Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/19

INTRODUCTION in a few years; painting reaches its climax in Michelangelo and Raphael; Bembo and Sadoleto are the high priests of the last refinement in scholarship; the Papal Court becomes the home of all elegance and luxury. Machiavelli in Florence, Ariosto and Tasso in Ferrara, are the supreme figures amid the innumerable writers of the Cinquecento.

The lyric poetry of the epoch is, however, disappointing. A careful study of Petrarch and a highly polished form are its chief characteristics; the spontaneous grace which Lorenzo learnt from the popular songs has disappeared, and instead we find an immense output of sonnets which, for all their melodious charm, make us wonder if it is altogether an advantage for a poet to possess an extremely musical language as his native speech. It is a relief to turn from the fluent elegance of Molza and della Casa to the rugged strength of Michelangelo, whose poems, in that age, seem like the cry of a giant breaking into a symphony of tuneful but expressionless voices. Even the lyrics of Ariosto, with the exception of one canzone, are not remarkable; it is in the Furioso and the satires that his unique irony, his insight into character, and his wealth of imagination find full scope.

It is idle to speculate as to what the result of this studied cultivation of language might have been if Italian liberty had not perished; actually, the last flower of the Cinquecento died in a wilderness of arid conceits, and two lyric forms only preserved any vestige of vitality: the ode of Bernardo Tasso, and the idyll which was developed in the pastoral dramas that followed Sannazaro's famous and tedious Arcadia. The fond resuscitation of the golden age—the idyllic existence of song and simplicity—is the 19