after Simonetta's funeral, even though the analytical temper of the poet's mind is revealed in his exact description of the shadow cast by the planet he was watching. The first meeting with Lucrezia, again, is prettily described in these stanzas of the Selve:

What time the chain was forged which then I bore, Air, earth, and heavens were linked in one delight; The air was never so serene before, The sun ne'er shed such pure and tranquil light; Young leaves and flowers upon the grassy floor Gladdened the earth where ran a streamlet bright, While Venus in her father's bosom lay And smiled from heaven upon the spot that day. She from her brows divine and amorous breast Took with both hands roses of many a hue, And showered them through the heavens that slept in rest, Covering my lady with their gracious dew; Jove, full of gladness, on that day released The ears of men, that they might hear the true Echoes of melody and dance divine, Which fell from heaven in songs and sounds benign. Fair women to that music moved their feet, Inflamed with gentle fire by Love's breath fanned: Behold yon lover with his lady sweet— Her hand long yearned for clasped in his loved hand; Their sighs, their looks, which pangs of longing cheat; Brief words that none but they can understand; The flowers that she lets fall, resumed and pressed, With kisses covered, to his head or breast. Amid so many pleasant things and fair, My loveliest lady with surpassing grace Eclipsed and crowned all beauties that were there; Her robe was white and delicate as lace; And still her eyes, with silent speech and rare, Talked to the heart, leaving the lips at peace: Come to me, come, dear heart of mine, she said: Here shall thy long desires at rest be laid.

The impression of these verses is hardly marred by the prosy catalogue of Lucrezia's beauties furnished in the Innamoramento. Lorenzo was an analyst. He could not escape from that quality so useful to the observer, so fatal to artists, if they cannot recompose the data furnished by observation in a new subjective synthesis. When we compare his description of the Age of Gold in the Selve,[472] justly celebrated for its brilliancy and wealth of detail, with the shorter passage from Poliziano's Stanze, we measure the distance between intelligent study of nature and the imagination which unifies and gives new form of life to every detail. The same end may be more briefly attained by a comparison of this passage about roses from Lorenzo's Corinto with a musical Ballata of Poliziano[473]:

Into a little close of mine I went One morning, when the sun with his fresh light Was rising all refulgent and unshent. Rose-trees are planted there in order bright, Whereto I turned charmed eyes, and long did stay Taking my fill of that new-found delight. Red and white roses bloomed upon the spray; One opened, leaf by leaf, to greet the morn, Shyly at first, then in sweet disarray; Another, yet a youngling, newly born, Scarce struggled from the bud, and there were some Whose petals closed them from the air forlorn; Another fell, and showered the grass with bloom; Thus I beheld the roses dawn and die, And one short hour their loveliness consume. But while I watched those languid petals lie Colorless on cold earth, I could but think How vain a thing is youthful bravery. Trees have their time to bloom on winter's brink; Then the rathe blossoms wither in an hour, When the brief days of spring toward summer sink; The fruit, as yet unformed, is tart and sour; Little by little it grows large, and weighs The strong boughs down with slow persistent power; Nor without peril can the branches raise Their burden; now they stagger 'neath the weight Still growing, and are bent above the ways; Soon autumn comes, and the ripe ruddy freight Is gathered: the glad season will not stay; Flowers, fruits, and leaves are now all desolate. Pluck the rose, therefore, maiden, while 'tis May!

That is good. It is the best kind of poetry within Lorenzo's grasp. But here is Poliziano's dance-song:

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. Violets and lilies grew on every side Mid the green grass, and young flowers wonderful, Golden and white and red and azure-eyed; Toward which I stretched my hands, eager to pull Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful, To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay. I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. But when my lap was full of flowers I spied Roses at last, roses of every hue; Therefore I ran to pluck their ruddy pride, Because their perfume was so sweet and true That all my soul went forth with pleasure new, With yearning and desire too soft to say. I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. I gazed and gazed. Hard task it were to tell How lovely were the roses in that hour; One was but peeping from her verdant shell, And some were faded, some were scarce in flower. Then Love said: Go, pluck from the blooming bower Those that thou seest ripe upon the spray. I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. For when the full rose quits her tender sheath, When she is sweetest and most fair to see, Then is the time to place her in thy wreath, Before her beauty and her freshness flee. Gather ye therefore roses with great glee, Sweet girls, or ere their perfume pass away. I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May.

Both in this Ballata and also in the stanzas on the Age of Gold, it might almost seem as though Poliziano had rewritten Lorenzo's exercise with a view to showing the world the difference between true poetry and what is only very like it.

The Selve d'Amore and the Corinto belong to Lorenzo's early manner, when his heart was yet fresh and statecraft had not made him cynical. The latter is a musical eclogue in terza rima; the former a discursive love-poem, with allegorical episodes, in octave stanzas. Up to the date of the Selve the ottava rima had, so far as I know, been only used for semi-epical poems and short love-songs. Lorenzo proved his originality by suiting it to a style of composition which aimed at brilliant descriptions in the manner of Ovid. He also handled it with an ease and brightness hitherto unknown. The pageant of Love and Jealousy and the allegory of Hope in the second part are both such poetry as only needed something magical from the touch of Ariosto to make them perfect.[474] As it is, Lorenzo's studies in verse produce the same impression as Bronzino's in painting. They are brilliant, but hard, cold, calculated, never fused by the final charm of poetry or music into a delightful vision. What is lacking is less technical skill or invention than feeling in the artist, the glow of passion, or the charm of spiritual harmony. Here is a picture of Hope's attendant train:

Following this luckless dame, where'er she goes, Flit dreams in crowds, with auguries and lies, Chiromants, arts that cozen and impose, Chances, diviners, and false prophecies, Spoken or writ in foolish scroll and glose, Whose forecast brings time flown before our eyes, Alchemy, all who heaven from our earth measure, And free conjectures made at will and pleasure. 'Neath the dark shadow of her mighty wings The whole deluded world at last must cower:— O blindness that involves all mortal things, Frail ignorance that treads on human power!— He who can count the woes her empire brings, Could number every star, each fish, each flower, Tell all the birds that cross the autumnal seas, Of leaves that flutter from the naked trees.

His Ambra is another poem in the same style as the Selve. It records Lorenzo's love for that Tuscan farm which Poliziano afterwards made famous in the sonorous hexameters he dedicated to the memory of Homer.[475] Following the steps of Ovid, Lorenzo feigns that a shepherd Lauro loved the nymph Ambra, whom Umbrone, the river-god, pursued through vale and meadow to the shores of Arno. There he would have done her violence, but that Diana changed her to a rock in her sore need:

Ma pur che fussi già donna ancor credi; Le membra mostran, come suol figura Bozzata e non finita in pietra dura.

This simile is characteristic both of Lorenzo's love for familiar illustration, and also of the age that dawned on Michelangelo's genius. In the same meter, but in a less ambitious style, is La Caccia col Falcone. This poem is the simple record of a Tuscan hawking-party, written to amuse Lorenzo's guests, but never meant assuredly to be discussed by critics after the lapse of four centuries. These pastorals, whether trifling like La Caccia, romantic like Corinto, or pictorial like Ambra, sink into insignificance beside La Nencia da Barberino—a masterpiece of true genius and humor, displaying intimate knowledge of rustic manners, and using the dialect of the Tuscan contadini.[476] Like the Polyphemus of Theocritus, but with even more of racy detail and homely fun, La Nencia versifies the love-lament of a hind, Vallera, who describes the charms of his sweetheart with quaint fancy, wooing her in a thousand ways, all natural, all equally in keeping with rural simplicity. It can scarcely be called a parody of village life and feeling, although we cannot fail to see that the town is laughing at the country all through the exuberant stanzas, so rich in fancy, so incomparably vivid in description. What lifts it above parody is the truth of the picture and the close imitation of rustic popular poetry[477]:

Le labbre rosse paion di corallo: Ed havvi drento due filar di denti Che son più bianchi che quei di cavallo: E d'ogni lato ella n'ha più di venti. Le gote bianche paion di cristallo Senz'altri lisci ovver scorticamenti: Ed in quel mezzo ell'è come una rosa. Nel mondo non fu mai sì bella cosa. Ben sì potrà tenere avventurato Che sia marito di sì bella moglie; Ben sì potrà tener in buon dì nato Chi arà quel fioraliso senza foglie; Ben sì potrà tener santo e beato, Che sì contenti tutte le sue voglie D'aver la Nencia e tenersela in braccio Morbida e bianca che pare un sugnaccio.

These lines, chosen at random from the poem, might be paralleled from Rispetti that are sung to-day in Tuscany. The vividness and vigor of La Nencia secured for it immediate popularity. It was speedily imitated by Luigi Pulci in the Beca da Dicomano, a village poem that, aiming at cruder realism than Lorenzo's, broke the style and lapsed into vulgarity. La Nencia long continued to have imitators; for one of the principal objects of educated poets in the Renaissance was to echo the manner of popular verse. None, however, succeeded so well as Lorenzo in touching the facts of country life and the truth of country feeling with a fine irony that had in it at least as much of sympathy as of sarcasm.

I Beoni is a plebeian poem of a different and more displeasing type. Written in terza rima, it distinctly parodies the style of the Divine Comedy, using the same phrases to indicate action and to mark the turns of dialogue; introducing similes in the manner of Dante, burlesquing Virgil and Beatrice in the disgusting Bartolino and Nastagio.[478] The poem might be called The Paradise of Drunkards, or their Hell; for it consists of a succession of scenes in which intoxication in all stages and topers of every caliber are introduced. The tone is coldly satirical, sardonically comic. The old man of Tennyson's "Vision of Sin" might have written I Beoni after a merry bout with the wrinkled ostler. When Lorenzo composed it, he was already corrupt and weary, sated with the world, worn with disease, disillusioned by a life of compromise, hypocrisy, diplomacy, and treason to the State he ruled. Yet the humor of this poem has nothing truly sinister or tragic. Its brutality is redeemed by no fierce Swiftian rage. If some of the descriptions in Lorenzo's earlier work remind us of Dutch flower and landscape-painters, Breughel or Van Huysum, the scenes of I Beoni recall the realism of Dutch tavern-pictures and Kermessen. It has the same humor, gross and yet keen, the same intellectual enjoyment of sensuality, the same animalism studied by an acute æsthetic spirit.[479]

To turn from I Beoni to Lorenzo's Lauds, written at his mother's request, and to the sacred play of S. Giovanni e Paolo, acted by his children, is to make one of those bewildering transitions which are so common in Renaissance Italy. Without rating Lorenzo's sacred poetry very high, either for religious fervor or æsthetic quality, it is yet surprising that the author of the Beoni and the Platonic sage of Careggi should have caught so much of the pietistic tone. We know that S. Giovanni e Paolo was written when he was advanced in years[480]; and the latent allusions to his illness and the cares of state which weighed upon him, give it an interest it would not otherwise excite. This couplet,

Spesso chi chiama Costantin felice Sta meglio assai di me e 'l ver non dice,

seems to be a sigh from his own weariness. Lorenzo may not improbably have envied Constantine, the puppet of his fancy, at the moment of abdication. And yet when Savonarola called upon him ere his death to deal justly with Florence, the true nature of the man was seen. Had he liked it or not, he could not then have laid down the load of care and crime which it had been the business of his whole life to accumulate by crooked ways in the enslavement of Florence and the perdition of his soul's peace. The Lauds, which may be referred to an earlier period of Lorenzo's life, when his mother ruled his education, and the pious Bishop of Arezzo watched his exemplary behavior in church with admiration, have here and there in them a touch of profound feeling[481]; nor are they in all respects inferior to the average of those included in the Florentine collection of 1863. The men of the Renaissance were so constituted that to turn from vice, and cruelty, and crime, from the deliberate corruption and enslavement of a people by licentious pleasures and the persecution of an enemy in secret, with a fervid and impassioned movement of the soul to God, was nowise impossible. Their temper admitted of this anomaly, as we may plainly see in Cellini's Autobiography. Therefore, though it is probable that Lorenzo cultivated the Laud chiefly as a form of art, we are not justified in assuming that the passages in which we seem to detect a note of ardent piety, are insincere.

The versatility of Lorenzo's talent showed itself to greater advantage when he quitted the uncongenial ground of sacred literature and gave a free rein to his fancy in the composition of Ballate and Carnival songs. This species of poetry offered full scope to a temperament excessive in all pleasures of the senses.[482] It also enabled him to indulge a deeply-rooted sympathy with the common folk. Nor must it be supposed that Lorenzo was following a merely artistic impulse. This strange man, in whose complex nature opponent qualities were harmonized and intertwined, made his very sensuality subserve his statecraft. The Medici had based their power upon the favor of the proletariate. Since the days of the Ciompi riot they had pursued one line of self-aggrandizement by siding with the plebeians in their quarrels with the oligarchs. The serious purpose which underlay Lorenzo's cultivation of popular poetry, was to amuse the crowd with pageantry and music, to distract their attention from State concerns and to blunt their political interest, to flatter them by descending to their level and mixing freely with them in their sports, and to acquire a popularity which should secure him from the aristocratic jealousies of the Acciaioli, the Frescobaldi, the Salviati, Soderini, and other ancestral foemen of his house. The frontispiece to an old edition of Florentine carnival songs shows him surrounded with maskers in quaint dresses, leading the revel beneath the walls of the Palazzo, while women gaze upon them from the windows.[483] That we are justified in attributing a policy of calculated enervation to Lorenzo is proved by the verdict of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, both of whom connect his successful despotism with the pageants he provided for the populace,[484] and also by this passage in Savonarola's treatise on the Government of Florence: "The tyrant, especially in times of peace and plenty, is wont to occupy the people with shows and festivals, in order that they may think of their own pastimes and not of his designs, and, growing unused to the conduct of the commonwealth, may leave the reins of government in his hands."[485] At the same time he would err who should suppose that Lorenzo's enjoyment of these pleasures, which he found in vogue among the people, was not genuine. He represented the worst as well as the best spirit of his age; and if he knew how to enslave Florence, it was because his own temperament shared the instincts of the crowd, while his genius enabled him to clothe obscenity with beauty.

We know that it was an ancient Florentine custom for young men and girls to meet upon the squares and dance, while a boy sang with treble voice to lute or viol, or a company of minstrels chanted part-songs. The dancers joined in the refrain, vaunting the pleasures of the May and the delights of love in rhythms suited to the Carola. Taking this form of poetry from the people, Lorenzo gave it the dignity of art. Sometimes he told the tale of an unhappy lover, or pretended to be pleading with a coy mistress, or broke forth into the exultation of a passion crowned with success. Again, he urged both boys and girls to stay the flight of time nor suffer the rose-buds of their youth to fade unplucked. In more wanton moods, he satirized the very love he praised, or, casting off the mask of decency, ran riot in base bestiality. These Canzoni a Ballo, though they lack the supreme beauty of Poliziano's style, are stylistically graceful. Their tone never rises above sensuality. Not only has the gravity of Dante's passion passed away from Florence, but Boccaccio's sensuous ideality is gone, and the naïveté of popular erotic poetry is clouded with gross innuendoes. We find in them the æesthetic immorality, the brilliant materialism of the Renaissance, conveyed with careless self-abandonment to carnal impulse.

The name of Lorenzo de' Medici is still more closely connected with the Canti Carnascialeschi or Carnival Songs, of which he is said to have been the first author, than with the Ballate, which he only used as they were handed to him. In Carnival time it was the custom of the Florentines to walk the streets, masked and singing satiric ballads. Lorenzo saw that here was an opportunity for delighting the people with the magnificence of pageantry. He caused the Triumphs in which he took a part to be carefully prepared by the best artists, the dresses of the maskers to be accurately studied, and their chariots to be adorned with illustrative paintings. Then he wrote songs appropriate to the characters represented on the cars. Singing and dancing and displaying their costumes, the band paraded Florence. Il Lasca in his introduction to the Triumphs and Carnival Songs dedicated to Don Francesco de' Medici gives the history of their invention[486]: "This festival was invented by the Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici. Before his time, when the cars bore mythological or allegorical masks, they were called Trionfi; but when they carried representatives of arts and trades, they kept the simpler name of Carri." The lyrics written for the Triumphs were stately, in the style of antique odes; those intended to be sung upon the Carri, employed plebeian turns of phrase and dealt in almost undisguised obscenity. It was their wont, says Il Lasca, "to go forth after dinner, and often they lasted till three or four hours into the night, with a multitude of masked men on horseback following, richly dressed, exceeding sometimes three hundred in number and as many men on foot with lighted torches. Thus they traversed the city, singing to the accompaniment of music arranged for four, eight, twelve, or even fifteen voices, supported by various instruments."

Lorenzo's fancy took the Florentine mind. From his days onward these shows were repeated every year, the best artists and poets contributing their genius to make them splendid. In the collection of songs written for the Carnival, we find Masks of Scholars, Artisans, Frog-catchers, Furies, Tinkers, Women selling grapes, Old men and Young wives, Jewelers, German Lansknechts, Gypsies, Wool-carders, Penitents, Devils, Jews, Hypocrites, Young men who have lost their fathers, Wiseacres, Damned Souls, Tortoiseshell Cats, Perfumers, Masons, Mountebanks, Mirror-makers, Confectioners, Prudent persons, Lawyers, Nymphs in love, Nuns escaped from convent—not to mention the Four Ages of Man, the Winds, the Elements, Peace, Calumny, Death, Madness, and a hundred abstractions of that kind. The tone of these songs is uniformly and deliberately immoral. One might fancy them composed for some old phallic festival. Their wit is keen and lively, presenting to the fancy of the student all the humors of a brilliant bygone age. A strange and splendid spectacle it must have been, when Florence, the city of art and philosophy, ran wild in Dionysiac revels proclaiming the luxury and license of the senses! Beautiful maidens, young men in rich clothes on prancing steeds, showers of lilies and violets, triumphal arches of spring flowers and ribbons, hail-storms of comfits, torches flaring to the sallow evening sky—we can see the whole procession as it winds across the Ponte Vecchio, emerges into the great square, and slowly gains the open space beneath the dome of Brunelleschi and the tower of Giotto. The air rings with music as they come, bass and tenor and shrill treble mingling with the sound of lute and cymbal. The people hush their cheers to listen. It is Lorenzo's Triumph of Bacchus, and here are the words they sing:

Fair is youth and void of sorrow; But it hourly flies away.— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow. This is Bacchus and the bright Ariadne, lovers true! They, in flying time's despite, Each with each find pleasure new; These their Nymphs, and all their crew Keep perpetual holiday.— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow. These blithe Satyrs, wanton-eyed, Of the Nymphs are paramours: Through the caves and forests wide They have snared them mid the flowers. Warmed with Bacchus, in his bowers, Now they dance and leap away.— Youths and maids enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow. These fair Nymphs, they are not loth To entice their lovers' wiles. None but thankless folk and rough Can resist when Love beguiles. Now enlaced with wreathed smiles, All together dance and play.— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow. See this load behind them plodding On the ass, Silenus he, Old and drunken, merry, nodding, Full of years and jollity; Though he goes so swayingly, Yet he laughs and quaffs alway.— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow. Midas treads a wearier measure: All he touches turns to gold: If there be no taste of pleasure, What's the use of wealth untold? What's the joy his fingers hold, When he's forced to thirst for aye?— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow. Listen well to what we're saying; Of to-morrow have no care! Young and old together playing, Boys and girls, be blithe as air! Every sorry thought forswear! Keep perpetual holiday.— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow. Ladies and gay lovers young! Long live Bacchus, live Desire! Dance and play, let songs be sung; Let sweet Love your bosoms fire; In the future come what may!— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.

On rolls the car, and the crowd closes round it, rending the old walls with shattering hurrahs. Then a corner of the street is turned; while soaring still above the hubbub of the town we hear at intervals that musical refrain. Gradually it dies away in the distance, and fainter and more faintly still the treble floats to us in broken waves of sound—the echo of a lyric heard in dreams.

Such were the songs that reached Savonarola's ears, writing or meditating in his cloister at S. Marco. Such were the sights that moved his indignation as he trod the streets of Florence. Then he bethought him of his famous parody of the Carnival, the bonfire of Vanities and the hymn in praise of divine madness sung by children dressed in white like angels.[487] Yet Florence, warned in vain by the friar, took no thought for the morrow; and the morrow came to all Italy with war, invasion, pestilence, innumerable woes. In the last year of Pier Soderini's Gonfalonierato (1512) it seemed as though the Italians had been quickened to a consciousness of their impending ruin. The siege of Brescia, the battle of Ravenna, the League of Cambray, the massacres of Prato, the sack of Rome, the fall of Florence, were all imminent. A fascination of intolerable fear thrilled the people in the midst of their heedlessness, and this fear found voice and form in a strange Carnival pageant described by Vasari[488]: "The triumphal car was covered with black cloth, and was of vast size; it had skeletons and white crosses painted upon its surface, and was drawn by buffaloes, all of which were totally black: within the car stood the colossal figure of Death, bearing the scythe in his hand; while round him were covered tombs, which opened at all the places where the procession halted, while those who formed it, chanted lugubrious songs, when certain figures stole forth, clothed in black cloth, on whose vestments the bones of a skeleton were depicted in white; the arms, breast, ribs, and legs, namely, all which gleamed horribly forth on the black beneath. At a certain distance appeared figures bearing torches, and wearing masks presenting the face of a death's head both before and behind; these heads of death as well as the skeleton necks beneath them, also exhibited to view, were not only painted with the utmost fidelity to nature, but had besides a frightful expression which was horrible to behold. At the sound of a wailing summons, sent forth with a hollow moan from trumpets of muffled yet inexorable clangor, the figures of the dead raised themselves half out of their tombs, and seating their skeleton forms thereon, they sang the following words, now so much extolled and admired, to music of the most plaintive and melancholy character. Before and after the car rode a train of the dead on horses, carefully selected from the most wretched and meager animals that could be found: the caparisons of those worn, half-dying beasts were black, covered with white crosses; each was conducted by four attendants, clothed in the vestments of the grave; these last-mentioned figures, bearing black torches and a large black standard, covered with crosses, bones, and death's heads. While this train proceeded on its way, each sang, with a trembling voice, and all in dismal unison, that psalm of David called the Miserere. The novelty and the terrible character of this singular spectacle, filled the whole city, as I have before said, with a mingled sensation of terror and admiration; and although at the first sight it did not seem well calculated for a Carnival show, yet being new, and within the reach of every man's comprehension, it obtained the highest encomium for Piero as the author and contriver of the whole, and was the cause as well as commencement of numerous representations, so ingenious and effective that by these things Florence acquired a reputation for the conduct of such subjects and the arrangement of similar spectacles such as was never equaled by any other city."

Of this Carnival song, composed by Antonio Alamanni, I here give an English version.

Sorrow, tears, and penitence Are our doom of pain for aye; This dead concourse riding by Hath no cry but Penitence. Even as you are, once were we: You shall be as now we are: We are dead men, as you see: We shall see you dead men, where Naught avails to take great care After sins of penitence. We too in the Carnival Sang our love-song through the town; Thus from sin to sin we all Headlong, heedless, tumbled down; Now we cry, the world around, Penitence, oh penitence! Senseless, blind, and stubborn fools! Time steals all things as he rides: Honors, glories, states, and schools, Pass away, and naught abides; Till the tomb our carcass hides, And compels grim penitence. This sharp scythe you see us bear, Brings the world at length to woe; But from life to life we fare; And that life is joy or woe; All heaven's bliss on him doth flow, Who on earth does penitence. Living here, we all must die; Dying, every soul shall live, For the King of kings on high This fixed ordinance doth give: Lo! you all are fugitive Penitence, cry penitence! Torment great and grievous dole Hath the thankless heart mid you: But the man of piteous soul Finds much honor in our crew; Love for loving is the due That prevents this penitence.

These words sounded in the ears of the people, already terrified by the unforgotten voice of Savonarola, like a trump of doom. The pageant was, indeed, an acted allegory of the death of Italy, the repentance after judgment of a nation fallen in its sins. Yet a few months passed, and the same streets echoed with the music of yet another show, which has also been described by Vasari.[489] If the Car of Death expressed the uneasy dread that fell on the Italians at the opening of the century, the shows of 1513 allegorized their mad confidence in the fortune of the age, which was still more deeply felt and widely shared. Giovanni de' Medici had just been elevated to the Papal Chair, and was paying a holiday visit to his native city. Giuliano de' Medici, his brother, the Duke of Nemours, was also resident in Florence, where he had formed a club of noble youths called the Diamond. Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the titular chief of the house, presided over a rival Company named Il Broncone—with a withered laurel-branch, whence leaves were sprouting, for its emblem. The Diamond signified the constancy of Casa Medici; the withered branch their power of self-recovery. These two men, Giuliano and Lorenzo, are the same who now confront each other upon their pedestals in Michelangelo's Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. Both were doomed to an untimely death; but in the year 1513, when Leo's election shed new luster on their house, they were still in the heyday of prosperity and hope. Giuliano resolved that the Diamond should make a goodly show. Therefore he intrusted the invention and the poems to Andrea Dazzi, who then held Poliziano's chair of Greek and Latin literature. Dazzi devised three Cars after the fashion of a Roman triumph. For the construction of each chariot an excellent architect was chosen; for their decoration the painter Pontormo was appointed. In the first rode beautiful boys; in the second, powerful men; in the third, reverend grandsires. Lorenzo, in competition with his uncle, determined that the Laurel branch should outrival the Diamond. He applied to Jacopo Nardi, the historian of Florence and translator of Livy. Nardi composed a procession of seven chariots to symbolize the Golden Age, and wrote appropriate poems for each, which are still extant. In the first car rode Saturn and Janus, attended by six shepherds of goodly form, naked, on horses without harness. In the second sat Numa Pompilius, surrounded by priests in antique raiment. The third carried Titus Manlius, whose consulship beheld the close of the first Punic war. In the fifth Augustus sat enthroned, accompanied by twelve laureled poets. The horses that drew him, were winged. The sixth carried Trajan, the just emperor, with doctors of the law on either side. All these chariots were adorned with emblems painted by Pontormo. The seventh car held a globe to represent the world. Upon it lay a dead man in a suit of rusty iron armor, from the cloven plates of which emerged a living child, naked and gilt with glistering leaf of gold. This signified the passing of the Iron, and the opening of the Golden Age—the succession of the Renaissance to feudalism—the fortunes of Italy reviving after her disasters in the sunlight of the smiles of Leo. Magnus sæclorum nascitur ordo! "The world's great age begins anew; the golden years return!" Thus the artists, scholars, and poets of Florence symbolized in a Carnival show the advent of the Renaissance. The boy who represented the Golden Age, died of the sufferings he endured beneath his gilding; and his father, who was a baker, received ten scudi of indemnity. A fanciful historian might read in this little incident the irony of fate, warning the Italians that the age they welcomed would perish for them in its bloom. In the year 1513 Luther was already thirty years of age, and Charles V. in the Low Countries was a boy of thirteen, accumulating knowledge under the direction of the future Adrian VI. Whatever destiny of gold the Renaissance might through Italy be offering to Europe, it was on the point of pouring blood and fastening heavier chains on every city of the sacred land.

In my desire to bring together these three representative festivals—Lorenzo's Triumph of Bacchus, Alamanni's Car of Death, and Pontormo's Pageant of the Golden Age—marking three moments in the Florentine Renaissance, and three diverse moods of feeling in the people—I have transgressed the chronological limits of this chapter. I must now return to the year 1464, when a boy of ten years old, destined to revive the glories of Italian literature with far greater luster than Lorenzo, came from Montepulciano to Florence, and soon won the notice of the Medicean princes. Angelo Ambrogini, surnamed Poliziano from his home above the Chiana, has already occupied a prominent place in this work.[490] It is not, therefore, needful to retrace the history of his uneventful life, or again to fix his proper rank among the scholars of the fifteenth century. He was the greatest student, and the greatest poet in Greek and Latin, that Italy has produced. In the history of European scholarship, he stands midway between Petrarch and Erasmus, taking the post of honor at the moment when erudition had acquired ease and elegance, but had not yet passed on into the final stage of scientific criticism. What concerns us here, is Poliziano's achievement as an Italian poet. In the history of the vulgar literature he fills a place midway between Petrarch and Ariosto, corresponding to the station of distinction I have assigned to him in humanistic culture. Of few men can it be said that they have held the same high rank in poetry and learning; and had the moral fiber of Poliziano, his intellectual tension and his spiritual aim, been at all commensurate with his twofold ability, the Italians might have shown in him a fourth singer equal in magnitude to their greatest. As it was, the excellence of his work was marred by the defect of his temperament, and has far less value for the general reader than for the student of versification.

Lorenzo de' Medici could boast of having restored the mother tongue to a place of honor among the learned. But he was far from being the complete artist that the age required. "That exquisite flower of sentiment we call good taste, that harmony of intellect we call judgment, lies not within the grasp of power or riches."[491] A man was needed who should combine creative genius with refined tact in the use of language; who should be competent to carry the tradition of Italian poetry beyond the point where Boccaccio dropped it, while giving to his work the polish and the splendor of a classic masterpiece. It was further necessary that this new dictator of the literary commonwealth should have left the Middle Age so far behind as not to be aware of its stern spirit. He must have acquired the erudition of his eminently learned century—a century in which knowledge was the pearl of great price; not the knowledge of righteousness; not the knowledge of nature and her laws; but the knowledge of the life that throbbed in ancient peoples, the life that might, it seemed, yet make the old world young again. Moreover, he must be strong enough to carry this erudition without bending beneath its weight; dexterous enough to use it without pedantry; exuberant enough in natural resources to reduce his stores of learning, his wealth of fancy, his thronging emotions, to one ruling harmony—fusing all reminiscences in one style of pure and copious Italian. He must be gifted with that reverent sense of beauty, which was the sole survivirg greatness of his century, animating the imagination of its artists, and justifying the proud boast of its students. This man was found in Angelo Poliziano. He, and only he, was destined, by combining the finish of the classics with the freshness of a language still in use, to inaugurate the golden age of form. Faustus, the genius of the middle ages, had wedded Helen, the vision of the ancient world. Their son, Euphorion, the inheritor of all their gifts, we hail in Poliziano.

When Poliziano composed Le Stanze he was nearly twenty-four years of age.[492] He had steeped himself in the classic literatures. Endowed with a marvelous memory, he possessed their spirit and their substance. Not less familiar with Tuscan poetry of the fourteenth century, he commanded the stores of Dante's, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's diction. Long practice in Greek and Latin composition had given him mastery over the metrical systems of the ancient languages.[493] The daily habit of inditing songs for music to please the ladies of the Medicean household, had accustomed him to the use of fluent Italian. The translation of the Iliad, performed in part before he was eighteen, had made him a faithful imitator, while it added dignity and fullness to his style.[494] Besides these qualifications for his future task of raising Italian to an equality with Latin poetry, he brought with him to this achievement a genius apt to comprehend the spirit of the Renaissance in its pomp and liberty and tranquil loveliness. The noble and yet sensuous manner of the great Venetian painters, their dignity of form, their luxury of color, their boldness and decision, their imperturbable serenity of mundane joy—the choicer delicacy of the Florentine masters, their refinement of outline, selection of type, suggestion of restrained emotion—the pure design of the Tuscan sculptors, the suavity and flexibility of the Lombard plasticatori—all these qualities of Italian figurative art appear, as it were in bud, in the Stanze. Poliziano's crowning merit as a stylist was that he knew how to blend the antique and the romantic, correct drawing with fleshly fullness. Breadth of design and harmony of color have rarely been produced in more magnificent admixture. The octave stanza, which in the hands of Boccaccio was languid and diffuse, in the hands of Lorenzo harsh, in the hands of Pulci rugged, became under Poliziano's treatment an inexhaustible instrument of varying melodies. At one time, beneath his touch, the meter takes an epic dignity; again it sinks to idyllic sweetness, or mourns with the elegy, or exults with the ode. Its movement is rapid or relaxed, smooth or vibrating, undulatory or impetuous, as he has chosen. When we reflect how many generations of poets it required to bring the Sonnet to completeness, we may marvel at this youth, in an age when scholarship absorbed inventive genius, who was able at one stroke to do for the octave stanza what Marlowe did for our Blank Verse. Poliziano gave to Ariosto the Italian epical meter perfected, and established a standard of style amid the anarchy which threatened the literature of Italy with ruin.

Yet it must be confessed that, after all, it is chiefly the style of Poliziano that deserves praise. Like so much else of Renaissance work—like the Farnesina frescoes in Rome, or Giulio Romano's luxuriant arabesques at Mantua, or the efflorescence of foliage and cupids in the bass-reliefs of palace portals at Venice—there is but little solid thought or serious feeling underneath this decorative richness. Those who cannot find a pleasure in form for its own sake, independent of matter, will never be able to do Poliziano justice. This brings us to the subject of the Stanze. They were written to celebrate the prowess of Giuliano de' Medici, Lorenzo's brother, in a tournament held at Florence in the beginning of the year 1478. This fact is worth consideration. The poem which opened a new age for Italian literature, had no nobler theme than a Court pageant. Dante had been inspired to sing the epic of the human soul. Petrarch finished a portrait of the life through love of an impassioned man. Boccaccio bound up in one volume a hundred tales, delineating society in all its aspects. Then the Muse of Italy fell asleep. Poliziano aroused her with the full deep intonations of a golden instrument. But what was the burden of his song? Giuliano de' Medici loved the fair Simonetta, and bore away the prize in a toy-tournament.

This marks the change effected by a century of prince-craft. Henceforth great poets were to care less for what they sang than for the style in which they sang. Henceforth poetry in Italy was written to please—to please patrons who were flattered with false pedigrees and absurd mythologies, with the imputation of virtues they never possessed, and with the impudent palliation of shame apparent to the world. Henceforth the bards of Ausonia deigned to tickle the ears of lustful boys and debauched cardinals, buying the bread of courtly sloth—how salt it tasted let Tasso and Guarini tell—with jests or panegyrics. Liberty could scarcely be named in verse when natives and strangers vied together in enslaving Italy. To praise the great deeds of bygone heroes within hearing of pusillanimous princes, would have been an insult. Even satires upon a degraded present, aspirations after a noble future, prophecies of resurrection from the tomb—those last resorts of a national literature that retains its strength through evil days—were unknown upon the lips of the Renaissance poets. Art had become a thing of pleasure, sometimes infamous, too often nugatory. The fault of this can scarcely be said to have rested with one man more than with another; nor can we lay the blame on Poliziano, though he undoubtedly represented the class who were destined to continue literature upon these lines. It was the combined result of scholarship, which for a whole century had diverted the minds of men to the form and words of literature; of court-life, which had enfeebled the recipients of princely patronage; of tyranny, which encouraged flattery, dissimulation, and fraud; of foreign oppression, which already was beginning to enervate a race of slaves; of revived paganism, which set the earlier beliefs and aspirations of the soul at unequal warfare with emancipated lusts and sensualities; of indolence, which loved to toy with trifles, instead of thinking and creating thought; of social inequalities, which forced the poet to eat a master's bread, and turned the scholars of Italy into a crowd of servile and yet arrogant beggars. All these circumstances, and many more of the same kind, were slowly and surely undermining the vigor of the Italian intellect. Over the meridian splendor of Le Stanze we already see their influences floating like a vaporous miasma.

Italy, though never so chivalrous as the rest of Europe, yet preserved the pompous festivities of feudalism. Jousts were held in all great cities, and it was reckoned part of a courtier's business to be a skillful cavalier. At Florence the custom survived of celebrating the first of May with tournaments, and on great occasions the wealthy families spent large sums of money in providing pastimes of this sort. February 7, 1468, witnessed a splendid spectacle, when Lorenzo de' Medici, mounted successively on chargers presented to him by the Duke of Ferrara and the King of Naples, attired in armor given by the Duke of Milan, bearing the fleurs de lys of France conferred upon the Medici by Louis XI., and displaying on his pennon for a motto Le Tems revient, won the prize of valor before the populace assembled in the square of S. Croce. Luca Pulci, the descendant of an ancient house of Tuscan nobles, composed an adulatory poem in octave stanzas on this event. So changed were the times that this scion of Florentine aristocracy felt no shame in fawning on a despot risen from the people to enslave his city. Yet the spectacle was worthy celebration. Lorenzo, the banker's son, the Platonist, the diplomatist and tyrant, charging in the lists of feudalism beneath Arnolfo's tower, with the lilies of France upon his shield and the device of the Renaissance on his banner—this figured symbol of the meeting of two ages in a single man was no mean subject for a poem!

From Poliziano's Stanze we learn no such characteristic details concerning Giuliano's later tournament. Though the poem is called La Giostra, the insignificant subject disappears beneath a wealth of illustration. The episodes, including the pictures of the Golden Age and of the garden and palace of Venus, form the real strength of a masterpiece which blent the ancient and the modern world in a work of art glowing with Italian fancy. That La Giostra has no subject-matter, no theme of weight to wear the poet thin through years of anxious toil, no progress from point to point, no chain of incidents and no romantic evolution, is a matter of little moment. When Giuliano de' Medici died before the altar by the hand of an assassin on April 26, 1478, Poliziano laid down his pen and left the Stanze unfinished.[495] It cannot be said that the poem suffered, or that posterity lost by this abrupt termination of a work conceived without a central thought. Enough had been already done to present Italy with a model of the style she needed; and if we ask why La Giostra should have become immediately popular in spite of its peculiar texture and its abrupt conclusion, the answer is not far to seek. Poliziano incarnated the spirit of his age, and gave the public what satisfied their sense of fitness. The three chief enthusiasms of the fifteenth century—for classical literature, for artistic beauty, and for nature tranquilly enjoyed—were so fused and harmonized within the poet's soul as to produce a style of unmistakable originality and charming ease. Poliziano felt the delights of the country with serene idyllic rapture, not at second hand through the ancients, but with the voluptuous enjoyment of the Florentine who loved his villa. He had, besides, a sense of form analogous to that possessed by the artists of his age, which guided him in the selection and description of the scenes he painted. Again, his profound and refined erudition enabled him "to shower," as Giovio phrased it, "the finest flowers of antique poetry upon the people." Therefore, while he felt nature like one who worshiped her for her own sake and for the joy she gave him, he saw in her the subjects of a thousand graceful pictures, and these pictures he studied through a radiant haze of antique reminiscences. Each stanza of La Giostra is a mimic world of beauty, art, and scholarship; a painting where the object stands before us modeled with relief of light and shade in finely modulated hues; a brief anthology of daintily-culled phrases, wafting to our memories the perfume of Greece, Rome, and Florence in her prime. These delicate little masterpieces are, turn by turn, a picture of Botticelli, a fresco by Giulio Romano, an engraving of Mantegna, a bass-relief of young Buonarroti, or a garden-scene of Gozzoli, expressed in the purest diction of all literatures by a poet who, while imitating, never ceased to be original.[496] Nothing more was needed by a nation of idyllic dreamers, artists and scholars.

What Poliziano might have achieved, if he had found a worthy theme for the employment of his powers, it would be idle to ask. It is perhaps the condemnation of the man and of his age that the former did not seek heroic subjects for song, and the latter did not demand them—in a word that neither poet nor public had in them anything heroic whatsoever. The fact is undeniably true; but this does not deprive Poliziano of the merit of such verses as the following:

After such happy wise, in ancient years, Dwelt the old nations in the age of gold; Nor had the font been stirr'd of mothers' tears For sons in war's fell labor stark and cold; Nor trusted they to ships the wild wind steers, Nor yet had oxen groaning plowed the wold; Their houses were huge oaks, whose trunks had store Of honey, and whose boughs thick acorns bore. Nor yet, in that glad time, the accursèd thirst Of cruel gold had fallen on this fair earth: Joyous in liberty they lived at first; Unplowed the fields sent forth their teeming birth: Till fortune, envious of such concord, burst The bond of law, and pity banned and worth; Within their breasts sprang luxury and that rage Which men call love in our degenerate age.

A somewhat earlier composition than La Giostra was La Favola di Orfeo, a dramatic poem similar in form to the Sacra Rappresentazione, with a classical instead of a religious subject.[497] To call it a tragedy would be to dignify it with too grand a title. To class it with pastorals is equally impossible, though the songs of the shepherds and wood-nymphs may be said to have anticipated the style of Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido. Nor again is it properly speaking an opera, though it was undoubtedly meant for music. The Orfeo combined tragedy, the pastoral, and the opera in a mixed work of melodramatic art, which by its great popularity inspired the poets of Italy to produce specimens of each kind, and prepared the public to receive them.[498] Still, in form and movement, it adhered to the traditions of the Sacra Rappresentazione, and its originality consisted in the substitution of a Pagan for a Christian fable.

Unerring instinct guided Poliziano in the choice of his subject. Orpheus was the proper hero of Renaissance Italy—the civilizer of a barbarous world by art and poetry, the lover of beauty, who dared to invade Hell and moved the iron heart of Pluto with a song. Long before the composition of Orfeo, Boccaccio had presented the same conception of society humanized by culture in his Ninfale Fiesolano. This was the ideal of the Renaissance; and, what is more, it accurately symbolized the part played by Italy after the dissolution of the middle ages. In the myth of Orpheus the humanism of the Revival became conscious of itself. This fable was the Mystery of the new age, the allegory of the work appointed for the nation. Did we dare to press a metaphor to the verge of the fantastic, we might even read in the martyrdom of Orpheus by the Mænads a prophecy of the Italian doom. Italy, who had aroused Europe from lethargy with the voice of poetry and learning, who had inaugurated a new age of civil and social refinement, who thought she could resist the will of God by arts and elegant accomplishments, after triumphing over the rude forces of nature was now about to violate the laws of nature in her vices, and to fall a victim to the Mænads of incurrent barbarism, inebriate with wine and blood, indifferent to the magic of the lyre, avengers blindly following the dictates of a power that rules the destinies of nations. Of this Italy, Poliziano, the author of Orfeo, was himself the representative hero, the protagonist, the intellectual dictator.[499]

The Orfeo was sent with a letter of dedication to Messer Carlo Canale, the obsequious husband of that Vannozza, who bore Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia to the Pope Alexander VI. Poliziano says that he "wrote this play at the request of the Most Reverend the Cardinal of Mantua, in the space of two days, among continual disturbances, and in the vulgar tongue, that it might be the better comprehended by the spectators." He adds: "This child of mine is of a sort to bring more shame than honor on its father."

There is good reason to believe that the year 1472, when the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga returned from Bologna to Mantua, and was received with "triumphs and pomps, great feasts and banquets," was the date of its composition. If so, the Orfeo was written at the age of eighteen. It could not have been played later than 1483, for in that year the Cardinal died. At eighteen Poliziano was already famous for his translation of the Iliad. He had gained the title of Homericus Juvenis, and was celebrated for his powers of improvization.[500] That he should have put the Orfeo together in forty-eight hours is hardly so remarkable as that he should have translated Herodian in the space of a few days, while walking and dictating. For the Orfeo is but a slight piece, though beautiful and pregnant with the germs of many styles to be developed from its scenes. The plot is simple, and the whole play numbers no more than 434 lines.

To do the Orfeo justice, we ought to have heard it with its own accompaniment of music. Viewed as a tragedy, judged by the standard of our Northern drama, it will always prove a disappointment. That mastery over the complex springs of human nature which distinguished the first efforts of Marlowe, is almost wholly absent. A certain adaptation of the language to the characters, in the rudeness of Thyrsis when contrasted with the rustic elegance of Aristæus; a touch of feeling in Eurydice's outcry of farewell; a discrimination between the tender sympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting; a spirited representation of Bacchanalian enthusiasm in the Mænads; an attempt to model the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet conscious of its anguish—these points constitute the chief dramatic features of the melodrama. But where there was the opportunity of a really tragic movement, Poliziano failed. We have only to read the lament uttered by Orpheus for the loss of Eurydice, in order to perceive how fine a situation has been spoiled. The pathos which might have made us sympathize with the lover in his misery, the passion approaching frenzy which might have justified his misogyny, are absent. Poliziano seems to have already felt the inspiration of the Bacchic chorus which concludes the play, and to have forgotten his duty to his hero, whose sorrow for Eurydice is stultified and made unmeaning by the prosaic expression of a base resolve. Yet, when we return from these criticisms to the real merit of the piece, we find in it a charm of musical language, a subtlety of musical movement, which are irresistibly fascinating. Thought and feeling seem alike refined to a limpidity that suits the flow of melody in song. The very words evaporate and lose themselves in floods of sound. Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage. Of character, he can scarcely be said to have anything marked; and his part rises to its height precisely in the passage where the singer has to be displayed. Thus the Orfeo is a good poem only where the situation is less dramatic than lyrical, and its finest scene was, fortunately for the author, one in which the dramatic motive could be lyrically expressed. Before the gates of Hades and the throne of Proserpine, Orpheus sings, and his singing is the right outpouring of a musician-poet's soul. Each octave resumes the theme of the last stanza with a swell of utterance, a crescendo of intonation, that recalls the passionate and unpremeditated descant of a bird upon the boughs alone. To this true quality of music is added the persuasiveness of pleading. Even while we read, the air seems to vibrate with pure sound, and the rich recurrence of the tune is felt upon the opening of each successive stanza. That the melody of this incomparable song is lost, must be reckoned a misfortune. We have reason to believe that the part of Orpheus was taken by Messer Baccio Ugolini, singing to the viol.[501]

Space does not permit me to detach the whole scene in Hades from the play and print it here; to quote a portion of it would be nothing less than mutilation.[502] I must content myself with this Chorus of the Mænads, which contains, as in a kernel, the whole dithyrambic poetry of the Italians:

Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! With ivy coronals, bunch and berry, Crown we our heads to worship thee! Thou hast bidden us to make merry Day and night with jollity! Drink then! Bacchus is here! Drink free, And hand ye the drinking-cup to me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! See, I have emptied my horn already; Stretch hither your beaker to me, I pray; Are the hills and the lawns where we roam unsteady? Or is it my brain that reels away? Let every one run to and fro through the hay, As ye see me run! Ho! after me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! Methinks I am dropping in swoon or slumber; Am I drunken or sober, yes or no? What are these weights my feet encumber? You too are tipsy, well I know! Let every one do as ye see me do, Let every one drink and quaff like me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé! Cry Bacchus! Cry Bacchus! Be blithe and merry, Tossing wine down your throats away! Let sleep then come and our gladness bury: Drink you, and you, and you, while ye may! Dancing is over for me to-day. Let every one cry aloud Evohé! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé!

It remains to speak of the third class of poems which the great scholar and supple courtier flung like wild flowers with a careless hand from the chariot of his triumph to the Capitolian heights of erudition. Small store, indeed, he set by them—these Italian love-songs, hastily composed to please Donna Ippolita Leoncina, the titular mistress of his heart; thrown off to serve the turn of Giuliano and his younger friends; or improvised, half jestingly, to meet the humor of his princely patron, when Lorenzo, quitting the laurel-crowned bust of Plato, or the groves of Careggi, or the audience-chamber where he parleyed with the envoys of the Sforza, went abroad like King Manfred of old with lute and mandoline and viol to serenade the windows of some facile beauty in the twilight of a night of June.[503] Little did Poliziano dream that his learning would pass away almost unreckoned, but that men of after time would gather the honey of the golden days of the Renaissance from these wilding garlands.[504] Yet, however slightly Poliziano may have prized these productions of his early manhood, he proved that the Canzone, the Rispetto, and the Ballata were as much his own in all their multiformity of lyric loveliness, as were the rich sonorous measures of the octave stanza. Expressing severally the depths of tender emotion, the caprices of adoring passion, and the rhythmic sentiment that winds in myriad movements of the dance, these three kinds of poem already belonged to the people and to love. Poliziano displayed his inborn taste and mastery of art in nothing more than in the ease with which he preserved the passionate simplicity of the Tuscan Volkslied, while giving it a place among the lyrics of the learned. We have already seen how that had been achieved by Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and afterwards in a measure by Lorenzo de' Medici. But the problem of writing love-poetry for the people in their own forms, without irony and innuendo, was not now so easy as it had been in the fourteenth century, when no barrier had yet arisen between educated poets and the folk. Nor had even Boccaccio, far less Lorenzo, solved it with the exquisite tact and purity of style we find in all Poliziano's verses. In order to comprehend their charm, we must transfer ourselves to Florence on a summer night, when the prince is abroad upon the streets attended by singing-boys as beautiful as Sandro's angels. The professor's chair is forgotten, and Plato's spheres are left to turn unheeded. Pulci and Poliziano join hands with girls from the workshop and the attic. Lorenzo and Pico figure in the dance with 'prentice-lads and carvers of wood-work or marble. All through the night beneath the stars the music of their lutes is ringing; and when the dancing stops, they gather round some balcony, or hold their own upon the square in matches of improvised melody with the unknown rhymsters of the people. What can be prettier than the ballad of roses made for "such a night," by Angelo Poliziano?[505]

Poliziano's Rispetti are written for the most part in ottava rima. This form alone suffices to mark them out as literary reproductions of the poetry upon which they are modeled. In the Rispetti more than the Ballate we notice a certain want of naïveté, which distinguishes them from the racier inspirations of the popular Muse. That passionate insight into the soul and essence of emotion which rarely fails the peasant in his verse however rude, is here replaced by concetti rounded into pearls of fancy with the daintiest art. Those brusque and vehement images that flash the light of imagination on the movements of the heart, throbbing with intensest natural feeling, yield to carefully selected metaphors developed with a strict sense of economy. Instead of the young contadino willing to mortgage Paradise for his dama, worshiping her with body, will and soul, compelling the morning and the evening star and the lilies of the field and the bells that swing their notes of warning over Rome, to serve the bidding of his passion, we have the scholar-courtier, who touches love with the finger-tips for pastime, and who imitates the gold of the heart with baser metal of fine rhetoric. Still we find in these Rispetti a quality which their rustic models lack. This is the roseate fluency and honeyed rapture of their author—an exquisite limpidity and ease of diction that reveal the inborn gift of art. Language in Poliziano's hand is plastic, taking form like softest wax, so that no effort of composition, no labor of the file can be discerned.

Nec pluteum cædit nec demorsos sapit ungues.

This line of Persius denotes the excellences no less than the faults of his erotic poetry, so charming in its flow, so fit to please a facile ear, so powerless to stir the depth of the soul or wring relenting from reluctant hearts. Compared with the love-poetry of elder poets, these Rispetti are what the artificial epigrams of Callimachus or the Anacreontics of the Alexandrian versifiers were to the ardent stanzas of Sappho, the impassioned scolia of Pindar. While they fail to reflect the ingenuous emotions of youth exulting in the Paradise of love without an afterthought, they no less fail to embody philosophy or chivalrous religion or the tragedy of passions in conflict. They are inspired by Aphrodité Pandemos, and the joys of which they tell are carnal.[506]

What has been said about the detached Rispetti, is true of those longer poems which consist of many octave stanzas strung together with a continuity of pleading rhetoric. The facility bordering on negligence of their construction is apparent. Verses that occur in one, reappear in others without alteration. All repeat the same arguments, the same enticements to a less than lawful love. The code of Florentine wooing may be conveniently studied in the rambling paragraphs, while the levity of their declarations and the fluency of their vows, doing the same service on different occasions, show them to be "false as dicers' oaths," mere verses of the moment, made to sway a yielding woman's heart.[507] Yet who can help enjoying them, when he connects their effusiveness of fervent language with the episodes of the Novelle, illustrated by figures borrowed from contemporary frescoes? Those sinewy lads of Signorelli and Masuccio, in parti-colored hose and tight jackets, climbing mulberry-tree or vine beneath their lady's window; those girls with the demure eyes of Lippo Lippi and Bandello, suspending rope-ladders from balconies to let their Romeo escape at daybreak: those lovers rushing, half-clad in shirt or jerkin, from bower and bed-chamber to cross their swords with jealous husbands at street corners; rise before us and sing their love-songs in these verses of Poliziano, written for precisely such occasions to express the very feelings of these heroes of romance. After all, too, there is a certain sort of momentary sincerity in their light words of love.

Three lyrics of higher artistic intention and of very different caliber mark the zenith of Poliziano's achievement. These are the portrait of the country girl, La brunettina mia; the canzone to La Bella Simonetta, written for Giuliano de' Medici; and the magnificent imitation of Petrarch's manner, beginning Monti, valli, antri e colli.[508] They are three studies in pictorial poetry, transparent, limpid, of incomparable freshness. A woman has sat for the central figure of each, and the landscape round her is painted with the delicacy of a quattrocento Florentine. La Brunettina is the simple village beauty, who bathes her face in the fountain, and crowns her blonde hair with a wreath of wild flowers. She is a blossoming branch of thorn in spring. Her breasts are May roses, her lips are strawberries. The portrait is so ethereally tinted and so firmly modeled that we seem to be looking at a study painted by a lover from the life. Simonetta moves with nobler grace and a diviner majesty[509]:

In lei sola raccolto Era quant'è d'onesto e bello al mondo.

. . . . . . . . .

Un'altra sia tra le belle la prima: Costei non prima chiamesi, ma sola; Chè 'l giglio e la viola Cedono e gli altri fior tutti alla rosa. Pendevon dalla testa luminosa Scherzando per la fronte e suoi crin d'oro, Mentre ella nel bel coro Movea ristretti al suono e dolci passi.

She is the lady of the Stanze, whom Giuliano found among the fields that April morning[510]:

Candida è ella, e candida la vesta, Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba; Lo inanellato crin dall'aurea testa Scende in la fronte umilmente superba. Ridegli attorno tutta la foresta, E quanto può sue cure disacerba, Nell'atto regalmente è mansueta; E pur col ciglio le tempeste acqueta.

. . . . . . . . .

Ell'era assissa sopra la verdura Allegra, e ghirlandetta avea contesta Di quanti fior creasse mai natura, De' quali era dipinta la sua vesta. E come prima al giovan pose cura, Alquanto paurosa alzò la testa; Poi con la bianca man ripreso il lembo, Levossi in piè con di fior pieno un grembo.

All the defined idealism, the sweetness and the purity of Tuscan portraiture are in these stanzas. Simonetta does not pass by with a salutation in a mist of spiritual glory like Beatrice. She is surrounded with no flames of sensual desire like the Griselda of Boccaccio. She sits for her portrait in a tranquil light, or moves across the canvas with the dignity of a great lady:

Lei fuor di guisa umana Mosse con maestà l'andar celeste, E con man sospendea l'ornata veste Regale in atto e portamento altero.

It was a rare and fugitive moment in the history of art when Poliziano could paint La Simonetta in these verses, and Lippo Lippi showed her likeness on cathedral walls of Prato. Different models of feminine beauty, different ideals of womanly grace served the painters and poets of a more developed age; Titian's Flora and Dosso Dossi's Circe illustrating the Alcina of Ariosto and the women of Guarini. Once more, it is the thought of Simonetta which pervades the landscape of the third canzone I have mentioned. Herself is absent; but, as in a lyric of Petrarch, her spirit is felt, and we are made to see her throned beneath the gnarled beech-branches or dipping her foot in the too happy rivulet. Something just short of perfection in the staccato exclamations of the final trophe reminds us of Poliziano's most serious defect. Amid so much tenderness of natural feeling, he fails to make us believe in the reality of his emotion. Not passion, not thought, but the refined sensuousness of a nature keenly alive to plastic beauty, educated in the schools of classical and Florentine art, and gifted with inexhaustible facility of language, is the dominant quality of Poliziano's Italian poetry. The same quality is found in his Latin and Greek verse—in the plaintive elegies for La Bella Simonetta and Albiera degli Albizzi, in the Violæ and in that ode In puellam suam [511] which is the Latin sister of La brunettina. The Sylvæ add a new element of earnestness to his style; for if Poliziano felt deep and passionate emotion, it was for Homer, Virgil and the poets praised in the Nutricia, while the Rusticus condenses in one picture of marvelous fullness the outgoings of genuine emotion stimulated by his love of the country.

Hanc, o cœlicolæ magni, concedite vitam! Sic mihi delicias, sic blandimenta laborum, Sic faciles date semper opes; hac improba sunto Vota tenus. Nunquam certe, nunquam ilia precabor, Splendeat ut rutilo frons invidiosa galero, Tergeminaque gravis surgat mihi mitra corona.

That is the heart-felt prayer of Poliziano. Give me the tranquil scholar's life among the pleasures of the fields; my books for serious thought in studious hours; the woods and fields for recreation; with moderate wealth well-gotten without toil; no bishop's miter or triple tiara to vex my brows. It is the same ideal as Alberti's. From this background of the modest rural life emerge three splendid visions—the Golden Age, when all was plenitude and peace; Orpheus of the dulcet lyre, evoking harmony from discord in man's jarring life; and Venus rising from the waves to bless the world with beauty felt through art. Such was the programme of human life sketched by the representative mind of his century, in an age when the Italians were summoned to do battle with France, Germany and Spain invasive of their borders.

Poliziano died before the great catastrophe. He sank at the meridian of his fame, in the same month nearly as Pico, two years later than Lorenzo, a little earlier than Ficino, in the year 1494, so fatal to his country, the date that marks the boundary between two ages in Italian history.