Part 1 (2/2)

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 pa.s.sed in confinement.[9] In the descriptive catalogue of his own works, the philosopher mentions seven books of sonnets and canzoni, which he called 'Le Cantiche.'[10] 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 a.s.serts that it formed only a seventh part.[11] The ma.n.u.script 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 t.i.tle:--'Scelta d' alcune poesie 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 protuberances.[12] 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 circ.u.mstance 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 Mazzuch.e.l.li; 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 Wolfenb.u.t.tel in the north of Germany. The new edition which Orelli gave to the press at Lugano has this t.i.tle:--'Poesie Filosofiche di Tommaso Campanella pubblicate per la prima volta in Italia da Gio. Gaspare Orelli, Professore all' Universita 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 editors.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.s uncorrected. In the sonnet ent.i.tled 'A Dio'

(D'Ancona, vol. i. p. 102), for example, _bocca_ stands for _buca_ in a place where sense and rhyme alike demand the rest.i.tution 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 n.o.bleness 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 pa.s.sionate 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 antic.i.p.ated 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, Sch.e.l.ling, 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 a.n.a.lytical; 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 pa.s.sionate 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 ma.s.s,' 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d, 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 t.i.tle 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 towns.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sionately. 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 n.o.ble 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 p.r.o.nounced 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, n.o.bility, 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 friends.h.i.+ps, 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.[13] As in the case of Michael Angelo, so also in that of Campanella, I have left the Canzoni untouched, except by way of ill.u.s.tration 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 s.p.a.ce. 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.[14] 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 exact.i.tude 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 t.i.tles 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 t.i.tles 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 n.o.ble and impa.s.sioned 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. _Nov. 1877._

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