Vittoria, a Widow, with the Nuns of San Silvestro.—Returns to Ischia.—Her Poetry divisible into two classes.—Specimens of her Sonnets.—They rapidly attain celebrity throughout Italy.—Vittoria's sentiments towards her Husband.—Her unblemished Character.—Platonic Love.—The Love Poetry of the Sixteenth Century.

Vittoria became thus a widow in the thirty-sixth year of her age. She was still in the full pride of her beauty, as contemporary writers assert, and as two extant medals, struck at Milan shortly before her husband's death, attest. One of them presents the bust of Pescara on the obverse, and that of Vittoria on the reverse; the other has the same portrait of her on the obverse, and a military trophy on the reverse. The face represented is a very beautiful one, and seen thus in profile is perhaps more pleasing than the portrait, which has been spoken of in a previous chapter. She was moreover even now probably the most celebrated woman in Italy, although she had done little as yet to achieve that immense reputation which awaited her a few years later. Very few probably of her sonnets were written before the death of her husband.

But the exalted rank and prominent position of her own family, the high military grade and reputation of her husband, the wide-spread hopes and fears of which he had recently been the centre in the affair of the conspiracy, joined to the fame of her talents, learning, and virtues, which had been made the subject of enthusiastic praise by nearly all the Ischia knot of poets and wits, rendered her a very conspicuous person in the eyes of all Italy. Her husband's premature and unexpected death added a source of interest of yet another kind to her person. A young, beautiful, and very wealthy widow, gave rise to quite as many hopes, speculations, and designs in the sixteenth century as in any other.

But Vittoria's first feeling, on receiving that fatal message at Viterbo, was, that she could never again face that world, which was so ready to open its arms to her. Escape from the world, solitude, a cell, whose walls should resemble, as nearly as might be, those of the grave, since that asylum was denied to her, was her only wish. And she hastened, stunned by her great grief, to Rome, with the intention of throwing herself into a cloister. The convent of San Silvestro in Capite—so called from the supposed possession by the community of the Baptist's head—had always been a special object of veneration to the Colonna family; and there she sought a retreat. Her many friends, well knowing the desperation of her affliction, feared, that acting under the spur of its first violence, she would take the irrevocable step of pronouncing the vows. That a Vittoria Colonna should be so lost to the world was not to be thought of. So, Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras, and afterwards made a cardinal by Pope Paul III., one of the most learned men of his day, himself a poet, and an intimate friend of Vittoria, hastened to Pope Clement, whose secretary he was at the time, and obtained from him a brief addressed to the abbess and nuns of San Silvestro, enjoining them to receive into their house, and console to the best of their ability the Marchesana di Pescara, "omnibus spiritualibus et temporalibus consolationibus," but forbidding them, under pain of the greater excommunication, to permit her to take the veil, "impetu potius sui doloris, quam maturo consilio circa mutationem vestium vidualium in monasticas."

This brief is dated the 7th December, 1525.

She remained with the sisters of San Silvestro till the autumn of the following year; and would have further deferred returning into a world which the conditions of the times made less than ever tempting to her, had not her brother Ascanio, now her only remaining natural protector, taken her from the convent to Marino, in consequence of the Colonna clan being once again at war with the Pope, as partisans of the Emperor.

On the 20th of September, 1526, this ever turbulent family raised a tumult in Rome to the cry of "Imperio! Imperio! LibertÀ! LibertÀ! Colonna! Colonna!" and sacked the Vatican, and every house belonging to the Orsini;[183] the old clan hatred showing itself as usual on every pretext and opportunity.

The result was a papal decree, depriving Cardinal Colonna of his hat; and declaring confiscated all the estates of the family. Deeply grieved by all these excesses, both by the lawless violence of her kinsmen, and by the punishment incurred by them, she left Marino, and once more returned to the retirement of Ischia in the beginning of 1527. It was well for her that she had decided on not remaining in or near Rome during that fatal year. While the eternal city and its neighbourhood were exposed to the untold horrors and atrocities committed by the soldiers of the Most Catholic King, Vittoria was safe in her island home, torn indeed to the heart by the tidings which reached her of the ruin and dispersion of many valued friends, but at least tranquil and secure.

And now, if not perhaps while she was still with the nuns of San Silvestro, began her life as a poetess. She had hitherto written but little, and occasionally only. Henceforward, poetical composition seems to have made the great occupation of her life. Visconti, the latest, and by far the best editor of her works, has divided them into two portions. With two or three unimportant exceptions, of which the letter to her husband already noticed is the most considerable, they consist entirely of sonnets. The first of Signor Visconti's divisions, comprising 134 sonnets, includes those inspired almost entirely by her grief for the loss of her husband. They form a nearly uninterrupted series "In Memoriam," in which the changes are rung with infinite ingenuity on a very limited number of ideas, all turning on the glory and high qualities of him whom she had lost, and her own undiminished and hopeless misery.

"I only write to vent that inward pain,
On which my heart doth feed itself, nor wills
Aught other nourishment,"

begins the first of these elegiac sonnets; in which she goes on to disclaim any idea of increasing her husband's glory,—"non per giunger lume al mio bel sole;" which is the phrase she uses invariably to designate him. This fancy of alluding to Pescara always by the same not very happily chosen metaphor, contributes an additional element of monotony to verses still further deprived of variety by the identity of their highly artificial form.

This form, it is hardly necessary to remark, more than any other mode of the lyre, needs and exhibits the beauties of accurate finish and neat polish. Shut out, as it is, by its exceeding artificiality and difficult construction from many of the higher beauties of more spontaneous poetical utterance, the sonnet, "totus, teres atque rotundus," is nothing if not elaborated to gem-like perfection.

Yet Vittoria writes as follows:—

"Se in man prender non soglio unqua la lima
Del buon giudicio, e ricercando intorno
Con occhio disdegnoso, io non adorno
NÈ tergo la mia rozza incolta rima,

Nasce perchÈ non È mia cura prima
Procacciar di ciÒ lode, o fuggir scorno;
NÈ che dopo il mio lieto al ciel ritorno
Viva ella al mondo in piÙ onorata stima.

Ma dal foco divin, che 'l mio intelletto
Sua mercÈ infiamma, convien che escan fuore
Mal mio grado talor queste faville.

E se alcuna di loro un gentil core
Avvien che scaldi, mille volte e mille
Ringraziar debbo il mio felice errore."

Which may be thus Englished with tolerable accuracy of meaning, if not with much poetical elegance.[184]

"If in these rude and artless songs of mine
I never take the file in hand, nor try
With curious care, and nice fastidious eye,
To deck and polish each uncultured line,

'Tis that it makes small portion of my aim
To merit praise, or 'scape scorn's blighting breath;
Or that my verse, when I have welcomed death,
May live rewarded with the meed of fame.

But it must be that Heaven's own gracious gift,
Which with its breath divine inspires my soul,
Strike forth these sparks, unbidden by my will.

And should one such but haply serve to lift
One gentle heart, I thankful reach my goal,
And, faulty tho' the strain, my every wish fulfil."

Again, in another sonnet, of which the first eight lines are perhaps as favourable a specimen of a really poetical image as can be found throughout her writings, she repeats the same profession of "pouring an unpremeditated lay."

"Qual digiuno augellin, che vede ed ode
Batter l'ali alla madre intorno, quando
Gli reca il nutrimento; ond egli amando
Il cibo e quella, si rallegra e gode,

E dentro al nido suo si strugge e rode
Per desio di seguirla anch'ei volando,
E la ringrazia in tal modo cantando,
Che par ch'oltre 'l poter la lingua snode;

Tal'io qualor il caldo raggio e vivo
Del divin sole, onde nutrisco il core
PiÙ del usato lucido lampeggia,

Muovo la penna, spinta dall'amore
Interno; e senza ch'io stessa m'avveggia
Di quel ch'io dico le sue lodi scrivo."

Which in English runs pretty exactly as follows:—

"Like to a hungry nestling bird, that hears
And sees the fluttering of his mother's wings
Bearing him food, whence, loving what she brings
And her no less, a joyful mien he wears,

And struggles in the nest, and vainly stirs,
Wishful to follow her free wanderings,
And thanks her in such fashion, while he sings,
That the free voice beyond his strength appears;

So I, whene'er the warm and living glow
Of him my sun divine, that feeds my heart,
Shine's brighter than its wont, take up the pen,

Urged by the force of my deep love; and so
Unconscious of the words unkempt by art
I write his praises o'er and o'er again."

The reader conversant with Italian poetry will have already seen enough to make him aware, that the Colonna's compositions are by no means, unkempt, unpolished, or spontaneous. The merit of them consists in the high degree, to which they are exactly the reverse of all this. They are ingenious, neat, highly studied, elegant, and elaborate. It may be true, indeed, that much thought was not expended on the subject matter; but it was not spared on the diction, versification, and form. So much so, that many of her sonnets were retouched, altered, improved, and finally left to posterity, in a form very different from that in which they were first handed round the literary world of Italy.[185] The file in truth was constantly in hand; though the nice fastidious care bestowed in dressing out with curious conceits a jejune or trite thought, which won the enthusiastic applause of her contemporaries, does not to the modern reader compensate for the absence of passion, earnestness, and reality.

Then, again, the declaration of the songstress of these would-be "wood notes wild," that they make no pretension to the meed of praise, nor care to escape contempt, nor are inspired by any hope of a life of fame after the author's death, leads us to contrast with such professions the destiny that really did,—surely not altogether unsought,—await these grief-inspired utterances of a breaking heart during the author's lifetime.

No sooner was each memory-born pang illustrated by an ingenious metaphor, or pretty simile packed neatly in its regulation case of fourteen lines with their complexity of twofold rhymes all right, than it was handed all over Italy. Copies were as eagerly sought for as the novel of the season at a nineteenth-century circulating library. Cardinals, bishops, poets, wits, diplomatists, passed them from one to another, made them the subject of their correspondence with each other, and with the fair mourner; and eagerly looked out for the next poetical bonne bouche which her undying grief and constancy to her "bel sole" should send them.

The enthusiasm created by these tuneful wailings of a young widow as lovely as inconsolable, as irreproachable as noble, learned enough to correspond with the most learned men of the day on their own subjects, and with all this a Colonna, was intense. Vittoria became speedily the most famous woman of her day, was termed by universal consent "the divine," and lived to see three editions of the grief-cries, which escaped from her "without her will."

Here is a sonnet, which was probably written at the time of her return to Ischia in 1527; when the sight of all the well-loved scenery of the home of her happy years must have brought to her mind Dante's—

"Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria!"

Vittoria looks back on the happy time as follows:—

"Oh! che tranquillo mar, oh che chiare onde
Solcava giÀ la mia spalmata barca,
Di ricca e nobil merce adorna e carca,
Con l'aer puro, e con l'aure seconde,

Il ciel, ch'ora i bei vaghi lumi asconde
Porgea serena luce e d'ombra scarca;
Ahi! quanto ha da temer chi lieto varca!
ChÈ non sempre al principio il fin risponde.

Ecco l'empia e volubile fortuna
Scoperse poi l'irata iniqua fronte,
Dal cui furor sÌ gran procella insorge.

Venti, pioggia, saette insieme aduna,
E fiere intorno a divorarmi pronte;
Ma l'alma ancor la fida Stella scorge."

In English, thus:—

"On what smooth seas, on what clear waves did sail
My fresh careenÈd bark! what costly freight
Of noble merchandise adorn'd its state!
How pure the breeze, how favouring the gale!

And Heaven, which now its beauteous rays doth veil,
Shone then serene and shadowless. But fate
For the too happy voyager lies in wait.
Oft fair beginnings in their endings fail.

And now doth impious changeful fortune bare
Her angry ruthless brow, whose threat'ning power
Rouses the tempest, and lets loose its war!

But though rains, winds, and lightnings fill the air,
And wild beasts seek to rend me and devour,
Still shines o'er my true soul its faithful star."

Bearing in mind what we have seen of Pescara, it would seem evident, that some monstrous illusion with respect to him must have obscured Vittoria's mind and judgment. It might have been expected that she would have been found attributing to him high and noble qualities, which existed only in her own imagination. But it is remarkable that, though in general terms she speaks of him as all that was noblest and greatest, yet in describing his merits, she confines herself to the few which he really had. This highly cultured, devout, thoughtful, intellectual woman, seems really to have believed, that a mercenary swordsman's calling was the noblest occupation earth could offer, and the successful following of it the best preparation and surest title to immortal happiness hereafter.

The following sonnet is one of many expressing the same sentiments.

"Alle Vittorie tue, mio lume eterno,
Non diede il tempo o la stagion favore;
La spada, la virtÙ, l'invitto core
Fur li ministri tuoi la state e' verno.

Col prudente occhio, e col saggio governo
L'altrui forze spezzasti in si brev'ore,
Che 'l modo all'alte imprese accrebbe onore
Non men che l'opre al tuo valore interno.

Non tardaro il tuo corso animi altieri,
O fiumi, o monti; e le maggior cittadi
Per cortesia od ardir rimaser vinte.

Salisti al mondo i piÙ pregiati gradi;
Or godi in ciel d'altri trionfi e veri,
D'altre frondi le tempie ornate e cinte."

Which may be Englished as follows:—

"To thy great victories, my eternal light,
Nor time, nor seasons, lent their favouring aid;
Thy sword, thy might, thy courage undismay'd,
Summer and winter serv'd thy will aright.

By thy wise governance and eagle sight,
Thou didst so rout the foe with headlong speed,
The manner of the doing crown'd the deed,
No less than did the deed display thy might.

Mountains and streams, and haughty souls in vain
Would check thy course. By force of courtesy
Or valour vanquish'd, cities of name were won.

Earth's highest honours did thy worth attain;
Now truer triumphs Heaven reserves for thee,
And nobler garlands do thy temples crown."

Often her wishes for death are checked by the consideration, that haply her virtue may not suffice to enable her to rejoin her husband in the mansions of the blest. Take the following example:—

"Quando del suo tormento il cor si duole
Si ch'io bramo il mio fin, timor m'assale,
E dice; il morir tosto a che ti vale
Si forse lungi vai dal tuo bel sole?

Da questa fredda tema nascer suole
Un caldo ardir, che pon d'intorno l'ale
All alma; onde disgombra il mio mortale
Quanto ella puÒ, da quel ch e 'l mondo vuole.

CosÌ lo spirto mio s'asconde e copre
Qui dal piacer uman, non giÀ per fama
O van grido, o pregiar troppo se stesso;

Ma sente 'l lume suo, che ognor lo chiama,
E vede il volto, ovunque mira, impresso,
Che gli misura i passi e scorge l'opre."

Thus done into English:—

"When of its pangs my heart doth sore complain,
So that I long to die, fear falls on me,
And saith, what boots such early death to thee,
If far from thy bright sun thou should'st remain.

Then oft from this cold fear is born again
A fervent boldness, which doth presently
Lend my soul wings, so that mortality
Strives to put off its worldly wishes vain.

For this, my spirit here herself enfolds,
And hides from human joys; and not for fame,
Nor empty praise, nor overblown conceit;

But that she hears her sun still call her name,
And still, where'er she looks, his face doth meet,
Who measures all her steps, and all her deeds beholds."

A similar cast of thought, both as regards her own disgust of life and the halo of sanctity, which by some mysterious process of mind she was able to throw around her husband's memory, is found again in this, the last of the sonnets, selected to illustrate this phase of our poetess's mind, and exemplify the first division of her writings.

"Cara union, che in si mirabil modo
Fosti ordinata dal signor del cielo,
Che lo spirto divino, e l'uman velo
LegÒ con dolce ed amoroso nodo,

Io, benchi lui di si bell'opra lodo,
Pur cerco, e ad altri il mio pensier non celo,
Sciorre il tuo laccio; ni piÙ a caldo o gelo
Serbarti; poi che qui di te non godo.

Che l'alma chiusa in questo carcer rio
Come nemico l'odia; onde smarrita
Ne vive qui, nÈ vola ove desia.

Quando sarÀ con suo gran sole unita,
Felice giorno! allor contenta fia;
Che sol nel viver suo conobbe vita."

Of which the subjoined rendering, prosaic and crabbed as it is, is perhaps hardly more so than the original.

"Sweet bond, that wast ordain'd so wondrous well
By the Almighty ruler of the sky,
Who did unite in one sweet loving tie
The godlike spirit and its fleshy shell,

I, while I praise his loving work, yet try—
Nor wish my thought from others to withhold—
To loose thy knot; nor more, through heat or cold,
Preserve thee, since in thee no joy have I.

Therefore my soul, shut in this dungeon stern,
Detests it as a foe; whence, all astray,
She lives not here, nor flies where she would go.

When to her glorious sun she shall return,
Ah! then content shall come with that blest day,
For she, but while he liv'd, a sense of life could know."

In considering the collection of 117 sonnets, from which the above specimens have been selected, and which were probably the product of about seven or eight years, from 1526 to 1533–4 (in one she laments that the seventh year from her husband's death should have brought with it no alleviation of her grief); the most interesting question that suggests itself, is,—whether we are to suppose the sentiments expressed in them to be genuine outpourings of the heart, or rather to consider them all as part of the professional equipment of a poet, earnest only in the work of achieving a high and brilliant poetical reputation? The question is a prominent one, as regards the concrete notion to be formed of the sixteenth-century woman, Vittoria Colonna; and is not without interest as bearing on the great subject of woman's nature.

Vittoria's moral conduct, both as a wife and as a widow, was wholly irreproachable. A mass of concurrent contemporary testimony seems to leave no doubt whatever on this point. More than one of the poets of her day professed themselves her ardent admirers, devoted slaves, and despairing lovers, according to the most approved poetical and Platonic fashion of the time; and she received their inflated bombast not unpleased with the incense, and answered them with other bombast, all en rÈgle and in character. The "carte de tendre" was then laid down on the Platonic projection; and the sixteenth century fashion in this respect was made a convenient screen, for those to whom a screen was needful, quite as frequently as the less classical whimsies of a later period. But Platonic love to Vittoria was merely an occasion for indulging in the spiritualistic pedantries, by which the classicists of that day sought to link the infant metaphysical speculations then beginning to grow out of questions of church doctrine, with the ever-interesting subject of romantic love.

A recent French writer,[186] having translated into prose Vittoria's poetical epistle to her husband, adds that she has been "obliged to veil and soften certain passages which might damage the writer's poetical character in the eyes of her fair readers, by exhibiting her as more woman than poet in the ardent and 'positive' manner, in which she speaks of her love." Never was there a more calumnious insinuation. It is true indeed that the Frenchwoman omits, or slurs over some passages of the original, but as they are wholly void of the shadow of offence, it can only be supposed that the translator did not understand the meaning of them.

There is no word in Vittoria's poetry which can lead to any other conclusion on this point, than that she was, in her position and social rank, an example, rare at that period, not only of perfect regularity of conduct, but of great purity and considerable elevation of mind. Such other indications as we have of her moral nature are all favourable. We find her, uninfluenced by the bitter hereditary hatreds of her family, striving to act as peacemaker between hostile factions, and weeping over the mischiefs occasioned by their struggles. We find her the constant correspondent and valued friend of almost every good and great man of her day. And if her scheme of moral doctrine, as gatherable from that portion of her poems which we have not yet examined, be narrow,—as how should it be otherwise,—yet it is expressive of a mind habitually under the influence of virtuous aspiration, and is more humanising in its tendencies, than that generally prevalent around her.

Such was Vittoria Colonna. It has been seen what her husband Pescara was. And the question arises,—how far can it be imagined possible that she should not only have lavished on him to the last while living, all the treasures of an almost idolatrous affection; not only have looked back on his memory after his death with fondness and charitable, even blindly charitable, indulgence; but should absolutely have so canonised him in her imagination as to have doubted of her own fitness to consort hereafter with a soul so holy! It may be said, that Vittoria did not know her husband as we know him; that the few years they had passed together had no doubt shown her only the better phases of his character. But she knew that he had at least doubted whether he should not be false to his sovereign, and had been most infamously so to his accomplices or dupes. She knew at least all that Giovio's narrative could tell her; for the bishop presented it to her, and received a sonnet in return.

But it is one of the most beautiful properties of woman's nature, some men say, that their love has power to blind their judgment. Novelists and poets are fond of representing women whose affections remain unalterably fixed on their object, despite the manifest unworthiness of it; and set such examples before us, as something high, noble, admirable, "beautiful;" to the considerable demoralisation of their confiding students of either sex. There is a tendency in woman to refuse at all risks the dethroning of the sovereign she has placed on her heart's throne. The pain of deposing him is so great, that she is tempted to abase her own soul to escape it; for it is only at that cost that it can be escaped. And the spectacle of a fine nature "dragged down to sympathise with clay," is not "beautiful," but exceedingly the reverse. Men do not usually set forth as worthy of admiration—though a certain school of writers do even this, in the trash talked of love at first sight—that kind of love between the sexes, which arises from causes wholly independent of the higher part of our nature. Yet it is that love alone which can survive esteem. And it is highly important to the destinies of woman, that she should understand and be thoroughly persuaded, that she cannot love that which does not merit love, without degrading her own nature; that under whatsoever circumstances love should cease when respect, approbation, and esteem have come to an end; and that those who find poetry and beauty in the love which no moral change in its object can kill, are simply teaching her to attribute a fatally debasing supremacy to those lower instincts of our nature, on whose due subordination to the diviner portion of our being all nobleness, all moral purity and spiritual progress depends.

Vittoria Colonna was not one whose intellectual and moral self had thus abdicated its sceptre. The texture of her mind and its habits of thought forbid the supposition; and, bearing this in mind, it becomes wholly impossible to accept the glorification of her "bel sole," which makes the staple of the first half of her poems, as the sincere expression of genuine feeling and opinion.

She was probably about as much in earnest as was her great model and master, Petrarch, in his adoration of Laura. The poetical mode of the day was almost exclusively Petrarchist; and the abounding Castalian fount of that half century in "the land of song" played from its thousand jets little else than Petrarch and water in different degrees of dilution. Vittoria has no claim to be excepted from the "servum pecus," though her imitation has more of self-derived vigour to support it. And this assumption of a mighty, undying, exalted and hopeless passion, was a necessary part of the poet's professional appurtenances. Where could a young and beautiful widow, of unblemished conduct, who had no intention of changing her condition, and no desire to risk misconstruction by the world, find this needful part of her outfit as a poet, so unobjectionably as in the memory of her husband, sanctified and exalted by the imagination to the point proper for the purpose.

For want of a deeper spiritual insight, and a larger comprehension of the finer affections of the human heart and the manifestations of them, with the Italian poets of the "rÉnaissance," love-poetry was little else than the expression of passion in the most restricted sense of the term. But they were often desirous of elevating, purifying, and spiritualising their theme. And how was this to be accomplished? The gratification of passion, such as they painted, would, they felt, have led them quite in a different direction from that they were seeking. A hopeless passion therefore, one whose wishes the reader was perfectly to understand were never destined to be gratified—better still, one by the nature of things impossible to be gratified—this was the contrivance by which love was to be poetised and moralised.

The passion-poetry, which addressed itself to the memory of one no more, met the requirements of the case exactly; and Vittoria's ten years despair and lamentations, her apotheosis of the late cavalry captain, and longing to rejoin him, must be regarded as poetical properties brought out for use, when she sat down to make poetry for the perfectly self-conscious, though very laudable purpose of acquiring for herself a poet's reputation.

But it must not be supposed that anything in the nature of hypocrisy was involved in the assumption of the poetical rÔle of inconsolable widow. Everybody understood that the poetess was only making poetry, and saying the usual and proper things for that purpose. She was no more attempting to impose on anybody than was a poet when on entering some "academia" he termed himself TyrtÆus or Lycidas, instead of the name inherited from his father.

And from this prevailing absence of all real and genuine feeling, arises the utter coldness and shallow insipidity of the poets of that time and school. Literature has probably few more unreadable departments than the productions of the Petrarchists of the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Vittoria, when she began to write on religious subjects, was more in earnest; and the result, as we shall see, is accordingly improved.