On the whole, no ruler in history has better deserved such high praise. Politian's Italian poetry included a fashionable celebration of the 'Joust' (Giostra) led by Giugliano de Medici, Lorenzo's younger brother. It was written in the octave stanzas which were Boccaccio's favourite metre. The tournament seems to have occurred when Politian was fourteen years old (1468), but the poem is hardly to be dated prior to 1476. The novel spectacle and the youthful prince tempted Politian to indulge in languorous stanzas of romance, full of promise for the future of Italian poetry; and in the Giostra, and even more in his Orfeo, an operatic play on the Ovidian Orpheus, Politian helped to build a bridge between Petrarch and Boccaccio on the one side, and Ariosto and Tasso on the other. One specimen of his muse may be given, for we have the advantage of quoting it from a version by Addington Symonds 'White is the maid, and white the robe around her, Enwreathed folds of golden tresses crowned her, The wild wood smiled; the thicket, where he found her, Serene she sits, with gesture queenly mild, And with her brow tempers the tempest wild. . . Reclined he found her on the swarded grass ... Then with her white hand gathered up her dress, Truly, as the translator says, all the defined idealism, the sweetness and the purity of Tuscan portraiture are in these stanzas ' 1. 1 1 J. A. Symonds, op. cit. The poems of BATTISTA SPAGNUOLI (1448-1516), commonly known as Mantuan after his birthplace Mantua, are chiefly interesting to modern readers because they formed one of the few Tudor schoolbooks used by Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon. Spagnuoli's inspiration, like his name, was derived from Virgil, the greater Mantuan. A general of the Carmelite order, he employed no other tongue save Latin, and his pastoral eclogues in that language acquired an extraordinary vogue. These it was which were used as a reading-book, and Holofernes, in Love's Labour Lost (IV, ii), quoted their opening verse 'Fauste, precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra and so forth. Ah, good old Mantuan!... Who understandeth thee not, loves thee not '. The Tudor version of Mantuan was effected by George Turberville, whose graceful imagery and diction are clearly to be traced in Edmund Spenser and other English poets. More intimately of Lorenzo's circle, and more akin in talent to Politian, was LUIGI PULCI (1432-84), a member of a cultured family, and a direct forerunner of poets greater than himself. What was missing till now is originality. In the manifold literary activity of the Latin-Italian Humanists, who had sat at the feet of the Greek exiles, the nearest approach to a novel theme, or to novel treatment of an old theme, had been reached by Politian in his Giostra. There he turned the occasion of a civic tournament into a discursive idyl, and connected his mythological researches with the tastes for Diana and Venus of the youthful Julian de Medici. The next step was fairly obvious, and Pulci took it in a stride which crossed the dividing-line between poetic experiment and poetry. The purpose of the Florentine writers (we have remarked it before) was to make their native tongue capable of the literary demands imposed by Latin style and diction. Hitherto, and hardly excepting Politian, this aim had been achieved in occasional songs and stanzas, and in poems with more form than body. But the proof of literature is the book; and the first true book of Italian verse, since the recent dawn of the New Learning, was Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, with which he delighted Lorenzo and the Court. Pulci aimed at permanent delight. Thus aiming, he took leave to ignore any intermediate object dear to Humanists in Florence. He was a poet, not an amateur of poetry. Where shall I find Luigi Pulci?' asked Lorenzo de Medici in one of his poems; and the reply came promptly— 'Oh, in the wood there. Gone, depend upon it, And Pulci himself confessed, with a shrewd hit at the 'Erewhile my Academe and my Gymnasia Were in the solitary woods I love, Whence I can see at will Afric or Asia ; There nymphs with baskets tripping through the grove Shower jonquils at my feet or colocasia : Far from the town's vexations there I'd rove, Haunting no more your Areopagi, Where folk delight in calumny and lie'. 1 Translated by Leigh Hunt. Translated by Addington Symonds. For Pulci was a poet, first and last. He took nothing seriously except his art; least of all the pretensions of the Hellenists or the piety of the theologians. His Morgante (maggiore means simply 'longer', and implies that the poem had been written in two instalments) is a romance of Roland, whose chanson de geste we examined in the heroic cycle of Charlemagne. The treachery of Gano at Roncesvalles and the rout of Count Roland in the pass had never been wholly dropped out of the repertories of street-minstrels; and a dull compilation in prose, known as the Reali de Francia, saved Pulci all the trouble of research. He employed the epic octave stanza, already nationalized by Boccaccio; and, thus equipped with a hero and a metre, the two essentials of subject and form, Pulci's genius broke away from the tentative poetizing of his contemporaries. He reinvented Roland as Orlando; he invented Morgante, a giant, captured and converted in the first canto, to aid and adorn the knight's prowess; he added Margutte, a second giant, as an unredeemed foil to the first; he introduced Malagigi, the magician, and Astarotte, the devil, to relieve the gloom of Dante's hell; he reduced the stature of Charlemagne, increasing his credulousness with his beard; and, through all, he sought deliberately to entertain rather than to instruct. The prevailing note of Morgante is its humour, tending sometimes to satire and burlesque. Pulci could rise in places to the height of the old, tragic theme of honour triumphant over death, in the valley of the shadow at Roncesvalles. But chiefly his purpose was set, to make an agreeable tale for the amusement of the Medicean court, and to preserve in all sections of his romance the unity of its artistic aim. Pulci, like Tennyson after him, in however different a sphere, deprecated the standard of a larger lay'. In the admirable version of Addington Symonds, he warns us 'I ask not for that wreath of bay or laurel Which on Greek brows or Roman proudly shone : My Pegasus is but a rustic sorrel ; Untutored mid the groves I still pipe on : 'A nobler bard shall rise and win the payment We must forgo the pleasure of illustration, for we shall meet Count Orlando again in the romance-epics of later Italian poets. But we may note that Pulci's modest prophecy was fulfilled in all its parts. The 'nobler bard' arose in Ariosto, and he won the rewards of fame. Yet in Pulci's honour be it noted, too, that an Italian critic assures us : 'You will adore Ariosto, you will admire Tasso, but you will love Pulci '. When we reach in a later chapter of this history the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, we shall find that its splendid success depended far less on Pulci's Morgante than on the contemporary Orlando Innamorato of MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO (1434-94). Indeed, it is a proof of that dependence, that Pulci's poem is still remembered, while Boiardo's is forgotten and submerged, despite its popular revision by Francesco Berni (1497-1535). This submersion was due, be it stated, to the excellence of Ariosto much more than to Boiardo's defects. All Boiardo's advantages were repeated in a higher degree by Ariosto, who possessed the supreme advantage of all, of finding ready to his hand the poem which Boiardo had left unfinished at Book III, canto ix. Securus judicat |