Modern Italian Poets | Page 4

how is it possible
for me to feel any personal fury toward them? When the later Italian
poets ask me to loathe spies and priests I am equally at a loss. I can
hardly form the idea of a spy, of an agent of the police, paid to haunt
the steps of honest men, to overhear their speech, and, if possible,
entrap them into a political offense. As to priests--well, yes, I suppose
they are bad, though I do not know this from experience; and I find
them generally upon acquaintance very amiable. But all this was
different with the Italians: they had known, seen, and felt tyrants, both
foreign and domestic, of every kind; spies and informers had helped to
make their restricted lives anxious and insecure; and priests had
leagued themselves with the police and the oppressors until the Church,
which should have been kept a sacred refuge from all the sorrows and
wrongs of the world, became the most dreadful of its prisons. It is no
wonder that the literature of these people should have been so filled
with the patriotic passion of their life; and I am not sure that literature
is not as nobly employed in exciting men to heroism and martyrdom for
a great cause as in the purveyance of mere intellectual delights. What it
was in Italy when it made this its chief business we may best learn from
an inquiry that I have at last found somewhat amusing. It will lead us
over vast meadows of green baize enameled with artificial flowers,
among streams that do nothing but purl. In this region the shadows are
mostly brown, and the mountains are invariably horrid; there are
tumbling floods and sighing groves; there are naturally nymphs and
swains; and the chief business of life is to be in love and not to be in
love; to burn and to freeze without regard to the mercury. Need I say
that this region is Arcady?

ARCADIAN SHEPHERDS
One day, near the close of the seventeenth century, a number of ladies
and gentlemen--mostly poets and poetesses according to their thinking
were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of Rome. As
they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and picturesque as
they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an ode with the sweet
patience of their race,--for they were all Italians,--it occurred to the
most conscious man among them that here was something
uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had been flattered.
There had been reading and praising of odes and sonnets the whole
blessed afternoon, and now he cried out to the complaisant, canorous
company, "Behold Arcadia revived in us!"
This struck everybody at once by its truth. It struck, most of all, a
certain Giovan Maria Crescimbeni, honored in his day and despised in
ours as a poet and critic. He was of a cold, dull temperament; "a mind
half lead, half wood", as one Italian writer calls him; but he was an
inveterate maker of verses, and he was wise in his own generation. He
straightway proposed to the tuneful _abbés, cavalieri serventi_, and
_précieuses_, who went singing and love-making up and down Italy in
those times, the foundation of a new academy, to be called the
Academy of the Arcadians.
Literary academies were then the fashion in Italy, and every part of the
peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque,
such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid,
or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray,
The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the
production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of
the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the
grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the
inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous
academy in Milan, they placed in the chair a child just able to talk; a
question was proposed, and the answer of the child, whatever it was,
was held by one side to solve the problem, and the debates, pro and con,
followed upon this point. Other academies in other cities had other
follies; but whatever the absurdity, it was encouraged alike by Church
and State, and honored by all the great world. The governments of Italy

in that day, whether lay or clerical, liked nothing so well as to have the
intellectual life of the nation squandered in the trivialities of the
academies--in their debates about nothing, their odes and madrigals and
masks and sonnets; and the greatest politeness you could show a
stranger was to invite him to a sitting of your academy; to be furnished
with a letter to the academy in