I.
It is with diffidence that I offer
a translation of Michael Angelo’s sonnets, for
the first time completely rendered into English rhyme,
and that I venture on a version of Campanella’s
philosophical poems. My excuse, if I can plead
any for so bold an attempt, may be found in this that,
so far as I am aware, no other English writer has dealt
with Michael Angelo’s verses since the publication
of his autograph; while Campanella’s sonnets
have hitherto been almost utterly unknown.
Something must be said to justify
the issue of poems so dissimilar in a single volume.
Michael Angelo and Campanella represent widely sundered,
though almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution
of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially
an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance.
Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation
was doing all it could to blight the free thought
of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit
of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs,
was opening a new stage for European science.
The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation
of beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth.
The one clung to Ficino’s dream of Platonising
Christianity: the other constructed for himself
a new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent
in nature. Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations
of a solitary life dedicated to the service of art,
at a time when art received the suffrage and the admiration
of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit,
exiled and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom
he lived, at a moment when philosophy was hunted down
as heresy and imprisoned as treason to the public
weal.
The marks of this difference in the
external and internal circumstances of the two poets
might be multiplied indefinitely. Yet they had
much in common. Both stood above their age, and
in a sense aloof from it. Both approached poetry
in the spirit of thinkers bent upon extricating themselves
from the trivialities of contemporary literature.
The sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical
poetry in an age when the Italians had lost their
ancient manliness and energy. Both were united
by the ties of study and affection to the greatest
singer of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch,
thrice diluted and emasculated, was the Phoebus of
academies and coteries.
This common antagonism to the degenerate
genius of Italian literature is the link which binds
Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the Renaissance,
to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age.
II.
My translation of Michael Angelo’s
sonnets has been made from Signor Cesare Guasti’s
edition of the autograph, first given to the world
in 1863. This masterpiece of laborious and minute
scholarship is based upon a collation of the various
manuscripts preserved in the Casa Buonarroti at Florence
with the Vatican and other Codices. It adheres
to the original orthography of Michael Angelo, and
omits no fragment of his indubitable compositions.
Signor Guasti prefaces the text he has so carefully
prepared, with a discourse upon the poetry of Michael
Angelo and a description of the manuscripts. To
the poems themselves he adds a prose paraphrase, and
prints upon the same page with each composition the
version published by Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1623.
Before the publication of this volume,
all studies of Michael Angelo’s poetry, all
translations made of it, and all hypotheses deduced
from the sculptor’s verse in explanation of
his theory or his practice as an artist, were based
upon the edition of 1623. It will not be superfluous
to describe what that edition was, and how its text
differed from that now given to the light, in order
that the relation of my own English version to those
which have preceded it may be rightly understood.
Michael Angelo seems to have entertained
no thought of printing his poems in his lifetime.
He distributed them freely among his friends, of whom
Sebastiano del Piombo, Luigi del
Riccio, Donato Giannotti, Vittoria
Colonna, and Tommaso de’ Cavalieri
were in this respect the most favoured. In course
of time some of these friends, partly by the gift
of the originals, and partly by obtaining copies, formed
more or less complete collections; and it undoubtedly
occurred to more than one to publish them. Ascanio
Condivi, at the close of his biography, makes
this announcement: ’I hope ere long to make
public some of his sonnets and madrigals, which I
have been long collecting, both from himself and others
who possessed them, with a view to proving to the world
the force of his inventive genius and the beauty of
the thoughts produced by that divine spirit.’
Condivi’s promise was not fulfilled. With
the exception of two or three pieces printed by Vasari,
and the extracts quoted by Varchi in his ’Lezione,’
the poems of Michael Angelo remained in manuscript
for fifty-nine years after his death. The most
voluminous collection formed part of the Buonarroti
archives; but a large quantity preserved by Luigi
del Riccio, and from him transferred to
Fulvio Orsini, had passed into the Vatican Library,
when Michelangelo the younger conceived the plan of
publishing his granduncle’s poetry. Michelangelo
obtained leave to transcribe the Vatican mss.
with his own hand; and after taking pains to collate
all the autographs and copies in existence, he set
himself to compare their readings, and to form a final
text for publication. Here, however, began what
we may call the Tragedy of his Rifacimento.
The more he studied his great ancestor’s verses,
the less he liked or dared to edit them unaltered.
Some of them expressed thoughts and sentiments offensive
to the Church. In some the Florentine patriot
spoke over-boldly. Others exposed their author
to misconstruction on the score of personal morality.
All were ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed
and obscure in thought the rough-hewn blockings-out
of poems rather than finished works of art, as it
appeared to the scrupulous, decorous, elegant, and
timorous Academician of a feebler age. While
pondering these difficulties, and comparing the readings
of his many manuscripts, the thought occurred to Michelangelo
that, between leaving the poems unpublished and printing
them in all their rugged boldness, lay the middle
course of reducing them to smoothness of diction,
lucidity of meaning, and propriety of sentiment.
In other words, he began, as Signer Guasti pithily
describes his method, ’to change halves of lines,
whole verses, ideas: if he found a fragment, he
completed it: if brevity involved the thought
in obscurity, he amplified: if the obscurity
seemed incurable, he amputated: for superabundant
wealth of conception he substituted vacuity; smoothed
asperities; softened salient lights.’ The
result was that a medley of garbled phrases, additions,
alterations, and sophistications was foisted on
the world as the veritable product of the mighty sculptor’s
genius. That Michelangelo meant well to his illustrious
ancestor is certain. That he took the greatest
pains in executing his ungrateful and disastrous task
is no less clear. But the net result of his meddlesome
benevolence has been that now for two centuries and
a half the greatest genius of the Italian Renaissance
has worn the ill-fitting disguise prepared for him
by a literary ‘breeches-maker.’ In
fact, Michael Angelo the poet suffered no less from
his grandnephew than Michael Angelo the fresco painter
from his follower Daniele da Volterra.
Nearly all Michael Angelo’s
sonnets express personal feelings, and by far the
greater number of them were composed after his sixtieth
year. To whom they were addressed, we only know
in a few instances. Vittoria Colonna and
Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, the two most
intimate friends of his old age in Rome, received
from him some of the most pathetically beautiful of
his love-poems. But to suppose that either the
one or the other was the object of more than a few
well-authenticated sonnets would be hazardous.
Nothing is more clear than that Michael Angelo worshipped
Beauty in the Platonic spirit, passing beyond its personal
and specific manifestations to the universal and impersonal.
This thought is repeated over and over again in his
poetry; and if we bear in mind that he habitually
regarded the loveliness of man or woman as a sign
and symbol of eternal and immutable beauty, we shall
feel it of less importance to discover who it was
that prompted him to this or that poetic utterance.
That the loves of his youth were not so tranquil as
those of his old age, appears not only from the regrets
expressed in his religious verses, but also from one
or two of the rare sonnets referable to his manhood.
The love of beauty, the love of Florence,
and the love of Christ, are the three main motives
of his poetry. This is not the place to discuss
at length the nature of his philosophy, his patriotism,
or his religion; to enquire how far he retained the
early teaching of Ficino and Savonarola; or to trace
the influence of Dante and the Bible on his mind.
I may, however, refer my readers who are interested
in these questions, to the Discourse of Signor Guasti,
the learned essay of Mr. J.E. Taylor, and the
refined study of Mr. W.H. Pater. My own views
will be found expressed in the third volume of my
‘Renaissance in Italy’; and where I think
it necessary, I shall take occasion to repeat them
in the notes appended to my translation.
III.
Michael Angelo’s madrigals and
sonnets were eagerly sought for during his lifetime.
They formed the themes of learned academical discourses,
and won for him the poet’s crown in death.
Upon his tomb the Muse of Song was carved in company
with Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting. Since
the publication of the rifacimento in 1623,
his verses have been used among the testi di lingua
by Italians, and have been studied in the three great
languages of Europe. The fate of Campanella’s
philosophical poems has been very different. It
was owing to a fortunate chance that they survived
their author; and until the year 1834 they were wholly
and entirely unknown in Italy. The history of
their preservation is so curious that I cannot refrain
from giving some account of it, before proceeding
to sketch so much of Campanella’s life and doctrine
as may be necessary for the understanding of his sonnets.
The poems were composed during Campanella’s
imprisonment at Naples; and from internal evidence
there is good reason to suppose that the greater part
of them were written at intervals in the first fourteen
years of the twenty-five he passed in confinement.
In the descriptive catalogue of his own works, the
philosopher mentions seven books of sonnets and canzoni,
which he called ’Le Cantiche.’
Whether any of these would have been printed but for
a mere accident is doubtful. A German gentleman,
named Tobia Adami, who is supposed to have been a
Court-Counsellor at Weimar, after travelling through
Greece, Syria, and Palestine, in company with a young
friend called Rodolph von Bunau, visited Campanella
in his dungeon. A close intimacy sprang up between
them, and Adami undertook to publish several works
of the philosopher in testimony of his admiration.
Among these were ‘Le Cantiche.’
Instead, however, of printing the poems in extenso,
he made a selection, choosing those apparently which
took his fancy, and which, in his opinion, threw most
light on Campanella’s philosophical theories.
It is clear that he neglected the author’s own
arrangement, since there is no trace of the division
into seven books. What proportion the selection
bore to the whole bulk of the Ms. seems to me
uncertain, though the latest editor asserts that it
formed only a seventh part. The manuscript itself
is lost, and Adami’s edition of the specimens
is all that now remains as basis for the text of Campanella’s
poems.
This first edition was badly printed
in Germany on very bad paper, without the name of
press or place. Besides the poems, it contained
a brief prose commentary by the editor, the value
of which is still very great, since we have the right
to suppose that Adami’s explanations embodied
what he had received by word of mouth from Campanella.
The little book bore this title: ’Scelta
d’ alcune poésie filosofiche di
Settimontano Squilla cavate da’
suo’ libri detti La Cantica,
con l’esposizione, stampato nell’
anno MDCXXII.’ The pseudonym Squilla
is a pun upon Campanella’s name, since both
Campana and Squilla mean a bell; while
Settimontano contains a quaint allusion to the
fact that the philosopher’s skull was remarkable
for seven protubérances. 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. , 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 were anticipated
by a few obscure thinkers. It is noticeable that
the States of Naples, hitherto comparatively inert
in the intellectual development of Italy, furnished
the five writers who preceded Bacon, Leibnitz, Schelling,
and Comte. Telesio of Cosenza, Bruno of Nola,
Campanella of Stilo, Vanini and Vico of Naples
are the chief among these novi homines or pioneers
of modern thought. The characteristic point of
this new philosophy was an unconditional return to
Nature as the source of knowledge, combined with a
belief in the intuitive forces of the human reason:
so that from the first it showed two sides or faces
to the world the one positive, scientific,
critical, and analytical; the other mystical, metaphysical,
subjective. Modern materialism and modern idealism
were both contained in the audacious guesses of Bruno
and Campanella; nor had the time arrived for clearly
separating the two strains of thought, or for attempting
a systematic synthesis of knowledge under one or the
other head.
The men who led this weighty intellectual
movement burned with the passionate ardour of discoverers,
the fiery enthusiasm of confessors. They stood
alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves,
and wholly misunderstood by the people round them.
Italy, sunk in sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden,
exhausted with the unparalleled activity of the Renaissance,
besotted with the vices of slavery and slow corruption,
had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The
Church, terrified by the Reformation, when she chanced
to hear those strange voices sounding through ‘the
blessed mutter of the mass,’ burned the prophets.
The State, represented by absolute Spain, if it listened
to them at all, flung them into prison. To both
Church and State there was peril in the new philosophy;
for the new philosophy was the first birth-cry of
the modern genius, with all the crudity and clearness,
the brutality and uncompromising sincerity of youth.
The Church feared Nature. The State feared the
People. Nature and the People those
watchwords of modern Science and modern Liberty were
already on the lips of the philosophers.
It was a philosophy armed, errant,
exiled; a philosophy in chains and solitary; at war
with society, authority, opinion; self-sustained by
the prescience of ultimate triumph, and invincible
through the sheer force of passionate conviction.
The men of whom I speak were conscious of Pariahdom,
and eager to be martyred in the glorious cause.
’A very Proteus is the philosopher,’ says
Pomponazzo: ’seeking to penetrate the secrets
of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares; he forgets
to thirst, to hunger, to sleep, to eat; he is derided
of all men; he is held for a fool and irreligious
person; he is persecuted by inquisitors; he becomes
a gazing-stock to the common folk. These are
the gains of the philosopher; these are his guerdon.
Pomponazzo’s words were prophetic. Of the
five philosophers whom I mentioned, Vanini was burned
as an atheist, Bruno was burned, and Campanella was
imprisoned for a quarter of a century. Both Bruno
and Campanella were Dominican friars. Bruno was
persecuted by the Church, and burned for heresy.
Campanella was persecuted by both Church and State,
and was imprisoned on the double charge of sedition
and heresy. Dormitantium animarum excubitor
was the self-given title of Bruno. Nunquam tacebo
was the favourite motto of Campanella.
Giovanni Domenico Campanella was born
in the year 1568 at Stilo in Calabria, one of
the most southern townships of all Italy. In his
boyhood he showed a remarkable faculty for acquiring
and retaining knowledge, together with no small dialectical
ability. His keen interest in philosophy and
his admiration for the great Dominican doctors, Thomas
Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, induced him at the age
of fifteen to enter the order of S. Dominic, exchanging
his secular name for Tommaso. But the old
alliance between philosophy and orthodoxy, drawn up
by scholasticism and approved by the mediaeval Church,
had been succeeded by mutual hostility; and the youthful
thinker found no favour in the cloister of Cosenza,
where he now resided. The new philosophy taught
by Telesio placed itself in direct antagonism to the
pseudo-Aristotelian tenets of the theologians, and
founded its own principles upon the Interrogation
of Nature. Telesio, says Bacon, was the prince
of the novi homines, or inaugurators of modern
thought. It was natural that Campanella should
be drawn towards this great man. But the superiors
of his convent prevented his forming the acquaintance
of Telesio; and though the two men dwelt in the same
city of Cosenza, Campanella never knew the teacher
he admired so passionately. Only when the old
man died and his body was exposed in the church before
burial, did the neophyte of his philosophy approach
the bier, and pray beside it, and place poems upon
the dead.
From this time forward Campanella
became an object of suspicion to his brethren.
They perceived that the fire of the new philosophy
burned in his powerful nature with incalculable and
explosive force. He moved restlessly from place
to place, learning and discussing, drawing men towards
him by the magnetism of a noble personality, and preaching
his new gospel with perilous audacity. His papers
were seized at Bologna; and at Rome the Holy Inquisition
condemned him to perpetual incarceration on the ground
that he derived his science from the devil, that he
had written the book ‘De tribus Impostoribus,’
that he was a follower of Democritus, and that his
opposition to Aristotle savoured of gross heresy.
At the same time the Spanish Government of Naples
accused him of having set on foot a dangerous conspiracy
for overthrowing the vice-regal power and establishing
a communistic commonwealth in southern Italy.
Though nothing was proved satisfactorily against him,
Campanella was held a prisoner under the sentence
which the Inquisition had pronounced upon him.
He was, in fact, a man too dangerous, too original
in his opinions, and too bold in their enunciation,
to be at large. For twenty-five years he remained
in Neapolitan dungeons; three times during that period
he was tortured to the verge of dying; and at last
he was released, while quite an old man, at the urgent
request of the French Court. Not many years after
his liberation Campanella died. The numerous philosophical
works on metaphysics, mathematics, politics, and aesthetics
which Campanella gave to the press, were composed
during his long imprisonment. How they came to
be printed, I do not know; but it is obvious that he
cannot have been strictly debarred from writing by
his jailors. In prison, too, he made both friends
and converts. We have seen that we owe the publication
of a portion of his poems to the visit of a German
knight.
V.
The sonnets by Campanella translated
in this volume might be rearranged under four headings Philosophical;
Political; Prophetic; Personal. The philosophical
group throw light on Campanella’s relation to
his predecessors and his antagonism to the pseudo-Aristotelian
scholasticism of the middle ages. They furthermore
explain his conception of the universe as a complex
animated organism, his conviction that true knowledge
can only be gained by the interrogation of nature,
his doctrine of human life and action, and his judgment
of the age in which he lived. The political sonnets
fall into two groups those which discuss
royalty, nobility, and the sovereignty of the people,
and those which treat of the several European states.
The prophetic sonnets seem to have been suggested
by the misery and corruption of Italy, and express
the poet’s belief in the speedy triumph of right
and reason. It is here too that his astrological
opinions are most clearly manifested; for Campanella
was far from having outgrown the belief in planetary
influences. Indeed, his own metaphysical speculations,
involving the principle of immanent vitality in the
material universe, gave a new value to the dreams of
the astrologers. Among the personal sonnets may
be placed those which refer immediately to his own
sufferings in prison, to his friendships, and to the
ideal of the philosophic character.
I have thought it best, while indicating
this fourfold division, to preserve the order adopted
by Adami, since each of the reprints accessible to
modern readers both that of Orelli and that
of D’Ancona maintains the arrangement
of the editio princeps. Two sonnets of the
prophetic group I have omitted, partly because they
have no bearing on the world as it exists for us at
present, and partly because they are too studiously
obscure for profitable reproduction. As in the
case of Michael Angelo, so also in that of Campanella,
I have left the Canzoni untouched, except by
way of illustration in the notes appended to my volume.
They are important and voluminous enough to form a
separate book; nor do they seem to me so well adapted
as the sonnets for translation into English.
To give reasons for my choice of certain
readings in the case of either Michael Angelo’s
or Campanella’s text; to explain why I have sometimes
preferred a strictly literal and sometimes a more paraphrastic
rendering; or to set forth my views in detail regarding
the compromises which are necessary in translation,
and which must vary according to the exigencies of
each successive problem offered by the original, would
occupy too much space. Where I have thought it
absolutely necessary, I have referred to such points
in my notes. It is enough here to remark that
the difficulties presented to the translator by Michael
Angelo and by Campanella are of different kinds.
Both, indeed, pack their thoughts so closely that
it is not easy to reproduce them without either awkwardness
or sacrifice of matter. But while Campanella
is difficult from the abruptness of his transitions
and the violence of his phrases, Michael Angelo has
the obscurity of a writer whose thoughts exceed his
power of expression, and who complicates the verbal
form by his endeavour to project what cannot easily
be said in verse. A little patience will generally
make it clear what Campanella meant, except in cases
where the text itself is corrupt. But it may
sometimes be doubted whether Michael Angelo could himself
have done more than indicate the general drift of
his thought, or have disengaged his own conception
from the tangled skein of elliptical and ungrammatical
sentences in which he has enveloped it. The form
of Campanella’s poetry, though often grotesque,
is always clear. Michael Angelo has left too
many of his compositions in the same state as his
marbles unfinished and colossal abbozzi,
which lack the final touches to make their outlines
distinct. Under these circumstances, it can hardly
happen that the translator should succeed in reproducing
all the sharpness and vivacity of Campanella’s
style, or should wholly refrain from softening, simplifying,
and prettifying Michael Angelo in his attempt to produce
an intelligible version. In both cases he is
tempted to make his translation serve the purpose also
of a commentary, and has to exercise caution and self-control
lest he impose a sense too narrow or too definite
upon the original.
So far as this was possible, I have
adhered to the rhyming structure of my originals,
feeling that this is a point of no small moment in
translation. Yet when the choice lay between a
sacrifice of metrical exactitude and a sacrifice of
sense, I have not hesitated to prefer the former,
especially in dealing with Campanella’s quatrains.
Michael Angelo and Campanella follow
different rules in their treatment of the triplets.
Michael Angelo allows himself three rhymes, while
Campanella usually confines himself to two. My
practice has been to study in each sonnet the cadence
both of thought and diction, so as to satisfy an English
ear, accustomed to the various forms of termination
exemplified by Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and Rossetti the
sweetest, the most sublime, the least artificial,
and the most artful sonnet-writers in our language.
The short titles attached to each
sonnet are intended to help the eye, rather than to
guide the understanding of the reader. Michael
Angelo and his editors supply no arguments or mottoes
for his poems; while those printed by Adami in his
edition of Campanella are, like mine, meant obviously
to serve as signposts to the student. It may savour
of impudence to ticket and to label little masterpieces,
each one of which, like all good poems, is a microcosm
of very varied meanings. Yet I have some authority
in modern times for this impertinence; and, when it
is acknowledged that the titles merely profess to guide
the reader through a labyrinth of abstract and reflective
compositions, without attempting to supply him with
a comprehensive argument or to dogmatise concerning
the main drift of each poem, I trust that enough will
have been said by way of self-defence against the
charge of arrogance.
The sonnet prefixed as a proem to
the whole book is generally attributed to Giordano
Bruno, in whose Dialogue on the Eroici Furori
it occurs. There seems, however, good reason to
suppose that it was really written by Tansillo, who
recites it in that Dialogue. Whoever may have
been its author, it expresses in noble and impassioned
verse the sense of danger, the audacity, and the exultation
of those pioneers of modern thought, for whom philosophy
was a voyage of discovery into untravelled regions.
Its spirit is rather that of Campanella than of Michael
Angelo. Yet the elevation at which Michael Angelo
habitually lived in thought and feeling was so far
above the plains of common life, that from the summit
of his solitary watch-tower he might have followed
even such high-fliers as Bruno or as Campanella in
their Icarian excursions with the eyes of speculative
interest.
DAVOS PLATZ. No.