Chapter II (1)

But meanwhile, during those centuries which lie between the dark ages and modern times, the Middle Ages (inasmuch as they mean not a mere chronological period, but a definite social and mental condition) fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they existed, it is almost impossible to understand how they would ever throughout Europe have come to an end; for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has it, one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and the Middle Ages, after this tedious dying of the fifteenth century, required to be shovelled into the tomb, nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance. This that we foolishly call--giving a quite incorrect notion of sudden and miraculous birth--the Renaissance, and limit to the time of the revival of Greek humanities, really existed, as I have repeatedly suggested wherever, during the mediaeval centuries, the civilization of which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were big was not, by the pressure of feudalism and monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn. Low as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and much as she borrowed for a long while from the more precocious northern nations, especially France and Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous advantage in the fact that her populations were not divided into victor and vanquished, and that the old Latin institutions of town and country were never replaced, except in certain northern and southern districts, by feudal arrangements. The very first thing which strikes us in the obscure Italian commonwealths of early times, is that in these resuscitated relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling of feudal superiority and inferiority; that there is no lord, and consequently no serf. Nor is this the case merely within the city walls. The never sufficiently appreciated difference between the Italian free burghs and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is that the citizens depend only in the remotest and most purely fictitious way upon any kind of suzerain; and moreover that the country, instead of belonging to feudal nobles, belong every day more and more completely to the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but one of three things--a hired labourer, a possessor of property, or a farmer, liable to no taxes, paying no rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as now, throughout Tuscany, the peasantry was an independent and well-to-do class. The land owned by one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a shopkeeper or manufacturer in the town) was divided into farms small enough to be cultivated--vines, olives, corn, and fruit--by one family of peasants, helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and less scrupulous peasants could, in good seasons, put by sufficient profit from their share of the produce to suffice after some years, and with the addition of what the women might make by washing, spinning, weaving, plaiting straw hats (an accomplishment greatly insisted upon by Lorenzo dei Medici), and so forth, to purchase some small strip of land of their own. Hence, a class of farmers at once living on another man's land and sharing its produce with him, and cultivating and paying taxes upon land belonging to themselves.

Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses in the mediaeval Italian novelists--a well-to-do set of people, in constant communication with the town where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, and easily getting confused with the lower class of artizans with whom they doubtless largely intermarried. These peasants whom we see in tidy kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in many a Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were in many respects better off than the small artizans of the city, heaped up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater and smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family," frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry; and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them--a conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it is impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that between the northern peasant, the starved and stunted serf, whom Holbein drew, driving his lean horses across the hard furrow, with compassionate Death helping along the plough, and the Tuscan farmer, as shown us by Lorenzo dei Medici--the young fellow who, while not above minding his cows or hoeing up his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces, and paint for her cheeks and eyelashes; who promises, to please her, to have his hair frizzled (as only the youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled and fuzzed) by the barber, and even dimly hints that some day he may appear in silken jerkin and tight hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No greater contrast perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his sweetheart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box full of jewels, her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and gold-worked bodice, her almost queenly ways towards her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a woman, but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving children in her mud cottage, and looking forward, in dull lethargy, after the morning full of outrages at the castle, to the night, the night on the heath, lit with mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the sacrifice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the serf to Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant woman described by Lorenzo with the female serf resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death," seated on the mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled hovel, stewing something on a fire of twigs, and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered baby-boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of an old nurse, the kindly skeleton is leading away out of this cruel world.

Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the great Italian commonwealths. They were, as much as the northern serfs were the reverse, creatures pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch.

The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite as much from the upper classes of feudal countries. They were, be it remembered, men of business, constantly in contact with the working classes; Albizis, Strozzis, Pandolfinis, Guinigis, Tolomeis, no matter what their name, these men who built palaces and churches which outdid the magnificence of northern princes, and who might, at any moment, be sent ambassadors from Florence, Lucca, or Siena, to the French or English kings, to the Emperor or the Pope, spent a large portion of their days at their office desk, among the bales of their warehouses, behind the counter of their shops; they wore the same dress, had the same habits, spoke the same dialect, as the weavers and dyers, the carriers and porters whom they employed, and whose sons might, by talent and industry, amass a fortune, build palaces, and go ambassadors to kings in their turn. When, therefore, these merchant nobles turned to the country for rest and relief from their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for the feudal noble of the North. Boar and stag hunts had no attraction for quiet men of business; forests stocked with wild beasts where vineyard and cornfield might have extended, would have seemed to them the very height of wastefulness, discomfort, and ugliness. Pacific and businesslike, they merely transferred to the country the habits of thought and of life which had arisen in the city. Not for them any imitation of the feudal castle, turreted and moated, cut up into dark irregular rooms and yards, filled with noisy retainers and stinking hounds. On some gentle hillside a well-planned palace, its rooms spacious and lofty, and sparely windowed for coolness in summer; with a neat cloistered court in the centre, ventilating the whole house, and affording a cool place, full of scent of flowers and sound of fountains for the burning afternoons; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek a breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem faint for heat, and the dim plumy heads of cypress and poplar are motionless against the misty blue sky. In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance; on the side and behind, elaborate garden walks walled with high walls of box and oak and laurel, in which stand statues in green niches; gardens with little channels to bring water, even during droughts, to the myrtles, the roses, the stocks and clove pinks, over which bend with blossoms brilliant against the pale blue sky the rose-flowered oleander, the scarlet-flowered pomegranate; also aviaries and cages full of odd and harmless creatures, ferrets, guinea pigs, porcupines, squirrels, and monkeys; arbours where wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law may sew and make music; and neat lawns where the young men may play at quoits, football, or swordsticks and bucklers; and then, sweeping all round the house and gardens and terraces an undulating expanse of field and orchard, smoke-tinted with olive, bright green in spring with budding crops, russet in autumn with sere vines; and from which, in the burning noon, rises the incessant sawing noise of the cicalas, and ever and anon the high, nasal, melancholy chant of the peasant, lying in the shade of barn door or fig tree till the sun shall sink and he can return to his labour. If the house in town, with its spacious store-rooms, its carved chapel, and painted banqueting hall, large enough to hold sons' children and brothers' wives and grandchildren, and a whole host of poor relatives, whom the wise father (as Pandolfini teaches) employs rather than strangers for his clerks and overseers--if this town house was the pride of the Italian burgess; the villa, with its farms and orchards, was the real joy, the holiday paradise of the over-worked man. To read in the cool house, with cicala's buzz and fountain plash all round, the Greek and Latin authors; to discuss them with learned men; to watch the games of the youths and the children, this was the reward for years of labour and intelligence; but sweeter than all this (how we feel it in Agnolo Pandolfini's speeches!) were those occupations which the city could not give: the buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of spaliers, the straightening of fences, the going round (with the self-importance and impatience of a cockney) to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had ripened over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among the vines; to pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-place, taking up handfuls of drying grain, breaking twigs of olives, to see how things were doing; and to have long conversations with the peasants, shrewd enough to affect earnest attention when the master was pleased to vent his town-acquired knowledge of agriculture and gardening. Sweet also, doubtless, for younger folk, or such perhaps as were fonder of teaching new lute tunes to the girls than of examining into cabbages, and who read Dante and Boccaccio more frequently than Cicero or Sallust; though sweet perhaps only as a vague concomitant of their lazy pleasures, to listen to those songs of the peasantry rising from the fields below, while lying perhaps on one's back in the shaded grass, watching the pigeons whirring about the belvedere tower. Vaguely pleasant this also, doubtless; but for a long while only vaguely. For, during more than two centuries, the burgesses of Italy were held enthralled by the Courtly poets of other countries; listening to, and reading, at first, only Provencals and Sicilians, or Italians, like Sordello, pretending to be of Provence or Sicily; and even later, enduring in their own poets, their own Guittones, Cavalcantis, Cinos, Guinicellis, nay even in Dante and Petrarch's lyrics, only the repetition (however vivified by genius) of the old common-places of Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the poetry of feudal nations. But the time came when not only Provencal and Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was neglected, when the revival of Greek and Latin letters made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare mediaeval prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern tongue, so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some grotesque painted saint, when compared with the splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and twining in graceful or solemn involutions, as of a Pyrrhic or a maidens' dance. And it was during this period, from Petrarch to Politian, that, as philologists have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable chivalric romance, and the poetry of Provencal and Sicilian school, cast off by the upper classes, was gradually picked up by the lower and especially by the rural classes. Vagabond ballad-singers and story-tellers--creatures who wander from house to house, mending broken pottery, collecting rags or selling small pedlar's wares--were the old clothesmen who carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery. The people of the town, constantly in presence of the upper classes, and therefore sooner or later aware of what was or was not in fashion, did not care long for the sentimental daintiness of mediaeval poetry; besides, satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town as are dogs in gutters and cats on roofs; and the townsfolk soon set their own buffoonish or satirical ideas to whatever remained of the music of mediaeval poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the sonnet had become for the Florentine artizans a mere scurrilous epigram. It was different in the country. The peasant, at least the Tuscan peasant, is eminently idealistic and romantic in his literary tastes; it may be that he has not the intellectual life required for any utterances or forms of his own, and that he consequently accepts poetry as a ready-made ornament, something pretty and exotic, which is valued in proportion to its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason whatever it may, certain it is that nothing can be too artificial or high-flown to please the Italian peasantry: its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights, winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its songs are almost without exception about love, constancy, moon, stars, flowers. Such things have not been degraded by familiarity and parody as in the town; they retain for the country folk the vague charm (like that of music, automatic and independent of thorough comprehension) of belonging to a sphere of the marvellous; hence they are repeated and repeated with almost religious servility, as any one may observe who will listen to the stories and verses told and sung even nowadays in the Tuscan country, or who will glance over the splendid collections of folklore made in the last twenty years. Such things, must suffer alteration from people who can neither read nor write, and who cannot be expected to remember very clearly details which, in many cases, must have for them only the vaguest meaning. The stories split in process of telling and re-telling, and are completed with bits of other stories; details are forgotten and have to be replaced; the same happens with poetry: songs easily get jumbled together, their meaning is partially obliterated, and has to be restored or, again, an attempt is made by bold men to adapt some seemingly adaptable old song to a new occasion an old love ditty seems fit to sing to a new sweetheart.--names, circumstances, and details require arranging for this purpose; and hence more alterations. Now, however much a peasant may enjoy the confused splendours of Court life and of Courtly love, he cannot, with the best will in the world, restore their details or colouring if they happen to become obliterated. If he chance to forget that when the princess first met the wizard she was riding forth on a snow-white jennet with a falcon on her glove, there is nothing to prevent his describing her as walking through the meadow in charge of a flock of geese; and similarly, should he happen to forget that the Courtly lover compares the skin of his mistress to ivory and her eyes to Cupid's torches, he is quite capable of filling up the gap by saying that the girl is as white as a turnip and as bright-eyed as a ferret. As with details of description and metaphors, so also with the emotional and social parts of the business. The peasant has not been brought up in the idea that the way to gain a woman's affection is to stick her glove on a helmet and perform deeds of prowess closely resembling those of Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena; so he attempts to ingratiate himself by offering her presents of strawberries, figs, buttons, hooks-and-eyes, and similar desirable things. Again, were the peasant to pay attentions to a married woman, he would merely get (what noble husbands were too well bred to dream of) a sound horsewhipping, or perhaps even a sharp knife thrust in his stomach; so that he takes good care to address his love songs only to marriageable young women. In this way, without any deliberate attempt .at originality, the old Courtly poetry becomes, when once removed to the country, thoroughly patched and seamed with rustic ideas, feelings, and images; while never ceasing to be, in its general stuff and shape, of a kind such as only professional poets of the upper classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's charming volume, are, therefore, a curious mixture of high-flown sentiment, dainty imagery, and most artistic arrangements of metre and diction (especially in the rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by logical involution of the most refined mediaeval sort), with hopes and complaints such as only a farmer could frame, with similes and descriptions such as only the business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could suggest. A mixture, but not a jumble. For as in this slow process of assimilation and alteration only that was remembered by the peasant which the peasant could understand and sympathize with; and only that was welded into the once Courtly poetry which was sufficiently refined to please the people who delighted in the exotic refinement--as, in short, everything came about perfectly simply and unconsciously, there resulted what in good sooth may be considered as a perfectly substantive and independent form of art, with beauties and refinements of its own. And, indeed, it appears to me that one might say, without too much paradox, that in these peasant songs only does the poetry of minnesingers and troubadours, become thoroughly enjoyable; that only when the conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by the freshness, the straightforwardness, nay, even the grotesqueness of rural likings, dislikings, and comparisons, can the dainty beauty of mediaeval Courtly poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing together Tigri's collection of Tuscan folk poetry with any similar anthology that might be made of middle-high German and Provencal, and early Italian lyrics, I feel that the adoption of Courtly mediaeval poetry by the Italian peasantry of the Renaissance can be compared more significantly than at first seemed with the adoption of a once fashionable garb by country folk. The peasant pulled about this Courtly lyrism, oppressively tight in its conventional fit and starched with elaborate rhetorical embroideries; turned it inside out, twisted a bit here, a bit there, ripped open seam after seam, patched and repatched with stuffs and stitches of its own; and then wore the whole thing as it had never been intended to be worn; until this cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on the freer moral limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather and earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its original fashionable stiffness, and crudeness of colour, and niminy-piminy fit, and had acquired instead I know not what grace of unexpectedness, picturesqueness, and ease.[1]

[1] Any one who is sceptical of the Courtly derivation of the Italian popular song may, besides consulting the admirable book of Prof. d'Ancona, compare with the contents of Tigri's famous "Canti popolari Toscani," the following scraps of Sicilian and early Italian lyrics:--

The Emperor Frederick II. writes: "Rosa di maggio--Colorita e fresca--Occhi hai fini--E non rifini--Di gioie dare--Lo tuo parlare--La gente innamora--Castella ed altura."

Jacopo Pugliesi says of his lady: "Chiarita in viso piu che argento--Donami allegrezze--Ben eo son morto--E mal colto--Se non mi dai conforto--_Fior dell' orto_."

Inghilfredi Siciliano: "Gesu Cristo ideolla in paradiso--E poi la fece angelo incarnando--Gioia aggio preso di giglio novello--E vago, che sormonta ogni ricchezza--Sua dottrina m' affrezza--Cosi mi coglie e olezza--Come pantera le bestie selvagge."

Jacopo da Lentino: "E di virtute tutte l' altre avanza--E somigliante a stella e di splendore--Colla sua conta (_cf_. Provencal _coindeta_, gentille) e gaia innamoranza--E piu bella e che rosa e che fiore--Cristo le doni vita ed allegranza--E si la cresca in gran pregio ed onore."

I must finish off what might be a much longer collection with a charming little scrap, quite in rispetto tone, by Guinicelli: "Vedut 'ho la lucente stella diana--Ch' appare anzi che 'l giorno renda albore--Ch' a preso forma di figura umana--Sovr' ogni altra mi par che dia splendore--Viso di neve colorato in grana--Occhi lucenti, gai e pien d'amore--Non credo che nel mondo sia cristiana--Si piena di beltate e di valore."]

Well; for many a year did the song of the peasants rise up from the fields and oliveyards unnoticed by the good townsfolk taking their holiday at the Tuscan villa; but one day, somewhere in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn chant of the rispetto, telling perhaps how the singer's sweetheart was beautiful as the star Diana, so beautiful as a baby that the Pope christened her with his own hands; the quavering nasal cadence of the stornello saying by chance--

Flower of the Palm, &c.,

did at last waken the attention of one lettered man, a man of curious and somewhat misshapen body and mind, of features satyr-like in ugliness, yet moody and mystical in their very earthiness; a man essentially of the senses, yet imperfect in them, without taste or smell, and, over and above, with a marvellously supple intellect; weak and coarse and idealistic; and at once feebly the slave of his times, and so boldly, spontaneously innovating as to be quite unconscious of innovation: the mixed nature, or rather the nature in many heterogeneous bits, of the man of letters who is artistic almost to the point of being an actor, natural in every style because morally connected with no style at all. The man was Lorenzo di Piero dei Medici, for whom posterity has exclusively reserved the civic title of all his family and similar town despots, calling him the Magnificent. It is the fashion at present to give Lorenzo only the leavings, as it were, of our admiration for the weaker, less original, nay, considerably enervate, humanistic exquisite Politian; and this absurd injustice appears to me to show that the very essence and excellence of Lorenzo is not nowadays perceived. The Renaissance produced several versatile and charming poets; and, in the midst of classic imitation, one or two, of whom one is certainly Boiardo, of real freshness and raciness. But of this new element in the Renaissance, this element which is neither imitation of antiquity nor revival of mediaeval, which is original, vital, fruitful, in short, modern, Lorenzo is the most versatile example. He is new, Renaissance, modern; not merely in this or that quality, he is so all round. And this in the first place because he is so completely the man of impressions; the man not uttering wonderful things, nor elaborating exquisite ones, but artistically embodying with marvellous versatility whatever strikes his fancy and feeling--fancy and feeling which are as new as the untouched sculptor's clay. And this extraordinary temper of art for art's sake, or rather effect for effect and form's sake, was possible in that day only in a man equally without strong passions, and without strong convictions. He is naturally attracted most by what is most opposed to the academic, Virgilian, Horatian, or Petrarchesque aestheticism of his contemporaries; he is essentially a realist, and all the effects, which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness of his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastliness in the reality of things. If Lorenzo writes at one moment carnival songs of ribald dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think, merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediaeval by turns, he preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which he remarked among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally drew him towards the classes where realism can deal with the real; and not the affected, the self-conscious, the deliberately attempted. Hence those wonderful little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers, which give us so completely, so gracefully, the whole appearance, work, manner, gesture of the people; give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that we scarcely know how they are given; that we almost forget verses and song, and actually see the pulling, twisting, and cutting of the gold-threads; that we see and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down the leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his customers of its pliability; that we see and smell the dear little pale yellow pasties nestling in the neat white baskets, after having stood by and watched the dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the iron plates heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked paste twisted and bent; nay, we feel almost as if we had eaten of them, those excellent things which seem such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at one go like nothing at all. Hence, I mean from this love of watching effects and reproducing them, originated also the masterpiece of Lorenzo dei Medici, the "Nencia da Barberino."

This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of those Tuscan peasant songs, of which I have told you the curious Courtly descent, at last having struck the fancy of a real poet. It is, what Lorenzo's masterpiece necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern performance; as modern as a picture by Bastien Lepage; as an opera, founded upon local music, by Bizet. For it is not by any manner of means a pastoral, a piece of conventional poetic decoration, with just a little realistic detail, more of the mere conventional or more of the realistic dominating according as it is a pastoral by Theocritus, or a pastoral by Quinault or Metastasio. It is the very reverse of this: it is the attempt to obtain a large and complete, detailed and balanced impression by the cunning arrangement of a number of small effects which the artist has watched in reality; it is the making into a kind of little idyl, something half narrative, half drama, with distinct figures and accessories and background, of a whole lot of little fragments imitated from the peasant poetry, and set in thin, delicate rims of imitation no longer of the peasant's songs, but of the peasant's thoughts and speech; a perfect piece of impressionist art, marred only in rare places by an attempt (inevitable in those days) to force the drawing and colour into caricature. The construction, which appears to be nowhere, is in reality a masterpiece; for, without knowing it, you are shown the actors, the background, the ups and downs of temper, the variation of the seasons; above all you are shown the heroine through the medium of the praises, the complaints, the narratives of the past, the imaginings of the future, of the hero, whose incoherent rhapsodizing constitutes the whole poem. He, Vallera, is a well-to-do young farmer; she, Nencia, is the daughter of peasant folk of the castellated village of Barberino in the Mugello; he is madly in love, but shy, and (to all appearance) awkward, so that we feel convinced that of all these speeches in praise of his Nenciozza, in blame of his indifference, highly poetic flights and most practical adjurations to see all the advantages of a good match, the young woman hears few or none; Vallera is talking not to her, but at her, or rather, he is rehearsing to himself all the things which he cannot squeeze out in her presence. It is the long day-dream, poetic, prosaic, practical, and imaginative, of a love-sick Italian peasant lad, to whom his sweetheart is at once an ideal thing of beauty, a goddess at whose shrine songs must be sung and wreaths twined; and a very substantial lass, who cannot be indifferent to sixpenny presents, and whom he cannot conceive as not ultimately becoming the sharer of his cottage, the cooker of his soup, the mender of his linen, the mother of his brats--a dream in which image is effaced by image, and one thought is expelled, unfinished, by another. She is to him like the Fairy Morgana, the fairy who kept so much of chivalry in her enchanted island; she is like the evening star when above his cottage it slowly pierces the soft blue sky with its white brilliancy; she is purer than the water in the well, and sweeter than the malmsey wine, and whiter than the miller's flour; but her heart is as hard as a pebble, and she loves driving to distraction a whole lot of youths who dangle behind her, captives of those heart-thievish eyes of hers. But she is also a most excellent housewife, can stand any amount of hard field labour, and makes lots of money by weaving beautiful woollen stuff. To see her going, to church of a morning, she is a little pearl! her bodice is of damask, and her petticoat of bright, colour, and she kneels down carefully where she may be seen, being so smart. And then, when she dances!--a born dancer, bouncing like a little goat, and twirling more than a mill-wheel; and when she has finished she makes you such a curtsey; no citizen's wife in Florence can curtsey as she does. It was in April that he first fell in love. She was picking salad in the garden; he begged her for a little, and she sent him about his business; las, alas! ever since then his peace has been gone; he cannot sleep, he can only think of her, and follow her about; he has become quite good-for-nothing as to his field work,--yet he hears all the people around laughing and saying, "Of course Vallera will get her." Only _she_ will pay no heed to him. She is finer to look at than the Pope, whiter than the whitest wood core: she is more delectable than are the young figs to the earwigs, more beautiful than the turnip flower, sweeter than honey. He is more in love with her than the moth is in love with the lamp; she loves to see him perishing for her. If he could cut himself in two without too much pain, he would, just to let her see that he carries her in his heart. No; he would cut out his heart, and when she has touched it with that slender hand of hers, it would cry out, "Nencia, Nencia bella." But, after all, he is not to be despised: he is an excellent labourer, most learned in buying--and selling pigs, he can play the bagpipe beautifully; he is rich, is willing to go to any expense to please her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair may be nice and fuzzy from the crimping irons; and if only he were to get himself tight hose and a silk jerkin, he would be as good as any Florentine burgess. But she will not listen; or, rather, she listens and laughs. Yes, she sits up in bed at night and laughs herself to death at the mere thought of him, that is all he gets. But he knows what it is! There is a fellow who will keep sneaking about her; if Vallera only catch him near his cottage, won't he give him a taste of his long new knife! nay, rip him up and throw his bowels, like those of a pig, to dry on a roof! He is sorry--perhaps he bores her--God bless you, Nencia!--he had better go and look after his sheep.

All this is not the poetry of the Renaissance peasant; it is the poem made out of his reality; the songs which Vallera sang in the fields about his Nencia we must seek in the volume of Tigri; those rispetti and stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four centuries ago; they are much more beautiful and poetic than any of Lorenzo's work; but Lorenzo has given us not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given us a peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears; he has given us the peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his sweetheart, as they exist even now. For Lorenzo is gone, and, greater than he, the paladins and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and virgins of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities; and the very Greek and Roman heroes of a hundred years ago, the very knights and covenanters of forty years since, have joined them; but Vallera exists still, and still in the flesh exists his Nenciozza. Everything changes, except the country and the peasant. For, in the long farms of Southern Tuscany, with double row of blackened balcony all tapestried with heavy ingots of Indian corn, and spread out among the olives of the hillside, up which twists the rough bullock road protected by its vine trellis; and in the little farms, with queer hood-shaped double roofs (as if to pull over the face of the house when it blows hard), and pigeon towers which show that some day they must have been fortified, all about Florence; farms which I pass every day, with their sere trees all round, their rough gardens of bright dahlias and chrysanthemums draggled by the autumn rains--in these there are, do not doubt it, still Nencias: magnificent creatures, fit models for Amazons, only just a trifle too full-blown and matronly; but with real Amazonian limbs, firm and delicate, under their red and purple striped print frocks; creatures with heads set on necks like towers or columns, necks firm in broad, well-fleshed chest as branches in a tree's trunk; great penthouses of reddish yellow or lustreless black crimped hair over the forehead; the forehead, like the cheeks, furrowed a good deal--perhaps we dainty people might say, faded and wrinkled by work in the burning sun and the wind; women whom you see shovelling bread into the heated ovens, or plashing in winter with bare arms in half-frozen streams, or digging up a turnip field in the drizzle; or on a Sunday, standing listless by their door, surrounded by rolling and squalling brats, and who, when they slowly look up at the passer-by, show us, on those monumental faces of theirs, a strange smile, a light of bright eyes and white teeth; a smile which to us sophisticated townspeople is as puzzling as certain sudden looks in some comely animal, but which yet makes us understand instinctively that we have before us a Nencia; and that the husband yonder, though he now swears at his wife, and perhaps occasionally beats her, has nevertheless, in his day, dreamed, argued, raged, and sung to himself just like Lorenzo's Vallera.

The "Nencia da Barberino" is certainly Lorenzo dei Medici's masterpiece: it is completely and satisfactorily worked out. Yet we may strain possibilities to the point of supposing (which, however, I cannot for a moment suppose) that this "Nencia" is a kind of fluke; that by an accident a beautiful and seemingly appreciative poem has resulted where the author, a mediaeval realist of a superior Villon sort, had intended only a piece of utter grotesqueness. But important as is the "Nencia," Lorenzo has left behind him another poem, greatly inferior in completeness, but which settles beyond power of doubt that in him the Renaissance was not merely no longer mediaeval, but most intensely modern. This poem is the "Ambra." It is simply an allegorical narrative of the inundation, by the river Ombrone, of a portion, called Ambra, of the great Medicean villa of Poggio a Caiano. Lorenzo's object was evidently to write a semi-Ovidian poem, of a kind common in his day, and common almost up to our own: a river-god, bearded, crown of reeds, urn, general dampness and uproariousness of temper, all quite correct; and a nymph, whom he pursues, who prays to the Virgin huntress to save her from his love, and who, just in the nick of time, is metamorphosed into a mossy stone, dimly showing her former woman's shape; the style of thing, charming, graceful, insipid, of which every one can remember a dozen instances, and which immediately brings up to the mind a vision of grand-ducal gardens, where, among the clipped ilexes and the cypress trunks, great lumbering water-gods and long-limbed nymphs splash, petrified and covered with melancholy ooze and yellow lichen, among the stagnant grotto waters. In some respects, therefore, there is in the "Ambra" somewhat more artificial, more _barrocco_ than that early Renaissance of Politian and Pontano would warrant. There also several bits, half graceful, half awkward, pedantic, constrained, childish, delightful, like the sedge-crowned rivers telling each other anecdotes of the ways and customs of their respective countries, and especially the charming dance of zephyr with the flowers on the lawns of Cyprus, which must immediately suggest pictures by Piero di Cosimo and by Botticelli. So far, therefore, there is plenty to enjoy, but nothing to astonish, in the "Ambra." But the Magnificent Lorenzo has had the extraordinary whim of beginning his allegory with a description, twenty-one stanzas long, of the season of floods. A description, full of infinitely delicate minute detail: of the plants which have kept their foliage while the others are bare--the prickly juniper, the myrtle and bay; of the flocks of cranes printing the sky with their queer shapes, of the fish under the ice, and the eagle circling slowly round the ponds--little things which affect us mixed up as they are with all manner of stiff classic allusions, very much as do the carefully painted daisies and clover among the embossed and gilded unrealities of certain old pictures. From these rather finikin details, Lorenzo passes, however, to details which are a good deal more than details, things little noticed until almost recently: the varying effect of the olives on the hillside--a grey, green mass, a silver ripple, according as the wind stirs them; the golden appearance of the serene summer air, and so forth; details no longer, in short, but essentially, however minute, effects. And then, suddenly leaving such things behind, he rushes into the midst of a real picture, a picture which you might call almost impressionistic, of the growth of rivers and the floods. The floods are a grand sight; more than a sight--a grand performance, a drama; sometimes, God knows, a tragedy. Last night, under a warm, hazy sky, through whose buff-tinted clouds the big moon crept in and out, the mountain stream was vaguely visible--a dark riband in its wide shingly bed, when the moon was hidden; a narrow, shallow, broken stream, sheets of brilliant metallic sheen, and showers of sparkling facets, when the moon was out; a mere drowsy murmur mixing with the creaking and rustling of dry reeds in the warm, wet wind. Thus in the evening. Look down from your window next morning. A tremendous rushing mass of waters, thick, turbid, reddish, with ominous steel-like lustre where its coppery surface reflects the moist blue sky, now fills the whole bed, shaking its short fringe of foam, tossing the spray as it swirls round each still projecting stone, angrily tugging at the reeds and alders which flop their draggled green upon its surface; eddying faster and faster, encircling each higher rock or sandbank, covering it at last with its foaming red mass. Meanwhile, the sky is covered in with vaporous grey clouds, which enshroud the hills; the clear runnels, dash over the green banks, spirt through the walls, break their way across the roads; the little mountain torrents, dry all summer, descend, raging rivers, red with the hill soil; and with every gust of warm wind the river rises higher and rushes along tremendously impetuous. Down in the plain it eats angrily at the soft banks, and breaks its muddy waters, fringed on the surface with a sort of ominous grime of broken wood and earth, higher and higher against the pierheads of the bridges; shaking them to split their masonry, while crowds of men and women look on, staring at the rising water, at the planks, tables, beams, cottage thatches, nay, whole trees, which it hurls at the bridge piers. And then, perhaps, the terrible, soft, balmy flood-wind persisting, there comes suddenly the catastrophe; the embankment, shaken by the resistless current, cracks, fissures gives way; and the river rushes into the city, as it has already rushed into the fields, to spread in constantly rising, melancholy livid pools, throughout the streets and squares.

This Lorenzo saw, and, wonderful to say, in this soiled and seething river, in these torn and crumbling banks, in all the dreadfulness of these things, he saw a beauty and a grandeur. But he saw not merely the struggle of the waters and of the land; he--the heartless man who laid his hand even upon the saved-up money of orphan girls in order to keep up the splendour of his house and of his bank--saw the misfortunes of the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the riverside, invaded by the flood; the doors burst open by the tremendous rushing stream, the stables and garners filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, watching their sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, and flour, the hemp bleached in the summer, the linen spun and woven in the long winter, their furniture and chattels, their labour and their hope whirled along by the foaming river.

Thus by this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this flippant, egotistic artist and despot, has at last been broken the long spell of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of spring, but of peasants and of autumn. An immoral and humanistic time, an immoral and humanistic man, have had at length a heart for the simpler, ruder less favoured classes of mankind; an eye for the bolder, grander, more solemn sights of Nature: modern times have begun, modern sympathies, modern art are in full swing.

SYMMETRIA PRISCA.

Mirator veterum, discipulusque memor,
Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi
Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas.
--_Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph by Platino Piatto_.

Into the holy enclosure which had received the precious shiploads of earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the graveyard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time face to face with the art of Antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on their arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, Orcagna of Florence, or Lorenzetti of Siena, painted the typical masterpiece of mediaeval art, the great fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful realization of character and situation he painted the prosperous of the world, the dapper youths and damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales and sound of lute and psaltery, unconscious of the colossal scythe wielded by the gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow them to the ground; while the crowd of beggars, ragged, maimed, paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their withered limbs, see and implore Death, and cry stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered robes and gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and Castruccio of Lucca, with their retinue of ladies and squires, and hounds and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly their horses stop, draw back; the Emperor's bay stretches out his long neck sniffing the air; the kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses; Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign, reigns impartially over all.

But opposite, all along the sides of the painted cloister, the Amazons are wrestling with the youths on the stone of the sarcophagi; the chariots are dashing forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble waves; the Bacchantae are striking their timbrels in their dance with the satyrs; the birds are pecking at the grapes, the goats are nibbling at the vines; all is life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken Hermes; the stalwart Hercules, resting against his club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath his beard; and the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds of men lie rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph for ever; our day will come."

We have all seen them opposite to each other, these two arts, the art born of Antiquity and the art born of the Middle Ages; but whether this meeting was friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question of constant dispute. To some, mediaeval art has appeared being led, Dante-like, by a magician Virgil through the mysteries of nature up to a Christian Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of heaven; others have seen mediaeval art, like some strong, chaste Sir Guyon turning away resolutely from the treacherous sorceress of Antiquity, and pursuing solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some the antique has been an impure goddess Venus, seducing and corrupting the Christian artist; the antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an unattainable perfection, ever pursued by the mediaeval craftsman, but seized by him only as a phantom. Magician or witch, voluptuous, destroying Venus or cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during the Renaissance? Was the relation between them that of tuition, cool and abstract; or of fruitful love; or of deluding and damning example?

The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was generated in the early mediaeval revival. The seeds may, indeed, have come down from Antiquity, but they remained for nearly a thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting remains of former vegetation; and it was not till that vegetation had completely decomposed and become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction had turned into germination, that artistic organism timidly reappeared. The new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it. Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artizans and merchants formed into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture; its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until, when mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation, when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres; painting, in the hands of Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and of Guido da Siena, freed itself from the tradition of the mosaicists as sculpture had freed itself from the practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an independent and organic art.

Thus painting was born of a new civilization, and grew by its own vital force; a thing of the Middle Ages, original and spontaneous. But contemporaneous with the mediaeval revival was the resuscitation of Antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization developed, the old civilization was exhumed; real Latin began to be studied only when real Italian began to be written; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio were at once the founders of modern literature and the exponents of the literature of antiquity; the strong young present was to profit by the experience of the past.

As it was with literature, so likewise was it with art. The most purely mediaeval sculpture, the sculpture which has, as it were, just detached itself from the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic sculptors, Niccolo, Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn from fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture how to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to chisel the robe of the Virgin. This spontaneous mediaeval sculpture, aided by the antique, preceded by a full half-century the appearance of mediaeval painting; and it was from the study of the works of the Pisan sculptors that Cimabue and Giotto learned to depart from the mummified monstrosities of the hieratic, Byzantine and Roman style of Giunta and Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the Pisans the painting of the school of Giotto received at second-hand the teachings of Antiquity. Sculpture had created painting; painting now belonged to the painters. In the hands of Giotto it developed within a few years into an art which seemed almost mature, an art dealing victoriously with its materials, triumphantly solving its problems, executing as if by miracle all that was demanded of it. But Giottesque art appeared perfect merely because it was limited; it did all that was required of it, because that which was required was little; it was not asked to reproduce the real nor to represent the beautiful; it was asked merely to suggest a character, a situation, a story.

The artistic development of a nation has its exact parallel in the artistic development of an individual. The child uses his pencil to tell a story, satisfied with balls and sticks as body, head, and legs; provided he and his friends can associate with them the ideas in their minds. The youth sets himself to copy what he sees, to reproduce forms and effects, without any aim beyond the mere pleasure of copying. The mature artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he approves, he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian painting the generation of men who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the mature artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced youths; the Giottesques are the children--children Titanic and seraph-like, but children nevertheless; and, like all children, learning more perhaps in their few years than can the youth and the man learn in a lifetime.