Thus we took our wine and were well content to sit
in the sunshine.
OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
The man of our time to class poetry as a thing very
pleasant and useful shall hardly be found. At
most the saying will suffer reprint as a quaintness,
a freak, or a paradox; and so it has proved. From
Prato, dusty little city of mid-Tuscany, and with
the impress of its Reale Orfanotrofio (nourisher,
it would thus appear, of more Humanities than one)
comes an "Opera Nova, nella quale si contengono
bellissime historie, contrasti, lamenti et frottole,
con alcune canzoni a ballo, strambotti, geloghe, farse,
capitoli e bazellette di piu eccellenti autori.
Aggiuntevi assai tramutationi, villanelle alla napolitana,
sonetti alla bergamasca et mariazi alla povana, indovinelli,
ritoboli e passerotti"; cosa, this legend
goes on to say, molto piacevole et utile.
This is, no doubt, rococo, and at best a pitiful,
catchfarthing bit of ancientry: yet it looks
back to a time when it was indeed the fact that no
choice work could be but useful, and when eyes and
ears, as conduits to the soul, had that full of consideration
we reserve for mouth and nose, purveyors to the belly.
Vasari, Giorgio, he too, bourgeois though he
were, and in so far the best of testimony, knew it
when he found Luca’s blue and white to be “molto
utile per la state.” We should say that
of a white umbrella or suit of flannels; why of earthenware
or an adroit strambotto? That marks the
cleft, the incurable gulf of difference between a people
like the Tuscans with art in their marrow, and our
present selves with our touching reliance upon a most
unseemly hunger after facts. I suppose I should
be stretching a point if I said that Samson Agonistes
was cosa molto piacevole ed utile. And
yet I name there a great poem and a weighty, whence
the general public suck, or claim to suck, no small
advantage. Is it more useful to them than Bradshaw?
I doubt. But here, in this Opera Nova so furthered,
are sixty-three little snatches of Luigi Pulci’s,
eight lines to the stave, about the idlest of make-believe
love affairs, full of such Petrarchisms as “Gl’
occhi tuoi belli son li crudel dardi,” or
“Tu m’ ai trafitto il cor! donde io moro,
Se tu, iddea, non mi dai aiutoro.”—
the merest commonplaces of gallantry: called
on what account by their contrivers molto utile?
I have urged in my Second Essay that the Tuscans were
inveterate weavers of fancy, choosing what came easiest
to hand to weave withal. I dared to see such
airy spinning in that Spanish Chapel from which Mr.
Ruskin has nearly frightened the lovers of Art; I
said that the Summa was to the painters there
as good vantage ground as any novel of Sacchetti’s.
I now say that Luigi Pulci and his kindred so treated
the love-lore which was solemn mystery to Guinicelli
