_Per_, what gentlemen they were, these "ingegni fiorentini," these Tuscan wits! What innate breeding and reticence! What punctilious loyalty to the little observances of literature, of wall-decoration, call it, in the most licentiously minded of them! Lorenzo Magnifico was a rake and could write lewdly enough, as we all know. Yet, when he chose, that is when Art bade him, how unerringly he chose the right momentum. His too was "la mente che non erra." I found this of his the other day, and must needs close up my notes with it. The very notion of it was, in his time, a convention; a series of sonnets bound together by an argument; a _Vita nova_ without its overmastering occasion. Simonetta was dead; whereupon "tutti i fiorentini ingegni, come si conviene in si pubblica jattura, diversamente ed avversamente si dolsono, chi in versi, chi in prosa." The poor dead lady was, in fact, a butt for these sharpshooters. Yet hear Lorenzo.
"Died, as we have declared, in our city a certain lady, whereby all people alike in Florence were moved to compassion. And this is no marvel, seeing that with all earthly beauty and courtesy she was adorned as, before her day, no other under heaven could have been. Among her other excellent parts, she had a carriage so sweet and winsome that whosoever should have any commerce or friendly dealing with her, straightway fell to believe himself enamoured of her. Ladies also, and all youth of her degree, not only suffered no harbourage to unkindly thought upon this her eminence over all the rest, nor grudged it her at all, but stoutly upheld and took pleasure in her loveliness and gracious bearing; and this so honestly that you would have found it hard to be believed so many men without jealousy could have loved her, or so many ladies without envy give her place. So, the more her life by its comely ordering had endeared her to mankind, pity also for her death, for the flower of her youth, and for a beauteousness which in death, it may be, showed the more resplendently than in life, did breed in the heart the smarting of great desire. Therefore she was carried uncovered on the bier from her dwelling to the place of burial, and moved all men, thronging there to see her, to abundant shedding of tears. And in some, who before had not been aware of her, after pity grew great marvel for that she, in death, had overcome that loveliness which had seemed insuperable while she yet lived. Among which people, who before had not known her, there grew a bitterness and, as it were, ground of reproach, that they had not been acquainted with so fair a thing before that hour when they must be shut off from it for ever; to know her thus and have perpetual grief of her. But truly in her was made manifest that which our Petrarch had spoken when he said,
'Death showed him lovely in her lovely face.'"
This is to write like a gentleman and an artist, with ear attuned to the subtlest fall and cadence, with scrupulous weighing of words that their true outline shall hold clear and sharp. It is _intarsiatura_, skilful and clean at the edges. He goes on to play with his hammered thought, always as delicately and precisely as before.
"Falling, therefore, such an one to death, all the wits of Florence, as is seemly in so public a calamity, lamented severally and mutually, some in rhyme, some in prose, the ruefulness of it; and bound themselves to exalt her excellence each after the contriving of his mind: in which company I, too, must needs be; I, too, mingle rhymes with tears. So I did in the sonnets below rehearsed; whereof the first began thus:
'O limpid shining star that to thy beam.'
"Night had fallen: together we walked, a dear friend and I, together talking of our common sorrow: and so speaking, the night being wondrous clear, I lifted my eyes to a star of exceeding brilliancy, which appeared in the West, of such assured splendour as not alone to excel other stars, but so eagerly to shine that it threw in shadow all the lights of heaven about it. Whereof having great marvel, I turned to my friend, saying--'We ought not to wonder at this sight, seeing that the soul of that most gentle lady is of a truth either re-informed in this, a new star, or conjoined to shine with it. Wherefore there is no marvel in such exceeding brightness; and we who took comfort in her living delights, may even now be appeased by her appearance in a limpid star. And if our vision for such a light is tender and fragile, we should beseech her shade, that is the god in her, to make us bolder by withholding some part of her beam that we may sometimes look upon her, nor sear our eyes. But, to say sooth, this is no over-boldness in her, endowed as she was with all the power of her beauty, that she should strive to shine more excellently than all the other stars, or even yet more proudly with Phoebus himself, asking of him his very chariot, that she, rather, may rule our day. Which thing, if you allow it without presumption in our star, how vilely shows the impertinence of Death to have laid hands upon such loveliness and authority as hers.' And since these my reasonings seemed of the stuff proper for a sonnet, I took leave of my friend and composed that one which follows; speaking in it of the above-mentioned star."
The sonnet is in the right Petrarchian vein, adroit and shallow as you please. With such a preface it could hardly be otherwise--the invocation of the lady's shade, the twitting of Death (making his Mastership jig to suit their occasions who had of late been in his presence) and the naive acceptance of all gifts as "buona materia a an sonetto," In the end he spins four to her memory; then finds another lady and doubles all his superlatives for her. For the star, he remembers, may have been Lucifer; and Lucifer is but herald of the day. To it then! with all the _buona materia a un sonetto_ the dawn can give you. Thus flourished poetry in the Tuscan _quattrocento_; for Politian was but little more poet than Lorenzo, while he was no less dextrous as a rhymer and fashioner of conceits. Not serious, but _piacevole_, with an _elegantia qudam prope divinum_; therefore _molto utile_. Pen-work in fact, and kin to needlework. Because Tuscany saw choicely-wrought things pleasing, and pleasant things useful, we of to-day can see Florence as an open-air Museum. But we wrap our own Poets in heavy bindings and let them lie on drawing-room tables in company of Whitaker's Almanack and an album of photographs. Well, well! We must teach them to say, _Philistia, be thou glad of me_, I suppose.
V
OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
[Footnote: This appeared in the _New Review_ for December 1896, and is reproduced by leave of the Publisher.]
_(A Colloquy with Perugino)_
"There," said my Roman escort, as we forded the Tiber near Torglano, "the haze is lifting: behold august Perugia," I looked out over the misty plain, and saw the spiked ridge of a hill, serried with towers and belfries as a port with ships' masts; then the grey stone walls and escarpments warm in the sun; finally a mouth to the city, which seemed to engulph both the white road and the citizens walking to and fro upon it like flies. But it was some time yet before I could decipher the image on the gonfalon streaming in the breeze above the Signiory. It was actually, on a field vert, a griffin rampant sable, langued gules. "So ho!" said the guide when! had described it, "So ho! the Mountain Cat is at home again.... And here comes scouring one of the whelps," he added in alarm. A young man, black-avised, bare-headed, pressing a lathered horse, bore down upon us. He seemed to gain exultation with every new pulse of his strength: the Genius of Brute Force, handsome as he was evil. And yet not evil, unless a wild beast is evil; which it probably is not. He soon reached us, pulled up short with a clatter of hoofs, and hailed me in a raw dialect, asking what I did, whence and who I was, whither I went, what I would? As he spake--looking at me with fierce eyes in which pride, suspicion, and the shyness of youth struggled and rent each other--he fooled with a straight sword, and seemed to put his demands rather to provoke a quarrel than to get an answer. I wished no quarrel with a boy, so, as my custom is, I answered deliberately that I travelled, and from Rome; that my name was Hewlett, at his service; that I was going to Perugia; that I would be rid of him. I saw him grow loutish before my adroit impassivity; his fencing was not with such tools. He sulked, and must know next what I wanted at Perugia. I told him I had business with Pietro Vannucci, called Il Perugino by those who