Pastoral poetry had in Italy a tendency to a rapid degeneration from the
first. "Decipit exemplum vitiis imitabile." The earliest "pastorals" were
far from being without merit, and merit of a high order. But they were
eminently "vitiis imitabiles." Two specimens of Italian Arcadian poetry
stand out, from the incredibly huge mass of such productions still extant,
superior to all the innumerable imitations to which they gave rise in a
more marked degree even than "originals" usually surpass imitations in
value. These are the "Aminta" of Tasso, and the "Pastor Fido" of the poet
with whom it is the object of these pages to make the English nineteenth
century reader, who never will find the time to read him, in some degree
acquainted—Batista Guarini. It would be difficult to say which of these
two celebrated pastoral dramas was received with the greater amount of
delight and enthusiasm by the world of their contemporaries, or even which
of them is the better performance. The almost simultaneous production of
these two masterpieces in their kind is a striking instance of the, one
may almost say, epidemic nature of the influences which rule the
production of the human intellect; influences which certainly did not
cease to operate for many generations after that of the authors of the
"Aminta" and the "Pastor Fido," although the servile imitation of those
greatly admired works unquestionably went for much in causing the
overwhelming flood of pastorals which deluged Italy immediately subsequent
to their enormous success.
I have said that it would be difficult to assign a preëminence to either
of these poems. But it must not be supposed that it is intended thence to
insinuate an equality between the authors of them. Tasso would occupy no
lower place on the Italian Parnassus if he had never written the "Aminta."
His fame rests upon a very much larger and firmer basis. But Guarini would
be nowhere—would not be heard of at all—had he not written the "Pastor
Fido." Having, however, produced that work—a work of which forty editions
are said to have been printed in his lifetime, and which has been
translated into almost every civilised language, including Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew—he has always filled a space in the eyes of his countrymen,
and occupied a position in the roll of fame, which render his admission as
one of our select band here imperative. He is, besides, a representative
poet; the head and captain of the pastoral school, which attained
everywhere so considerable a vogue, and in Italy such colossal
proportions.
Guarini was born in the year 1537 in Ferrara,—desolate, dreary, shrunken,
grass-grown, tumble-down Ferrara, which in the course of one half-century
gave to the world, besides a host of lesser names, three such poets as
Tasso, Ariosto and Guarini. Ariosto died four years before Guarini was
born; but Tasso was nearly his contemporary, being but seven years his
junior.
In very few cases in all the world and in all ages has it happened that
intellectual distinction has been the appanage of one family for as many
generations as in that of the Guarini. They came originally from Verona,
where Guarino, the first of the family on record, who was born in 1370,
taught the learned languages, and was one of the most notable of the band
of scholars who laboured at the restoration of classical literature. He
lived to be ninety years old, and is recorded to have had twenty-three
sons. It is certain that he had twelve living in 1438. One of them,
Giovanni Batista, succeeded his father in his professorship at Ferrara, to
which city the old scholar had been invited by Duke Hercules I. It would
seem that another of his sons must also have shared the work of teaching
in the University of Ferrara: for Batista the poet was educated by his
great-uncle Alessandro, and succeeded him in his professorship. Of the
poet's father we only learn that he was a mighty hunter, and further, that
he and his poet-son were engaged in litigation respecting the inheritance
of the poet's grandfather and great-uncle. It is probable that the two old
scholars wished to bequeath their property, which included a landed
estate, to their grandson and great-nephew, who already was manifesting
tastes and capacities quite in accordance with their own, rather than to
that exceptional member of the race who cared for nothing but dogs and
horses.
Nor was Batista the last of his race who distinguished himself in the same
career. His son succeeded him in his chair at the university; and we have
thus at least four generations of scholars and professors following the
same course in the same university, which was in their day one of the most
renowned in Europe.
All this sounds very stable, very prosperous, very full of the element of
contentment. And there is every reason to believe that the
great-grandfather, the grandfather, the great-uncle, the son, were all as
tranquil and contented and happy as well-to-do scholars in a prosperous
university city should be. But not so the poet. His life was anything but
tranquil, or happy, or contented. The lives of few men, it may be hoped,
have been less so.
Yet his morning was brilliant enough. He distinguished himself so
remarkably by his success in his early studies that, on the death of his
great-uncle Alexander when he was only nineteen, he was appointed to
succeed him. This was in 1556, when Hercules II. was Duke of Ferrara, and
when that court of the Este princes was at the apogee of its splendour,
renown, and magnificence. The young professor remained working at the
proper labours of his profession for ten years; and they were in all
probability the best and happiest, the only happy ones of his life. Happy
is the nation, it has been said, which has no history; and much the same
probably may be said of an individual. Respecting these ten years of
Guarini's life but little has been recorded. No doubt the chronicle of
them would have been monotonous enough. The same quiet duties quietly and
successfully discharged; the same morning walk to his school, the same
evening return from it, through the same streets, with salutations to the
same friends, and leisurely pauses by the way to chat, Italian fashion,
with one and another, as they were met in the streets, not then, as now,
deserted, grass-grown, and almost weird in their pale sun-baked
desolation, but thronged with bustling citizens, mingled with gay
courtiers, and a very unusually large proportion of men whose names were
known from one end of Italy to the other. Those school haunts in the
Ferrarese University were haunts which the world-weary ex-professor must
often throughout the years of his remaining life—some forty-five of them,
for he did not die till 1612, when he was seventy-five—have looked back
on as the best and happiest of his storm-tossed existence.
There is, however, one record belonging to this happy time which must not
be forgotten. It was at Padua, Padova la dotta, as she has been in all
ages and is still called, Padua the learned, in the year 1565. Guarini was
then in his twenty-eighth year, and had been a professor at Ferrara for
the last eight years. Probably it was due to the circumstance that his
friend and fellow-townsman, Torquato Tasso, was then pursuing his studies
at Padua, that the young Ferrarese professor turned his steps in that
direction, bound "on a long vacation ramble." Tasso was only
one-and-twenty at the time; but he was already a member of the famous
Paduan Academy of the "Etherials," which Guarini was not. And we may
readily fancy the pride and pleasure with which the younger man, doing the
honours of the place to his learned friend, procured him to be elected a
member of the "Etherials." Guarini (so called nel secolo—in the world),
was Il Costante—the "Constant One" among the "Etherials." Scipio
Gonzaga, who became subsequently the famous Cardinal, spoke an oration of
welcome to him on his election. Then what congratulations, what
anticipations of fame, what loving protestations of eternal friendship,
what naïve acceptance of the importance and serious value of their
Etherial Academic play, as the two youths strolling at the evening hour
among the crowds of gravely clad but in no wise gravely speaking students
who thronged the colonnades in deep shadow under their low-browed arches,
sally forth from beneath them as the sun nears the west, on to the vast
open space which lies around the great church of St. Antony! Advancing in
close talk they come up to Donatello's superb equestrian statue of the
Venetian General Gattamelata, and lean awhile against the tall pedestal,
finishing their chat before entering the church for the evening prayer.
The "Etherials" of Padua constituted one of the innumerable "Academies"
which existed at that day and for a couple of centuries subsequently in
every one of the hundred cities of Italy. The "Arcadian" craze was the
generating cause of all of them. All the members were "shepherds;" all
assumed a fancy name on becoming a member, by which they were known in
literary circles; and every Academy printed all the rhymes its members
strung together!
Those must have been pleasant days in old Padua, before the young
Professor returned to his work in the neighbouring university of Ferrara.
The two young men were then, and for some time afterwards, loving friends;
for they had not yet become rival poets.
At the end of those ten years of university life he may be said to have
entered on a new existence—to have begun life afresh—so entirely
dis-severed was his old life from the new that then opened on him.
Alphonso II., who had succeeded his father, Hercules II., as Duke of
Ferrara in 1559, "called him to the court" in 1567, and he began life as a
courtier, or a "servant" of the Duke, in the language of the country and
time.
Well, in 1567 he entered into the service of the Duke, his sovereign, and
never had another happy or contented hour!
The first service on which the Duke employed him, and for the performance
of which he seems specially to have taken him from his professional chair,
was an embassy to Venice, to congratulate the new Doge, Pietro Loredano,
on his elevation to the ducal throne, to which he had been elected on the
previous 19th of June. On this occasion the Professor was created
Cavaliere, a title to which his landed estate of Guarina, so called from
the ancestor on whom it had been originally bestowed by a former duke,
fairly entitled him.
Shortly afterwards he was sent as ambassador to the court of Turin; and
then to that of the Emperor Maximilian at Innspruck. Then he was twice
sent to Poland; the first time on the occasion of the election of Henry
the Third of France to the throne of that kingdom; and the second time
when Henry quitted it to ascend that of France on the death of his brother
Charles IX. The object of this second embassy was to intrigue for the
election to the Polish crown of Alphonso. But, as it is hardly necessary
to say, his mission was unsuccessful.
It seems, too, to have been well-nigh fatal to the ambassador. There is
extant a letter written from Warsaw to his wife, which gives a curious and
interesting account of the sufferings he endured on the journey and at the
place of his destination. He tells his wife not to be discontented that
his silence has been so long, but to be thankful that it was not eternal,
as it was very near being! "I started, as you know, more in the fashion of
a courier than of an ambassador. And that would have been more tolerable
if bodily fatigue had been all. But the same hand that had to flog the
horses by day, had to hold the pen by night. Nature could not bear up
against this double labour of body and mind; especially after I had
travelled by Serravelles and Ampez,[48] which is more disagreeable and
difficult than I can tell you, from the ruggedness no less of the country
than of the people, from the scarcity of horses, the miserable mode of
living, and the want of every necessary. So much so that on reaching
Hala[49] I had a violent fever. I embarked, however, for Vienna
notwithstanding. What with fever, discouragement, an intense thirst,
scarcity of remedies and of medical assistance, bad lodging, generally far
to seek,[50] and often infected with disease, food disgusting, even to
persons in health, bed where you are smothered in feathers, in a word,
none of the necessaries or comforts of life! I leave you to imagine what I
have suffered. The evil increased; my strength grew less. I lost my
appetite for everything save wine. In a word, little hope remained to me
of life, and that little was odious to me. There is on the Danube, which I
was navigating, a vast whirlpool, so rapid that if the boatmen did not
avail themselves of the assistance of a great number of men belonging to
the locality, strong and powerful and well acquainted with the danger, who
are there constantly for the purpose, and who struggle with their oars
against the rapacious gulf, there is not a vessel in that great river
which would not be engulfed! The place is worthy of the name of "the Door
of Death," which with a notoriety of evil fame it has gained for itself.
There is no passenger so bold as not to pass that bit of the course of the
river on foot; for the thing is truly formidable and terrible. But I was
so overcome by illness, that having lost all sense of danger or desire to
live, I did not care to leave the boat, but remained in it, with those
strong men, I hardly know whether to say stupidly or intrepidly—but I
will say intrepidly, since at one point, where I was within an ace of
destruction, I felt no fear."
He goes on to tell how at Vienna a physician treated him amiss, and made
him worse; how every kind of consideration, and his own desire to save his
life, counselled him to delay there; but how the honour, the
responsibility of the embassy wholly on his shoulders, his duty to his
sovereign prevailed to drive him onwards. He feared, too, lest it should
be supposed at Warsaw that he preferred his life to the business on which
he came, an accusation which might have been made use of by suspicious and
malignant adversaries to deprive him of all the credit of his labours, and
"to snatch from my Prince the crown which we are striving to place on his
head. It is impossible to imagine," he continues, "what I suffered in that
journey of more than six hundred miles from Vienna to Warsaw, dragged
rather than carried in carts, broken and knocked to pieces. I wonder that
I am still alive! The obstinate fever, the want of rest, of food, and of
medicine, the excessive cold, the infinite hardships, the uninhabited
deserts, were killing me. More often than not it was a much lesser evil to
crouch by night in the cart, which dislocated my bones by day, rather than
to be suffocated in the foulness of those dens, or stables rather, where
the dogs and cats, the cocks and hens, and the geese, the pigs and the
calves, and sometimes the children, kept me waiting."
He proceeds to tell how the country was overrun, in that time of
interregnum, by lawless bands of Cossacks; how he was obliged to travel
with a strong escort, but nevertheless was obliged several times to
deviate from the direct road to avoid the Cossacks, but on two occasions
had very narrow escapes from falling into their hands. When he reached
Warsaw at last, more dead than alive, the only improvement of his position
was that he was stationary instead of in motion. "The cart no more
lacerates my limbs!" But there was no rest to be got. "The place, the
season, the food, the drink, the water, the servants, the medicines, the
doctors, mental trouble, and a thousand other ills make up my torment.
Figure to yourself all the kingdom lodged in one little town, and my room
in the midst of it! There is no place from the top to the bottom, on the
right or on the left, by day or by night, that is not full of tumult and
noise. There is no special time here destined for business. Negotiation is
going on always, because drinking is going on always; and business is dry
work without wine. When business is over, visits begin; and when these are
at an end, drums, trumpets, bombs, uproar, cries, quarrels, fighting,
split one's head in a manner piteous to think of. Ah! if I suffered all
this labour and this torment for the love and the glory of God, I should
be a martyr!" (one thinks of Wolsey!) "But is he not worthy of the name
who serves without hope of recompense?"
He concludes his letter, bidding his wife not to weep for him, but to live
and care for her children, in a manner which indicates that he had even
then but little hope of returning alive.
We are nevertheless assured by his biographers that he acquitted himself
upon all these occasions in such sort as to give satisfaction to his
sovereign and to acquire for himself the reputation of an upright and able
minister. The Italian practice of entrusting embassies especially to men
of letters, which we first had occasion to note when tracing the
vicissitudes of the life of Dante in the thirteenth century, which we saw
subsequently exemplified in the cases of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto,
and which might be further exemplified in the persons of many other
Italian scholars and men of letters, still, as we see, prevailed in the
sixteenth century, and continued to do so for some little time longer.
But in no one instance, of all those I have mentioned, does the poet thus
employed in functions which in other lands and other times have usually
led to honours and abundant recognition of a more solid kind, appear to
have reaped any advantage in return for the service performed, or to have
been otherwise than dissatisfied and discontented with the treatment
accorded to him.
It would have been very interesting to learn somewhat of the impression
made upon an Italian scholar of the sixteenth century by the places
visited, and persons with whom he must have come in contact in those
transalpine lands, which were then so far off, so contrasted in all
respects with the home scenes among which his life had been passed in the
low-lying, fat, and fertile valley of the Po. Of all this his various
biographers and contemporaries tell us no word! But there is a volume of
his letters, a little square quarto volume, now somewhat rare, printed at
Venice in the year 1595.[51] These letters have somewhat unaccountably not
been included in any of the editions of his works, and they are but little
known. But turning to this little volume, and looking over the dates of
the letters (many of them, however, are undated), I found three written
"Di Spruch," and eagerly turned to them, thinking that I should certainly
find there what I was seeking. The letters belong to a later period of
Guarini's life, having been written in 1592, when he was again sent on an
embassy to the German Emperor. This circumstance, however, is of no
importance as regards the purpose for which I wanted the letters. I was
disappointed. But I must nevertheless give one of these letters, not
wantonly to compel my reader to share my disappointment, but because it is
a curiosity in its way. The person to whom he writes is a lady, the
Contessa Pia di Sala, with whom he was evidently intimate. He is at
Innspruck at the Court of the Emperor Maximilian. The lady is at Mantua,
and this is what he writes to her:
"Di Spruch, Nov. 29, 1592.
"The letter of your Illustrious Ladyship, together with
which you send me that of your most excellent brother,
written at the end of August, reached me yesterday, at first
to my very great anger at having been for so long a time
deprived of so precious a thing, while I appeared in fault
towards so distinguished a lady; but finally to my very
great good fortune. For if a letter written by the most
lovely flame[52] in the world had arrived, while the skies
were burning, what would have become of me, when, now that
winter is beginning, I can scarcely prevent myself from
falling into ashes? And in truth, when I think that those so
courteous thoughts come from the mind which informs so
lovely a person, that those characters have been traced by a
hand of such excellent beauty, I am all ablaze, no less than
if the paper were fire, the words flames, and all the
syllables sparks. But God grant that, while I am set on fire
by the letter of your Illustrious Ladyship, you may not be
inflamed by anger against me, from thinking that the terms
in which I write are too bold. Have no such doubt, my
honoured mistress! I want nothing from the flaming of my
letter, but to have made by the light of it more vivid and
more brilliant in you, the natural purity of your beautiful
face, even as it seems to me that I can see it at this
distance. My love is nothing else save honour; my flame is
reverence; my fire is ardent desire to serve you. And only
so long will the appointment in his service, which it has
pleased my Lord His Serene Highness the Duke of Mantua to
give me, and on which your Illustrious Ladyship has been
kind enough to congratulate me so cordially, be dear to me,
as you shall know that I am fit for it, and more worthy and
more ready to receive the favour of your commands, which
will always be to me a most sure testimony that you esteem
me, not for my own worth, as you too courteously say, but
for the worth which you confer on me, since I am not worthy
of such esteem for any other merit than that which comes to
me from being honoured by so noble and beautiful a lady. I
kiss the hand of your Illustrious Ladyship, wishing the
culmination of every felicity."
Now, this letter I consider to be a very great curiosity! The other two
written from the same place, one to a Signor Bulgarini at Siena, the other
to a lady, the Marchesa di Grana, at Mantua, are of an entirely similar
description. I turned to them in the hope of finding how Innspruck, its
stupendous scenery, its court, its manners so widely different from those
to which the writer and his correspondents were used, its streets, its
people, impressed a sixteenth century Italian from the valley of the Po. I
find instead a psychological phenomenon! The writer is a grave, austere
man (Guarini was notably such), celebrated throughout Italy for his
intellectual attainments, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, with a
wife and family; he is amidst scenes which must, one would have thought,
have impressed in the very highest degree the imagination of a poet, and
must, it might have been supposed, have interested those he was writing to
in an only somewhat less degree, and he writes the stuff the reader has
just waded through. It is clear that this Italian sixteenth century
scholar, poet and of cultivated intellect as he was, saw nothing amid the
strange scenes to which a hard and irksome duty called him, which he
thought worthy of being mentioned even by a passing word to his friends!
Surely this is a curious trait of national character.
He remained in the service of the court for fourteen years, employed
mainly, as it should seem, in a variety of embassies; an employment which
seems to have left him a disappointed, soured, and embittered man. He
considered that he had not been remunerated as his labour deserved, that
the heavy expenses to which he had been put in his long journeys had not
been satisfactorily made up to him, and that he had not been treated in
any of the foreign countries to which his embassies had carried him with
the respect due to his own character and to his office.
He determined therefore to leave the court and retire to Padua, a
residence in which city, it being not far distant from his estate of
Guarina, would offer him, he thought, a convenient opportunity of
overlooking his property and restoring order to his finances, which had
suffered much during his travels. This was in the year 1582, when Guarini
was in the forty-fifth year of his age. It is not clear, however, that
this retirement was wholly spontaneous; and the probability is that the
Duke and his ambassador were equally out of humour with each other. And it
is probable that the faults were not all on the side of the Duke. There is
sufficient evidence that the author of the "Pastor Fido" must have been a
difficult man to live with.
The old friendship of happier days with Tasso had not survived the wear
and tear of life at court. It was known that they no longer saw or spoke
with each other. And everybody—if not of their contemporaries, at least
of subsequent writers—jumped to the conclusion that the writer of the
"Aminta" and the writer of the "Pastor Fido" must be jealous of each
other. Jealousy there certainly was. But some frailer and more mortal
female than the Muse was the cause of it. The Abate Serassi in his life of
Tasso admits that Tasso first gave offence to Guarini by a sonnet in which
he endeavoured to alienate the affections of a lady from him, by
representing him as a faithless and fickle lover. The lines in which Tasso
attacked his brother poet are, it must be admitted, sharp enough!
Si muove e si raggira
Instabil più che arida fronde ai venti;
Nulla fè, null' amor, falsi i tormenti
Sono, e falso l'affeto ond' ei sospira.
Insidioso amante, ama e disprezza
Quasi in un punto, e trionfando spiega
Di femminile spoglie empi trofei.[53]...
The attack was savage enough, it must be admitted, and well calculated to
leave a lasting wound. Guarini immediately answered the cruel sonnet by
another, the comparative weakness of which is undeniable.
Questi che indarno ad alta mira aspira
Con altrui biasmi, e con bugiardi accenti,
Vedi come in se stesso arruota i denti,
Mentre contra ragion meco s'adira.
Di due fiamme si vanta, e stringe e spezza
Più volte un nodo; e con quest' arti piega
(Chi 'l crederebbe!) a suo favore i Dei.[54]...
There is reason to think that the accusation of many times binding and
loosing the same knot, may have hit home. The sneer about bending the gods
to favour him, alludes to Tasso's favour at court, then in the ascendant,
and may well have been as offensive to the Duke and the ladies of his
court as to the object of his satire. Both angry poets show themselves
somewhat earth-stained members of the Paduan "Etherials." But the sequel
of the estrangement was all in favour of the greater bard. Tasso, in
desiring a friend to show his poems in manuscript to certain friends, two
or three in number, on whose opinion he set a high value, named Guarini
among the number. And upon another occasion wishing to have Guarini's
opinion as to the best of two proposed, methods of terminating a sonnet,
and not venturing to communicate directly with him, he employed a common
friend to obtain his brother-poet's criticism. Tasso had also in his
dialogue entitled the "Messagero" given public testimony to Guarini's high
intellectual and civil merits. But Guarini appears never to have forgiven
the offence. He never once went to see Tasso in his miserable confinement
in the hospital of St. Anne; nor, as has been seen, would hold any
communication with him.
He must have been a stern and unforgiving man. And indeed all the
available testimony represents him as having been so,—upright, honest,
and honourable, but haughty, punctilious, litigious, quick to take
offence, slow to forget or forgive it, and cursed with a thin-skinned
amour propre easily wounded and propense to credit others with the
intention of wounding where no such intention existed. The remainder of
the story of his life offers an almost unbroken series of testimonies to
the truth of such an estimate of his character.
It was after fourteen years' service in the court of Duke Alphonso, as has
been said, that he retired disgusted and weary to live in independence and
nurse his estate in the neighbourhood of Padua. But the part of
Cincinnatus is not for every man! It was in 1582 that he retired from the
court intending to bid it and its splendours, its disappointments and its
jealousies, an eternal adieu. In 1585, on an offer from the Duke to make
him his secretary, he returned and put himself into harness again!
But this second attempt to submit himself to the service, to the caprices
and exigencies of a master and of a court ended in a quicker and more
damaging catastrophe than the first. In a diary kept by the poet's nephew,
Marcantonio Guarini, under the date of July 13, 1587, we find it written
that "the Cavalier Batista Guarini, Secretary of the Duke, considering
that his services did not meet with sufficient consideration in proportion
to his worth, released himself from that servitude." The phrase here
translated "released himself" is a peculiar one—si licenzio—"dismissed
himself." To receive licenza, or to be licenziato, is to be dismissed,
or at least parted with in accordance with the will of the employer. But
the phrase used by the diarist seems intended to express exactly what
happened when the poet, once more discontented, took himself off from
Ferrara and its Duke. He seems to have done so in a manner which gave deep
and lasting offence. In a subsequent passage of the above-quoted diary we
read, "the Cavaliere Batista Guarini having absented himself from Ferrara,
disgusted with the Duke, betook himself to Florence, and then, by the
intermedium of Guido Coccapani the agent, asked for his dismissal in form
and obtained it." We happen, however, to have a letter written by this
Coccapani, who seems to have been the Duke's private secretary and
managing man, in which he gives his version of the matter. He was
"stupefied," he says, "when he received the extravagant letter of the
Cavaliere Guarini, and began to think that it would be with him as it had
been with Tasso," who by that time had fallen into disgrace. There is
reason to think that he left Ferrara secretly, without taking leave of the
Duke, or letting anybody at court know where he had gone. He did,
however, obtain his formal dismissal, as has been said, but the Duke by no
means forgave him.
Though it would appear that on leaving Ferrara in this irregular manner he
went in the first instance to Florence, it seems that he had had hopes
given him of a comfortable position and honourable provision at Turin. He
was to have been made a Counsellor of State, and entrusted with the task
of remodelling the course of study at the university, with a stipend of
six hundred crowns annually. But on arriving at Turin he found
difficulties in the way. In fact, the angry Duke of Ferrara had used his
influence with the Duke of Savoy to prevent anything being done for his
contumacious Secretary of State. Guarini, extremely mortified, had to
leave Turin, and betook himself to Venice.
His adventure, however, was of a nature to cause great scandal in that
clime and time. As usual, the Italians were offended at the "imprudence"
of which Guarini's temper had led him to be guilty, more than they would
have been by many a fault which among ourselves would be deemed a very
much worse one. A violence of temper or indignation shown in such a manner
as to injure one's own interests is, and in a yet greater degree was, a
spectacle extremely disgusting to Italian moral sentiment.
The outcry against Guarini on this occasion was so great that he found
himself obliged to put forth an exculpatory statement.
"If human actions, my most kind readers," he begins, "always bore marked
on the front of them the aims and motives which have produced them, or if
those who talk about them were always well informed enough to be able to
judge of them without injury to the persons of whom they speak, I should
not be compelled, at my age, and after so many years of a life led in the
eyes of the world, and often busied in defending the honour of others, to
defend this day my own, which has always been dearer to me than my life.
Having heard, then, that my having left the service of His Serene Highness
the Duke of Ferrara and entered that of the Duke of Savoy has given
occasion to some persons, ignorant probably of the real state of the case,
to make various remarks, and form various opinions, I have determined to
publish the truth, and at the same time to declare my own sentiments in
the matter.
"I declare, then, that previously to my said departure I consigned to the
proper person everything, small as it was, which was in my hands regarding
my office, which had always been exercised by me uprightly and without any
other object in view than the service of my sovereign and the public
welfare. Further, that I, by a written paper under my own hand (as the
press of time and my need rendered necessary), requested a free and
decorous dismissal from the Duke in question, and also, that I set forth
in all humility the causes which led me to that determination; and I added
(some of the circumstances in which I was compelling me to do so) that if
His Serene Highness did not please to give me any other answer, I would
take his silence as a consent to my request of dismissal. I declare
further that the paper was delivered to the principal Minister of his
Serene Highness, and lastly, that my salary was, without any further
communication with me, stopped, and cancelled from the roll of payments.
And as this is the truth, so it is equally true that my appointment as
reformer of the University of Turin, and Counsellor of State with six
hundred crowns yearly, was settled and concluded with His Serene Highness
the Duke of Savoy, and that I declined to bind myself, and did not bind
myself, to ask any other dismissal from His Serene Highness the Duke of
Ferrara than that which I have already spoken. And, finally, it is true
that, as I should not have gone to Turin if I had not been engaged for
that service and invited thither, so I should not have left, or wished to
leave this place,[55] had I not known that I received my dismissal in the
manner above related. Now, as to the cause which may have retarded and may
still retard the fulfillment of the engagement above mentioned, I have
neither object, nor obligation, nor need to declare it. Suffice it that it
is not retarded by any fault of mine, or difficulty on my side. In
justification of which I offered myself, and by these presents now again
offer myself, to present myself wheresoever, whensoever, and in whatsoever
manner, and under whatsoever conditions and penalties, as may be seen more
clearly set forth in the instrument of agreement sent by me to His
Highness. From all which, I would have the world to know, while these
affairs of mine are still in suspension, that I am a man of honour, and am
always ready to maintain the same in whatsoever manner may be fitting to
my condition and duty. And as I do not at all doubt that some decision of
some kind not unworthy of so just and so magnanimous a prince will be
forthcoming; so, let it be what it may, it will be received by me with
composure and contentment; since, by God's grace, and that of the serene
and exalted power under the most just and happy dominion of which I am now
living, and whose subject, if not by birth, yet by origin and family, I
am,[56] I have a comfortable and honoured existence. And may you, my
honoured readers, live in happiness and contentment. Venice, February 1,
1589."
We must, I think, nevertheless be permitted to doubt the contentment and
happiness of the life he led, as it should seem, for the next four years,
at Venice. No such decision of any kind, as he hoped from the Duke of
Savoy, was forthcoming. He was shunted! He had quarrelled with his own
sovereign, and evidently the other would have none of him. The Italians of
one city were in those days to a wonderful degree foreigners in another
ruled by a different government; and there can be little doubt that
Guarini wandered among the quays and "calle" of Venice, or paced the great
piazza at the evening hour, a moody and discontented man!
At last, after nearly four years of this sad life, there came an
invitation from the Duke of Mantua proposing that Guarini should come to
Mantua together with his son Alessandro, to occupy honourable positions in
that court. The poet, heartily sick of "retirement," accepted at once, and
went to Mantua. But there, too, another disappointment awaited him. The
"magnanimous" Duke Alphonso would not tolerate that the man who had so
cavalierly left his service should find employment elsewhere. It is
probable that this position was obtained for him by the influence of his
old friend and fellow-member of the "Etherials" at Padua, Scipione
Gonzaga; and it would seem that he occupied it for a while, and went on
behalf of the Duke of Mantua to Innspruck, whence he wrote the wonderful
letters which have been quoted.
The Cardinal's influence, however, was not strong enough to prevail
against the spite of a neighbouring sovereign. There are two letters
extant from the Duke, or his private secretary, to that same Coccapani
whom we saw so scandalized at Guarini's hurried and informal departure
from Ferrara, and who was residing as Alphonso's representative at Mantua,
in which the Minister is instructed to represent to the Duke of Mantua
that his brother of Ferrara "did not think it well that the former should
take any of the Guarini family into his service, and when they should see
each other he would tell him his reasons. For the present he would only
say that he wished the Duke to know that it would be excessively pleasing
to him if the Duke would have nothing to say to any of them."
This was in 1593; and the world-weary poet found himself at fifty-six once
again cast adrift upon the world. The extremity of his disgust and
weariness of all things may be measured by the nature of the next step he
took. He conceived, says his biographer Barotti, that "God called him by
internal voices, and by promise of a more tranquil life, to accept the
tonsure." His wife had died some little time before; and it was therefore
open to him to do so. He went to Rome accordingly for the purpose of there
taking orders. But during the short delay which intervened between the
manifestation of his purpose and the fulfilment of it, news reached him
that his friend and protectress the Duchess of Urbino, Alphonso's sister,
had interceded for him with the Duke, and that he was forgiven! It was
open to him to return to his former employment! And no sooner did the news
reach him than he perceived that "the internal voices" were altogether a
mistake. God had never called him at all, and Alphonso had! All thoughts
of the Church were abandoned on the instant, and he hastened to Ferrara,
arriving there on the 15th of April, 1595.
But neither on this occasion was he destined to find the tranquillity
which he seemed fated never to attain! And this time the break-up was a
greater and more final one than the last. Duke Alphonso died in 1597; and
the Pontificial Court, which had long had its eye on the possibility of
enforcing certain pretended claims to the Duchy of Ferrara, found the
means at Alphonso's death of ousting his successor the Duke Cesare, who
remained thenceforward Duke of Modena only, but no longer of Ferrara.
Guarini was once more adrift! Nor were the political changes in Ferrara
the only thing which rendered the place no longer a home for him. Other
misfortunes combined to render a residence in the city odious to him. His
daughter Anna had married a noble gentleman of Ferrara, the Count Ercole
Trotti, by whom she was on the 3rd of May, 1598, murdered at his villa of
Zanzalino near Ferrara. Some attempt was made to assert that the husband
had reason to suspect that his wife was plotting against his life. But
there seems to have been no foundation for any accusation of the sort; and
the crime was prompted probably by jealousy. Guarini, always on bad terms
with his sons, and constantly involved in litigation with them, as he had
been with his father, was exceedingly attached to this unfortunate
daughter.
But even this terrible loss was not the only bitterness which resulted
from this crime. Guarini composed a long Latin epitaph, in which he
strongly affirms her absolute innocence of everything that had been laid
to her charge, and speaks with reprobation of the husband's[57] crime. But
scarcely had the stone bearing the inscription been erected than the
indignant father was required by the authorities of the city to remove it.
A declaration, which he published on the subject, dated June 15, 1598, is
still extant. "On that day," he writes, "the Vice-legate of Ferrara spoke
with me, in the name of the Holy Father, as to the removing of the epitaph
written by me on Anna my daughter in the church of Sta. Catherina. He said
that there were things in it that might provoke other persons to
resentment, and occasion much scandal; and that, besides that, there were
in the inscription words of Sacred Scripture, which ought not to be used
in such a place. I defended my cause, and transmitted a memorial to his
Holiness, having good reason to know that these objections were the mere
malignity of those who favour the opposite party, and of those who caused
the death of my innocent child. But at last, on the 22nd, I caused the
epitaph to be removed, intimating that it was my intention to take up the
body, and inter it elsewhere. On which it is worthy of remark, that having
made my demand to that effect, I was forbidden to do so." He further adds:
"Note! news was brought to me here that my son Girolamo, who was evidently
discovered to be the accomplice, and principal atrocious author of the
death of his sister Anna, received from the Potesta of Rovigo licence to
come into the Polisina with twelve men armed with arquebuses."
All this is very sad; and whether these terrible suspicions may or may not
have had any foundation other than the envenomed temper generated by the
family litigations, it must equally have had the effect of making the life
of Guarini a very miserable one, and contributing to his determination to
abandon finally his native city.
More surprising is it that, after so many disgusts and disappointments, he
should once again have been tempted to seek, what he had never yet been
able to find there, in a court. In a letter written in November, 1598, he
informs the Duke Cesare (Duke of Modena, though no longer of Ferrara) that
the Grand Duke of Florence had offered him a position at Florence. And his
Serene Highness, more kindly and forgiving than the late Duke, wrote him
an obliging and congratulatory letter in the following month.
At Florence everything at first seemed to be going well with him, and he
seemed to stand high in favour with the Grand Duke Ferdinand. But very
shortly he quitted Florence in anger and disgust on the discovery of the
secret marriage of his third son, Guarini, with a woman of low condition
at Pisa, with at least the connivance, as the poet thought, whether justly
or not there is nothing to show, of the Grand Duke.
After that his old friend the Duchess of Urbino once again stood his
friend, and he obtained a position in the court of Urbino, then one of the
most widely famed centres of cultivation and letters in Italy. And for a
while everything seemed at last to be well with him there. On the 23rd of
February, 1603, he writes to his sister, who apparently had been pressing
him to come home to Ferrara:—"I should like to come home, my sister. I
have great need and a great desire for home; but I am treated so well
here, and with so much distinction and so much kindness, that I cannot
come. I must tell you that all expenses for myself and my servants are
supplied, so that I have not to spend a farthing for anything in the world
that I need. The orders are that anything I ask for should be furnished to
me. Besides all which, they give me three hundred crowns a year; so that,
what with money and expenses, the position is worth six hundred crowns a
year to me. You may judge, then, if I can throw it up. May God grant you
every happiness!
Your brother,
B. Guarini."
But all would not do. He had been but a very little time in this little
Umbrian Athens among the Apennines before he once again threw up his
position in anger and disgust, because he did not obtain all the marks of
distinction to which he thought that he was entitled. This was in 1603. He
was now sixty-six, and seems at length to have made no further attempt to
haunt at court. Once again he was at Rome in 1605, having undertaken, at
the request of the citizens of Ferrara, to carry their felicitations to
the new Pope, Paul the Fifth. And with the exception of that short
expedition his last years were spent in the retirement of his ancestral
estate of Guarina.
The property is situated in the district of Lendinara, on the fat and
fertile low-lying region between Rovigo and Padua, and belongs to the
commune—parish, as we should say—of St. Bellino. The house, dating
probably from the latter part of the fifteenth century, is not much more
than a hundred yards or so from the piazza of the village, which boasts
two thousand inhabitants. The road between the two is bordered with trees.
The whole district is as flat as a billiard table, and as prosaical in its
well-to-do fertility as can be imagined. It is intersected by a variety of
streams, natural and artificial. About a couple of miles from the house to
the south is the Canalbianco; and a little farther to the north the
Adigetto. To the east runs the Scortico. St. Bellino, from whom the
village is named, was, it seems, enrolled among the martyrs by Pope
Eugenius the Third in 1152. He has a great specialty for curing the bite
of mad dogs. There is a grand cenotaph in his honour in the village
church, which was raised by some of the Guarini family. But this, too,
like all else, became a subject of trouble and litigation to our poet. A
certain Baldassare Bonifaccio of Rovigo wanted to transport the saint to
that city. Guarini would not hear of this; litigated the matter before the
tribunals of Venice, and prevailed. So the saint still resides at St.
Bellino to the comfort of all those bitten by mad dogs in those parts. The
house and estate have passed through several hands since that time; but a
number of old family portraits may still be seen on the walls, together
with the family arms, and the motto, "Fortis est in asperis non turbari."
The armchair and writing table of the poet are also still preserved in the
house, and a fig-tree is pointed out close by it, under the shade of which
the poet, as tradition tells, wrote on that table and in that chair his
"Pastor Fido." There is an inscription on the chair as follows: "Guarin
sedendo qui canto, che vale al paragon seggio reale."[58]
It was not, however, during this his last residence here that the "Pastor
Fido" was written, but long previously. It was doubtless his habit to
escape from the cares of official life in Ferrara from time to time as he
could; and it must have been in such moments that the celebrated pastoral
was written.[59]
The idea of a scholar and a poet, full of years and honours, passing the
quiet evening of his life in a tranquil retirement in his own house on his
own land, is a pleasing one. But it is to be feared that in the case of
the author of the "Pastor Fido" it would be a fallacious one. Guarini
would not have come to live on his estate if he could have lived
contentedly in any city. We may picture him to ourselves sitting under his
fig-tree, or pacing at evening under the trees of the straight avenue
between his house and the village, or on the banks of one of the sluggish
streams slowly finding their way through the flat fields towards the Po;
but I am afraid the picture must be of one "Remote, unfriended,
melancholy, slow," with eyes bent earthwards, and discontented mind:
"remote," because to the Italian mind all places beyond the easy reach of
a city are so; "unfriended," because he had quarrelled with everybody;
"melancholy," because all had gone amiss with him, and his life had been a
failure; "slow," because no spring of hope in the mind gave any elasticity
to his step.
One other "haunt" of the aged poet must, however, be mentioned, because it
is a very characteristic one. During this last residence at Guarina, he
hired an apartment at Ferrara, selecting it in a crowded part of the
centre of the city, especially frequented by the lawyers, that he might be
in the midst of them, when he went into the city on the various business
connected with his interminable lawsuits. The most crowded part of the
heart of the city of Ferrara! It would be difficult to find any such part
now. But the picture offered to the imagination, of the aged poet,
professor, courtier, haunting the courts, the lawyers' chambers, leaving
his, at least, tranquil retreat at St. Bellino, to drag weary feet through
the lanes of the city in which he had in earlier days played so different
a part, is a sad one. But there are people who like contention so much
that such work is a labour of love to them. And certainly, if the
inference may be drawn from the fact of his never having been free from
lawsuits in one quarrel or another, Guarini must have been one of these.
But it is passing strange that the same man should have been the author of
the "Pastor Fido."
They pursued him to the end, these litigations; or he pursued them! And at
last he died, not at Guarina, but at Venice, on the 7th of October, 1612,
where, characteristically enough, he chanced to be on business connected
with some lawsuit.
And now a few words must be said about his great work, the "Pastor Fido."
It is one of the strangest things in the range of literary history that
such a man should have written such a poem. He was, one would have said,
the last man in the world to produce such a work. The first ten years of
his working life were spent in the labour of a pedagogue; the rest of it
in the inexpressibly dry, frivolous, and ungenial routine of a small
Italian court, or in wandering from one to the other of them in the vain
and always disappointed search for such employment. We are told that he
was a punctilious, stiff, unbending, angular man; upright and honourable,
but unforgiving and wont to nurse his enmities. He was soured,
disappointed, discontented with everybody and everything, involved in
litigation first with his father, and then with his own children. And this
was the man who wrote the "Pastor Fido," of all poems comparable to it in
reputation the lightest, the airiest, and the most fantastic! The argument
of it is as follows:
The Arcadians, suffering in various ways from the anger of Diana, were at
last informed by the oracle that the evils which afflicted them would
cease when a youth and a maiden, both descended from the Immortals, as it
should seem the creme de la creme of Arcadian society mostly was, should
be joined together in faithful love. Thereupon Montano, a priest of the
goddess who was descended from Hercules, arranged that his only son Silvio
should be betrothed to Amaryllis, the only daughter of Tytirus, who was
descended from Pan. The arrangement seemed all that could be desired, only
that a difficulty arose from the fact that Silvio, whose sole passion was
the chase, could not be brought to care the least in the world for
Amaryllis. Meantime Mirtillo, the son, as was supposed, of the shepherd
Carino, fell desperately in love with Amaryllis. She was equally attached
to him, but dared not in the smallest degree confess her love, because the
law of Arcadia would have punished with death her infidelity to her
betrothed vows. A certain Corisca, however, who had conceived a violent
but unrequited passion for Mirtillo, perceiving or guessing the love of
Amaryllis for him, hating her accordingly, and hoping that, if she could
be got out of the way, she might win Mirtillo's love, schemes by deceit
and lies to induce Mirtillo and Amaryllis to enter together a cave, which
they do in perfect innocence, and without any thought of harm. Then he
contrives that they should be caught there, and denounced by a satyr; and
Amaryllis is condemned to die. The law, however, permits that her life may
be saved by any Arcadian who will voluntarily die in her stead; and this
Mirtillo determines to do, although he believes that Amaryllis cares
nothing for him, and also is led by the false Corisca to believe that she
had gone into the cave for the purpose of meeting with another lover. The
duty of sacrificing him devolves on Montano the priest; and he is about to
carry out the law, when Carino, who has been seeking his reputed son
Mirtillo, comes in, and while attempting to make out that he is a
foreigner, and therefore not capable of satisfying the law by his death,
brings unwittingly to light circumstances that prove that he is in truth a
son of Montano, and therefore a descendant of the god Hercules. It thus
appears that a marriage between Mirtillo and Amaryllis will exactly
satisfy the conditions demanded by the oracle. There is an under-plot,
which consists in providing a lover and a marriage for the woman-hater
Silvio. He is loved in vain by the nymph Dorinda, whom he unintentionally
wounds with an arrow while out hunting. The pity he feels for her wound
softens his heart towards her, and all parties are made happy by this
second marriage.
Such is a skeleton of the story of the "Pastor Fido." It will be observed
that there is more approach to a plot and to human interest than in any
previous production of this kind, and some of the situations are well
conceived for dramatic effect. And accordingly the success which it
achieved was immediate and immense. Nor, much as the taste of the world
has been changed since that day, has it ever lost its place in the
estimation of cultivated Italians.
It would be wholly uninteresting to attempt any account of the
wide-spreading literary controversies to which the publication of the
"Pastor Fido" gave rise. The author terms it a tragi-comedy; and this
title was violently attacked. The poet himself, as may well be imagined
from the idiosyncrasy of the man, was not slow to reply to his critics,
and did so in two lengthy treatises entitled from the name of a
contemporary celebrated actor, "Verato primo," and "Verato secondo," which
are printed in the four-quarto-volume edition of his works, but which
probably no mortal eye has read for the last two hundred years!
The question of the rivalry between the "Aminta" of Tasso and the "Pastor
Fido" has an element of greater interest in it. It is certain that the
former preceded the latter, and doubtless suggested it. It seems probable
that Ginguené is right in his suggestion, that Guarini, fully conscious
that no hope was open to him of rivalling his greater contemporary and
townsman in epic poetry, strove to surpass him in pastoral. It must be
admitted that he has at least equalled him. Yet, while it is impossible to
deny that almost every page of the "Pastor Fido" indicates not so much
plagiarism as an open and avowed purpose of doing the same thing better,
if possible, than his rival has done it, the very diverse natural
character of the two poets is also, at every page, curiously indicated.
Specially the reader may be recommended to compare the passages in the two
poems where Tasso under the name of Thyrsis, and Guarini under the name of
Carino (Act 5, scene 1), represent the sufferings both underwent at the
court of Alphonso II. The lines of Guarini are perhaps the most vigorous
in their biting satire. But the gentler and nobler nature of Tasso is
unmistakable.
It is strange that the Italian critics, who are for the most part so
lenient to the licentiousness of most of the authors of this period, blame
Guarini for the too great warmth, amounting to indecency, of his poem. The
writer of his life in the French "Biographie Universelle" refers to
certain scenes as highly indecent. I can only say that, on examining the
passages indicated carefully, I could find no indecency at all. It is
probable that the writer referred to had never read the pages in question.
But it is odd that those whose criticism he is no doubt reflecting should
have said so. No doubt there are passages, not those mentioned by the
writer in the "Biographie," but for instance the first scene of the second
act, when a young man in a female disguise is one among a party of girls,
who propose a prize for her who can give to one of them, the judge, the
sweetest kiss, which prize he wins, which might be deemed somewhat on the
sunny side of the hedge that divides the permissible from the
unpermissible. But in comparison with others of that age Guarini is pure
as snow.
It has been said in speaking of the sad story of his daughter Anna, that
she was accused of having given her husband cause for jealousy. It would
seem very clear that there was no ground for any such accusation. But it
was said that the misconduct on her part had been due to the corruption of
her mind by the reading of her father's verses. The utter groundlessness
of such an assertion might be shown in many ways. But the savage and
malignant cruelty of it points with considerable evidence to the sources
of the current talk about the courtier poet's licentiousness.
It is impossible to find room here for a detailed comparison between these
two celebrated pastorals; and it is the less needed inasmuch as Ginguené
has done it very completely and at great length in the twenty-fifth
chapter of the second part of his work.
Guarini also produced a comedy, the "Idropica," which was acted with much
success at the court of Mantua, and is printed among his works, as well as
some prose pieces of small importance, the principal of which is "Il
Secretario," a treatise on the duties of a secretary, not printed among
his works, but of which an edition exists in pot quarto (186 pages)
printed at Venice in 1594. Neither have his letters been printed among his
works. They exist, printed without index or order of any kind, in a volume
of the same size as the "Secretario," printed at Venice also in 1595, but
by a different printer.
The name, however, of Batista Guarini would have long since been
forgotten, had he not written the "Pastor Fido."
T. Adolphus Trollope, in Belgravia.