Thus we took our wine and were well content to sit in the sunshine.
IV
Table of Contents OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
The man of our time to class poetry as a thing very pleasant and useful shall hardly be found. At most the saying will suffer reprint as a quaintness, a freak, or a paradox; and so it has proved. From Prato, dusty little city of mid-Tuscany, and with the impress of its Reale Orfanotrofio (nourisher, it would thus appear, of more Humanities than one) comes an "Opera Nova, nella quale si contengono bellissime historie, contrasti, lamenti et frottole, con alcune canzoni a ballo, strambotti, geloghe, farse, capitoli e bazellette di più eccellenti autori. Aggiuntevi assai tramutationi, villanelle alla napolitana, sonetti alla bergamasca et mariazi alla povana, indovinelli, ritoboli e passerotti"; cosa, this legend goes on to say, molto piacevole et utile. This is, no doubt, rococo, and at best a pitiful, catchfarthing bit of ancientry: yet it looks back to a time when it was indeed the fact that no choice work could be but useful, and when eyes and ears, as conduits to the soul, had that full of consideration we reserve for mouth and nose, purveyors to the belly.
Vasari, Giorgio, he too, bourgeois though he were, and in so far the best of testimony, knew it when he found Luca's blue and white to be "molto utile per la state." We should say that of a white umbrella or suit of flannels; why of earthenware or an adroit strambotto? That marks the cleft, the incurable gulf of difference between a people like the Tuscans with art in their marrow, and our present selves with our touching reliance upon a most unseemly hunger after facts. I suppose I should be stretching a point if I said that Samson Agonistes was cosa molto piacevole ed utile. And yet I name there a great poem and a weighty, whence the general public suck, or claim to suck, no small advantage. Is it more useful to them than Bradshaw? I doubt. But here, in this Opera Nova so furthered, are sixty-three little snatches of Luigi Pulci's, eight lines to the stave, about the idlest of make-believe love affairs, full of such Petrarchisms as "Gl' occhi tuoi belli son li crudel dardi," or
"Tu m' ai trafitto il cor! donde io moro,
Se tu, iddea, non mi dai aiutoro."-
the merest commonplaces of gallantry: called on what account by their contrivers molto utile?
I have urged in my Second Essay that the Tuscans were inveterate weavers of fancy, choosing what came easiest to hand to weave withal. I dared to see such airy spinning in that Spanish Chapel from which Mr. Ruskin has nearly frightened the lovers of Art; I said that the Summa was to the painters there as good vantage ground as any novel of Sacchetti's. I now say that Luigi Pulci and his kindred so treated the love-lore which was solemn mystery to Guinicelli and Lapo and Fazio, or the young Dante shuddering before his lord of terrible aspect. I would add Petrarch's name to this honourable roll if I believed it fitting such a niche; but I find him the greatest equivocator of them all, and owe him a grudge for making a fifteenth-century Dante impossible. It is true, had there been such a poet we should never have had our Milton; but that may not serve the Swan of Vaucluse as justification for being miserable before a looking-glass, that he starved his grandsons to serve ours. Take him then as a poser: give him, for the argument's sake, Boccace to his company, Cino; give him our Pulci, give him Ariosto, give him Lorenzo, Politian; give him Tasso for aught I care; you have no one left but the sugar-cured Guarino. Dante stands alone upon the skyey peaks of his great argument, steadied there and holding his breath, as for the hush that precedes weighty endeavour; and Bojardo (no Tuscan by birth) stands squarely to the plains, holding out one hand to Rabelais over-Alps and another to Boccace grinning in his grave. The fellow is such a sturdy pagan we must e'en forgive him some of his quirks. Italian poesy, poor lady, stript to the smock, can still look honestly out if she have but two such vestments whole and unclouted as the Commedia and the Orlando. Let us look at some of her spoiled bravery. Take up my Opera Nova and pick over Pulci in his lightest mood. I am minded to try my hand for your amusement.
"Let him rejoice who can; for me, I'd grieve.
Peace be with all; for me yet shall be war.
Let him that hugs delight, hug on, and leave
To me sweet pain, lest day my night shall mar.
I am struck hard; the world, you may believe,
Laughs out;-rejoice, my world! I'll pet my scar.
Rogue love, that puttest me to such a pass,
They cry thee, 'It is well!' I sing, 'Alas!'"
Vers de société? No; too rhetorical: your antithesis gives headaches to fine ladies. Euphuist? Not in the applied sense: read Shakespere's sonnets in that manner; or, if you object that Shakespere is too high for such comparisons, read Drummond of Hawthornden. Poetry, which has a soul, we cannot call it. Verse it assuredly is, and of the most excellent. Just receive a quatrain of the pure spring, and judge for yourself:
"Chi gode goda, che pur io stento;
Chi è in pace si sia, ch' io son in guerra;
Chi ha diletto l' habbi, ch' io ho tormento;
Chi vive lieto, in me dolor afferra."
Balance is there. Vocalisation, adjustment of sound, discriminate use of long syllables and short, of subjunctive and indicative moods.[1] Unpremeditated art it is not: indeed it is craft rather than art; for Art demands a larger share of soul-expenditure than Pulci could afford. And of such is the delicate ware which Tuscany, nothing doubting, took for lavoro molto utile. For, believe it or not, of that kind were Delia Robbia's enrichments, Ghirlandajo's frescos, Raphael's Madonnas, and Alberti's broad marble churches: of that kind and of no other; on a level with the painted lady smiling out of a painted window at Airolo, whose frozen lips assure the traverser of the Saint Gothard that he has passed the ridge and may soon smell the olives.
[Footnote 1: More than that: the piece is an excellent example of the skilful use of redundant syllables. It is certain that a study of Italian poetry would help our, too often, tame blank verse to be (however bad otherwise) at least not dull. It might bring it nearer to Milton, as Dante brought Keats. Witness his revision of Hyperion. If the Tuscans overrated the craft in Poetry, we assuredly underrate it.]
Wherein, then, is the use? Why, it is in the art of it. I will convict you out of Alberti's own mouth, or his biographer's, for he spake it truly. "For he was wont to say," thus runs the passage, "that whatever might be accomplished by the wit of man with a certain choiceness, that indeed was next to the divine." To image the divine, you see, you must accomplish somewhat, scrupulously weigh, select and refuse; in short adapt exquisitely your means until they are adequate to your ends. And, keeping the eye steadily on that, you might grow to discard solemn ends, or momentous, altogether, until poetry and painting ceased to be arts at all, and must be classed, at best, with needlework. So indeed it proved in the case of poetry. After Politian (who really did catch some echo of other times, and of manners more primal than his own, and did instil something of it in his Orfeo) no poet of Italy had anything serious to say. I doubt it even of Tasso, though Tasso, I know, has a vogue. I except, of course, Michael Angelo, as I have already said; and I except Boccace and Bojardo. Painting was drawn out of the pit laid privily for her by the sheer necessity of an outlet; and painting, having much to say, became the representative Italian art. Poetry, the most ancient of them all, as she is the most majestic; the art which refuses to be taught, and alone of her sisters must be acquired by self-spenditure (so that before you can learn to string your words in music you must be shaken with a thought which, to your torturing, you must spoil); poetry, at once music and soothsay, knitted to us as touching her common speech, and to the spheres as touching on the same immortal harmonies; poetry such as Dante's was, was gone from Tuscany, and painting, to her own ruining, reigned instead, drawing in sculpture and architecture to share her kingdom and attributes. Which indeed they did, to their equal detriment and our discouragement that read.
When I want to see Death in small-clothes bowing in the drawing-room I turn to my Petrarch and open at Sonnet cclxxxii., where it is written how:-
"It lies with Death to take the beauty of Laura but not the gracious memory of her";
As thus:
"Now hast them touch'd thy stretch of power, O Death;
Thy brigandage hath beggar'd Love's demesne
And quench'd the lamp that lit it, and the queen
Of all the flowers snapped with thy ragged teeth.
Hollow and meagre stares our life beneath
The querulous moon, robb'd of its sovereign:
Yet the report of her, her deathless mien-
Not thine, O churl! Not thine, thou greedy Death!
They are with her in Heaven, the which her grace,
Like some brave light, gladdens exceedingly
And shoots chance beams to this our dwelling-place;
So art thou swallowed in her victory.
Yet on me, beauty-whelmed in very sooth,
On me that last-born angel shall have ruth."
Look in vain for the deep heart-cry that voiced Dante's passion in the tremendous statements of this:-
"Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven,
The kingdom where the angels are at peace;
And lives with them: and to her friends is dead.
Not by the frost of winter was she...
