Chapter VIII (1)

HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE OF TASTE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.

SECT. I. 1520-1550.

_Poetry in Italy--In Spain and Portugal--In France and Germany--In
England--Wyatt and Surrey--Latin Poetry._

|Poetry of Bembo.|

1. The singular grace of Ariosto’s poem had not less distinguished it than his fertility of invention and brilliancy of language. For the Italian poetry, since the days of Petrarch, with the exception of Lorenzo and Politian, the boasts of Florence, had been very deficient in elegance; the sonnets and odes of the fifteenth century, even those written near its close, by Tibaldeo, Serafino d’Aquila, Benivieni, and other now obscure names, though the list of poets in Crescimbeni will be found very long, are hardly mentioned by the generality of critics but for the purpose of censure; while Boiardo, who deserved most praise for bold and happy inventions, lost much of it through an unpolished and inharmonious style. In the succeeding period, the faults of the Italian school were entirely opposite; in Bembo, and those who, by their studious and servile imitation of one great master, were called Petrarchists, there was an elaborate sweetness, a fastidious delicacy, a harmony of sound, which frequently served as an excuse for coldness of imagination and poverty of thought. “As the too careful imitation of Cicero,” says Tiraboschi, “caused Bembo to fall into an affected elegance in his Latin style, so in his Italian poetry, while he labours to restore the manner of Petrarch, he displays more of art than of natural genius. Yet, by banishing the rudeness of former poetry, and pointing out the right path, he was of no small advantage to those who knew how to imitate his excellencies and avoid his faults.”[766]

[766] Vol. x. p. 3.

|Its beauties and defects.|

2. The chief care of Bembo was to avoid the unpolished lines which deformed the poetry of the fifteenth century in the eyes of one so exquisitely sensible to the charms of diction. It is from him that the historians of Italian literature date the revival of the Petrarchan elegance; of which a foreigner, unless conversant with the language in all its varieties, can hardly judge, though he may perceive the want of original conception, and the monotony of conventional phrases, which is too frequently characteristic of the Italian sonnet. Yet the sonnets of Bembo on the death of his Morosina, the mother of his children, display a real tenderness not unworthy of his master; and the canzone on that of his brother has obtained not less renown; though Tassoni, a very fastidious critic, has ridiculed its centonism, or studious incorporation of lines from Petrarch; a practice which the habit of writing Latin poetry, wherein it should be sparingly employed, but not wholly avoided, would naturally encourage.[767]

[767] Tiraboschi, ibid. Corniani, iv. 102.

|Character of Italian poetry.|

3. The number of versifiers whom Italy produced in the sixteenth century was immensely great. Crescimbeni gives a list of eighty earlier than 1550, whom he selects from many hundred ever forgotten names. By far the larger proportion of these confined themselves to the sonnet and the canzone or ode; and the theme is generally love, though they sometimes change it to religion. A conventional phraseology, an interminable repetition of the beauties and coldness of perhaps an ideal, certainly to us an unknown mistress, run through these productions; which so much resemble each other, as sometimes to suggest to any one who reads the Sceltas which bring together many extracts from these poets, no other parallel than that of the hooting of owls in concert: a sound melancholy and not unpleasing to all ears in its way, but monotonous, unintellectual, and manifesting as little real sorrow or sentiment in the bird as these compositions do in the poet.[768]

[768] Muratori himself observes the tantalising habit in which
sonnetteers indulge themselves, of threatening to die for love,
which never comes to anything; quella volgare smania che mostrano
gl’amanti di voler morire, e che tante volte s’ode in bocca loro,
ma non mai viene ad effetto.

|Alamanni.|

|Vittoria Colonna.|

4. A few exceptions may certainly be made. Alamanni, though the sonnet is not his peculiar line of strength, and though he often follows the track of Petrarch with almost servile imitation, could not, with his powerful genius, but raise himself above the common level. His Lygura Pianta, a Genoese lady, the heroine of many sonnets, is the shadow of Laura; but when he turns to the calamities of Italy and his own, that stern sound is heard again, that almost reminds us of Dante and Alfieri. The Italian critics, to whom we must of course implicitly defer as to the grace and taste of their own writers, speak well of Molza, and some other of the smaller poets; though they are seldom exempt from the general defects above mentioned. But none does Crescimbeni so much extol, as a poetess, in every respect the most eminent of her sex in Italy, the widow of the Marquis of Pescara, Vittoria Colonna, surnamed, he says, by the public voice, the divine. The rare virtues and consummate talents of this lady were the theme of all Italy, in that brilliant age of her literature; and her name is familiar to the ordinary reader at this day. The canzone dedicated to the memory of her illustrious husband is worthy of both.[769]

[769] Crescimbeni della Volgar Poesia, vols. ii. and iii. For the
character of Vittoria Colonna, see ii. 360. Roscoe (Leo X. iii.
314) thinks her canzone on her husband in no respect inferior to
that of Bembo on his brother. It is rather by a stretch of
chronology, that this writer reckons Vittoria, Berni, and several
more, among the poets of Leo’s age.

|Satires of Ariosto and Alamanni.|

5. The satires of Ariosto, seven in number, and composed in the Horatian manner, were published after his death in 1534. Tiraboschi places them at the head of that class of poetry. The reader will find an analysis of these satires, with some extracts, in Ginguéné.[770] The twelve satires of Alamanni, one of the Florentine exiles, of which the first edition is dated in 1532, though of earlier publication than those of Ariosto, indicate an acquaintance with them. They are to one another as Horace and Juvenal, and as their fortunes might lead us to expect; one gay, easy, full of the best form of Epicurean philosophy, cheerfulness, and content in the simpler enjoyments of life; the other ardent, scornful, unsparing, declamatory, a hater of vice, and no great lover of mankind, pouring forth his moral wrath in no feeble strain. We have seen in another place his animadversions on the court of Rome; nor does anything in Italy escape his resentment.[771] The other poems of Alamanni are of a very miscellaneous description; eclogues, little else than close imitations of Theocritus and Virgil, elegies, odes, hymns, psalms, fables, tragedies, and what were called selve, a name for all unclassed poetry.

[770] ix. 100-129. Corniani, iv. 55. In one passage of the second
satire, Ariosto assumes a tone of higher dignity than Horace
ever ventured, and inveighs against the Italian courts in the
spirit of his rival Alamanni.

[771] The following lines, which conclude the twelfth and last satire,
may serve as a specimen of Alamanni’s declamatory tone of
invective, and his bitter attacks on Rome, whom he is addressing.

O chi vedesse il ver, vedrebbe come
Più disnor tu che ’l tuo Luther Martino
Porti a te stessa, e più gravose some;
Non la Germania, nò, ma l’ocio, il vino,
Avarizia, ambition, lussuria e gola,
Ti mena al fin, che già veggiam vicino.
Non pur questo dico io, non Francia sola,
Non pur la Spagna, tutta Italia ancora
Che ti tien d’heresia, di vizi scuola.
E che nol crede, ne dimandi ogn’ora
Urbin, Ferrara, l’Orso, e la Colonna,
La Marca, il Romagnuol, ma più che plora
Per te servendo, che fù d’Altri donna.

|Alamanni.|

|Rucellai.|

|Trissino.|

6. Alamanni’s epic, or rather romantic poem, the Avarchide, is admitted by all critics to be a work of old age, little worthy of his name. But his poem on agriculture, la Coltivazione, has been highly extolled. A certain degree of languor seems generally to hang on Italian blank verse; and in didactic poetry it is not likely to be overcome. The Bees of Rucellai is a poem written with exquisite sweetness of style; but the critics have sometimes forgotten to mention, that it is little else than a free translation from the fourth Georgic.[772] No one has ever pretended to rescue from the charge of dulness and insipidity the epic poem of the father of blank verse, Trissino, on the liberation of Italy from the Goths by Belisarius. It is, of all long poems that are remembered at all, the most unfortunate in its reputation.

[772] Roscoe’s Leo, iii. 351. Tiraboschi, x. 85. Algarotti, and
Corniani (v. 116), who quotes him, do not esteem the poem of
Rucellai highly.

|Berni.|

7. A very different name is that of Berni, partly known by his ludicrous poetry, which has given that style the appellation of Poesia Bernesca, rather on account of his excellence than originality, for nothing is so congenial to the Italians,[773] but far more by his _rifaccimento_, or remoulding of the poem of Boiardo. The Orlando Innamorato, an ill-written poem, especially to Tuscan ears, had been encumbered by the heavy continuation of Agostini. Yet if its own intrinsic beauties of invention would not have secured it from oblivion, the vast success of the Orlando Furioso, itself only a continuation, and borrowing most of its characters from Boiardo’s poem, must have made it impossible for Italians of any curiosity to neglect the primary source of so much delight. Berni, therefore, undertook the singular office of writing over again the Orlando Innamorato, preserving the sense of almost every stanza, though every stanza was more or less altered, and inserting nothing but a few introductory passages, in the manner of Ariosto, to each canto.[774] The genius of Berni, playful, satirical, flexible, was admirably fitted to perform this labour; the rude Lombardisms of the lower Po gave way to the racy idiom of Florence; and the Orlando Innamorato has descended to posterity as the work of two minds, remarkably combined in this instance; the sole praise of invention, circumstance, description, and very frequently that of poetical figure and sentiment, belonging to Boiardo: that of style, in the peculiar and limited use of the word, to Berni. The character of the poem, as thus adorned, has sometimes been misconceived. Though Berni is almost always sprightly, he is not, in this romance, a burlesque or buffoon poet.[775] I once heard Foscolo prefer him to Ariosto. A foreigner, not so familiar with the peculiarities of language, would probably think his style less brilliant and less pellucid; and it is in execution alone that he claims to be considered as an original poet. The Orlando Innamorato was also remoulded by Domenichi in 1545; but the excellence of Berni has caused this feeble production to be nearly passed over by the Italian critics.[776]

[773] Corniani, iv. 252. Roscoe, iii. 323.

[774] The first edition of the Rifaccimento is in 1541, and the second
in 1542. In that of 1545, the first eighty-two stanzas are very
different from those that correspond in former editions; some that
follow are suspected not to be genuine. It seems that we have no
edition on which we can wholly depend. No edition of Berni appeared
from 1545 to 1725, though Domenichi was printed several times. This
reformer of Boiardo did not alter the text nearly so much as Berni.
Panizzi, vol. ii.

[775] Tiraboschi, vii. 195, censures Berni for “motti e racconti troppo
liberi ed empi, che vi ha inseriti.” Ginguéné exclaims, as well he
may, against this imputation. Berni has inserted no stories; and
unless it were the few stanzas that remain at the head of the
twentieth canto, it is hard to say what Tiraboschi meant by
impieties. But though Tiraboschi must have read Berni, he has here
chosen to copy Zeno, who talks of “il poema di Boiardo, rifatto dal
Berni, e di serio trasformato in ridicolo, e di onesto in
iscandoloso, e però giustamente dannato dallo chiesa.” (Fontanini,
p. 273). Zeno, even more surely than Tiraboschi, was perfectly
acquainted with Berni’s poem: how could he give so false a
character of it? Did he copy some older writer? And why? It seems
hard not to think that some suspicion of Berni’s bias towards
Protestantism had engendered a prejudice against his poem, which
remained when the cause had been forgotten, as it certainly was in
the days of Zeno and Tiraboschi.

[776] “The ingenuity,” says Mr. Panizzi, “with which Berni finds a
resemblance between distant objects, and the rapidity with which he
suddenly connects the most remote ideas; the solemn manner in which
he either alludes to ludicrous events or utters an absurdity; the
air of innocence and naïveté with which he presents remarks full of
shrewdness and knowledge of the world; that peculiar bonhommie with
which he seems to look kindly and at the same time unwillingly on
human errors or wickedness; the keen irony which he uses with so
much appearance of simplicity and aversion to bitterness; the
seeming singleness of heart with which he appears anxious to excuse
men and actions, at the very moment that he is most inveterate in
exposing them; these are the chief elements of Berni’s poetry. Add
to this the style, the loftiness of the verse contrasting with the
frivolity of the argument, the gravest conception expressed in the
most homely manner; the seasonable use of strange metaphors and of
similes sometimes sublime, and for this very reason the more
laughable, when considered with relation to the subject which they
are intended to illustrate, form the most remarkable features of
his style.” P. 120.

“Any candid Italian scholar who will peruse the Rifaccimento of
Berni with attention, will be compelled to admit that, although
many parts of the poem of Boiardo have been improved in that work,
such has not always been the case; and will moreover be convinced
that some parts of the Rifaccimento, besides those suspected in
former times, are evidently either not written by Berni, or have
not received from him, if they be his, such corrections as to be
worthy of their author.” P. 141. Mr. P. shows in several passages
his grounds for this suspicion.

|Spanish poets.|

|Boscan. Garcilasso.|

8. Spain now began to experience one of those revolutions in fashionable taste, which await the political changes of nations. Her native poetry, whether Castilian or Valencian, had characteristics of its own, that placed it in a different region from the Italian. The short heroic, amatory, or devotional songs, which the Peninsular dialects were accustomed to exhibit, were too ardent, too hyperbolical for a taste which, if not correctly classical, was at least studious of a grace not easily compatible with extravagance. But the continual intercourse of the Spaniards with Italy, partly subject to their sovereign, and the scene of his wars, accustomed their nobles to relish the charms of a sister language, less energetic, but more polished than their own. Two poets, Boscan and Garcilasso de la Vega, brought from Italy the softer beauties of amorous poetry, embodied in the regular sonnet, which had hitherto been little employed in the Peninsula. These poems seem not to have been printed till 1543, when both Boscan and Garcilasso were dead, and their new school had already met with both support and opposition at the court of Valladolid. The national character is not entirely lost in these poets; love still speaks with more impetuous ardour, with more plaintive sorrow, than in the contemporary Italians; but the restraints of taste and reason are perceived to control his voice. An eclogue of Garcilasso, called Salicio and Nemoroso, is pronounced by the Spanish critics to be one of the finest works in their language. It is sadder than the lament of saddest nightingales. We judge of all such poetry differently in the progressive ages of life.

|Mendoza.|

9. Diego Mendoza, one of the most remarkable men for variety of talents whom Spain has produced, ranks with Boscan and Garcilasso as a reformer of Castilian poetry. His character as a soldier, as the severe governor of Siena, as the haughty minister of Charles at the court of Rome and the council at Trent, is notorious in history.[777] His epistles, in an Horatian style, full of a masculine and elevated philosophy, though deficient in harmony and polish, are preferred to his sonnets; a species of composition where these faults are more perceptible; and for which, at least in the style then popular, the stern understanding of Mendoza seems to have been ill adapted. “Though he composed,” says Bouterwek, “in the Italian manner with less facility than Boscan and Garcilasso, he felt more correctly than they or any other of his countrymen the difference between the Spanish and Italian languages, with respect to their capabilities for versification. The Spanish admits of none of those pleasing elisions, which, particularly when terminating vowels are omitted, render the mechanism of Italian versification so easy, and enable the poet to augment or diminish the number of syllables according to his pleasure; and this difference in the two languages renders the composition of a Spanish sonnet a difficult task. Still more does the Spanish language seem hostile to the soft termination of a succession of feminine rhymes, for the Spanish poet, who adopts this rule of the Italian sonnet, is compelled to banish from his rhymes all infinitives of verbs, together with a whole host of sonorous substantives and adjectives. Mendoza therefore availed himself of the use of masculine rhymes in his sonnets; but this metrical licence was strongly censured by all partizans of the Italian style. Nevertheless, had he given to his sonnets more of the tenderness of Petrarch, it is probable that they would have found imitators. Some of them, indeed, may be considered as successful productions, and throughout all the language is correct and noble.”[778]

[777] Sadolet, in one of his epistles dated 1532 (lib. vi. p. 309 edit.
1554), gives an interesting character of Mendoza, then young, who
had visited him at Carpentras on his way to Rome; a journey
undertaken solely for the sake of learning.

[778] P. 198.

|Saa di Miranda.|

10. The lyric poems of Mendoza, written in the old national style, tacitly improved and polished, are preferred by the Spaniards to his other works. Many of them are printed in the Romancero General. Saa di Miranda, though a Portuguese, has written much in Castilian, as well as in his own language. Endowed by nature with the melancholy temperament akin to poetic sensibility, he fell readily into the pastoral strain, for which his own language is said to be peculiarly formed. The greater and better part of his eclogues, however, are in Castilian. He is said to have chosen the latter language for imagery, and his own for reflection.[779] Of this poet, as well as of his Castilian contemporaries, the reader will find a sufficient account in Bouterwek and Sismondi.

[779] Bouterwek, p. 240. Sismondi.

|Ribeyro.|

11. Portugal, however, produced one who did not abandon her own soft and voluptuous dialect, Ribeyro; the first distinguished poet she could boast. His strains are chiefly pastoral, the favourite style of his country, and breathe that monotonous and excessive melancholy, with which it requires some congenial emotion of our own to sympathise. A romance of Ribeyro, Menina e Moça, is one of the earliest among the few specimens of noble prose which we find in that language. It is said to be full of obscure allusions to real events in the author’s life, and cannot be read with much interest; but some have thought that it is the prototype of the Diana of Montemayor, and the whole school of pastoral romance, which was afterwards admired in Europe for an entire century. We have however seen that the Arcadia of Sannazzaro has the priority; and I am not aware that there is any specific distinction between that romance and this of Ribeyro. It should be here observed, that Ribeyro should perhaps have been mentioned before; his eclogues seem to have been written and possibly published, before the death of Emanuel in 1521. The romance however was a later production.[780]

[780] Bouterwek, Hist. of Portuguese Liter., p. 24. Sismondi, iv. 280.

|French poetry.|

|Marot.|

12. The French versifiers of the age of Francis I. are not few. It does not appear that they rise above the level of the preceding reigns, Louis XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII.; some of them mistaking insipid allegory for the creations of fancy, some tamely describing the events of their age, others, with rather more spirit, satirising the vices of mankind, and especially of the clergy; while many, in little songs, expressed their ideal love with more perhaps of conventional gallantry than passion or tenderness,[781] yet with some of those light and graceful touches which distinguish this style of French poetry. Clément Marot ranks far higher. The psalms of Marot, though famous in their day, are among his worst performances. His distinguishing excellence is a naïveté, or pretended simplicity, of which it is the highest praise to say, that it was the model of La Fontaine. This style of humour, than which nothing is more sprightly or diverting, seems much less indigenous among ourselves, if we may judge by our older literature, than either among the French or Italians.

[781] Goujet, Bibliothèque Française vols. x. and xi. passim. Auguis,
Recueil des Anciens Poëtes Français, vols. ii. and iii.

|Their metrical structure.|

13. In the days of Marot, French poetry had not put on all its chains. He does not observe the regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, nor scruple the open vowel, the suppression of a mute e before a consonant in scanning the verse, the carrying on the sense, without a pause, to the middle of the next line. These blemishes, as later usage accounts them, are common to Marot with all his contemporaries. In return, they dealt much in artificial schemes of recurring words or lines, as the chant royal, where every stanza was to be in the same rhyme, and to conclude with the same verse; or the rondeau, a very popular species of metre long afterwards, wherein two or three initial words were repeated at the refrain or close of every stanza.[782]

[782] Goujet, Bibl. Française, xi. 36. Gaillard, Vie de François I.,
vii. 20. Pasquier, Recherches de la France, l. vii. c. 5. Auguis,
vol. iii.

|German poetry.|

|Hans Sachs.|

14. The poetical and imaginative spirit of Germany, subdued as it had long been, was never so weak as in this century. Though we cannot say that this poverty of genius was owing to the Reformation, it is certain that the Reformation aggravated very much in this sense the national debasement. The controversies were so scholastic in their terms, so sectarian in their character, so incapable of alliance with any warmth of soul, that, so far as their influence extended, and that was to a large part of the educated classes, they must have repressed every poet, had such appeared, by rendering the public insensible to his superiority. The meister-singers were sufficiently prosaic in their original constitution; they neither produced, nor perhaps would have suffered to exhibit itself, any real excellence in poetry. But they became in the sixteenth century still more rigorous in their requisitions of a mechanical conformity to rule; while at the same time they prescribed a new code of law to the versifier, that of theological orthodoxy. Yet one man, of more brilliant fancy and powerful feeling than the rest, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nuremberg, stands out from the crowd of these artizans. Most conspicuous as a dramatic writer, his copious muse was silent in no line of verse. Heinsius accounts the bright period of Hans Sachs’s literary labours to have been from 1530 to 1538; though he wrote much both sooner and after that time. His poems of all kinds are said to have exceeded six thousand; but not more than one-fourth of them are in print. In this facility of composition he is second only to Lope de Vega; and it must be presumed that, uneducated, unread, accustomed to find his public in his own class, so wonderful a fluency was accompanied by no polish, and only occasionally by gleams of vigour and feeling. The German critics are divided concerning the genius of Hans Sachs: Wieland and Goethe gave him lustre at one time by their eulogies; but these having been as exaggerated as the contempt of a former generation, the place of the honest and praiseworthy shoemaker seems not likely to be fixed very high; and there has not been demand enough for his works, which are very scarce, to encourage their republication.[783]

[783] Heinsius, iv. 150. Bouterwek, ix. 381. Retrospective Review,
vol. x.

|German hymns.|

15. The Germans, constitutionally a devout people, were never so much so as in this first age of protestantism. And this, in combination with their musical temperament, displayed itself in the peculiar line of hymns. No other nation has so much of this poetry. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the number of religious songs was reckoned at 33,000, and that of their authors at 500. Those of Luther have been more known than the rest; they are hard and rude, but impressive and deep. But this poetry, essentially restrained in its flight, could not develop the creative powers of genius.[784]

[784] Bouterwek. Heinsius.

|Theuerdanks of Pfintzing.|

16. Among the few poems of this age none has been so celebrated as the Theuerdanks of Melchior Pfintzing, secretary to the emperor Maximilian; a poem at one time attributed to the master, whose praises it records, instead of the servant. This singular work, published originally in 1517, with more ornament of printing and delineation than was usual, is an allegory, with scarce any spirit of invention or language; wherein the knight Theuerdanks, and his adventures in seeking the marriage of the princess Ehrreich, represent the memorable union of Maximilian with the heiress of Burgundy. A small number of German poets are commemorated by Bouterwek and Heinsius, superior no doubt in ability to Pfintzing, but so obscure in our eyes, and so little extolled by their countrymen, that we need only refer to their pages.

|English poetry. Lyndsay.|

17. In the earlier part of this period of thirty years, we can find very little English poetry. Sir David Lyndsay, an accomplished gentleman and scholar of Scotland, excels his contemporary Skelton in such qualities, if not in fertility of genius. Though inferior to Dunbar in vividness of imagination and in elegance of language, he shows a more reflecting and philosophical mind; and certainly his satire upon James V. and his court is more poignant than the other’s panegyric upon the Thistle. But in the ordinary style of his versification he seems not to rise much above the prosaic and tedious rhymers of the fifteenth century. His descriptions are as circumstantial without selection as theirs; and his language, partaking of a ruder dialect, is still more removed from our own. The poems of Lyndsay were printed in 1540, and are among the very first-fruits of the Scottish press; but one of these, the Complaint of the Papingo, had appeared in London two years before. Lyndsay’s poetry is said to have contributed to the Reformation in Scotland; in which, however, he is but like many poets of his own and preceding times. The clergy were an inexhaustible theme of bitter reproof.

|Wyatt and Surrey.|

18. “In the latter end of king Henry VIII.’s reign,” says Puttenham in his Art of Poesie, “sprung up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travailed into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and stile of the Italian poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie, from that it had bene before, and for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English meeter and stile. In the same time or not long after was the Lord Nicolas Vaux, a man of much facilitie in vulgar makings.”[785] The poems of Sir John Wyatt, who died in 1544, and of the Earl of Surrey, executed in 1547, were published in 1557, with a few by other hands, in a scarce little book called Tottel’s Miscellanies. They were, however, in all probability known before; and it seems necessary to mention them in this period, as they mark an important epoch in English literature.

[785] Puttenham, book i. ch. 31.

19. Wyatt and Surrey, for we may best name them in the order of time, rather than of civil or poetical rank, have had recently the good fortune to be recommended by an editor of extensive acquaintance with literature, and of still superior taste. It will be a gratification to read the following comparison of the two poets, which I extract the more willingly that it is found in a publication somewhat bulky and expensive for the mass of readers.

|Dr. Nott’s character of them.|

20. “They were men whose minds may be said to have been cast in the same mould; for they differ only in those minuter shades of character which always must exist in human nature; shades of difference so infinitely varied, that there never were and never will be two persons in all respects alike. In their love of virtue and their instinctive hatred and contempt of vice, in their freedom from personal jealousy, in their thirst after knowledge and intellectual improvement, in nice observation of nature, promptitude to action, intrepidity and fondness for romantic enterprise, in magnificence and liberality, in generous support of others and high-spirited neglect of themselves, in constancy in friendship, and tender susceptibility of affections of a still warmer nature, and in everything connected with sentiment and principle, they were one and the same; but when those qualities branch out into particulars, they will be found in some respects to differ.

21. “Wyatt had a deeper and more accurate penetration into the characters of men than Surrey had; hence arises the difference in their satires. Surrey, in his satire against the citizens of London, deals only in reproach; Wyatt, in his, abounds with irony, and those nice touches of ridicule which make us ashamed of our faults, and therefore often silently effect amendment.[786] Surrey’s observation of nature was minute; but he directed it towards the works of nature in general, and the movements of the passions, rather than to the foibles and characters of men; hence it is that he excels in the description of rural objects, and is always tender and pathetic. In Wyatt’s Complaint we hear a strain of manly grief which commands attention, and we listen to it with respect for the sake of him that suffers. Surrey’s distress is painted in such natural terms, that we make it our own, and recognise in his sorrows emotions which we are conscious of having felt ourselves.

[786] Wyatt’s best poem, in this style, the Epistle to John Poins, is
a very close imitation of the tenth satire of Alamanni; it is
abridged, but every thought and every verse in the English is taken
from the Italian. Dr. Nott has been aware of this; but it certainly
detracts a leaf from the laurel of Wyatt, though he has translated
well.

The lighter poems of Wyatt are more unequal than those of Surrey;
but his ode to his lute does not seem inferior to any production of
his noble competitor. The sonnet in which he intimates his secret
passion for Anne Boleyn, whom he describes under the allegory of a
doe, bearing on her collar--

Noli me tangere: I Cæsar’s am,

is remarkable for more than the poetry, though that is pleasing. It
may be doubtful whether Anne were yet queen: but in one of Wyatt’s
latest poems, he seems to allude penitentially to his passion for
her.

22. “In point of taste and perception of propriety in composition, Surrey is more accurate and just than Wyatt; he therefore seldom either offends with conceits, or wearies with repetition, and when he imitates other poets, he is original as well as pleasing. In his numerous translations from Petrarch, he is seldom inferior to his master; and he seldom improves upon him. Wyatt is almost always below the Italian, and frequently degrades a good thought by expressing it so that it is hardly recognizable. Had Wyatt attempted a translation of Virgil, as Surrey did, he would have exposed himself to unavoidable failure.”[787]

[787] Nott’s edition of Wyatt and Surrey, ii. 156.

|Perhaps rather exaggerated.|

23. To remarks so delicate in taste and so founded in knowledge, I should not venture to add much of my own. Something, however, may generally be admitted to modify the ardent panegyrics of an editor. Those who, after reading this brilliant passage, should turn for the first time to the poems either of Wyatt or of Surrey, might think the praise too unbounded, and, in some respects perhaps, not appropriate. It seems to be now ascertained, after sweeping away a host of foolish legends and traditionary prejudices, that the Geraldine of Surrey, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, was a child of thirteen, for whom his passion, if such it is to be called, began several years after his own marriage.[788] But in fact there is more of the conventional tone of amorous song, than of real emotion, in Surrey’s poetry. The

“Easy sighs, such as men draw in love,”

are not like the deep sorrows of Petrarch, or the fiery transports of the Castilians.

[788] Surrey was born about 1518, married Lady Frances Vere 1535,
fell in love, if so it was, in 1541, with Geraldine, who was born
in 1528.

|Surrey improves our versification.|

24. The taste of this accomplished man is more striking than his poetical genius. He did much for his own country and his native language. The versification of Surrey differs very considerably from that of his predecessors. He introduced, as Dr. Nott says, a sort of involution into his style, which gives an air of dignity and remoteness from common life. It was in fact borrowed from the licence of Italian poetry, which our own idiom has rejected. He avoids pedantic words, forcibly obtruded from the Latin, of which our earlier poets, both English and Scots, had been ridiculously fond. The absurd epithets of Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, and Douglas are applied equally to the most different things, so as to show that they annexed no meaning to them. Surrey rarely lays an unnatural stress on final syllables, merely as such, which they would not receive in ordinary pronunciation; another usual trick of the school of Chaucer. His words are well chosen and well arranged.

|Introduces blank verse.|

25. Surrey is the first who introduced blank verse into our English poetry. It has been doubted whether it had been previously employed in Italian, save in tragedy; for the poems of Alamanni and Rucellai were not published before many of our noble poet’s compositions had been written. Dr. Nott, however, admits that Boscan and other Spanish poets had used it. The translation by Surrey of the second book of the Æneid, in blank verse, is among the chief of his productions. No one had, before his time, known how to translate or imitate with appropriate expression. But the structure of his verse is not very harmonious, and the sense is rarely carried beyond the line.

|Dr. Nott’s hypothesis as to his metre.|

26. If we could rely on a theory, advanced and ably supported by his editor, Surrey deserves the still more conspicuous praise of having brought about a great revolution in our poetical numbers. It had been supposed to be proved by Tyrwhitt, that Chaucer’s lines are to be read metrically, in ten or eleven syllables, like the Italian, and, as I apprehend, the French of his time. For this purpose, it is necessary to presume that many terminations, now mute, were syllabically pronounced; and where verses prove refractory after all our endeavours, Tyrwhitt has no scruple in declaring them corrupt. It may be added, that Gray, before the appearance of Tyrwhitt’s essay on the versification of Chaucer, had adopted without hesitation the same hypothesis.[789] But, according to Dr. Nott, the verses of Chaucer, and of all his successors down to Surrey, are merely rhythmical, to be read by cadence, and admitting of considerable variety in the number of syllables, though ten may be the more frequent. In the manuscripts of Chaucer, the line is always broken by a cæsura in the middle, which is pointed out by a virgule; and this is preserved in the early editions down to that of 1532. They come near, therefore, to the short Saxon line, differing chiefly by the alternate rhyme, which converts two verses into one. He maintains that a great many lines of Chaucer cannot be read metrically, though harmonious as verses of cadence. This rhythmical measure he proceeds to show in Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, Skelton, and even Wyatt; and thus concludes, that it was first abandoned by Surrey, in whom it very rarely occurs.[790]

[789] Gray’s Works (edit. Mathias), ii. 1.

[790] Nott’s Dissertation, subjoined to second volume of his Wyatt
and Surrey.

27. This hypothesis, it should be observed, derives some additional plausibility from a passage in Gascoyne’s “Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Rhyme in English,” printed in 1575. “Whosoever do peruse and well consider his (Chaucer’s) works, he shall find that, although his lines are not always of one self-same number of syllables, yet being read by one that hath understanding, the longest verse, and that which hath most syllables in it, will fall (to the ear) correspondent unto that which hath fewest syllables; and likewise that which hath fewest syllables shall be found yet to consist of words that have such natural sound, as may seem equal in length to a verse which hath many more syllables of lighter accents.”

|But seems too extensive.|

28. A theory so ingeniously maintained, and with so much induction of examples, has naturally gained a good deal of credit. I cannot, however, by any means concur in the extension given to it. Pages may be read in Chaucer, and still more in Dunbar, where every line is regularly and harmoniously decasyllabic; and though the cæsura may perhaps fall rather more uniformly than it does in modern verse, it would be very easy to find exceptions, which could not acquire a rhythmical cadence by any artifice of the reader.[791] The deviations from the normal type, or decasyllable line, were they more numerous than, after allowance for the licence of pronunciation, as well as the probable corruption of the text, they appear to be, would not, I conceive, justify us in concluding that it was disregarded. These aberrant lines are much more common in the dramatic blank verse of the seventeenth century. They are, doubtless, vestiges of the old rhythmical forms; and we may readily allow that English versification had not, in the fifteenth or even sixteenth centuries, the numerical regularity of classical or Italian metre. In the ancient ballads, Scots and English, the substitution of the anapæst for the iambic foot is of perpetual recurrence, and gives them a remarkable elasticity and animation; but we never fail to recognise a uniformity of measure, which the use of nearly equipollent feet cannot, on the strictest metrical principles, be thought to impair.

[791] Such as these, among multitudes more:--

A lover, and a lusty bachelor.
Chaucer.

But reason, with the shield of gold so shene.
Dunbar.

The rock, again the river resplendent.
Id.

Lydgate apologises for his own lines,--

Because I know the verse therein is wrong,
As being some too short, and some too long,--

in Gray, ii. 4. This seems at once to exclude the rhythmical
system, and to account for the imperfection of the metrical.
Lydgate has perhaps on the whole more aberrations from the
decasyllable standard than Chaucer.

Puttenham, in his Art of Poesie (1586), book ii. ch. 3, 4, though
he admits the licentiousness of Chaucer, Lydgate, and other poets
in occasionally disregarding the cæsura, does not seem to doubt
that they wrote by metrical rules; which indeed is implied in the
other. Dr. Nott’s theory cannot allow a want of cæsura.

|Politeness of Wyatt and Surrey.|

29. If we compare the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey with that of Barclay or Skelton, about thirty or forty years before, the difference must appear wonderful. But we should not, with Dr. Nott, attribute this wholly to superiority of genius. It is to be remembered that the later poets wrote in a court, and in one which, besides the aristocratic manners of chivalry, had not only imbibed a great deal of refinement from France and Italy, but a considerable tinge of ancient literature. Their predecessors were less educated men, and they addressed a more vulgar class of readers. Nor was this polish of language peculiar to Surrey and his friend. In the short poems of Lord Vaux, and of others about the same time, even in those of Nicolas Grimoald, a lecturer at Oxford, who was no courtier, but had acquired a classical taste, we find a rejection of obsolete and trivial phrases, and the beginnings of what we now call the style of our older poetry.

|Latin poetry.|

|Sannazarius.|

30. No period since the revival of letters has been so conspicuous for Latin poetry as the present. Three names of great reputation adorn it, Sannazarius, Vida, Fracastorius. The first of these, Sannazarius, or San Nazaro, or Actius Sincerus, was a Neapolitan, attached to the fortunes of the Aragonese line of kings; and following the last of their number Frederic, after his unjust spoliation, into France, remained there till his master’s death. Much of his poetry was written under this reign, before 1503; but his principal work, De Partu Virginis, did not appear till 1522. This has incurred not unjust blame for the intermixture of classical mythology, at least in language, with the Gospel story; nor is the latter very skilfully managed. But it would be difficult to find its equal for purity, elegance, and harmony of versification. The unauthorised word, the doubtful idiom, the modern turn of thought, so common in Latin verse, scarce ever appear in Sannazarius; a pure taste enabled him to diffuse a Virgilian hue over his language; and a just ear, united with facility in command of words, rendered his versification melodious and varied beyond any competitor. The Piscatory Eclogues of Sannazarius, which are perhaps better known, deserve at least equal praise; they seem to breathe the beauty and sweetness of that fair bay they describe. His elegies are such as may compete with Tibullus. If Sannazarius does not affect sublimity, he never sinks below his aim; the sense is sometimes inferior to the style, as he is not wholly free from conceits;[792] but it would probably be more difficult to find cold and prosaic passages in his works than in those of any other Latin poet in modern times.

[792] The following lines, on the constellation Taurus, are more
puerile than any I have seen in this elegant poet:

Torva bovi facies; sed qua non altera cœlo
Dignior, imbriferum quæ cornibus inchoet annum,
Nec _quæ tam claris mugitibus astra lacessat_.

|Vida.|

31. Vida of Cremona is not by any means less celebrated than Sannazarius; his poem on the Art of Poetry, and that on the Game of Chess, were printed in 1527; the Christiad, an epic poem, as perhaps it deserves to be called, in 1535; and that on silk worms in 1537. Vida’s precepts are clear and judicious, and we admire in his Game of Chess especially, and the poem on Silk worms, the skill with which the dry rules of art, and descriptions the most apparently irreducible to poetical conditions, fall into his elegant and classical language. It has been observed, that he is the first who laid down rules for imitative harmony, illustrating them by his own example. The Christiad shows not so much, I think, of Vida’s great talents, at least in poetical language; but the subject is better managed than by Sannazarius. Yet, notwithstanding some brilliant passages, among which the conclusion of the second book De Arte Poetica is prominent, Vida appears to me far inferior to the Neapolitan poet. His versification is often hard and spondaic, the elisions too frequent, and the cæsura too much neglected. The language, even where the subject best admits of it, is not so elevated as we should desire.

|Fracastorius.|

32. Fracastorius has obtained his reputation by the Syphilis, published in 1530; and certainly, as he thought to make choice of the subject, there is no reader but must admire the beauty and variety of his digressions, the vigour and nobleness of his style. Once only has it been the praise of genius, to have delivered the rules of practical art in all the graces of the most delicious poetry, without inflation, without obscurity, without affectation, and generally perhaps with the precision of truth. Fracastorius, not emulous in this of the author of the Georgics, seems to have made Manilius rather, I think, than Lucretius, his model in the didactic portion of his poem.

|Latin verse not to be disdained.|

33. Upon a fair comparison we should not err much, in my opinion, by deciding that Fracastorius is the greater poet, and Sannazarius the better author of Latin verses. In the present age it is easy to anticipate the supercilious disdain of those who believe it ridiculous to write Latin poetry at all, because it cannot, as they imagine, be written well. I must be content to answer, that those who do not know when such poetry is good, should be as slow to contradict those who do, as the ignorant in music to set themselves against competent judges. No one pretends that Sannazarius was equal to Ariosto. But it may be truly said, that his poetry, and a great deal more that has been written in Latin, beyond comparison excels most of the contemporary Italian; we may add, that its reputation has been more extended and European.

|Other Latin poets in Italy.|

34. After this famous triumvirate, we might reckon several in different degrees of merit. Bembo comes forward again in these lists. His Latin poems are not numerous; that upon the lake Benacus is the best known. He shone more however in elegiac than hexameter verse. This is a common case in modern Latin, and might be naturally expected of Bembo, who had more of elegance than of vigour. Castiglione has left a few poems, among which the best is in the archaic lapidary style, on the statue of Cleopatra in the Vatican. Molza wrote much in Latin; he is the author of the epistle to Henry VIII., in the name of Catherine, which has been ascribed to Joannes Secundus. It is very spirited and Ovidian. These poets were perhaps surpassed by Naugerius and Flaminius; both, but especially the latter, for sweetness and purity of style, to be placed in the first rank of lyric and elegiac poets in the Latin language. In their best passages, they fall not by any means short of Tibullus or Catullus. Aonius Palearius, though his poem on the Immortality of the Soul is equalled by Sadolet himself to those of Vida and Sannazarius, seems not entitled to anything like such an eulogy. He became afterwards suspected of Lutheranism, and lost his life on the scaffold at Rome. We have in another place mentioned the Zodiacus Vitæ of Palingenius Stellatus, whose true name was Manzolli. The Deliciæ Poetarum Italorum present a crowd of inferior imitations of classical models; but I must repeat that the volumes selected by Pope, and entitled Poemata Italorum, are the best evidences of the beauties of these poets.

|In Germany.|

35. The cisalpine nations, though at a vast distance from Italy, cannot be reckoned destitute, in this age, of respectable Latin poets. Of these the best known, and perhaps upon the whole the best, is Joannes Secundus, who found the doves of Venus in the dab-chicks of Dutch marshes. The Basia, however, are far from being superior to his elegies, many of which, though not correct, and often sinning by false quantity, a fault pretty general with these early Latin poets, especially on this side of the Alps, are generally harmonious, spirited, and elegant. Among the Germans, Eobanus Hessus, Micyllus, professor at Heidelberg, and Melanchthon, have obtained considerable praise.

SECT. II. 1520-1550.

_State of Dramatic Representation in Italy--Spain and
Portugal--France--Germany--England._

|Italian comedy.|

|Machiavel.|

|Aretin.|

36. We have already seen the beginnings of Italian comedy, founded in its style, and frequently in its subjects, upon Plautus. Two of Ariosto’s comedies have been mentioned, and two more belong to this period. Some difference of opinion has existed with respect to their dramatic merit. But few have hesitated to place above them the Mandragola and Clitia of a great contemporary genius, Machiavel. The Mandragola was probably written before 1520, but certainly in the fallen fortunes of its author, as he intimates in the prologue. Ginguéné, therefore, forgot his chronology, when he supposes Leo X. to have been present, as cardinal, at its representation.[793] It seems however to have been acted before this pope at Rome. The story of the Mandragola which hardly bears to be told, though Ginguéné has done it, is said to be founded on a real and recent event at Florence, one of its striking resemblances to the Athenian comedy. It is admirable for its comic delineations of character, the management of the plot, and the liveliness of its idiomatic dialogue. Peter Aretin, with little of the former qualities, and inferior in all respects to Machiavel, has enough of humorous extravagance to amuse the reader. The licentiousness of the Italian stage in its contempt of morality, and even, in the comedies of Peter Aretin, its bold satire on the great, remind us rather of Athens than of Rome; it is more the effrontery of Aristophanes than the pleasant freedom of Plautus. But the depravity which had long been increasing in Italy, gained in this first part of the sixteenth century a zenith which it could not surpass, and from which it has very gradually receded. These comedies are often very satirical on the clergy; the bold strokes of Machiavel surprise us at present; but the Italian stage had something like the licence of a masquerade; it was a tacit agreement that men should laugh at things sacred within those walls, but resume their veneration for them at the door.[794]

[793] Ginguéné, vi. 222.

[794] Besides the plays themselves, see Ginguéné, vol. vi., who gives
more than a hundred pages to the Calandra, and the comedies of
Ariosto, Machiavel, and Aretin. Many of the old comedies are
reprinted in the great Milan collection of Classici Italiani. Those
of Machiavel and Ariosto are found in most editions of their works.

|Tragedy.|

|Sperone. Cinthio.|

37. Those who attempted the serious tone of tragedy were less happy in their model; Seneca generally represented to them the ancient buskin. The Canace of Sperone Speroni, the Tullia of Martelli, and the Orbecche of Giraldo Cinthio, esteemed the best of nine tragedies he has written, are within the present period. They are all works of genius. But Ginguéné observes how little advantage the first of these plays afforded for dramatic effect, most of the action passing in narration. It is true that he could hardly have avoided this without aggravating the censures of those who, as Crescimbeni tells us, thought the subject itself unfit for tragedy.[795] The story of the Orbecche is taken by Cinthio from a novel of his own invention, and is remarkable for its sanguinary and disgusting circumstances. This became the characteristic of tragedy in the sixteenth century; not by any means peculiarly in England, as some half-informed critics of the French school used to pretend. The Orbecche, notwithstanding its passages in the manner of Titus Andronicus, is in many parts an impassioned and poetical tragedy. Riccoboni, though he censures the general poverty of style, prefers one scene in the third act to any thing on the stage: “If one scene were sufficient to decide the question, the Orbecche would be the finest play in the world.”[796] Walker observes, that this is the first tragedy wherein the prologue is separated from the play, of which, as is very well known, it made a part on the ancient theatre. But in Cinthio, and in other tragic writers long afterwards, the prologue continued to explain and announce the story.[797]

[795] Della volgar Poesia, ii 391. Alfieri went still farther than
Sperone in his Mirra. Objections of a somewhat similar kind were
made to the Tullia of Martelli.

[796] Hist. du Théâtre Italian, vol. i.

[797] Walker, Essay on Italian Tragedy. Ginguéné, vi. 61, 69.

|Spanish drama.|

|Torres Naharro.|