The Yellow Book Volume I Part 23

No length of banishment did e'er remove My heart from you, nor if by Fortune sped I roam the azure waters, or the Red, E'er with the body shall the spirit rove: If by each drop of every wave we clove, Or by Sun's light or Moon's encompa.s.sed, Another Venus were engendered, And each were pregnant with another Love: And thus new shapes of Love where'er we went Started to life at every stroke of oar, And each were cradled in an amorous thought; Not more than now this spirit should adore; That none the less doth constantly lament It cannot wors.h.i.+p as it would and ought.

Before long, however, the pangs of separation overcome this elation of spirit, while he is not yet afraid of being forgotten:--

III

Like lightning s.h.i.+ning forth from east to west, Hurled are the happy hours from morn to night, And leave the spirit steeped in undelight In like proportion as themselves were blest.

Slow move sad hours, by thousand curbs opprest, Wherewith the churlish Fates delay their flight; Those, impulses of Mercury incite, These lag at the Saturnian star's behest.

While thou wert near, ere separation's grief Smote me, like steeds contending in the race, My days and nights with equal speed did run: Now broken either wheel, not swift the pace Of summer's night though summer's moon be brief; Or wintry days for brevity of sun.

IV

Now that the Sun hath borne with him the day, And haled dark Night from prison subterrene, Come forth, fair Moon, and, robed in light serene, With thy own loveliness the world array.

Heaven's spheres, slow wheeled on their majestic way, Invoke as they revolve thy orb unseen, And all the pageant of the starry scene, Wronged by thy absence, chides at thy delay.

Shades even as splendours, earth and heaven both Smile at the apparition of thy face, And my own gloom no longer seems so loth; Yet, while my eye regards thee, thought doth trace Another's image; if in vows be troth, I am not yet estranged from Love's embrace.

Continual separation, however, and the absence of any marked token that he is borne in memory, necessarily prey more and more on the sensitive spirit of the poet. During the first part, her husband's tenure of office as Governor of the Milanese, the Marchioness, as already mentioned, took up her residence in the island of Ischia, where she received her adorer's eloquent aspirations for her welfare--heartfelt, but so worded as to convey a reproach:

V

That this fair isle with all delight abound, Clad be it ever in sky's smile serene, No thundering billow boom from deeps marine, And calm with Neptune and his folk be found.

Fast may all winds by aeolus be bound, Save faintest breath of lispings Zephyrene; And be the odorous earth with glowing green Of gladsome herbs, bright flowers, quaint foliage crowned.

All ire, all tempest, all misfortune be Heaped on my head, lest aught thy pleasure stain, Nor this disturbed by any thought of me, So scourged with ills' innumerable train, New grief new tear begetteth not, as sea Chafes not the more for deluge of the rain.

The "quaint foliage" is in the original "Arab leaves," _arabe frondi_, an interesting proof of the cultivation of exotic plants at the period.

The lady rejoins her husband at Milan, and Tansillo, landing on the Campanian coast, lately devastated by earthquakes and eruptions, finds everywhere the image of his own bosom, and rejoices at the opportunity which yawning rifts and chasms of earth afford for an appeal to the infernal powers:--

VI

Wild precipice and earthquake-riven wall; Bare jagged lava naked to the sky; Whence densely struggles up and slow floats by Heaven's murky shroud of smoke funereal; Horror whereby the silent groves enthral; Black weedy pit and rifted cavity; Bleak loneliness whose drear sterility Doth prowling creatures of the wild appal: Like one distraught who doth his woe deplore, Bereft of sense by thousand miseries, As pa.s.sion prompts, companioned or alone; Your desert so I rove; if as before Heaven deaf continue, through these crevices, My cry shall pierce to the Avernian throne.

The poet's melancholy deepens, and he enters upon the stage of dismal and hopeless resignation to the inevitable:

VII

As one who on uneasy couch bewails Besetting sickness and Time's tardy course, Proving if drug, or gem, or charm have force To conquer the dire evil that a.s.sails: But when at last no remedy prevails, And bankrupt Art stands empty of resource, Beholds Death in the face, and scorns recourse To skill whose impotence in nought avails.

So I, who long have borne in trust unspent That distance, indignation, reason, strife With Fate would heal my malady, repent, Frustrate all hopes wherewith my soul was rife, And yield unto my destiny, content To languish for the little left of life.

A lower depth still has to be reached ere the period of salutary and defiant reaction:--

VIII

So mightily abound the hosts of Pain, Whom sentries of my bosom Love hath made, No s.p.a.ce is left to enter or evade, And inwardly expire sighs born in vain, If any pleasure mingle with the train, By the first glimpse of my poor heart dismayed, Instant he dies, or else, in bondage stayed, Pines languis.h.i.+ng, or flies that drear domain.

Pale semblances of terror keep the keys, Of frowning portals they for none displace Save messengers of novel miseries: All thoughts they scare that wear a gladsome face; And, were they anything but Miseries, Themselves would hasten from the gloomy place.

Slighted love easily pa.s.ses from rejection into rebellion, and we shall see that such was the case with Tansillo. The following sonnet denotes an intermediate stage, when resignation is almost renunciation, but has not yet become revolt:--

IX

Cease thy accustomed strain, my mournful lute; New music find, fit for my lot forlorn; Henceforth be Wrath and Grief resounded, torn The strings that anciently did Love salute, Not on my own weak wing irresolute But on Love's plumes I trusted to be borne, Chanting him far as that remotest bourne Whence strength Herculean reft Hesperian fruit.

To such ambition was my spirit wrought By gracious guerdon Love came offering When free in air my thought was bold to range: But otherwhere now dwells another's thought, And Wrath has plucked Love's feather from my wing, And hope, style, theme, I all alike must change.

This, however, is not a point at which continuance is possible, the mind must go either backward or forward. The lover for a time persuades himself that he has broken his mistress's yoke, and that his infatuation is entirely a thing of the past. But the poet, like the lady, protests too much:--

X

If Love was miser of my liberty, Lo, Scorn is bounteous and benevolent, Such scope permitting, that, my fetter rent, Not lengthened by my hand, I wander free.

The eyes that yielded tears continually Have now with Lethe's drops my fire besprent, And more behold, Illusion's glamour spent, Than fabled Argus with his century.

The tyrant of my spirit, left forlorn As va.s.sal thoughts forsake him, doth remove, And back unto her throne is Reason borne, And I my metamorphosis approve, And, old strains tuning to new keys, of Scorn Will sing as anciently I sang of Love.

Several solutions of this situation are conceivable. Tansillo's is that which was perhaps that most likely in the case of an emotional nature, where the feelings are more powerful than the will. He simply surrenders at discretion, retracts everything disparaging that he has said of the lady (taking care, however, not to burn the peccant verses, which are much too good to be lightly parted with), and professes himself her humble slave upon her own terms:--

XI

All bitter words I spoke of you while yet My heart was sore, and every virgin scroll Blackened with ire, now past from my control, These would I now recall; for 'tis most fit My style should change, now Reason doth reknit, Ties Pa.s.sion sundered, and again make whole; Be then Oblivion's prey whate'er my soul Hath wrongly of thee thought, spoke, sung, or writ.

Not, Lady, that impeachment of thy fame With tongue or pen I ever did design; But that, if unto these shall reach my name, Ages to come may study in my line How year by year more streamed and towered my flame, And how I living was and dying thine.

There is no reason to doubt the perfect sincerity of these lines at the period of their composition; but Tansillo's mistress had apparently resolved that his attachment should not henceforth have the diet even of a chameleon; and it is small wonder to find him shortly afterwards a tender husband and father, lamenting the death of an infant son in strains of extreme pathos, and instructing his wife on certain details of domestic economy in which she might have been supposed to be better versed than himself. His marriage took place in 1550, and in one of his sonnets he says that his unhappy attachment had endured sixteen years, which, allowing for a decent interval between the Romeo and the Benedict, would date its commencement at 1532 or 1533.

Maria d'Aragona died on November 9, 1568, and Tansillo, whose services had been rewarded by a judicial appointment in the kingdom of Naples, followed her to the tomb on December 1. If her death is really the subject of the two poems in terza rima which appear to deplore it, he certainly lost no time in bewailing her, but the interval is so brief, and the poems are so weak, that they may have been composed on some other occasion. With respect to the latter consideration, however, it must be remembered that he was himself, in all probability, suffering from disabling sickness, having made his will on November 29. It is also worthy of note that the first sonnets composed by Petrarch upon the death of Laura are in general much inferior in depth of tenderness to those written years after the event. "In Memoriam" is another proof that the adequate poetical expression of grief, unlike that of life, requires time and study. Tansillo, then, may not have been so completely disillusioned as his editor thinks. If the poems do not relate to Maria d'Aragona, we have no clue to the ultimate nature of his feelings towards her.

A generally fair estimate of Tansillo's rank as a poet is given in Ginguene's "History of Italian Literature," vol. ix., pp. 340-343. It can scarcely be admitted that his boldness and fertility of imagination transported him beyond the limits of lyric poetry--for this is hardly possible--but it is true that they sometimes transcended the limits of good taste, and that the germs may be found in him of the extravagance which so disfigured Italian poetry in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, he has the inestimable advantage over most Italian poets of his day of writing of genuine pa.s.sion from genuine experience. Hence a truth and vigour preferable even to the exquisite elegance of his countryman, Angelo di Costanzo, and much more so to the mere amatory exercises of other contemporaries. After Michael Angelo he stands farther aloof than any contemporary from Petrarch, a merit in an age when the study of Petrarch had degenerated into slavish imitation. His faults as a lyrist are absent from his didactic poems, which are models of taste and elegance. His one unpardonable sin is want of patriotism; he is the dependant and panegyrist of the foreign conqueror, and seems equally unconscious of the past glories, the actual degradation, or the prospective regeneration of Italy. Born a Spanish subject, his ideal of loyalty was entirely misplaced, and he must not be severely censured for what he could hardly avoid. But Italy lost a Tyrtaeus in him.

A Book Plate for J. L. Propert, Esq.

By Aubrey Beardsley

A Book Plate for Major-General Gosset By R. Anning Bell

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The Fool's Hour

The First Act of a Comedy

By John Oliver Hobbes and George Moore

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