TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
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is denoted like =this=.
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* * * * *
Short Histories of
the Literatures of
the World: IV.
Edited by Edmund Gosse
Short Histories of the
Literatures of the World
EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE
Large Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. each Volume
ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE
By Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, M.A.
FRENCH LITERATURE
By Prof. EDWARD DOWDEN, D.C.L., LL.D.
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
By the EDITOR
ITALIAN LITERATURE
By RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D.
SPANISH LITERATURE
By J. FITZMAURICE-KELLY
[_Shortly_
JAPANESE LITERATURE
By WILLIAM GEORGE ASTON, C.M.G.
[_Shortly_
MODERN SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURE
By GEORGE BRANDES
SANSKRIT LITERATURE
By Prof. A. A. MACDONELL
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE
By Dr. ZOLTÁN BRÖTHY
AMERICAN LITERATURE
By Professor MOSES COIT TYLER
GERMAN LITERATURE
By Dr. C. H. HERFORD
LATIN LITERATURE
By Dr. A. W. VERRALL
_Other volumes will follow_
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
[_All rights reserved_]
A History of
ITALIAN LITERATURE
BY
RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D.
[Illustration]
London
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MDCCCXCVIII
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
PREFACE
“I think,” says Jowett, writing to John Addington Symonds (August
4, 1890), “that you are happy in having unlocked so much of Italian
literature, certainly the greatest in the world after Greek, Latin,
English. To have interpreted one such literature and made it accessible
to English-speaking people seems to me a sufficient result of a life.”
It seems, however, peculiarly appropriate that a history of Italian
literature should follow and should precede other and parallel
histories. Symonds himself had long before pointed out that no man,
at least in a single work of moderate compass, can fully deserve
the credit of having unlocked Italian literature. The study of
Italian letters, he had reminded us, cannot be profitably pursued by
itself. The literature of Italy requires to be constantly considered
in connection with other literatures, both those from which it is
itself derived, and those which it has deeply influenced. It is more
intimately affiliated to antiquity than any other European literature,
and may indeed be regarded as a continuation or revival of the Latin.
Its advent was long and unaccountably delayed--it is the youngest of
all the chief European literatures; but when at length it did appear,
its form, already classical, dispensed it from an infancy of rudeness
and barbarism. It may be compared to Hermes, the youngest but most
precocious of the Gods; not, like Pallas, born adult, but equal to any
achievement from the cradle:
_The babe was born at the first peep of day;
He began playing on the lyre at noon;
And the same evening did he steal away
Apollo’s herds._
Entering at once upon a heritage of classical tradition, Italians
began to teach foreign nations long before they found anything to
learn from them; and this influence is so large a part of the glory of
Italy that her literature cannot be fully unlocked to the foreigner
unless he is shown, not only what she has herself effected in letters,
but how greatly she has modified the intellectual development of
other countries. She owes nothing to Chaucer, Spenser, or Milton;
but Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton are infinitely indebted to her.
The position she so long retained as the instructor and exemplar of
civilised nations invests her literature with an importance more
considerable than that attaching to the merits of her individual
authors, illustrious as these are. Yet it is impossible to elucidate
this momentous department of the subject in a manual of four hundred
pages. All that can be done is to indicate by continual reference and
allusion that the need exists, and must be satisfied elsewhere. The
influence upon Italy herself of foreign writers, and of movements
common to Europe in general, has required and received fuller treatment.
Other circumstances, and these not attributable to the restricted
scale of his undertaking, conspire to afflict the historian of Italian
literature with a feeling of insufficiency. From causes which will
appear in the course of this history, many of the most gifted Italians
wrote in Latin. From Petrarch down to Nicius Erythræus a succession of
books which would have adorned the vernacular literature if they had
belonged to it, appeared in the common idiom of scholars. Petrarch’s
_Canzoniere_, as respects mere dimension, is as nothing to the mass of
his Latin works. Politian writes just enough Italian to prove that he
might have revived Boccaccio or anticipated Ariosto. Pontano, one of
the brightest intellects of Italy, writes entirely in Latin. To exclude
the Latin books of such men entirely from consideration is impossible;
but they cannot be adequately treated in a professed history of
vernacular literature; and much else of deep significance must be
passed over without a hint of its existence.
Another circumstance places the Italian mind at a disadvantage when
contemplated solely through a literary medium. Literature in Italy
is a less exhaustive manifestation than elsewhere of the intellect
of the nation. The intellectual glory of England, France, and
Germany depends mainly upon their authors and men of science; their
illustrious artists, the succession of great German composers since
Handel excepted, are for the most part isolated phenomena. In the ages
of Italian development, whether of the imitative arts or of music,
artists far outnumber authors, and the best energies of the country are
employed in artistic production. Of this super-abundant vitality mere
literary history affords no trace. Michael Angelo, one of the greatest
men the world has seen, can here claim no more than a paragraph on the
strength of a handful of sonnets. It is indeed remarkable that out of
the nine Italians most brilliantly conspicuous in the very first rank
of genius and achievement--Aquinas, Dante, Columbus, Leonardo, Michael
Angelo, Raphael, Titian, Galileo, Napoleon--only one should have been
a man of letters. The reader, therefore, who may deem the field of
Italian literature infertile in comparison with the opulence of England
or France, must remember that it expresses a smaller proportion of the
country’s benefaction to humanity. Yet Jowett is perfectly justified
in claiming for the Italian a front place among the literatures of the
world, but only on condition that its great representatives shall be
weighed rather than counted.
The comparative--though only comparative--paucity of authors in Italy
is so far favourable to the historian working on a small scale, that it
allows a more expansive treatment of the greatest men, and at the same
time the inclusion of minor writers not always of high distinction, but
indispensable to the continuity of the narrative. This is essential
in a book which does not profess to be a string of biographies, but a
biography of Italian Literature herself regarded as a single entity
revealed through a succession of personages, the less gifted among
whom may be true embodiments of her spirit for the time being. Many
remarkable manifestations of the national intellect are, nevertheless,
necessarily excluded. Writers in dialect are omitted, unless when
acknowledged classics like Meli or Belli. Academies and universities
are but slightly mentioned. Theologians, jurists, and men of science
have been passed over, except in so far as they may also have been men
of letters. There is, in fact, no figure among them like Luther, who,
though not inspired by the love of letters as such, so embodied the
national spirit and exerted so mighty an influence upon the language,
that he could no more than Goethe be omitted from a history of German
literature.
Some want of proportion may be charged against the comparatively
restricted space here allotted to Dante. It is indeed true that if
genius prescribed the scale of treatment, at least a third of the book
ought to have been devoted to him; but this very fact refutes the
censure it seems to support, since, the limits assigned admitting of no
extension, all other authors must have suffered for the sake of one. In
a history, moreover, rather dealing with Italian literature as a whole
than with writers as individuals, the test is not so much greatness as
influence upon letters, and in this respect Dante is less significant
than Petrarch and Boccaccio. Preceding the Renaissance, he could not
profoundly affect its leading representatives, or the succeeding
generations whose taste was moulded by it; and although at all times
admired and venerated, it was only at the appearance of the romantic
school and the Revolution that he became a potent literary force.
Another reason for a more compendious treatment of Dante is that while
in the cases of other Italian writers it is difficult to remedy defects
by reference to any special monograph, English literature possesses
several excellent handbooks to the Divine Comedy, resort to which would
be expedient in any case.
The books to which the writer has been chiefly indebted are enumerated
in a special bibliography. He is obliged to Mr. W. M. Rossetti and
to Messrs. Ellis and Elvey for permission to use the exquisite
translations from the _Dante and his Circle_ of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
cited in the early chapters of the book. The graceful versions from
Boiardo and other poets contributed by Miss Ellen Clerke have not, with
one exception, been previously printed. Where no acknowledgment of
indebtedness is made, translations are by the author of the volume.
RICHARD GARNETT.
_December 1897._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BEGINNINGS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE 1
II. THE EARLY ITALIAN LYRIC 12
III. DANTE’S LIFE AND MINOR WRITINGS 24
IV. THE DIVINE COMEDY 40
V. PETRARCH AS MAN OF LETTERS 53
VI. PETRARCH AND LAURA 66
VII. BOCCACCIO 82
VIII. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 97
IX. THE POETICAL RENAISSANCE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 110
X. CHIVALRIC POETRY 126
XI. ARIOSTO AND HIS IMITATORS 140
XII. MACHIAVELLI AND GUICCIARDINI 156
XIII. OTHER PROSE-WRITERS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 170
XIV. THE PETRARCHISTS 185
XV. HUMOROUS POETRY--THE MOCK-HEROIC 201
XVI. THE NOVEL 212
XVII. THE DRAMA 223
XVIII. TASSO 237
XIX. THE PROSE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 256
XX. THE POETRY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 272
XXI. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 288
XXII. THE COMEDY OF MASKS--THE OPERA--DRAMA OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 305
XXIII. THE REVIVAL 327
XXIV. THE REGENERATION 352
XXV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY--MIDDLE PERIOD 375
XXVI. CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE 394
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 419
INDEX 425
A HISTORY OF
ITALIAN LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE
Great literatures, like great rivers, seldom derive their origin from
a single fountain, but rather ooze from the soil in a multitude of
almost imperceptible springs. The literature of Greece may appear an
exception, but we know that the broad stream of Homeric song in which
we first behold it must have been fed by a number of rills which it has
absorbed into itself, and whose original sources lie beyond the range
of scrutiny. In no literature is this general maxim better exemplified
than the Italian, if, at least, as the economy of this little history
demands, we restrict this appellation to its modern period. It might
be plausibly contended that the Latin and Italian literatures, like
the Roman and Byzantine empires, are, in truth, a single entity, but
the convenience of the student precludes a view in support of which
much might be adduced by the critic and philologist. Defining Italian
literature, therefore, so as to comprise whatsoever is written in any
dialect of that “soft bastard Latin” which bears the Italian name, and
to exclude all compositions in a language which a Roman would have
called Latin, we find none among great literatures whose beginnings
are more humble and obscure, or, which at first seems surprising,
more recent. The perfection of form which the literature of Italy had
attained while all others, save the Provençal, were yet devoid of
symmetry and polish, the comparative intelligibility of the diction
of “Dante and his circle” at the present day, while the contemporary
writers in other tongues require copious glossaries, lead to the tacit
and involuntary assumption of a long antecedent period of development
and refinement which did not in fact exist. In truth, the earliest
literary compositions definable as Italian are scarcely older than the
thirteenth century.
There is, perhaps, no other such example in history of the
obliteration of literary taste and method as that which in Italy befell
one of the most gifted peoples of the world for nearly six hundred
years. After Boethius (about 530 A.D.) the little that is left of
literature becomes entirely utilitarian, and is, with rare exceptions,
restricted to theology, jurisprudence, and monkish chronicles. There
is still much evidence that the Latin classical writers had not passed
out of the knowledge of men; but--except when like Virgil they became
heroes of popular legend--little that they exercised any appreciable
influence upon men’s ideas and imaginations. One unfortunate precursor
of the Renaissance, indeed, Vilgardus of Ravenna (about A.D. 1000),
was led by his admiration for the classics to disparage Christianity,
and suffered death in consequence. As a rule, however, the Latin poets
merely served as a magazine of commonplace quotations and an arsenal
of metrical rules, which some of the least degenerate writers of the
period apply with considerable skill. The explanation of this paralysis
of Latin literature in Italy, while Greek was still an efficient organ
of thought in the Eastern Empire, is no doubt to be found in the fact
that it had never been a robust national growth. The property of the
learned and cultivated, it had taken no deep hold upon the mass of the
people; and when culture and learning perished amid the vicissitudes
of barbarian conquest, it was only preserved, apart from the services
of the Church, by the absolute necessity of maintaining some vestiges
of law, physic, and divinity, and the impossibility of conveying
instruction in the debased dialects into which the old Latin language
was resolving itself.
It might have been expected, nevertheless, that these dialects would
have become the vehicles of popular legend and poetry, and that, as
anciently in Greece, a literature would at length have been evolved
from the tales of the story-tellers and the songs of the minstrels. The
very existence of vernacular minstrels and story-tellers is but matter
of inference, the little which we possess in any sense referable to
this department being in Latin. The instances laboriously accumulated
by Rubieri to prove the existence of popular poetry throughout the Dark
Ages seem to be all in this language; and centuries pass without any
indication that the ancestors of Dante thought it possible to write in
any other, and scarcely any that they cared for written composition at
all, except as a medium for instruction in such knowledge as the age
possessed, and the transaction of the ordinary business of life. The
symptoms of vitality became more evident after the Christian world had
turned the corner of its first millennium. The eleventh century was in
Italy an age of eminent theologians; it also beheld the musical reforms
of Guido of Arezzo; and towards its conclusion poets of some note arose
to chant in Latin hexameters the triumphs of Genoa and Pisa over the
Saracens. Still, although, as has been well remarked, the enthusiasm
for the Crusades excited by itinerant preachers goes far to prove that
public addresses were delivered in the popular dialects, there is not a
trace of any written Italian language, or a hint of any such vernacular
literature as existed, if it hardly flourished, among the Germans, the
French, and the Anglo-Saxons. When at length in the twelfth century
Poetry unmistakably presents herself in the songs of the wandering
students (_Goliardi_), her attire is still Latin. But it was much
that any class of society should now be making its own songs, and the
transition to a vernacular lyric was not long or difficult, although,
instead of taking birth among the people, it was fostered into life by
the patronage of Courts.
The first of the Latin nations to acquire a cultivated vernacular
literature was the Provençal. Many reasons, singly insufficient, but
cumulatively of great force, may be adduced for this unquestionable
priority. The language, which may be roughly but accurately described
as a connecting link between French and Italian, as its Catalan and
Valencian congeners form one between French and Spanish, is better
adapted for poetical composition than French; while, the Latin
influence being less oppressively overwhelming than in the land of the
Romans, it escaped the ban of provinciality which so long prohibited
serious literary composition in the vernacular speech of Italy. Before
the demon of religious persecution was unchained by the Popes, the
country enjoyed remarkable prosperity and tranquillity; the harsher
features of the feudal system were mitigated by industry and commerce,
while the aristocratical organisation of society ensured literature
that patronage without which it could hardly have flourished in the
absence of a reading class.
The early poets of Provence were almost without exception the
favourites of princes and noblemen, whose exploits they celebrated,
whose enemies they satirised, whose own political course they
sometimes inspired, and for whose gratification they vied with each
other in improvised poetical contests (_tenzons_). Their strains,
though occasionally lighted up by some bright thought which Petrarch
subsequently did not disdain to appropriate, appear to us in general
artificial and constrained. This is partly owing to the exaggeration
of a virtue, that attention to “strictest laws of rhyme and rule,” in
which, as an English poet truly declares, the bard finds “not bonds,
but wings.” But the cultivation of form is carried too far when it
becomes the end instead of the means, and the Provençal poets allowed
themselves to be seduced by their language’s unequalled facilities
for rhyming into an idolatry of the elaborate, which offered great
impediments to the simple expression of feeling. Some of their strophes
contain no fewer than twenty-eight verses, the same set of rhymes
being carried through the whole stanza, and very frequently through
the entire poem. Out of four hundred pieces in a single manuscript
collection Ginguené found only two in the simple quatrain. It was
fortunate for the Italians that their language, fluent and supple as it
is, is incapable of such feats, and that, while adopting their lyrical
measures from the Provençals, they could not, had they wished, cramp
themselves by the reproduction of the latter’s _tours de force_.
It is in the last quarter of the twelfth century that we find
Provençal troubadours established at the Courts of the North Italian
princes, writing exactly such poems as they would have written at
home, and apparently just as well understood and equally popular,
a proof that neither in Provence nor in Italy had the culture of
_belles lettres_ progressed beyond the highest circles. One or two
of them occasionally mingled an Italian strophe with their Provençal
substance, and at a somewhat later date Bonvesin da Riva and others
wrote in a curiously mixed dialect of French and Italian. There is,
however, no proper Italian literature until, about 1220, we suddenly
find a school of vernacular poetry flourishing at Palermo under the
patronage of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany, an Italian on his
mother’s side, and by his tastes and sympathies more of an Italian than
of a German prince. The character of its productions is in general
wholly Provençal, but the language is Italian of the Tuscan type, and
it is a highly interesting question whether this was the case from the
first, or whether the pieces as we possess them are adaptations from
the Sicilian dialect, which appears from contemporary prose monuments
to have existed at the time nearly in its present form. We cannot
attempt to decide the controversy, which does not affect the position
of the pieces as the earliest undoubted examples of vernacular Italian
literature. Their poetical merit cannot in general be rated very
highly, and they contain hardly anything which might not have been
written in Provence as well as in Sicily. Frederick himself was one of
the principal writers, and his canzone on his Lady in Bondage might
appear to the English reader to possess considerable merit, but for the
suspicion that the great poet who translated it infused more poetical
inspiration than he found. It would gain considerably in significance
if Rossetti could be proved right in conjecturing that the immured lady
is a symbol of Frederick’s empire in captivity to the Pope:
_Each morn I hear his voice bid them
That watch me, to be faithful spies
Lest I go forth and see the skies;
Each night to each he saith the same;--
And in my soul and in mine eyes
There is a burning heat like flame._
_Thus grieves she now; but she shall wear
This love of mine whereof I spoke
About her body for a cloak,
And for a garland in her hair,
Even yet; because I mean to prove,
Not to speak only, this my love._
--ROSSETTI.
Of the few really Sicilian poets whose verses remain, the most
remarkable is Cielo dal Carno, more commonly known from the misreading
of an ill-written text as _Ciullo d’Alcarno_. The mention of Saladin
has till recently caused his _Dialogue between Lover and Lady_ to be
ascribed to the close of the twelfth century, but more unequivocal
indications prove that it cannot have been written before 1231. It is
a piece of rare merit in its way, exempt from the insipid gallantry
of the typical troubadour or minnesinger, and full of humour at once
robust and sly at the expense of slippery suitors and complacent
damsels. Nothing can be more delightfully naïve, for instance, than the
knight’s unsolicited confession that he has stolen his Bible:
_Then, on Christ’s book, borne with me still
To read from and to pray
(I took it, fairest, in a church,
The priest being gone away)._
--ROSSETTI.
Some of the nearly contemporary Tuscan poets may have belonged to
Frederick’s circle, but it will be convenient to treat of them in
the next chapter among the precursors of Dante. Of the undoubted
Sicilian poets the most remarkable is Jacopo, the notary of Lentino,
depreciated by Dante on account of the rusticity of his style, a defect
which disappears when he is rendered into another language. Rossetti,
speaking from Lentino’s mask, frequently thrills with strokes of true
magic, as when he names
_the song,
Sweet, sweet and long, the song the sirens know._
In some of Lentino’s sonnets also the germs and groundwork of Dante’s
lyrical poetry are manifestly to be discovered.
Something should be said here of the lyrical forms used by the
Italian poets of the best ages. The principal are the _canzone_, the
_sonnet_, and the _ballata_. The canzone admits of several varieties of
structure, but usually commences with three unrhymed lines of eleven
syllables each, followed by three similar lines rhyming to their
predecessors, a seventh of a discretionary number of syllables rhyming
to the third and sixth, and five or six lines on a different rhyming
system, short or long at the poet’s discretion, yet generally having
the last rhyme of the preceding system once repeated. The following
stanza from Guido Cavalcanti may serve as an example:
_But when I looked on death made visible,
From my heart’s sojourn brought before mine eyes,
And holding in her[1] hand my grievous sin,
I seemed to see my countenance, that fell,
Shake like a shadow: my heart uttered cries,
And my soul wept the curse that lay therein.
Then Death: 'Thus much thine urgent prayer shall win:--
I grant thee the brief interval of youth
At natural pity’s strong soliciting.’
And I (because I knew that moment’s ruth
But left my life to groan for a frail space)
Fell in the dust upon my weeping face._
--ROSSETTI.
By this highly intelligent system the vagrant overgrowth of the
Provençal stanza was pruned, and a lyrical form constituted, which
was unsurpassed for the combination of dignity with melodious grace.
The sonnet, unmatched as the most appropriate form for the harmonious
development of a single thought, is one of Italy’s most precious
gifts to the world of letters. It is too thoroughly naturalised in
this country to need detailed description; but the caution is not
superfluous that a Shakespearian sonnet, a sonnet on the French model,
or a very irregular sonnet, are strictly speaking not sonnets, but
quatorzains; and that, although it would be pedantic to insist upon
unvarying conformity to one of the four legitimate Italian structures
of the sestet, they will seldom be widely departed from without injury
to the music and architecture of the poem. The name _sonnetto_--a
little sound--(cf. _sonnette_) admirably expresses the pealing effect
of a well-manipulated sestet. The ballata is less confined by strict
rules. “It is properly a lyric of two or more stanzas, in the first
of which is set out the theme to be amplified in the following”
(Boswell). It often terminates with an _envoy_ or quasi summing-up, as
is frequently the case with the canzone also. The octave, familiar to
English readers as the metre of _Don Juan_, was generally reserved for
narrative poetry, but was also converted by the Sicilian poets into a
lyrical form by merging the final couplet in the preceding sestet, as
described and exemplified by an English imitator:
_To thee, fair Isle, Italia’s satellite,
Italian harps their native measures lend;
Yet, wooing sweet diversity, not quite
Thy octaves with Italia’s octave blend.
Six streaming lines amass the arrowy might
In hers, one cataract couplet doth expend.
Thine lakewise widens, level in the light,
And like to its beginning is its end._
The _sestine_, a favourite form with the Provençals, and frequently
used by Dante and Petrarch, is too complicated to be well understood
without an example.
The same phenomenon is observed in Italian literature as in
English--the decay, after the language had begun to receive a high
scholastic cultivation, of the simple spontaneous melody which had
originally characterised it. Italian prose probably never possessed the
majestic rhythm and sonorous cadences which came unsought to English
poets of the time of Elizabeth and James; but Italian verse had its
Campions, and these, like ours, left no successors. Without disparaging
the tunefulness of late writers like Chiabrera, it must still be owned
that this is in a measure artificial, and that the cause is the divorce
of poetry and music. “It seems,” says Panizzi, “that the art of writing
lines in which so much simplicity, smoothness, and strength were united
to so delicate a proportion of sounds, is lost; and the reason is
that in our days canzoni and sonnets have nothing but the name of a
song.” The most melodious modern poetry, accordingly, is the portion of
Metastasio’s plays which was actually written to be sung.
It is too early to speak as yet of Italian prose, of which no
important example will be found until we reach Dante’s _Vita Nuova_,
near the end of the thirteenth century. It need only be remarked that
the grace of diction and the intricacy of metrical form which Italian
poets had attained by the middle of the thirteenth century, show that
the language was already capable of fine prose, and that it was only
needful to dispel the superstition that serious subjects must be
treated in a learned tongue. Poetry prospered in the vernacular for the
obvious reasons that the bards were in general ignorant of Latin, and
that if they had been acquainted with it their accomplishment would
have been wasted upon the lords and ladies for whom they principally
wrote. The historical or philosophical writer, however, best reached
the classes he addressed through the medium of Latin. Hence, though
for different reasons, we observe in early Italian literature the
same phenomenon as in early Greek--a brilliant poetical activity
in the almost total absence of prose composition. Yet, when Tuscan
prose fairly begins, its productions are the purest examples of
diction--_testi di lingua_. This elegance testifies at once to the
innate refinement of the people and to the continuous operation of
intellectual influences latent in the obscurest deeps of the Dark Ages.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Death (_La Morte_) being feminine in Italian.