Chapter VI: Lorenzo De' Medici and Poliziano (1)

Period from 1470 to 1530--Methods of treating it--By
Chronology--By Places--By Subjects--Renascence of Italian--At
Florence, Ferrara, Naples--The New Italy--Forty Years of
Peace--Lorenzo de' Medici--His Admiration for and Judgment of
Italian Poetry--His Privileges as a Patron--His _Rime_--The
Death of Simonetta--Lucrezia Donati--Lorenzo's Descriptive
Power--The _Selve_--The _Ambra_--_La Nencia_--_I Beoni_--His
Sacred Poems--Carnival and Dance Songs--Carri and
Trionfi--Savonarola--The Mask of Penitence--Leo X. in
Florence, 1513--Pageant of the Golden Age--Angelo
Poliziano--His Place in Italian Literature--_Le
Stanze_--Treatment of the Octave Stanza--Court
Poetry--Mechanism and Adornment--The _Orfeo_--Orpheus, the
Ideal of the Cinque Cento--Its Dramatic Qualities--Chorus of
Maenads--Poliziano's Love Poems--_Rispetti_--Florentine
Love--La Bella Simonetta--Study and Country Life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What time the chain was forged which then I bore,
Air, earth, and heavens were linked in one delight;
The air was never so serene before,
The sun ne'er shed such pure and tranquil light;
Young leaves and flowers upon the grassy floor
Gladdened the earth where ran a streamlet bright,
While Venus in her father's bosom lay
And smiled from heaven upon the spot that day.

She from her brows divine and amorous breast
Took with both hands roses of many a hue,
And showered them through the heavens that slept in rest,
Covering my lady with their gracious dew;
Jove, full of gladness, on that day released
The ears of men, that they might hear the true
Echoes of melody and dance divine,
Which fell from heaven in songs and sounds benign.

Fair women to that music moved their feet,
Inflamed with gentle fire by Love's breath fanned:
Behold yon lover with his lady sweet--
Her hand long yearned for clasped in his loved hand;
Their sighs, their looks, which pangs of longing cheat;
Brief words that none but they can understand;
The flowers that she lets fall, resumed and pressed,
With kisses covered, to his head or breast.

Amid so many pleasant things and fair,
My loveliest lady with surpassing grace
Eclipsed and crowned all beauties that were there;
Her robe was white and delicate as lace;
And still her eyes, with silent speech and rare,
Talked to the heart, leaving the lips at peace:
Come to me, come, dear heart of mine, she said:
Here shall thy long desires at rest be laid.

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

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

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

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,
In a green garden in mid month of May.

Violets and lilies grew on every side
Mid the green grass, and young flowers wonderful,
Golden and white and red and azure-eyed;
Toward which I stretched my hands, eager to pull
Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful,
To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,
In a green garden in mid month of May.

But when my lap was full of flowers I spied
Roses at last, roses of every hue;
Therefore I ran to pluck their ruddy pride,
Because their perfume was so sweet and true
That all my soul went forth with pleasure new,
With yearning and desire too soft to say.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,
In a green garden in mid month of May.

I gazed and gazed. Hard task it were to tell
How lovely were the roses in that hour;
One was but peeping from her verdant shell,
And some were faded, some were scarce in flower.
Then Love said: Go, pluck from the blooming bower
Those that thou seest ripe upon the spray.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,
In a green garden in mid month of May.

For when the full rose quits her tender sheath,
When she is sweetest and most fair to see,
Then is the time to place her in thy wreath,
Before her beauty and her freshness flee.
Gather ye therefore roses with great glee,
Sweet girls, or ere their perfume pass away.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,
In a green garden in mid month of May.

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

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

Following this luckless dame, where'er she goes,
Flit dreams in crowds, with auguries and lies,
Chiromants, arts that cozen and impose,
Chances, diviners, and false prophecies,
Spoken or writ in foolish scroll and glose,
Whose forecast brings time flown before our eyes,
Alchemy, all who heaven from our earth measure,
And free conjectures made at will and pleasure.

'Neath the dark shadow of her mighty wings
The whole deluded world at last must cower:--
O blindness that involves all mortal things,
Frail ignorance that treads on human power!--
He who can count the woes her empire brings,
Could number every star, each fish, each flower,
Tell all the birds that cross the autumnal seas,
Of leaves that flutter from the naked trees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair is youth and void of sorrow;
But it hourly flies away.--
Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

This is Bacchus and the bright
Ariadne, lovers true!
They, in flying time's despite,
Each with each find pleasure new;
These their Nymphs, and all their crew
Keep perpetual holiday.--
Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

These blithe Satyrs, wanton-eyed,
Of the Nymphs are paramours:
Through the caves and forests wide
They have snared them mid the flowers.
Warmed with Bacchus, in his bowers,
Now they dance and leap away.--
Youths and maids enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

These fair Nymphs, they are not loth
To entice their lovers' wiles.
None but thankless folk and rough
Can resist when Love beguiles.
Now enlaced with wreathed smiles,
All together dance and play.--
Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

See this load behind them plodding
On the ass, Silenus he,
Old and drunken, merry, nodding,
Full of years and jollity;
Though he goes so swayingly,
Yet he laughs and quaffs alway.--
Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

Midas treads a wearier measure:
All he touches turns to gold:
If there be no taste of pleasure,
What's the use of wealth untold?
What's the joy his fingers hold,
When he's forced to thirst for aye?--
Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

Listen well to what we're saying;
Of to-morrow have no care!
Young and old together playing,
Boys and girls, be blithe as air!
Every sorry thought forswear!
Keep perpetual holiday.--
Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

Ladies and gay lovers young!
Long live Bacchus, live Desire!
Dance and play, let songs be sung;
Let sweet Love your bosoms fire;
In the future come what may!--
Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;
Naught ye know about to-morrow.

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