BROWNING'S ITALY

Copyright, 1907, by The Baker & Taylor Company

Published, October, 1907

The Plimpton Pres* Norwood Mau. USA.

INTRODÜCTION

THE inspiration for much of Robert Browning's work was found elsewhere than in Italy, yet the fact that many of his most populär shorter poems as well as his great crux "Sordello" and his great master-piece "The Ring and the Book" blossomed from the soil of Italian life and art has brought into prominence his debt to Italian sources. Doubtless his many years of happy life with Mrs. Browning in Italy, as well as her enthu-siasm for the cause of Italian independence, served to intensify the interest and delight which he feit upon his initial visit to the land that was to become one of enchantinent to him.

His first journey thither was taken in 1838, with a view to becoming familiär with the scenes among which "Sordello" had been conceived. The special experience of this visit seems to have been the admiration awak-ened in him for the beautiful little hill-town of Asolo, — the play-kingdom of Caterina Cornaro. His first love among Italian cities

he was wont to call it. So intense was his feeling for this town that he used frequently to dream of it. He described this dream, which had haunted him, to his friend, Mrs. Bronson: "I am traveling with a friend, sometimes with one person, sometimes with another, oftenest with one I do not recognize. Suddenly I see the town I love sparkling in the sun on the hillside. I cry to my com-panion, 'Look! look! there is Asolo! Oh, do let us go there!' The friend invariably an-swers, 'Impossible; we cannot stop/ 'Pray, pray, let us go there/ I entreat. *No/ per-sists the friend, 'we cannot; we must go on and leave Asolo for another day,' and so I am hurried away, and wake to know that I have been dreaming it all, both pleasure and disappointment."

This deep sentiment for Asolo lasted to the end of his life, and was enshrined not only in his poetry but in the gift which the younger Browning made the town in memory of his father — namely, the establishment of the lace industry. A visitor to Asolo now will find "il poeta," as he is called, held in reveren-tial memory. There he heard, in his early manhood, the little peasant child singing a snatch of Sordello's poetry as he climbed his way up the mountain toward the sky; here

he imagined tlie little silk-winder Pippa scat-

tering, all-unconscious, her uplif ting influences in a "naughty world," — "so far a little candle throws its beams," — and put her into a play of which Mrs. Browning said she distinctly envied the authorship; and here, at the veiy last, he and his sister spent royal days with their kind American friend Mrs. Bronson. He prepared his last volume, "Asolando," for the press here, and dedicated it with most appreciative words to Mrs. Bronson. But a few short weeks later, upon the day this volume was published in England, he died in Venice.

"In a Gondola" gives his impressions of Venice received on this first visit to Italy, though the poem was directly inspired by a picture of Maclise's, "a divine Venetian work," the poet calls it, for which he was asked to write appropriate lines. These grew into the longer poem.

Another visit to Italy in 1844 is made mem-orable in Browning's literary life by his poem, "The Englishman in Italy." In this is given a wonderful picture of a sirocco on the piain of Sorrento. It has his usual dramatic touch. The storm is not described for itself, but, by the way, as he tries to comfort a little Italian girl, who is frightened at the black clouds,

vüi INTRODUCTION

with stories of what he sees the peasant folk do when getting readv for the storm, and how nature is affected by "the coming fury of wind and wave.

He has nowhere given a more charming picture of Italian scenery unless it be in the poem, "Two in the Campagna":

"The champaign with its endless fleece Of feathery grosses every where.

Silence and passion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air —

Rome's ghost since her decease."

In 1846 he went to Italy with his wife, and during her life they lived most of the time at Casa Guidi in Florence, with summer excur-sions to the Baths of Lucca and other places and an occasional winter in Rome. Up to the time of his continued residence in Italy, Browning had written some dozen poems on Italian subjects, including all the dramas and several of the Renaissance poems: "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's," "Pictor Ignotus," "In a Gondola."

In 1855, after nine years in Italy, he pub-lished his two volumes called "Men and Women," with a dedicatory poem to Mrs. Browning. In this, Italian subjects are still

prominent, and include some of his most im-portant work, as, for example, "Fra Lippo Lippi," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "The Statue and the Bust," "Andrea del Sarto," "A Grammarian's Funeral."

Shortly before Mrs. Browning's death, he had found one day on a book stall, in the Piazza san Lorenzo in Florence, the original parchment-bound record of the Franceschini case, which was after several years to be transmitted into his greatest work and his last work on an Italian subject of deep significance.

This poem, with its beautiful apostrophe to his dead wife, his "Lyric Love, half angel and half bird," and its marvelous insight into the most exalted heights of a woman's soul as portrayed in Pompilia, is a süperb monument to her "of whom enamored was his soul," as he elsewhere expresses his abiding devotion to her.

Unless we except "Cenciaja," "Pietro of Abano," in the "Parleyings," those with Bar-toli and Furini, and a few unimportant things in "Asolando" which remind one of a sort of Italian "St. Martin's Summer," he wrote no more great Italian poems.

During the thirty years of literary activity left him, he went almost entirely to other sources for inspiration, and produced many poems which, in spite of the carping of some

critics at his later work, have won as wide an appreciation as anything he has written, such as "Herv£ Riel," "Caliban," "At the Mer-maid," " Balaustian's Adventure," and many others.

Thus, it becomes evident that his Italian enthusiasm belonged to the days of his early manhood, when life held out to him its golden promises; to the succeeding days of the ful-filment of a rare happiness in his beloved land; and finally closed with a glorious swan-song in "The Ring and the Book" which has immortalized forever the two great pas-sions of the poet's life — his artistic enthusiasm for Italy and his soul-love for Mrs. Browning. Of the one he wrote:

Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it 'Italy.'"

Of the other, in Venice, many years alter her death:

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Then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under, Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's success:

All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder, Till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing less.

Only, at heart's utmost joy and triumph, terror Sudden turns the blood to ice: a chill wind disencharms

All the late enchantment! What if all be error — If the halo irised round my head were, Love, thine arms."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAGE THB DAWN OF THB RENAISSANCE 1

CHAPTER H Gumpses OF Poutical Life 58

CHAPTER £D The Italian Scholar 166

CHAPTER IV The Abtist and His Abt 209

CHAPTER V PiCTüBEB of Social Life 287

A Gondola Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Statue of Dante in the Ufizzi, Florence .... 6

Arena at Verona 20

Gate of Bosari, Verona (1600 years old) .... 42

The Duomo, Florence 70

Porto Romana, Florence 88

Turin 114

Florence, Old and New: Old Gate and Triumphal Arch 210

The Campanile 220

Sculpture from Campanile Representing Agriculture . 224

Coronation of the Virgin, by Fra Angelico .... 240

Coronation of the Virgin, by Fra Lippo Lippi 248

Portrait of Andrea del Sarto, by Himself .... 262

The Annunciation, by Andrea del Sarto .... 268

Piazza del Popolo, Rome 326

Church of San Lorenzo, Rome 342

Statue of Duke Ferdinand, Florence 364

Venice 368

Saint Mark's, Venice. Before the Fall of the Tower 372

Interior of St. Mark's, Venice 376

TheRialto — "Shylock's Bridge,** at Venice ... 380

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BROWNING'S ITALY

BROWNINGS ITALY

THE DAWN OP THE RENAISSANCE

"Love's undoing Taught me the worth of love in man's estate, And what proportion love should hold with power In his right Constitution: love preceding Power, and with much power, alwavs much more love."

— ParaceUus.

IN the Italy of History and Biography the name of Sordello, the Italian troubadour, is hardly known; but in the Italy of Browning he is one of the most conspicuous figures, and Stands for the first faint streaks of daybreak of that great movement in art and literature known as the Italian Renaissance. He is celebrated by Browning as the forerunner of Dante, whose füll dawn splendor would have blotted out this earlier, lesser light completely had it not been that the great poet himself mentions the lesser one several times in his Divine Comedy and elsewhere, with enthu-siasm. Though there is no mention of Sordello in

ordinary histories, many conflicting accounts

t BROWNINGS ITALY

exist of him in early Italian archives, and many of the commentators of Dante have had their say about him, so that to any one bury-ing himself in Sordello literature this poet looms up large in the perspective of his time — so large, in fact, that Justin H. Smith writes of him in "The Troubadours at Home":

" Nothing in the life or the times of Sordello was so extraordinary as the trail of glory that perpetuated his fame, and we must end as we began by exclaiming: What an extraordinary destiny!"

The real Sordello — that is, as far as he is discoverable from the conflicting accounts — was one of many Italian troubadours who flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth cen-turies. He was born in Goito, a quiet little town, nine or ten miles from Mantua, on the right bank of the Mincio. This town had strong walls and a Castle, and here, as in Browning's poem, the young Sordello spent his early years. It is not long, however, ere he comes before the eyes of men — not as the hyper-sensitive poet, with complicated psychological makeup, which Browning de-picts, but as a brawler in taverns. From this he goes on to an elopement with Cunizza, the wife of Count Richard, under peculiar

DAWN OF THE RENAISSANCE 3

circumstances. Sordello had attached him-self to the Court of Richard, which was held both in Mantua and Verona, and soon became the close friend of this liberal and cultured Count. But Ecelin, at first a friend of Richard^,—the two having married sisters,— later desired to injure his brother-in-law, and so arranged with Sordello that he should ran away with Richard's wife. Later we see him carrying off a lady without the knowledge of her family and marrying her. Thereupon the lady's family, the Strassos, joined with the partisans of Count Richard and waged such persistent warfare against him that he found it necessary to protect himself with a large troop.

Then we hear of him journeying through Italy and France, Spain and Portugal, preach-ing the doctrine of pleasure wherever he goes, and evidently following his own preachments if we may trust accounts. Drifting to Provence again, after a stay at Rodez, he attaches himself to Charles of Anjou, and becomes prominent in public affairs. When Charles invaded Italy, to seize the crown of Naples and Sicily, Sordello assisted him and received as his reward no less than five Castles. To-ward the last of his life he falls into pleasant relations with the Pope, and turns his atten-

tion from love-poems to a long poem of a didactic nature in which he teils young nobles how to win God and the world. Justin H. Smith rather fiercely describes him as a "bold, unprincipled, licentious, and unflinch-ingly practical adventurer," who yet left a remarkable impress upon his own age and the ages to come. He sums up his career with graphic force as a "man who won his fame by singing in a foreign tongue upon a foreign soil, who was enriched by fighting against Italy for a GaUic oppressor, and who in spite of this is mentioned by Dante as the ideal patriot, the embodiment of Ital-ian aspirations. This error so thoroughly planted throve on the ignorance of Dante's commentators, and still more upon the in-ventive ability of Aliprandi; and eventually Em&ic David thought that he found three distinct men in the inflated volumes of his legend."

So much for the real Sordello! Brown-ing's imagination was evidently fired by Dante's enthusiasm, and in creating his char-acter of Sordello the poet seized upon any hints in the accounts that best fitted into his conception of the sort of person the fore-runner of Dante should be, taking his cue from Dante's reference to Sordello in the

DAWN OF THE RENAISSANCE 5

sixth book crf the "Purgatorio," and from a prose writing, " De Vulgari Eloquentia." The passage in the " Purgatorio " is as follows:

'But yonder there behold! a soul that stationed

All, all alone is looking hitherward;

It will point out to us the quiekest way.' We came up onto it; O Lombard soul,

How lofty and disdainful thou didst bear thee,

And grand and slow in moving of thine eyes.

"Nothing whatever did it say to us, But let us go our way, eyeing us only After the manner of a couchant lion;

Still near to it Virgilius drew, entreating That it would point us out the best ascent; And it replied not unto his demand,

But of our native land and of our life

It questioned us; and the sweet Guide began: ' Mantua,' — and the shade, all in itself recluse,

Rose tow'rds him from the place where first it was, Saying: 'O Mantuan, I am Sordello Of thine own land!' and one embraced the other.

"That noble soul was so impatient, only At the sweet sound of his own native land, To make its Citizen glad welcome there."