The Strife of Love in a Dream
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THE STRIFE OF LOUE IN A DREAME FRANCESCO COLONNA Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 http://archive.org/details/strifeofloveindrOOcolo Cutioc Ht'brarp. THE STRIFE OF LOVE IN A DREAM. Five hundred copies of this Edition are printed. THE STRIFE OF LOVE IN A DREAM BEING THE ELIZABETHAN VERSION OF THE FIRST BOOK OF THE H Y P N E R O T O M A C H I A OF FRANCESCO COLONNA 9 A NEW EDITION BY ANDREW LANG, M.A. LONDON PUBLISHED BY DAVID NUTT IN THE STRAND MDCCCXC CHISWICK PRESS:—C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. INTRODUCTION. IGHT or nine years ago I chanced to go into the shop of Mr. Toovey, in Picca- dilly, and began turning over the cheaper and less considered of his books. Among them I found " Hypnerotomachia. The strife of Loue in a Dreame. At London, Printed for Simon Waterson, and are to be sold at his shop, in S. Paules Churchyard, at Cheape-gate, 1592." This is the usual title, my specimen, as will be seen, varied slightly. The Bodleian copy also contains this (the 2nd) title. The book was a small thin quarto, not in good condition. It contained no name of author or translator, and the initials, R. D., of the dedication (the most in- teresting part of the work), tell us nothing. Mr. Douce conjectures that they may stand for Robert Dallyngton, the translator of " The Mirrour of Mirth, etc., from the French of Bonaventure des Periers," London, 1 583, 4to. The woodcuts were excessively debased reminiscences of those famous examples in the Aldine edition of 1499. The little book seemed an oddity, and I purchased it from Mr. Toovey for the sum of twenty shillings. I was then but an ignorant collector of the Cheap and the Odd in books, and Mr. Toovey's own attention had been given to more beautiful things than this shabby quarto. I took it home, read it, wrote a little article on it in the St. James's Gazette, and found out that the volume was imperfect. Having ex- hausted my interest in it, I carried it back to Mr. Toovey, pointed out the absence of the last five pages, and re- " turned it, in exchange for Les Memoires de la Reyne Marguerite, a Paris, chez Claude Barbin, dans la Grand' Salle du Pallais, au Signe de la Croix, m.d.c.lxi," in yellow morocco. I never made a worse bargain. The Hypneroto7nachia, imperfect as my copy was, is among the very rarest of books, and therefore among the most desirable. This particular copy, by the way, was "printed for Iohn Busbie, and to be sold at his Schoppe, at the west doore of Paules." Meanwhile M. Claude Popelin had long been lying in wait for the English version of Francesco Colonna's book. He was engaged on his ex- cellent version of the original, to which this preface owes a boundless debt for information. 1 The English version was not to be found in the British Museum, nor in the Bibliotheque Nationale, nor in the libraries of Berlin, Amsterdam, the Hague, Leyden, Utrecht, Vienna, or Munich, nor have I heard of it even in America. In short this despised and rejected tract is among the extreme rarities of the world. And I had swopped it for La Reyne Marguerite in a new edition ! One man's loss is another's gain, and M. Popelin, hunting the sale rooms in London, bought my castaway copy " a un de ces prix qu'on n'avoue pas a sa menagere." M. Popelin deserved to get it for his learned edition, and I deserved to lose it for my carelessness. I am only sorry Liseux, Paris, 1883. vi I did not know he wanted it, when it would have been much at his service, for love, and the mdnagere would not have been justly vexed by extravagance Vile damnum, after all, the loss of the book, if we look only at the literary merits of the Hypnerotomachia in Elizabethan English. The translation is ignorant and unintelligible : a meaning cannot be made out of much of it, and the sense, when the translator does " deviate into sense," is not always that of his original. We have re- printed it with absolute fidelity. The idea of altering the punctuation was mooted, but where the translators meaning was obscure, the original text cast no light on it whatever ; so any alteration would have been conjectural. Thus the volume reappears with all its sins on its head, except the horrors of its barbarous illustrations. For these miseries, a few examples copied from the original have been substituted. Obvious misprints alone have been corrected, and the text is reproduced from the example in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. About the original Hypnei'otomachia, and its author, and illustrator, and meaning, all that is ever likely to be known has been set forth by M. Popelin. As is usual in antiquarian subjects, where almost everything is uncertain, there is a great deal of learning about Francesco Colonna, the author, his mistress Polia, his purpose, and his book. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili " Loves strife in a dream The y with the Loves of Pollia," as we may paraphrase the title, was published, in folio, by Aldus Manutius in 1499. It contains an hundred and seventy-two woodcuts, which have been attributed, wildly, to Raphael, to either Bellini, to Andrea Mantegna, to the two Montagnas, to Carpaccio, to the author himself, to the anonymous Master of the Dolphins, to the Bolognese engraver Peregrini, and pro- vii bably to other people. 1 M. Eugene Piot introduced the belief in the Master of the Dolphins, who illustrated many other books for the Aldi. M. Popelin is inclined to agree with M. Piot, especially as the animals in an s&sop illustrated by the Master of the Dolphins closely re- semble those in the Hypnerotomachia. Mr. W. B. Scott (Athen&um, March 27, April 10, 1880) votes for Stephanus Caesenus Peregrinus. This opinion rests on certain initials, subscribed to the frontispieces of certain other works of the period. But nothing can certainly be known, and internal evidence is notoriously untrustworthy. As Mr. Carlyle says about the poet of the Nibelungenlied, to be certain about the letters that make up his name would be of very little benefit to us. It is probable that many an artist of his date, inspired by the old art and the new learning, could do all that he did. Francesco Colonna, too, the author of the Hypneroto- machia, is little more than the shadow of a name. Benoit de Court, writing in 1533 on the Arresta Amorum of Martial de Paris, calls Colonna multiscius, "full of know- ledge." That he knew a great deal about ancient architec- ture, rather late Greek and Roman essayists, and obscure mythology, is clear enough from his book, whereof the object is to make a parade of learning. Rabelais cites him in Gargantua (i. ix.). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries authors on architecture speak highly of Colonna, and offer guesses about his biography. He was said to have belonged to a family of Lucca, and to have been born in Venice about 1433. If his book was finished, as the colophon says, in 1467, when he would have been thirty-four, it may contain 1 Popelin, i. cxcviii. viii — ; all the lore and the learning of his youth, a sacrifice of them to the goddess of Pedantry, Une chapelle dc parfums Et de cierges mclancholiqiies. The biography, however, is made up, like many classical biographies, out of hints in the author's work. Polia, the beloved of Francesco, would be, on this showing, Ippolita, niece of Teodoro Lelio, bishop of Treviso, in whose house- hold Colonna had a place. The authority cited is a MS. note on a copy of the book in the library of the Domini- cans delle Zatere. The note points out that the first letters of each chapter in the book, when placed together in order, produce Poliam frater Franciscus Colonna peramavit. Ad hue vivit Venetiis in S. Iohannce et Paulo. The biography, or romance, goes on to say that Polia and Francesco were betrothed that, in terror of the plague, ; the lady vowed to take the veil if she escaped with life that she kept her word, and that Colonna also went into religion, and became a monk in 1464. But all this is pure fiction. Colonna was a monk as early as 1455. From a Venetian MS. in the convent of St. John and St. Paul, we gather that Colonna died, at a great old age, in 1527. M. Popelin's personal researches in Italy have added nothing to the few scattered notices of a long and quiet life. As to Polia, we must guess for ourselves whether she was once a living girl, whether she was a mere ideal, or whether she is an allegory of antique beauty and learning. The prettiest and most human pas- sage in the book contains, at least, a picture of life, and tells how Polia was sitting at her window, sunning her long yellow locks, when Poliphile passed by, and was caught in that golden net, as Lucius was by the hair of Fotis. ix b Every day he wandered by the palace windows, every night he would sing beneath them, and all to no avail. Then Polia, in fear of a pestilence, "vowed herself to Diana." In vain he implored her to be his, with abun- dance of reference to the Fates, Atys, Agave, Pentheus, Scylla, and Charybdis, and that African lake which is cold by day under the sun, and boiling hot at night.