Chapter XV: Pietro Aretino (2)

Thus far we have been dealing with Aretino's relation to sovereigns, ladies, and people of importance in the world of art. That he should have imposed upon them is singular. But his position in the republic of letters offers still stranger food for reflection. In an age of literary refinement and classical erudition, this untaught child of the people arrogated to himself the fame of a prominent author, and had his claims acknowledged by men like Bembo, Varchi, Molza, Sperone.[529] All the Academies in Italy made him their member with extraordinary honors, and he corresponded with every writer of distinction. He treated the scholars of his day as he treated the princes of Italy, abusing them collectively for pedantry, and showering the epithets of _divino, divinissimo_, upon them individually. With his usual sagacity, Aretino saw how to command the public by running counter to the prejudices of his century, and proclaiming his independence of its principles. He resolved to win celebrity by contrast, by piquancy of style, by the assertion of his individual character, by what Machiavelli termed _virtu_. As he had boasted of the baseness of his origin, so now he piqued himself upon his ignorance. He made a parade of knowing neither Latin nor Greek, derided the puristic veneration for Petrarch and Boccaccio then in vogue, and asserted that his mother-wit was the best source of inspiration. This audacity proved successful. While the stylists of the day were polishing their labored periods to smoothness, he expressed such thoughts as occurred to him in the words which came first to hand, seeking only vivacity, relief and salience. He wrote as he talked; and the result was that he acquired a well-won reputation for freshness, wit, originality and vigor. This is how he dictates the terms of epistolary style to Bernardo Tasso:[530] "I, who am more your brother in benevolence than you show yourself to be my friend in honor, did not believe that the serenity of my mind would ever again be dimmed by those clouds, which, after thunders and lightnings, burst in the bolt that sent Antonio Broccardo beneath the earth. Pride and vanity, for certain, prompted you to tell the excellent and illustrious Annibale Caro that no writer of letters is worthy to be imitated at the present day, sagaciously hinting at yourself as the right man to be imitated. Without doubt, your inordinate self-love, combined with your inattention to the claims of others, brought your judgment to this pass. I published letters before you, and you borrowed your style, in so far as it is worth anything, from me. Yet you cannot produce even a counterfeit of my manner. My sentences and similes are made to live; yours issue stillborn from your mind. It is time that you copy a few of my familiar phrases, word by word. What else can you do? Your own taste is rather inclined to the scent of flowers than the savor of fruits. You have the graces of a certain celestial style, fit for epithalamial odes and hymns. But all that sweetness is out of place in epistles, where we want the salience of invention, not the illuminated arabesques of artifice. I am not going to sing my own praises, nor to tell you that men of merit ought to mark my birthday with white chalk--I, who without scouring the post-roads, without following Courts, without stirring from my study, have made every living duke, prince, sovereign, tributary to my virtue--I, who hold fame at my discretion through the universe--I, whose portrait is revered, whose name is honored in Persia and the Indies. To end this letter, I salute you with the assurance that nobody, so far as your epistles go, blames you for envy's sake, while many, very many, praise you through compassion for your having written them." There was no limit to his literary self-confidence.[531] "Of the three opinions current respecting the talents which keep my name alive, time has refuted that, which, hearing I had no erudition, judged my compositions to be nonsense, together with that other, which, finding in them some gust of genius, affirmed they were not mine. Whence it follows that only one remains, the opinion, to wit, that I, who never had a tutor, am complete in every branch of knowledge. All this comes from the poverty of art, which ever envies the wealth of nature, from whom I borrow my conceptions. Wherefore, if you are of the number of those who, in order to deprive me of nature's favor, attribute to me the learning that comes from study, you deceive yourself, for I swear by God I hardly understand my mother tongue." Meanwhile his tirades against the purists are full of excellent good sense. "O mistaken multitude, I tell you again, and yet again that poetry is a caprice of nature in her moments of gladness; it depends on a man's own inspiration, and if this fails, a poet's singing is but a tambourine without rattles, a bell-tower without bells. He who attempts to write verses without the gift is like the alchemists, who, for all their industry and eager avarice, never yet made gold, while nature, without labor, turns it out in plenty, pure and beautiful. Take lessons from that painter, who, when he was asked whom he imitated, pointed to a crowd of living men, meaning that he borrowed his examples from life and reality. This is what I do, when I write or talk. Nature herself, of whose simplicity I am the secretary, dictates that which I set down."[532] And again: "I laugh at those pedants, who think that learning consists in Greek and Latin, laying down the law that one who does not understand these languages, cannot open his mouth. It is not because I do not know them, that I have departed from Petrarch's and Boccaccio's precedents; but because I care not to lose time, patience, reputation, in the mad attempt to convert myself into their persons. The true aim of writing is to condense into the space of half a page, the length of histories, the tedium of orations; and this my letters clearly show that I have done." "It is far better to drink out of one's own wooden cup than another's golden goblet; and a man makes a finer show in his own rags than in stolen velvets. What have we to do with other people's property?"[533] "What have we to do with words which, however once in common use, have now passed out of fashion?"[534] At times he bursts into a fury of invective against erudition: "Those pedants, the asses of other people's books, who, after massacring the dead, rest not till they have crucified the living! It was pedantry that murdered Duke Alessandro, pedantry that flung the Cardinal of Ravenna into prison, and, what is worse, stirred up heresy against our faith through the mouth of that arch-pedant Luther."[535] This is admirable. It plunges to the very root of the matter. Sharpened by his hostility to the learning he did not share, and the puerile aspects of which he justly satirized, this acute and clairvoyant critic is enabled to perceive that both Italian tyrannicide and German Reformation had their origin in the humanistic movement of the fifteenth century. He is equally averse to either consequence. Erudition spoils sport, stiffens style, breaks in upon the pastimes of the principalities and papacies, which breed the lusts on which an Aretino lives.

[Footnote 529: The adulation with which all the chief literary men of Italy greeted Aretino, is quite incredible. One must read their letters in the _Lettere all'Aretino_ to have any conception of it. See in particular those of Varchi (_ib._ vol. ii. pp. 186-202), of Dolce (vol. ii. pp. 277-295), of Paolo Giovio (vol. iii. pp. 59-64), of Niccolo Martelli (vol. iii. pp. 116-125), of Annibale Caro (_ib._ p. 163), of Sperone (_ib._ pp. 324-330), of Firenzuola (_ib._ p. 345), of Doni (vol. iv. p. 395). Molza, terrified by one of Aretino's threats, cringes before him (vol. i. p. 340). Doni signs himself "Il Doni dell'Aretino," and Vergerio, Bishop of Capo d'Istria, "Il Vescovo dell'Aretino." Even the excellent Bishop of Fossombrone pays him courtly compliments (vol. ii. pp. 61-67). The pitch attained by these flatteries may be understood from this opening of a letter: "Bella armonia, e soave concento, dovea essere nel cielo, Signor Pietro divino, e fra le stelle amiche, il di, che Iddio e la Natura di voi fece altero dono a questa nostra etade," etc. _ad. inf._ (vol. iv. p. 269). Here is another fragment: "Manifestamente si vede e si conosce che da Iddio per conservazione de la sua gloria e per utilita del mondo v'abbi fra tanti avversari," etc. (vol. iv. p. 398).]

[Footnote 530: _Lettere_, v. 184. The above is only a condensed paraphrase of a very long tirade.]

[Footnote 531: _Lettere_, ii. 242.]

[Footnote 532: _Lettere_, i. 123.]

[Footnote 533: _Lettere_, ii. 182.]

[Footnote 534: _Lettere_, i. 210.]

[Footnote 535: _Lettere_, i. 143.]

It was Aretino's boast that he composed as fast as the pen would move across the paper, and that his study contained no books of reference--nothing but the quire of paper and the bottle of ink, which were necessary to immortalize the thick-crowding fancies of his brain. His comedy of the _Filosofo_ was written in ten mornings; the _Talanta_ and the _Ipocrita_ in "the hours robbed from sleep during perhaps twenty nights."[536] Referring to his earlier fertility in 1537, he says:[537] "Old age begins to stupefy my brains, and love, which ought to wake them up, now sends them off to sleep. I used to turn out forty stanzas in a morning; now I can with difficulty produce one. It took me only seven mornings to compose the _Psalms_; ten for the _Cortigiana_ and the _Marescalco_; forty-eight for the two _Dialogues_; thirty for the _Life of Christ_." The necessary consequences of this haste are discernible in all his compositions. Aretino left nothing artistically finished, nothing to which it is now possible to point in justification of his extraordinary celebrity. His sonnets are below contempt. Frigid, inharmonious, pompous, strained, affected, they exhibit the worst vices to which this species of poetry is liable. His _Capitoli_, though he compared them to "colossal statues of gold or silver, where I have carved the forms of Julius, a Pope, Charles, an Emperor, Catherine, a Queen, Francesco Maria, a Duke, with such art that the outlines of their inner nature are brought into relief, the muscles of their will and purpose are shown in play, the profiles of their emotions are thrown into salience"[538]--these _Capitoli_ will not bear comparison for one moment with Berni's. They are coarse and strident in style, threadbare in sentiment, commonplace in conception, with only one eminent quality, a certain gross prolific force, a brazen clash and clangor of antithesis, to compensate for their vulgarity. Yet, such as they are, the _Capitoli_ must be reckoned the best of his compositions in verse. Of his comedies I have already spoken. These will always be valuable for their lively sketches of contemporary manners, their free satiric vein of humor. The _Dialoghi_, although it is scarcely possible to mention them in a decent book of history, are distinguished by the same qualities of veracity, acumen, prolific vigor, animal spirits, and outspokenness. Aretino's religious works, it need hardly be said, are worthless or worse. Impudent romances, penned by one of the most unscrupulous of men, frankly acknowledged by their author to be a tissue of "poetical lies," we are left to marvel how they could have deceived the judgment and perverted the taste of really elevated natures.[539] That the Marchioness of Pescara should have hailed the coarse fictions of the Life of S. Catherine, which Aretino confessed to have written out of his own head, as a work of efficient piety, remains one of the wonders of that extraordinary age.

[Footnote 536: _Lettere_, iii. 84. Letter at the end of the _Talanta_.]

[Footnote 537: _Lettere_, i. 99.]

[Footnote 538: _Lettere_, vi. 4.]

[Footnote 539: See _Lettere_, ii. 168, iii. 169, for his method of composing these books.]

What then, it may finally be asked, was Aretino's merit as an author? Why do we allude to him at all in writing the history of sixteenth-century literature? The answer can be given in two words--originality and independence. It was no vain boast of Aretino that he trusted only to nature and mother-wit. His intellectual distinction consisted precisely in this confidence and self-reliance, at a moment when the literary world was given over to pedantic scruples and the formalities of academical prescription. Writing without the fear of pedagogues before his eyes--seeking, as he says, relief, expression, force, and brilliancy of phrase, he produced a manner at once singular and attractive which turned to ridicule the pretensions of the purists. He had the courage of his personality, and stamped upon his style the very form and pressure of himself. As a writer, he exhibited what Machiavelli demanded from the man of action--_virtu_, or the virility of self-reliance. That was the secret of his success. The same audacity and independence characterize all his utterances of opinion--his criticisms of art and literature--his appreciation of natural beauty. In some of the letters written to painters and sculptors, and in a description of a Venetian sunset already quoted in this book, we trace the dawnings of a true and natural school of criticism, a forecast of the spontaneity of Diderot and Henri Beyle. This naturalness of expression did not save Aretino from glaring bad taste. His letters and his dedicatory introductions abound in confused metaphors, extravagant _concetti_, and artificial ornaments. It seems impossible for him to put pen to paper without inventing monstrous and ridiculous periphrases. Still the literary impropriety, which would have been affectation in any one else, and which became affectation in his imitators, was true to the man's nature. He could not be true to himself without falseness of utterance, because there was in him an inherent insincerity, and this was veiled by no scholastic accuracy or studied purity of phrase.

Much of the bad taste of the later Renaissance (the tropes of Marini and the absurdities of _seicentismo_) may be ascribed to the fascination exercised by this strange combination of artificiality and naturalness in a style remarkable for vigor. Who, for instance does not feel that the mannerism of our euphuistic prosaists is shadowed forth in the following passage from the introduction to the _Talanta_?[540] The Prologue, on the drawing of the curtain, takes the audience into his confidence, and tells them that he long had hesitated which of the Immortal Gods to personate. Mars, Jupiter, Phoebus, Venus, Mercury, and all the Pantheon in succession were rejected, for different appropriate reasons, till the God of Love appeared. "When at last it came to Cupid's turn, I immediately said Yes! and having so assented, I felt wings growing at my shoulders, the quiver at my side, the bow within my hands. In a moment I became all steel, all fire; and eager to be ware what things are done in love, I cast a glance upon the crowd of lovers; whence I soon could see who has the rendezvous, who is sent about his business, who prowls around his mistress' house, who enters by the door, who clambers up the walls, who scales the rope, who jumps from the window, who hides himself within a tub, who takes the cudgel, who gets a gelding for his pains, who is stowed away by the chambermaid, who is kicked out by the serving-man, who goes mad with anxiety, who bursts with passion, who wastes away in gazing, who cuts snooks at hope, who lets himself be hoodwinked, who spends a fortune on his mistress to look grand, who robs her for a freak, who saps her chastity with threats, who conjures her with prayers, who blabs of his success, who hides his luck, who bolsters up his vaunt with lies, who dissembles the truth, who extols the flame that burns him, who curses the cause of his heart's conflagration, who cannot eat for grief, who cannot sleep for joy, who compiles sonnets, who scribbles billets-doux, who dabbles in enchantments, who renews assaults, who takes counsel with bawds, who ties a favor on his arm, who mumbles at a flower the wench has touched, who twangles the lute, who hums a glee, who thrusts his rival through the body, who gets killed by his competitors, who eats his heart out for a mylady, who dies of longing for a strumpet. When I understood the things aforesaid, I turned round to these female firebrands, and saw how the devil (to chastise them for the perverse ways they use toward men who serve them, praise them, and adore them) gives them up, easy victims, to a pedant, a plebeian, a simpleton, a loon, a groom, a graceless clown, and to a certain mange that catches them."

[Footnote 540: I have purposely chosen an extract where the style is keen and mobile. Had I taken examples from the Letters, I could have produced a far closer parallel to Lilly's rhetoric.]

Aretino congregated round him a whole class of literary Bohemians, drawing forth the peccant humors of more than one Italian city, and locating these greedy adventurers in Venice as his satellites. It is enough to mention Niccolo Franco, Giovanni Alberto Albicante, Lorenzo Veniero, Doni, Lodovico Dolce. They were, most of them, hack writers, who gained a scanty livelihood by miscellaneous work for the booksellers and by selling dedications to patrons. More or less successfully, they carried on the trade invented and developed by Aretino; remaining on terms of intimacy with him, at first as friends or secretaries, afterwards as enemies and rivals. We have already seen what use was made of Albicante for the mutilation of Berni's _Innamoramento_. This poetaster was a native of Milan, who published a history of the war in Piedmont, which Aretino chose to ridicule in one of his _Capitoli_.[541] Albicante replied with another poem in _terza rima_, and Aretino seems to have perceived that he had met a worthy adversary. It was Albicante's glory to be called _furibondo_ and _bestiale_. He affected an utter indifference to consequences, an absolute recklessness concerning what he did and said. Whether Aretino was really afraid of him, or whether he wished to employ him in the matter of Berni's _Innamoramento_, is not certain. At any rate, he made advances to Albicante in a letter which begins: "My brother, the rage of poets is but a frenzy of stupidity." The antagonists were reconciled, and the Academy of the Intronati at Siena thought this event worthy of commemoration in a volume: "Combattimento poetico del divino Aretino e del bestiale Albicante occorso sopra la Guerra di Piemonte, e la pace loro celebrata nella Accademia de gli Intronati a Siena."

[Footnote 541: See the article on Albicante in Mazzuchelli's _Scrittori Italiani_, vol. i.]

Niccolo Franco was a native of Benevento, whom Aretino took into his service, as a kind of secretary.[542] Being deficient in scholarship, he needed a man capable of supplying him with Greek and Latin quotations, and who could veneer his coarse work with a show of humanistic erudition. Franco undertook the office; and it is probable that some of Aretino's earlier works of piety and learning--the _Genesis_, for instance--issued from this unequal collaboration. But their good accord did not last long. Franco proved to be a ruffian of even fiercer type than his master. If Aretino kept a literary poignard in the scabbard, ready to strike when his utility demanded, Franco went about the world with unsheathed dagger, stabbing for the pleasure of the sport. "I would rather lose a dinner," he writes, "than omit to fire my pen off when the fancy takes me." The two men could not dwell together in union. When Aretino published the first series of his letters, Franco issued a rival volume, in the last epistle of which, addressed to Envy, he made an attack on his patron. Ambrogio degli Eusebi, an _ame damnee_ of the Aretine, about whom many scurrilous stories were told, stabbed Franco, while Aretino published invective after invective against him in the form of letters. Franco left Venice, established himself for a while at Casale in the lordship of Montferrat, opened a school at Mantua, and ran a thousand infamous adventures, pouring forth satirical sonnets all the while at Aretino. In the course of his wanderings, he completed a Latin commentary on the _Priapea_. These two works together--the centuries of sonnets against Aretino, and the Priapic lucubrations--obtained a wide celebrity. Speaking of the book, Tiraboschi is compelled to say that "few works exist which so dishonor human nature. The grossest obscenities, the most licentious evil-speaking, the boldest contempt of princes, Popes, Fathers of the Council, and other weighty personages, are the gems with which he adorned his monument of perverse industry." Franco proved so obnoxious to polite society that he was at last taken and summarily hanged in 1569. The curious point about this condemnation of a cur is, that he was in no whit worse than many other scribblers of the day. But he made more noise; he had not the art to rule society like Aretino; he committed the mistake of trusting himself to the perilous climates of Lombardy and Rome. His old master drove him out of Venice, and the unlucky reprobate paid the penalty of his misdeeds by becoming the scapegoat for men whom he detested.

[Footnote 542: For what follows see Tiraboschi, tom. vii. part 3, lib. iii.]

Doni began his Venetian career as a friend of Aretino, whose companion he was in the famous Academy of the Pellegrini. They quarreled over a present sent to Doni by the Duke of Urbino, and the bizarre Florentine passed over to the ranks of Aretino's bitterest enemies. In 1556 he declared war, with a book entitled "Terremoto del Doni Fiorentino." The preface was addressed to "the infamous and vicious Pietro Aretino, the source and fountain of all evil, the stinking limb of public falsehood, and true Antichrist of our century." Soon after the appearance of this volume, followed Aretino's death. But Doni pursued his animosity beyond the grave, and was instrumental in causing his rival's writings to be subjected to ecclesiastical interdiction.

We tire of these low literary quarrels. Yet they form an integral part of the history of Italian civilization; and the language of invective used in them, originating with Aretino and improved upon by Doni and Franco, became the model of vituperative style in Europe. Doni's "Earthquake, with the Ruin of a great Bestial Colossus, the Antichrist of our age," brings to mind a score of pamphlets, published in Europe during the conflict of the Church with Reformation. We find an echo of its strained metaphors in the polemical writings of Bruno and Campanella. The grotesque manner of the seventeenth century begins with Aretino and his satellites, just as its far-fetched conceits may be traced in the clear language of Guarini. Gongora, Marini, Euphues, and the _Precieuses Ridicules_ of the Hotel Rambouillet are contained, as it were, in germ among this little knot of refugees at Venice, who set their wits against the academical traditions of pure Italian taste.

A characteristic legend is told of Aretino's death. Two of his sisters kept, it is said, a house of ill fame; and the story runs that he died of immoderate laughter, flinging himself backward in his chair and breaking his neck, on hearing some foul jest reported by them. It is difficult to believe that this tale has any foundation in fact. We must take it as a scurrilous invention, proving the revolution of public opinion, which since his books had been put upon the Index in 1559, undoubtedly took place. Of like tenor is the epitaph which was never really placed upon his grave:[543]

Qui giace l'Aretin poeta tosco,
Che disse mal d'ognun fuorche di Cristo,
Scusandosi col dir: non lo conosco.

[Footnote 543: These lines have been, without authority, ascribed to Giovio; they may thus be rendered:

Here lieth Aretine, in prose and poem
Who spake such ill of all the world but Christ,
Pleading for this neglect, I do not know him.

Giovio, we may remember, styled Aretino _divino_, _divinissimo_, _unichissimo_, _precellentissimo_, in his letters.]

His features, though formed upon a large and not ignoble type, bore in later life a mixed expression of the wolf and the fox; nor was it without oblique satire that the engraver of his portrait, Giuseppe Patrini, surrounded the medallion with a wolf's hide, the grinning snarl and slanting eyes of the brute mimicking the man's physiognomy. It was a handsome face, no doubt, in youth, when, richly attired in the satin mantle cut for him by a bishop, and mounted on his white charger, he scoured the streets of Reggio at Giovanni de' Medici's side, curling his blue-black beard, and fixing his bold bright eyes upon the venal beauties they courted in company. But the thick lips and open sensual mouth, the distended nostrils, and the wicked puckers of the wrinkles round his eyes and nose, show that the beast of prey and appetite had been encouraged through a life of self-indulgence, until the likeness of humanity yielded to victorious animalism. The same face, at once handsome and bestial, never to be forgotten after a first acquaintance, leans out, in the company of Sansovino and Titian, from the bronze door of the Sacristy in S. Mark's Church.[544] The high relief is full of life and movement, one of Sansovino's masterpieces. And yet it strikes one here with even greater strangeness than the myths of Ganymede and Leda on the portals of S. Peter's at Rome.

[Footnote 544: Among the many flatteries addressed to Aretino none is more laughable than a letter (_Lettere all'Aretino_, vol. iii. p. 175) which praises his physical beauty in most extravagant terms: "Most divine Lord Peter; if, among the many and so lovely creatures that swinish Nature sends into this worst of worlds, you alone are of such beauty and incomparable grace that you combine all qualities the human frame can boast of: for the which cause there is no need to wonder that Titian, when he seeks to paint a face that has in it true beauty, uses his skilled brush in only drawing you," etc. etc. The period is too long to finish.]

Aretino is, in truth, not the least of the anomalies which meet us everywhere in the Italian Renaissance. Was he worse, was he not even in some respects better than his age? How much of the repulsion he inspires can be ascribed to altered taste and feeling? To what extent was the legend of the man, so far as this is separable from the testimony of his writings, made black by posthumous malevolence and envy? These are the questions which rise in our mind when we reflect upon the incidents of his extraordinary career, and calmly estimate his credit with contemporaries. The contradictions of the epoch were concentrated in his character. He was a professed Christian of the type formed by Rome before the Counter-Reformation. He helped the needy, tended the sick, dowered orphans, and kept open house for beggars. He was the devoted friend of men like Titian, a sincere lover of natural and artistic beauty, an acute and enthusiastic critic. At the same time he did his best to corrupt youth by painting vice in piquant colors. He led a life of open and voluptuous debauchery. He was a liar, a bully, a braggart, venomous in the pursuit of private animosities, and the remorseless foe of weaker men who met with his displeasure. From the conditions of society which produced Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Pier Luigi Farnese and Gianpaolo Baglioni, it was no wonder that a writer resolved on turning those conditions to account, should have arisen. The credit of originality, independence, self-reliant character--of what Machiavelli called _virtu_--does certainly belong to him. It is true that he extracted the means of a luxurious existence from patrons upon whom he fawned. Yet he was superior to the common herd of courtiers, in so far as he attached himself to no master, and all his adulation masked a battery of menaces. The social diseases which emasculated men of weaker fiber, he turned to the account of his rapacious appetites. His force consisted in the clear notion he had formed of his own aim in life, and the sagacity with which he used the most efficient means for attaining it. The future, whether of reputation or of literary fame, had no influence over his imagination. He resolved to enjoy the present, and he succeeded beyond expectation. Corruption is itself a kind of superiority, when it is consummate, cynical, self-conscious. It carries with it its own clairvoyance, its own philosophy of life, its own good sense. More than this, it imposes on opinion and fascinates society. Aretino did not suffer from a divided will. He never halted between two courses, but realized the ideal of the _perfettamente tristo_. He lived up to Guicciardini's conception of the final motive, which may be described as the cult of self. Sneering at all men less complete in purpose than himself, he disengaged his conduct from contemporary rules of fashion; dictated laws to his betters in birth, position, breeding, learning, morals, taste; and vindicated his virility by unimpeded indulgence of his personal proclivities. He was the last, the most perfect, if also the most vitiated product of Renaissance manners. In the second half of the sixteenth century, when hypocrisy descended like a cloud upon the ineradicable faults of Italy, there was no longer any possibility for the formation of a hero after Aretino's type.

Thus at the close of any estimate of Aretino, we are forced to do justice to the man's vigor. It is not for nothing that even a debased society bows to a dictatorship so autocratic; nor can eminence be secured, even among the products of a decadent civilization, by undiluted defects. Aretino owed his influence to genuine qualities--to the independence which underlay his arrogance, to the acute common sense which almost justified his vanity, to the outspokenness which made him satirize the vices that he shared and illustrated.[545] We have abundant and incontrovertible testimony to the fact that his _Dialoghi_, when they were first published, passed for powerful and drastic antidotes to social poisons[546]; and it is clear that even his religious works were accepted by the pious world as edifying. The majority of his contemporaries seem to have beheld in him the fearless denouncer of ecclesiastical and civil tyrants, the humble man's friend, and the relentless detective of vice. The indescribable nastiness of the _Dialoghi_, the false feeling of the _Vita di S. Catherina_, which makes us turn with loathing from their pages, did not offend the taste of his century. While, therefore, he comprehended and expressed his age in its ruffianism and dissoluteness, he stood outside it and above it, dealing haughtily and like a potentate with evils which subdued less hardened spirits, and with personages before whom his equals groveled. We must not suffer our hatred of his mendacity, uncleanliness, brutality, and arrogance to blind us to the elements of strength and freedom which can be discerned in him.[547]

[Footnote 545: I should not be surprised to see an attempt soon made to whitewash Aretino. Balzac, in his _Catherine de Medicis_, has already indicated the line to be followed: "L'Aretin, l'ami de Titien et le Voltaire de son siecle, a, de nos jours, un renom en complete opposition avec ses oeuvres, avec son caractere, et que lui vaut une debauche d'esprit en harmonie avec les ecrits de ce siecle, ou le drolatique etait en honneur, ou les reines et les cardinaux ecrivaient des contes, dits aujourd'hui licentieux."]

[Footnote 546: I will only refer to a very curious epistle (_Lettere a P. Aretino_, vol. iii. p. 193), which appears to me genuine, in which Aretino is indicated as the poor man's friend against princely tyrants; and another from Daniello Barbaro (_ibid._ p. 217), in which the Dialogue on Courts is praised as a handbook for the warning and instruction of would-be courtiers. The Pornographic Dialogues made upon society the same impression as Zola's _Nana_ is now making, although it is clear to us that they were written with a licentious, and not an even ostensibly scientific, intention.]

[Footnote 547: While these sheets are passing through the press, I see announced a forthcoming work by Antonio Virgili, _Francesco Berni con nuovi documenti_. We may expect from this book more light upon Aretino's relation to the Tuscan poet.]