Sonnets | Page 4

quaint allusion to the fact
that the philosopher's skull was remarkable for seven protuberances.[12]
A very few copies of the unpretending little volume were printed; and
none of these seem to have found their way into Italy, though it is
possible that they had a certain circulation in Germany. At any rate
there is reason to suppose that Leibnitz was not unacquainted with the
poems, while Herder, in the Renaissance of German literature,

published free translations from a few of the sonnets in his 'Adrastea.'
To this circumstance we owe the reprint of 1834, published at Lugano
by John Gaspar Orelli, the celebrated Zurich scholar. Early in his youth
Orelli was delighted with the German version made by Herder; and
during his manhood, while residing as Protestant pastor at Bergamo, he
used his utmost endeavours to procure a copy of the original. In his
preface to the reprint he tells us that these efforts were wholly
unsuccessful through a period of twenty-five years. He applied to all
his literary friends, among whom he mentions the ardent Ugo Foscolo
and the learned Mazzuchelli; but none of these could help him. He
turned the pages of Crescimbeni, Quadrio, Gamba, Corniani,
Tiraboschi, weighty with enormous erudition--and only those who
make a special study of Italian know how little has escaped their
scrutiny--but found no mention of Campanella as a poet. At last, after
the lapse of a quarter of a century, he received the long-coveted little
quarto volume from Wolfenbuttel in the north of Germany. The new
edition which Orelli gave to the press at Lugano has this title:--'Poesie
Filosofiche di Tommaso Campanella pubblicate per la prima volta in
Italia da Gio. Gaspare Orelli, Professore all' Università di Zurigo.
Lugano, 1834.' The same text has been again reprinted at Turin, in
1854, by Alessandro d'Ancona, together with some of Campanella's
minor works and an essay on his life and writings. This third edition
professes to have improved Orelli's punctuation and to have rectified
his readings. But it still leaves much to be desired on the score of
careful editorship. Neither Orelli nor D'Ancona has done much to clear
up the difficulties of the poems--difficulties in many cases obviously
due to misprints and errors of the first transcriber; while in one or two
instances they allow patent blunders to pass uncorrected. In the sonnet
entitled 'A Dio' (D'Ancona, vol. i. p. 102), for example, bocca_ stands
for _buca in a place where sense and rhyme alike demand the
restitution of the right word.
At no time could the book have hoped for many readers. Least of all
would it have found them among the Italians of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, to whom its energetic language and unfamiliar
conceptions would have presented insuperable difficulties. Between

Dante and Alfieri no Italian poet except Michael Angelo expressed so
much deep thought and feeling in phrases so terse, and with originality
of style so daring; and even Michael Angelo is monotonous in the
range of his ideas and uniform in his diction, when compared with the
indescribable violence and vigour of Campanella. Campanella borrows
little by way of simile or illustration from the outer world, and he never
falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology. His poems exhibit
the exact opposite of the Petrarchistic or the Marinistic mannerism.
Each sonnet seems to have been wrenched alive and palpitating from
the poet's heart. There is no smoothness, no gradual unfolding of a
theme, no rhetorical exposition, no fanciful embroidery, no sweetness
of melodic cadence, in his masculine art of poetry. Brusque, rough,
violent in transition, leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous--his
poems owe their elevation to the intensity of their feeling, the
nobleness and condensation of their thought, the energy and audacity of
their expression, their brevity, sincerity, and weight of sentiment.
Campanella had an essentially combative intellect. He was both a poet
and a philosopher militant. He stood alone, making war upon the
authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in state-craft, and of
Petrarch in art, taking the fortresses of phrase by storm, and subduing
the hardest material of philosophy to the tyranny of his rhymes.
Plebeian saws, salient images, dry sentences of metaphysical
speculation, logical summaries, and fiery tirades are hurled together--
half crude and cindery scoriae, half molten metal and resplendent ore--
from the volcano of his passionate mind. Such being the nature of
Campanella's style, when in addition it is remembered that his text is
sometimes hopelessly corrupt and his allusions obscure, the difficulties
offered by his sonnets to the translator will be readily conceived.
IV.
At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
centuries, philosophy took a new point of departure among the Italians,
and all the fundamental ideas which have since formed the staple of
modern European systems