Part 13

There is, however, one record belonging to this happy time which must not be forgotten. It was at Padua, _Padova la dotta_, as she has been in all ages and is still called, Padua the learned, in the year 1565. Guarini was then in his twenty-eighth year, and had been a professor at Ferrara for the last eight years. Probably it was due to the circumstance that his friend and fellow-townsman, Torquato Tasso, was then pursuing his studies at Padua, that the young Ferrarese professor turned his steps in that direction, bound "on a long vacation ramble." Tasso was only one-and-twenty at the time; but he was already a member of the famous Paduan Academy of the "Etherials," which Guarini was not. And we may readily fancy the pride and pleasure with which the younger man, doing the honours of the place to his learned friend, procured him to be elected a member of the "Etherials." Guarini (so called _nel secolo_--in the world), was _Il Costante_--the "Constant One" among the "Etherials." Scipio Gonzaga, who became subsequently the famous Cardinal, spoke an oration of welcome to him on his election. Then what congratulations, what anticipations of fame, what loving protestations of eternal friendship, what naive acceptance of the importance and serious value of their Etherial Academic play, as the two youths strolling at the evening hour among the crowds of gravely clad but in no wise gravely speaking students who thronged the colonnades in deep shadow under their low-browed arches, sally forth from beneath them as the sun nears the west, on to the vast open space which lies around the great church of St. Antony! Advancing in close talk they come up to Donatello's superb equestrian statue of the Venetian General Gattamelata, and lean awhile against the tall pedestal, finishing their chat before entering the church for the evening prayer.

The "Etherials" of Padua constituted one of the innumerable "Academies" which existed at that day and for a couple of centuries subsequently in every one of the hundred cities of Italy. The "Arcadian" craze was the generating cause of all of them. All the members were "shepherds;" all assumed a fancy name on becoming a member, by which they were known in literary circles; and every Academy printed all the rhymes its members strung together!

Those must have been pleasant days in old Padua, before the young Professor returned to his work in the neighbouring university of Ferrara. The two young men were then, and for some time afterwards, loving friends; for they had not yet become rival poets.

At the end of those ten years of university life he may be said to have entered on a new existence--to have begun life afresh--so entirely dis-severed was his old life from the new that then opened on him. Alphonso II., who had succeeded his father, Hercules II., as Duke of Ferrara in 1559, "called him to the court" in 1567, and he began life as a courtier, or a "servant" of the Duke, in the language of the country and time.

Well, in 1567 he entered into the service of the Duke, his sovereign, and never had another happy or contented hour!

The first service on which the Duke employed him, and for the performance of which he seems specially to have taken him from his professional chair, was an embassy to Venice, to congratulate the new Doge, Pietro Loredano, on his elevation to the ducal throne, to which he had been elected on the previous 19th of June. On this occasion the Professor was created Cavaliere, a title to which his landed estate of Guarina, so called from the ancestor on whom it had been originally bestowed by a former duke, fairly entitled him.

Shortly afterwards he was sent as ambassador to the court of Turin; and then to that of the Emperor Maximilian at Innspruck. Then he was twice sent to Poland; the first time on the occasion of the election of Henry the Third of France to the throne of that kingdom; and the second time when Henry quitted it to ascend that of France on the death of his brother Charles IX. The object of this second embassy was to intrigue for the election to the Polish crown of Alphonso. But, as it is hardly necessary to say, his mission was unsuccessful.

It seems, too, to have been well-nigh fatal to the ambassador. There is extant a letter written from Warsaw to his wife, which gives a curious and interesting account of the sufferings he endured on the journey and at the place of his destination. He tells his wife not to be discontented that his silence has been so long, but to be thankful that it was not eternal, as it was very near being! "I started, as you know, more in the fashion of a courier than of an ambassador. And that would have been more tolerable if bodily fatigue had been all. But the same hand that had to flog the horses by day, had to hold the pen by night. Nature could not bear up against this double labour of body and mind; especially after I had travelled by Serravelles and Ampez,[48] which is more disagreeable and difficult than I can tell you, from the ruggedness no less of the country than of the people, from the scarcity of horses, the miserable mode of living, and the want of every necessary. So much so that on reaching Hala[49] I had a violent fever. I embarked, however, for Vienna notwithstanding. What with fever, discouragement, an intense thirst, scarcity of remedies and of medical assistance, bad lodging, generally far to seek,[50] and often infected with disease, food disgusting, even to persons in health, bed where you are smothered in feathers, in a word, none of the necessaries or comforts of life! I leave you to imagine what I have suffered. The evil increased; my strength grew less. I lost my appetite for everything save wine. In a word, little hope remained to me of life, and that little was odious to me. There is on the Danube, which I was navigating, a vast whirlpool, so rapid that if the boatmen did not avail themselves of the assistance of a great number of men belonging to the locality, strong and powerful and well acquainted with the danger, who are there constantly for the purpose, and who struggle with their oars against the rapacious gulf, there is not a vessel in that great river which would not be engulfed! The place is worthy of the name of "the Door of Death," which with a notoriety of evil fame it has gained for itself. There is no passenger so bold as not to pass that bit of the course of the river on foot; for the thing is truly formidable and terrible. But I was so overcome by illness, that having lost all sense of danger or desire to live, I did not care to leave the boat, but remained in it, with those strong men, I hardly know whether to say stupidly or intrepidly--but I will say intrepidly, since at one point, where I was within an ace of destruction, I felt no fear."

He goes on to tell how at Vienna a physician treated him amiss, and made him worse; how every kind of consideration, and his own desire to save his life, counselled him to delay there; but how the honour, the responsibility of the embassy wholly on his shoulders, his duty to his sovereign prevailed to drive him onwards. He feared, too, lest it should be supposed at Warsaw that he preferred his life to the business on which he came, an accusation which might have been made use of by suspicious and malignant adversaries to deprive him of all the credit of his labours, and "to snatch from my Prince the crown which we are striving to place on his head. It is impossible to imagine," he continues, "what I suffered in that journey of more than six hundred miles from Vienna to Warsaw, dragged rather than carried in carts, broken and knocked to pieces. I wonder that I am still alive! The obstinate fever, the want of rest, of food, and of medicine, the excessive cold, the infinite hardships, the uninhabited deserts, were killing me. More often than not it was a much lesser evil to crouch by night in the cart, which dislocated my bones by day, rather than to be suffocated in the foulness of those dens, or stables rather, where the dogs and cats, the cocks and hens, and the geese, the pigs and the calves, and sometimes the children, kept me waiting."

He proceeds to tell how the country was overrun, in that time of interregnum, by lawless bands of Cossacks; how he was obliged to travel with a strong escort, but nevertheless was obliged several times to deviate from the direct road to avoid the Cossacks, but on two occasions had very narrow escapes from falling into their hands. When he reached Warsaw at last, more dead than alive, the only improvement of his position was that he was stationary instead of in motion. "The cart no more lacerates my limbs!" But there was no rest to be got. "The place, the season, the food, the drink, the water, the servants, the medicines, the doctors, mental trouble, and a thousand other ills make up my torment. Figure to yourself all the kingdom lodged in one little town, and my room in the midst of it! There is no place from the top to the bottom, on the right or on the left, by day or by night, that is not full of tumult and noise. There is no special time here destined for business. Negotiation is going on always, because drinking is going on always; and business is dry work without wine. When business is over, visits begin; and when these are at an end, drums, trumpets, bombs, uproar, cries, quarrels, fighting, split one's head in a manner piteous to think of. Ah! if I suffered all this labour and this torment for the love and the glory of God, I should be a martyr!" (one thinks of Wolsey!) "But is he not worthy of the name who serves without hope of recompense?"

He concludes his letter, bidding his wife not to weep for him, but to live and care for her children, in a manner which indicates that he had even then but little hope of returning alive.

We are nevertheless assured by his biographers that he acquitted himself upon all these occasions in such sort as to give satisfaction to his sovereign and to acquire for himself the reputation of an upright and able minister. The Italian practice of entrusting embassies especially to men of letters, which we first had occasion to note when tracing the vicissitudes of the life of Dante in the thirteenth century, which we saw subsequently exemplified in the cases of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, and which might be further exemplified in the persons of many other Italian scholars and men of letters, still, as we see, prevailed in the sixteenth century, and continued to do so for some little time longer.

But in no one instance, of all those I have mentioned, does the poet thus employed in functions which in other lands and other times have usually led to honours and abundant recognition of a more solid kind, appear to have reaped any advantage in return for the service performed, or to have been otherwise than dissatisfied and discontented with the treatment accorded to him.

It would have been very interesting to learn somewhat of the impression made upon an Italian scholar of the sixteenth century by the places visited, and persons with whom he must have come in contact in those transalpine lands, which were then so far off, so contrasted in all respects with the home scenes among which his life had been passed in the low-lying, fat, and fertile valley of the Po. Of all this his various biographers and contemporaries tell us no word! But there is a volume of his letters, a little square quarto volume, now somewhat rare, printed at Venice in the year 1595.[51] These letters have somewhat unaccountably not been included in any of the editions of his works, and they are but little known. But turning to this little volume, and looking over the dates of the letters (many of them, however, are undated), I found three written "Di Spruch," and eagerly turned to them, thinking that I should certainly find there what I was seeking. The letters belong to a later period of Guarini's life, having been written in 1592, when he was again sent on an embassy to the German Emperor. This circumstance, however, is of no importance as regards the purpose for which I wanted the letters. I was disappointed. But I must nevertheless give one of these letters, not wantonly to compel my reader to share my disappointment, but because it is a curiosity in its way. The person to whom he writes is a lady, the Contessa Pia di Sala, with whom he was evidently intimate. He is at Innspruck at the Court of the Emperor Maximilian. The lady is at Mantua, and this is what he writes to her:

"Di Spruch, Nov. 29, 1592.

"The letter of your Illustrious Ladyship, together with which you send me that of your most excellent brother, written at the end of August, reached me yesterday, at first to my very great anger at having been for so long a time deprived of so precious a thing, while I appeared in fault towards so distinguished a lady; but finally to my very great good fortune. For if a letter written by the most lovely flame[52] in the world had arrived, while the skies were burning, what would have become of me, when, now that winter is beginning, I can scarcely prevent myself from falling into ashes? And in truth, when I think that those so courteous thoughts come from the mind which informs so lovely a person, that those characters have been traced by a hand of such excellent beauty, I am all ablaze, no less than if the paper were fire, the words flames, and all the syllables sparks. But God grant that, while I am set on fire by the letter of your Illustrious Ladyship, you may not be inflamed by anger against me, from thinking that the terms in which I write are too bold. Have no such doubt, my honoured mistress! I want nothing from the flaming of my letter, but to have made by the light of it more vivid and more brilliant in you, the natural purity of your beautiful face, even as it seems to me that I can see it at this distance. My love is nothing else save honour; my flame is reverence; my fire is ardent desire to serve you. And only so long will the appointment in his service, which it has pleased my Lord His Serene Highness the Duke of Mantua to give me, and on which your Illustrious Ladyship has been kind enough to congratulate me so cordially, be dear to me, as you shall know that I am fit for it, and more worthy and more ready to receive the favour of your commands, which will always be to me a most sure testimony that you esteem me, not for my own worth, as you too courteously say, but for the worth which you confer on me, since I am not worthy of such esteem for any other merit than that which comes to me from being honoured by so noble and beautiful a lady. I kiss the hand of your Illustrious Ladyship, wishing the culmination of every felicity."

Now, this letter I consider to be a very great curiosity! The other two written from the same place, one to a Signor Bulgarini at Siena, the other to a lady, the Marchesa di Grana, at Mantua, are of an entirely similar description. I turned to them in the hope of finding how Innspruck, its stupendous scenery, its court, its manners so widely different from those to which the writer and his correspondents were used, its streets, its people, impressed a sixteenth century Italian from the valley of the Po. I find instead a psychological phenomenon! The writer is a grave, austere man (Guarini was notably such), celebrated throughout Italy for his intellectual attainments, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, with a wife and family; he is amidst scenes which must, one would have thought, have impressed in the very highest degree the imagination of a poet, and must, it might have been supposed, have interested those he was writing to in an only somewhat less degree, and he writes the stuff the reader has just waded through. It is clear that this Italian sixteenth century scholar, poet and of cultivated intellect as he was, saw nothing amid the strange scenes to which a hard and irksome duty called him, which he thought worthy of being mentioned even by a passing word to his friends! Surely this is a curious trait of national character.

He remained in the service of the court for fourteen years, employed mainly, as it should seem, in a variety of embassies; an employment which seems to have left him a disappointed, soured, and embittered man. He considered that he had not been remunerated as his labour deserved, that the heavy expenses to which he had been put in his long journeys had not been satisfactorily made up to him, and that he had not been treated in any of the foreign countries to which his embassies had carried him with the respect due to his own character and to his office.

He determined therefore to leave the court and retire to Padua, a residence in which city, it being not far distant from his estate of Guarina, would offer him, he thought, a convenient opportunity of overlooking his property and restoring order to his finances, which had suffered much during his travels. This was in the year 1582, when Guarini was in the forty-fifth year of his age. It is not clear, however, that this retirement was wholly spontaneous; and the probability is that the Duke and his ambassador were equally out of humour with each other. And it is probable that the faults were not all on the side of the Duke. There is sufficient evidence that the author of the "Pastor Fido" must have been a difficult man to live with.

The old friendship of happier days with Tasso had not survived the wear and tear of life at court. It was known that they no longer saw or spoke with each other. And everybody--if not of their contemporaries, at least of subsequent writers--jumped to the conclusion that the writer of the "Aminta" and the writer of the "Pastor Fido" must be jealous of each other. Jealousy there certainly was. But some frailer and more mortal female than the Muse was the cause of it. The Abate Serassi in his life of Tasso admits that Tasso first gave offence to Guarini by a sonnet in which he endeavoured to alienate the affections of a lady from him, by representing him as a faithless and fickle lover. The lines in which Tasso attacked his brother poet are, it must be admitted, sharp enough!

Si muove e si raggira Instabil piu che arida fronde ai venti; Nulla fe, null' amor, falsi i tormenti Sono, e falso l'affeto ond' ei sospira. Insidioso amante, ama e disprezza Quasi in un punto, e trionfando spiega Di femminile spoglie empi trofei.[53]...

The attack was savage enough, it must be admitted, and well calculated to leave a lasting wound. Guarini immediately answered the cruel sonnet by another, the comparative weakness of which is undeniable.

Questi che indarno ad alta mira aspira Con altrui biasmi, e con bugiardi accenti, Vedi come in se stesso arruota i denti, Mentre contra ragion meco s'adira.

Di due fiamme si vanta, e stringe e spezza Piu volte un nodo; e con quest' arti piega (Chi 'l crederebbe!) a suo favore i Dei.[54]...

There is reason to think that the accusation of many times binding and loosing the same knot, may have hit home. The sneer about bending the gods to favour him, alludes to Tasso's favour at court, then in the ascendant, and may well have been as offensive to the Duke and the ladies of his court as to the object of his satire. Both angry poets show themselves somewhat earth-stained members of the Paduan "Etherials." But the sequel of the estrangement was all in favour of the greater bard. Tasso, in desiring a friend to show his poems in manuscript to certain friends, two or three in number, on whose opinion he set a high value, named Guarini among the number. And upon another occasion wishing to have Guarini's opinion as to the best of two proposed, methods of terminating a sonnet, and not venturing to communicate directly with him, he employed a common friend to obtain his brother-poet's criticism. Tasso had also in his dialogue entitled the "Messagero" given public testimony to Guarini's high intellectual and civil merits. But Guarini appears never to have forgiven the offence. He never once went to see Tasso in his miserable confinement in the hospital of St. Anne; nor, as has been seen, would hold any communication with him.

He must have been a stern and unforgiving man. And indeed all the available testimony represents him as having been so,--upright, honest, and honourable, but haughty, punctilious, litigious, quick to take offence, slow to forget or forgive it, and cursed with a thin-skinned _amour propre_ easily wounded and propense to credit others with the intention of wounding where no such intention existed. The remainder of the story of his life offers an almost unbroken series of testimonies to the truth of such an estimate of his character.

It was after fourteen years' service in the court of Duke Alphonso, as has been said, that he retired disgusted and weary to live in independence and nurse his estate in the neighbourhood of Padua. But the part of Cincinnatus is not for every man! It was in 1582 that he retired from the court intending to bid it and its splendours, its disappointments and its jealousies, an eternal adieu. In 1585, on an offer from the Duke to make him his secretary, he returned and put himself into harness again!

But this second attempt to submit himself to the service, to the caprices and exigencies of a master and of a court ended in a quicker and more damaging catastrophe than the first. In a diary kept by the poet's nephew, Marcantonio Guarini, under the date of July 13, 1587, we find it written that "the Cavalier Batista Guarini, Secretary of the Duke, considering that his services did not meet with sufficient consideration in proportion to his worth, released himself from that servitude." The phrase here translated "released himself" is a peculiar one--_si licenzio_--"dismissed himself." To receive _licenza_, or to be _licenziato_, is to be dismissed, or at least parted with in accordance with the will of the employer. But the phrase used by the diarist seems intended to express exactly what happened when the poet, once more discontented, took himself off from Ferrara and its Duke. He seems to have done so in a manner which gave deep and lasting offence. In a subsequent passage of the above-quoted diary we read, "the Cavaliere Batista Guarini having absented himself from Ferrara, disgusted with the Duke, betook himself to Florence, and then, by the intermedium of Guido Coccapani the agent, asked for his dismissal in form and obtained it." We happen, however, to have a letter written by this Coccapani, who seems to have been the Duke's private secretary and managing man, in which he gives his version of the matter. He was "stupefied," he says, "when he received the extravagant letter of the Cavaliere Guarini, and began to think that it would be with him as it had been with Tasso," who by that time had fallen into disgrace. There is reason to think that he left Ferrara secretly, without taking leave of the Duke, or letting anybody at court know where he had gone. He did, however, obtain his formal dismissal, as has been said, but the Duke by no means forgave him.

Though it would appear that on leaving Ferrara in this irregular manner he went in the first instance to Florence, it seems that he had had hopes given him of a comfortable position and honourable provision at Turin. He was to have been made a Counsellor of State, and entrusted with the task of remodelling the course of study at the university, with a stipend of six hundred crowns annually. But on arriving at Turin he found difficulties in the way. In fact, the angry Duke of Ferrara had used his influence with the Duke of Savoy to prevent anything being done for his contumacious Secretary of State. Guarini, extremely mortified, had to leave Turin, and betook himself to Venice.