At the meetings of a famous
academy in Milan, they placed in the chair a child just able to talk;
a question was proposed, and the answer of the child, whatever it was,
was held by one side to solve the problem, and the debates, _pro_ and
_con_, followed upon this point. Other academies in other cities had
other follies; but whatever the absurdity, it was encouraged alike by
Church and State, and honored by all the great world. The governments
of Italy in that day, whether lay or clerical, liked nothing so well
as to have the intellectual life of the nation squandered in the
trivialities of the academies--in their debates about nothing, their
odes and madrigals and masks and sonnets; and the greatest politeness
you could show a stranger was to invite him to a sitting of your
academy; to be furnished with a letter to the academy in the next city
was the highest favor you could ask for yourself.
In literature, the humorous Bernesque school had passed; Tasso had
long been dead; and the Neapolitan Marini, called the Corrupter of
Italian poetry, ruled from his grave the taste of the time. This
taste was so bad as to require a very desperate remedy, and it was
professedly to counteract it that the Academy of the Arcadians had
arisen.
The epoch was favorable, and, as Emiliani-Giudici (whom we shall
follow for the present) teaches, in his History of Italian Literature,
the idea of Crescimbeni spread electrically throughout Italy.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25