Part 3 (1/2)
Subito ordin i premi a coloro, che lottare volessero, offrendo di dare al vincitore un bel vaso di legno di acero, ove per mano del Padoano Mantegna, artefice sovra tutti gli altri accorto ed ingegnosissimo, eran dipinte molte cose: ma tra l' altre una ninfa ignuda, con tutti i membri bellissimi, dai piedi in fuori, che erano come quelli delle capre; la quale, sovra un gonfiato otre sedendo, lattava un picciolo satirello, e con tanta tenerezza il mirava, che parea che di amore e di carita tutta si struggesse: e 'l fanciullo nell' una mammella poppava, nell' altra tenea distesa la tenera mano, e con l' occhio la si guardava, quasi temendo che tolta non gli fosse. Poco discosto da costoro si vedean due fanciulli pur nudi, i quali avendosi posti due volti orribili di maschere cacciavano per le bocche di quelli le picciole mani, per porre spavento a duo altri, che davanti loro stavano; de' quali l' uno fuggendo si volgea in dietro, e per paura gridava; l' altro caduto gia in terra piangeva, e non possendosi altrimenti aitare, stendeva la mano per graffiarlo. (_Prosa_ XI.)
I shall make no attempt at translation. Some versions, really wonderful in the success with which they reproduce the style of the original, will be found in Symonds' _Italian Literature_[60]. It is probably unnecessary to put in a warning that the _Arcadia_ is a work of which extracts are apt to give a somewhat too favourable impression. In its long complaints, speeches, and descriptions it is at whiles intolerably prolix and dull, but it caught the taste of the age and went through a large number of editions, many with learned annotations, between the appearance of the first authorized edition and the end of the sixteenth century[61], There were several imitations later, such as the _Accademia tusculana_ of Benedetto Menzini; Firenzuola imitated the third _Prosa_ in his _Sacrifizio pastorale_; while collections of tales and _facetiae_ such as the _Arcadia in Brenta_ of Giovanni Sagredo equally sought the prestige of the name. A French translation published in 1544 went through three editions, and another appeared in 1737, while it was translated into Spanish in 1547, and again in 1578. It may have been due to the existence of Sidney's more ambitious work of the same name that no translation ever appeared in English.
Our survey of Italian pastoralism, in spite of the fact that its most important manifestation has been reserved for separate treatment later, has of necessity been lengthy. It was at Italian b.r.e.a.s.t.s that the infant ideal, reborn into a tumultuous world, was nursed. The other countries of continental Europe borrowed that ideal from Italy, though each in turn contributed characteristics of its own. It was to Italy that England too was directly indebted, while at the same time it absorbed elements peculiar to France and Spain. It will therefore be necessary briefly to review the forms that flourished in those countries respectively, though they need detain us but a brief s.p.a.ce in comparison with the Italian fountain-head.
Before proceeding, however, it may be worth while to pause for a moment in order to take a general survey of the nature of the ideal, we might almost say the religion, of pastoralism, which reached its maturity in the work of Sannazzaro. Its location in the uplands of Arcadia may be traced to Vergil, who had the wors.h.i.+p of Pan in mind, but the selection of the barren mountain district of central Peloponnesus as the seat of pastoral luxuriance and primitive culture is not without significance in respect of the severance of the pastoral ideal from actuality.[62] In it the world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the materialism that bound it. Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of what the northern peoples understand by romance. Yet it needed some relief from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly. What the pietism of Perugino's saints is to the feuds of the Baglioni, such is the Arcadian dream to the intellectual cynicism of Italian politics.
When children weave fancies of wonderland they use the resources of the imagination with economy; uninterrupted suns.h.i.+ne soon cloys. So too with these other children of the renaissance. Their wonderland is a place whither they may escape from the pressure of the world that is too much with them; they seek in it at least the virtue that its evils shall be the opposite of those from which they fly. They could not, it is true, believe in an Arcadia in which all the cares of this world should end--the golden age is always a time to be sung and remembered, or else to be dreamed of, in the years to come, it is never the present--but if they cannot escape from the changes and chances of this mortal life, if death and unfaith are still realities in their dreamland as on earth, they will at least utter their grief melodiously, and water fair pastures with their tears.
Like the garden of the Rose which satisfied the middle age before it, the Arcadian ideal of the renaissance degenerated, as every ideal must. The decay of pastoral, however, was in this unique, that it tended less to exaggerate than to negative the spirit that gave it birth. Theocritus turned from polite society and sought solace in his no doubt idealized recollections of actual shepherd life. On the other hand, to the allegorical pastoralists from Vergil to Spagnuoli, the shepherd-realm either reflects, or is made directly to contrast with, the interests and vices of the actual world; in their work the note of longing for escape to an ideal life is heard but faintly or not at all. In the songs of the late fifteenth century and in Sannazzaro there is a genuine pastoral revival; the desire of freedom from reality is strong upon men in that age of strenuous living. It has been happily said that Mantuan's shepherds meet to discuss society, Sannazzaro's to forget it. And yet, after all, these men are too strongly bound by the affections of this world to be able wholly to sacrifice themselves to the joys of the ideal. Fiammetta must have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth. And so when Arcadia ceased to be a necessity of sentiment and became one of fas.h.i.+on, where poets were no longer content to wander with their mistresses in the land of fancy, alone, 'at rest from their labour with the world gone by,'
there appeared a tendency to return to the allegorical style, and to make Arcadia what Sicily had already become--the mirror of the polite society of the Italian courts. Thus it is that in the crowning jewels of Italian pastoralism, in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor fido_, we trace a yearning towards a simpler, freer, and more genuine life, side by side with such incompatible and antagonistic elements as the reproduction in pastoral guise of the personages and surroundings of the circle of Ferrara. Not content with the pure ideal, the poets endeavoured, like Faust at the sight of Helena, to find in it a place for the earthly affections that bound them, and at the touch of reality the vision dissolved in mist.
VII
When we turn to the literature of the western peninsula during the early years of the sixteenth century, we find it characterized by a temporary but very complete subjection to Italian models. This phenomenon, which is particularly marked in pastoral, is readily explained by the fact that the similarity of the dialects made the transference of poetic forms from Italian to Spanish an easy matter. Thus when among the nations of Europe Italy awoke to her great task of recovering an old and discovering a new world of arts and letters, it was upon Spanish verse that she was able to exercise the most immediate and overpowering influence. Under these circ.u.mstances it was impossible but that she should drag the literature of that country, for a while at least, in her train, away from its own proper genius and natural course of development. Other countries were saved from servitude by the very failure of their attempts to imitate the new Italian style; and Spain herself, it must be remembered, was not long in recovering her individuality and in endowing Europe with one of the richest national literatures of the world.
It is important, however, to distinguish from the pastoral work produced under this dominating Italian influence certain other work in the kind, which, while to some extent dependent for its form upon foreign models, bears at the same time strong marks of native inspiration. In this earlier and more popular tradition the tendencies of the national literature, the pastoral possibilites of which appear at times in the ballads, mingle more or less with elements of convention and allegory drawn from Vergil or his humanistic followers. Little influence of this popular tradition can as a rule be traced in the later pastoral work, but it acquires a certain incidental interest in connexion with another branch of literature. It is, namely, the remarkable part it played in the evolution of the national drama that makes it worth while mentioning a few of its more important examples in this place.[63]
An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future drama as the index of its possibility, is the _Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_, the composition of an unknown author. It is an eclogue in which two shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak reign of Enrique IV. In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and vigorous vernacular. Of far greater importance in the history of literature are certain poems--_eclogas_ they are for the most part styled--of Juan del Encina, which belong roughly to the closing years of the fifteenth and opening years of the sixteenth century. Numbering about a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama.
About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited pa.s.sion ending in suicide, and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude herdsmen. Contemporary with, though a disciple of, Encina, is the Portuguese Gil Vicente, who wrote in both dialects, and whose _Auto pastoril castelhano_ may be cited as carrying on the tradition between his master and Lope de Vega.
With Lope's dramatic production as a whole we are not, of course, concerned. He lies indeed somewhat off our track; the pastoral influence in his work is capricious. It will be sufficient to note that the influence, where it exists, is external; it is nowhere the outcome of Christian allegory, nor does it arise out of the nature of the subject as such t.i.tles as the _Pastores de Belen_ might suggest. It is found equally in the religious or quasi-religious plays--such as the _Vuelta de Egypto_ with its shepherds and gypsies, and the _Pastor lobo_, an allegorical satire on the church Lope afterwards entered--and in such purely secular, amorous, and on the whole less dramatic pieces as the _Arcadia_--not to be confused with his romance of the same name--and the _Selva sin amor_, a regular Italian pastoral in miniature, both of which were acted, besides many others intended primarly for reading, though they may possibly have been recited after the manner of Castiglione's _Tirsi_.
While on the subject of the drama I may mention translations of the _Aminta_ and _Pastor fido_. Ta.s.so's piece was rendered into Castilian by Juan de Jauregui, and first printed at Rome in 1607, a revised edition appearing among the author's poems in 1618. The _Pastor fido_ was translated by Cristobal Suarez de Figueroa, the best version being that printed at Valentia in 1609, from which Ticknor quotes a pa.s.sage as typical as it is successful. It was to these two versions of the masterpieces of Italian pastoral that Cervantes accorded the highest meed of praise, declaring that 'they haply leave it doubtful which is the translation or original.'[64] There likewise exists a poor adaptation of Guarini's play, said to be the work of Solis, Coello, and Calderon[65].
The pastoral appears, however, never to have gained a very firm footing upon the mature Spanish stage, no doubt for the same reason that led to a similar result in England, namely, that the vigorous national drama about it overpowered and choked its delicate and exotic growth[66].
Apart from the dramatic or semi-dramatic work we have been reviewing, the pastoral verse which possesses the most natural and national character, though it may not be the earliest in date, is to be found in the poems of Francisco de Sa de Miranda[67]. He appears to have begun writing independently of the Italian school, and, even after he came under the influence of Garcilaso, to have preserved much of his natural simplicity and genuineness of feeling. He probably had some direct knowledge of the Italians, for he writes:
Liamos....
.... os pastores italianos Do bom velho Sanazarro.
He may also have been influenced by Encina, most of whose work had already appeared.
The first and foremost of those who deliberately based their style on the Italian was Garcilaso de la Vega, whose pastoral work dates from about 1526. To him, in conjunction with Boscan and Mendoza, the vogue was due.
At his best, when he really a.s.similates the foreign elements borrowed from his models and makes their style his own, he writes with the true genius of his nation. The first of his three eclogues, which was probably composed at Naples and is regarded as his best work, introduces the shepherds Salico and Nemoroso, of whom the first stands for the author, while in the other it is not hard to recognize his friend Boscan. This poem, a portion of which is translated by Ticknor, should of itself suffice to place Garcilaso in the front rank of pastoral writers. Yet he does not appear to occupy any isolated eminence among his fellows, and Ticknor may be right in thinking that, throughout, the regular pastoral showed fewer of its defects in Spain than elsewhere. It is also true that it appears to have been endowed with less vital power of development.
Garcilaso's followers were numerous. Among them mention may be made of Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes' _Galatea_; Pedro de Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa, the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo episode into Montemayor's _Diana_; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many imitators, who incorporated in his _Siglo de Oro_ a number of eclogues which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from Theocritus rather than Vergil.
In spite of the fas.h.i.+on of writing in Castilian which prevailed among Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed in the less important dialect. Sa de Miranda has been mentioned above.
Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five autobiographical eclogues[68] dating from about 1516-24, and consequently earlier than Garcilaso's. They are composed, like some of Sa de Miranda's, in the short measures more natural to the language than the _terza rima_ and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets. Later on Camoens wrote fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to Sannazzaro:
O pescador Sincero, que amansado Tem o pego de Prochyta co' o canto Por as sonoras ondas compa.s.sado.
D'este seguindo o som, que pode tanto, E misturando o antigo Mantuano, Facamos novo estylo, novo espanto.
Whereas in the case of the verse pastoral the Italian fas.h.i.+on pa.s.sed from Spain into Portugal, exactly the reverse process took place with regard to the prose romance more or less directly founded upon Sannazzaro. The first to imitate the _Arcadia_ was the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro, who during a two-years' residence in Italy composed the 'beautiful fragment,' as Ticknor styles it, ent.i.tled from the first words of the text _Menina e moca_. This unfinished romance first appeared, in the form of an octavo charmingly printed in gothic type, at Ferrara in 1554, though it must have been written at least thirty years earlier. It differs considerably from its model, the verse being purely incidental, and the intricacy of the story antic.i.p.ating later examples, as does likewise the admixture of chivalric adventure. It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. On the other hand it resembles the Italian pastoral in the introduction of real characters, which, though their ident.i.ty was concealed under anagrams and all manner of obscurity, appear to have been traceable by the keen eye of authority, for the book was placed on the Index. Such knowledge of Sannazzaro's writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish translation of the _Arcadia_. It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works.