Modern Italian Poets | Page 6

except that purely
Italian invention, the cavaliere servente, who was in great vogue. But
there were everywhere in the cities coteries of fine ladies, called
preziose, who were formed upon the French _précieuses_ ridiculed by
Molière, and were, I suppose, something like what is called in Boston
demi-semi-literary ladies--ladies who cultivated alike the muses and the
modes. The preziose held weekly receptions at their houses, and
assembled poets and cavaliers from all quarters, who entertained the
ladies with their lampoons and gallantries, their madrigals and gossip,
their sonnets and their repartees. "Little by little the poets had the better
of the cavaliers: a felicitous rhyme was valued more than an elaborately
constructed compliment." And this easy form of literature became the
highest fashion. People hastened to call themselves by the sentimental
pastoral names of the Arcadians, and almost forgot their love-intrigues
so much were they absorbed in the production and applause of "toasts,
epitaphs for dogs, verses on wagers, epigrams on fruits, on Echo, on the
Marchioness's canaries, on the Saints. These were read here and
repeated there, declaimed in the public resorts and on the promenades",
and gravely studied and commented on. A strange and surprising
jargon arose, the utterance of the feeblest and emptiest affectation. "In
those days eyes were not eyes, but pupils; not pupils, but orbs; not orbs,
but the Devil knows what," says Signor Torelli, losing patience. It was
the golden age of pretty words; and as to the sense of a composition,
good society troubled itself very little about that. Good society
expressed itself in a sort of poetical gibberish, "and whoever had said,
for example, Muses instead of Castalian Divinities, would have passed
for a lowbred person dropped from some mountain village. Men of fine
mind, rich gentlemen of leisure, brilliant and accomplished ladies, had
resolved that the time was come to lose their wits academically."
II
In such a world Arcadia nourished; into such a world that illustrious
shepherd, Carlo Innocenze Frugoni, was born. He was the younger son

of a noble family of Genoa, and in youth was sent into a cloister as a
genteel means of existence rather than from regard to his own wishes or
fitness. He was, in fact, of a very gay and mundane temper, and
escaped from his monastery as soon as ever he could, and spent his
long life thereafter at the comfortable court of Parma, where he sang
with great constancy the fortunes of varying dynasties and celebrated in
his verse all the polite events of society. Of course, even a life so
pleasant as this had its little pains and mortifications; and it is history
that when, in 1731, the last duke of the Farnese family died, leaving a
widow, "Frugoni predicted and maintained in twenty-five sonnets that
she would yet give an heir to the duke; but in spite of the twenty-five
sonnets the affair turned out otherwise, and the extinction of the house
of Farnese was written."
Frugoni, however, was taken into favor by the Spanish Bourbon who
succeeded, and after he had got himself unfrocked with infinite
difficulty (and only upon the intercession of divers princes and
prelates), he was as happy as any man of real talent could be who
devoted his gifts to the merest intellectual trifling. Not long before his
death he was addressed by one that wished to write his life. He made
answer that he had been a versifier and nothing more, epigrammatically
recounted the chief facts of his career, and ended by saying, "of what I
have written it is not worth while to speak"; and posterity has upon the
whole agreed with him, though, of course, no edition of the Italian
classics would be perfect without him. We know this from the classics
of our own tongue, which abound in marvels of insipidity and
emptiness.
But all this does not make him less interesting as a figure in that
amusing literarified society; and we may be glad to see him in Parma
with Signor Torelli's eyes, as he "issues smug, ornate, with his
well-fitting, polished shoe, his handsome leg in its neat stocking, his
whole immaculate person, and his demure visage, and, gently
sauntering from Casa Caprara, takes his way toward Casa Landi."
I do not know Casa Landi; I have never seen it; and yet I think I can tell
you of it: a gloomy-fronted pile of Romanesque architecture, the lower
story remarkable for its weather-stained, vermiculated stone, and the
ornamental iron gratings at the windows. The _porte-cochère_ stands
wide open and shows the leaf and blossom of a lovely garden inside,

with a tinkling fountain in the midst. The marble nymphs and naiads
inhabiting the shrubbery and the water are already somewhat time-worn,
and have here and there a touch of envious mildew;