EUPHORION.*

These studies are dedicated to Mr. Walter Pater, and they take their title from a passage in Mr. J. A. Symond's "Renaissance in Italy," in which he calls Faustus a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middle Ages, and Euphorion, the name given by Goethe to the marvellous child born of the mystic marriage of Faust and Helena, may be given to the spirit of the modern world, taking life and reality from the Middle Ages, but born of and curiously nurtured by the spirit of antiquity, to which significant accident has given the name of Renaissance. The writer has lived in Italy for many years, and her acquaintance with its literature —mediæval, renaissance and modern — is extensive. But she calls herself rather an impressionist than a historian, and she presents pictures rather than consecutive narrative. She makes them vivid by her intimate knowledge of a people who have not woven for themselves a new civilization like other European nations, but who have retained the abodes, apparel, and, in a great measure, customs, religion, and literature which were the best that could be devised five hundred years ago. This is true even in the cities, but especially true in the rural districts remote from the great centres.
"Old palaces, almost strongholds, which are still inhabited by those too poor to pull them down and build plastered bandboxes instead; poems and prose-tales written or told five hundred years ago, edited and re-edited by printers to whom there came no modern poems or prose-tales worth publishing instead; half-pagan mediaeval priest-lore, believed in by men and women who have not been given anything to believe instead; easy going, all-permitting, fifteenth-century scepticism, not yet replaced by the scientific and socialistic disbelief which is puritanic and iconoclastic ; sly and savage habits of vengeance still doing service among the lower classes instead of the orderly chicanery of modern justice — these are the things, and a hundred others besides, concrete and spiritual, things too magnificent, too sordid, too irregular, too beautiful, too nauseous, and, above all, too utterly unpractical and old-fashioned for our time, which I call the rags of the Renaissance, and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel of modern thoughts and things."
It is from seeing these things actually present that the writer has believed that she could better enter into the past. Her own horror at the crimes and the anomalies of the Renaissance make her see how they struck the Elizabethan dramatists, while contemporary Italy took them as matters of course, and even good men and women, whose lives were blameless, had no horror at the cruelty, the perfidy, and the monstrous vices of men high in the State, and accomplished and educated beyond their fellows.
"The moral atmosphere of those days can not be breathed by us ; say what we may against both Protestant reformation and Catholic reaction, these two began to make an atmosphere different from that of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, an atmosphere in which lived creatures like ourselves, into which ourselves might penetrate."
Towards the end of the fifteenth century Italy seemed to have obtained the inheritance of Greece, and Rome increased by her own strong original essentially modern activities, but while intellectually expanding her moral vitality shrunk. Liberty was extinguished, public good faith and private morality appeared to be dying out ; despots, unscrupulous, and often infamous, seized on power. Warfare was carried on by rapacious mercenaries, diplomacy became a mere swindle in the revival of letters the filthiest refuse of antiquity was thrown up with the best, family ties were loosened and all law, human and divine, set at defiance.
The Renaissance had its cradle in the free towns which sprung up in larger numbers and had wider jurisdiction in Italy than in Germany and the Low Countries, where the suzerain held his own outside the walls of the town, and even exercised some authority within it. In Italy alone the barbarous conquerors could not change the language and the manners of the people, feudalism thus became limited to the hilly country, the plain became the property of the cities which it surrounded. The old struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, between the German feudal element and the Latin civic one, ended in the complete annihilation of the former in the north and centre of Italy. The Commune was the only kind of free government possible during the Middle Ages. Feudalism stamped out civilization, monasticism warped it, and only within the walls of a city could it develop. And so long as the State remains small enough to meet in the market-place and vote all went well. But success led to expansion, and jealousies of rival cities led to wars, and when the weaker was absorbed it was not trusted. The Burghers of Florence tried to stamp out Pisa as a rival centre. Thus the victorious Communes became surrounded by conquered Communes, which were not allies but focuses of revolt, or at best impediments. When the States became rich and powerful they constantly fell under the power of tyrants, whether rich bankers or skilled military commanders, or even religious reformers. A shapeless, fluctuating democracy affords opportunity for any man to rise to supreme power, and all existing organizations may be political friends or foes. At each tarn of the cards important citizens are banished or lose their lives. Not infrequently a foreign State is called in to interfere. The employment of mercenary troops so bitterly inveighed against by Machiavelli, though necessary for industrial peoples when the invention of firearms had made special training necessary, gave opportunities to adventurers to obtain possession of States.
The main causes of the immorality of the Renaissance lay in the general disbelief of the doctrines which had been sincerely or mechanically or superstitiously held when confronted with the revived knowledge of ante-Christian times, which had awakened an indiscriminating admiration, and to the success of unscrupulous talent in the condition of political disorder. The worst feature was the universal toleration of wickedness. We require of good men and women nowadays that they should not only be incapable of evil, but that they should abhor it. Not to speak of Machiavelli, who was really a patriot, and in many ways an upright and honourable man, who recommended and sanctioned policy unscrupulous and false, we see that the pious Æneas Sylvius admires a man of fraud and violence like Sforza, and that the upright Guarino passes lenient judgment on the infamous Beccadelli. While the astonished English visitors to Italy saw in it the characters and the scenes for the darkest tragedy and the most repulsive horrors, the daily life and current literature was absolutely devoid of tragic elements. The epic poets of the Italian Renaissance— Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto, even Tasso himself— are no epic poets at all, but rather light and amusing gossips. When they tell tales which we know as tragedies— those of the Duchess of Malfi, of Romeo and Juliet, of Desdemona and Othello— it is in the serene, cheerful, chatty style of the Decameron or of the Fabliaux. Ariosto's ladies and gentlemen are not like the chaste and noble impossibilities of earlier romance— good and bad alike are light, fickle, amorous, and fibbing. The English, who came from a purer moral atmosphere, made of the stories which they read or heard tragedies too painful to be acted or even read now, while the people where the evil things were done wrote about shepherds and knights errant.
The bodily portraits of the men who have committed the greatest crimes painted by the sternly realistic art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are even more confusing to our ideas than their moral portraits drawn by contemporary chroniclers. Caesar Borgia, with his long fine features and noble head, looks like a gracious and refined person ; there is perhaps a certain duplicity in the well cut lips ; the beard worn full and peaked in Spanish fashion forms a sort of mask to the lower part of the face, but what we see is noble and intellectual. Malatesta's head is infinitely more human than that, of Lionello d'Este, one of the best of the Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Ordnis, are in their gallantly trimmed jerkins and jewelled caps the veriest assemblage of harmless young dandies, pretty and insipid. Nowhere among the portraits of Renaissance monsters do we meet with anything like those Roman Emperors Vitellius and Caracalla. Macaulay thus describes the portraits of the remarkable Italians of the time of Machiavelli, Ample and majestic foreheads, brows strong and dark, but not frowning, eyes of which the calm full gaze while it expresses nothing seems to discern everything, cheeks pale with thought and sedentary habits, lips formed with feminine delicacy, but compressed with more than muscular decision, show men who would have been formidable enemies and unsafe allies, but men of tempers mild and equable, with ample and subtle intellects. Ford alone of the early dramatists has caught the Renaissance spirit, and lets his evil characters preserve their superficial innocence of tone, their blindness to evil. Webster, Tourneur, and Marston were astonished and fascinated by the tragic subjects presented to them and showed them in superb and awful garb. The healthy intellect of Shakspeare and his wide scope of vision enabled him to pass over the base and frightful parts of human nature and see its purer and higher side. Massinger, from the very superficiality of his insight and the narrowness of his sympathies, could not realize the horrors which he in vented. But in Shakspeare's " Titus Andronicus" and "Pericles" we see the kind of stories which, with him the exception, were the staple of the early dramatists.
If it is the case that the loosening of old traditional beliefs and the free career to unscrupulous ambition thus perverts, or rather destroys, the moral sense, are we not now on the eve, if we have not already entered on a similar phase, when all dogma is questioned and all established laws of conduct, whether judicial or customary, are shaken? We think not, because this age is not like that of the Renaissance, thrown back on a pagan past from the hollowness, the formality, the hypocrisy, and the cruelty of the dominant religion, but reaching forward, through scientific research, through practical experiment, towards a larger and better future for humanity. The idle and the frivolous may be the worse for throwing off restraints which their fathers held sacred, but the best and strongest intellects of the day are profoundly conscientious.
Vernon Lee, in a chapter on the "Outdoor Poetry of the Middle Ages," tells us that no season is ever mentioned but spring, and no scene but a wood or forest. They appeared to be insensible to the grandeur of the mountain and the peaceful security of the plain, the varied outlines of the seashore and the beneficent course of brooks and rivers. The spring which they described with its eternal green in phrases so similar that they seem like conventional platitudes, was the spring of well-to-do people leaving their castles or their cities and dancing on the sward to the sound of musical instruments, not the seedtime of the hopeful husbandman. Asceticism has been blamed for this insensibility to the sights and sounds of Nature, but asceticism, though it might absorb Bernard of Clairvaux so deeply in spiritual meditations that he did not so much as see the Lake Leman when he passed by it, had no effect whatever on the people who delighted in the stories of Boccacio or the songs of the troubadours. The cause of this blindness to Nature is to be sought in feudalism rather than in mistaken piety.
" Ever since Schiller in his 'Gods of Greece' lamented the undivinizing of Nature, it has been the fashion to blame Christianity for having robbed the fields and woods of their gods. But it is not so. It was feudalism which throws out a divinity greater than Pales, or Vertumnus, or mighty Pan— a divinity called Man. For a man it is difficult to call him — this mediaeval serf, this lump of earth detached from the field, and wrought into a semblance of manhood merely that the soil might be delved and sown; nor as a man did the feudal age conceive it. The serf and his labours are so much ignored in the literature of the time that if it were not for legal and ecclesiastical trials of peasants for sacrilege and devil worship we should know little or nothing of the life of the men and women who in France and Germany did the work which was taught by Hesiod and Virgil. Mediaeval poets speak only of the brutishness, the cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness of the serf. A sad change from the pious rustic, the innocent God-beloved husband man of antiquity, on whose threshold justice stopped a while when she fled from the towns."
Only one passage can be found in the pretty French thirteenth century tale of Aucassin and Nicolette, where the forlorn lover weeping because he cannot find the object of his passion is accosted by a hideous peasant with wide mouth, flat nose, and blackened skin, who wonders at his grief and despises it, for he has lost a red bullock of his master's and cannot find it, and must make the price good. From his old mother has been taken her single garment, so that she lies naked in the straw, and he wanders in the wood lest he should be put in gaol. The story is only inserted to show Aucassin's good heart in giving 20 sols for the bullock ; but the contrast is striking and suggestive between the daintily nurtured boy and this ragged, hideous serf, who neither complains nor begs nor threatens, but takes his misfortune as a matter of course, more distressed for his mother than himself. This condition of things did not exist everywhere Serfdom never was so hard or so debasing in England as it was on the Continent. The peasants' risings under Jack Cade and others were not like the terrible revolts of the Jacquerie, for the peasant had not been so oppressed and debased in England. Even before the great plague of 1348, as far back as Edward the Second's time, the practice became increasingly general to accept money compensations instead of labour rents, and feudal services.
In Italy things were better still. Her populations were not divided into victor and vanquished, and the old Latin institutions of town and country were never replaced by feudal arrangements, except in a few northern and southern districts. In the early obscure Italian Commonwealths there were no Lords, and consequently no serfs. In this they were different from the free towns of Provence, Germany, and Flanders, which had no outside territory. In Italy the country belonged to the burghers. The peasant was not a serf ; he was either a hired labourer, or a possessor of property, or a metayer, dividing with the proprietor the produce of the land. This latter system still exists in Tuscany, in which a well-to-do peasant family, with a little outside hired help, can make a good living by the cultivation of vines, olives, corn, and fruit, and various woman's work out of doors and in doors.
We got occasional glimpses of these Tuscan peasants in the Italian novelists, but the best picture that has ever been given is in Lorenzo dei Medici's "Nencia da Barbarino.'' The folk songs, which the country people sang, and which are preserved in Tigri's collection, are condensed into this quaint and natural poem. It is the long daydream of a lovesick Italian peasant, making honest love to a pretty girl not quite so well off as himself. He sings of her charms, and he cannot help telling of his claims on her attention :—
" If she is like the evening star, purer than well water, sweeter than Malmsey wine, whiter than the miller's flour, driving men to distraction by her eyes, she is also an excellent housewife, who can stand any amount of field labour, and makes lots of money by weaving beautiful woollen stuff. To see her going to Church of a morning she is a little pearl! Her bodice is of damask, her petticoat of bright colour, and she kneels down carefully where she may be seen, she is so smart. And when she dances she bounds like a little goat and twirls like a mill-wheel, and when she has finished she makes you a courtsey : no citizen's wife in Florence can courtsey like her. It was in April that he fell in love. She was picking salad in the garden ; he begged her for a little, and she sent him about his business. Ever since then his peace has been gone, and all for Nencia Bella. . . .
But after all he is not to be despised, He is an excellent labourer, most learned in buying and selling pigs ; he can play the bag pipe beautifully; he is rich, is willing to go to any expense to please her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair may be nice and frizzy from the crisping irons. ... He is sorry, perhaps, he bores her. God bless you, Nencia ; he had better go and look after his sheep."
Probably Lorenzo did not know the value of this work, but he has given us in it not only a peasant's love song, but his thoughts and actions, his hopes and fears. He has given as the peasant himself, his house, his fields and his sweetheart as they exist in Tuscany to this day— a very different picture from that of the mediæval serf. No pastoral poem can be compared with this but Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" and some of Burn's descriptive poems. Allan Ramsay was a barber and Burns a peasant, while Lorenzo was a reigning Duke.

Lorenzo wrote another poem called the "Ambra," describing the flow and the flood of the River Ombrone. Here we get out of the eternal wood of the Middle Ages ; and not only is there a grand description of the flood itself in its destructive career, but a minute and accurate picture of the face of the country in the season of floods quite modern in its realism. Unscrupulous as Lorenzo was in his actions for his own aggrandizement and emolument, he appears to feel for the misfortune of the peasants from the devastation of their fields and olive groves and the destruction of their houses. This appears to us quite proper and natural, but it was exceptional in the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent. We have nothing in English, French, or German literature at all like these two poems till we come to the eighteenth century.
Vernon Lee's chapter on "Mediaeval Love" is a curious one. She gives to the burghers and artisans and artists of the Northern Italian cities the credit of purifying and elevating the love sung by troubadours and Provencals until Platonic and spiritual love culminated in the "Vita Nuova" of Dante. That, again, was made more intelligible and popular by Petrarch. Our early English poetry, that of Chaucer, was awakened by Boccaccio and Petrarch, and long afterwards Sydney's and Spenser's sonnets show how deeply they had drunk from the spirit and style of Petrarch. Chaucer had sketched in his Palamon and Arcite a kind of modern love, among a people who permitted a woman to choose her own husband, and she therefore could be wooed and worshipped, and forbade a man wooing another man's wife, which was the sum and substance of almost all the mediaeval love poets. When girls are really given in marriage by their parents all private lovemaking is forbidden amongst the respectable classes, and this is the main reason why the wooings in ancient and mediaeval literature jar upon our modern ideas. English and Scottish ballad literature is full of tales of love without marriage, in which the girl is forsaken, or in which the lover patches up the injury by making a honest woman of her, which is held to be very generous, but mediaeval literature was full of love against marriage ; and as the husband's rights had been acquired not through love,but through family interests, the popular opinion held his wrongs very cheap. Indeed, the curious fantastical Courts of Love and canons of chivalry, of which we do not get the real drift in Don Quixote, who fixed his affections on a maiden, supported the rights of the lover as against the husband, and even decreed that real love could not exist between husband and wife. All the ancient romances from Tristram downwards represent the Knight as devoted to the wife of another man, and maintaining by force of arms the honour and reputation which he has been the only one to sully. It seems a long way from this to the " Vita Nuova" of Dante, but aided by the better moral atmosphere of his native country the evolution may be traced.
Vernon Lee's style is a little too ornate and perhaps redundant in places, but she lets us see what she sees ; and although some of the pictures are not pleasant, those times cannot be represented in rosewater.
In the epilogue our author tells us that the deepest impression made on her by the study of the Middle Ages is their wastefulness ; so many germs of good and great things lay in them and so few came to maturity. Wastefulness in this long period of confusion of the most precious things which we possess— time, thought, and feeling refused to the realities of the world and lavished on the figments of the imagination. In convent cells and solitary hermitages were shut up some of the greatest, the sweetest, and the most richly endowed natures, spending on what was called service to God, the Virgin, and the saints all the faculties that might have raised and humanized the serf, softened the savage military spirit, modified the inequalities of the law, and purified the literature. Intellects wasted on the subtleties of dogmatic theology powers that might have pulled down cruelty in high places, torn off the veil from superstition, and wrenched the sword from the hand of fanaticism.

Wastefulness we see still, but not to so vast an extent, and not from the greatest natures. The votaries of luxury, fashion, and frivolity now as always waste their opportunities, but the leaven of the world is no longer unused. The sense that is borne in upon us from all experience that gifts are for service, and the consciousness that men expect fine issues from spirits finely touched, will, we fondly hope, preserve us from any such moral chaos as was met with in the Renaissance.

* "Euphorion : Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance. By Vernon Lee author of 'Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy,' 'The Countess of Albany, &c' London: T. Fisher Unwin.


 South Australian Register 30 December 1885,