To Italy there always attaches a singular fascination. Its natural
beauties, its historic associations, its ancient ruins, its mediaeval
buildings, its collections of art—these things scattered thickly and in
endless variety from one end of the peninsula to the other, from Sicily
to Milan, from Genoa to Venice, make Italy the country of countries
for the traveller of culture and sensibility, of enthusiasm for things
splendid and beautiful.
This being so, it might seem a most inconsistent and regrettable fact
that, while there are thousands who go, guidebook in hand, through
the galleries of the Vatican or the palace of the Venetian Doges, or
through that Florentine church of Santa Croce where they read the name
of a Michelangelo or a Machiavelli on illustrious tombs, yet a very few
have thought fit to look into Italian literature, to see if it perhaps
contains things as worthy of regard as Italian edifices or Italian
pictures. Few also realize that it is often impossible to understand
Italian art without understanding contemporary Italian literature.
Time was when education was hardly a complete and liberal education if
it did not include the knowledge of Italian and of the best thoughts of
Italy. Time was when England was the pupil of Italy in letters, as it
has largely continued to be in those other arts which are called “fine.”
At two periods, namely, first in the days of Chaucer, and afterwards for
more than a century, from the time of Wyatt and Surrey to the prime of
Milton, Italian masterpieces and Italian style were chief patterns to
Englishmen, and Italian thoughts and subjects were borrowed without stint.
Doubtless Italy has had her day as our teacher in letters, and we look to
her no more for inspiration or guidance in poetry or prose. Nevertheless
it is a mistake to seek so little direct knowledge of what is meant
by the names of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Ariosto and Tasso,
and of others well known to the ear. The study of writers like these
in their own tongue would do much to remove the false impressions we
are so apt to form of foreign peoples and their character. Literature
is the “expression of the soul of a people,” and the only sure way of
getting at a people’s soul is to study the expression of that soul in its
literature. For instance, are the Italians a people of profound feeling,
of much imagination, of high ideals of conduct? It is not travel which
will readily tell us this, but a study of the emotions, imaginings, and
moral conceptions which are revealed in their books.
* * * * *
The Italians are in but a partial degree descendants of the ancient
Romans. The Romans proper never did fill much of Italy. To the south of
Rome and in Sicily lay colonies of Greeks, at Naples, Reggio, Taranto,
Syracuse and Palermo. To the north lay the alien and rather mysterious
Etruscans in modern Tuscany. Still further north lay various Celtic
Gauls along the valleys of Piedmont and Lombardy. And even in central
Italy there were many tribes and many dialects, which were only brought
by force under a common Roman empire and a common literary and official
Latin tongue. The Romans did their best to weld all these diverse
elements into a homogeneous people with a common feeling of nationality,
common ideals and common customs. But at no time did one identical race
or one identical dialect fill the peninsula of Italy.
With the fall of the Roman empire Italy became the prey of Goths and
Lombards in the north, and later of Saracens, Normans, and Spaniards
successively in the south. Modern times have seen these elements also
combining as best they can into one people, with a national sentiment and
a national soul.
The modern Italians are, therefore, descendants of ancient Romans and
their kindred tribes, intermixed in intricate ways with Etruscans,
Ligurians, and Gaulish Celts, with Goths and other Teutons, with Greeks,
Spaniards, and a strain of Saracen. Nevertheless, among all these
constituents, it is the Roman mental attitude which most prevails. Beyond
doubt the literary ideal which possesses modern Italy is an inheritance
from ancient Rome.
The modern Italian speech is the child of Latin, in the sense in which
French and Spanish are the children of Latin; or rather, like French
and Spanish, it is a new shape which Latin has gradually put on after
hundreds of years of use and misuse. Perhaps a word must be said in
order to explain the chasm between Latin literature and the Italian
literature of Dante. At no time, even in the zenith of Roman prosperity,
did all parts of Italy speak the same Latin, even if they spoke Latin
at all. Local peculiarities of grammar and pronunciation were numerous
and marked. Moreover, in the most golden days of Latin speech, that
Latin which we know and learn was the language of a literary and
cultured class; the Latin of the people was different and more free. As
generations went by, and the Roman empire grew, the difference between
the literary and the popular speech became wider and wider still, until
the one was scarcely recognizable in the other. And when Italy in the
Dark Ages was ravaged, unsettled, and dismembered; when little state
sprang up here and little state there; when the literary and cultured
class almost disappeared, the upshot was that the speech of the people
prevailed, just as Saxon-English prevailed over Norman-French. In each
district its own dialect became the law, so that people at Naples, at
Rome, at Florence, at Bologna, at Venice, and at Milan, were speaking in
distinct manners of their own, while recognized Italian language there
was none. Dialects exist in all these places, and in many more, even
to-day; nevertheless there is an orthodox Italian language, the “Tuscan
speech with the Roman utterance,” in which cultivated people endeavour to
speak, and which is the only language recognized for serious literature.
Many still imagine that it was Dante who made that language. On the
contrary, no great literature can exist till the language is shaped.
English had to be formed before Chaucer could come. An Italian tongue was
necessary before Dante could build his masterpiece.
It appears at first a remarkable thing that the first literature which
can pretend to any extensive influence in Italy was called “Sicilian.”
Moreover the ideal language of Dante was one which he called the “courtly
language”—the _lingua aulica cortigiana_—whereas no court existed in
his Tuscan Republics. The two facts have their relation. Until late in
the twelfth century Italy, having no recognized language, had produced
nothing. Meanwhile the southern half of France had been for several
generations ringing with the musical voices of the Provençal troubadours.
Yet Italy, except for some troubadour influence in the north, was
silent. But about the year 1220, Frederick II, of the “two Sicilies,”
had gathered about himself, in his rich and luxurious court at Palermo,
scholars and men of refinement from all parts of Italy and Provence.
At his seat, where cultured Saracens were numerous, and their artistic
tastes in strong evidence, Provençal troubadours were to be found rhyming
their dainty and harmonious songs of love and chivalry. “Sicilians” and
others, gathered from the rest of Italy, took the key from these, and in
Sicily sprang up for the first time in Italy a definite form of poetry
composed in a popular speech instead of Latin. It is a love-poetry,
which, in kind, is copied from Provence, aiming solely at a fine air of
style and harmony of verse, and caring nothing for variety of subject
or for originality of thought. There are the same trite comparisons,
the same threadbare reflections, self-communings, and self-pityings. But
the language employed was the Italian of the court, an eclectic diction,
polished and regulated, and known as the _lingua cortigiana_ or _lingua
aulica_—the “court language.” To the Italians assembled in Frederick’s
dominions this diction became the model for literary speech. Any who
composed in it were “courtly makers” in “Sicilian.”
After the decline of Frederick’s power in the south, it was Florence,
Pisa, Lucca and the Tuscan communes that possessed the chief vitality and
influence in Italy, and it was these that chiefly carried on the literary
tradition. But the Tuscan dialect, like the East Midland English, was
the most central. Its peculiarities were therefore the least pronounced
among the dialects of the peninsula. The Tuscans readily formed from
their own dialect a “courtly language” similar to that of the Sicilian
poetry, and it was to Florence and its neighbourhood that Italians came
to look for the choicest literature, as they looked for the most vigorous
commerce. The custom of turning literary compositions from the local
dialects into Tuscan as the fashionable language—the process called
_Toscaneggiamento_—had begun before Dante wrote. And when Dante had
written in Tuscan that monumental and immortal work, the _Divine Comedy_,
it was inevitable that Tuscan should remain for all time the one and only
language of ambitious Italian composition.
The first promptings to any Italian literature thus came from the
graceful and musical, but often sickly and always artificial, poems
of the troubadours, whether clustered about Frederick or brought by
visitors to the northern courts of Milan, Ferrara, or Verona. The
contribution of Italy itself had so far been the sonnet form, invented
in Sicily and destined to play the most important part among all Italian
lyrics. The ideal erected had been one of polish, not of thought, and
unhappily for the most part this suited the Italian genius only too well.
But fortunately for the literature of the peninsula, there came very
early the man to whom life was real and earnest, and to whom writing
meant the expression of things intensely serious and vital.
Dante Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, and died in exile at
Ravenna in 1321. The first great writer of Italian is its very greatest—a
name to be written with those of Homer and Shakespeare. It would require
a volume to speak adequately and with illustration of the profound
impression of nobility of character which he leaves upon his readers,
of the vast reach of his imagination, of the startling vividness of
the visions which he creates, of his master-power to make simple words
tell just what he sees. To read the story of his life and times is a
romance in itself. To place oneself in that Florence of six centuries
ago, where Guelfs are conflicting with Ghibellines and “Whites” with
“Blacks,” where the burghers are at one moment filling the streets with
songs and gay processions and pageants, and at another moment with the
shouts of fighting and scenes of murder; to see among these same burghers
the firm-set face of the future poet Dante, as he goes out to battle at
Campaldino; to see him sitting as a magistrate of the city, and then
again driven into exile and wandering, with a price upon his head, to
Verona or Ravenna—it is tempting to dwell upon such visions, but the
temptation is one which we must resist.
Dante is a figure in the literature of the world, not of Italy alone.
Like Shakespeare, he began with the lyric work dominant in his age.
Like Shakespeare, he therein revealed a power beyond his contemporaries
or predecessors. His sonnets and _Canzoni_ are indeed limited by the
prevailing conventions of that style, but from him they gain a pure
nobility of feeling and an intrinsic weight which no Provençal had
displayed, and to which the best Italians had but striven. But to the
world at large he is the author of the _Divine Comedy_. His readers, not
he himself, called it the “Divine,” both because it deals with things
heavenly and mystical beyond all ordinary vision, and also because it
transcends all other works which bore the name of “Comedy”—divine in its
subject, divine in its execution. Dante himself called it _Commedia_. He
knew nothing of the correct distinctions of true drama, for none existed
in his day. To him _commedia_ meant a medley, with a happy ending,
something written in the vulgar tongue, not aspiring to be an epic, like
that of the great master Virgil, but written in the middle style. The
poem, as a fact, is no more a comedy than _Paradise Lost_ is a comedy.
Yet the title is his own and is indefeasible.
The _Divine Comedy_ is a work which stands alone in literature, without a
distinct prototype and without a worthy follower. The fact that Homer had
made Odysseus descend to the shades, and that Virgil had done the same
with Aeneas, accounts for the shape or machinery, but for no more. It is
a work involving the most stupendous materials—no less than an epitome of
contemporary thought, belief, mysticism, aspiration, passion, history—and
handled with stupendous unconsciousness of mastery.
On the face of it, it is a narrative of a journey taken by the poet
through Hell, through Purgatory, and into Paradise. In Easter week of the
year 1300, Dante is led by Virgil (who to the Middle Ages had strangely
enough become the incarnation of this world’s wisdom) down through the
concentric circles of Hell—a funnel-shaped abyss within the centre of
the earth—and descends step after step to greater and greater horrors.
There he sees the gluttons wallowing in fetid mud, and the leaders of
heresies burning in half-opened tombs; he sees the sinners of avarice and
of prodigality suffer together with mutual revilings; he sees the steady
rain of burning flakes of fire; he is amazingly fertile in other agonies
for unrepentant or unshriven sinners. Then, from the _Inferno_, under the
self-same guidance, he mounts to the light and ascends the mountain of
Purgatorio, which rises like a cone, plane after plane, in seven tiers
for the seven deadly sins. Here the souls that are being purified are
suffering penances, which grow less and less awful as we approach the
summit. On the summit itself is the Terrestrial Paradise. Further than
that Virgil, the pagan poet, may not go; but Beatrice, Dante’s lost love
and his emblem of Christian faith, comes down to meet him, and together
they rise in spiral rings of flight, upward and upward through glory
after glory, till they reach the true Paradise, and stand in the presence
of the Beatific Vision.
There is something awe-inspiring in the very contemplation of a subject
so vast: yet Dante combines and handles all these mysteries with such a
vivid realistic power that the last suggestion to rise in the reader’s
mind is any suspicion of grotesque, still less of futile, extravagance.
His pictures are intensely vivid. His creations live. It would be no
wonder if the good people of Verona really pointed him out in awe, and
said, “Yonder is the man who has been in Hell!” A pictorial artist
could scarcely exhaust Dante in subjects for paintings. And, with it
all, his mere language is as simple and direct as was ever used by a
poet’s pen. It is so far Homeric. Almost the mere noun and verb suffice
to say what he has to say, and yet, somehow, that same noun and verb
combine into a sweet and majestic harmony which fit the sublime subject
as the “organ-voice” of Milton fitted his. We must, of course, make all
concession to the ignorance of his day and the unattractive subtleties
of the philosophy. These may often affect our interest, but they take
nothing from the poet’s genius.
Such was the narrative on the face of it. But the narrative is only the
cloak for an allegory. Dante, unlike most other Italian writers, was a
profoundly pious, and not merely a pietistic man. Moreover, his mind
was stored with all the theology, science, and philosophy of the time,
and he meant his work to have another and a deeper interpretation. In
the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ he represents the moral passage of man
through life, learning to see its vices and their punishments, descending
through them, and thence again mounting through self-mortification
and cleansing fires upward to moral purity and wisdom. Virgil is the
embodiment of moral philosophy; and so far moral philosophy can guide us.
But Beatrice is the personification of Divine philosophy, the heavenly
wisdom of theology, and it is this which is required to bring man to the
full beauty and beatitude of perfect holiness. That, on the one hand, so
many should read the narrative as narrative, and be awed and fascinated
by it, while they miss, or are unconcerned with, the allegory beneath;
and that, on the other, the allegorical interpretation should not obtrude
itself, and yet should be so clear and so symmetrical when discovered, is
a superlative token of the poet’s extraordinary genius.
There had been nothing really like this poem before, and there has been
nothing since. We cannot explain away the original genius of Dante.
Before him Italian literature had nothing but the amatory effusions
of the Provençal-Sicilian type, insipid songs, laboured and affected
sonnets, and some crude visions and allegories. From these the _Divine
Comedy_ utterly departs. All that it can be said to owe to the writer’s
times and his nation is the vivid realistic way in which spiritual
conceptions are apprehended. The tendency which had been awakened by St.
Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic had become general in Dante’s day,
a tendency to make material and visible, in symbols, in painting, and
in acting, all the mysterious things hoped and feared in religion—a
tendency to picture the details, the scenes, and the personages in Heaven
and Hell—a tendency in which we do not share, and which sometimes shocks
the weaker brethren when they read the _Divine Comedy_.
There is one other topic to be considered, which must keenly interest
both readers of Dante in particular, and students of literature,
including English, in general. Before his great masterpiece, Dante had
written a work in which stately prose alternates with grave and stately
sonnets. This was the _Vita Nuova_ (or _New Life_), a work full of
a profoundly touching, if quaint, nobility of manner, and one which
places Dante more humanly, so to speak, among the writers of his time.
His sonnets, we have said, are a prelude to greater work. They are the
outcome of his era. The attitude towards love comes from Provence, and
the sonnet from Sicily, while a certain allegorical metaphysics had been
imparted by the Italian Guido Guinicelli, who had combined with the
troubadour spirit the philosophic learning—such as it was—of Bologna.
Dante had contemporaries, Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, who
composed sonnets in a vein closely resembling that of the greater master.
And in all of them the treatment is of one and the same thing—love.
In a previous chapter we have spoken of the conventional theory of that
affection as established in Provence, and have anticipated its connection
with the immortalized Beatrice of Dante and the Laura of Petrarch.
Woman, it will be remembered, had been sublimated into something half
divine, an object of a distant devotion, shrouded in a semi-religious
haze. Following the Provençal fashion, every Tuscan poet—putting, it is
true, into his work a finer and graver spirit than that of his Provençal
models—felt bound to devote himself, or to profess to devote himself, to
some such ennobling object of affection. To that real or imaginary being
he addressed his sonnets, from her he sought inspiration, by the ideal of
her he guided his life. We shall find this phenomenon in its completest
form in Petrarch, from whom it passed to our English sonneteers.
Sometimes the sentiment was absolutely real, as real as the Rosalind of
Spenser’s _Amoretti_. We cannot but believe that in the first instance
it was so with Dante, when he wrote of Beatrice in his _Vita Nuova_,
possibly even when he commemorated her in the _Divine Comedy_. We cannot
but believe that he loved a real Beatrice de’ Portinari, whom he first
saw at nine years of age, with a pure and elevated sentiment, and that
he encouraged the sentiment as the means of uplifting and stimulating
his genius and his soul. And we must believe that he is in earnest when,
after her death, he makes her not only the type of all that is best in
womanhood, but converts her into an abstract emblem of celestial wisdom.
There is the very sound of truth in the words wherein he tells us of
their first meeting. Rossetti translates them thus: “At that moment, I
say most truly, that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the
secretest chamber of my heart, began to tremble so violently that the
least pulses of my body shook therewith, and in trembling it said these
words: ‘Behold God is stronger than I, and he shall reign over me.’”
And after her death he writes: “It was given unto me to behold a very
wonderful vision; wherein I saw things which determined me that I would
say nothing further of this most blessed one, until such time as I could
discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labour all I
can, as she well knoweth. Wherefore, if it be His pleasure through whom
is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years,
it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her that which hath not
before been written of any woman. After the which, may it seem good unto
Him who is the master of grace, that my spirit should go hence to behold
the glory of its lady; to wit, of that blessed Beatrice, who now gazeth
continually on His countenance, who is blessed for all ages.”
Of Dante it has seemed necessary to speak at this length because he is
so incalculable a proportion of Italian literature. While other writers
of Italy can be placed in general categories, Dante’s _Commedia_ must
remain for ever by itself. So far as he betrays himself Italian, it is
that, like all Italians, he is a vivid realist of pictures, cultivates a
literary style of finished art, and possesses by nature a strong vein of
irony.
* * * * *
Francesco Petrarca is accorded a rank second only to Dante among Italian
poets. Perhaps in our primary object, which considers the influence of
Italian literature upon ourselves, he is of more palpable consequence
than Dante himself. For though Dante did indeed set modern Europe a great
example, a model of sublimity in literature; though he did indeed supply
English writers with many a thought and phrase; though Chaucer made
borrowings and translations from him—as, for instance, in the story of
Ugolino; and though he influenced the early part of Milton’s _Paradise
Lost_ in a degree which we cannot exactly estimate, nevertheless his
influence is comparatively indirect. But Petrarch is the writer to whom
our English “courtly makers” and sonneteers directly and admittedly owe
the conception of their literary form and tone, from Wyatt and Surrey
and Sidney down to Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is to the
existence of Petrarch’s sonnets that Shakespeare’s owe theirs. Vast is
the influence of a man to whose example is due at least the form, and
often more than the hint of the matter, of the sonnets of our poets,
great and small, for five hundred years. Nor was his influence confined
to the sonnets. Chaucer borrowed love-songs from Petrarch, and Spenser
learned his art of writing in translating a Petrarchan _canzone_. The
effect of Petrarch was moreover cumulative, inasmuch as the French
sonneteers, like Saint-Gelais, Ronsard, and Du Bellay, who borrowed
from him, were themselves in turn imitated by Spenser and other English
writers.
Petrarch, who was born in 1304, and lived for seventy years, was both a
poet and a scholar. He cared, in fact, more for his Latin writing in an
epic like _Africa_, and for his collections of Latin MSS. than for those
Italian poems which have made him famous to all Europe. We may render
him hearty thanks for the immense help he gave towards bringing about
the Renaissance; but we are here concerned with him only as the poet
who expresses the Italian mind and expands the literature of England.
Petrarch is the poet of love. He is the heir of the Provençal lyrics of
chivalrous idealizing devotion. But his Laura is set upon a more human
plane than Beatrice. The Laura de Noves, whom Petrarch first saw in the
church at Avignon in the year 1327, and to whom he addressed some three
hundred sonnets, was his inspiration, as Beatrice was Dante’s. “I owe
to Laura all that I am,” he asserts. “She made to bud forth with the
noblest sentiments all the seeds of virtue which nature had sowed in my
heart.” Here we meet explicitly the accepted Italian attitude, as we
met it in Dante, and as it was afterwards adopted—though with a change
due to time and race and circumstances—by our English Surrey, and even
by Shakespeare. Beatrice was a woman seen through all the grave piety
and theology of Dante’s serious soul; Laura was a woman seen through
a Platonic atmosphere which the humanist Petrarch was adopting from
the Greek revival. Yet Laura, though an inspiration, is only a real
woman; she does not become refined away, like Beatrice, into a mere
personification of some abstract motive force. Petrarch’s sonnets are
poems to Laura, so many polished gems, so many keleidoscopic aspects of
a true and pure passion, of the fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise.
He is an artist in words and in verbal music. He uses no artificial
ornamentation, and he scarcely ever falls below himself. If taste,
delicacy, and refinement, combined with ingenious fancy and with a purity
of thought which spurns all vulgarity, can make a poet, Petrarch is a
great poet. And it is no wonder if sonneteers of all nations have made
him their model. Nor is it much wonder that, after the exhaustive manner
in which he treats of the phases of his passion, its vicissitudes, and
its inward and outward experiences, there was little room for novelty on
the part of any but a more than ordinary genius.
After Dante there is one thing we shall never find in Italian poetry,
and we do not find it in Petrarch. We shall find taste, melody, beauty
of expression, descriptive power, but we shall not find deep passion,
uncontrollable rapture, soarings of sublime inspiration. Yet, for what
Petrarch’s sonnets are, they are perfect. His _Canzoniere_ contains works
of graceful thought or of tender feeling, of brilliant and polished
expression, such works as a more fertile Tennyson might have written in
that age; but they have no claims to be more. The impression, however,
must not be left that Petrarch’s poetry was all in sonnets. To this
Sicilian form he joined a series of larger and freer _Canzoni_ after
Provençal example, and also _Trionfi_, or allegorical visions, dealing
more after the fashion of Dante with love, death, chastity, and other
abstracts.
* * * * *
From the _Divine Comedy_, through Petrarch, we come down to the
Human Comedy of Boccaccio. Giovanni Boccaccio, the younger and more
worldly-minded contemporary of Petrarch, the son of a Florentine merchant
and a Paris _grisette_, educated at Naples and domiciled in his maturer
years at Florence, is best known as the author of the first great prose
work of Italy, the _Decameron_. In the year 1348 a terrible plague
befell the city of Florence. Boccaccio, after opening with a powerful
description of this pestilence, represents seven young ladies and three
cavaliers as retiring to a delightful villa outside the walls in order
to escape the contagion and their responsibilities, and to pass the time
in idleness and amusement. Each of the ten persons relates ten stories,
and thus we obtain a hundred short tales (or “novels,” as they then
called them), tales pathetic, sportive, or licentious. We are not greatly
concerned with these stories; they are not original, but are taken from
current recital, from Oriental sources, from French _fabliaux_, and from
scattered productions or collections of insignificant Italian writers,
such as are found in the crude shapes of the _Cento Novelle_. The notion
of a series of stories strung into some sort of connection with each
other is as old as the _Book of Sinbad_ or the _Seven Sages_. Boccaccio’s
chief merit is that he wrought such stories into artistic tales full of
the varied life of his time, and gave them literary shape in language
pure, elegant, and sonorous, if, perhaps, often too diffuse. It is he
who sets the example for his immediate follower Sacchetti and for those
novels of Bandello or Cinthio which were current in English in the
Elizabethan age, and which so often supplied our dramatists, including
Shakespeare, with plots. It particularly interests us that the plan of
Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, where each pilgrim is to tell the same
number of stories, is directly or indirectly borrowed from Boccaccio, as
indeed are some of the tales themselves, besides hints hard to specify.
Gower’s _Confessio Amantis_ is under the same kinds of obligation.
In this work Boccaccio shows the usual Italian love, and also power, of
depicting in words whatever the eye sees, a love and power which recall
the Italian fondness for realistic painting. There is in the Italian
genius at all times this same quality. In Ariosto or in Tasso, as in
Boccaccio, there appears this affection for word-painting, always skilful
and complete, but often carried to excess and satiety.
Meanwhile, for students of English literature, there is other work of
Boccaccio’s which possesses no small importance. His two heroic poems,
_La Teseide_ and _Filostrato_, were the source of Chaucer’s _Knight’s
Tale_ and his _Troilus and Cressida_, as well as of all the compositions
for which these have served as models. _La Teseide_ is the story of
Palamon and Arcite and their rivalry for the hand of Emilia; and Chaucer,
Fletcher, and Dryden are among the English writers who have handled this
theme. _Filostrato_ is the story of Troilus and Cressida, and to compare
Chaucer with Boccaccio is to see how different is the characteristic
Italian light-hearted and rather cynically objective contemplation of the
struggle of innocence and vice, from the English tendency to the dramatic
and subjective realization of the pathos of love and suffering. For other
copying of Boccaccio it may be enough to refer to Lydgate’s _Falls of
Princes_ and to the _Mirror for Magistrates_ (1559) based on the _De
Casibus Illustrium Virorum_ of the Italian.
* * * * *
Before leaving this great triumvirate of the most potent and golden
period of Italian letters—a triumvirate which represents three steps,
from the sublimity of poetic vision, through the higher experiences of
the poetic real, down to unelevated or vulgar facts of the reality of
prose; from a Beatrice through a Laura to a Fiammetta, who was very much
flesh and blood; we must not forget to note their several vehicles of
verse. Dante wrote in the _terza rima_, or stanza of three lines, linked
in an arrangement which we may represent by _a b a_, _b c b_, _c d c_,
and so on consistently. This is not found before him, though after him
it became appropriated to Italian philosophic and satirical poetry.
Petrarch’s chief vehicle was the sonnet. Boccaccio composed his poems
in the _ottava rima_, which he did not, indeed, invent, but which he
fixed for ever after as the orthodox verse of Italian romance and epic,
whether to be used by Ariosto and Tasso or by lesser men. The Italians
are characteristically imitators of set forms, and the metres of Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio have bound their followers in a degree in which
Englishmen have never been bound by any metres. When English writers
adopted Boccaccio’s _ottava rima_, they modified it. Chaucer dropped a
line; Spenser added one. Yet both the stanza of Chaucer’s _Troilus and
Cressida_ and the stanza of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_ are none the less
to be reckoned as borrowings from Italy, though both, we may believe,
are improvements upon the original. That Spenser’s, at least, was such
is shown by the unanimity with which Thomson, Byron, Shelley and Keats
accepted it for sustained works of their own.
* * * * *
The first three classics of Italy thus passed away. Boccaccio died in
1375, and the Italian literature of Italy practically stood still.
This was the age of the revival of learning, when the Latin and Greek
classics, and at first particularly the Latin classics, were engaging the
attention of every man who pretended to scholarship and taste, and when
men of letters, instead of perfecting their own tongue and enriching it
with works full of modern manners and modern thoughts, were engaged in
a servile imitation of the ancient writers of Rome, especially Virgil,
Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, and Seneca. It was a time of insatiate erudition
in the things of antiquity, an age of great scholars like Bruno, Poggio
Bracciolini, Filelfo, and Valla, but an age when all their best was
written in Latin and that without originality or the savour of reality.
It was also a great time of literary patronage. The princes themselves
studied more or less earnestly, and affected literary taste, scholarship
and Platonism. Scholars were in the highest repute, not only as teachers
and companions of princes, but as ambassadors and counsellors. Every
little state had its group of learned writers. The Popes at Rome, the
Visconti at Milan, the Gonzaga at Mantua, the Este at Ferrara, the Medici
at Florence, collected together men of letters and bestowed lavish gifts
upon them. Cosmo de’ Medici, the Florentine merchant who had gained the
control of his city, turned his gardens into an academy. His trading
agents collected manuscripts everywhere in Greece and the East. The first
of those academies which afterwards became so numerous, and which bore
such remarkable names as _Della Crusca_, _Intronati_, and the rest, began
to spring up everywhere in Italy. Florence took the lead. The talk was
of letters and literary taste. Much pedantry, no doubt, there was; but
the universal love of letters was none the less genuine. Unfortunately
it took the practical shape of a cultivation of writing in Latin, not
in Italian. The _illuminati_ of the day despised the tongue of Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio. They gathered and absorbed the ideas of pagan
antiquity, but they did not yet seek to embody them in the language which
men actually spoke. They learned the secrets of literary polish, but did
not apply them to composition in Italian. So was it till towards the end
of the fifteenth century, or, roughly speaking, a hundred years after
the death of Boccaccio. These studies were anything but regrettable in
the end: the immediate fault lay in exclusive devotion to them, to the
neglect of the vernacular. When the fruits of classical study began to be
utilized for the purpose of literature in Italian, the results were of
the best. For the enthusiasm of the New Learning itself all Europe has
reason to be grateful to Italy, and no country more so than England, from
which (in 1488) Linacre went to sit at the feet of Poliziano in Florence,
whither also Grocyn and Latimer found their way.
At length, thanks to the efforts of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano
and Pulci at Florence, and of Boiardo at Ferrara, there was a revival
of Italian letters, a new breath of spontaneity passing over literary
creation. There is no need to speak in detail of the sonnets and
_canzoni_ of Lorenzo de’ Medici, modelled on Petrarch and addressed to
a Lucrezia Donato as the counterpart of Laura, nor of the lyric grace
and descriptive beauty of the learned and tasteful Poliziano. But of
Pulci’s romantic epic of _Morgante Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando
Innamorato_ it is necessary to say a word, for the reason that they are
the precursors of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_, of Tasso’s _Jerusalem
Delivered_, and thence indirectly of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_. It is
Ariosto and Tasso who rank next to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and
who consummate that sixteenth century or “Cinque Cento” literature which
constitutes the silver epoch of Italian letters. Pulci’s _Morgante
Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ are both “chivalrous
romances,” written in the _ottava rima_, or Italian equivalent of the
Spenserian stanza. They are not exactly epics, but rather stories of
knightly adventures, full of description and of the marvellous, of the
romance of love and arms, full of knights who slay giants, liberate
ladies, and fall in love with pagan maidens. Pulci’s work, though often
sufficiently earnest and stirring, is also often seasoned with that
mocking humour, that irony, that refusal to take ideals seriously, which
is one of the most constant of Italian characteristics. That of Boiardo
is of a more serious type. These books, as has just been hinted, mark a
revival of the well-known French romances, of the adventures credited to
the Paladins of Charlemagne. Such stories, which have no foundation in
sober history, were early borrowed by the Italians, and everyone knew of
Charlemagne, of Roland and Oliver, of the disaster of Roncesvalles, of
the traitor Gano and the rest. It was for Pulci and Boiardo to take these
legends of romance from the people, give them a literary shape, and so
lead the way for the magnificent work of Ariosto. It may be mentioned
in passing that Boiardo’s Moorish hero Rodamonte, the insolent and
atheistic—a name utilized by Ariosto in the form Rodomonte—has supplied a
term for that species of bombastic romancing which we call “rodomontade.”
That Boiardo was read by Milton is clear from allusion in _Paradise
Regained_.
In the next generation the _Orlando Innamorato_ was recast by Berni into
a mocking and satirical form, which was much more to the taste of the
Italian mind. The language of this _rifacimento_ is marked by greater
ease and polish than the original, but its chief claim to distinction
lies in the peculiar humour of the writer—the “Bernesque”—of interest
to students of English literature, from the fact that Berni largely
determined the character of the great productions of Byron’s Italian
period.
Italian literature has thus been brought back from scholars to the
people, when Lodovico Ariosto begins to write at Ferrara. His works are
various, including comedies and the inevitable sonnet after the manner
of Petrarch; but it is the _Orlando Furioso_, the romance of “Orlando
Mad,” which renders him immortal. That work is of special interest here,
inasmuch as it advanced English literature by inspiring the author of
the _Faerie Queene_ with the desire to “outgo” its power of perfect
description, and its unending chain of marvels and adventures. The poem
is a “romantic epic,” begun in 1505, and finished in eleven years. It
undertakes—following Boiardo on a higher plane of art—to sing of Paladins
at the court of Charlemagne, their loves, and their adventures, during
the fabulous wars of that famous emperor with the Moors. The hero Orlando
became mad through love of Angelica, and this madness, though it is only
an episode in the poem, gives the name to the whole. The entire work
is full of the spirit of prowess, of marvellous adventures of heroes
in rapid succession, their triumphs over the forces of nature and the
spells of magic, and of magnificent descriptions painted by the poet as
vividly as Italian artists painted with the brush—perhaps, it may be,
somewhat too fully, too precisely. The actions are placed in an ideal
world of chivalry, of knightly courtesy and knightly omnipotence, where
there are no stubborn facts and limitations to interfere with the valour
of the heroes. That world Ariosto did not create; he borrowed it from
the French trouvères, and from his predecessor Boiardo, whose work he
simply continues while throwing it into the shade. The magic and sorcery
come largely from Arabian sources; nevertheless Ariosto himself is of
imagination all compact, he invents episodes with wonderful fertility,
and orders them with wonderful distinctness. And the style is of the
most consummate in point of grace, elegance, and sweetness. He, like
other Italians, draws character but faintly; he does not soar to great
poetic heights, or descend to profound poetic depths; but in all the
forty thousand lines of his poem, it is asserted by Italians who should
be judges of their own tongue, that there is not one which is crude,
inharmonious, or feeble. According to himself
Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto,
and it is not easy to see how such things could be more perfectly sung.
Ariosto became a rage and a model. During the sixteenth century every
Paladin and every Knight of the Round Table had his poet. Our own
Spenser, deeply read as he was in Italian, had not only read Ariosto, but
in all probability more than one imitator of Ariosto, and it is not for
nothing that so many characters in the _Faerie Queene_, such as Archimago
and Orgoglio, Duessa, and Fidissa, bear Italian names, names that so well
fit the land of romance which the Italians had annexed for their own. In
1591 appeared the well-known translation by Sir John Harington.
Torquato Tasso, who lived during the latter half of the sixteenth century
(1544-1595), and who also wrote at Ferrara, composed the world-famed
epic _Gerusalemme Liberata_, or “Jerusalem Delivered.” It is the epic or
Iliad of the first great Crusade, in which Godfrey of Boulogne, who is
the hero—_Goffredo_ indeed was the earlier name of the epic—took back
the sacred city of Jerusalem from the Saracens. It would be vain to
attempt here to give an idea of this splendid heroic poem, of its vigour,
of the beauty of language in its episodes, of the romantic experiences
of the knightly Tancred and the heroine Clorinda, of the exploits, the
miracles, the magic, and the enchanted forest. That it greatly influenced
Spenser—whose Bower of Acrasia, for instance, is Tasso’s garden of
Armida—that it, along with the _Iliad_, the _Aeneid_, and the _Divine
Comedy_, helped to build up the _Paradise Lost_ of Milton, is one of its
claims upon our special notice here. To Elizabethan readers the work was
made accessible through the famous translation of Fairfax (1600), and
by others of less renown. To Tasso also belongs an unfinished poem on
the Creation, _Il Mondo Creato_, with which Milton was manifestly well
acquainted. Whether or not the English poet was also influenced in his
_Paradise Lost_ by another Italian production, the _Adamo_ of Andreini,
is uncertain.
Before proceeding further, we must take advantage of the mention of
Tasso, and make reference to another form of composition, of which the
Italians were always peculiarly fond, and which much affected the rest of
Europe for nearly two centuries. We have seen how the Greek Theocritus
wrote idylls of country life in Sicily, and how Virgil composed pastoral
eclogues on Italian soil. After the Renaissance—even the earlier wave of
that name—the writers of Italy took up these themes and began to dwell
again on country scenes, and on the delights of an ideal pastoral life,
as far removed as possible from the vicious and troublous realities of
their cities. Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Mantuanus are steps in the
history of such pastoral before Tasso. The poet of _Jerusalem Delivered_
does not disdain this region of poetry. In his pastoral drama _Aminta_ he
places his highly cultivated and courtly shepherds, shepherdesses, and
nymphs on the hills about Sorrento, and lends to their external life as
much pretence at reality as he can command. But he is above all things a
poet, and only secondarily a dramatist, and it is upon the lyrics that
the chief effect is staked. What the great Tasso did, others must do, and
at the end of the sixteenth century there are more than a dozen Italian
verse-writers composing in similar strain. The chief is Guarini, with
his _Pastor Fido_, destined to become well-known in an English shape as
Fletcher’s _Faithful Shepherdess_. But Tasso, as has just been said, was
not the first to revive the pastoral. It was a century since Poliziano
had written a _Favola di Orfeo_, a dramatic eclogue blending idyll and
tragedy. But greatest among such predecessors had been the Neapolitan
Sannazaro, who in 1504 had published the _Arcadia_, a medley of romance
and eclogue, partly in prose, partly in verse, which gave its shape to
our own _Arcadia_, the polished, if long and often tiresome, work of
Sir Philip Sidney. Sannazaro indeed practically invented that mythical
Arcady, or rural Utopia, into which poets and prose-writers have since
made so many journeys in order to find a land where there still lingers
the golden age of innocence and felicity amid bowers of beauty, where
hard facts and bad weather never intrude. Another writer, Battista of
Mantua—commonly called “the Mantuan”—composing in Latin, had also become
a famous model in the pastoral kind for all western Europe. Readers of
_Love’s Labour’s Lost_ need hardly be told that “good old Mantuan” was a
Latin school-book in Shakespeare’s boyhood, and had also been imitated
by Barclay, and translated by Turbervile. From him, partly direct and
partly through the medium of the French Marot, came the cue for Spenser’s
_Shepheard’s Calender_ and its progeny. In the Elizabethan age, pastorals
and pastoral plays were numerous, and among the writers must be reckoned
Lyly, Lodge, Greene, Peele, and Giles Fletcher.
* * * * *
The work of Italy in this century—the “Cinquecento”—was above all things
work of artistic polish. The importance attached to beauty of style and
elegance of words is apt to seem to us disproportionate. We are inclined
to wish that the Italian writers had explored greater heights and depths
of thinking and feeling, and had grappled more closely with matters of
high seriousness. We find them enlarging, elaborating, and polishing
tales of romance and adventure, or scenes of beauty and romantic life. We
find them revelling in descriptions, and yet, all the time, ironically
playing with the very unrealities of that which they describe, often
plainly hinting to us not to take the matter too seriously. Above all
things they are artists in style. And, therefore, it is natural to find
that words are often compassed to the neglect of the matter. This was
not only so in writing, it extended to their more courtly speech. It is
largely from Italy, though partly from Spain, that there came over France
and England that vice of affectation which developed a special shape in
Euphuism. Before the appearance of Lyly’s _Euphues_ in 1578, association
with the gallants and wits of the Italian Courts had worked upon English
pretenders to courtly graces. They deliberately affected forms of speech
which should show both how much they knew, and how ingeniously refined
they could be in novelty of phrase. Early Elizabethan literature is
greatly tainted by Euphuism, with its tricks of language, alliterative,
antithetical, hyperbolical, full of whimsical comparisons, overwrought
descriptions, plays on words, avoiding natural forms of expression in
favour of those which would show off the writer’s cultivation, his wit,
and taste.
Carried to its extreme in Italy, this minute attention to elaborate
expression produced an irritating artificiality in the literature of
the seventeenth century. The _seicentisti_ produced many fine words,
but little important substance. Literature declined into a plaything.
Marini’s affected figures of speech, far-fetched comparisons, and tricks
of verbiage, as illustrated particularly in his romantic _Adone_,
characterized a generation of writers. “Marinism” in Italian literature,
like “Alexandrianism” in the Greek, is now a term of reproach in letters.
We cannot, indeed, in fairness, always attribute a mania of style to
some definite inventor. Nor can we always draw clear distinction between
one class of frigid, and finally exasperating, artifice and another.
Unfortunately each new example is a new temptation, since exaggerations
and tricks are always easier to imitate than the quiet and unaccentuated
perfections of the consummate masters. The strained conceits of Donne
and Crashaw, and in general of the “Fantastic” and “Metaphysical” school
of our early seventeenth century, are one manifestation of the same
spirit which was working in Italy. But Donne follows in the track of
Euphuism, with new developments from his own talents, while others of the
“Fantastics” go directly to the school of Marini. Among these must be
included Crashaw, who both translates and imitates the Italian poet, and
Cowley, whose early poems reproduce many of the Italian conceits.
* * * * *
In the seventeenth century Italian literature fell into its decline,
and by about 1650 its influences on English writers ceased. Milton is
perhaps the last great poet whose debts to Italian models and Italian
culture can be declared measurable. His own knowledge of the Italian
language, his travels in Italy, and his friendships with Italians kept
him in touch with the current literature of the country. The sonnet was
not dead in a land which was still to produce a Filicaia, and Milton
was a sonneteer both in his own language and in Italian. His _Comus_ is
an Italian pastoral masque raised for once to the scope and dignity of
literature, and to two famous poems he is led to attach the Italian names
_L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. What his great epic owes to his reading
of Dante and Tasso is readily perceived, and the student of the two
literatures cannot but feel that the quiet tone of noble sweetness in his
earlier work is largely due, as it is with Spenser, to the fine example
of Italy. We should, perhaps, add at this point that a less considerable
contemporary of Milton, the artificial Cowley, was much under the
influence of the Italian lyrist Chiabrera (1552-1637), whose sumptuous,
courtly, glittering, but very un-Pindaric, “Pindarics” for a time
challenged the lyric supremacy of Petrarch. It is not a little strange
that Wordsworth also was so far attracted by Chiabrera as to translate
certain of his poetical epitaphs. Nor is it to be passed over that Pope’s
heroi-comical _Rape of the Lock_ was suggested—and in such compositions
the suggestion counts for much—by the _Rape of the Bucket_ (_La Secchia
Rapita_) of Tassoni, who died in 1636.
It is hardly part of our subject to dwell upon Italian drama, inasmuch as
it exerted but very little effect upon ours. So far as there was any,
it was in the “masques,” which owe their birth to the age of Poliziano,
played no inconsiderable part in the court festivities of England from
the time of Henry VIII, and came to engage so much of the learning and
ingenuity of Ben Jonson. Yet masques are little more than glorified
tableaux in glorified “private theatricals,” accompanied by some form of
libretto written _ad hoc_, and of almost no permanent value. Milton’s
_Comus_ is no fair specimen of the class. It is, perhaps, scarcely
relevant to literature to record that we owe our Harlequin and Pantaloon
to the stock characters in the Italian semi-improvisations known as
_commedie dell’arte_.
Italians may think otherwise, but, to our foreign conception, Italy
has never possessed a really fine dramatic masterpiece, tragic or
comic. The drama of Italy, like drama elsewhere, had its prelude in
the realistic presentations of religion, commonly known as “mysteries”
and “miracles,” but in Italy styled _sacre rappresentazioni_. But
Italy, unlike France or England, quickly developed the purely secular
drama from a source distinct from the Church. The Italians lay nearer
to the Roman comedy, and it was in Italy that the Latin Renaissance
came earliest. The ordinary Italian ingenuity and love of art and show
produced the “masque,” which was apt to be blent with pastoral, while
the deliberate Latinizing of the cultured classes brought in imitations,
often mere translations, of the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and of
the tragedies of Seneca. In the development of its tragedy Italy became
severely “classical,” in the misused sense of the term. That is to say,
it became Senecan, and obeyed the three unities. The vogue began with
Trissino and his _Sofonisba_ (1515), and was carried on by Rucellai,
Alamanni, and others. Comedy, which also followed in the Roman path,
was in a large degree emancipated by Aretino. To none of the dramatic
forms, tragedy, comedy, _drammi pastorali_, _drammi musicali_ (_opera_,
_tragedia per musica_), do we owe any real growths within our own
literature. Late in the eighteenth century Alfieri did his best, within
the Senecan conventions, to create a tragic stage, and much can be said
in praise of his efforts and his talents; but he was no dramatic genius.
Goldoni’s comedies do not concern us. The one dramatic gift of Italy to
Europe has been opera, which arose from musical pastoral in Rinnucini’s
_Dafne_. This, however, belongs rather to the domain of music. It is, no
doubt, hard to pass by the lyric brilliancy and charm of Metastasio (who
flourished about 1740), but for our subject he cannot fairly be regarded
as of moment.
For prose, besides the _novelle_ and _novellini_, we have in particular
the much read and rightly detested _Prince_ of Machiavelli, and the
_Cortegiano_ of Castiglione (1518), a book which speedily influenced
English courtly ideals, both directly and through various manuals written
in imitation. But there is little else to which conspicuous influence
could be ascribed without exaggeration.
The “Novella” is regularly a short story outlined round a situation which
is intended to be exciting. It is not a novel, but rather the sketch of
one. In this domain Italy was exceedingly prolific. True to the national
instinct for fidelity to patterns, the Italian _novellieri_ are fond
of the old device of Boccaccio, borrowed by Chaucer; they frequently
pretend that their various stories are related by a company of persons
accidentally brought together in a country house, or on a voyage, or the
like, and placed in need of such mutual entertainment. The _Pecorone_
of Ser Giovanni, the _Hecatommithi_ of Cinthio, and the stories of
Straparola, Da Porto, Bandello, and others, enjoyed a wide vogue in
France and England, and formed matter for the exploitation of every class
of our Elizabethan dramatists or writers of fiction.
* * * * *
What English literature owes to that of Italy, except in the case of
Byron’s Bernesque period, it owes before the middle of the seventeenth
century. From Dante to Tasso the obligations were great and manifold. To
Italian stories, Italian sonnets and lyrics, to Italian epic, romance
and pastoral, our writers from Chaucer to Milton are multifariously
indebted. Most indebted of all is the great epoch which culminated
in Shakespeare. Before his day the Tudor Court had much affected the
language and courtesies of Italy. Italian travel was common, and Italians
were relatively numerous in London. Even that sweet stateliness which
characterizes so much of the Elizabethan lyric is a gift of Italy.
To Italian skill and refinement of language, to Italian melodies of
versification, our rough lyric beginnings owe debts more appreciable
than to Italian matter. In other words, Italy taught us the art of
writing, while leaving us to use it upon our own realities of thought
and feeling. Before the poetical innovations of Wyatt and Surrey, English
verse had stood in much need of further moulding of form and polish of
language. It was an outcome of the partiality of the Court of Henry VIII
for Italian art and manners that there arose the new school of poets
whom Puttenham describes as “a new company of courtly makers, of whom
Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two
chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet
and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly
crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly
polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had
been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers
of our English metre and style.” Both Wyatt and Surrey are best known
as sonneteers. Sometimes they are translating from Petrarch, but they
are by no means mere translators, or even servile imitators. It is well
known that the sonnet, as introduced by them, differs somewhat from the
Italian, and its ending in an epigrammatic couplet is a purely English
novelty. “Sonnet,” indeed, was for a time used loosely for other forms
than the true poem of fourteen lines; but, when it found itself, it
had lost nothing in strength and beauty. Perhaps the chief impulse in
establishing the sonnet in England, when a certain halt had occurred
after Surrey, came from Watson’s _Passionate Century of Love_ (1581),
although in these “sonnets,” Italian enough in spirit, the form is
strangely made to consist of eighteen lines in three sestets.
The whole Elizabethan world of lyrists “Petrarchized.” The _Amoretti_ of
Spenser made him to Gabriel Harvey “an English Petrarch,” although in
truth Petrarch is but one in a list of Spenser’s models, which includes
also Sannazaro, Ariosto, and Tasso. It would be easy to trace throughout
the English sonneteers, from the appearance of _Tottell’s Miscellany_
in 1557, the effects of many an Italian Petrarchist whose name has not
been given in the foregoing sketch. Nor was the borrowing confined to the
sonnet form or the sonnet spirit. It extended also to the “sonnet series”
or “sonnet sequence.” The notion of such related sonnets was introduced
from Italy by Surrey in his series dedicated to “Geraldine,” and from
him was taken up by Sidney (to Stella), Spenser (to Rosalind), Constable
(_Diana_), Daniel (_Delia_), Drayton (_Idea_), Lodge (_Phillis_), Giles
Fletcher (_Licia_), as well as by Shakespeare, who, in his more noble
way, leaves the object nameless. This development should perhaps serve as
a warning to those who press Shakespeare’s sonnets too rigorously for a
key to his actual experiences.
Our servitude to France followed upon the decline of Italian influence.
So far as we have been affected by Italy during the last century it has
been due rather to the residence of English writers—Byron, Shelley,
Landor, Leigh Hunt, Browning, Ruskin—in the peninsula, than to any new
fountains of inspiration to be found in its productions.
* * * * *
The English genius wisely rejected some portions of the literary
offerings of Italy. Especially was this so in the domain of critical
principle, and particularly as it concerned the drama. Sidney’s _Apologie
for Poetrie_ follows the false doctrine of the dramatic unities as laid
down by Castelvetro (1570), but such pseudo-classical plays as were
attempted met with the fate which had previously attended Sackville’s
sterile effort of _Gorboduc_. The only useful and permanent contribution
from dramatic sources was the blank verse of Trissino, which Surrey first
borrowed for his translation of the _Aeneid_, whence it was passed on
to the stage by Sackville. Taken up by playwrights, it was moulded into
a powerful instrument by Marlowe, and thence grew to all its subsequent
ripe uses. For the rest, when Gascoigne translated Ariosto’s comedy _I
Suppositi_ in _The Supposes_, the Italian model itself proved barren, but
the lesson of style in dialogue left its usual improving result.
In borrowing the Italian _novelle_ and translating them, the English
sixteenth century for a time reproduced their horrors and licentiousness,
much to the disgust of many good citizens, who would scarcely have
recognized themselves if described as Puritans. It became necessary
even to order the burning of many of them for their wantonness. Yet
on the whole the English selection, whether for mere reading (as in
Painter’s _Palace of Pleasure_), or for exploitation by the stage (as
in _Romeo and Juliet_), or by prose fiction (as in the work of Greene),
shows sufficient indication of the superior English sense of decency.
Nevertheless, it was a recommendation to story-books if it could be said
(truly or otherwise) that the tales came “from Italy.” Nor did the
borrowings of them cease till the Puritans closed the playhouses, for
Massinger and Webster seek their situations where Shakespeare sought his,
albeit their choice may be less sure.
* * * * *
The Italians display literary characteristics not difficult to define.
They are the heirs of the Latin tradition. But Latin literature, as
has been stated earlier in this book, was not particularly original
either in thought or style. It was not a highly imaginative or emotional
literature; its verse tends chiefly to polish, and its prose to either
declamation or epigram. It was marked by incessant strivings after
verbal art, but not by any abandonments of passionate ardour, of lofty
endeavours, or of profound meditations. It was a literature given to
narration and satire; but not to exalted feeling. In other words, it
was a literature of culture rather than of spontaneity. It was prone,
therefore, to follow models, and to consider the form before the
substance. In almost all these qualities Italian literature shares.
Except in Dante, it hardly shows in any large measure the great poetic
faculty of experiencing and vividly realizing great passions and
far-reaching thoughts. Nearly all the Italians, after the vernacular
had once been established, cultivate the most fastidious perfection of
workmanship, while their thought and feeling are of but average depth,
dealing with things positive and on the surface. Except in Dante and his
age, Italian literature avoids the visionary and abstract, and deals by
preference with the material and sensuous. It is not marked by potent
and seminal thoughts, which are found almost only in Dante. For that
reason it is Dante whom we generally satisfy ourselves with reading, if,
indeed, we are not rather satisfied with talking of him and reading about
him.