BROWNING'S ITALY (20 page)

THE ITALIAN SCHOLAR 199

tinguished humanists great perfection of Organization and became instrumenta of higher education. But, on the whole, indiyidual enterprise seems to have accomplished the greatest results.

Burckhard teils at length of two humanist teachers who remind us much of Browning's Grammarian in their utter devotion. "At the court of Giovan Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua appeared the illustrious Vittorino da Feltre — one of those men who devote their whole life to an object for which their natural gifts constitute a special vocation. He wrote almost nothing and finally destroyed the few poems of his youth which he had long kept by him. He studied with unwearied industry; he never sought after titles, which, like all outward distinctions, he scorned; and he lived on terms of the dosest friendship with teachers, companions, and pupils, whose good-will he knew how to preserve. He excelled in bodily no less than in mental exercises, was an admirable rider, dancer, and fencer, wore the same clothes in winter as in summer, walked in nothing but sandals even during the severest frost, and lived so that until his old age he was never ill. He so restrained his passions, his natural inclination to sensuality and anger, that he

remained chaste his whole life through and hardly ever hurt any one by a hard word.

"He directed the education of the sons and daughters of the princely house, and one of the latter became under his care a woman of learning. When his reputation extended far and wide over Italy, and numbers of great and wealthy families came from far and wide, even from Germany in search of his Instructions, Gonzaga was not only willing that they should be received, but seems to have held it an honor for Mantua to be the chosen school of the aristocratic world. Here for the first time gymnastics and all noble bodily exercises were treated along with scientific instruction as indispensable to a liberal education. Besides these pupils came others, whose instruction Vittorino probably held to be his highest earthly aim, the gifted poor, often as many as seventy together, whom he supported in his house and educated along with the other high-born youths who here learned to live under the same roof with untitled genius. The greater the crowd of pupils who flocked to Mantua the more teachers were needed to impart the instruction which aimed at giving each pupil that sort of learning which he was most fitted to receive- Gonzaga paid him a yearly salary

THE ITALIAN SCHOLAR 201

of two hundred and forty gold florins, built him besides a splendid house, "La Giocosa," in which the master lived with his scholars and contributed to the expenses caused by the poorer pupils. What was still further needed Vittorino begged from princes and wealthy people, who did not always, it is true, give a ready ear to his entreaties, and forced him by their hard-heartedness to run into debt. Yet in the end he found himself in comfortable circumstances, owned a small property in town, and an estate in the country where he stayed with his pupils during the holidays, and possessed a famous collection of books which he gladly lent or gave away, though he was not a little angry when they were taken without leave. In the early morning he read religious books, then scourged himself and went to church; his pupils were also compelled to go to church, like him to confess once a month, and to observe fast days most strictly. His pupils respected him, but trembled before his glance. When they did anything wrong, they were punished immediately after the offense. He was honored by all his contemporaries no less than by his pupils and people took the journey to Mantua merely to see him," Another equally interesting scholar of the

time was Guarino of Verona. In 1429 he was called to Ferrara to educate Lionello, the son of Niccolo d'Este.

"He had many other pupils besides Lionello from various parts of the country, and, besides, supported wholly or in part a select class of poor scholars in his own house. He laid more stress on pure scholarship than Vit-torino. Far into the night he heard lessons or indulged in instructive conversation. Yet with all this he found time to write transla-tions from the Greek and voluminous original works.

"Like Vittorino's his house was the home of a strict religion and morality."

Italy was füll of scholars of similar attain-ments to these. They were not only teachers and translators and professors in Universities, but they held important positions in the Church and State, but by the time the sixteenth Century arrives a sad change in the attitude of society toward them has to be recorded. "The whole class feil into deep and general disgrace," writes Burckhard. "To the two chief accusations against them — that of malicious self-conceit, and that of abominable profligacy — a third charge of irreligion was now loudly added by the rising powers of the Counter-reformation."

THE ITALIAN SCHOLAR 203

The humanists themselves were loudest in defaming one another.

Burckhard's summing up explains this downfall as fully, perhaps, as it can be at this distance of time. "Three facts," he says "explain and perhaps diminish their guilt: the overflowing excess of favor and fortune when the luck was on their side; the uncertainty of the future in which luxury or misery depended on the caprice of a patron or the malice of an enemy, and finally the misleading influence of antiquity. This un-dermined their morality without giving them its own instead; and in religious matters, since they could never think of accepting the positive belief in the old gods, it affected them only on the negative and sceptical side. Just because they conceived of antiquity dogmat-ically — that is, took it for the model of all thought and action — its influence was here pernicious. But that an age existed which idolized the ancient world and its products with an exclusive devotion, was not the fault of individuals. It was the work of an historical providence, and all the culture of the ages which have followed and of the ages to come rests upon the fact that it was so, and that all the ends of life but this one were then deliberately put aside."

In " The Grammarian's Funeral," Browning has preserved for us the breath and finer spirit of this scholarly aspect of the Renaissance.

We may imagine the pupils of Vittorino or Guarino burying their master in the same lofty spirit. Figuratively speaking their memories are enshrined upon the heights of humanism in its most aspiring manifestations, and similarly the poem is, as it were, the supreme blossom of art growing out of the complex elements provided by the historians of the learning of the time.

A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL

SHORTLT AFTER THE REVTVAL OP LEARNING IN EUROPE

Let us begin and carry up this corpse,

Singing together. Leave we the common crofts, the vulgär thorpes

Each in its tether Sleeping safe on the bosom of the piain,

Cared-for tili cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again

Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,

Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,

Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered piain its herd and crop;

Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top,

Crowded with culture!

THE ITALIAN SCHOLAR 205

All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;

Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's

Circling its summit. Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights;

Wait ye the warning ? Our low life was the level's and the night's;

He's for the morning. Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,

'Ware the beholders! This is our master, famous, calm and dead,

Borne on our Shoulders.

Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft

Safe from the weather! He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft,

Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat,

Lyric Apollo! Long he lived nameless: how should Spring take note

Winter would follow ? Till lo! the little touch, and youth was gone,

Cramped and diminished, Moaned he, "New measures, other feet anon!

My dance is finished " ? No, that's the world's way: (keep the mountain-side,

Make for the city!) He knew the Signal, and stepped on with pride

Over men's pity; Left play for work, and grappled with the world

Bent on escaping: "What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled?

Show me their shaping,

Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage, —

Give!" — So, he gowned him, Straight got my heart that book to its last page:

Learned, we found him. Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead,

Accents uncertain: "Time to taste life," another would have said,

"Up with a curtain!" This man said rather, "Actual life comes next?

Patience a moment! Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text,

Still there's the comment. Let me know all! Prate not of most or least,

Painful or easy! Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast,

Ay, nor feel queasy." Oh, such a life as he resolved to live,

When he had learned it, When he had gathered all books had to give!

Sooner, he spurned it. Image the whole, then execute the parte —

Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz,

Ere mortar dab brick!

(Here's the town-gate reached: there's the market-place

Gaping before us.) Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace

(Hearten our chorus!) That before living he'd learn how to live —

No end to learning: Earn the means first — God surely will contrive

Use f or our earning.

THE ITALIAN SCHOLAR 207

Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes:

live now or never!" He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has Forever." Back to his book then: deeper drooped his head:

CaUndus racked him: Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead:

Tussis attacked him. "Now, master, take a little rest!" — not he!

(Caution redoubled, Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!)

Not a whit troubled, Back to his studies, fresher than at first,

Fierce as a dragon He (soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst)

Sucked at the flagon. Oh, if we draw a circle premature,

Heedless of far gain, Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure

Bad is our bargain! Was it not great ? did not he throw on God,

(He loves the burthen) — God's task to make the heavenly period

Perfect the earthen ? Did not he magnify the mind, show clear

Just what it all meant ? He would not discount life, as fools do here,

Paid by instalment. He ventured neck or nothing — heaven's success

Found, or earth's failure: "Wilt thou trust death or not?" He answered "Yes!

Hence with life's pale Iure!" That low man seeks a little thing to do,

Sees it and does it:

This high man, with a great thing to pursue,

Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one,

ffis hundred's soon hit: This high man, aiming at a million,

Misses an unit. That, has the world here — should he need the next,

Let the world mind him! This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed

Seeking shall find him. So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,

Ground he at grammar; Still> through the rattle, parts of speech were rife:

While he could stammer He settled HotVs business — let it be! —

Properly based Oun — Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De 9

Dead from the waist down. Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place;

Hail to your purlieus, All ye highfliers of the feathered race,

Swallows and curlews! Here's the top-peak; the multitude below

Live, for they can, there: This man decided not to Live but Know —

Bury this man there ? Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form*

Läghtnings are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,

Peace let the dew send! Lofty designs must close in Hke effects:

Loftily lying, Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects,

Iiving and dying.

THE AKTIST AND HIB ART

"Each Art a-strain Would stay the apparition, — nor in vain: The Poet's word-mesh, Painter's sure and swift Color-and-line-throw — proud the prize they lift! Thus feit Man and thus looked Man, — passions caught I' the midway swim of sea, — not much, if aught, Of nether-brooding loves, hates, hopes, and fears, Enwombed past Art's disclosure."

— Charles Avison.

BROWNING'S interest in Italian art, in his poetry at any rate, centered itself principally upon the painters of the earlier Renaissance and upon those who inaugurated the later and greater Renaissance in art. With the exception of Andrea del Sarto, who belongs in the period of the culmination of Italian art, though not among its greatest exemplars, he has celebrated none of those whom the world has acclaimed the supreme masters. In fact he very dis-tinct./sta«es his determioatioo not todo so in his poem, "Old Pictures in Florence": —

For oh, this world and the wrong it does; They are safe in heaven with their backs to it, The Michaels and Rafaels, you hum and buzz Round the works of, you of the little wit!

Much they reck of your praise and you!

But the wronged great souls — can they be quit Of a world where their work is all to do,

Where you style them you of the little wit, Old Master This and Early the Other,

Not dreaming that Old and New are fellows: A younger succeeds to an eider brother,

Da Vincis derive in good time from Dellos."

««

What he declares that he loves is the season

"Of Art's spring birth so dim and dewy; My sculptor is Nicolo the Pisan

My painter — who but Cimabue ? Nor even was man of them all indeed,

From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo, Could say that he missed my critic meed."

When one reads the extravagant praises bestowed upon these early painters and sculp-tors in Vasari's "Lives of the Painters," and the echoes from these that appear in later works upon art, it would hardly seem as if Cimabue or Giotto or Nicolo Pisano needed Browning's defense. But it is well to re-member in this connection that one meets plenty of laymen who do not especially