The Romance of Biography (Vol 1 of 2)
by Mrs. Jameson · English · Gutenberg #35382 · 376,173 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Romance of Biography (Vol 1 of 2)
Author: Mrs. Jameson
Release date: February 24, 2011 [eBook #35382]
Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF BIOGRAPHY (VOL 1 OF 2) ***
Produced by Julia Miller, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
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file was produced from images generously made available
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[Illustration: _T. Wright. sc._
ARIOSTO READING HIS VERSES TO ALESSANDRA STROZZI.]
_London, Published by H. Colburn, 1829._
THE LOVES OF THE POETS.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY S. AND R. BENTLEY,
Dorset Street, Fleet Street.
THE ROMANCE OF BIOGRAPHY;
OR
MEMOIRS OF WOMEN LOVED AND CELEBRATED BY POETS,
FROM
THE DAYS OF THE TROUBADOURS TO THE PRESENT AGE;
A SERIES OF ANECDOTES INTENDED TO ILLUSTRATE THE INFLUENCE WHICH FEMALE
BEAUTY AND VIRTUE HAVE EXERCISED OVER THE CHARACTERS AND WRITINGS OF MEN
OF GENIUS.
BY MRS. JAMESON,
_Authoress of the Diary of an Ennuyee; Lives of Celebrated Female
Sovereigns; Female Characters of Shakspeare's Plays; Beauties of the
Court of Charles the Second, &c._
THIRD EDITION,
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
SAUNDERS AND OTLEY.
MDCCCXXXVII.
Enfin, relevons-nous sous le poids de l'existence; ne donnons pas a nos
injustes ennemis, a nos amis ingrats, le triomphe d'avoir abattu nos
facultes intellectuelles. Ils reduisent a chercher la celebrite ceux qui
se seraient contentes des affections: eh bien! il faut l'atteindre. Ces
essais ambitieux ne porteront point remede aux peines de l'ame; mais ils
honoreront la vie. La consacrer a l'espoir toujours trompe du bonheur,
c'est la rendre encore plus infortunee. Il vaut mieux reunir tous ses
efforts pour descendre avec quelque noblesse, avec quelque reputation,
la route qui conduit de la jeunesse a la mort.
MADAME DE STAEL.
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.
These little sketches (they can pretend to no higher title,) are
submitted to the public with a feeling of timidity almost painful.
They are absolutely without any other pretension than that of
exhibiting, in a small compass and under one point of view, many
anecdotes of biography and criticism, and many beautiful poetical
portraits, scattered through a variety of works, and all tending to
illustrate a subject in itself full of interest,--the influence which
the beauty and virtue of women have exercised over the characters and
writings of men of genius. But little praise or reputation attends the
mere compiler, but the pleasure of the task has compensated its
difficulty;--"song, beauty, youth, love, virtue, joy," these "flowers of
Paradise," whose growth is not of earth, were all around me; I had but
to gather them from the intermingling weeds and briars, and to bind them
into one sparkling wreath, consecrated to the glory of women and the
gallantry of men.
The design which unfolded itself before me, as these little sketches
extended gradually from a few memoranda into volumes, is not completed;
much has been omitted, much suppressed. If I have paused midway in my
task, it is not for want of materials, which offer themselves in almost
exhaustless profusion--nor from want of interest in the subject--the
most delightful in which the imagination ever revelled! but because I
desponded over my own power to do it justice. I know, I feel that it
required more extensive knowledge of languages, more matured judgment,
more critical power, more eloquence;--only Madame de Stael could have
fulfilled my conception of the style in which it ought to have been
treated. It was enthusiasm, not presumption, which induced me to attempt
it. I have touched on matters, on which there are a variety of tastes
and opinions, and lightly passed over questions on which there are
volumes of grave "historic doubts;" but I have ventured on no
discussion, still less on any decision. I have been satisfied merely to
quote my authorities; and where these exhibited many opposing facts and
opinions, it seemed to me that there was far more propriety and much
less egotism in simply expressing, in the first person, what I thought
and felt, than in asserting absolutely that a thing _is so_, or _is said
to be so_. Every one has a right to have an opinion, and deliver it with
modesty; but no one has a right to clothe such opinions in general
assertions, and in terms which seem to insinuate that they are or ought
to be universal. I know I am open to criticism and contradiction on a
thousand points; but I have adhered strictly to what appeared to me the
truth, and examined conscientiously all the sources of information that
were open to me.
The history of this little book, were it worth revealing, would be the
history, in miniature, of most human undertakings: it was begun with
enthusiasm; it has been interrupted by intervals of illness, idleness,
or more serious cares; it has been pursued through difficulties so
great, that they would perhaps excuse its many deficiencies; and now I
see its conclusion with a languor almost approaching to despair;--at
least with a feeling which, while it renders me doubly sensitive to
criticism, and apprehensive of failure, has rendered me almost
indifferent to success, and careless of praise.
I owe four beautiful translations from the Italian (which are noticed in
their proper places,) to the kindness of a living poet, whose justly
celebrated name, were I allowed to mention it, would be subject of pride
to myself, and double the value of this little book. I have no other
assistance of any kind to acknowledge.
* * * * *
Will it be thought unfeminine or obtrusive, if I add yet a few words?
I think it due to truth and to myself to seize this opportunity of
saying, that a little book published three years ago, and now perhaps
forgotten, was not written for publication, nor would ever have been
printed but for accidental circumstances.
That the title under which it appeared was not given by the writer, but
the publisher, who at the time knew nothing of the author.
And that several false dates, and unimportant circumstances and
characters were interpolated, to conceal, if possible, the real purport
and origin of the work. Thus the intention was not to create an
illusion, by giving to fiction the appearance of truth, but, in fact, to
give to truth the air of fiction. I was not _then_ prepared for all that
a woman must meet and endure, who once suffers herself to be betrayed
into authorship. She may repent at leisure, like a condemned spirit; but
she has passed that barrier from which there is no return.
C'est assez,--I will not add a word more, lest it should be said that I
have only disclaimed the title of the _Ennuyee_, to assume that of the
_Ennuyeuse_.
CONTENTS
OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
Page
CHAPTER I.
A POET'S LOVE 1
CHAPTER II.
LOVES OF THE CLASSIC POETS 7
CHAPTER III.
THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS 14
CHAPTER IV.
THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS (continued) 34
CHAPTER V.
GUIDO CAVALCANTI AND MANDETTA.--CINO DA PISTOJA AND SELVAGGIA 55
CHAPTER VI.
LAURA 64
CHAPTER VII.
LAURA AND PETRARCH (continued) 85
CHAPTER VIII.
DANTE AND BEATRICE PORTINARI 105
CHAPTER IX.
DANTE AND BEATRICE (continued) 125
CHAPTER X.
CHAUCER AND PHILIPPA PICARD.--KING JAMES AND LADY JANE BEAUFORT 133
CHAPTER XI.
LORENZO DE' MEDICI AND LUCRETIA DONATI 161
CHAPTER XII.
THE FAIR GERALDINE 185
CHAPTER XIII.
ARIOSTO, GINEVRA, AND ALESSANDRA STROZZI 198
CHAPTER XIV.
SPENSER'S ROSALIND. SPENSER'S ELIZABETH 219
CHAPTER XV.
ON THE LOVE OF SHAKSPEARE 237
CHAPTER XVI.
SYDNEY'S STELLA (LADY RICH) 249
CHAPTER XVII.
COURT AND AGE OF ELIZABETH.
DRAYTON, DANIEL, DRUMMOND, MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, CLEMENT
MAROT AND DIANA DE POICTIER, RONSARD'S CASSANDRE,
RONSARD'S MARIE, RONSARD'S HELENE 263
CHAPTER XVIII.
LEONORA D'ESTE 288
CHAPTER XIX.
MILTON AND LEONORA BARONI 330
THE LOVES OF THE POETS.
CHAPTER I.
A POET'S LOVE.
Io ti cinsi de gloria, e fatta ho dea!--GUIDI.
Of all the heaven-bestowed privileges of the poet, the highest, the
dearest, the most enviable, is the power of immortalising the object of
his love; of dividing with her his amaranthine wreath of glory, and
repaying the inspiration caught from her eyes with a crown of
everlasting fame. It is not enough that in his imagination he has
deified her--that he has consecrated his faculties to her honour--that
he has burned his heart in incense upon the altar of her perfections:
the divinity thus decked out in richest and loveliest hues, he places on
high, and calls upon all ages and all nations to bow down before her,
and all ages and all nations obey! worshipping the beauty thus enshrined
in imperishable verse, when others, perhaps as fair, and not less
worthy, have gone down, unsung, "to dust and an endless darkness." How
many women who would otherwise have stolen through the shades of
domestic life, their charms, virtues, and affections buried with them,
have become objects of eternal interest and admiration, because their
memory is linked with the brightest monuments of human genius? While
many a high-born dame, who once moved, goddess-like, upon the earth, and
bestowed kingdoms with her hand, lives a mere name in some musty
chronicle. Though her love was sought by princes, though with her dower
she might have enriched an emperor,--what availed it?
"She had no poet--and she died!"
And how have women repaid this gift of immortality? O believe it, when
the garland was such as woman is proud to wear, she amply and deeply
rewarded him who placed it on her brow. If in return for being made
illustrious, she made her lover happy,--if for glory she gave a heart,
was it not a rich equivalent? and if not--if the lover was unsuccessful,
still the poet had his reward. Whence came the generous feelings, the
high imaginations, the glorious fancies, the heavenward inspirations,
which raised him above the herd of vulgar men--but from the ennobling
influence of her he loved? Through _her_, the world opened upon him with
a diviner beauty, and all nature became in his sight but a transcript of
the charms of his mistress. He saw her eyes in the stars of heaven, her
lips in the half-blown rose. The perfume of the opening flowers was but
her breath, that "wafted sweetness round about the world:" the lily was
"a sweet thief" that had stolen its purity from her breast. The violet
was dipped in the azure of her veins; the aurorean dews, "dropt from the
opening eyelids of the morn," were not so pure as her tears; the last
rose-tint of the dying day was not so bright or so delicate as her
cheek. Her's was the freshness and the bloom of the Spring; she consumed
him to languor as the Summer sun; she was kind as the bounteous Autumn,
or she froze him with her wintry disdain. There was nothing in the
wonders, the splendours, or the treasures of the created universe,--in
heaven or in earth,--in the seasons or their change, that did not borrow
from her some charm, some glory beyond its own. Was it not just that the
beauty she dispensed should be consecrated to her adornment, and that
the inspiration she bestowed should be repaid to her in fame?
For what of thee thy poet doth invent,
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give,
But found it in thy cheek; he can afford
No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.
_Then thank him not for that which he doth say,
Since what he owes thee, thou thyself dost pay!_
SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS.
The theory, then, which I wish to illustrate, as far as my limited
powers permit, is this: that where a woman has been exalted above the
rest of her sex by the talents of a lover, and consigned to enduring
fame and perpetuity of praise, the passion was real, and was merited;
that no deep or lasting interest was ever founded in fancy or in
fiction; that truth, in short, is the basis of all excellence in amatory
poetry, as in every thing else; for where truth is, there is good of
some sort, and where there is truth and good, there must be beauty,
there must be durability of fame. Truth is the golden chain which links
the terrestrial with the celestial, which sets the seal of heaven on the
things of this earth, and stamps them to immortality. Poets have risen
up and been the mere fashion of a day, and have set up idols which have
been the idols of a day: if the worship be out of date and the idols
cast down, it is because these adorers wanted sincerity of purpose and
feeling; their raptures were feigned; their incense was bought or
adulterate. In the brain or in the fancy, one beauty may eclipse
another--one coquette may drive out another, and tricked off in airy
verse, they float away unregarded like morning vapours, which the beam
of genius has tinged with a transient brightness: but let the heart once
be touched, and it is not only wakened but inspired; the lover kindled
into the poet, presents to her he loves, his cup of ambrosial praise:
she tastes--and the woman is transmuted into a divinity. When the
Grecian sculptor carved out his deities in marble, and left us wondrous
and god-like shapes, impersonations of ideal grace unapproachable by
modern skill, was it through mere mechanical superiority? No;--it was
the spirit of faith within which shadowed to his imagination what he
would represent. In the same manner, no woman has ever been truly,
lastingly deified in poetry, but in the spirit of truth and of love!
CHAPTER II.
LOVES OF THE CLASSIC POETS.
I am not sufficiently an antiquarian or scholar, to trace the muses
"upward to their spring," neither is there occasion to seek our first
examples of poetical loves in the days of fables and of demi-gods; or in
those pastoral ages when shepherds were kings and poets: the loves of
Orpheus and Eurydice are a little too shadowy, and those of the royal
Solomon rather too mixed and too mystical for our purpose.--To descend
then at once to the _classical_ ages of antiquity.
It must be allowed, that as far as women are concerned, we have not much
reason to regard them with reverence. The fragments of the amatory
poetry of the Greeks, which have been preserved to our times, show too
plainly in what light we were then regarded; and graceful and exquisite
as many of them are, they bear about them the taint of degraded morals
and manners, and are utterly destitute of that exalted sentiment of
respect and tenderness for woman, either individually or as a sex, which
alone can give them value in our eyes.
I must leave it then to learned commentators to explore and elucidate
the loves of Sappho and Anacreon. To us unlearned women, they shine out
through the long lapse of ages, bright _names_, and little else; a kind
of half-real,--half-ideal impersonations of love and song; the one
enveloped in "a fair luminous cloud," the other "veiled in shadowing
roses;" and thus veiled and thus shadowed, by all accounts, they had
better remain.
The same remark, with the same reservation, applies to the Latin poets.
They wrote beautiful verses, admirable for their harmony, elegance and
perspicuity of expression; and are studied as models of style in a
language, the knowledge of which, as far as these poets are concerned,
were best confined to the other sex. They lived in a corrupted age, and
their pages are deeply stained with its licentiousness; they inspire no
sympathy for their love, no interest, no respect for the objects of it.
How, indeed, should that be possible, when their mistresses, even
according to the lover's painting, were all either perfectly insipid, or
utterly abandoned and odious?[1] Ovid, he who has revealed to mortal
ears "all the soft scandal of the laughing sky," and whose gallantry has
become proverbial, represents himself as so incensed by the public and
shameless infidelities of his Corinna, that he treats her with the
unmanly brutality of some street ruffian;--in plain language, he beats
her. They are then reconciled, and again there are quarrels, coarse
reproaches, and mutual blows. At length the lady, as might be expected
from such tuition, becoming more and more abandoned, this delicate and
poetical lover requests, as a last favour, that she will, for the
future, take some trouble to deceive him more effectually; and the fair
one, can she do less? kindly consents!
Cynthia, the mistress of Propertius, gets tipsey, overturns the
supper-table, and throws the cups at her lover's head; he is delighted
with her _playfulness_: she leaves him to follow the camp with a
soldier; he weeps and laments: she returns to him again, and he is
enchanted with her amiable condescension. Her excesses are such, that he
is reduced to blush for her and for himself; and he confesses that he is
become, for her sake, the laughing-stock of all Rome. Cynthia is the
only one of these classical loves who seems to have possessed any mental
accomplishments. The poet praises, incidentally, her talents for music
and poetry; but not as if they added to her charms or enhanced her value
in his estimation. The Lesbia[2] of Catullus, whose eyes were red with
weeping the loss of her favourite sparrow, crowned a life of the most
flagitious excesses by poisoning her husband. Of the various ladies
celebrated by Horace and Tibullus, it would really be difficult to
discover which was most worthless, venal, and profligate. These were the
refined loves of the classic poets!
* * * * *
The passion they celebrated never seems to have inspired one ennobling
or generous sentiment, nor to have lifted them for one moment above the
grossest selfishness. They had no scruple in exhibiting their mistresses
to our eyes, as doubtless they appeared in their own, degraded by every
vice, and in every sense contemptible; beings, not only beyond the pale
of our sympathy, but of our toleration. Throughout their works, virtue
appears a mere jest: Love stript of his divinity, even by those who
first deified him, is what we disdain to call by that name; _sentiment_,
as we now understand the word,--that is, the union of fervent love with
reverence and delicacy towards its object,--a thing unknown and unheard
of,--and all is "of the earth, earthy."
* * * * *
It is for women I write; the fair, pure-hearted, delicate-minded, and
unclassical reader will recollect that I do not presume to speak of
these poets critically, being neither critic nor scholar; but merely
with a reference to my subject, and with a reference to my sex. As
monuments of the language and literature of a great and polished people,
rich with a thousand beauties of thought and style, doubtless they have
their value and their merit: but as monuments also of a state of morals
inconceivably gross and corrupt; of the condition of women degraded by
their own vices, the vices and tyranny of the other sex, and the
prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, the tendency of which, (however
disguised by rhetoric,) was ever to lower the tone of the mind;
considered in this point of view, they might as well have all burned
together in that vast bonfire of love-poetry which the Doctors of the
Church raised at Constantinople:--what a flame it must have made![3]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I need scarcely observe, that the following sketch of the lyrical
poets of Rome is abridged from the analysis of their works, in
Ginguene's Histoire Litteraire, vol. 3.
[2] Clodia, the wife of Quintus Metellus Celer.
[3] "J'ai oui dire dans mon enfance a Demetrius Chalcondyle, homme tres
instruit de tout ce qui regarde la Grece, qui les Pretres avaient eu
assez d'influence sur les Empereurs de Constantinople, pour les engager
a bruler les ouvrages de plusieurs anciens poetes Grecs, et en
particulier de ceux qui parlaient des amours, &c. * * * Ces pretres,
sans doute, montrerent une malveillance honteuse envers les anciens
poetes; mais ils donnerent une grande preuve d'integrite, de probite, et
de religion."--ALCYONIUS.
This sentiment is put into the mouth of Leo X. at a time when the mania
of classical learning was at its height.--See Roscoe, (Leo X.) and
Ginguene.
CHAPTER III.
THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS.
Gente, che d'amor givan ragionando.--PETRARCA.
The irruptions of the northern nations, among whom our sex was far
better appreciated than among the polished Greeks and Romans; the rise
of Christianity, and the institution of chivalry, by changing the moral
condition of women, gave also a totally different character to the
homage addressed to them. It was in the ages called gothic and
barbarous,--in that era of high feelings and fierce passions,--of love,
war, and wild adventure, that the sex began to take their true station
in society. From the midst of ignorance, superstition, and ferocity,
sprung up that enthusiasm, that exaggeration of sentiment, that
serious, passionate, and imaginative adoration of women, which has
since, indeed, degenerated into mere gallantry, but was the very
fountain of all that is most elevated and elegant in modern poetry, and
most graceful and refined in modern manners.
The amatory poetry of Provence had the same source with the national
poetry of Spain; both were derived from the Arabians. To them we trace
not only the use of rhyme, and the various forms of stanzas, employed by
the early lyric poets, but by a strange revolution, it was from the
East, where women are now held in seclusion, as mere soulless slaves of
the passions and caprices of their masters, that the sentimental
devotion paid to our sex in the chivalrous ages was derived.[4] The
poetry of the Troubadours kept alive and enhanced the tone of feeling on
which it was founded; it was cause and effect re-acting on each other;
and though their songs exist only in the collections of the antiquarian,
and the very language in which they wrote has passed away, and may be
accounted _dead_,--so is not the spirit they left behind: as the
founders of a new school of amatory poetry, we are under obligations to
their memory, which throw a strong interest around their personal
adventures, and the women they celebrated.
The tenderness of feeling and delicacy of expression in some of these
old Provencal poets, are the more touching, when we recollect that the
writers were sometimes kings and princes, and often knights and
warriors, famed for their hardihood and exploits. William, Count of
Poitou, our Richard the First, two Kings of Arragon, a King of Sicily,
the Dauphin of Auvergne, the Count de Foix, and a Prince of Orange, were
professors of the "gaye science." Thibault,[5] Count of Provence and
King of Navarre, was another of these royal and chivalrous Troubadours,
and his _lais_ and his virelais were generally devoted to the praises of
Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis the Ninth--the same Blanche whom
Shakspeare has introduced into King John, and decked out in panegyric
far transcending all that her favoured poet and lover could have offered
at her feet.[6]
Thibault did, however, surpass all his contemporaries in refinement of
style: he usually concludes his _chansons_ with an _envoi_, or address,
to the Virgin, worded with such equivocal ingenuity, that it is equally
applicable to the Queen of Heaven, or the queen of his earthly
thoughts,--"La Blanche couronnee." There is much simplicity and elegance
in the following little song, in which the French has been modernised.
"Las! si j'avais pouvoir d'oublier
Sa beaute,--son bien dire,
Et son tres doux regarder
Finirait mon martyre!
Mais las! mon coeur je n'en puis oter;
Et grand affolage
M'est d'esperer;
Mais tel servage
Donne courage
A tout endurer.
Et puis comment oublier
Sa beaute, son bien dire,
Et son tres doux regarder?
Mieux aime mon martyre!"
Princesses and ladies of rank entered the lists of poesy, and
vanquished, on almost every occasion, the Troubadours of the other sex.
For instance, that Countess of Champagne, who presided with such eclat
in one of the courts of love; Beatrice, Countess of Provence, the mother
of four queens, among whom was Berengaria of England; Clara d'Anduse,
one of whose songs is translated by Sismondi; a certain Dame
Castellosa, who in a pathetic remonstrance to some ungrateful lover,
assures him that if he forsakes her for another, and leaves her to die,
he will commit a heinous sin before the face of God and man; that
charming Comtesse de Die, of whom more presently, and others
innumerable, "tout hommes que femmes, la pluspart gentilshommes et
Seigneurs de Places, amoureux des Roynes, Imperatrices, Duchesses,
Marquises, Comtesses, et gentils-femmes; desquelles les maris
s'estimaient grandement heureux quand nos poetes leurs addressaient
quelque chant nouveau en notre langue Provencal." The said poets being
rewarded by these debonnaire husbands with rich dresses, horses, armour,
and gold;[7] and by the ladies with praise, thanks, courteous words, and
sweet smiles, and very often, "altra cosa piu cara." The biography of
these Troubadours generally commences with the same phrase--Such a one
was "gentilhomme et chevalier," and was "pris d'amour" for such a lady,
always named, who was the wife of such a lord, and in whose honour and
praise he composed "maintes belles et doctes chansons." In these
"chansons,"--for all the amatory poetry of those times was sung to
music,--we have love and romantic adventure oddly enough mixed up with
piety and devotion, such as were the mode in an age when religion ruled
the imagination and opinions of men, without in any degree restraining
the passions, or influencing the conduct. One Troubadour tells us, that
when he beholds the face of his mistress, he crosses himself with
delight and gratitude; another pathetically entreats a priest to
dispense him from his vows of love to a certain lady, whom he loved no
longer; the lady being the wife of another, one would imagine that the
dispensation should rather have been required in the first instance.
Arnaldo de Daniel, unable to soften the obdurate heart of his mistress,
performs penance, and celebrates six (or as some say, a thousand) masses
a day, "en priant Dieu de pouvoir acquerir la grace de sa dame," and
burns lamps before the Virgin, and consecrates tapers for the same
purpose: the lady with whom he is thus piously in love, was Cyberna, the
wife of Guillaume de Bouille. This was something like the incantations
and sacrifices of the classic poets, who familiarly mixed up their
mythology with their amours; but in a spirit as different as the
allegorical cupid of these chivalrous poets is from the winged and
wanton deity of the Greeks and Romans. Pierre Vidal sees a vision of
Love, whom he describes as a young knight, fair and fresh as the day,
crowned with a wreath of flowers instead of a helmet; and mounted on a
palfrey as white as snow, with a saddle of jasper, and spurs of
chalcedony; his squires and attendants are "_Mercy_, _Pudeur_, and
_Loyaute_." _Sir Cupid_ on horseback, with his saddle and his spurs,
attended by Gentleness, Modesty, and Good Faith, is a novel
divinity.--Thus, among the Greeks, Love was attended by the Graces, and
among the Troubadours by the Virtues. In the same spirit of allegory,
but touched with a more classic elegance, we have Petrarch's Cupid,
driving his fiery car in triumph, followed by a shadowy host of captives
to his power,--the heroes who had confessed and the poets who had sung
his might.
Vidi un vittorioso e sommo duce,
Pur com' un di color ch' in Campidoglio
Trionfal carro a gran gloria conduce.
....*....*....*....*
Quattro destrier via piu che neve bianchi:
Sopr' un carro di foco un garzon crudo
Con arco in mano, e con saeette a' fianchi.
And yet more finished is Spenser's "Masque of Cupid," in the third book
of the Fairy Queen, where Love, as in the antique gem, is mounted on a
lion, preceded by minstrels carolling
A lay of love's delight with sweet concent,
attended by Fancy, Desire, Hope, Fear, and Doubt; and followed by Care,
Repentance, Shame, Strife, Sorrow, &c.--The vivid colours in which these
imaginary personages are depicted, the image of the God "uprearing
himself," and looking round with disdain on the troop of victims and
slaves who surround him, the rattling of his darts, as he shakes them in
defiance and in triumph, and "claps on high his coloured wings twain,"
forms altogether a most finished and gorgeous picture; such as Rubens
should have painted, as far as his pencil, rainbow-dipt, could have
reflected the animated pageant to the eye.
The extravagance of passion and boundless devotion to the fair sex,
which the Troubadours sang in their lays, they not unfrequently
illustrated by their actions; and while the knowledge of the first is
confined to a few antiquarians, the latter still survive in the history
and the traditions of their province. One of these (Guillaume de la
Tour) having lost the object of his love, underwent, during a whole
year, the most cruel and unheard-of penances, in the hope that heaven
might be won to perform a miracle in his favour, and restore her to his
arms; at length he died broken-hearted on her tomb.[8] Another,[9]
beloved by a certain princess, in some unfortunate moment breaks his vow
of fidelity, and unable to appease the indignation of his mistress, he
retires to a forest, builds himself a cabin of boughs, and turns hermit,
having first made a solemn vow that he will never leave his solitude
till he is received into favour by his offended love. Being one of the
most celebrated and popular Troubadours of his province, all the knights
and the ladies sympathise with his misfortunes: they find themselves
terribly _ennuyes_ in the absence of the poet who was accustomed to
vaunt their charms and their deeds of prowess; and at the end of two
years they send a deputation, entreating him to return,--but in vain:
they then address themselves to the lady, and humbly solicit the pardon
of the offender, whose disgrace in her sight, has thrown a whole
province into mourning. The princess at length relents, but upon
conditions which appear in these unromantic times equally extraordinary
and difficult to fulfil. She requires that a hundred brave knights, and
a hundred fair dames, pledged in love to each other, (s'aimant d'amour)
should appear before her on their knees, and with joined hands
supplicate for mercy: the conditions are fulfilled: the fifty pair of
lovers are found to go through the ceremony, and the Troubadour receives
his pardon.[10]
The story of Peyre de Ruer, "gentilhomme et Troubadour," might be termed
a satirical romance, did we not know that it is a plain fact, related
with perfect simplicity. He devotes himself to a lady of the noble
Italian family of Carraccioli, and in her praise he composes, as usual,
"maintes belles et doctes chansons:"--but the lady seems to have had a
taste for magnificence and pleasure; and the poet, in order to find
favour in her eyes, expends his patrimony in rich apparel, banquets, and
_joustes_ in her honour. The lady, however, continues inexorable; and
Peyre de Ruer takes the habit of a pilgrim and wanders about the
country. He arrives in the holy week at a certain church, and desires of
the cure permission to preach to his congregation of penitents:--he
ascends the pulpit, and recites with infinite fervour and grace one of
his own chansons d'amour,--for, says the chronicle, "_autre chose ne
scavait_," "he knew nothing better." The people mistaking it for an
invocation to the Virgin Mary or the Saints, are deeply affected and
edified; eyes are seen to weep that never wept before; the most
impenitent hearts are suddenly softened: he concludes with an
exhortation in the same strain--and then descending from the pulpit,
places himself at the door, and holding out his hat for the customary
alms, his delighted congregation fill it to overflowing with pieces of
silver. Peyre de Ruer forthwith casts off his pilgrim's gown, and in a
new and splendid dress, and with a new song in his hand, he presents
himself before the ladye of his love, who charmed by his gay attire not
less than by his return, receives him most graciously, and bestows on
him "maintes caresses."
I must observe that the biographer of this Peyre de Ruer, himself a
churchman, does not appear in the least scandalised or surprised at
this very novel mode of recruiting his finances and obtaining the favour
of the lady; but gives us fairly to understand, that after such a proof
of _loyaute_ he should have thought it quite contrary to all rule if she
had still rejected the addresses of this _gentil Troubadour_.
Jauffred (or Geffrey) de Rudel is yet more famous, and his story will
strikingly illustrate the manners of those times. Rudel was the
favourite minstrel of Geffrey Plantagenet de Bretagne, the elder brother
of our Richard Coeur de Lion, and like the royal Richard, a patron of
music and poetry. During the residence of Rudel at the court of England,
where he resided in great honour and splendour, caressed for his talents
and loved for the gentleness of his manners, he heard continually the
praises of a certain Countess of Tripoli; famed throughout Europe for
her munificent hospitality to the poor Crusaders. The pilgrims and
soldiers of the Cross, who were returning wayworn, sick and disabled,
from the burning plains of Asia, were relieved and entertained by this
devout and benevolent Countess; and they repaid her generosity, with all
the enthusiasm of gratitude, by spreading her fame throughout
Christendom.
These reports of her beauty and her beneficence, constantly repeated,
fired the susceptible fancy of Rudel: without having seen her, he fell
passionately in love with her, and unable to bear any longer the
torments of absence, he undertook a pilgrimage to visit this unknown
lady of his love, in company with Bertrand d'Allamanon, another
celebrated Troubadour of those days. He quitted the English court in
spite of the entreaties and expostulations of Prince Geffrey
Plantagenet, and sailed for the Levant. But so it chanced, that falling
grievously sick on the voyage, he lived only till his vessel reached the
shores of Tripoli. The Countess being told that a celebrated poet had
just arrived in her harbour, who was dying for her love, immediately
hastened on board, and taking his hand, entreated him to live for her
sake. Rudel, already speechless, and almost in the agonies of death,
revived for a moment at this unexpected grace; he was just able to
express, by a last effort, the excess of his gratitude and love, and
expired in her arms: thereupon the Countess wept bitterly, and vowed
herself to a life of penance for the loss she had caused to the
world.[11] She commanded that the last song which Rudel had composed in
her honour, should be transcribed in letters of gold, and carried it
always in her bosom; and his remains were inclosed in a magnificent
mausoleum of porphyry, with an Arabic inscription, commemorating his
genius and his love for her.
It is in allusion to this well-known story, that Petrarch has introduced
Rudel into the Trionfo d'Amore.
Gianfre Rudel ch' uso la vela e 'l remo,
A cercar la suo morte.
The song which the minstrel composed when he fell sick on this romantic
expedition, and found his strength begin to fail, and which the Countess
wore, folded within her vest, to the end of her life, is extant, and has
been translated into most of the languages of Europe; of these
translations, Sismondi's is the best, preserving the original and
curious arrangement of the rhymes, as well as the piety, naivete, and
tenderness of the sentiment.
Irrite, dolent partirai
Si ne vois cet amour de loin,
Et ne sais quand je le verrai
Car sont par trop nos terres loin.
Dieu, qui toutes choses as fait
Et formas cet amour si loin,
Donne force a mon coeur, car ai
L'espoir de voir m'amour au loin.
Ah, Seigneur, tenez pour bien vrai
L'amour qu'ai pour elle de loin.
Car pour un bien que j'en aurai
J'ai mille maux, tant je suis loin.
Ja d'autr'amour ne jouirai
Sinon de cet amour de loin--
Qu'une plus belle je n'en scais
En lieu qui soit ni pres ni loin!
Mrs. Piozzi and others have paraphrased this little song, but in a
spirit so different from the antique simplicity of the original, that I
shall venture to give a version, which has at least the merit of being
as faithful as the different idioms of the two languages will allow; I
am afraid, however, that it will not appear worthy of the honour which
the Countess conferred on it.
"Grieved and troubled shall I die,
If I meet not my love afar;
Alas! I know not that I e'er
Shall see her--for she dwells afar.
O God! that didst all things create,
And formed my sweet love now afar;
Strengthen my heart, that I may hope
To behold her face, who is afar.
O Lord! believe how very true
Is my love for her, alas! afar,
Tho' for each joy a thousand pains
I bear, because I am so far.
Another love I'll never have,
Save only she who is afar,
For fairer one I never knew
In places near, nor yet afar."
Bertrand d'Allamanon, whom I have mentioned as the companion of Rudel on
his romantic expedition, has left us a little ballad, remarkable for the
extreme refinement of the sentiment, which is quite a la Petrarque: he
gives it the fantastic title of a _demi chanson_, for a very fantastic
reason: it is thus translated in Millot. (vol. i. 390).
"On veut savoir pourquoi je fais une _demi chanson_? c'est parceque je
n'ai qu'un demi sujet de chanter. Il n'y a d'amour que de ma part; la
dame que j'aime ne veut pas m'aimer! mais au defaut des _oui_ qu'elle me
refuse, je prendrai les _non_ qu'elle me prodigue:--_esperer aupres
d'elle vaut mieux que jouir avec tout autre!_"
This is exactly the sentiment of Petrarch:
Pur mi consola, che morir per lei
Meglio e che gioir d'altra--
But it is one of those thoughts which spring in the heart, and might
often be repeated without once being borrowed.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Sismondi--Litterature du Midi.
[5]
Thibault fut Roi galant et valoureux,
Ses hauts faits et son rang n'ont rien fait pour sa gloire;
Mais il fut chansonnier--et ses couplets heureux,
Nous ont conserve sa memoire.
ANTHOLOGIE DE MONET.
[6]
If lusty Love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanche?
If zealous Love should go in search of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanche?
If Love, ambitious, sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanche?
[7] La plus honorable recompence qu'on pouvait faire aux dits poetes,
etait qu'on leur fournissait de draps, chevaux, armure, et argent.
[8] Millot, vol. ii. p. 148.
[9] Richard de Barbesieu.
[10] Millot, vol. iii. p. 86.--Ginguene, vol. i. p. 280.
[11] "Depuis ne fut jamais veue faire bonne chere," says the old
chronicle.--I am tempted to add the description of the first and last
interview of the Countess and her lover in the exquisite old French, of
which the antique simplicity and naivete are untranslateable.
"En cet estat fut conduit au port de Trypolly, et la arrive, son
compagnon feist (_fit_) entendre a la Comtesse la venue du Pelerin
malade. La Comtesse estant venue en la nef, prit le poete par la main;
et lui, sachant que c'estait la Comtesse, incontinent apres le doult et
gracieux accueil, recouvra ses esprits, la remercia de ce qu'elle lui
avait recouvre la vie, et lui dict: 'Tres illustre et vertueuse
princesse, je ne plaindrai point la mort oresque'--et ne pouvant achever
son propos, sa maladie s'aigrissant et augmentant, rendit l'esprit entre
les mains de la Comtesse."--_Vies des plus celebres Poetes Provencaux_,
p. 24.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS CONTINUED.
In striking contrast to the tender and gentle Rudel, we have the
ferocious Bertrand de Born: he, too, was one of the most celebrated
Troubadours of his time. As a petty feudal sovereign, he was, partly by
the events of the age, more by his own fierce and headlong passions,
plunged in continual wars. Nature however had made him a poet of the
first order. In these days he would have been another Lord Byron; but he
lived in a terrible and convulsed state of society, and it was only in
the intervals snatched from his usual pursuits,--that is, from burning
the castles, and ravaging the lands of his neighbours, and stirring up
rebellion, discord, and bloodshed all around him,--that he composed a
vast number of _lays_, _sirventes_, and _chansons_; some breathing the
most martial, and even merciless spirit; others devoted to the praise
and honour of his love, or rather loves, as full of submissive
tenderness and chivalrous gallantry.
He first celebrated Elinor Plantagenet, the sister of his friend and
brother in arms and song, Richard Coeur de Lion; and we are expressly
told that Richard was proud of the poetical homage rendered to the
charms of his sister by this knightly Troubadour, and that the Princess
was far from being insensible to his admiration. Only one of the many
songs addressed to Elinor has been preserved; from which we gather, that
it was composed by Bertrand in the field, at a time when his army was
threatened with famine, and the poet himself was suffering from the
pangs of hunger. Elinor married the Duke of Saxony, and Bertrand chose
for his next love the beautiful Maenz de Montagnac, daughter of the
Viscount of Turenne, and wife of Talleyrand de Perigord. The lady
accepted his service, and acknowledged him as her Knight; but evil
tongues having attempted to sow dissension between the lovers, Bertrand
addressed to her a song, in which he defends himself from the imputation
of inconstancy, in a style altogether characteristic and original. The
warrior poet, borrowing from the objects of his daily cares, ambition
and pleasures, phrases to illustrate and enhance the expression of his
love, wishes "that he may lose his favourite hawk in her first flight;
that a falcon may stoop and bear her off, as she sits upon his wrist,
and tear her in his sight, if the sound of his lady's voice be not
dearer to him than all the gifts of love from another."--"That he may
stumble with his shield about his neck; that his helmet may gall his
brow; that his bridle may be too long, his stirrups too short; that he
may be forced to ride a hard trotting horse, and find his groom drunk
when he arrives at his gate, if there be a word of truth in the
accusations of his enemies:--that he may not have a _denier_ to stake at
the gaming-table, and that the dice may never more be favourable to
him, if ever he had swerved from his faith:--that he may look on like a
dastard, and see his lady wooed and won by another;--that the winds may
fail him at sea;--that in the battle he may be the first to fly, if he
who has slandered him does not lie in his throat," &c. and so on through
seven or eight stanzas.
Bertrand de Born exercised in his time a fatal influence on the counsels
and politics of England. A close and ardent friendship existed between
him and young Henry Plantagenet, the eldest son of our Henry the Second;
and the family dissensions which distracted the English Court, and the
unnatural rebellion of Henry and Richard against their father, were his
work. It happened some time after the death of Prince Henry, that the
King of England besieged Bertrand de Born in one of his castles: the
resistance was long and obstinate, but at length the warlike Troubadour
was taken prisoner and brought before the King, so justly incensed
against him, and from whom he had certainly no mercy to expect. The
heart of Henry was still bleeding with the wounds inflicted by his
ungrateful children, and he saw before him, and in his power, the
primary cause of their misdeeds and his own bitter sufferings. Bertrand
was on the point of being led out to death, when by a single word he
reminded the King of his lost son, and the tender friendship which had
existed between them.[12] The chord was struck which never ceased to
vibrate in the parental heart of Henry; bursting into tears, he turned
aside, and commanded Bertrand and his followers to be immediately set at
liberty: he even restored to Bertrand his castle and his lands, "_in the
name of his dead son_." It is such traits as these, occurring at every
page, which lend to the chronicles of this stormy period an interest
overpowering the horror they would otherwise excite: for then all the
best, as well as the worst of human passions were called into play. In
this tempestuous commingling of all the jarring elements of society, we
have those strange approximations of the most opposite
sentiments,--implacable revenge and sublime forgiveness;--gross
licentiousness and delicate tenderness;--barbarism and
refinement;--treachery and fidelity--which remind one of that
heterogeneous mass tossed up by a stormy ocean; heaps of pearls,
unvalued gems, wedges of gold, mingled with dead men's bones, and all
the slimy, loathsome, and monstrous productions of the deep, which
during a calm remain together concealed and unknown in its unfathomed
abysses.
To return from this long similitude to Bertrand de Born: he concluded
his stormy career in a manner very characteristic of the times; for he
turned monk, and died in the odour of sanctity. But neither his late
devotion, nor his warlike heroism, nor his poetic fame, could rescue him
from the severe justice of Dante, who has visited his crimes and his
violence with so terrible a judgment, that we forget, while we thrill
with horror, that the crimes were real, the penance only imaginary.
Dante, in one of the circles of the Inferno, meets Bertrand de Born
carrying his severed head, _lantern wise_, in his hand;--the phantom
lifts it up by the hair, and the ghastly lips unclose to confess the
cause and the justice of this horrible and unheard-of penance.
----Or vedi la pena molesta
Tu che spirando vai veggendo i morti;
Vedi s'alcuna e grande come questa.
E perche tu di me novella porti,
Sappi ch' i' son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli
Che diedi al Re giovane i ma' conforti.
I' feci 'l padre e 'l figlio in se ribelli:
....*....*....*....*
Perch'io partii cosi giunte persone,
Partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!
Dal suo principio ch 'e 'n questo troncone.
Cosi s'osserva in me lo contrappasso.[13]
Now behold
This grievous torment, thou, who breathing goest
To spy the dead: behold, if any else
Be terrible as this,--and that on earth
Thou mayst bear tidings of me, know that I
Am Bertrand, he of Born, who gave King John
The counsel mischievous. Father and son
I set at mutual war:----
Spurring them on maliciously to strife.
For parting those so closely knit, my brain
Parted, alas! I carry from its source
That in this trunk inhabits. Thus the law
Of retribution fiercely works in me.[14]
Pierre Vidal, whose description of love I have quoted before, was one of
the most extraordinary characters of his time, a kind of poetical Don
Quixotte:--his brain was turned with love, poetry, and vanity: he
believed himself the beloved of all the fair, the mirror of knighthood,
and the prince of Troubadours. Yet in the midst of all his
extravagances, he possessed exquisite skill in his art, and was not
surpassed by any of the poets of those days, for the harmony, delicacy,
and tenderness of his amatory effusions. He chose for his first love
the beautiful wife of the Vicomte de Marseilles: the lady, unlike some
of the Princesses of her time, distinguished between the poet and the
man, and as he presumed too far on the encouragement bestowed on him in
the former capacity, he was banished: he then followed Richard the First
to the crusade. The verses he addressed to the lady from the Island of
Cyprus are still preserved. The folly of Vidal, or rather the
derangement of his imagination, subjected him to some of those
mystifications which remind us of Don Quixote and Sancho, in the court
of the laughter-loving Duchess. For instance, Richard and his followers
amused themselves at Cyprus, by marrying Vidal to a beautiful Greek girl
of no immaculate reputation, whom they introduced to him as the niece of
the Greek Emperor. Vidal, in right of his wife, immediately took the
title of Emperor, assumed the purple, ordered a throne to be carried
before him, and played the most fantastic antics of authority. Nor was
this the greatest of his extravagances: on his return to Provence, he
chose for the second object of his amorous and poetical devotion, a
lady whose name happened to be Louve de Penautier: in her honour he
assumed the name of _Loup_, and farther to merit the good graces of his
"_Dame_," and to do honour to the name he had adopted, he dressed
himself in the hide of a wolf, and caused himself to be hunted in good
earnest by a pack of dogs: he was brought back exhausted and half dead
to the feet of his mistress, who appears to have been more moved to
merriment than to love by this new and ridiculous exploit.
In general, however, the Troubadours had seldom reason to complain of
the cruelty of the ladies to whom they devoted their service and their
songs. The most virtuous and illustrious women thought themselves
justified in repaying, with smiles and favours, the poetical adoration
of their lovers; and this lasted until the profession of Troubadour was
dishonoured by the indiscretions, follies, and vices of those who
assumed it. Thus Peyrols, a famous Provencal poet, who was distinguished
in the court of the Dauphin d'Auvergne, fell passionately in love with
the sister of that Prince, (the Baronne de Mercoeur) and the Dauphin,
(himself a Troubadour) proud of the genius of his minstrel and of the
poetical devotion paid to his sister, desired her to bestow on her lover
all the encouragement and favour which was consistent with her dignity.
The lady, however, either misunderstood her instructions, or found it
too difficult to obey them: the seducing talents and tender verses of
this _gentil Troubadour_ prevailed over her dignity:--Peyrols was
beloved; but he was not sufficiently discreet. The sudden change in the
tone and style of his songs betrayed him, and he was banished. A great
number of his verses, celebrating the Dame de Mercoeur, are preserved
by St. Palaye, and translated by Millot.
Bernard de Ventadour was beloved by Elinor de Guienne, afterwards the
wife of our Henry the Second, and the mother of Richard the First:--I
have before observed the poetical penchants of all Elinor's children,
which they seem to have inherited from their mother.
Sordello of Mantua, whose name is familiar to all the readers of Dante,
as occurring in one of the finest passages of his great poem,[15] was an
Italian, but like all the best poets of his day, wrote in the Provencal
tongue: he is said to have carried off the sister of that modern
Phalaris, the tyrant Ezzelino of Padua. There is a very elegant ballad
(ballata) by Sordello, translated in Millot's collection; it is properly
a kind of rondeau, the first line being repeated at the end of every
stanza; "Helas! a quoi me servent mes yeux?"--"Alas! wherefore have I
eyes?"--It describes the pleasures of the Spring, which are to him as
nothing, in the absence of the only object on which his eyes can dwell
with delight. The arrangement of the rhymes in this pastoral song is
singularly elegant and musical.
Lastly, as illustrating the history of the amatory poetry of this age, I
extract from Nostradamus[16] the story of the young Countess de Die; she
loved and was beloved by the Chevalier d'Adhemar: (ancestor I presume to
that Chevalier d'Adhemar who figures in the letters of Madame de
Sevigne.) It was not in this case the lover who celebrated the charms of
his mistress, but the lady, who, being an illustrious female Troubadour,
"docte en poesie," celebrated the exploits and magnanimity of her lover.
The Chevalier, proud of such a distinction, caused the verses of his
mistress to be beautifully copied, and always carried them in his bosom;
and whenever he was in the company of knights and ladies, he enchanted
them by singing a couplet in his own praise out of his lady's book. The
publicity thus given to their love, was quite in the spirit of the
times, and does not appear to have injured the reputation of the
Countess for immaculate virtue,[17] which Adhemar would probably have
defended with lance and spear, against any slanderous tongue which had
dared to defame her.
The conclusion of this romantic story is melancholy. Adhemar heard a
false report, that the Countess, whose purity and constancy he had so
proudly maintained, had cast away her smiles on a rival: he fell sick
with grief and bitterness of heart: the Countess, being informed of his
state, set out, accompanied by her _mother_, and a long train of knights
and ladies, to visit and comfort him with assurances of her fidelity;
but when she appeared at his bed-side, and drew the curtain, it was
already too late: Adhemar expired in her arms. The Countess took the
veil in the convent of St. Honore, and died the same year _of grief_,
says the chronicle;--and to conclude the tragedy characteristically, the
mother of the young Countess buried her in the same grave with her
lover, and raised a superb monument to the memory of both. The Countess
de Die was one of the ten ladies who formed the _Court of Love_, held at
Pierrefeu, (about 1194) and in which Estifanie de Baux presided.
These Courts of Love, and the scenes they gave rise to, were certainly
open to ridicule; the "belles et subtiles questions d'amour" which were
there solemnly discussed, and decided by ladies of rank, were often
absurd, and the decisions something worse: still the fanciful influence
they gave to women on these subjects, and the gallantry they introduced
into the intercourse between the sexes, had a tendency to soften the
manners, to refine the language, and to tinge the sentiments and
passions with a kind of philosophical mysticism. But these gay and
gallant Courts of Love, the Provencal Troubadours, their lays, which for
two centuries had been the delight of all ranks of people, and had
spread music, love, and poetry through the land;--their language, which
had been the chosen dialect of gallantry in every court of Europe,--were
at once swept from the earth.
The glory of the Provencal literature began when Provence was raised to
an independent Fief, under Count Berenger I. about the year 1100; it
lasted two entire centuries, and ended when that fine and fertile
country became the scene of the horrible crusade against the Albigenses;
when the Inquisition sent forth its exterminating fiends to scatter
horror and devastation through the land, and the wars and rapacity of
Charles of Anjou, its new possessor, almost depopulated the country. The
language which had once celebrated deeds of love and heroism, now sang
only of desolation and despair. The Troubadours, in a strain worthy of
their gentle and noble calling, generally advocated the part of the
Albigenses, and the oppressed of whatever faith; and in many provinces,
in Lombardy especially, their language was interdicted, lest it might
introduce heretical or rebellious principles; gradually it fell into
disuse, and at length into total oblivion. The Troubadours, no longer
welcomed in castle or in hall, where once
They poured to lords and ladies gay,
The unpremeditated lay,
were degraded to wandering minstrels and itinerant jugglers. An attempt
was made, about a century later, (1324) by the institution of the
Floral Games at Thoulouse, to keep alive this high strain of poetical
gallantry. They were formerly celebrated with great splendour, and a
shadow of this institution is, I believe, still kept up, but it has
degenerated into a mere school of affectation. The original race of the
Troubadours was extinct long before Clemence d'Isaure and her golden
violet were thought of.
I cannot quit the subject of the Troubadours without one or two
concluding observations. To these rude bards we owe some new notions of
poetical justice, which never seem to have occurred to Horace or
Longinus, and are certainly more magnanimous, as well as more true to
moral feeling, than those which prevailed among the polished Greeks and
Romans. For instance, the generous Hector and the constant Troilus are
invariably exalted above the subtle Ulysses and the savage Achilles.
Theseus, Jason, and AEneas, instead of being represented as classical
heroes and pious favourites of the gods, are denounced as recreant
knights and false traitors to love and beauty. In the estimation of
these chivalrous bards, a woman's tears outweighed the exploits of
demi-gods; all the glory of Theseus is forgotten in sympathy for
Ariadne; and AEneas, in the old ballads and romances, is not, after all
his perfidy, dismissed to happiness and victory, but is plagued by the
fiends, haunted by poor Dido's "grimly ghost," and, finally, doomed to
perish miserably.[18] Nor does Jason fare better at their hands; in all
the old poets he is consigned to just execration. In Dante, we have a
magnificent and a terrible picture of him, doomed to one of the lowest
circles of hell, amid a herd of vile seducers, who betrayed the trusting
faith, or bartered the charms of women. Demons scourge him up and down,
without mercy or respite, in vengeance for the wrongs of Hypsipyle and
Medea.
Guarda quel grande che viene
E per dolor, non par lagrima spanda;
Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!
Quelli e Giasone--
--Con segni e con parole ornate
Isifile inganno----
Tal colpa a tal martiro lui condanna,
Ed anche di MEDEA si fa vendetta.
INFERNO, C. 18.
"Behold that lofty shade, who this way tends,
And seems too woe-begone to drop a tear;
How yet the regal aspect he retains!
'Tis Jason--
--He who with tokens and fair witching words
Hypsipyle beguil'd--
Such is the guilt condemns him to this pain;
Here too Medea's injuries are aveng'd!"--
CAREY.
And Chaucer, in relating the same story, begins with a burst of generous
indignation:
Thou root[19] of false lovers, Duke Jason,
Thou slayer, devourer, and confusion
Of gentil women, gentil creatures!
The story of his double perfidy is told and commented on in the same
chivalrous feeling: and the old poet concludes with characteristic
tenderness and simplicity--
This was the mede of loving, and guerdon
That Medea received of Duke Jason,
Right for her truth and for her kindnesse,
That loved him better than herself I guesse!
And lefte her father and her heritage:
And of Jason this is the vassalage
That in his dayes was never none yfound
So false a lover going on the ground.
It is in the same beautiful spirit of reverence to the best virtues of
our sex, that Alcestis, the wife of Admetus, who sacrificed her life to
prolong that of her husband, is honoured above all other heroines of
classical story. She has even been elevated into a kind of presiding
divinity,--a second Venus, with nobler attributes,--and in her new
existence is feigned to be the consort and companion of Love himself.
Another peculiarity of the poetry of the middle ages, was the worship
paid to the daisy, (la Marguerite) as symbolical of all that is lovely
in women. Why so lowly a flower should take precedence of the queenly
lily and the sumptuous rose, is not very clear; but it seems to have
originated with one of the old Provencal poets, whose mistress bore the
name of Marguerite; and afterwards it became a fashion and a kind of
poetical mythology.[20]
Thus in the "Flower and the Leafe" of Chaucer, the ladies and knights of
the flower approach singing a chorus in honour of the Daisy, of which
the burthen is, "si douce est la Marguerite."
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Le Roi lui demande, "S'il a perdu raison?" il lui repond, "Helas,
oui! c'est depuis la mort du Prince Henri, votre fils!"
[13] Inferno, c. xxviii.
[14] Carey's translation of Dante. Mr. Carey reads Re Giovanni, instead
of Re giovane:--King John, instead of Prince Henry.
[15] Purgatorio, c. vi.
[16] Vies des plus celebres poetes Provencaux.
[17] Agnes de Navarre, Comtesse de Foix, was beloved by Guillaume de
Machaut, a French poet; he became jealous, and she sent her own
confessor to him to complain of the injustice of his suspicions, and to
swear that she was still faithful to him. She required, also, of her
lover, to write and to publish in verse the history of their love; and
she preserved, at the same time, in the eyes of her husband and of the
world, the character of a virtuous Princess.--_See Foscolo_--_Essays on
Petrarch._
[18] Percy's Reliques.
[19] _Root_, i. e. example or beginner.
[20] See the notes to Chaucer, the works of Froissart, and Memoires sur
les Troubadours.
CHAPTER V.
GUIDO CAVALCANTI AND MANDETTA,
CINO DA PISTOJA AND SELVAGGIA.
Amatory poetry was transmitted from the Provencals to the Italians and
Sicilians, among whom the language of the Troubadours had long been
cultivated, and their songs imitated, but in style yet more affected and
_recherche_. Few of the Italian poets who preceded Dante, are
interesting even in a mere literary point of view: of these only one or
two have shed a reflected splendour round the object of their adoration.
Guido Cavalcanti, the Florentine, was the early and favourite friend of
Dante: being engaged in the factions of his native city, he was forced
on some emergency to quit it; and to escape the vengeance of the
prevailing party, he undertook a pilgrimage to Sant Jago. Passing
through Tolosa, he fell in love with a beautiful Spanish girl, whom he
has celebrated under the name of _Mandetta_:
In un boschetto trovai pastorella
Piu che la stella bella al mio parere,
Capegli avea biondetti e ricciutelli.
Some of his songs and ballads have considerable grace and nature; but
they were considered by himself as mere trifles. His grand work on which
his fame long rested, is a "Canzone sopra l'Amore," in which the subject
is so profoundly and so philosophically treated, that seven voluminous
commentaries in Latin and Italian have not yet enabled the world to
understand it.
The following Sonnet is deservedly celebrated for the consummate beauty
of the picture it resents, and will give a fair idea of the platonic
extravagance of the time.
Chi e questa che vien ch' ogni uom la mira!
Che fa tremar di caritate l' a're?
E mena seco amor, si che parlare
Null' uom ne puote; ma ciascun sospira?
Ahi dio! che sembra quando gli occhi gira!
Dicalo Amor, ch'io nol saprei contare;
Cotanto d' umilta donna mi pare
Che ciascun' altra inver di lei chiam' ira.
Non si porria contar la sua piacenza;
Che a lei s'inchina ogni gentil virtute,
E la beltate per sua Dea la mostra.
Non e si alta gia la mente nostra
E non s'e posta in noi tanta salute
Che propriamente n' abbian conoscenza!
LITERAL TRANSLATION.
"Who is this, on whom all men gaze as she approacheth!--who
causeth the very air to tremble around her with
tenderness?--who leadeth Love by her side--in whose presence
men are dumb; and can only sigh? Ah! Heaven! what power in
every glance of those eyes! Love alone can tell; for I have
neither words nor skill! She alone is the Lady of
gentleness--beside her, all others seem ungracious and
unkind. Who can describe her sweetness, her loveliness? to
her every virtue bows, and beauty points to her as her own
divinity. The mind of man cannot soar so high, nor is it
sufficiently purified by divine grace to understand and
appreciate all her perfections!"
The vagueness of this portrait is a part of its beauty:--it is like a
lovely dream--and probably never had any existence, but in the fancy of
the Poet.
Cino da Pistoia enjoyed the double reputation of being the greatest
doctor and teacher of the civil law, and most famous poet of his time.
He was also remarkable for his personal accomplishments and his love of
pleasure. There is a sonnet which Dante addressed to Cino, reproaching
him with being inconstant and volatile in love.[21] Apparently, this was
after the death of the beautiful Ricciarda dei Selvaggi; or, as he calls
her, his Selvaggia: she was of a noble family of Pistoia, her father
having been gonfaliere, and leader of the faction of the Bianchi; and
she was also celebrated for her poetical talents. It appears from a
little madrigal of hers, which has been preserved, that though she
tenderly returned the affection of her lover, it was without the
knowledge of her haughty family. It is not distinguished for poetic
power, but has at least the charm of perfect frankness and simplicity,
and a kind of _abandon_ that is quite bewitching.
A MESSER CINO DA PISTOJA.
Gentil mio sir, lo parlare amoroso
Di voi si in allegranza mi mantene,
Che dirvel non poria, ben lo sacciate;
Perche del mio amor sete giojoso,
Di cio grand' allegria e gio' mi vene,
Ed altro mai non haggio in volontate,
Fuor del vostro piacere;
Tutt' hora fate la vostra voglienza:
Haggiate previdenza
Voi, di celar la nostra desienza.
"My gentle love and lord! those tender words
Of thine so fill my conscious heart with joy,
--I cannot speak it--but thou know'st it well;
Wherefore do thou rejoice in that deep love
I bear thee, knowing that I have no thought
But to fulfil thy will and crown thy wish:
--Watch thou--and hide our mutual hope from all!"
Meantime the parents of Ricciarda were exiled from Pistoia, by the
faction of the Neri. They took refuge from their enemies in a little
fortress among the Appenines, whither Cino followed them, and was
received as a comforter amid their distresses. Probably the days passed
in this dreary abode, among the wild and solitary hills, when he
assisted Ricciarda in her household duties, and in aiding and consoling
her parents, were among the happiest of his life; but the winter came,
and with it many privations and many hardships. Their mountain retreat
was ill calculated to defend them against the fury of the elements:
Ricciarda drooped under the pressure of misery and want, and her parents
and her lover watched the gradual extinction of life--saw the rose-hue
fade from her cheek, and the light from her eye, till she melted from
their arms into death; then they buried her with tears, in a nook among
the mountains.
Many years afterwards, when Cino had reached the height of his fame, and
had been crowned with wealth and honours by his native city, he had
occasion to cross the Appenines on an embassy, and causing his suite to
travel by another road, he made a pilgrimage alone to the tomb of his
lost Selvaggia. This incident gave rise to the most striking of all his
compositions, which with great pathos and sweetness describes his
feelings, when he flung himself down on her humble grave, to weep over
the recollection of their past happiness:
Io fu' in sull'alto e in sul beato monte,
Ove adorai baciando il santo sasso,
E caddi in su quella pietra, oime lasso!
Ove l' onesta pose la sua fronte;
E ch' ella chiuse d' ogni virtu il fonte
Quel giorno che di morte acerbo passo
Fece la donna dello mio cor,--lasso!--
Gia piena tutta d' adornezze conte.
Quivi chiamai a questa guisa Amore:
"Dolce mio Dio, fa che quinci mi traggia
La morte a se, che qui giace il mio cor!"
Ma poi che non m'intese il mio signore,
Mi disparti, pur chiamando, Selvaggia!
L'alpe passai, con voce di dolore.
The circumstance in the last stanza, "I rose up and went on my way, and
passed the mountain summits, crying aloud 'Selvaggia!' in accents of
despair," has a strong reality about it, and no doubt _was_ real. Her
death took place about 1316.
In the history of Italian poetry, Selvaggia is distinguished as the
"_bel numer' una_,"--"the fair number one"--of the four celebrated
women of that century--The others were Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's
Laura, and Boccaccio's Fiammetta.
Every one who reads and admires Petrarch, will remember his beautiful
Sonnet on the Death of Cino, beginning "Piangete Donne"
Perche 'l nostro amoroso messer Cino
Novellamente s'e da noi partito.
In the venerable Cathedral at Pistoia, there is an ancient half-effaced
bas-relief, representing Cino, surrounded by his disciples, to whom he
is explaining the code of civil law: a little behind stands the figure
of a female veiled, and in a pensive attitude, which is supposed to
represent Ricciarda de' Selvaggi.
All these are alluded to by Petrarch in the Trionfo d'Amore.
Ecco Selvaggia,
Ecco Cin da Pistoja; Guitton d'Arezzo;
Ecco i due Guidi che gia furo in prezzo.
The two Guidi are, Guido Guizzinello, and Guido Cavalcanti. Guitone was
a famous monk, who is said to have invented the present form of the
sonnet: to him also is attributed the discovery of counterpoint, and the
present system of musical notation.
Of Conti's mistress nothing is known, but that she had the most
beautiful hand in the world, whence the volume of poems written by her
lover in her praise, is entitled, _La Bella Mano_, the fair hand. Conti
lived some years later than Petrarch. I mention him merely to fill up
the list of those ancient minor poets of Italy, whose names and loves
are still celebrated.
FOOTNOTES:
[21]
Chi s' innamora, siccome voi fate
Ed ad ogni piacer si lega e scioglie
Mostra ch'amor leggermente il saetti--SON. 44.
CHAPTER VI.
LAURA.
There are some who doubt the reality of Petrarch's love, because it is
expressed in numbers; and others, refining on this doubt, profess even
to question whether his Laura ever existed, except in the imagination
and the poetry of her lover. The first objection could only be made by
the most prosaic of commentators--some true "black-letter dog"[22]--who
had dustified and mistified his faculties among old parchments. The most
real and most fervent passion that ever fell under my own knowledge, was
revealed in verse, and very exquisite verse too, and has inspired many
an effusion, full of beauty, fancy, and poetry; but it has not,
therefore, been counted less sincere; and Heaven forbid it should prove
less lasting than if it had been told in the homeliest prose, and had
never inspired one beautiful idea or one rapturous verse!
To study Petrarch in his own works, and in his own delightful language;
to follow him line by line, through all the vicissitudes and
contradictions of passion; to listen to his self-reproaches, his
terrors, his regrets, his conflicts; to dwell on his exquisite
delineations of individual character and peculiar beauty, his simple
touches of profound pathos and melancholy tenderness:--and then believe
all to be mere invention,--the coinage of the brain,--a tissue of
visionary fancies, in which the heart had no share; to confound him with
the cold metaphysical rhymesters of a later age,--seems to argue not
only a strange want of judgment, but an extraordinary obtuseness of
feeling.[23]
The faults of taste of which Petrarch has been accused over and over
again, by those who seem to have studied him as Voltaire studied
Shakspeare,--his _concetti_--his fanciful adoration of the laurel, as
the emblem of Laura--his playing on the words _Laura_, _L'aura_, and
_Lauro_, his _freezing flames_ and _burning ice_,--I abandon to critics,
and let them make the best of them, as defects in what were else
perfection.
These were the fashion of the day: a great genius may outrun his times,
but not without bearing about him some ineffaceable impressions of the
manners and character of the age in which he lived. He is too witty--"Il
a trop d'esprit," to be sincere, say the critics,--"he has a conceit
left him in his misery,--a miserable conceit;" but we know--at least
_I_ know--how in the very extremity of passion the soul can mock at
itself--how the fancy can with a bitter and exaggerated gaiety sport
with the heart!--These are faults of composition in the writer, and
admitted to be such; but they prove nothing against the man, the poet,
or the lover. The reproach of monotony, I confess I never could
understand. It is rather matter of astonishment, how in a collection of
nearly four hundred poems, all, with one or two exceptions, turning upon
the same subject and sentiment, the poet has poured forth such an
endless and redundant variety both of thought and feeling--how from the
wide universe, the changeful face of all beautiful nature, the treasures
of antique learning, and, above all, from his own overflowing heart, he
has drawn those lovely pictures, allusions, situations, sentiments and
reflections, which have, indeed, been stolen, borrowed, imitated, worn
threadbare by succeeding poets, but in him were the fresh and
spontaneous effusions of profound feeling and luxuriant fancy. Schlegel
very justly observes, that the impression of monotony may arise from
our considering at one view, and bound up in one volume, a long series
of poems, which were written in the course of many years, at different
times, and on different occasions. Laura herself, he avers, would
certainly have been _ennuyee_ to death with her own praises, if she had
been obliged to read over, at one sitting, all the verses which her
lover composed on her charms; and I agree with him.
It appears to me that the very impression of Petrarch's individual
character, and the circumstances of his life, on the whole mass of his
poetry, are evidence of the truth of his attachment, and the reality of
its object. He was by nature a poet; his love was, therefore, poetical:
he loved "in numbers, for the numbers came." He was an accomplished
scholar in a pedantic age,--and his love is, therefore, illustrated by
such comparisons and turns of thought as were allied to his habitual
studies. He had a fertile and playful fancy, and his love is adorned by
all the luxuriance of his imagination. He had been educated for the
profession of the Civil Law, "per vender parole anzi mensogne,"--to
sell words and lies, as he disdainfully expressed it,--and his love is
mixed up with subtile reasonings on his own hapless state. He was a
philosopher, and it is tinged with the mystic reveries of Platonism, the
favourite and fashionable philosophy of the age. He was deeply
religious, and the strain of devotional and moral feeling which mingles
with that of passion, or of grief,--his fears lest the excess of his
earthly affections should interfere with his eternal salvation,--his
continual allusions to his faith, to a future existence, and the
nothingness and vanity of the world,--are not so many proofs of his
profaneness, but of his sincerity. He was suspicious, irritable, and
susceptible; subject to quick transitions of feeling; raised by a word
to hope--plunged by a glance into despair; just such a finely-toned
instrument as a woman loves to play on;--and all this we have set forth
in the contradictions, the self-reproaches, the little daily
vicissitudes which are events and revolutions in a life of passion; a
life, which when exhibited in the rich and softening tints of poetry,
has all the power of strong interest, united to the charm of harmony and
expression; but in the reality, and in plain prose, cannot be
contemplated without a painful compassion. "The day may perhaps come,"
says Petrarch in one of his familiar letters,[24] "when I shall have
calmness enough to contemplate all the misery of my soul, to examine my
passion, not however, that I may continue to love her--but that I may
love thee alone, O my God! But at this day, how many obstacles have I
yet to surmount, how many efforts have I yet to make! I no longer love
as I did love, but still I love; I love in spite of myself--in
lamentations and in tears. I will hate her--No!--I must still love her!"
Seven years afterwards he writes,--"my love is extreme, but it is
exclusive and virtuous--virtuous!--no!--this disquietude, these
suspicions, these transports, this watchfulness, this utter weariness of
every thing, are not signs of a virtuous love!" What a picture of an
impassioned and distracted heart!
* * * * *
And who was this Laura, the illustrious object of a passion which has
filled the wide universe from side to side with her name and fame? What
was her station, her birth, her lineage? What were her transcendant
qualities of person, heart, and mind, that she should have swayed, with
such despotic and distracting power, one of the sovereign spirits of the
age? Is it not enough that we acknowledge her to have been Petrarch's
love--as chaste as fair?
And whether coldness, pride, or virtue, dignify
A woman, so she is good, what does it signify?
In the present case, it signifies much:--we are not to be put off with a
witty or satirical couplet:--the insatiable curiosity which Laura has
excited from age to age--the volumes which have been written on the
subject--are a proof of the sincerity of her lover; for nothing but
truth could ever inspire this lasting and universal interest. But
without diving into these dry disputations, let us take Laura's portrait
from Petrarch himself, drawn, it will be said, by the partial hand of a
poetic lover:--true; but since Laura is interesting to us from the
charms she possessed in his eyes, it were unfair to seek her portraiture
elsewhere.
Laura was of high birth and station, though her life was spent in
retirement and domestic cares;
In nobil sangue, vita umile e quete.
Her father, Audibert de Noves, was of the _haute noblesse_ of Avignon,
and died in her infancy, leaving her a dowry of 1000 gold crowns, (about
10,000 pounds)--a magnificent portion for those times. She was married
at the age of eighteen to Hugh de Sade, a man of rank equal to her own,
and of corresponding age, but not distinguished by any advantages either
of person or mind. The marriage contract is dated in January, 1325, two
years before her first meeting with Petrarch: and in it, her mother, the
Lady Ermessende, and brother John de Noves, stipulate to pay the dower
left by her father; and also to bestow on the bride two magnificent
dresses for state occasions; one of green, embroidered with violets; the
other of crimson, trimmed with feathers. In all the portraits of Laura
now extant, she is represented in one of these two dresses, and they are
frequently alluded to by Petrarch. He tells us expressly, that when he
first met her at matins in the Church of St. Claire, she was habited in
a robe of green, spotted with violets.[25] Mention is also made of a
coronal of silver, with which she wreathed her hair; of her necklaces
and ornaments of pearl. Diamonds are not once alluded to, because the
art of cutting them had not then been invented. From all which, it
appears that Laura was opulent, and moved in the first class of society.
It was customary for the women of rank, in those times, to dress with
extreme simplicity on ordinary occasions, but with the most gorgeous
splendour when they appeared in public. There are some beautiful
descriptions of Laura surrounded by her young female companions,
divested of all her splendid apparel, in a simple white robe and a few
flowers in her hair; but still pre-eminent over all by her superior
loveliness. From the frequent allusions to her dress, and Petrarch's
angry apostrophes to her mirror, because it assisted to heighten charms
already too destructive,[26] we may infer that Laura was not unmindful
of the cares of the toilette.
She was in person a fair Madonna-like beauty with soft dark eyes, and a
profusion of pale golden hair parted on her brow, and falling in rich
curls over her neck. He dwells on the celestial grace of her figure and
movements, "l' andar celeste."
Non era l' andar suo cosa mortale
Ma d' angelica forma.
He describes the beauty of her hand in the 166th sonnet,--
O bella man che mi distringi il core.
And the loveliness of her mouth,--
La bella bocca angelica.
The general character of her beauty must have been pensive, soft,
unobtrusive, and even somewhat languid:
L' angelica sembianza umile e piana--
L' atto mansueto, umile e tardo--
the last line is exquisitely characteristic. This extreme softness and
repose must have been far removed from insipidity; for he dwells also on
the rare and varying expression of her loveliness, "Leggiadria singolare
e pellegrina;"--the lightning of her smile, "Il lampeggiar dell'
angelico riso;"--and the tender magic of her voice, which was felt in
the inmost heart, "Il cantar che nell' anima si sente." She had a habit
of veiling her eyes with her hand, and her looks were generally bent on
the earth, "o per umiltade o per orgoglio." In the portrait of Laura,
which I saw at the Laurentian Library at Florence, the eyes have this
characteristic downcast look. Her lover complains also of a veil, which
she was fond of wearing. Wandering in the country, one summer's day, he
sees a young peasant-girl washing a veil in the running stream; he
recognises the very texture which had so often intervened between him
and the heaven of Laura's beauty, and he trembles as if he had been in
the presence of Laura herself. This little incident is the subject of
the first Madrigal.
He describes her dignified humility, "l' umilta superba;"--her beautiful
silence, "il bel tacere;"--her frequent sighs, "i sospir soavemente
rotti;"--her sweet disdain and gentle repulses, "dolci sdegni, placide
repulse;"--the gesture which spoke without the aid of words, "l'atto che
parla con silenzio." The picture, it must be confessed, is most
finished, most delicate, most beautiful;--supposing only half to be
true, it is still beautiful. But far more flattering, and more
honourable to Laura, is her lover's confession of the influence which
her charming character possessed over him; for it is certain that we owe
to Laura's exquisite purity of mind and manners, the polished delicacy
of the homage addressed to her. Passing over, of course, the
circumstance of her being a married woman, and therefore not a proper
object of amorous verse,--there is not in all the poetry she inspired, a
line or sentiment which angels might not hear and approve. Petrarch
represents her as expressing neither surprise nor admiration at the
self-sacrifice of Lucretia, but only wondering that shame and grief had
not anticipated the dagger of the Roman matron. He describes her
conversation, "pien d'intelletti dolci ed alti," and her mind ever
serene, though her countenance was pensive, "in aspetto pensoso, anima
lieta." He tells us that she had raised him above all low-thoughted
cares, and purified his heart from all base desires. "I bless the place,
the time, the hour, when I presumed to lift my eyes upon her,--I say, O
my soul, thankful shouldst thou be that hast been deemed worthy of such
high honour--for from her spring those gentle thoughts which shall lead
thee to aspire to the highest good, and to disdain all that the vulgar
mind desires."
I' benedico il loco e 'l tempo e l'ora
Che si alti miraron gli occhi mici;
E dico: anima, assai ringraziar dei
Che fosti a tanto onor degnata allora.
....*....*....*....*
Da lei ti vien l' amoroso pensiero
Che, mentre 'l segui all' Sommo ben t'invia
Poco prezzando quel ch' ogni uom desia.
Every generous feeling, every noble and elevated sentiment, every desire
for improvement, he refers to her, and to her only:
S' alcun bel frutto
Nasce di me, da voi vien prima il seme.
Io per me son quasi un terreno asciutto
Colto da voi; e 'l pregio e vostro in tutto.
CANZONE 8.
He gives us in a single line the very _beau ideal_ of a female
character, when he tells us that Laura united the highest intellect with
the purest heart, "In alto intelletto un puro core." He dwells with
rapture on her angelic modesty, which excited at once his reverence and
his despair; but he confesses that he still hopes something from the
pitying tenderness of her disposition.--
Non e si duro cor, che lagrimando,
Pregando, amando, talor non si smova
Ne si freddo voler, che non si scalde.
The attachment inspired by such a woman was not likely to be lessened by
absence, or removed by death itself; and it is certain that the second
part of the Canzoniere of Petrarch, written after the death of Laura, is
more beautiful than the first part: in a more impassioned style, a
higher tone of feeling, with far fewer faults, both of taste and style.
* * * * *
It will be said perhaps that "the picture of such a mind as Petrarch's,
enslaved and distracted by a dreaming passion, employed even in his
declining years, in writing and polishing love verses, is a pitiable
subject of contemplation; that if he had not left us his Canzoniere, he
would probably have performed some other excelling work of genius, which
would have crowned him with equal or superior glory; and that if he had
never been the lover of Laura, he would have been no less that
master-spirit who gave the leading impulse to the age in which he
lived, by consecrating his life, his energies, all his splendid talents,
to the cultivation of philosophy and the fine arts, the extension of
learning and liberty, and the general improvement of mankind."
I doubt this, and I appeal to Petrarch himself.
I believe there is no version into English of the 48th Canzone. If Lady
Dacre had executed it--and in the same spirit as the "Chiare, fresche e
dolce acque," and the "Italia mia," the reader had been spared my
abortive prose sketch, which will give as just an idea of the original
as a hasty penciled outline of one of Titian's or Domenichino's
masterpieces would give us of all the magic colouring and effect of
their glorious and half-breathing creations.
In this Canzone, Petrarch, in a high strain of poetic imagery, which
takes nothing from the truth or pathos of the sentiment, allegorises his
own situation and feelings: he represents himself as citing the Lord of
Love, "Suo empio e dolce Signore," before the throne of Reason, and
accusing him as the cause of all his sufferings, sorrows, errors, and
misspent time. "Through _him_ (Love) I have endured, even from the
moment I was first beguiled into his power, such various and such
exquisite pain, that my patience has at length been exhausted, and I
have abhorred my existence. I have not only forsaken the path of
ambition and useful exertion, but even of pleasure and of happiness: I,
who was born, if I do not deceive myself, for far higher purposes than
to be a mere amorous slave! Through _him_ I have been careless of my
duty to Heaven,--negligent of myself:--for the sake of one woman I
forgot all else!--me miserable! What have availed me all the high and
precious gifts of Heaven, the talents, the genius which raised me above
other men? My hairs are changed to grey, but still my heart changeth
not. Hath he not sent me wandering over the earth in search of repose?
hath he not driven me from city to city, and through forests, and woods,
and wild solitudes?[27] hath he not deprived me of peace, and of that
sleep which no herbs nor chaunted spells have power to restore? Through
him, I have become a bye-word in the world, which I have filled with my
lamentations, till by their repetition I have wearied myself, and
perhaps all others."
To this long tirade, Love with indignation replies: "Hearest thou the
falsehood of this ungrateful man? This is he who in his youth devoted
himself to the despicable traffic of words and lies, and now he blushes
not to reproach me with having raised him from obscurity, to know the
delights of an honourable and virtuous life. I gave him power to attain
a height of fame and virtue to which of himself he had never dared to
aspire. If he has obtained a name among men, to me he owes it. Let him
remember the great heroes and poets of antiquity, whose evil stars
condemned them to lavish their love upon unworthy objects, whose
mistresses were courtezans and slaves; while for him, I chose from the
whole world one lovely woman, so gifted by Heaven with all female
excellence, that her likeness is not to be found beneath the moon,--one
whose melodious voice and gentle accents had power to banish from his
heart every vain, and dark, and vicious thought. These were the wrongs
of which he complains: such is my reward for all I have done for
him,--ungrateful man! Upon my wings hath he soared upwards, till his
name is placed among the greatest of the sons of song, and fair ladies
and gentle knights listen with delight to his strains:--had it not been
for me, what had he become before now? Perhaps a vain flatterer, seeking
preferment in a Court, confounded among the herd of vulgar men! I have
so chastened, so purified his heart through the heavenly image impressed
upon it, that even in his youth, and in the age of the passions, I
preserved him pure in thought and in action;[28] whatever of good or
great ever stirred within his breast, he derives from her and from me.
From the contemplation of virtue, sweetness, and beauty, in the
gracious countenance of her he loved, I led him upwards to the adoration
of the first Great Cause, the fountain of all that is beautiful and
excellent;--hath he not himself confessed it? And this fair creature,
whom I gave him to be the honour, and delight, and prop of his frail
life"--
Here the sense is suddenly broken off in the middle of a line. Petrarch
utters a cry of horror, and exclaims--"Yes, you gave her to me, but you
have also taken her from me!"
Love replies with sweet austerity--"Not I--but HE--the eternal One--who
hath willed it so!"
After this, it will be allowed, I think, that it is to Laura we owe
Petrarch; and that if the recompense she bestowed on him was not exactly
that which he sought,--yet in fame, in greatness, in virtue, and in
happiness, she well and richly repaid the adoration he lavished at her
feet, and the glorious wreath of song with which he has circled her
brows!
FOOTNOTES:
[22] See Pursuits of Literature.
[23] In a private letter of Petrarch to the Bishop of Lombes, occurs the
following passage--(the Bishop, it appears, had rallied him on the
subject of his attachment.) "Would to God that my Laura were indeed but
an imaginary person, and my passion for her but sport!--Alas! it is
rather a madness!--hard would it have been, and painful, to feign so
long a time--and what extravagance to play such a farce in the world!
No! we may counterfeit the action and voice of a sick man, but not the
paleness and wasted looks of the sufferer; and how often have you
witnessed both in me!"--SADE, vol. i. p. 281.
[24] Quoted by Foscolo.
[25] Canz. xv. Son. 10.
[26] See Son. 37, 38, &c.
[27] Foscolo remarks the restless spirit which all his life drove
Petrarch, like a perturbed spirit, from one residence to another.
[28] Here Petrarch seems to have forgotten himself; he was not _always_
immaculate.
CHAPTER VII.
LAURA AND PETRARCH CONTINUED.
Much power of lively ridicule, much coarse wit,--principally French
wit,--has been expended on the subject of Laura's virtue; by those, I
presume, who under similar circumstances would have found such virtue
"too painful an endeavour."[29] Much depraved ingenuity has been
exerted to twist certain lines and passages in the Canzoniere into a
sense which shall blot with frailty the memory of this beautiful and
far-famed being: once believe these interpretations, and all the
peculiar and graceful charm which now hangs round her intercourse with
Petrarch vanishes,--the reverential delicacy of the poet's homage
becomes a mockery, and all his exalted praises of her unequalled virtue,
and her invincible chastity, are turned to satire, and insult our moral
feeling.
But the question, I believe, is finally set at rest, and it were idle
to war with epigrams. All the evidence that has been collected, external
and internal, prose and poetry, critical and traditional, tends to
prove, first, that Laura preserved her virtue to the last; and,
secondly, that she did not preserve it unassailed; that Petrarch, true
to his sex,--a very man, (as Laura has been called a _very woman_,) used
at first every art, every effort, every advantage, which his diversified
accomplishments of mind and person lent him, to destroy the very virtue
he adored. He only _hints_ this in his poetry, just sufficiently to
enhance the glory which he has thrown round his divinity; but he speaks
more plainly in prose.
"Untouched by my prayers, unvanquished by my arguments, unmoved by my
flattery, she remained faithful to her sex's honour; she resisted her
own young heart, and mine, and a thousand, thousand, thousand things,
which must have conquered any other. She remained unshaken. A woman
taught me the duty of a man! to persuade me to keep the path of virtue,
her conduct was at once an example and a reproach; and when she beheld
me break through all bounds, and rush blindly to the precipice, she had
the courage to abandon me, rather than follow me."[30]
But whether, in this long conflict, Laura preserved her heart untouched,
as well as her virtue immaculate; whether she shared the love she
inspired; or whether she escaped from the captivating assiduities and
intoxicating homage of her lover, "_fancy-free_;"--whether coldness, or
prudence, or pride, or virtue, or the mere heartless love of admiration,
or a mixture of all together, dictated her conduct, is at least as well
worth inquiry, as the exact colour of her eyes, or the form of her nose,
upon which we have pages of grave discussion. She might have been
_coquette par instinct_, if not _par calcul_; she might have felt, with
feminine _tacte_, that to preserve her influence over Petrarch, it was
necessary to preserve his respect. She was evidently proud of her
conquest: she had else been more or less than woman; and at every
hazard, but that of self-respect, she was resolved to retain him. If
Petrarch absented himself for a few days, he was generally better
treated on his return.[31] If he avoided her, then her eye followed him
with a softer expression. When he looked pale from sickness of heart and
agitation of spirits, Laura would address him with a few words of
pitying tenderness. He thanks her in those exquisite lines, which seem
to glow with all the renovation of hope,
Volgendo gli occhi al mio novo colore
Che fa di morte rimembrar le gente
Pieta vi mosse, onde benignamente
Salutando teneste in vita il core.
La frale vita ch'ancor meco alberga,
Fu de' begli occhi vostri aperto dono,
E della voce angelica soave![32]
He presumes upon this benignity, and is again dashed back with frowns.
He flies to solitude,--solitude!--Never let the proud and torn heart,
wrung with the sense of injury, and sick with unrequited passion, seek
that worst resource against pain, for there grief grows by contemplation
of itself, and every feeling is sharpened by collision. Petrarch sought
to "mitigate the fever of his heart" amid the shades of Vaucluse, a spot
so gloomy and so solitary, that his very servants forsook him; and
Vaucluse, its fountains, its forests, and its hanging cliffs, reflected
only the image of Laura.
L'acque parlan d'amore, e l'aura, e i rami
E gli augeletti, e i pesci e i fiori e l'erba;
Tutti insieme pregando ch' io sempr'ami![33]
He is driven again to her feet by his own insupportable thoughts--and in
terror of himself;--
Tal paura ho di ritrovarmi solo!
He endeavours to maintain in her presence that self-constraint she had
enjoined. He assumes a cold and calm deportment, and Laura, as she
passes him, whispers in a tone of gentle reproach, "Petrarch! are you so
soon weary of loving me?" (ten or eleven years of adoration were, in
truth, nothing--_to signify_!) At length, he resolved to leave Laura and
Avignon for ever; and instead of plunging into solitude, to seek the
wiser resource of travel and society. He announced this intention to
Laura, and bade her a long farewell; either through surprise, or grief,
or the fear of losing her glorious captive, she turned exceedingly pale,
a cloud overspread her beautiful countenance, and she fixed her eyes on
the ground. This was to her lover an intoxicating moment; in the
exultation of sudden delight, he interpreted these symptoms of
relenting, this "vago impallidir," too favourably to himself. "She bent
those gentle eyes upon the earth, which in their sweet silence said,--to
me at least they seemed to say,--'who takes my faithful friend so far
from me?'"
Chinava a terra il bel guardo gentile,
E tacendo dicea, com' a me parve--
"Chi m'allontana il mio fedele amico?"
On his return to Avignon, a few months afterwards, Laura received him
with evident pleasure; but he is not, therefore, more _avance_; all this
was probably the refined coquetterie of a woman of calm passions; but
not heartless, not really indifferent to the devotion she inspired, nor
ungrateful for it.
Petrarch has himself left us a most minute and interesting description
of the whole course of Laura's conduct towards him, which by a beautiful
figure of poetry he has placed in her own mouth. The passage occurs in
the TRIONFO DI MORTE, beginning, "La notte che segui l'orribil caso."
The apparition of Laura descending on the morning dew, bright as the
opening dawn, and crowned with Oriental gems,
Di gemme orientali incoronata,
appears before her lover, and addresses him with compassionate
tenderness. After a short dialogue, full of poetic beauty and noble
thoughts,[34] Petrarch conjures her, in the name of heaven and of truth,
to tell him whether the pity she sometimes expressed for him was allied
to love? for that the sweetness she mingled with her disdain and
reserve--the soft looks with which she tempered her anger, had left him
for long years in doubt of her real sentiments, still doating, still
suspecting, still hoping without end:
Creovvi amor pensier mai nella testa,
D' aver pieta del mio lungo martire
Non lasciando vostr' alta impresa onesta?
Che vostri dolci sdegni e le dolc' ire--
Le dolci paci ne' begli occhi scritte--
Tenner molt' anni in dubbio il mio desire.
She replies evasively, with a smile and a sigh, that her heart was ever
with him, but that to preserve her own fair fame, and the virtue of
both, it was necessary to assume the guise of severity and disdain. She
describes the arts with which she kept alive his passion, now checking
his presumption with the most frigid reserve, and when she saw him
drooping, as a man ready to die, "all fancy-sick and pale of cheer,"
gently restoring him with soft looks and kind words:
"Salvando la tua vita e'l nostro onore."
She confesses the delight she felt in being beloved, and the pride she
took in being sung by so great a poet. She reminds him of one particular
occasion, when seated by her side, and they were left alone, he sang to
his lute a song composed to her praise, beginning, "Dir piu non osa il
nostro amore;" and she asks him whether he did not perceive that the
veil had then nearly fallen from her heart?[35]
She laments, in some exquisite lines, that she had not the happiness to
be born in Italy, the native country of her lover, and yet allows that
the land must needs be fair in which she first won his affection.
Duolmi ancor veramente, ch'io non nacqui
Almen piu presso al tuo fiorito nido!--
Ma assai fu bel paeese ov'io ti piacqui.
In another passage we have a sentiment evidently taken from nature, and
exquisitely graceful and feminine. "You," says Laura, "proclaimed to all
men the passion you felt for me: you called aloud for pity: you kept not
the tender secret for me alone, but took a pride and a pleasure in
publishing it forth to the world; thus constraining me, by all a woman's
fear and modesty, to be silent."--"But not less is the pain because we
conceal it in the depths of the heart, nor the greater because we lament
aloud: fiction and poetry can add nothing to truth, nor yet take from
it."
Tu eri di merce chiamar gia roco
Quand'io tacea; perche vergogna e tema
Facean molto desir, parer si poco;
Non e minor il duol perch' altri 'l prema,
Ne maggior per andarsi lamentando:
Per fizion non cresce il ver, ne scema.
Petrarch, then all trembling and in tears, exclaims, "that could he but
believe he had been dear to her eyes as to her heart, he were
sufficiently recompensed for all his sufferings;" and she replies, "that
will I never reveal!" ('_quello mi taccio._') By this coquettish and
characteristic answer, we are still left in the dark. Such was the
sacred respect in which Petrarch held her he so loved, that though he
evidently wishes to believe--perhaps _did_ believe, that he had touched
her heart, he would not presume to insinuate what Laura had never
avowed. The whole scene, though less polished in the versification than
some of his sonnets, is written throughout with all the flow and fervour
of real feeling. It received the poet's last corrections twenty-six
years after Laura's death, and but a few weeks previous to his own.
* * * * *
When at Milan, I was taken, as a matter of course, to visit the
Ambrosian library. At the time I was ill in health, dejected and
indifferent; and I only remember being led in passive resignation from
room to room, and called upon to admire a vast variety of objects, at
the moment when I was pining for rest; when to look, think, speak, or
move, was pain,--when to sit motionless and gaze out upon the sunshine,
seemed to me the only supreme blessedness. In such moments as these, we
can have sympathies with nature, but not with old books and antiquities.
I have a most confused recollection both of the locality and the
contents of this famous collection; but there were two objects which
roused me from this sullen stupor, and indelibly impressed my
imagination and my memory; and one of these was the celebrated copy of
Virgil, which had been the favourite companion and constant study of
Petrarch, containing that memorandum of the death of Laura, in his own
handwriting, which, after much expenditure of paper, and argument, and
critical abuse, is at length admitted to be genuine. I knew little of
the controversy this famous inscription had occasioned in Italy,--though
I was aware that its authenticity had been disputed: but as a homely
proverb saith, _seeing is believing_; to look upon the handwriting with
my own eyes, would have made assurance double sure, if in that moment I
needed such assurance. I do not remember reasoning or doubting on the
subject;--but gushing up like the waters of an intermitting fountain,
there was a sudden flow of feeling and memory came over my heart:--I
stood for some moments silently contemplating the name of LAURA, in the
pale, half-effaced characters traced by the hand of her lover; that name
with which his genius and his love have filled the earth: confused
thoughts of the mingling of vanity and glory,--of the "poco polvere che
nulla sente," and the immortality of deified beauty, were crowded in my
mind. When all were gone, I turned back, and gave the guide a small
gratuity to be allowed to do homage to the name of Laura, by pressing my
lips upon it. The reader smiles at this sentimental enthusiasm; so would
I, if time had not taught me to respect, as well as regret, what it has
taken from me, and never can restore.
The memorandum has often been quoted; but this account of the love of
Petrarch would not be complete were it omitted here. It runs literally
thus:--
"Laura, illustrious by her own virtues, and long celebrated by my
verses, I beheld for the first time, in my early youth, on the 6th of
April, 1327, about the first hour of the day, in the church of Saint
Claire in Avignon: and in the same city, in the same month of April, the
same day and hour, in the year 1348, this light of my life was withdrawn
from the world while I was at Verona, ignorant, alas! of what had
befallen me. The terrible intelligence was conveyed in a letter from
Louis, and reached me at Parma the 19th of May, early in the morning.
"Her chaste and beautiful remains were deposited the same day after
vespers, in the Church of the Fratri Minori (Cordeliers). Her spirit, as
Seneca said of Scipio Africanus,[36] has returned, doubtless, to that
heaven whence it came.
"To preserve the memory of this afflicting loss, it is with a bitter
pleasure I record it here, in this book which is ever before my eyes,
that nothing in this world may hereafter delight me: and that the chief
tie which bound me to life being broken, I may, by frequently looking on
these words, and thinking on this transitory existence, be prepared to
quit this earthly Babylon, which, with the help of the divine grace, and
the constant and manly recollection of those fruitless desires, and vain
hopes, and sad vicissitudes which have so long agitated me, will be an
easy task."
Laura died of the plague, which then desolated Avignon, and terminated
the life of the sufferer on the third day. The moment she was seized
with the fatal symptoms, she dictated her will; and notwithstanding the
pestilential nature of her disorder, she was surrounded to the last by
her numerous relations and friends, who braved death rather than forsake
her.
Her tomb was discovered and opened in 1533, in the presence of Francis
the First, whose celebrated stanzas on the occasion are well known.
Of the fame, which even in her lifetime, the love and poetical adoration
of Petrarch had thrown round his Laura, a curious instance is given
which will characterise the manners of the age. When Charles of
Luxemburgh (afterwards Emperor) was at Avignon, a grand fete was given,
in his honour, at which all the noblesse were present. He desired that
Petrarch's Laura should be pointed out to him; and when she was
introduced, he made a sign with his hand that the other ladies present
should fall back; then going up to Laura, and for a moment contemplating
her with interest, he kissed her respectfully on the forehead and on the
eyelids. Petrarch alludes to this incident in the 201st sonnet, the last
line of which shows that this royal salutation was considered singular.
"M'empia d'invidia l'atto dolce e strano."
Petrarch survived her twenty-six years, dying in 1374. He was found
lifeless one morning in his study, his hand resting on a book.
* * * * *
The inferences I draw from this rapid sketch are, first, that Laura was
virtuous, but not insensible;--for had she been facile, she would not
have preserved her lover's respect; had she been a heartless trifler,
she could not have retained his love, nor deserved his undying regrets:
and secondly, that if Petrarch had not attached himself fervently to
this beautiful and pure-hearted woman, he would have employed his
splendid talents like other men of his time. He might then have left us
theological treatises and Latin epics, which the worms would have eaten;
he might have risen high in the church or state; have become a bold,
intriguing priest; a politic archbishop,--a cardinal,--a pope;--most
worthless and empty titles all, compared with that by which he has
descended to us, as Petrarch, the poet and the lover of Laura![37]
FOOTNOTES:
[29] Madame Deshoulieres speaks "avec connaissance de fait," and even
points out the very spot in which Laura, "de l'amoureux Petrarque
adoucit le martyre."--Another French lady, who piqued herself on being a
descendant of the family of Laura, was extremely affronted and
scandalised when the Chevalier Ramsay asserted that Petrarch's passion
was purely poetical and platonic, and regarded it heresy to suppose that
Laura could have been "_ungrateful_,"--such was her idea of feminine
_gratitude_!--(Spence's Anecdotes.) Then comes another French woman,
with the most anti-poetical soul that God ever placed within the form of
a woman--"Le fade personage que votre Petrarque! que sa Laure etait
sotte et precieuse! que la Cour d'Amour etait fastidieuse!" &c. exclaims
the acute, amusing, profligate, heartless Madame du Deffand. It must be
allowed that Petrarch and Laura would have been extremely _desplaces_ in
the Court of the Regent,--the only _Court of Love_ with which Madame du
Deffand was acquainted, and which assuredly was not _fastidieuse_.
[30] From the Dialogues with St. Augustin, as quoted in the "Pieces
Justificatives," and by Ginguene (Hist. Litt. vol. iii. notes.) These
imaginary dialogues are a series of Confessions not intended for
publication by Petrarch, but now printed with his prose works.
[31] Sonnet 39.
[32] Ballata 5.
[33] Petrarch withdrew to Vaucluse in 1337, and spent three years in
entire solitude. He commenced his journey to Rome in 1341, about
fourteen years after his first interview with Laura.
[34] Petrarch asks her whether it was "pain to die?" she replies in
those fine lines which have been quoted a thousand times:
La Morte e fin d' una prigion oscura
Agli animi gentili; agli altri e noia,
Ch' hanno posto nel fango ogni lor cura.
[35]
Ma non si ruppe almen ogni vel quando
Sola i tuoi detti, te presente accolsi
"_Dir piu non osa il nostro amor_," cantando.
(The song here alluded to is not preserved in Petrarch's works, and the
expression "_il nostro amore_," is very remarkable.)
[36] This sounds at first pedantic; but it must be remembered that at
this very time Petrarch was studying Seneca, and writing a Latin poem on
the history of Scipio: thus the ideas were fresh in his mind.
[37] The hypothesis I have assumed relative to Laura's character, her
married state, and the authenticity of the MS. note in the Virgil, have
not been lightly adopted, but from deep conviction and patient
examination: but this is not the place to set arguments and authorities
in array--Ginguene and Gibbon against Lord Byron and Fraser Tytler. I am
surprised at the ground Lord Byron has taken on the question. As for his
characteristic sneer on the assertion of M. de Bastie, who had said
truly and beautifully--"qu'il n'y a que la vertu seule qui soit capable
de faire des impressions que la mort n'efface pas," I disdain, in my
feminine character, to reply to it; I will therefore borrow the
eloquence of a more powerful pen:--"The love of a man like Petrarch,
would have been less in character, if it had been less ideal. For the
purposes of inspiration, a single interview was quite sufficient. The
smile which sank into his heart the first time he ever beheld Laura,
played round her lips ever after: the look with which her eyes first met
his, never passed away. The image of his mistress still haunted his
mind, and was recalled by every object in nature. Even death could not
dissolve the fine illusion; for that which exists in the imagination is
alone imperishable. As our feelings become more ideal, the impression of
the moment indeed becomes less violent; but the effect is more general
and permanent. The blow is felt only by reflection; it is the rebound
that is fatal. We are not here standing up for this kind of Platonic
attachment, but only endeavouring to explain the way in which the
passions very commonly operate in minds accustomed to draw their
strongest interests from constant contemplation."--_Edinburgh Review._
CHAPTER VIII.
ON THE LOVE OF DANTE FOR BEATRICE PORTINARI.
Had I taken chronology into due consideration, Dante ought to have
preceded Petrarch, having been born some forty years before him,--but I
forgot it. "Truth," says Wordsworth, "has her pleasure-grounds,
Her haunts of ease
And easy contemplation;--gay parterres
And labyrinthine walks; her sunny glades
And shady groves for recreation framed."
And such a haunted pleasure-ground of beautiful recollections, would I
wish my subject to be to myself and to my readers; where we shall be
priviledged to wander at will; to pause or turn back; to deviate to
this side or to that, as memory may prompt, or imagination lead, or
illustration require.
Dante and his Beatrice are best exhibited in contrast to Petrarch and
Laura. Petrarch was in his youth an amiable and accomplished courtier,
whose ambition was to cultivate the arts, and please the fair. Dante
early plunged into the factions which distracted his native city, was of
a stern commanding temper, mingling study with action. Petrarch loved
with all the vivacity of his temper; he took a pleasure in publishing,
in exaggerating, in embellishing his passion in the eyes of the world.
Dante, capable of strong and enthusiastic tenderness, and early
concentrating all the affections of his heart on one object, sought no
sympathy; and solemnly tells us of himself,--in contradistinction to
those poets of his time who wrote of love from fashion or fancy, not
from feeling,--that he wrote as love inspired, and as his heart
dictated.
"Io mi son un che, quando
Amore spira, noto, ed in quel modo
Ch'ei detta dentro, vo significando."
PURGATORIO, c. 24.
A coquette would have triumphed in such a captive as Petrarch; and in
truth, Laura seems to have "sounded him from the top to the bottom of
his compass:"--a tender and impassioned woman would repose on such a
heart as Dante's, even as his Beatrice did. Petrarch had a gay and
captivating exterior; his complexion was fair, with sparkling blue eyes
and a ready smile. He is very amusing on the subject of his own
coxcombry, and tells us how cautiously he used to turn the corner of a
street, lest the wind should disorder the elaborate curls of his fine
hair! Dante, too, was in his youth eminently handsome, but in a style of
beauty which was characteristic of his mind: his eyes, were large and
intensely black, his nose aquiline, his complexion of a dark olive, his
hair and beard very much curled, his step slow and measured, and the
habitual expression of his countenance grave, with a tinge of melancholy
abstraction. When Petrarch walked along the streets of Avignon, the
women smiled, and said, "there goes the lover of Laura!" The impression
which Dante left on those who beheld him, was far different. In allusion
to his own personal appearance, he used to relate an incident that once
occurred to him. When years of persecution and exile had added to the
natural sternness of his countenance, the deep lines left by grief, and
the brooding spirit of vengeance, he happened to be at Verona, where
since the publication of the Inferno, he was well known. Passing one day
by a portico, where several women were seated, one of them whispered,
with a look of awe,--"Do you see that man? that is he who goes down to
hell whenever he pleases, and brings us back tidings of the sinners
below!" "Ay, indeed!" replied her companion,--"very likely; see how his
face is scarred with fire and brimstone, and blackened with smoke, and
how his hair and beard have been singed and curled in the flames!"
Dante had not, however, this forbidding appearance when he won the young
heart of Beatrice Portinari. They first met at a banquet given by her
father, Folco de' Portinari, when Dante was only nine years old, and
Beatrice a year younger. His childish attachment, as he tells us
himself, commenced from that hour; it became a passion, which increased
with his years, and did not perish even with its object.
Beatrice has not fared better at the hands of commentators than Laura.
Laura, with her golden hair scattered to the winds, "i capei d'oro al
aura sporsi," her soft smiles, and her angel-like deportment, was to be
Repentance; and the more majestic Beatrice, in whose eyes dwelt love,
E spiriti d'amore infiammati,
was sublimated into _Theology_: with how much reason we shall examine.
In one of his canzoni, called il Ritratto, (the Portrait) Dante has left
us a most minute and finished picture of his Beatrice, "which," says Mr.
Carey, "might well supply a painter with a far more exalted idea of
female beauty, than he could form to himself from the celebrated Ode of
Anacreon, on a similar subject." From this canzone and some lines
scattered through his sonnets, I shall sketch the person and character
of Beatrice. She was not in form like the slender, fragile-looking
Laura, but on a larger scale of loveliness, tall and of a commanding
figure;[38]--graceful in her gait as a peacock, upright as a crane,
Soava a guisa va di un bel pavone,
Diritta sopra se, come una grua.
Her hair was fair and curling,
"Capegli crespi e biondi,"
but not _golden_,--an epithet I do not find once applied to it: she had
an ample forehead, "spaciosa fronte," a mouth that when it smiled
surpassed all things in sweetness; so that her Poet would give the
universe to hear it pronounce a kind "yes."
Mira che quando ride
Passa ben di dolcezza ogni altra cosa.
Cosi di quella bocca il pensier mio
Mi sprona, perche io
Non ho nel mondo cosa che non desse
A tal ch'un si, con buon voler dicesse.
Her neck was white and slender, springing gracefully from the bust--
Poi guarda la sua svelta e bianca gola
Commessa ben dalle spalle e dal petto.
A small, round, dimpled chin,
Mento tondo, fesso e piccioletto:
and thereupon the Poet breaks out into a rapture, any thing but
theological,
Il bel diletto
Aver quel collo fra le braccia stretto
E far in quella gola un picciol segno!
Her arms were beautiful and round; her hand soft, white, and polished;
La bianca mano morbida e pulita:
her fingers slender, and decorated with jewelled rings as became her
birth; fair she was as a pearl;
Con un color angelica di perla:
graceful and lovely to look upon, but disdainful where it was becoming:
Graziosa a vederla,
E disdegnosa dove si conviene.
And as a corollary to these traits, I will quote the eleventh Sonnet as
a more general picture of female loveliness, heightened by some tender
touches of mental and moral beauty, such as never seem to have occurred
to the debased imaginations of the classic poets:
Negli occhi porta la mia Donna Amore;
Perche si fa gentil ciocch' ella mira:
Ov' ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira;
E cui saluta, fa tremar lo core,
Sicche bassando 'l viso tutto smuore,
Ed ogni suo difetto allor sospira;
Fugge dinanzi a lei superbia ed ira.
Ajutatemi, donne, a farle onore!
Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile
Nasce nel core a chi parlar la sente;
Onde e laudato chi prima la vide.
Quel ch' ella par, quando un poco sorride
No si puo dicer, ne tenera mente;
Si e nuovo miracolo e gentile.
TRANSLATION.
"Love is throned in the eyes of my Beatrice! they ennoble
every thing she looks upon! As she passes, men turn and
gaze; and whomsoever she salutes, his heart trembles within
him; he bows his head, the colour forsakes his cheek, and he
sighs for his own unworthiness. Pride and anger fly before
her! Assist me, ladies, to do her honour! All sweet thoughts
of humble love and good-will spring in the hearts of those
who hear her speak, so that it is a blessedness first to
behold her, and when she faintly and softly smiles--ah! then
it passes all fancy, all expression, so wondrous is the
miracle, and so gracious!"
The love of Dante for his Beatrice partook of the purity, tenderness,
and elevated character of her who inspired it, and was also stamped with
that stern and melancholy abstraction, that disposition to mysticism,
which were such strong features in the character of her lover. He does
not break out into fond and effeminate complaints, he does not sigh to
the winds, nor swell the fountain with his tears; his love does not,
like Petrarch's, alternately freeze and burn him, nor is it "un dolce
amaro," "a bitter sweet," with which his fancy can sport in good set
terms. No; it shakes his whole being like an earthquake; it beats in
every pulse and artery; it has dwelt in his heart till it has become a
part of his life, or rather his life itself.[39] Though we are not told
so expressly, it is impossible to doubt, on a consideration of all those
passages and poems which relate to Beatrice, that his love was approved
and returned, and that his character was understood and appreciated by a
woman too generous, too noble-minded, to make him the sport of her
vanity. He complains, indeed, _poetically_, of her disdain, for which he
excuses himself in another poem: "We know that the heavens shine on in
eternal serenity, and that it is only our imperfect vision, and the
rising vapours of the earth, that make the ever-beaming stars appear
clouded at times to our eye." He expresses no fear of a rival in her
affections; but the native jealousy as well as delicacy of his temper
appears in those passages in which he addresses the eulogium of Beatrice
to the Florentine ladies and her young companions.[40] Those of his own
sex, as he assures us, were not worthy to listen to her praises; or must
perforce have become enamoured of this picture of female excellence, the
fear of which made a coward of him--
Ma trattero del suo stato gentile
Donne e donzelle amorose, con vui;
Che non e cosa da parlarne altrui.
Among the young companions of Beatrice, Dante particularly distinguishes
one, who appears to have been her chosen friend, and who, on account of
her singular and blooming beauty, was called, at Florence, Primavera,
(the Spring.) Her real name was Giovanna. Dante frequently names them
together, and in particular in that exquisitely fanciful sonnet to his
friend Guido Cavalcanti; where he addresses them by those familiar and
endearing diminutives, so peculiarly Italian--
E Monna Vanna e Monna Bice poi.[41]
It appears from the 7th and 8th Sonnets of the Vita Nuova, that in the
early part of their intercourse, Beatrice, indulging her girlish
vivacity, smiled to see her lover utterly discountenanced in her
presence, and pointed out her triumph to her companions. This offence
seems to have deeply affected the proud, susceptible mind of Dante: it
was under the influence of some such morose feeling, probably on this
very occasion, that his dark passions burst forth in the bitter lines
beginning,
Io maledico il di ch' io vidi imprima
La luce de' vostri occhi traditori.
"I curse the day in which I first beheld the splendour of those traitor
eyes," &c. This angry sonnet forms a fine characteristic contrast with
that eloquent and impassioned effusion of Petrarch, in which he
multiplies blessings on the day, the hour, the minute, the season, and
the spot, in which he first beheld Laura--
Benedetto sia l' giorno, e 'l mese, e l' anno, &c.
This fit of indignation was, however, short-lived. Every tender emotion
of Dante's feeling heart seems to have been called forth when Beatrice
lost her excellent father. Folco Portinari died in 1289; and the
description we have of the inconsolable grief of Beatrice and the
sympathy of her young companions,--so poetically, so delicately touched
by her lover,--impress us with a high idea both of her filial tenderness
and the general amiability of her disposition, which rendered her thus
beloved. In the 12th and 13th Sonnets, we have, perhaps, one of the most
beautiful groups ever presented in poetry. Dante meets a company of
young Florentine ladies, who were returning from paying Beatrice a visit
of condolence on the death of her father. Their altered and dejected
looks, their downcast eyes, and cheeks "colourless as marble," make his
heart tremble within him; he asks after Beatrice--"_our_ gentle lady,"
as he tenderly expresses it: the young girls raise their downcast eyes,
and regard him with surprise. "Art thou he," they exclaim, "who hast so
often sung to us the praises of our Beatrice? the voice, indeed, is his;
but, oh! how changed the aspect! Thou weepest!--why shouldest _thou_
weep?--thou hast not seen _her_ tears;--leave _us_ to weep and return to
our home, refusing comfort; for we, indeed, have heard her speak, and
seen her dissolved in grief; so changed is her lovely face by sorrow,
that to look upon her is enough to make one die at her feet for
pity."[42]
It should seem that the extreme affliction of Beatrice for the loss of
her father, acting on a delicate constitution, hastened her own end, for
she died within a few months afterwards, in her 24th year. In the "Vita
Nuova" there is a fragment of a canzone, which breaks off at the end of
the first strophe; and annexed to it is the following affecting note,
originally in the handwriting of Dante.
"I was engaged in the composition of this Canzone, and had completed
only the above stanza, when it pleased the God of justice to call unto
himself this gentlest of human beings; that she might be glorified
under the auspices of that blessed Queen, the Virgin Maria, whose name
was ever held in especial reverence by my sainted Beatrice."
Boccaccio, who knew Dante personally, tells us, that on the death of
Beatrice, he was so changed by affliction that his best friends could
scarcely recognise him. He scarcely eat or slept; he would not speak; he
neglected his person, until he became "una cosa selvatica a vedere," _a
savage thing to the eye_: to borrow his own strong expression, he seems
to have been "grief-stung to madness." To the first Canzone, written
after the death of Beatrice, Dante has prefixed a note, in which he
tells us, that after he had long wept in silence the loss of her he
loved, he thought to give utterance to his sorrow in words; and to
compose a Canzone, in which he should write, (weeping as he wrote,) of
the virtues of her who through much anguish had bowed his soul to the
earth. "Then," he says, "I thus began:--gli occhi dolenti,"--which are
the first words of this Canzone. It is addressed, like the others, to
her female companions, whom alone he thought worthy to listen to her
praises, and whose gentle hearts could alone sympathise in his grief.
Non vo parlare altrui
Se non a cor gentil, che 'n donna sia!
One stanza of this Canzone is unequalled, I think, for a simplicity at
once tender and sublime. The sentiment, or rather the meaning, in homely
English phrase, would run thus:--
"Ascended is our Beatrice to the highest Heaven, to those realms where
angels dwell in peace; and you, her fair companions, and Love and me,
she has left, alas! behind. It was not the frost of winter that chilled
her, nor was it the heat of summer that withered her; it was the power
of her virtue, her humility, and her truth, that ascending into Heaven
moved the ETERNAL FATHER to call her to himself, seeing that this
miserable life was not worthy of any thing so fair, so excellent!"
On the anniversary of the death of Beatrice, Dante tells us that he was
sitting alone, thinking upon her, and tracing, as he meditated, the
figure of an angel on his tablets.[43] Can any one doubt that this
little incident, so natural and so affecting,--his thinking on his lost
Beatrice, and by association sketching the figure of an angel, while his
mind dwelt upon her removal to a brighter and better world,--must have
been real? It gave rise to the 18th Sonnet of the Vita Nuova, which he
calls "Il doloroso annovale," (the mournful anniversary.)
Another little circumstance, not less affecting, he has beautifully
commemorated in two Sonnets which follow the one last mentioned. They
are addressed to some kind and gentle creature, who from a window beheld
Dante abandon himself, with fearful vehemence, to the agony of his
feelings, when he believed no human eye was on him. "She turned pale,"
he says, "with compassion; her eyes filled with tears, as if she had
loved me: then did I remember my noble-hearted Beatrice, for even thus
she often looked upon me," &c. And he confesses that the grateful, yet
mournful pleasure with which he met the pitying look of this fair being,
excited remorse in his heart, that he should be able to derive pleasure
from anything.
Dante concludes the collection of his _Rime_, (his miscellaneous poems
on the subject of his early love) with this remarkable note:--
"I beheld a marvellous vision, which has caused me to cease from writing
in praise of my blessed Beatrice, until I can celebrate her more
worthily; which that I may do, I devote my whole soul to study, as _she_
knoweth well; in so much, that if it please the Great Disposer of all
things to prolong my life for a few years upon this earth, I hope
hereafter to sing of my Beatrice what never yet was said or sung of
woman.'"
And in this transport of enthusiasm, Dante conceived the idea of his
great poem, of which Beatrice was destined to be the heroine. It was to
no Muse, called by fancy from her fabled heights, and feigned at the
poet's will; it was not to ambition of fame, nor literary leisure
seeking a vent for overflowing thoughts; nor to the wish to aggrandise
himself, or to flatter the pride of a patron;--but to the inspiration of
a young, beautiful, and noble-minded woman, we owe one of the grandest
efforts of human genius. And never did it enter into the imagination of
any lover, before or since, to raise so mighty, so vast, so enduring, so
glorious a monument to the worth and charms of a mistress. Other poets
were satisfied if they conferred on the object of their love an
immortality on earth: Dante was not content till he had placed _his_ on
a throne in the Empyreum, above choirs of angels, in presence of the
very fountain of glory; her brow wreathed with eternal beams, and
clothed with the ineffable splendours of beatitude;--an apotheosis,
compared to which, all others are earthly and poor indeed.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] "Membra formosi et grandi."
[39] It borrows even the solemn language of Sacred Writ to express its
intensity:
Nelle man vostre, o dolce donna mia!
Raccomando lo spirito che muore.
SON. 34.
[40] I refer particularly to that sublime Canzone addressed to the
ladies of Florence, and beginning
"Donne ch' avete intelletto d' amore."
[41] Monna Vanna, for _Madonna Giovanna_; and Monna Bice, _Madonna
Beatrice_.
This famous sonnet has been translated by Hayley and by Shelley. I
subjoin the version of the latter, as truer to the spirit of the
original.
THE WISH.--TO GUIDO CAVALCANTI.
Guido! I would that Lapo, thou, and I,
Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
With winds at will, where'er our thoughts might wend:
And that no change, nor any evil chance
Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be
That even satiety should still enhance
Between our hearts their strict community,
And that the bounteous wizard there would place
Vanna and Bice, and thy gentle love,
Companions of our wanderings, and would grace
With passionate talk, wherever we might rove
Our time!--and each were as content and free
As I believe that thou and I should be!
[42] Sonnetto 13 (Poesie della Vita Nuova.)
[43] Vita Nuova, p. 268.
CHAPTER IX.
DANTE AND BEATRICE CONTINUED.
Through the two first parts of the Divina Commedia, (Hell and
Purgatory,) Beatrice is merely announced to the reader--she does not
appear in person; for what should the sinless and sanctified spirit of
Beatrice do in those abodes of eternal anguish and expiatory torment?
Her appearance, however, in due time and place, is prepared and shadowed
forth in many beautiful allusions: for instance, it is she, who
descending from the empyreal height, sends Virgil to be the deliverer of
Dante in the mysterious forest, and his guide through the abysses of
torment.
Io son Beatrice che ti faccio andare;
Vegno di loco ove tornar disio:
Amor mi mosse che mi fa parlare.
INFERNO, c. 2.
"I who now bid thee on this errand forth
Am Beatrice; from a place I come
Revisited with joy; love brought me thence,
Who prompts my speech."
CAREY'S TRANS.
And she is _indicated_, as it were, several times in the course of the
poem, in a manner which prepares us for the sublimity with which she is
at length introduced, in all the majesty of a superior nature, all the
dreamy splendour of an ideal presence, and all the melancholy charm of a
beloved and lamented reality. When Dante has left the confines of
Purgatory, a wondrous chariot approaches from afar, surrounded by a
flight of angelic beings, and veiled in a cloud of flowers ("un nuvola
di fiori," is the beautiful expression.)--A female form is at length
apparent in the midst of this angelic pomp, seated in the car, and
"robed in hues of living flame:" she is veiled: he cannot discern her
features, but there moves a hidden virtue from her,
At whose touch
The power of ancient love was strong within him.
He recognises the influence which even in his childish days had smote
him--
Che gia m'avea trafitto
Prima ch' io fuor della puerizia fosse;
and his failing heart and quivering frame confess the thrilling presence
of his Beatrice--
Conosco i segni dell'antica fiamma!
The whole passage is as beautifully wrought as it is feelingly and truly
conceived.
Beatrice,--no longer the soft, frail, and feminine being he had known
and loved upon earth, but an admonishing spirit,--rises up in her
chariot,
And with a mien
Of that stern majesty which doth surround
A mother's presence to her awe-struck child,
She looked--a flavour of such bitterness
Was mingled with her pity!
CAREY'S TRANS.
Dante then puts into her mouth the most severe yet eloquent accusation
against himself: while he stands weeping by, bowed down by shame and
anguish. She accuses him before the listening angels for his neglected
time, his wasted talents, his forgetfulness of her, when she was no
longer upon earth to lead him with the light of her "youthful eyes,"
(gli occhi giovinetti.)
Soon as I had changed
My mortal for immortal, then he left me,
And gave himself to others; when from flesh
To spirit I had risen, and increase
Of beauty and of virtue circled me,
I was less dear to him and valued less!
PURGATORY, C. 30.--CAREY'S TRANS.
This praise of herself and stern upbraiding of her lover, would sound
harsh from woman's lips, but have a solemnity, and even a sublimity, as
uttered by a disembodied and angelic being. When Dante, weeping, falters
out a faint excuse--
Thy fair looks withdrawn,
Things present with deceitful pleasures turned
My steps aside,--
she answers by reproaching him with his inconstancy to her memory:--
Never didst thou spy
In art or nature aught so passing sweet
As were the limbs that in their beauteous frame
Enclosed me, and are scattered now in dust.
If sweetest thing thus failed thee with my death,
What afterward of mortal should thy wish
Have tempted?
PURGATORY, c. 31.
And she rebukes him, for that he could stoop from the memory of her love
to be the thrall of a _slight girl_. This last expression is supposed to
allude either to Dante's unfortunate marriage with Gemma Donati,[44] or
to the attachment he formed during his exile for a beautiful Lucchese
named Gentucca, the subject of several of his poems. But,
notwithstanding all this severity of censure, Dante, gazing on his
divine monitress, is so rapt by her loveliness, his eyes so eager to
recompence themselves for "their ten years' thirst," (Beatrice had been
dead ten years) that not being yet freed from the stain of his earthly
nature, he is warned not to gaze "too fixedly" on her charms. After a
farther probation, Beatrice introduces him into the various spheres
which compose the celestial paradise; and thenceforward she certainly
assumes the characteristics of an allegorical being. The true
distinction seems this, that Dante has not represented Divine Wisdom
under the name and form of Beatrice, but the more to exalt his Beatrice,
he has clothed her in the attributes of Divine Wisdom.
She at length ascends with him into the Heaven of Heavens, to the source
of eternal and uncreated light, without shadow and without bound; and
when Dante looks round for her, he finds she has quitted his side, and
has taken her place throned among the supremely blessed, "as far above
him as the region of thunder is above the centre of the sea:" he gazes
up at her in a rapture of love and devotion, and in a sublime apostrophe
invokes her still to continue her favour towards him. She looks down
upon him from her effulgent height, smiles on him with celestial
sweetness, and then fixing her eyes on the eternal fountain of glory, is
absorbed in ecstasy. Here we leave her: the poet had touched the limits
of permitted thought; the seraph wings of imagination, borne upwards by
the inspiration of deep love, could no higher soar,--the audacity of
genius could dare no farther!
* * * * *
Dante died at Ravenna in 1321, and was sumptuously interred at the cost
of Guido da Polenta, the father of that unfortunate Francesca di Rimini,
whose story he has so exquisitely told in the fifth canto of the
Inferno. He left several sons and an only daughter, whom he had named
Beatrice, in remembrance of his early love: she became a nun at Ravenna.
Now where, in the name of all truth and all feeling, were the heads, or
rather the hearts, of those commentators, who could see nothing in the
Beatrice thus beautifully pourtrayed, thus tenderly lamented, and thus
sublimely commemorated, but a mere allegorical personage, the creation
of a poet's fancy? Nothing can come of nothing; and it was no unreal or
imaginary being who turned the course of Dante's ardent passions and
active spirit, and burning enthusiasm, into one sweeping torrent of love
and poetry, and gave to Italy and to the world the Divina Commedia!
FOOTNOTES:
[44] This marriage was one of policy, and negociated by the friends of
Dante and of Gemma Donati: her temper was violent and harsh, and their
domestic peace was, probably, not increased by Dante's obstinate regret
for his first love.
CHAPTER X.
CHAUCER AND PHILIPPA PICARD.
After Italy, England,--who has ever trod in her footsteps, and at length
outstript her in the race of intellect,--was the next to produce a great
and prevailing genius in poetry, a master-spirit, whom no change of
customs, manners, or language, can render wholly obsolete; and who was
destined, like the rest of his tribe, to bow before the influence of
woman, to toil in her praise, and soar by her inspiration.
Seven years after the death of Dante, Chaucer was born, and he was
twenty-four years younger than Petrarch, whom he met at Padua in 1373;
this meeting between the two great poets was memorable in itself, and
yet more interesting for having first introduced into the English
language that beautiful monument to the virtue of women,--the story of
Griselda.
Boccaccio had lately sent to his friend the MS. of the Decamerone, of
which it is the concluding tale: the tender fancy of Petrarch, refined
by a forty years' attachment to a gentle and elegant female, passed over
what was vicious and blameable, or only recommended by the wit and the
style, and fixed with delight on the tale of Griselda; so beautiful in
itself, and so honourable to the sex whom he had poetically deified in
the person of one lovely woman. He amused his leisure hours in
translating it into Latin, and having finished his version, he placed it
in the hands of a citizen of Padua, and desired him to read it aloud.
His friend accordingly began; but as he proceeded, the overpowering
pathos of the story so affected him, that he was obliged to stop; he
began again, but was unable to proceed; the gathering tears blinded
him, and choked his voice, and he threw down the manuscript. This
incident, which Petrarch himself relates in a letter to Boccaccio,
occurred about the period when Chaucer passed from Genoa to Padua to
visit the poet and lover of Laura--
Quel grande, alla cui fama angusto e il mondo.
Petrarch must have regarded the English poet with that wondering,
enthusiastic admiration with which we should now hail a Milton or a
Shakspeare sprung from Otaheite or Nova Zembla; and his heart and soul
being naturally occupied by his latest work, he repeated the experiment
he had before tried on his Paduan friend. The impression which the
Griselda produced upon the vivid, susceptible imagination of Chaucer,
may be judged from his own beautiful version of it in the Canterbury
Tales; where the barbarity and improbability of the incidents are so
redeemed by the pervading truth and purity and tenderness of the
sentiment, that I suppose it never was perused for the first time
without tears. Chaucer, as if proud of his interview with Petrarch, and
anxious to publish it, is careful to tell us that he did not derive the
story from Boccaccio, but that it was
Learned at Padua of a worthy clerk,
As proved by his wordes and his work;
Francis Petrark, the Laureat Poete;
which is also proved by internal evidence.
Chaucer so far resembled Petrarch, that, like him, he was at once poet,
scholar, courtier, statesman, philosopher, and man of the world; but
considered merely as poets, they were the very antipodes of each other.
The genius of Dante has been compared to a Gothic cathedral, vast and
lofty, and dark and irregular. In the same spirit, Petrarch may be
likened to a classical and elegant Greek temple, rising aloft in its
fair and faultless proportions, and compacted of the purest Parian
marble; while Chaucer is like the far-spreading and picturesque palace
of the Alhambra, with its hundred chambers, all variously decorated,
and rich with barbaric pomp and gold: he is famed rather as the animated
painter of character, and manners, and external nature, than the poet of
love and sentiment; and yet no writer, Shakspeare always excepted, (and
perhaps Spenser) contains so many beautiful and tender passages relating
to, or inspired by, women. He lived, it is true, in rude times, times
strangely deficient in good taste and decorum; but when all the
institutions of chivalry, under the most chivalrous of our kings and
princes,[45] were at their height in England. As a poet, Chaucer was
enlisted into the service of three of the most illustrious, most
beautiful, and most accomplished women of that age--Philippa, the
high-hearted and generous Queen of Edward the Third; the Lady Blanche of
Lancaster, first wife of John of Gaunt; and the lovely Anne of Bohemia,
the Queen of Richard the Second;[46] for whom, and at whose command, he
wrote his "Legende of Gode Women," as some amends for the scandal he had
spoken of us in other places. The Countess of Essex, the Countess of
Pembroke, and that beautiful Lady Salisbury, the ancestress of the
Montagu family, whose famous mischance gave rise to the Order of the
Garter, were also among Chaucer's patronesses. But the most
distinguished of all, and the favourite subject of his poetry, was the
Duchess Blanche. The manner in which he has contrived to celebrate his
own loves and individual feelings with those of Blanche and her royal
suitor, has given additional interest to both, and has enabled his
commentators to fix with tolerable certainty the name and rank of the
object of his love, as well as the date and circumstances of his
attachment.
In the earliest of Chaucer's poems, "The COURT OF LOVE," he describes
himself as enamoured of a fair mistress, whom in the style of the time,
he calls Rosial, and himself Philogenet: the lady is described as
"sprung of noble race and high," with "angel visage," "golden hair," and
eyes orient and bright, with figure "sharply slender,"
So that from the head unto the foot all is sweet womanhead,
and arrayed in a vest of green, with her tresses braided with silk and
gold. She treats him at first with disdain, and the Poet swoons away at
her feet: satisfied by this convincing proof of his sincerity, she is
induced to accept his homage, and becomes his "liege ladye," and the
sovereign of his thoughts. In this poem, which is extremely wild, and
has come down to us in an imperfect state, Chaucer quaintly admonishes
all lovers, that an absolute faith in the perfection of their
mistresses, and obedience to her slightest caprice, are among the first
of duties; that they must in all cases believe their ladye faultless;
that,
In every thing she doth but as she should.
Construe the best, believe no tales new,
For many a lie is told that seem'th full true;
But think that she, so bounteous and so fair,
Could not be false; imagine this alway.
....*....*....*....*
And tho' thou seest a fault right at thine eye,
Excuse it quick, and glose it prettily.[47]
Nor are they to presume on their own worthiness, nor to imagine it
possible they can earn
By right, her mercie, nor of equity,
But of her grace and womanly pitye.[47]
There is, however, no authority for supposing that at the time this poem
was written, Chaucer really aspired to the hand of any lady of superior
birth, or was very seriously in love; he was then about nineteen, and
had probably selected some fair one, according to the custom of his age,
to be his "fancy's queen," and in the same spirit of poetical
gallantry, he writes to do her honour; he says himself,
My intent and all my busie care
Is for to write this treatise as I can,
Unto my ladye, stable, true, and sure;
Faithful and kind sith firste that she began
Me to accept in service as her man;
To her be all the pleasures of this book,
That, when her like, she may it rede and look.[48]
Mixed up with all this gallantry and refinement are some passages
inconceivably absurd and gross; but such were those times,--at once rude
and magnificent--an odd mixture of cloth of frieze and cloth of gold!
The "Parliament of Birds," entitled in many editions, the "_Assembly of
Fowls_," celebrates allegorically the courtship of John of Gaunt and
Blanche of Lancaster.
Blanche, as the greatest heiress of England, with a duchy for her
portion, could not fail to be surrounded by pretenders to her hand; but,
after a year of probation, she decided in favour of John of Gaunt, who
thus became Duke of Lancaster in right of his bride. This youthful and
princely pair were then about nineteen.
The "Parliament of Birds" being written in 1358, when Blanche had
postponed her choice for a year, has fixed the date of Chaucer's
attachment to the lady he afterwards married; for, here he describes
himself as one who had not yet felt the full power of love--
For albeit that I know not love indeed,
Ne wot how that he quitteth folks their hire,
Yet happeth me full oft in books to read
Of his miracles.----
But the time was come when the poet, now in his thirty-second year, was
destined to feel, that a strong attachment for a deserving object--for
one who will not be obtained unsought, "was no sport," as he expresses
it, but
Smart and sorrow, and great heavinesse.
During the period of trial which Lady Blanche had inflicted on her
lover, it was Chaucer's fate to fall in love in sad earnest.--The object
of this passion, too beautifully and unaffectedly described not to be
genuine, was Philippa Picard de Rouet, the daughter of a knight of
Hainault, and a favourite attendant of Queen Philippa. Her elder sister
Catherine, was at the same time maid of honour to the Duchess Blanche.
Both these sisters were distinguished at Court for their beauty and
accomplishments, and were the friends and companions of the Princesses
they served: and both are singularly interesting from their connection,
political and poetical, with English history and literature.
Philippa Picard is one of the principal personages in the poem entitled
"Chaucer's Dream," which is a kind of epithalamium celebrating the
marriage of John of Gaunt with the Lady Blanche, which took place at
Reading, May 19, 1359. It is a wild, fanciful vision of fairy-land and
enchantments, of which I cannot attempt to give an analysis. In the
opening lines, written about twelve months after the "Parliament of
Birds," we find Chaucer in deep love according to all its forms. He is
lying awake,
About such hour as lovers weep
And cry after their lady's grace,
thinking on his mistress--all her goodness and all her sweetness, and
marvelling how heaven had formed her so exceeding fair,
And in so litel space
Made such a body and such a face;
So great beauty, and such features,
More than be in other creatures!
He falls into a dream as usual, and in the conclusion fancies himself
present at the splendid festivities which took place at the marriage of
his patron. The ladye of his affection is described as the beloved
friend and companion of the bride. She is sent to grace the marriage
ceremony with her presence; and Chaucer seizes the occasion to plead his
suit for love and mercy. Then the Prince, the Queen, and all the rest of
the Court, unite in conjuring the lady to have pity on his pain, and
recompence his truth; she smiles, and with a pretty hesitation at last
consents.
Sith his will and yours are one,
Contrary in me shall be none.
They are married: the ladies and the knights wish them
----Heart's pleasance,
In joy and health continuance!
The minstrels strike up,--the multitude send forth a shout; and in the
midst of these joyous and triumphant sounds, and in the troubled
exultation of his own heart, the sleeper bounds from his couch,--
Wening to have been at the feast,
and wakes to find it all a dream. He looks around for the gorgeous
marriage-feast, and instead of the throng of knights and ladies gay, he
sees nothing but the figures staring at him from the tapestry.
On the walls old portraiture
Of horsemen, of hawks and hounds,
And hurt deer all full of wounds;
Some like torn, some hurt with shot;
And as my dream was, _that_ was not![49]
He is plunged in grief to find himself thus reft of all his visionary
joys, and prays to sleep again, and dream thus for aye, or at least "a
thousand years and ten."
Lo, here my bliss!--lo, here my pain!
Which to my ladye I complain,
And grace and mercy of her requere,
To end my woe and all my fear;
And me accept for her service--
That of my dream, the substance
Might turnen, once, to cognisance.[50]
And the whole concludes with a very tender "envoi," expressly addressed
to Philippa, although the poem was written in honour of his patrons, the
Duke and Duchess. It has been well observed, that nothing can be more
delicate and ingenious than the manner in which Chaucer has complimented
his mistress, and ventured to shadow forth his own hopes and desires;
confessing, at the same time, that they were built on air and ended in a
dream: it may be added, that nothing can be more picturesque and
beautiful, and vigorous, than some of the descriptive parts of this
poem.
There is no reason to suppose that Philippa was absolutely deaf to the
suit, or insensible to the fame and talents of her poet-lover. The delay
which took place was from a cause honourable to her character and her
heart; it arose from the declining health of her royal mistress, to whom
she was most strongly and gratefully attached, and whose noble qualities
deserved all her affection. It appears, from a comparison of dates, that
Chaucer endured a suspense of more than nine years, during which he was
a constant and fervent suitor for his ladye's grace. In this interval he
translated the Romaunt of the Rose, the most famous poetical work of the
middle ages. He addressed it to his mistress; and it is remarkable that
a very elaborate and cynical satire on women, which occurs in the
original French, is entirely omitted by Chaucer in his version; perhaps
because it would have been a profanation to her who then ruled his
heart: on other occasions he showed no such forbearance.
In the year 1369, Chaucer lost his amiable patroness, the Duchess
Blanche; she died in her thirtieth year; he lamented her death in a long
poem, entitled the "Booke of the Duchesse." The truth of the story, the
virtues, the charms, and the youth of the Princess, the grief of her
husband, and the simplicity and beauty of many passages, render this one
of the most interesting and striking of all Chaucer's works.
The description of Blanche, in the "Booke of the Duchesse," shows how
trifling is the difference between a perfect female character in the
thirteenth century, and what would now be considered as such. It is a
very lively and animated picture. Her golden hair and laughing eyes; her
skill in dancing, and her sweet carolling; her "goodly and friendly
speech;" her debonair looks; her gaiety, that was still "so womanly;"
her indifference to general admiration; her countenance, "that was so
simple and so benigne," contrasted with her high-spirited modesty and
consciousness of lofty birth,
No living wight might do her shame,
_She loved so well her own name_;
her disdain of that coquetterie which holds men "in balance,"
By half-word or by countenance;
her wit, "without malice, and ever set upon gladnesse;" and her
goodness, which the Poet, with a nice discrimination of female virtue,
distinguishes from mere ignorance of evil--for though in all her actions
was perfect innocence, he adds,
I say not that she had no knowing
What harm was; for, else, she
Had known no good--so thinketh me;
are all beautifully and happily set forth, and are charms so appropriate
to woman, as _woman_, that no change of fashion or lapse of ages can
alter their effect. Time
"Can draw no lines there with his antique pen."
But afterwards follows a trait peculiarly characteristic of the women of
that chivalrous period. She was not, says Chaucer, one of those ladies
who send their lovers off
To Walachie,
To Prussia, and to Tartary,
To Alexandria, ne Turkie;
and on other bootless errands, by way of displaying their power.
She used no such _knacks small_.
That is, she was superior to such frivolous tricks.
John of Gaunt, who is the principal speaker and chief mourner in the
poem, gives a history of his courtship, and tells with what mixture of
fear and awe, he then "right young," approached the lovely heiress of
Lancaster: but bethinking him that Heaven could never have formed in any
creature so great beauty and bounty "withouten mercie,"--in that hope he
makes his confession of love; and he goes on to tell us, with exquisite
_naivete_,--
I wot not well how I began,
Full evil rehearse it, I can:
....*....*....*....*
For many a word I overskipt
In telling my tale--for pure fear,
Lest that my words misconstrued were.
Softly, and quaking for pure dred,
And shame,--
Full oft I wax'd both pale and red;
I durst not once look her on,
For wit, manner, and all was gone;
I said, "Mercie, sweet!"--and no more.
Then his anguish at her first rejection, and his rapture when, at last,
he wins from his ladye
The noble gift of her mercie;
his domestic happiness--his loss, and his regrets, are all told with the
same truth, simplicity, and profound feeling. For such passages and such
pictures as these, Chaucer will still be read, triumphant as the poet of
nature, over the rust and dust of ages, and all the difficulties of
antique style and obsolete spelling; which last, however, though
repulsive, is only a difficulty to the eye, and easily overcome.
To return to Chaucer's own love.--In the opening lines of the "Booke of
the Duchesse," he describes himself as wasted with his "eight years'
sicknesse," alluding to his long courtship of the coy Philippa:
I have great wonder, by this light,
How that I live!--for day nor night
I may not sleepen well-nigh nought:
I have so many an idle thought
Purely for the default of sleep;
That, by my troth, I take no keep
Of nothing--how it com'th or go'th,
To me is nothing liefe or lothe;[51]
All is equal good to me,
Joy or sorrow--whereso it be;
For I have feeling in no thing,
But am, as 'twere, a mazed[52] thing,
All day in point to fall adown
For sorrowful imagination, &c.
In the same year with the Duchess died the good Queen of Edward the
Third; and Philippa Picard being thus sadly released from her attendance
on her mistress, a few months afterwards married Chaucer, then in his
forty-second year.
In consequence of her good service, Philippa had a pension for her life;
and I regret that little more is known concerning her: but it should
seem that she was a good and tender wife, and that long years of wedded
life did not weaken her husband's attachment for her; for she
accompanied Chaucer when he was exiled, about fifteen years after his
marriage, though every motive of prudence and selfishness, on both
sides, would then have induced a separation.[53] Neither was the poet
likely to be easily satisfied on the score of conjugal obedience; he was
rather _exigeant_ and despotic, if we may trust his own description of a
perfect wife. The chivalrous and poetical lover was the slave of his
mistress; but once married, it is all _vice versa_.
She saith not once _nay_, when he saith _yea_
"Do this," saith he, "all ready, Sir," saith she!
The precise date of Philippa's death is not known, but it took place
some years before that of her husband. Their residence at the time of
their marriage, was a small stone building, near the entrance of
Woodstock Park; it had been given to Chaucer by Edward the Third;
afterwards they resided principally at Donnington Castle, that fine and
striking ruin, which must be remembered by all who have travelled the
Newberry road. In the domain attached to this castle were three oaks of
remarkable size and beauty, to which Chaucer gave the names of the
Queen's oak, the King's oak, and Chaucer's oak; these venerable trees
were felled in Evelyn's time, and are commemorated in his Sylva, as
among the noblest of their species.
Philippa's eldest son, Thomas Chaucer, had a daughter, Alice, who became
the wife of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, the famous favourite of
Margaret of Anjou. The grandson of Alice Chaucer, by the Duke of
Suffolk, John Earl of Lincoln, was declared heir to the crown by Richard
the Third;[54] and had the issue of the battle of Bosworth been
different, would undoubtedly have ascended the throne of England;--as it
was, the lineage of Chaucer was extinguished on a scaffold.
The fate of Catherine Picard de Rouet, the sister of Chaucer's wife, was
still more remarkable,--she was destined to be the mother of a line of
kings.
She had been _domicella_, or maid of honour to the Duchess Blanche,
after whose death, the infant children of the Princess were committed to
her care.[55] In this situation she won the heart of their father, the
Duke of Lancaster, who on the death of his second wife, Constance of
Castile, married Catherine, and his children by her were solemnly
legitimatized. The conduct of Catherine, except in one instance, had
been irreproachable: her humility, her prudence, and her various
accomplishments, not only reconciled the royal family and the people to
her marriage, but added lustre to her rank: and when Richard the Second
married Isabella of France, the young Queen, then only nine years old,
was placed under the especial care and tuition of the Duchess of
Lancaster.
One of the grand-daughters of Catherine, Lady Jane Beaufort, had the
singular fortune of becoming at once the inspiration and the love of a
great poet, the queen of an accomplished monarch, and the common
ancestress of all the sovereigns of England since the days of
Elizabeth.[56]
Never, perhaps, was the influence of woman on a poetic temperament more
beautifully illustrated, than in the story of James the First of
Scotland, and Lady Jane Beaufort. It has been so elegantly told by
Washington Irving in the Sketch-Book, that it is only necessary to refer
to it.--James, while a prisoner, was confined in Windsor Castle, and
immediately under his window there was a fair garden, in which the Lady
Jane was accustomed to walk with her attendants, distinguished above
them all by her beauty and dignity, even more than by her state and the
richness of her attire. The young monarch beheld her accidentally, his
imagination was fired, his heart captivated, and from that moment his
prison was no longer a dungeon, but a palace of light and love. As he
was the best poet and musician of his time, he composed songs in her
praise, set them to music, and sang them to his lute. He also wrote the
history of his love, with all its circumstances, in a long poem[57]
still extant; and though the language be now obsolete, it is described,
by those who have studied it, as not only full of beauties both of
sentiment and expression, but unpolluted by a single thought or allusion
which the most refined age, or the most fastidious delicacy, could
reject;--a singular distinction, when we consider that James's only
models must have been Gower and Chaucer, to whom no such praise is due:
we must rather suppose that he was no imitator, but that he owed his
inspiration to modest and queenly beauty, and to the genuine tenderness
of his own heart. His description of the fair apparition who came to
bless his solitary hours, is so minute and peculiar, that it must have
been drawn from the life:--the net of pearls, in which her light tresses
were gathered up; the chain of fine-wrought gold about her neck; the
heart-shaped ruby suspended from it, which glowed on her snowy bosom
like a spark of fire; her white vest looped up to facilitate her
movements; her graceful damsels who followed at a respectful distance;
and her little dog gambolling round her with its collar of silver
bells,--these, and other picturesque circumstances, were all noted in
the lover's memory, and have been recorded by the poet's verse. And he
sums up her perfections thus:
In her was youth, beauty, and numble port,
Bountee, richesse, and womanly feature.
God better knows than my pen can report,
Wisdom, largesse,[58] estate,[59] and cunning[60] sure:
In every point so guided her measure,
In word, in deed, in shape, in countenance,
That nature could no more her child advance.
The account of his own feelings as she disappears from his charmed
gaze,--his lingering at the window of his tower, till Phoebus
Had bid farewell to every leaf and flower,--
then resting his head pensively on the cold stone, and the vision which
steals upon his half-waking, half-dreaming fancy, and shadows forth the
happy issue of his love,--are all conceived in the most lively manner.
It is judged from internal evidence, that this poem must have been
finished after his marriage, since he intimates that he is blessed in
the possession of her he loved, and that the fair vision of his solitary
dungeon is realised.
When the King of Scots was released, he wooed and won openly, and as a
monarch, the woman he had adored in secret. The marriage was solemnized
in 1423, and he carried Lady Jane to Scotland where she was crowned soon
after his bride and queen.
How well she merited, and how deeply she repaid the love of her devoted
and all-accomplished husband, is told in history. When James was
surprised and murdered by some of his factious barons, his queen threw
herself between him and the daggers of the assassins, received many of
the wounds aimed at his heart, nor could they complete their purpose
till they had dragged her by force from his arms. She deserved to be a
poet's queen and love! These are the souls, the deeds which inspire
poetry,--or rather which are themselves poetry, its principle and its
essence. It was on this occasion that Catherine Douglas, one of the
queen's attendants, thrust her arm into the stanchion of the door to
serve the purpose of a bolt, and held it there till the savage
assailants forced their way by shattering the frail defence. What times
were those!--alas! the love of women, and the barbarity of men!
FOOTNOTES:
[45] Edward III. and the Black Prince.
[46] She was popularly distinguished as the "_good_ Queen Anne," and as
dear to her husband as to her people. Richard, who with many and fatal
faults, really possessed sensibility and strong domestic affections with
which Shakspeare has so finely pourtrayed him, was passionately devoted
to his amiable wife. She died young, at the Palace of Sheen; and when
Richard afterwards visited the scene of his loss, he solemnly cursed it
in his anguish, and commanded it to be razed to the ground, which was
done. One of our kings afterwards rebuilt it. I think Henry the VIIth.
[47] Court of Love, v. 369-412.
[48] Court of Love, v. 36-42.
[49] _i. e._ the tapestry, like my dream, was a representation, not a
reality.
[50] Chaucer's Dreame, v. 2185. "Here also is showed Chaucer's match
with a certain gentlewoman, who was so well liked and loved of the Lady
Blanche and her Lord (as Chaucer himself also was), that gladly they
concluded a marriage between them."--_Arguments to Chaucer's Works.
Edit._ 1597.
[51] To me there is nothing dear or hateful, every thing is indifferent.
[52] _Mazed_,--distracted.
[53] Godwin's Life of Chaucer, v. iii. p. 5.
[54] In right of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, eldest sister of
Edward IV.
[55] These were Henry of Lancaster, afterwards Henry IV. Philippa, Queen
of Portugal, and Elizabeth, Duchess of Exeter.
[56] Catherine, Duchess of Lancaster, had three sons: the second was the
famous Cardinal Beaufort; the eldest (created Earl of Somerset,) was
grandfather to Henry the Seventh, and consequently ancestor to the whole
race of Tudor: thus from the sister of Chaucer's wife are descended all
the English sovereigns, from the fifteenth century; and likewise the
present family of Somerset, Dukes of Beaufort.
[57] "The King's Quhair," (i.e. _cahier_ or book.)
[58] Liberality.
[59] Dignity.
[60] Knowledge and discretion.
CHAPTER XI.
LORENZO DE' MEDICI AND LUCRETIA DONATI.
To Lorenzo de' Medici,--or rather to the preeminence his personal
qualities, his family possessions, and his unequalled talents, gave him
over his countrymen,--some late travellers and politicians have
attributed the downfall of the liberties of Florence, and attacked his
memory as the precursor of tyrants and the preparer of slaves. It may be
so:--yet was it the fault of Lorenzo, if his collateral posterity
afterwards became the oppressors of that State of which he was the
father and the saviour? And since in this world some must command and
some obey, what power is so legitimate as that derived from the
influence of superior virtue and talent? from the employ of riches
obtained by honourable industry, and expended with princely munificence,
and subscribed to by the will and the affections of the people?
But I forget:--these are questions foreign to our subject. Politics I
never could understand in my life, and history I have forgotten,--or
would wish to forget,--perplexed by its conflicting evidence, and
shocked by its interminable tissue of horrors. Let others then scale the
height while we gather flowers at the foot; let others explore the mazes
of the forest; ours be rather
The gay parterre, the chequered shade,
The morning bower, the evening colonnade,
Those soft recesses of uneasy minds,
whence the din of doleful war, the rumour of cruelty and suffering, and
all the "fitful stir unprofitable" of the world are shut out, and only
the beautiful and good, or the graceful and the gay, are admitted. There
have been pens enough, Heaven knows, to chronicle the wrongs, the
crimes, the sorrows of our sex: why should I add an echo to that voice,
which from the beginning has cried aloud in the wilderness of this
world, upon women betrayed, and betraying in self-defence? A nobler and
more grateful task be mine, to show them how much of what is most fair,
most excellent, most sublime among the productions of human genius, has
been owing to their influence, direct or indirect; and call up the
spirits of the dead,--those who from their silent urns still rule the
pulses of our hearts--to bear witness to this truth.
* * * * *
It is not, then, Lorenzo the MAGNIFICENT, the statesman, and the chief
of a great republic, who finds a place in these pages,--but Lorenzo the
lover and the poet, round whose memory hover a thousand bright
recollections connected with the revival of arts and literature, and the
golden age of Italy. Let politicians say what they will, there is a
spell of harmony, there is music in his very name! how softly the
vowelled syllables drop from the lips--LORENZO DE' MEDICI!--it even
looks elegant when written. Yes, there is something in the mere sound of
a name. I remember once taking up a book, and a very celebrated book,
in which, after turning over some of the pages with pleasure, I came to
_Peter_ and _Laurence Medecis_,--I shut it hastily, as I would have
covered my ears to protect them from a sudden discord in music.
Between Petrarch and Lorenzo de' Medici, there occurs not a single great
name in Italian poetry. The century seemed to lie fallow, as if
preparing for the great birth of various genius which distinguished the
succeeding age. The sciences and the classics were chiefly studied, and
philosophy and Greek seemed to have banished love and poetry.
In such a state of things, it is rather surprising to find in Lorenzo
de' Medici the common case reversed; for by his own confession, it
appears that it was not love which made him a poet, but poetry which
made him a lover.
Giuliano, the brother of Lorenzo,--he who was afterwards assassinated by
the Pazzi, and was so beloved at Florence for his amiable character and
personal accomplishments, had been seized with a passion for a lady
named Simonetta, who was esteemed the most beautiful woman in Florence,
and is scarcely ever mentioned but with the epithet, "La bella
Simonetta."--She died in the bloom of early youth, and all the wit and
eloquence of her native city were called forth in condolences addressed
to Giuliano, or elegies to her memory, in prose and verse, Latin, Greek,
and Italian. Among the rest, Lorenzo, who had already made several
attempts in Italian poetry, pressed forward to celebrate the love and
the loss of his amiable brother:--in his zeal to do justice to so dear a
subject, he worked himself up into a fit of amorous and poetical
enthusiasm which soon found a real and living beauty for its object. But
to give this romantic tale its proper effect, it must be related in
Lorenzo's own words. He has left us a most circumstantial and elegant as
well as interesting and fanciful account of the birth and progress of
his poetic passion, and I extract it at length from Mr. Roscoe's
translation.
"A young lady of great personal attractions happened to die at Florence;
and as she had been very generally admired and beloved, so her death
was as generally lamented. Nor was this to be much wondered at; for,
independent of her beauty, her manners were so engaging, that almost
every person who had any acquaintance with her flattered himself that he
had obtained the chief place in her affections." (In other words, this
beautiful Simonetta was an exquisite coquette.)
"This fatal event excited the extreme regret of her admirers; and as she
was carried to the place of burial, with her face uncovered, those who
had known her when living, pressed for a last look at the object of
their adoration, and accompanied her funeral with their tears.
"On this occasion, all the eloquence, and all the wit of Florence were
exerted in paying due honours to her memory, both in prose and verse.
Amongst the rest, I also composed a few sonnets; and in order to give
them greater effect, I endeavoured to convince myself, that I too had
been deprived of the object of my love, and to excite in my own mind all
those passions that might enable me to move the affections of
others.--Under the influence of this delusion, I began to think how
severe was the fate of those by whom she had been beloved; and from
thence was led to consider, whether there was any other lady in this
city deserving of such honour and praise, and to imagine the happiness
that must be experienced by any one, whose good fortune could procure
him such a subject for his pen. I accordingly sought for some time
without having the satisfaction of finding any one, who in my judgment
was deserving of a sincere and constant attachment. But when I had
nearly resigned all expectations of success, chance threw in my way that
which had been denied to my most diligent inquiry; as if the God of Love
had selected this hopeless period, to give me a more decisive proof of
his power.--A public festival was held in Florence, to which all that
was noble and beautiful in the city resorted. To this I was brought by
some of my companions (I suppose as my destiny led) against my will, for
I had for some time past avoided such exhibitions; or if at times I
attended them, it proceeded rather from a compliance with custom, than
from any pleasure I experienced in them. Among the ladies there
assembled, I saw one of such sweet and attractive manners, that while I
regarded her, I could not help saying, 'If this person were possessed of
the delicacy, the understanding, the accomplishments of her who is
lately dead--most certainly she excels her in the charms of her
person.--"
* * * * *
"Resigning myself to my passion, I endeavoured to discover, if possible,
how far her manners and her conversation agreed with her appearance; and
here I found such an assemblage of extraordinary endowments, that it was
difficult to say whether she excelled more in person or in mind. Her
beauty was, as I have before mentioned, astonishing. She was of a just
and proper height. Her complexion extremely fair, but not
pale,--blooming but not ruddy. Her countenance was serious, without
being severe,--mild and pleasant without levity or vulgarity. Her eyes
were lively, without any indication of pride or conceit. Her whole
shape was so finely proportioned, that amongst other women she appeared
with superior dignity, yet free from the least degree of formality or
affectation. In walking, in dancing, or in other exercises which display
the person, every motion was elegant and appropriate. Her sentiments
were always just and striking, and have furnished materials for some of
my sonnets; she always spoke at the proper time, and always to the
purpose, so that nothing could be added, nothing taken away. Though her
remarks were often keen and pointed, yet they were so tempered as not to
give offence. Her understanding was superior to her sex, but without the
appearance of arrogance or presumption; and she avoided an error too
common among women, who, when they think themselves sensible, become for
the most part insupportable.[61] To recount all her excellencies would
far exceed my present limits, and I shall therefore conclude with
affirming, that there was nothing which could be desired in a beautiful
and an accomplished woman, which was not in her most abundantly found.
By these qualities I was so captivated, that not a power or faculty of
my body or mind remained any longer at liberty, and I could not help
considering the lady who had died, as the star of Venus, which at the
approach of the sun is totally overpowered and extinguished."
The real name of this beautiful and accomplished creature, Lorenzo was
too discreet to reveal; but from contemporary authors, we learn that she
was Lucretia Donati--a noble lady, distinguished at Florence for her
virtue and beauty, and of the same illustrious family which had given a
wife to Dante.
When Lorenzo undertook to fall in love thus poetically, he was only
twenty: the experiment was perilous; and it is not wonderful that this
imaginary passion had at first in his ardent and susceptible mind all
the effects of a real one: he neglected society--abandoned himself to
musing and solitude--affected the rural shades, and gave up his time,
and devoted all his powers, to celebrate, in the richest colouring of
poetry, her whom he had selected to be the mistress of his heart, or
rather the presiding goddess of his fancy.
The result is exactly what may be imagined, and a proof of the theory on
which I insist, that "nothing but what arises from the heart goes to the
heart, and that the verse which never quickened a pulse in the bosom of
the poet, never awakened a throb in that of his reader." If I were
required to express in one word the distinguishing character of
Lorenzo's amatory poems, I should say _grace_: they are full of refined
sentiment, elegant simplicity, the most exquisite little touches of
description, and illustrations, drawn either from external nature, or
from the refined mysteries of platonism; but there is a want of passion,
of power, and of pathos; there is no genuine emotion; no overflow of the
heart, bursting with its own intense feeling; no voice that cries aloud
for our sympathy, and echoes to our inmost bosom. What true lover ever
thought of apologising for having given his time to celebrate the object
of his love?
"Persecuted as I have been from my youth," says Lorenzo, "some
indulgence may perhaps be allowed me for having sought consolation in
these pursuits."--And again, in allusion to his political
situation,--"It is not to be wondered at if I endeavoured to alleviate
my anxiety by turning to more agreeable subjects of meditation; and in
celebrating the charms of my mistress, sought a temporary refuge from my
cares."--Thus Lorenzo tells us that it was not in obedience to the
dictates of his own overflowing heart, nor yet to celebrate the charms
of his mistress, and win her favour, that he wrote in her praise, but to
amuse himself and distract his mind from those cares and anxieties into
which he was so early plunged. It has followed as a natural consequence,
that elegant as are the amatory effusions of Lorenzo, they are less
celebrated, less popular, than his descriptive and moral poems. His
Ambra, La Nencia, and his songs for the carnival, have all in their
respective style a higher stamp of excellence and originality than his
love poetry. His forte seems to have been lively description,
philosophical illustration, and brilliant and sportive fancy, combined
with a classic taste and polished versification. Some of those sonnets,
which, though addressed to Madonna Lucretia, turn chiefly on some
beautiful thought or description, are finished like gems; as that on
Solitude--
Cerchi chi vuol le pompe e gli alti onori;
and that well known and charming one, "Sopra Violetti,"
Non di verdi giardin, ornati e colti, &c.
both of which have been happily translated by Roscoe; and to these may
be added the address to Cytherea--
Lascia l' isola tua tanta diletta!
Lascia il tuo regno delicato e bello
Ciprigna Dea! &c.
There is another, not so well known, distinguished by its peculiar fancy
and elegance--
Spesso mi torna a mente, anzi gia mai, &c.
In this he recalls to mind the time and the place, and even the vesture
in which his gentle lady first appeared to him--
Quanto vaga, gentil, leggiadra, e pia
Non si puo dir, ne imaginar assai;
and he beautifully adds,
Quale sopra i nevosi, ed alti monti
Apollo spande il suo bel lume adorno,
Tal' i crin suoi sopra la bianca gonna!
Il tempo e 'l luogo non convien ch' io conti,
Che dov' e si bel sole e sempre giorno;
E Paradiso, ov' e si bella Donna!
"As over the snowy summits of the high mountains Apollo sheds his golden
beams, so flowed her golden tresses over her white vest.--But for the
_time_ and the _place_, is it necessary that I should note them? Where
shines so fair a sun, can it be other than day? Where dwells so
excellent a beauty, can it be other than Paradise?"
It happened in the midst of Lorenzo's visions of love and poetry, that
he was called upon to give his hand to a wife chosen by his father for
political reasons. His inclinations were not consulted, as is plain
from the blunt amusing manner in which he has noted it down in his
memoranda. "I, Lorenzo, took to wife Donna Clarice Orsini,--or rather
she was given to me, (ovvero mi fu data) on such a day." Yet a union
thus inauspiciously contracted, was rendered, by the affectionate
disposition of Lorenzo, and the amiable qualities of his wife, rather
happy than otherwise; it is true, we have no poetical compliments
addressed by Lorenzo to Donna Clarice, but there is extant a little
billet written to her a few months after their marriage, from the tone
of which it is fair to suppose, that Lorenzo had exchanged his poetic
flame for a real attachment to an amiable woman.[62]
There is a very beautiful and elegant passage in the beginning of
Lorenzo's commentary on his own poems, in which he enlarges on the
theory of love. "The conditions (he says) which appear necessarily to
belong to a true, exalted, and worthy love, are two. First,--_to love
but one_: secondly,--_to love that one always_. Not many lovers have
hearts so generous as to be capable of fulfilling these two conditions;
and exceedingly few women display sufficient attractions to withhold men
from the violation of them; yet without these there is no true love."
And afterwards, enumerating those charms of person and mind which
inspire affection, he adds, "and yet these estimable qualities are not
enough, unless the lover possess sensibility of heart to discern them,
and elevation and generosity of soul to appreciate them."
This in the original is very elegantly expressed, and the sentiment is
as true as it is exalted and graceful; but that Lorenzo was not always
thus philosophically refined, that he could descend from these
Platonics to be impassioned and in earnest, and that when touched to the
heart, he could pour forth the language of the heart, we have a single
instance, which it is impossible to allude to without feeling some
emotion of curiosity, which can never now be gratified.
We find among Lorenzo's poems, written later in life than those
addressed to Lucretia Donati, one entitled simply "An Elegy;" the style
is different from that of his earlier poetry, and has more of the
terseness and energy of Dante than the sweetness and flow of Petrarch.
It begins
"Vinto dagli amorosi, empi martiri."
"Subdued by the fierce pangs of my love, a thousand times have I taken
up the pen, to tell thee, O gentle lady mine, all the sighs of my sick
heart. Then fearing thy displeasure, I have, on a second thought, flung
it from me. * * * Yet must I speak, for if words were wanting, my pallid
cheek would betray my suffering."
He then tells her that he does not seek her dishonour, but only her kind
thoughts, and that he may find a place within her gentle heart.
Perche non cerco alcun tuo disonore,
Ma sol la grazia tua, e che piaci
Che'l mio albergo sia dentro al tuo core!
He wishes that he might be once permitted to twine his fingers in her
fair hair; to gaze into her eyes;--but he complains that she will not
even meet his look,--that she resolutely turns her eyes another way at
his approach.--"But do with me what thou wilt: while I live upon this
earth, still I must love thee, since it so pleaseth Heaven--I swear it!
and my hand writes it!
* * * * *
"Come then! oh come, while yet thy gracious looks may avail me, for
delay is death to one who loves likes me! Would I could send with this
scroll all the torture of heart, the tears and sighs, the gesture and
the look, that should accompany it!"
Ma s' egli avvien, che soletti ambo insieme,
Posso il braccio tenerti al collo avvolto,
Vedrai come d'amore alto arde e geme,
Vedrai cader dal mio pallido volto,
Nel tuo candido sen lagrime tante.
(I leave these lines untranslated for the benefit of the Italian
reader). After a few more stanzas, we have this very unequivocal
passage:
"O would to Heaven, lady, that marriage had made us one! ah, why didst
thou not come into this world a little sooner?--or I a little later? Yet
why these vain thoughts? since I am doomed to see thee the bride of
another, and am myself fettered in these marriage bonds!
* * * * *
"Thou knowest, Madonna, that these sighs, these burning words, are not
feigned; for even as Love dictates does my hand write.
* * * * *
"My life and death are with thee;--grant me but a few words, and I am
content to live;--if not, let me die! and let my poor remains be laid in
some forlorn and sequestered spot. Let none whisper the cause of my
death, lest it should grieve thee! enough if some kind hand engrave upon
my tomb,--'_He perished through too much love and too much cruelty._'"
I have given, literally, the leading sentiments of this little poem, but
have left untranslated many of the stanzas. There are one or two
concetti; but as Ginguene truly observes on a different occasion, "Dans
les poetes Italiens, souvent la passion est vraie, meme quand
l'expression ne l'est pas."
The style is so natural, the transitions so abrupt, the expressions so
energetic, and there are so few of those descriptive ornaments which are
plentifully scattered through Lorenzo's other poems, that I should
pronounce it the real effusion of a heart, touched,--and deeply touched.
It is to be regretted that we know nothing of the name or real character
of an object who, deserving or not, could call forth such strong lines
as these; and in the plenitude of his power and fame, and in the midst
of his great and serious avocations, deeply, though secretly, tyrannise
over the peace of Lorenzo.
He is accused,--I regret that I must allude to it,--of considerable
licence of manners with regard to women;--a reproach from which Roscoe
has fairly vindicated him. United, at the age of twenty-one, to a woman
he had never seen; residing in a dissipated capital, surrounded by
temptation, and from disposition peculiarly sensible to the influence of
women, it is not matter of astonishment if Lorenzo's conjugal faith was
not preserved immaculate,--if he occasionally became the thrall of
beauty, and--(since he was not likely to be caught by vulgar
charms,)--if he sighed, _par hazard_, for one who was not to be tempted
by power or gold: such a one as his Elegy indicates. Two points are
certain,--that his uniform respect and kindness to his wife Clarice,
left her no reason to complain; while his discretion was such, that
though historians have hazarded a general accusation against him in this
one particular, there exists not in any contemporary writer one
scandalous anecdote of his private life, nor the name of any woman to
whom he was attached, except that of his poetical love, Lucretia Donati.
Lorenzo de' Medici was not handsome in face, nor graceful in form; but
he was captivating in his manners, and excelled in all manly exercises.
The engraving prefixed to Roscoe's life of him, does not do justice to
his countenance. I remember the original picture in the gallery of
Florence, on which I have looked day after day for many minutes
together, with an interest that can only be felt on the very spot where
the memory of Lorenzo is "wherever we look, wherever we move." In spite
of the stoop in the shoulders, the unbecoming dress, and the harsh
features, I was struck by the grand simplicity of the head, and the
mingled expression of acuteness, benevolence, and earnest thought in the
countenance; the imagination filled with the splendid character of the
man, might possibly have perceived more than the eye,--but such was my
impression.
Lorenzo died in his forty-fourth year, in 1492. He is not interred in
that celebrated chapel of his family, rich with the sublimest
productions of Michael Angelo's chisel: he lies at the opposite side of
the church, in a magnificent sarcophagus of bronze, which contains also
the ashes of his murdered brother, Giuliano.--Among the recollections,
sweet and bitter, which I brought from Florence, is the remembrance of a
day when retiring, from the glare of an Italian noontide, I stood in the
church of San Lorenzo, sketching the tomb of Lorenzo and Giuliano de'
Medici. The spot whence I viewed it was so obscure, that I could scarce
see the lines traced by my pencil; but immediately behind the
sarcophagus, there flowed from above a stream of strong light, relieving
with added effect the dark outline of the sculptured ornaments. Through
the grating which formed the background, I could see the figures of
shaven monks and stoled priests gliding to and fro, like apparitions;
and while I thought more,--O much more,--of the still and cold repose
which wrapped the dead, than of their high deeds and far-spread fame,
the plaintive music of a distant choir, chanting the _Via crucis_,
floated through the pillared aisles, receding or approaching as the
singers changed their station; swelling, sinking, and at length dying
away on the ear.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Lorenzo tells us in the original, that the ladies who rendered
themselves thus insupportable, were called (_vulgarly_)
_Saccenti_:--query--_vulgarly, Blue-stockings_?
[62] Lorenzo de' Medici to his wife Clarice:--
"I arrived here in safety, and am in good health: this, I believe, will
please thee better than any thing else, except my return, at least so I
judge from my own desire to be once more with thee. Associate as much as
possible with my father and sisters. I shall make all possible speed to
return to thee, for it appears a thousand years till I see thee again.
Pray to God for me--if thou want any thing from this place write in
time. From Milan, 22d July, 1469. THY LORENZO."
CHAPTER XII.
THE FAIR GERALDINE.
In the reign of the second Grand Duke of Tuscany, of Lorenzo's family,
(Cosmo I.) Florence, it is said, beheld a novel and extraordinary
spectacle: a young traveller, from a court and a country which the
Italians of that day seemed to regard much as we now do the
Esquimaux,[63] combining the learning of the scholar and the amiable
bearing of the courtier, with all the rash bravery of youthful romance,
astonished the inhabitants of that queenly city, first, by rivalling her
polished nobles in the splendour of his state, and gallantry of his
manners, and next, by boldly proclaiming that his "lady love" was
superior to all that Italy could vaunt of beauty, that she was "oltre le
belle, bella," fair beyond the fairest,--and maintaining his boast in a
solemn tourney held in her honour, to the overthrow of all his
opponents.
This was our English Surrey; one of the earliest and most elegant of our
amatory poets, and the lover of the Fair Geraldine.
It must be admitted that the fame of the Earl of Surrey does not rest
merely on title, and that if the fair Geraldine had never existed, he
would still have lived in history as an accomplished scholar, soldier,
courtier, and been lamented as the noble victim of a suspicious tyrant.
But if some fair object of romantic gallantry had not given the impulse
to his genius, and excited him to try his powers in a style of which no
models yet existed in his native language,[64]--it may be doubted
whether his name would have descended to us with all those poetical and
chivalrous associations which give a charm and an interest to his
memory, far beyond that of a mere historical character. As for the
fair-haired, blue-eyed Geraldine, the mistress of his fancy and
affections, and the subject of his verse, her identity long lay
_entombed_, as it were, in a poetical name; but Surrey had loved her,
had maintained her beauty at the point of his lance--had made her
"famous by his pen, and glorious by his sword." This was more than
enough to excite the interest and the inquiries of posterity, and lo!
antiquaries and commentators fell to work, archives were searched,
genealogies were traced, and at length the substance of this beautiful
poetical shadow was detected: she was proved to have been the Lady
Elizabeth Fitzgerald, afterwards the wife of a certain Earl of Lincoln,
of whom little is known--but that he married the woman Surrey had loved.
Surrey has ingeniously contrived to compress, within the compass of a
sonnet, some of the most interesting particulars of the personal and
family history of his mistress. The Fitzgeralds derive their origin
from the Geraldi of Tuscany,--hence
From Tuscan came my ladye's worthy race,
Fair Florence was sometime their ancient seat.
She was born and nurtured in Ireland--
Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast.
Her father was the Earl of Kildare, her mother allied to the blood
royal.
Her sire an Earl, her dame of Prince's blood.
She was brought up (through motives of compassion, after the misfortunes
of her family,) at Hunsdon, with the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth,
where Surrey, who frequently visited them in company with the young Duke
of Richmond,[65] first beheld her.
Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyes.
She was then extremely young, not above fourteen or fifteen, as it
appears from comparative dates; and Surrey says very clearly,
She wanted years to understand
The grief that he did feel.
But even then her budding charms made him confess as he beautifully
expresses it--
How soon a look can print a thought
That never may remove!
It was during the festivals held at Hampton Court, whither she
accompanied the Princesses, that her conquest was completed; and Surrey
being afterwards confined at Windsor,[66] was deprived of her society.
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight;
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine,
Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight.
Hampton Court was the scene of their frequent interviews. Surrey
mentions a certain recessed or bow window, in which, retired apart from
the gay throng around them, they held "converse sweet." Here she gave
him, as it seems, some encouragement; too proud of such a distinguished
suitor to let him escape. He in the same moment confesses himself a very
slave, and betrays an indignant consciousness of the arts by which she
keeps him entangled in her chain.
In silence tho' I keep to such secrets myself,
Yet do I see how she sometime, doth yield a look by stealth;
As tho' it seemed, I wis,--"I will not lose thee so!"
When in her heart so sweet a thought did never truly grow.
He accuses her expressly of a love of general admiration, and of giving
her countenance and favour to unworthy rivals. In "The Warning to a
Lover how he is abused by his Love," he thus addresses himself as the
deceived lover:--
Where thou hast loved so long, with heart and all thy power,
I see thee fed with feigned words, &c.
I see her pleasant cheer in chiefest of thy suit:
When thou art gone, I see him come who gathers up the fruit;
And eke in thy respect, I see the base degree
Of him to whom she gives the heart, that promised was to thee![67]
The fair Geraldine must have been a practised coquette to have sat for a
picture so finished and so strongly marked: yet before we blame her for
this disdainful trifling, it should be remembered that Lord Surrey, at
the time he was wooing her with "musicke vows," was either married or
contracted to another,[68]--a circumstance quite in keeping with the
fashionable system of Platonic gallantry introduced from Italy--
O Plato! Plato! you have been the cause, &c.
and so forth. I forbear to continue the apostrophe.
According to the old tradition, repeated by all Surrey's biographers, he
visited on his travels the famous necromancer Cornelius Agrippa, who in
a magic mirror revealed to him the fair figure of his Geraldine, lying
dishevelled on a couch, and, by the light of a taper, reading one of his
tenderest sonnets.
Fair all the pageant, but how passing fair
The slender form that lay on couch of Ind!
O'er her white bosom strayed her hazel hair,
Pale her dear cheek, as if for love she pined.
All in her night-robe loose, she lay reclined,
And pensive read from tablet eburnine,
Some strain that seemed her inmost soul to find;--
That favoured strain was Surrey's raptured line,
That fair and lovely form, the Lady Geraldine![69]
This beautiful incident is too celebrated, too touching, not to be one
of the articles of our poetical faith. It was believed by Surrey's
contemporaries, and in the age immediately following was gravely related
by a grave historian. It shows at least the celebrity which his poetry,
unequalled at that time, had given to his love, and the object of it. In
fact, when divested of the antique spelling, which, at the first glance,
revolts by the impression it gives of difficulty and obscurity, some of
the lyrics of Surrey have not since been surpassed either in elegance of
sentiment, or flowing grace of expression:--for example--
A Praise of his Love, wherein he reproveth them that compare
their Ladies with his.
Give place ye lovers here before,
That spent your boastes and braggs in vain,
My ladye's beauty passeth more
The best of yours, I dare well sayne,
Then doth the sun the candle light,
Or brightest d
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