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RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
_ITALIAN LITERATURE_
In Two Parts
BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
_Author of "Studies of the Greek Poets," "Sketches in Italy and
Greece," etc._
"Questa provincia pare nata per risuscitare le cose morte,
come si e visto della Poesia, della Pittura e della Scultura."
MACH.: _Arte della Guerra_
PART I
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1888
PREFACE.
This work on the Renaissance in Italy, of which I now give the last two
volumes to the public, was designed and executed on the plan of an essay
or analytical inquiry, rather than on that which is appropriate to a
continuous history. Each of its four parts--the _Age of the Despots_,
the _Revival of Learning_, the _Fine Arts_, and _Italian
Literature_--stood in my mind for a section; each chapter for a
paragraph; each paragraph for a sentence. At the same time, it was
intended to make the first three parts subsidiary and introductory to
the fourth, for which accordingly a wider space and a more minute method
of treatment were reserved. The first volume was meant to explain the
social and political conditions of Italy; the second to relate the
exploration of the classical past which those conditions necessitated,
and which determined the intellectual activity of the Italians; the
third to exhibit the bias of this people toward figurative art, and
briefly to touch upon its various manifestations; in order that,
finally, a correct point of view might be obtained for judging of their
national literature in its strength and limitations. Literature must
always prove the surest guide to the investigator of a people's
character at some decisive epoch. To literature, therefore, I felt that
the plan of my book allowed me to devote two volumes.
The subject of my inquiry rendered the method I have described, not only
natural but necessary. Yet there are special disadvantages, to which
progressive history is not liable, in publishing a book of this sort by
installments. Readers of the earlier parts cannot form a just conception
of the scope and object of the whole. They cannot perceive the relation
of its several sections to each other, or give the author credit for his
exercise of judgment in the marshaling and development of topics. They
criticise each portion independently, and desire a comprehensiveness in
parts which would have been injurious to the total scheme. Furthermore,
this kind of book sorely needs an Index, and its plan renders a general
Index, such as will be found at the end of the last volume, more
valuable than one made separately for each part.
Of these disadvantages I have been rendered sensible during the progress
of publication through the last six years. Yet I have gained some
compensation in the fact that the demand for a second edition of the
first volume has enabled me to make that portion of the work more
adequate.
With regard to authorities consulted in these two concluding volumes, I
have special pleasure in recording none--with only insignificant
exceptions--but Italian names. The Italians have lately made vigorous
strides in the direction of sound historical research and scientific
literary criticism. It is not too much to say that the labors of this
generation are rapidly creating a radical change in the views hitherto
accepted concerning the origins and the development of Italian
literature. Theories based on rational investigation and philosophical
study are displacing the academical opinions of the last century. The
Italians are forming for themselves a just conception of their past, at
the same time that they are consolidating their newly-gained political
unity.
To dwell upon the works of Francesco de Sanctis and Pasquale Villari is
hardly necessary here. The former is perhaps less illustrious by
official dignity than by his eloquent _Storia della Letteratura
Italiana_. The latter has gained European reputation as the biographer
of Savonarola and Machiavelli, the historian of Florence at their epoch.
But English readers are probably not so familiar with acute and accurate
criticism of Giosue Carducci; with the erudition of Alessandro d'Ancona,
and the voluminous history of the veteran Cesare Cantu; with the
intelligence and facile pen of Adolfo Bartoli; with the philological
researches of Napoleone Caix, and Francesco Fiorentino's philosophical
studies; with Rajna's patient labors in one branch of literary history,
and Monaci's discoveries in another; with the miscellaneous
contributions to scholarship and learning made by men like Comparetti,
Guasti, D'Ovidio, Rubieri, Milanesi, Campori, Passano, Biagi, Pitre,
Tigri, Vigo, Giudici, Fracassetti, Fanfani, Bonghi, Grion, Mussafia,
Morsolin, Del Lungo, Virgili. While alluding thus briefly to students
and writers, I should be sorry to omit the names of those
publishers--the Florentine Lemonnier, Barbera, Sansoni; the Neapolitan
Morano; the Palermitan Lauriel; the Pisan Vico and Nistri; the Bolognese
Romagnoli and Zanichelli--through whose spirited energy so many works of
erudition have seen the light.
I have mentioned names almost at random, passing over (not through
forgetfulness, but because space compels me) many writers to whom I owe
weighty obligations. The notes and references in these volumes will, I
trust, contain acknowledgment sufficient to atone for omissions in this
place.
Not a few of these distinguished men hold professorial appointments; and
it is clear that they are forming students in the great Italian cities,
to continue and complete their labors. Very much remains to be explored
in the field of Italian literary history. The future promises a harvest
of discovery scarcely less rich than that of the last half-century. On
many moot points we can at present express but partial or provisional
judgments. The historian of the Renaissance must feel that his work,
when soundest, may be doomed to be superseded, and when freshest, will
ere long seem antiquated. So rapid is the intellectual movement now
taking place in Italy.
In conclusion, it remains for me to add that certain passages in Chapter
II. have been reproduced from an article by me in the _Quarterly
Review_, while some translations from Poliziano and Boiardo, together
with portions of the critical remarks upon those poets, were first
published, a few years since, in the _Fortnightly Review_. From the
_Fortnightly Review_, again, I have extracted the translation of ten
sonnets by Folgore da San Gemignano.
In quoting from Italian writers, in the course of this literary history,
I have found it best to follow no uniform plan; but, as each occasion
demanded, I have given the Italian text, or else an English version, or
in some cases both the original and a translation. To explain the
motives for my decision in every particular, would involve too much
expenditure of space. I may, however, add that the verse-translations in
these volumes are all from my pen, and have been made at various times
for the special purpose of this work.
DAVOS: _March, 1881._
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST PART.
CHAPTER I.
THE ORIGINS.
The period from 1300 to 1530--Its Division into Three Sub-Periods--Tardy
Development of the Italian Language--Latin and Roman Memories--Political
Struggles and Legal Studies--Conditions of Latin Culture in Italy during
the Middle Ages--Want of National Legends--The Literatures of Langue
d'Oc and Langue d'Oil cultivated by Italians--Franco-Italian
Hybrid--Provencal Lyrics--French Chansons de Geste--Carolingian and
Arthurian Romances--Formation of Italian Dialects--Sicilian School of
Court Poets--Frederick II.--Problem of the _Lingua Aulica_--Forms of
Poetry and Meters fixed--General Character of the Sicilian Style--Rustic
Latin and Modern Italian--Superiority of Tuscan--The _De
Eloquio_--Plebeian Literature--Moral Works in Rhyme--Emergence of Prose
in the Thirteenth Century--Political Songs--Popular Lyrics--Religious
Hymns--Process of Tuscanization--Transference of the Literary Center
from Sicily to Tuscany--Guittone of Arezzo--Bolognese School--Guido
Guinicelli--King Enzio's Envoy to Tuscany--Florentine Companies of
Pleasure--Folgore de San Gemignano--The Guelf City 1
CHAPTER II.
THE TRIUMVIRATE.
Chivalrous Poetry--Ideal of Chivalrous Love--Bolognese Erudition--New
Meaning given to the Ideal--Metaphysics of the Florentine School of
Lyrists--Guido Cavalcanti--Philosophical Poems--Popular Songs--Cino of
Pistoja--Dante's _Vita Nuova_--Beatrice in the _Convito_ and the
_Paradiso_--The Preparation for the _Divine Comedy_ in
Literature--Allegory--The _Divine Comedy_--Petrarch's Position in
Life--His Conception of Humanism--Conception of Italy--His Treatment of
Chivalrous Love--Beatrice and Laura--The _Canzoniere_--Boccaccio, the
Florentine Bourgeois--His Point of View--His Abandonment of the
Chivalrous Standpoint--His Devotion to Art--Anticipates the
Renaissance--The _Decameron_--_Commedia Umana_--Precursors of
Boccaccio--Novels--_Carmina Vagorum_--Plan of the Book--Its Moral
Character--The _Visione Amorosa_--Boccaccio's Descriptions--The
_Teseide_--The _Rime_--The _Filocopo_--The _Filostrato_--The _Ameto_,
_Fiammetta_, _Ninfale_, _Corbaccio_--Prose before Boccaccio--_Fioretti
di San Francesco_ and _Decameron_ compared--Influence of Boccaccio over
the Prose Style of the Renaissance--His Death--Close of the Fourteenth
Century--Sacchetti's Lament 59
CHAPTER III.
THE TRANSITION.
The Church, Chivalry, the Nation--The National Element in Italian
Literature--Florence--Italy between 1373 and 1490--Renascent
Nationality--Absorption in Scholarship--Vernacular Literature follows an
Obscure Course--Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular
Currents--Renascence of Italian--The Italian Temperament--Importance of
the Quattrocento--Sacchetti's Novels--Ser Giovanni's
_Pecorone_--Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry--Lyrics of the Villa
and the Piazza--Nicolo Soldanieri--Alesso Donati--His Realistic
Poems--Followers of Dante and Petrarch--Political Poetry of the Guelfs
and Ghibellines--Fazio degli Uberti--Saviozzo da Siena--Elegies on
Dante--Sacchetti's Guelf Poems--Advent of the
_Bourgeoisie_--Discouragement of the Age--Fazio's _Dittamondo_--Rome and
Alvernia--Frezzi's _Quadriregio_--Dantesque Imitation--Blending of
Classical and Medieval Motives--Matteo Palmieri's _Citta di Vita_--The
Fate of _Terza Rima_--Catherine of Siena--Her Letters--S. Bernardino's
Sermons--Salutati's Letters--Alessandra degli Strozzi--Florentine's
Annalists--Giov. Cavalcanti--Corio's _History of Milan_--Matarazzo's
_Chronicle of Perugia_--Masuccio and his _Novellino_--His Style and
Genius--Alberti--Born in Exile--His Feeling for Italian--Enthusiasm for
the Roman Past--The Treatise on the Family--Its Plan--Digression on the
Problem of its Authorship--Pandolfini or Alberti--The
_Deiciarchia_--_Tranquillita dell'Animo_--_Teogenio_--Alberti's
Religion--Dedication of the Treatise on Painting--Minor Works in Prose
on Love--_Ecatomfila_, _Amiria_, _Deifiria_, etc.--Misogynism--Novel of
_Ippolito and Leonora_--Alberti's Poetry--Review of Alberti's Character
and his Relation to the Age--Francesco Colonna--The _Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili_--Its Style--Its Importance as a Work of the Transition--A
Romance of Art, Love, Humanism--The Allegory--Polia--Antiquity--Relation
of this Book to Boccaccio and Valla--It Foreshadows the Renaissance 139
CHAPTER IV.
POPULAR SECULAR POETRY.
Separation between Cultivated Persons and the People--Italian despised
by the Learned--Contempt for Vernacular Literature--The _Certamen
Coronarium_--Literature of Instruction for the Proletariate--Growth of
Italian Prose--Abundance of Popular Poetry--The People in the
Quattrocento take the Lead--Qualities of Italian Genius--Arthurian and
Carolingian Romances--_I Reali di Francia_--Andrea of Berberino and his
Works--Numerous Romances in Prose and Verse--Positive Spirit--Versified
Tales from Boccaccio--Popular Legends--Ginevra degli Almieri--Novel of
_Il Grasso_--Histories in Verse--_Lamenti_--The Poets of the
People--_Cantatori in Banca_--Antonio Pucci--His _Sermintesi_--Political
Songs--Satires--Burchiello--His Life and Writings--Dance-Songs--Derived
from Cultivated Literature, or produced by the
People--Poliziano--Love-Songs--_Rispetti_ and _Stornelli_--The Special
Meaning of _Strambotti_--Diffusion of this Poetry over Italy--Its
Permanence--Question of its Original Home--Intercommunication and
Exchange of Dialects--_Incatenature_ and _Rappresaglie_--Traveling in
Medieval Italy--The Subject-Matter of this Poetry--Deficiency in Ballad
Elements--Canti Monferrini--The Ballad of _L'Avvelenato_ and Lord Ronald
234
CHAPTER V.
POPULAR RELIGIOUS POETRY.
The Thirteenth Century--Outburst of Flagellant Fanaticism--The
_Battuti_, _Bianchi_, _Disciplinati_--Acquire the name of
_Laudesi_--Jacopone da Todi--His Life--His Hymns--The
_Corrotto_--Franciscan Poetry--Tresatti's Collection--Grades of
Spiritual Ecstasy--Lauds of the Confraternities--Benivieni--Feo Belcari
and the Florentine Hymn-writers--Relation to Secular
Dance-songs--Origins of the Theater--Italy had hardly any true Miracle
Plays--Umbrian _Divozioni_--The Laud becomes Dramatic--Passion
Plays--Medieval Properties--The Stage in Church or in the Oratory--The
_Sacra Rappresentazione_--A Florentine Species--Fraternities for
Boys--Names of the _Festa_--Theory of its Origin--Shows in Medieval
Italy--Pageants of S. John's Day at Florence--Their
Machinery--Florentine _Ingegnieri_--Forty-three Plays in D'Ancona's
Collection--Their Authors--The Prodigal Son--Elements of
Farce--Interludes and Music--Three Classes of _Sacre
Rappresentazioni_--Biblical Subjects--Legends of Saints--Popular
_Novelle_--Conversion of the Magdalen--Analysis of Plays 279
CHAPTER VI.
LORENZO DE' MEDICI AND POLIZIANO.
Period from 1470 to 1530--Methods of treating it--By Chronology--By
Places--By Subjects--Renascence of Italian--At Florence, Ferrara,
Naples--The New Italy--Forty Years of Peace--Lorenzo de' Medici--His
Admiration for and Judgment of Italian Poetry--His Privileges as a
Patron--His _Rime_--The Death of Simonetta--Lucrezia Donati--Lorenzo's
Descriptive Power--The _Selve_--The _Ambra_--_La Nencia_--_I Beoni_--His
Sacred Poems--Carnival and Dance Songs--Carri and
Trionfi--Savonarola--The Mask of Penitence--Leo X. in Florence,
1513--Pageant of the Golden Age--Angelo Poliziano--His Place in Italian
Literature--_Le Stanze_--Treatment of the Octave Stanza--Court
Poetry--Mechanism and Adornment--The _Orfeo_--Orpheus, the Ideal of the
Cinque Cento--Its Dramatic Qualities--Chorus of Maenads--Poliziano's Love
Poems--_Rispetti_--Florentine Love--La Bella Simonetta--Study and
Country Life 359
CHAPTER VII.
PULCI AND BOIARDO.
The Romantic Epic--Its Plebeian Origin--The Popular Poet's
Standpoint--The Pulci Family--The Carolingian Cycle--Turpin--_Chanson de
Roland_--Historical Basis--Growth of the Myth of Roland--Causes of its
Popularity in Italy--Burlesque Elements--The _Morgante
Maggiore_--Adventures in Paynimry--Roncesvalles--Episodes introduced by
the Poet--Sources in Older Poems--The Treason of Gano--Pulci's
Characters--His Artistic Purpose--His Levity and
Humor--Margutte--Astarotte--Pulci's _bourgeois_ Spirit--Boiardo--His
Life--Feudalism in Italy--Boiardo's Humor--His Enthusiasm for
Knighthood--His Relation to Renaissance Art--Plot of the _Orlando
Innamorato_--Angelica--Mechanism of the Poem--Creation of
Characters--Orlando and Rinaldo--Ruggiero--Lesser Heroes--The
Women--Love--Friendship--Courtesy--Orlando and Agricane at
Albracca--Natural Delineation of Passions--Speed of Narration--Style of
Versification--Classical and Medieval Legends--The Punishment of
Rinaldo--The Tale of Narcissus--Treatment of Mythology--Treatment of
Magic--Fate of the _Orlando Innamorato_ 425
CHAPTER VIII.
ARIOSTO.
Ancestry and Birth of Ariosto--His Education--His Father's Death--Life
at Reggio--Enters Ippolito d'Este's Service--Character of the
Cardinal--Court Life--Composition and Publication of the
_Furioso_--Quiet Life at Ferrara--Comedies--Governorship of
Garfagnana--His Son Virginio--Last Eight Years--Death--Character and
Habits--The Satires--Latin Elegies and Lyrics--Analysis of the
Satires--Ippolito's Service--Choice of a Wife--Life at Court and
Place-hunting--Miseries at Garfagnana--Virginio's
Education--Autobiographical and Satirical Elements--Ariosto's Philosophy
of Life--Minor Poems--Alessandra Benucci--Ovidian Elegies--Madrigals and
Sonnets--Ariosto's Conception of Love 493
* * * * *
APPENDICES.
No. I.--Note on Italian Heroic Verse 523
No. II.--Ten Sonnets translated from Folgore da San Gemignano 526
No. III.--Translations from Alesso Donati 531
No. IV.--Jacopone's "Presepio," "Corrotto," and "Cantico dell'Amore
Superardente," translated into English Verse 532
No. V.--Passages translated from the "Morgante Maggiore" of Pulci 543
No. VI.--Translations of Elegiac Verses by Girolamo Benivieni and
Michelangelo Buonarroti 561
RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
CHAPTER I.
THE ORIGINS.
The period from 1300 to 1530--Its Division into Three
Sub-Periods--Tardy Development of the Italian Language--Latin
and Roman Memories--Political Struggles and Legal
Studies--Conditions of Latin Culture in Italy during the
Middle Ages--Want of National Legends--The Literatures of
Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oil cultivated by
Italians--Franco-Italian Hybrid--Provencal Lyrics--French
Chansons de Geste--Carolingian and Arthurian
Romances--Formation of Italian Dialects--Sicilian School of
Court Poets--Frederick II.--Problem of the _Lingua
Aulica_--Forms of Poetry and Meters fixed--General Character
of the Sicilian Style--Rustic Latin and Modern
Italian--Superiority of Tuscan--The _De Eloquio_--Plebeian
Literature--Moral Works in Rhyme--Emergence of Prose in the
Thirteenth Century--Political Songs--Popular Lyrics--Religious
Hymns--Process of Tuscanization--Transference of the Literary
Center from Sicily to Tuscany--Guittone of Arezzo--Bolognese
School--Guido Guinicelli--King Enzio's Envoy to
Tuscany--Florentine Companies of Pleasure--Folgore da San
Gemignano--The Guelf City.
Between 1300, the date of Dante's vision, and 1530, the date of the fall
of Florence, the greatest work of the Italians in art and literature was
accomplished. These two hundred and thirty years may be divided into
three nearly equal periods. The first ends with Boccaccio's death in
1375. The second lasts until the birth of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1448.
The third embraces the golden age of the Renaissance. In the first
period Italian literature was formed. In the second intervened the
studies of the humanists. In the third, these studies were carried over
to the profit of the mother tongue. The first period extends over
seventy-five years; the second over seventy-three; the third over
eighty-two. With the first date, 1300, we may connect the jubilee of
Boniface and the translation of the Papal See to Avignon (1304); with
the second, 1375, the formation of the Albizzi oligarchy in Florence
(1381); with the third, 1448, the capture of Constantinople (1453); and
with the fourth, 1530, the death of Ariosto (1533) and the new direction
given to the Papal policy by the Sack of Rome (1527).
The chronological limits assigned to the Italian Renaissance in the
first volume of this work would confine the history of literature to
about eighty years between 1453 and 1527; and it will be seen by
reference to the foregoing paragraph that it would not be impossible to
isolate that span of time. In dealing with Renaissance literature, it so
happens that strict boundaries can be better observed than in the case
of politics, fine arts, or learning. Yet to adhere to this section of
literary history without adverting to the antecedent periods, would be
to break the chain of national development, which in the evolution of
Italian language is even more important than in any other branch of
culture. If the renascence of the arts must be traced from Cimabue and
Pisano, the spirit of the race, as it expressed itself in modern speech,
demands a still more retrogressive survey, in order to render the
account of its ultimate results intelligible.
The first and most brilliant age of Italian literature ended with
Boccaccio, who traced the lines on which the future labors of the nation
were conducted. It was succeeded by nearly a century of Greek and Latin
scholarship. To study the masterpieces of Dante and Petrarch, or to
practice their language, was thought beneath the dignity of men like
Valla, Poggio, or Pontano. But toward the close of the fifteenth
century, chiefly through the influence of Lorenzo de' Medici and his
courtiers, a strong interest in the mother-tongue revived. Therefore the
vernacular literature of the Renaissance, as compared with that of the
expiring middle ages, was itself a renascence or revival. It reverted to
the models furnished by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and combined
them with the classics, which had for so long a while eclipsed their
fame. Before proceeding to trace the course of the revival, which forms
the special subject of these volumes, it will be needful to review the
literature of the fourteenth century, and to show under what forms that
literature survived among the people during the classical enthusiasm of
the fifteenth century. Only by this antecedent investigation can the new
direction taken by the genius of the combined Italian nation, after the
decline of scholarship, be understood. Thus the three sub-periods of the
two hundred and thirty years above described may be severally named the
medieval, the humanistic, and the renascent. To demonstrate their
connection and final explication is my purpose in this last section of
my work on the Renaissance.
In the development of a modern language Italy showed less precocity than
other European nations. The causes of this tardiness are not far to
seek. Latin, the universal tongue of medieval culture, lay closer to the
dialects of the peninsula than to the native speech of Celtic and
Teutonic races, for whom the official language of the Empire and the
Church always exhibited a foreign character. In Italy the ancient speech
of culture was at home: and nothing had happened to weaken its
supremacy. The literary needs of the Italians were satisfied with Latin;
nor did the genius of the new people make a vigorous effort to fashion
for itself a vehicle of utterance. Traditions of Roman education
lingered in the Lombard cities, which boasted of secular schools, where
grammarians and rhetoricians taught their art according to antique
method, long after the culture of the North had passed into the hands of
ecclesiastics.[1] When Charlemagne sought to resuscitate learning, he
had recourse to these Italian teachers; and the importance of the
distinction between Italians and Franks or Germans, in this respect, was
felt so late as the eleventh century. Some verses in the Panegyric
addressed by Wippo to the Emperor Henry III. brings the case so vividly
before us that it may be worth while to transcribe them here[2]:
Tunc fac edictum per terram Teutonicorum,
Quilibet ut dives sibi natos instruat omnes.
Litterulis, legemque suam persuadeat illis,
Ut, cum principibus placitandi venerit usus,
Quisque suis libris exemplum proferat illis.
Moribus his dudum vivebat Roma decenter:
His studiis tantos potuit vincire tyrannos.
Hoc servant Itali post prima crepundia cuncti;
Et sudare scholis mandatur tota juventus.
Solis Teutonicis vacuum vel turpe videtur,
Ut doceant aliquem nisi clericus accipiatur.
While the Italians thus continued the rhetorical and legal studies of
the ancients, they did not forget that they were representatives and
descendants of the Romans. The Republic and the Empire were for them the
two most glorious epochs of their own history; and any attempt which
they made to revive either literature or art, was imitative of the past.
They were not in the position to take a new departure. No popular epic,
like the Niebelungen of the Teuton, the Arthurian legend of the Celt,
the Song of Roland of the Frank, or the Spanish Cid, could have sprung
up on Italian soil. The material was wanting to a race that knew its own
antiquity. Even when an Italian undertook a digest of the Tale of Troy
or of the Life of Alexander, he converted the metrical romances of the
middle ages into prose, obeying an instinct which led him to regard the
classical past as part of his own history.[3] In like manner, the
recollection of a previous municipal organization in the communes,
together with the growing ideal of a Roman Empire, which should restore
Italy to her place of sovereignty among the nations, proved serious
obstacles to the unification of the people. We have already seen that
this reversion of the popular imagination to Rome may be reckoned among
the reasons why the victory of Legnano and the Peace of Constance were
comparatively fruitless.[4] Politically, socially, and intellectually,
the Italians persisted in a dream of their Latin destiny, long after the
feasibility of realizing that vision had been destroyed, and when the
modern era had already formed itself upon a new type in the federation
of the younger races.
Of hardly less importance, as negative influences, were the failure of
feudalism to take firm hold upon Italian soil, and the defect of its
ideal, chivalry. The literature of trouveres, troubadours, and
minnesingers grew up and flourished in the castles of the North; nor was
it until the Italians, under the sway of the Hohenstauffen princes,
possessed something analogous to a Provencal Court, that the right
conditions for the development of literary art in the vernacular were
attained. From this point of view Dante's phrase of _lingua aulica_, to
express the dialect of culture, is both scientific and significant. It
will further appear in the course of this chapter that the earliest dawn
of Italian literature can be traced to those minor Courts of Piedmont
and the Trevisian Marches, where the people borrowed the forms of feudal
society more sympathetically than elsewhere in Italy.
It must moreover be remembered that during the eleventh and twelfth
centuries the force of the Italian people was concentrated upon two
great political struggles, the contest of the Church with the Empire,
and the War of Lombard Independence. In the prosecution of these
quarrels, the Italians lost sight of letters, art, theology. They became
a race of statesmen and jurists. Their greatest divines and
metaphysicians wandered northward into France and England. Their most
favored university, that of Bologna, acquired a world-famed reputation
as a school of jurisprudence. Legal studies and political activity
occupied the attention of their ablest men. It would be difficult to
overrate the magnitude of the work done during these two centuries. In
the course of them, the Italians gave final form to the organism of the
Papacy, which must be regarded as a product of their constructive
genius. They developed Republican governments of differing types in each
of their great cities, and made, for the first time since the foundation
of the Empire, the name of _People_ sovereign. They resuscitated Roman
law, and reorganized the commerce of the Mediterranean. Remaining loyal
to the Empire as an idea, they shook off the yoke of the German Caesars;
and while the Papacy was their own handiwork, they, alone of European
nations, viewed it politically rather than religiously, and so weakened
it as to prepare the way for the Babylonian captivity at Avignon.
Thus, through the people's familiarity with Latin; through the survival
of Roman grammar schools and the memory of Roman local institutions;
through a paramount and all-pervading enthusiasm for the Roman past;
through the lack of new legendary and epical material; through the
failure of feudalism, and through the political ferment attending on the
Wars of Investment and Independence, the Italians were slow to produce
a modern language and a literature of modern type. They came late into
the field; and when they took their place at last, their language
presented a striking parallel to their political condition. As they
failed to acquire a solid nationality, but remained split up into petty
States, united by a Pan-Italic sentiment; so they failed to form a
common speech. The written Italian of the future was used in its
integrity by no one province; each district clinging to its dialect with
obstinate pride.[5] Yet, though the race was tardy in literary
development, and though the tongue of Ariosto has never become so
thoroughly Italian as that of Shakspere is English or that of Moliere is
French; still, on their first appearance, the Italian masters proved
themselves at once capable of work maturer and more monumental than any
which had been produced in modern Europe. Their education during two
centuries of strife was not without effect. The conditions of
burghership in their free communes, the stirring of their political
energies, the liberty of their _popolo_, and the keen sense of reality
developed by their legal studies, prepared men like Dante and Guido
Cavalcanti for solving the problems of art in a resolute, mature and
manly spirit, fully conscious of the aim before them, and self-possessed
in the assurance of adult faculties.
In the first, or, as it may be termed, the Latin period of medieval
culture, there was not much to distinguish the Italians from the rest of
Europe. Those Lombard schools, of which mention has already been made,
did indeed maintain the traditions of decadent classical education more
alive than among the peoples of the North. Better Latin, and
particularly more fluent Latin verse, was written during the dark ages
in Italy than elsewhere.[6] Still it does not appear that the whole
credit of medieval Latin hymnology, and of its curious counterpart, the
songs of the wandering students, should be attributed to the Italians.
While we can refer the _Dies Irae_, _Lauda Sion_, _Pange Lingua_ and
_Stabat Mater_ with tolerable certainty to Italian poets; while there is
abundant internal evidence to prove that some of the best _Carmina
Burana_ were composed in Italy and under Italian influences; yet Paris,
the focus of theological and ecclesiastical learning, as Bologna was the
center of legal studies, must be regarded as the headquarters of that
literary movement which gave the rhyming hexameters of Bernard of Morlas
and the lyrics of the Goliardi to Europe.[7] It seems clear that we
cannot ascribe to the Italians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
any superiority in the use of Latin over the school of France. Their
previous vantage-ground had been lost in the political distractions of
their country. At the same time, they were the first jurists and the
hardiest, if not the most philosophical, freethinkers of Europe.
This is a point which demands at least a passing notice. Their practical
studies, and the example of an emperor at war with Christendom, helped
to form a sect of epicureans in Italy, for whom nothing sanctioned by
ecclesiastical authority was sacred. To these pioneers of modern
incredulity Dante assigned not the least striking Cantos of the
_Inferno_. Their appearance in the thirteenth century, during the
ascendancy of Latin culture, before the people had acquired a language,
is one of the first manifestations of a national bias toward positive
modes of thought and feeling, which we recognize alike in Boccaccio and
Ariosto, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Pomponazzi and the speculators of
the South Italian School. It was the quality, in fact, which fitted the
Italians for their work in the Renaissance. As metaphysicians, in the
stricter sense of that word, they have been surpassed by Northern races.
Their religious sense has never been so vivid, nor their opposition to
established creeds so earnest. But throughout modern history their great
men have manifested a practical and negative good sense, worldly in its
moral tone, impervious to pietistic influences, antagonistic to
mysticism, contented with concrete reality, which has distinguished them
from the more fervent, boyish, sanguine, and imaginative enthusiasts of
Northern Europe. We are tempted to speculate whether, as they were the
heirs of ancient civility and grew up among the ruins of Roman greatness
so they were born spiritually old and disillusioned.
Another point which distinguished the Italians in this Latin period of
their literature, was the absence of the legendary or myth-making
faculty. It is not merely that they formed no epic, and gave birth to no
great Saga; but they accepted the fabulous matter, transmitted to them
from other nations, in a prosaic and positive spirit. This does not
imply that they exercised a critical faculty, or passed judgment on the
products of the medieval fancy. On the contrary, they took legend for
fact, and treated it as the material of history. Hector, Alexander, and
Attila were stripped of their romantic environments, and presented in
the cold prose of a digest, as persons whose acts could be sententiously
narrated. This attitude of the Italians toward the Saga is by no means
insignificant. When their poets came to treat Arthurian or Carolingian
fables in the epics of Orlando, they apprehended them in the same
positive spirit, adding elements of irony and satire.
For the rest, the Italians shared with other nations the common stock of
medieval literature--Chronicles, Encyclopaedias, Epitomes, Moralizations,
Histories in verse, Rhetorical Summaries, and prose abstracts of
Universal History--the meager _debris_ and detritus of the huge moraines
carried down by extinct classic glaciers. It is not needful to dwell
upon this aspect of the national culture, since it presents no specific
features. What is most to our purpose, is to note the affectionate
remembrance of Rome and Roman worthies, which endured in each great
town. The people, as distinguished from the feudal nobility, were and
ever felt themselves to be the heirs of the old Roman population.
Therefore the soldiers on guard against the Huns at Modena in 924, sang
in their barbarous Latin verse of Hector and the Capitol[8]:
Dum Hector vigil exstitit in Troia,
Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia:
Prima quiete dormiente Troia,
Laxavit Sinon fallax claustra perfida ...
Vigili voce avis anser candida
Fugavit Gallos ex arce Romulea
Pro qua virtute facta est argentea,
Et a Romanis adorata ut Dea.
The Tuscan women told tales of Troy and Catiline and Julius Caesar[9]:
L'altra, traendo alla rocca la chioma,
Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
De' Troiani e di Fiesole e di Roma.
A rhyming chronicler of Pisa compared the battles of the burghers
against the Saracens with the Punic wars. The tomb of Virgil at Naples
was an object for pilgrimage, and one of the few spots round which a
group of local legends clustered. The memory of Livy added luster to
Padua, and Mussato boasted that her walls, like those of Troy, her
mother-city, were sacrosanct. The memory of the Plinies ennobled Como,
that of Ovid gave glory to Sulmona, that of Tully to Arpino. Florence
clung to the mutilated statue of Mars upon her bridge with almost
superstitious reverence, as proof of Roman origin; while Siena adopted
for her ensign the she-wolf and the Roman twins. Pagan customs survived,
and were jealously maintained in the central and southern provinces; and
the name of the Republic sufficed to stir Arnold's revolution in Rome,
long before the days of Rienzi. To the mighty German potentate, King
Frederick Barbarossa, attended with his Northern chivalry, a handful of
Romans dared to say: "Thou wast a stranger; I, the City, gave thee civic
rights. Thou camest from transalpine regions; I have conferred on thee
the principality."[10] It would be easy to multiply these instances.
Enough, however, has been said to show that through the gloom of
medieval history, before humanism had begun to dawn, and while the other
nations were creating legends and popular epics, Italy maintained a dim
but tenacious sense of her Roman past. This consciousness has here to be
insisted on, not merely because it stood in the way of mythopoeic
activity, but because it found full and proper satisfaction in that
Revival of Learning which decided the Renaissance.
While the Italians were fighting the Wars of Investiture and
Independence, two literatures had arisen in the country which we now
call France. Two languages, the _langue d'oc_ and the _langue d'oil_,
gave birth to two separate species of poetry. The master-product of the
latter was the Song of Roland, which, together with the after-birth of
Arthurian romance, flooded Europe with narratives, embodying in a more
or less epical form the ideals, enthusiasms, and social creed of
Chivalry. The former, cultivated in the southern provinces that border
on the Mediterranean, yielded a refined and courtly fashion of lyrical
verse, which took the form of love-songs, battle-songs, and satires, and
which is now known as Provencal literature. The influence of feudal
culture, communicated through these two distinct but closely connected
channels, was soon felt in Italy. The second phase of Italian
development has been called Lombard, because it was chiefly in the north
of the peninsula that the motive force derived from France was active.
Yet if we regard the matter of this new literature, rather than its
geographical distribution, we shall more correctly designate it by the
title Franco-Italian. In the first or Latin period, the Italians used an
ancient language. They now adopted not only the forms but also the
speech of the people from whom they received their literary impulse. It
is probable that the Lombard dialects were still too rough to be
accommodated to the new French style. The cultivated classes were
familiar with Latin, and had felt no need of raising the vernacular
above the bare necessities of intercourse. But the superior social
development of the French courts and castles must be reckoned the main
reason why their language was acclimatized in Italy together with their
literature. Just as the Germans before the age of Herder adopted polite
culture, together with the French tongue, ready-made from France, so now
the Lombard nobles, bordering by the Riviera upon Provence, borrowed
poetry, together with its diction, from the valley of the Rhone. Passing
along the Genoese coast, crossing the Cottian Alps, and following the
valley of the Po, the languages of France and Provence diffused
themselves throughout the North of Italy. With the _langue d'oil_ came
the Chansons de Geste of the Carolingian Cycle and the romances of the
Arthurian legend. With the _langue d'oc_ came the various forms of
troubadour lyric. Without displacing the local dialects, these imported
languages were used and spoken purely by the nobles; while a hybrid,
known as _franco-italian_, sprang up for the common people who listened
to the tales of Roland and Rinaldo on the market-place. The district in
which the whole mass of this foreign literature seems to have flourished
most at first, was the Trevisan March, stretching from the Adige, along
the Po, beyond the Brenta and past Venice, to the base of the Friulian
Alps. The Marches of Treviso were long known as _La Marca Amorosa_ or
_Gioiosa_, epithets which strongly recall the Provencal phrases of
_Joie_ and _Gai Saber_, and which are familiar to English readers of Sir
Thomas Mallory in the name of Lancelot's castle, _Joyous Gard_. Exactly
to define the period of Trevisan culture would be difficult. It is
probable that it began to flourish about the end of the twelfth, and
declined in the middle of the thirteenth century. Dante alludes to it in
a famous passage of the _Purgatory_[11]:
In sul paese ch'Adige e Po riga,
Solea valore e cortesia trovarsi
Prima che Federigo avesse briga.
There are many traces of advanced French civilization in this district,
among which may be mentioned the exhibition of Miracle Plays upon the
French type at Civitale in the years 1298 and 1304, and the _Castello
d'Amore_ at Treviso described by Rolandini in the year 1214. Yet, though
the Trevisan Marches were the nucleus of this Gallicizing fashion, the
use of French and Provencal spread widely through the North and down
into the center of Italy. Numerous manuscripts in the _langue d'oil_
attest the popularity of the Arthurian romances throughout Lombardy, and
we know that in Umbria S. Francis first composed poetry in French.[12]
It was in French, again, that Brunetto Latini wrote his _Tesoro_. So
late as the middle of the fourteenth century this habit had not died
out. Dante in the _Convito_ thought it necessary to stigmatize "those
men of perverse mind in Italy who commend the vulgar tongue of
foreigners and depreciate their own."
We have seen that the language and the matter of this imported
literature were twofold; and we can distinguish two distinct currents,
after its reception into Italy. The Provencal lyric, as was natural,
attracted the attention of the nobles; and since feudalism had a
stronger hold upon the valley of the Po than on any other district,
Lombardy became the chief home of this poetry. Not to mention the
numerous Provencal singers who sought fortune and adventure in northern
Italy, about twenty-five Italians, using the _langue d'oc_, may be
numbered between the Marchese Alberto Malaspina, who held Lunigiana
about 1204, and the Maestro Ferrara, who lived at the Court of Azzo VII.
of Este.[13] These were for the most part courtiers and imperial
feudatories; and only two were Tuscans. The person of one of them,
Sordello, is familiar to every reader of the _Purgatory_.
The second tide of influence passed from Northern France together with
the epics of chivalry. But its operation was not so simple as that of
the Provencal lyric. We can trace for instance a marked difference
between the effect produced by the _Chansons de Geste_ and that of the
Arthurian tales. The latter seem to have been appropriated by the
nobles, while the former found acceptance with the people. Nor was this
unnatural. At the opening of the twelfth century the Carolingian Cycle
had begun to lose its vogue among the polished aristocracy of France.
That uncompromising history of warfare hardly suited a society which had
developed the courtesy and the romance of chivalry. It represented the
manners of an antecedent age of feudalism. Therefore the tales of the
Round Table arose to satisfy the needs of knights and ladies, whose
thoughts were turned to love, the chase, the tournament, and errantry.
The Arthurian myth idealized their newer and more refined type of feudal
civility. It was upon the material of this romantic Epic that the nobles
of North Italy fastened with the greatest eagerness. No one has
forgotten how the tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere proved, in a later
day, the ruin of Francesca and her lover.[14] The people, on the other
hand, took livelier interest in the songs of Roland and Charlemagne. The
Chansons de Geste formed the stock in trade of those _Cantatores
Francigenarum_, who crowded the streets and squares of Lombard
cities.[15] The exchange of courtesies and refined sentiments between a
Tristram and Iseult or a Lancelot and Guinevere must naturally have been
less attractive to a rude populace than narratives of battle with the
Infidel, and Roland's horn, and Gano's treason, and Rinaldo's quarrels
with his liege. In the Arthurian Cycle names and places alike--Avalon,
Camelot, Winchester, Gawain, Galahaut--were distant and ill-adapted to
Italian ears.[16] The whole tissue of the romance, moreover, was
imaginative. The Carolingian Cycle, on the contrary, introduced
personages with a good right to be considered historical, and dwelt upon
familiar names and traditional ideas. We are not, therefore, surprised
to find that this Epic took a strong hold on the popular imagination,
and so penetrated the Italian race as to assume a new form on Italian
soil, while the Arthurian romance survived as a pastime of the upper
classes, and underwent no important metamorphosis at their hands. In the
course of this volume, I shall have to show how, when Italian literature
emerged again from the people after nearly a century of neglect, it was
the transformed tale of Charlemagne and Roland which supplied the
Italian nation with its master-works of epic poetry--the _Morgante_ and
the two _Orlandos_.
The Lombard, or rather the Franco-Italian period is marked by the
adoption of a foreign language and foreign fashions. Literature at this
stage was exotic and artificial; but the legacy transmitted to the
future was of vast importance. On the one side, the courtly rhymers who
versified in the Provencal dialect, bequeathed to Sicily and Tuscany the
chivalrous lyric of love, which was destined to take its final and
fairest form from Dante and Petrarch. On the other hand, the populace
who listened to the Song of Roland on the market-place, prepared the
necessary conditions for a specific and eminently characteristic product
of Italian genius. Without a national epic, the Italians were forced to
borrow from the French. But what they borrowed, they transmuted--not
merely adding new material, like the tale of Gano's treason and the
fiction of Orlando's birth at Sutri, but importing their own spirit,
positive, ironical and incredulous, into the substance of the legend.
In the course of Italianizing the tale of Roland, the native dialects
made their first effort to assume a literary form. We possess sufficient
MS. evidence to prove that the Franco-Italian language of the songs
recited to the Lombard townsfolk, was composed by the adaptation of
local modes of speech to French originals. The process was not one of
pure translation. The dialects were not fit for such performance. It may
rather be described as the attempt of the dialects to acquire capacity
for studied expression. With French poems before them, the popular
rhapsodes introduced dialectical phrases, substituted words, and, where
this was possible, modified the style in favor of the dialect they
wished to use. French still predominated. But the hybrid was of such a
nature that a transition from this mixed jargon to the dialect,
presented in a literary shape, was imminent.
There is sufficient ground for presuming that the Italian dialects
triumphed simultaneously in all parts of the peninsula about the middle
of the thirteenth century.[17] This presumption is founded partly on the
quotations from dialectical poetry furnished by Dante in the _De
Eloquio_, which prove a wide-spread literary activity; partly on
fragments recovered from sources which can be referred to the second
half of the century. The peculiar problems offered by the conditions of
poetry at Frederick II.'s Court, though these are open to many
contradictory solutions, render the presumption more than probable. It
is difficult to understand the third or Sicilian period of literature
without hypothesizing an antecedent stage of vulgar poetry produced in
local dialects. But, owing to the scarcity of documents, no positive
facts regarding the date and mode of their emergence can be adduced. We
have on this point to deal with matters of delicate conjecture and
minute inference; and though it might seem logical to introduce at once
a discussion on the growth of the Italian language, and its relation to
the dialects which were undoubtedly spoken before they were committed to
writing, special reasons induce me to defer this topic for the present.
While the North of Italy was deriving the literature both of its
cultivated classes and of the people from France, a new and still more
important phase of evolution was preparing in the South. Both Dante and
Petrarch recognize the Sicilian poets as the first to cultivate the
vulgar tongue with any measure of success, and to raise it to the
dignity of a literary language. In this opinion they not only uttered
the tradition of their age, but were also without doubt historically
correct. Whatever view may be adopted concerning the formation of the
_lingua illustre_, or polished Italian, from the dialectical elements
already employed in local kinds of poetry, there is no disputing the
importance of the Sicilian epoch. We cannot fix precise dates for its
duration. Yet, roughly speaking, it may be said to have begun in 1166,
when troubadours of some distinction gathered round the person of the
Norman king, William II., at Palermo, and to have ended in 1266, when
Manfred was killed at the battle of Benevento. It culminated during the
reign of the Emperor Frederick II. (1210-1250), who was himself skilled
in Latin and the vulgar tongues of France and Italy, and who drew to his
court men distinguished for their abilities in science and literature.
Dante called Frederick, _Cherico grande_. The author of the _Cento
Novelle_ described him as _veramente specchio del mondo in parlare et in
costumi_, and spoke of his capital as the resort of _la gente ch'avea
bontade ... sonatori, trovatori, e belli favellatori, uomini d'arti,
giostratori, schermitori, d'ogni maniera gente_.[18] The portrait drawn
of him by Salimbene in his contemporary Chronicle, though highly
unfavorable to the schismatic enemy of Holy Church, proves that his
repute was great in Italy as a patron of letters and himself a poet of
no mean pretensions.[19]
It is impossible in these pages to inquire into the views of this great
ruler for the resuscitation of culture in Italy, which, had he not been
thwarted in his policy by the Church, might have anticipated the
Renaissance by two centuries. Yet the opinion may be hazarded that the
cultivation of Italian as a literary language was due in no small
measure to the forethought and deliberate intention of an Emperor, who
preferred his southern to his northern provinces. Unlike the Lombard
nobles, Frederick, while adopting Provencal literature, gave it Italian
utterance. This seems to indicate both purpose and prevision on his
part. Wishing to found an Italian dynasty, and to acclimatize the
civilization of Provence in his southern capitals, he was careful to
promote purely Italian studies. There can at any rate be no doubt that
during his reign and under his influence very considerable progress was
made towards fixing the diction and the forms of poetry. He found
dialects, not merely spoken, but already adapted to poetical expression,
in more than one district of Italy. From these districts the most
eminent artists flocked to his Court. It was there that a common type of
speech was formed, which, when the burghers of Central Italy began to
emulate the versifiers of Palermo, furnished them with an established
style.
How the _lingua aulica_ came into being admits of much debate. But we
may, I think, maintain that the fundamental dialect from which it sprang
was Sicilian, purified by comparison with Provencal and Latin, and
largely modified by Apulian elements. The difficulty of understanding
the problem is in part removed when we remember the variety of
representatives from noble towns of Italy who met in Frederick's circle,
the tendencies of a dialect to refine itself when it assumes a literary
form, and the continuous influences of Court-life in common. Italians
gathered round the person of the sovereign at Palermo from their native
cities, must in ordinary courtesy have abandoned the crudities of their
respective idioms. This sacrifice could not but have been reciprocal;
and since Provencal was not spoken to the exclusion of the
mother-tongue, a generic Italian had here the best chance of
development. That this generic or Court Italian was at root Sicilian, we
have substantial reasons to believe; but that it exactly resembled the
Sicilian of to-day, which does not greatly differ from extant documents
of thirteenth and fourteenth century Sicilian dialect, seems too crude a
supposition.[20] Unfortunately, our evidence upon this point is
singularly scanty. Few poems of the Sicilian period, as will appear in
the sequel, have descended to us in their primitive form.
Not only was a common language instituted in the Court of Frederick; but
the metrical forms of subsequent Italian poetry were either fixed or
suggested by the practice of these early versifiers. Few subjects are
involved in darker obscurity than the history of meters--the creation of
rhythmical structures whereby one national literature distinguishes
itself from another.[21] Just as each writer who can claim an individual
style seems to possess his own rhythm, his peculiar tune, to which his
sentences are cadenced, so each nation appropriates and adheres to its
own meter. The Italian hendecasyllabic, the French Alexandrian, the
English heroic iambic, are obvious examples. This selection of a
characteristic meter, and the essays through which the race arrives at
its perfection, seem to imply some instinct, planted within the deeps of
national personality, whereof the laws have not been formulated. When we
speak of the genius of a language, we do but personify this instinct,
which appears to exercise itself at an early period of national
development, leaving for subsequent centuries the task of refining and
completing what had been projected at the outset. Therefore, nothing
very distinct can be asserted about the origin of the hendecasyllable
iambic line, which marks Italian poetry.[22] Yet it certainly appears
among the early specimens of the Sicilian period. The rhyming system of
the octave stanza may possibly be traced in Ciullo d'Alcamo's _tenzone_
between the lover and his mistress; though it still needed a century of
elaboration at the hands of popular _rispetti_-writers, to present it in
completed form to Boccaccio's muse.[23] This poem is Alexandrine in
rhythm. _Terza rima_ seems to be suggested by the sonnet of the
_Sparviere_; while a perfect sonnet, differing very little either in
structure or in diction from the type of Petrarch's, is supplied in
Piero delle Vigne's _Perocche amore_. At the same time the highwrought
structure of the _Canzone_, destined to play so triumphant a part during
the whole period of the _trecento_, receives its essential outlines from
the rhymers of this age, especially from Jacopo da Lentino and Guido
delle Colonne.
Though the forms and language of Sicilian poetry decided the destinies
of Italian, the substance of this literature was far from being
national. Under its Italian garb, it was no less an exotic than the
Provencal and French compositions of the Lombard period. After running a
brilliant course in Provence, the poetry of chivalrous love was now
declining to its decadence. It had ceased to be the spontaneous
expression of a dominant ideal, and had degenerated into a pastime for
_dilettanti_. Its style had become conventional; its phrases fixed. The
visionary science upon which it was based, had to be studied in codes of
doctrine and repeated with pedantic precision. Frederick and his
courtiers received it at the point of its extinction. They adhered as
closely as possible to traditional forms, imitated time-honored models,
and confined their efforts to the reproduction of the old art in a new
vehicle of language. Therefore, vernacular Italian poetry in this first
stage of its existence presents the curious spectacle of literature
decrepit in the cradle, hampered with the euphuism of an exhausted
manner before it could move freely, and taught to frame conceits and
cold antitheses before it learned to lisp.
Such, in general, may be said to have been the character of the Sicilian
or Italo-Provencal style. Yet a careful student of these Canzoni,
Serventesi, and Tenzoni, will discover much that is both natural and
graceful, much that is elevated in thought, much again that belongs to
the crude sensuousness of Southern temperament. There is an unmistakable
blending of the Provencal tradition with indigenous realism, especially
in such compositions as the Lament of Odo delle Colonne, the Lament of
Ruggieri Pugliese, and the _Tenzone_ of Ciullo d'Alcamo.[24] We can
trace a double current of inspiration: the one passing downward from the
learned writers of the Court, the judges, notaries, and men of state,
who followed Provencal tradition; the other upward from the people, who
rhymed as nature taught them: both mingling in the compositions of those
more genial poets, who were able to infuse reality into the labored
form of their adoption. What might have been the destiny of Italian
literature, if the Suabian House had maintained its hold on the Two
Sicilies, and this process of fusion had been completed at Naples or
Palermo, cannot even be surmised.
Our knowledge of the earliest Italo-Provencal poetry is vague, owing to
lack of genuine Sicilian monuments. We can only trace faint indications
of a progress toward greater freedom and more spontaneous inspiration,
as the "courtly makers" yielded to the singers of the people. The battle
of Benevento extinguished at one blow both the hopes of the Suabian
dynasty and the development of Sicilian poetry. When Manfred's body had
been borne naked on a donkey from the battle-field to his nameless
grave, amid the cries of _Chi compra Manfredi?_ a foreign troubadour,
Amerigo di Peguilhan, composed his lament, bidding the _serventese_ pass
through all lands and over every sea to find the man who knew where
Arthur dwelt and when he would return. Arthur was dead, and would never
come again. Chivalry and feudalism had held their brief and feeble sway
in Italy, and that was over. Neither in Lombardy among the castles, nor
in Sicily within the Court, throbbed the real life of the Italian
nation. That life was in the Communes. It beat in the heart of the
people--especially of that people who had made nobility a crime beside
the Arno, and had outlawed the _Scioperati_ from their City of the
Flower. What the Suabian princes gave to Italy was the beginning of a
common language. It remained for Tuscany to stamp that language with
her image and superscription, to fix it in its integrity for all future
ages, and to render it the vehicle of stateliest science and consummate
art.
The question of the origin of the Italian language pertains rather to
philology than to the history of culture.[25] Yet I cannot pass it
wholly by in silence, since it was raised at an early period by the
founders of Italian literature, who occupied themselves with singular
sagacity concerning the relations of the literary to the dialectical
forms of speech. Dante's _De Eloquio_, though based on unscientific
principles of analysis, opened a discussion which exercised the acutest
intellects of the sixteenth century.
During the whole Roman period, it is certain that literary Latin
differed in important respects from the vulgar, rustic or domestic,
language. Thus while a Roman gentleman would have said _habeo pulchrum
equum_, his groom probably expressed the same thought in words like
these: _ego habeo unum bellum caballum_. Between a _graffito_ scribbled
on the wall of some old Roman building--_Alexander unum animal est_, for
instance--and one now chalked in the same district, _Alessandro e un
animale_, there is hardly as much difference as between a literary Latin
sentence and either of these rustic epigrams; while the use of such
intensitives as _multum_ and _bene_, to express the superlative degree,
indicate in vulgar Latin the presence of a principle alien to literary
Latin but sympathetic to modern speech. The vulgar or rustic Latin
continued, side by side with its literary counterpart, throughout the
middle ages, forming in the first centuries of imperial decline the
common speech of the Romance peoples, and gradually assuming those
specific forms which determined the French, Spanish, and Italian types.
There is little doubt that, could we possess ourselves of sufficient
documents, we should be able to trace the stages in this process. Both
literary and vulgar Latin suffered transformation--the former declining
in purity, variety, and vigor; the latter diverging dialectically into
the constituents of the three grand families of modern Latin. But the
metamorphosis was not of the same nature in both cases. While the
literary language had been fixed, arrested, and delivered over to death,
the vulgar tongue retained a vivid and assimilative life, capable of
biological transmutation. French, Spanish, and Italian are modes of its
existence continued under laws of organic variety and change.
It would be unscientific to suppose that rustic Latin, even in the most
flourishing period of the Roman Empire, was identical in all provinces.
From the first it must have held within itself the principles of
differentiation. And when we consider the varying conditions of soil,
climate, ethnological admixture and political development in the several
regions of the Roman world, together with the divers influences of
contiguous or invasive races, we shall form some notion of the process
by which the three languages in question branched off from the common
stock of rustic Latin.
The same laws of differentiation hold good with regard to the dialects
in each of these new languages. It is improbable that absolutely the
same vulgar Latin was at any epoch spoken in two remote districts of the
same province--on the Tuscan sea-coast, for example, and on the banks of
Padus. Even when the Roman empire used one language, intelligible from
the AEgean to the German Ocean, the Italic districts must have differed
in their local vernacular. Again, the same conditions (climatic,
ethnological, political, and so forth) which helped to determine the
generic distinctions of French, Spanish, and Italian, determined also
the specific distinctions of one Italian dialect from another. Those of
the north-west, for instance, inclined to Gallic, and those of the
north-east to Illyrian idiom. Those of Lombardy in general exhibit a
mixture of German words. Those of Sicily and the south approximate more
to a Spanish type, and share the effects of Greek and Arab occupation.
The dialects of the center, especially the Tuscan, show marked
superiority both in grammatical form and phonetic purity over the more
disintegrated and corrupted idioms of north and south. It might be
suggested that Tuscan, being less modified by foreign contact, continued
the natural life of the old rustic Latin according to laws of unimpeded
self-development. But, however we may attempt to explain this problem,
the fact remains that, while the Italian dialects present affinities
which show them to be of one linguistic family, it is Tuscan that
completes and interprets them collectively. Tuscan stands to Italian in
the same relation as Castilian to Spanish, or the speech of the Ile de
France to French. It is a dialect, but a dialect that realized the bent
and striving of the language. We find it difficult to feel, far more to
state, what qualities in a dialect and in the people of the district who
use it, render one idiom more adapted to literary usage, more
characteristic of the language it helps to constitute, more plastic and
expressive of national peculiarities, than those around it. But the fact
is certain that this superiority in Tuscan was early recognized;[26] and
that too without any political advantages in favor of its triumph.
Boniface VIII. unconsciously expressed, perhaps, the truth, when he
called the Florentines _il quinto elemento_. It was something
spiritually quintessential, something complementary to the sister
dialects, which caused the success of Tuscan.
Thus, while literary Latin, though dying and almost dead, was taught in
the grammar schools and used by learned men, the rustic Latin in the
thirteenth century had disappeared. But this disappearance was not
death. It was transformation. The group of dialects which represented
the new phase in its existence, shared such common qualities as proved
them to have had original affinity; and fitted them for being recognized
as a single family. The position, therefore, of the Italians at the
close of the thirteenth century with regard to language, was this. They
possessed the classic Latin authors in a bad state of preservation, and
studied a few of them with some minuteness, basing their own learned
style upon the imitation of Virgil and Ovid, Cicero, Boethius, and the
rhetoricians of the lower empire. But at home, in their families, upon
the market-place, and in the prosecution of business, they talked the
local dialects, each of which was more or less remotely representative
of the ancient vulgar Latin. However these dialects might differ, they
formed in combination a new language, distinct from the parent stock of
Rustic Latin, and equally distinct from French and Spanish.[27] Whatever
difficulty an Italian of Calabria or Friuli might have felt in
understanding the _Divine Comedy_, he would have recognized an element
in its diction which defined it from French or Spanish, and marked it
out as proper to his mother-tongue. If this was true of the refined type
of Tuscan used by a great master, it was no less true of dialectical
compositions selected for the express purpose of exhibiting their
rudeness. Dante clearly expected contemporary readers not only to
interpret, but to appreciate the shades of greater and lesser nicety in
the examples he culled from Roman, Apulian, Florentine and other
vernacular literatures. This expectation proves that he felt himself to
be dealing with a group of dialects which, taken collectively, formed a
common idiom. In these circumstances it was the problem of writers, at
the close of the thirteenth century, to construct the ideal vulgar
tongue, to discover its capacities for noble utterance, to refine it for
artistic usage by the omission of cruder elements existing in each
dialect, and to select from those store-houses of living speech the
phrases which appeared well suited to graceful utterance. The
desideratum, to use Dante's words, was "that illustrious, cardinal,
courtly, curial mother-tongue, proper to each Italian State, special to
none, whereby the local idioms of every city are to be measured,
weighed, and compared."[28] Dante saw that this selection of a literary
language from the fresh shoots sent up by the antique vulgar Latin stock
could best be accomplished in a capital or Court, the meeting-place of
learned people and polished intelligences. But such a metropolis of
culture, corresponding to Elizabeth's London or the Paris of Louis XIV.,
was ever wanting in Italy. "We have no Court," he says: "and yet the
members that should compose a Court are not absent."[29] He refers to
men of education and good manners, upon whom, in the absence of a local
center of refinement, fell the duty of reforming the vernacular. The
peculiar conditions of Italy, as he described them, were destined to
subsist throughout the next two centuries and a half, when men of
learning, taking Tuscan as their standard, sought by practice and
example to form a national language. The self-consciousness of the
Italians front to front with this problem, as revealed to us in the
pages of the _De Eloquio_, and the decision with which the great
authors of the fourteenth century fixed a certain type of diction,
accurately spoken nowhere, though nearer to the Tuscan than to any other
idiom, may be reckoned among the most interesting phenomena in the
history of literature. Tuscan predominated; but that the masterpieces of
the _trecento_ were not composed in any one of the unadulterated Tuscan
dialects is clear, not merely from the contemporary testimony of Dante
himself, but also from the obstinate discussions raised upon this
subject by Bembo at a later period. A guiding and controlling principle
of taste determined the instinctive method of selection whereby Tuscan
was adapted to the common needs of Italy.
While treating of the Latin, the Lombard or Franco-Italian, and the
Sicilian or Italo-Provencal periods of national development, I have
hitherto neglected that plebeian literature which, although its
monuments have almost perished, must have been diffused in dialects
through Italy after the opening of the thirteenth century. Written for
and by the people, the relics of this prose and poetry are valuable, not
merely for the light they throw on the formation of language, but also
for their indications of national tendencies. In the northern dialects
we meet with treatises of religious, ethical and gnomic import, among
which the _Gerusalemme Celeste_ and _Babilonia Infernale_ of Fra
Giacomino of Verona, the Bible History of Pietro Bescape of Milan, the
Contention between Satan and the Virgin of Bonvesin da Riva, and two
other dialogues by the same author, one between the Soul and Body, the
other between a son and his father in hell, deserve mention. To this
class again belongs Bonvesin's _Cinquanta Cortesie da Tavola_, a book of
etiquette adapted to the needs of the small _bourgeoisie_ upon their
entrance into social life.
It is impossible to fix even an approximate date for the emergence of
Italian prose. Law documents, deeds of settlement, contracts, and public
acts, which can be referred with certainty to the first half of the
thirteenth century, display a pressure of the vulgar speech upon the
formal Latin of official verbiage. The effort to obtain precision in
designating some particular locality or some important person, forces
the scribe back upon his common speech; and these evidences of
difficulty in wielding the Latin which had now become a dying language,
prove that, long before it was written, Italian was spoken. From the
year 1231 we possess accounts of domestic expenditure written by one
Mattasala di Spinello dei Lambertini in the Sienese dialect. Then follow
Lucchese documents and letters of Sienese citizens, which, though they
have no literary value, show that people who could write had begun to
express their thoughts in spoken idiom. The first essays in Italian
composition for a lettered public were translations from works already
written by Italians in _langue d'oil_. Among these a prominent place
must be assigned to the version of Marco Polo's travels, which
Rusticiano of Pisa first published in French, having possibly received
them in Venetian from the traveler's own lips. The _Tesoro_ of Brunetto
Latini and Egidio's _De Regimine Principum_ were Italianized in this
way; while numerous digests of Frankish romances, including the
collection known as _Conti di antichi Cavalieri_, appeared to meet the
same popular demand. Religious history and ethics furnished another
library in the vernacular. The _Dodici Conti Morali_, the _Introduzione
alle Virtu_, the _Giardino della Consolazione_, and the _Libra di Cato_
supplied the people with specimens from works already famous. After a
like manner, books of rhetoric and grammar in vogue among the medieval
students were popularized in abstracts for Italian readers. We may cite
a version of Orosius, and a _Fiore di Retorica_ based upon the _Ad
Herennium_ and Cicero. Of scientific compilations, the _Composizione del
Mondo_ by Ristoro of Arezzo, embracing astronomical and geographical
information, takes rank with the ethical and rhetorical works already
mentioned. The note of all these compositions is that they are
professedly epitomes of learning, already possessed in more authentic
sources by scholars. As such, they prove that there existed a class of
readers eager for instruction, to whom books written in Latin or in
French were not accessible. In a word, they indicate the advent of the
modern tongue, with all its exigencies and with all its capabilities. To
deal with the Chronicles of this period is no easy matter; for those
which are professedly the oldest--Matteo Spinelli's Ricordano
Malespini's, and _Lu Ribellamentu di Sicilia_--have been proved in some
sense fabrications. On the other hand, it is clear from the _Cento
Novelle_ that the more dramatic episodes of history and myth were being
submitted to the same epitomizing treatment. Finally we have to mention
Guittone of Arezzo's epistles as the first serious attempt to treat the
vulgar tongue rhetorically, for a distinct literary purpose.
From the dry records of incipient prose it is refreshing to turn to
another species of popular poetry; for poetry in the period of origins
is always more adult than prose. Numerous fragments of political songs
have been disinterred from chronicles, which can be referred to the
thirteenth century. Thus an anonymous Genoese rhymster celebrated the
victories of Laiazzo (1294) and Curzola (1298), while Giovanni Villani
preserved six lines upon the siege of Messina (1282).[30] Verses in the
vulgar tongue commemorating the apostasy of Fra Elia, General of the
Franciscans, in 1240, and the coming of the Florentine Lambertesco dei
Lamberteschi as Podesta to Reggio in 1243, with scraps of song relating
to Pisan and Florentine history, may be read in Carducci's monumental
work upon this period of literature.[31] These relics, though precious,
are singularly scanty; nor can a Northern student pass them by without
remarking the absence of that semi-historical, semi-mythical poetry,
which is so familiar to us under the name of Ballad. More important,
because of greater extent, are the laments and amorous or comic poems,
which can be attributed to the same century. The Lament of the Paduan
woman for her husband, who has journeyed to Holy Land in the Crusade
preached by Urban IV., may be compared with Rinaldo d'Aquino's
Farewell.[32] Both of these compositions were written under Provencal
influence, though the former at least is strictly dialectical and
popular. Passing to satirical poems, I may mention two pieces extracted
from a Bolognese MS. of 1272 which paint with vivid force of humor the
manners of women.[33] One represents a drinking-party of more than
Aristophanic freedom; the other, a wrangling match between two
sisters-in-law--the _Cognate_. Each displays facility of composition and
a literary style already formed. They are not without French parallels;
but the mode of presentation is Italian, and the phrases have been
transplanted without change from vulgar dialogue. Two romantic lyrics
extracted from the same MS. prove that the fashionable style of Provence
had descended from the nobles to the common folk and taken a new
tincture of realism.[34] The complaint of an unwedded maiden to her
mother is a not uncommon motive in this early literature, turning either
to pathos or suggesting a covert coarseness in the climax.[35] To the
same class may be referred some graceful lyrics and dance-songs,
combining the artlessness of popular inspiration with reminiscences of
French originals.[36] Of these the Nightingale and the Song of Love in
Dreams might be selected for their close sympathy with the _rispetti_
made in Italian country districts at the present day. Lastly, I have to
mention two obscene poems of great popularity, _Il Nicchio_ and
_L'Ugellino_.[37] These were known to Boccaccio, for he refers to them
by name at the close of the fifth day in the Decameron. Each of the
ditties bears a thoroughly Italian stamp, and anticipates by its
peculiar style of _double entendre_ a whole department of national
poetry--the Florentine Carnival Songs and the Capitoli of the Roman
academies being distinctly foreshadowed in their humorous and allusive
treatment of a vulgar topic. Hence we may take occasion to observe that
those who accuse Lorenzo de' Medici and his contemporaries of debasing
popular taste by the deliberate introduction of licentiousness into art,
exceed the limits of just censure. What is called the Paganism of the
Renaissance, was indigenous in Italy. We find it inherent in vulgar
literature before the date of Boccaccio; and if, with the advance of
social luxury, it assumed, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a
more objectionable prominence, this should not be exclusively ascribed
to the influence of humanistic studies or to the example of far-sighted
despots. Indeed, it can be asserted that the specific quality of the
popular Italian genius--its sensuous realism, qualified with
irony--emerges unmistakably in five most important relics of the
thirteenth century, the _Cognate_, the _Comadri_, the Tenzone of the
Maiden and her Mother (_Mamma lo temp'e venuto_), the _Nicchio_, and the
_Ugellino_.[38] They yield the common stuff of that magnificent art
which shall afterwards be developed into the _Decameron_ and the
_Novelle_, out of which shall proceed the comedies and Bernesque lyrics
of the _Cinque Cento_, and which is destined to penetrate the golden
cantos of the _Orlando Furioso_. To an unprejudiced student of Italian
arts and letters nothing seems more clearly proved than the fact that a
certain powerful objective quality--call it realism, call it
sensuousness--determines their most genuine productions, sinking to
grossness, ascending to sublimity, combining with religious feeling in
the fine arts, blending with the definiteness of classic style, but
never absent. It is this objectivity, realism, sensuousness, which
constitutes the strength of the Italians, and assigns the limitations of
their faculty.
In quite a different region, but of no less importance for the future of
Italian literature, must be reckoned the religious hymns, which, during
the thirteenth century, began to be composed in the vernacular. The
earliest known specimen is S. Francis' famous _Cantico del Sole_, which,
even as it is preserved to us, after undergoing the process of
modernization, retains the purity and freshness of a bird's note in
spring. After S. Francis, but at the distance of half a century,
followed Jacopone da Todi, with his passionate and dithyrambic odes,
which seem to vibrate tongues of fire. To this religious lyric the
Flagellant frenzy (1260) and the subsequent formation of Companies of
Laudesi gave decisive impulse. I shall have in a future chapter to
discuss the relation between the Umbrian Lauds and the origins of the
Drama. It is enough here to notice the part played in the evolution of
the language by so early a transition from the Latin Hymns of the Church
to Hymns written in the modern speech for private confraternities and
domestic gatherings.
We learn from this meager review of ancient popular poetry that during
the thirteenth century the dialects of each district had begun to seek
literary expression. There are many indications that the products of one
province speedily became the property of the rest. Spontaneous motives
were mingled with French and Provencal recollections; and already we can
trace the unconscious effort to form a common language in the process
known as _Toscaneggiamento_, or the translation of local songs into
Tuscan idiom.[39] It would, therefore, be incorrect to imagine either
that the Sicilian poets were blank imitators of Provencal models, or
that the Italian language started into being at Palermo. What really
happened was, that Frederick's Court became the center of a widespread
literary movement. The Sicilian dialect predominating at Palermo over
the rest, the poets of different provinces who assembled round the
Emperor were subsequently known as Sicilian. Their songs, passing upward
through the peninsula, bore that name, even when they had, as at
Florence, been converted, by dialectical modifications, to the use of
Tuscan folk.[40] The aristocratic tone of the Court made Provencal
literature fashionable; and a refined diction, softening the crudities
of more than one competing dialect, was formed to express the subtleties
of the Provencal style. We must bear in mind that the poets of this
Court were men of learned education--judges, notaries, officials. Dante
makes _dottori_ nearly synonymous with _trovatori_. At the same time,
one of the earliest specimens of Sicilian poetry, Ciullo d'Alcamo's
_Tenzone_, is popular, free from Provencal affectation, inclining to
comedy in some of its marked motives and to coarseness at its close.
This proves that in the island, side by side with "courtly makers" and
_dottori_, there flourished an original and vulgar manner of poetry.
The process of Tuscanization referred to in the preceding paragraph is
too important in its bearings on the problems of Italian language and
literature, to be passed over without further discussion. Nearly all the
poetry of the Sicilian epoch has been transmitted to us in Florentine
MSS., after undergoing _Toscaneggiamento_. We possess but a few stanzas
in a pure condition. There is, therefore, reason to believe that when
Dante treated of the courtly Sicilian poets in his essay _De Vulgari
Eloquio_, he knew their writings in a form already Tuscanized.[41] In
commending the curial and illustrious vernacular, as something distinct
from the dialects, he was in truth praising the dialect of his own
province, refined by the practice of polite versifiers. At the date of
the composition of that essay, the Suabian House had been extinguished;
the literary society of the south was broken up; and to Florence had
already fallen the heritage of art. What is even more remarkable, the
Bolognese poets, who preceded Dante and his peers by one generation, had
abandoned their own dialect in favor of the purified Tuscan.
Consequently the new Italian literature was already Tuscan either by
origin, or by adoption, or by a process of transformation, before the
Florentines assumed the dictatorship of letters. It seems paradoxical to
hint that Dante should not have perceived what has been here stated as
more than a mere possibility. How came it that he included Florentine
among the peccant idioms, and maintained that the true literary speech
was still to seek? These doubts may in part at least be removed, when we
remember the peculiar conditions under which the courtly poetry he
praised had been produced; and the indirect channels by which it had
reached him. In the first place, we have seen that it was composed in
avowed imitation of Provencal models, by men of taste and learning drawn
from several provinces. They culled, for literary purposes, a vocabulary
of colorless and neutral words, which clothed the same conventional
ideas with elegant and artificial monotony. When these compositions
underwent the further process of Tuscanization (which was easy, owing to
certain dialectical affinities between Sicilian and Tuscan), they lost
to a large extent what still remained to them of local character,
without acquiring the true stamp of Florentine. Even a contemporary
could not have recognized in the verse of Jacopo da Lentino, thus
treated, either a genuine Sicilian or a genuine Tuscan flavor. His
language presented the appearance of being, as indeed it was, different
from both idioms. The artifice of style made it pass for superior; and,
in purely literary quality, it was in truth superior to the products of
plebeian inspiration. We may prefer the racy stanzas of the _Cognate_ to
those frigid and exhausted euphuisms. But the critical taste of so great
a master as even Dante was not tuned to any such preference. Though he
recognized the defects of the Sicilian poets, as is manifest from his
dialogue with Guido in the _Purgatory_, he gave them all credit for
elevating verse above the vulgar level. Their insipid diction seemed to
him the first germ of a noble _lingua aulica_. Its colorlessness and
strangeness hid the fact that it had already, at the close of the
thirteenth century, assumed the Tuscan habit, and that from the
well-springs of Tuscan idiom the Italian of the future would have to
draw its aliment.
The downfall of the Hohenstauffens and the dispersion of their
Court-poets proved a circumstance of decisive benefit to Italian
literature, by removing it from a false atmosphere into conditions where
it freely flourished and expanded its originality. Feudalism formed no
vital part of the Italian social system, and chivalry had never been
more than an exotic, cultivated in the hotbed of the aristocracy. The
impulse given to poetry in the south, under influences in no true sense
of the phrase national--a Norman-German dynasty attempting to
acclimatize Provencal forms upon Italian soil--could hardly have
produced a vigorous type of literature. It is from the people, in
centers of popular activity, or where the spirit of the people finds
full play in representative society, that characteristic art must be
developed. When we say this, we think inevitably of Periclean Athens,
Elizabeth's London, the Paris of Louis XIV. If the chances of our drama
had been confined to Court-patronage or Sidney's Areopagus, instead of
being extended to the nation by free competition in the wooden theaters
where Marlowe and Shakspere appealed to popular taste, there is little
doubt but that England would only have boasted of a mediocre and
academical stage. When Italian poetry deserted Palermo for the banks of
the Arno, it exchanged the Court for the people; the subtleties of
decadent chivalry for the genuine impulses of a free community; the
pettiness of culture for the humanities of a public conscious of high
destinies and educated in a masculine political arena. Here the grand
qualities of the Italian genius found an open field. Literature,
abandoning imitative elegance, expressed the feelings, thoughts, and
aspirations of a breed second to none in Europe for acuteness of
intellect, intensity of emotion, and greatness of purpose. At Palermo
the princes and their courtiers had been reciprocally auditors and
poets. At Florence the people listened; and the poets, sprung from them,
were speakers. Except at Athens in the golden age of Hellas, no populace
has equaled that of Florence both for the production of original genius,
and also for the sensitiveness to beauty, diffused throughout all
classes, which brings the artist and his audience into right accord.
Two stages in the transition from Sicily to Florence need to be
described. Guittone of Arezzo (1230-1294) strikes the historian of
literature as the man who first attempted to nationalize the polished
poetry of the Sicilian Court, and to strip the new style of its feudal
pedantry.[42] It was his aim, apparently, dismissing chivalrous
conventions, to use the diction and the forms of literary art in an
immediate appeal to the Italian people. He wrote, however, roughly.
Though he practiced vernacular prose, and assumed in verse the
declamatory tone which Petrarch afterwards employed with such effect in
his addresses to the consciousness of Italy, yet Dante could speak of
him with cold contempt[43]; nor can we claim for him a higher place than
that of precursor. He attempted more than he was able to fulfill. But
his attempt, when judged by the conditions of his epoch, deserves to
rank among achievements.
With a poet of Bologna the case is different. Placed midway between
Lombardy and Tuscany, Bologna shared the instincts of the two noblest
Italian populations--the Communes who wrested liberty from Frederick
Barbarossa, and the Communes who were to give arts and letters to the
nation. Bologna, moreover, was proud of her legal university, and had
already won her title of "the learned." Here Guido Guinicelli solved the
problem of rendering the Sicilian style at once national in spirit and
elevated in style.[44] He did so by making it scientific. Receiving from
his Italo-Provencal predecessors the material of chivalrous love, and
obeying the genius of his native city, Guido rhymed of love no longer as
a fashionable pastime, but as the medium of philosophic truth. Learning
was the mother of the national Italian poetry. From Guido started a
school of transcendental singers, who used the ancient form and
subject-matter of exotic poetry for the utterance of metaphysical
thought. The Italians, born, as it were, old, were destined thus to pass
from imitation, through speculation, to the final freedom of their
sensuous art. Of this new lyric style--logical, allegorical,
mystical--the first masterpiece was Guido's Canzone of the Gentle Heart.
The code was afterwards formulated in Dante's _Convito_. The life it
covered and interpreted was painted in the _Vita Nuova_. Its apocalypse
was the _Paradiso_. If Guido Guinicelli did not succeed in writing from
the heart, if he was more of an analyst than a lover, it is yet clear
that the euphuisms of the Italo-Provencal imitators have yielded in his
verse to genuine emotion, while, speaking technically, the complex
structure of the true Italian Canzone now appears in all its harmony of
grace and grandeur. Guido's language is Tuscan; not the Tuscan of the
people, but the Tuscan of the Toscaneggiamenti. Herein, again, we note
the importance of this poet in the history of literature. Working
outside Florence, but obeying Florentine precedent, he stamps Italian
with a Tuscan seal, and helps to conceal from Tuscans themselves the
high destinies of their idiom.
Dante puts us at the right point of view for estimating Guido's service.
Though he recognized the Sicilians as the first masters of poetic style
in Italy, Dante saluted the poet of Bologna as his father[45]:
Quando i' udi' nomar se stesso il padre
Mio, e degli altri miei miglior, che mai
Rime d'amor usar dolci e leggiadre.
On the authority of this sentence we hail in Guido the founder of the
new and specifically national literature of the Italians. If not the
master, he was the prophet of that _dolce stil nuovo_, which freed them
from dependence on foreign traditions, and led, by transmutation, to the
miracles of their Renaissance art. He divined that sincere source of
inspiration, whereof Dante speaks[46]:
Io mi son un che quando
Amore spira, noto; ed a quel modo
Ch'ei detta dentro, vo significando.
The happy instinct which led him to use Tuscan, has secured his place
upon the roll of poets who may still be read with pleasure. And of this,
too, Dante prophesied[47]:
Li dolci detti vostri,
Che, quanto durera l'uso moderno,
Faranno cari ancora i loro inchiostri.
Bologna could boast of many minor bards--of the excellent Onesto, of
Fabrizio and Ghislieri, _qui doctores fuerunt illustres et vulgarium
discretione repleti_.[48] Her erudition was further illustrated by the
work of one Guidotto, who composed a treatise on the new vernacular,
which he dedicated to King Manfred. Thus both by example and precept, by
the testimony of Dante and the fair fame of her own writers, this city
makes for us a link between Sicilian and Tuscan literature.
Manfred was slain at Benevento in 1266, and with him expired the
prospects of Sicilian poetry. Dante, destined to inaugurate the great
age, was born at Florence in 1265. Guido Guinicelli died in 1277, when
Dante had completed his twelfth year. From 1249 until 1271, during the
whole childhood of Dante, Enzo, King of Sardinia, Manfred's half-brother
and Frederick II.'s son, remained a prisoner in the public palace of
Bologna. In one of those years of preparation and transition, while the
learned stanzas of Guido Guinicelli were preluding the "new sweet style"
of Tuscany, this yellow-haired scion of the Suabian princes, the
progenitor of the Bentivogli, sent a song forth from his dungeon's
_loggie_ to greet the provinces of Italy:--
Va, Canzonetta mia,
E saluta Messere,
Dilli lo mal ch'i' aggio.
Quella che m'ha in balia
Si distretto mi tene,
Ch'eo viver non poraggio.
Salutami Toscana,
Quella ched e sovrana,
In cui regna tutta cortesia;
E vanne in Puglia piana,
La magna Capitana,
La dove e lo mio core notte e dia.
These lines sound a farewell to the old age and a salutation to the new.
Enzo's heart is in the lowlands of Apulia and the great Capitanate,
where his father built castles and fought mighty wars. He belongs, like
his verses, like his race, like the chivalrous sentiments he had imbibed
in youth, to the past; and now he is dreaming life away, a captive with
the burghers of Bologna. Yet it is Tuscany for which he reserves the
epithet of Sovereign--Tuscany where all courtesy holds sway. The
situation is pathetic. The poem is a prophecy.
Raimond of Tours, one of the earlier French minnesingers, bade his
friend seek hospitality "in the noble city of the Florentines, named
Florence; for it is there that joy and song and love are perfected with
beauty crowned."[49] The delicate living and graceful pastimes of
Valdarno were famous throughout Europe. In the old French romance of
"Cleomades," for example, we read a rhymed description of the games and
banquets with which Florence welcomed May and June[50]:--
Pour May et Gayn honorer;
Le May pour sa jolivite,
Et le Gayn pour la plante.
Villani, writing of the year 1283, when the Guelfs had triumphed and the
nobles had been quelled, speaks thus of those festivities[51]:--"In this
happy and fair state of ease and peaceful quiet so wealth-giving to
merchants and artificers, and specially to the Guelfs, who ruled the
land, there was formed in the quarter of S. Felicita beyond the Arno,
where the family De' Rossi took the lead, together with their
neighborhood, a company or band of one thousand men and upwards, all
attired in white, with a Lord named the Lord of Love. This band had no
other purpose than to pass the time in games and solace, and in dances
of ladies, knights and other people of the city, roaming the town with
trumpets and divers instruments of music, in joy and gladness, and
abiding together in banquets at mid-day and eventide." From another
chronicle it appears that this company was called the _Brigata bianca_,
or _Brigata amorosa_.[52] "There," says a rhymer who had seen the
sports, "might one behold the rich attire of silk and gold, of samite,
white and blue and violet, with fair velvets; and trappings of all
colors I beheld that day. The young men mid the women went with gaze
fixed upon those eyes angelical, that turn the midnight into noon. Over
their blonde tresses the maidens wore gems and precious garlands;
lilies, violets and roses were their charming faces. You would not have
said: 'Yon are mortal beings.' They rather seemed a thousand
paradises."[53]
The amusements lasted two months, from May 1 until the end of the
midsummer feast of S. John, patron of Florence. Later on, we read of two
companies, the one dressed in yellow, the other in white, each led by
their King, who filled the city with the sound of music, and wore
garlands on their heads, and spent their time in dances and
banquets.[54]
Again, when the nobles, after the battle of Campaldino, had been finally
suppressed, Villani once more returns to the subject of these companies,
describing the booths of wood adorned with silken curtains, which were
ranged along the streets and squares, for the accommodation of
guests.[55] It will be observed that Villani connects the gladness of
this season with the successive triumphs of the Guelf party and the
suppression of the nobles by the Popolo. Not only was Florence freed
from grave anxieties and heavy expenses, caused by the intramural
quarrels between Counts and Burghers, but the city felt the advent of
her own prosperity, the realization of her true type, in their
victorious close. Then the new noble class, the _popolani grassi_,
assumed the gentle manners of chivalry, accommodating its customs to
their own rich jovial ideal. Feudalism was extinguished; but society
retained such portions of feudal customs as shed beauty upon common
life. Tranquillity succeeded to strife, and the medieval city presented
a spectacle similar to that which an old Greek lyrist has described
among the gifts of Peace:
To mortal men Peace giveth these good things:
Wealth, and the flowers of honey-throated song;
The flame that springs
On carven altars from fat sheep and kine,
Slain to the gods in heaven; and, all day long,
Games for glad youths, and flutes, and wreaths, and circling wine.
Then in the steely shield swart spiders weave
Their web and dusky woof:
Rust to the pointed spear and sword doth cleave;
The brazen trump sounds no alarms;
Nor is sleep harried from our eyes aloof,
But with sweet rest my bosom warms:
The streets are thronged with beauteous men and young,
And hymns in praise of Love like flames to heaven are flung.
Goro di Stagio Dati, writing at the end of the fourteenth century, has
preserved for us an animated picture of Florence in May.[56] "When the
season of spring appears to gladden all the world, every man bethinks
him how to make fair the day of S. John, which follows at midsummer, and
there is none but provides himself betimes with clothes and ornaments
and jewels. Marriages and other joyous occasions are deferred until that
time, to do the festival honor; and two months before the date, they
begin to furnish forth the decorations of the races--dresses of varlets,
banners, clarions, draperies, and candles, and whatsoever other
offerings should be made. The whole city is in a bustle for the
preparation of the Festa; and the hearts of young men and women, who
take part therein, are set on naught but dancing, playing, singing,
banqueting, jousting, and other fair amusements as though naught else
were to be done in those weeks before the coming of S. John's Eve." The
minute account of the ceremonies observed on S. John's Day which
follows, need not be transcribed. Yet it may be well to call attention
to a _quattrocento_ picture in the Florentine Academy, which illustrates
the customs of that festival. It is a long panel representing the
marriage of an Adimari with a daughter of the Ricasoli. The Baptistery
appears in the background; and on the piazza are ladies and young men,
clad in damask and rich stuffs, with jewels and fantastic head-dresses,
joining hands as though in act of dancing. Under the Loggia del Bigallo
sit the trumpeters of the Signory, blowing clarions adorned with
pennons. The lily of Florence is on these trappings. Serving men carry
vases and basins toward the Adimari palace, in preparation for the
wedding feast. A large portion of the square is covered in with a white
and red awning.
If the chroniclers and painters enable us to form some conception of
Florentine festivity, we are introduced to the persons and pastimes of
these jovial companies by the poet Folgore da San Gemignano.[57] Two
sets of his Sonnets have been preserved, the one upon the Months,
addressed to the leader of a noble Sienese company; the other on the
Days, to a member of a similar Florentine society. If we are right in
reckoning Folgore among the poets of the thirteenth century, the
facility and raciness of his style, its disengagement from
Provencalizing pedantry, and the irony of his luxurious hedonism, prove
to what extent the Tuscans had already left the middle age behind
them.[58] Folgore, in spite of his spring fragrance and auroral
freshness, anticipates the spirit of the Renaissance. He is a
thirteenth-century Boccaccio, without Boccaccio's enthusiasm for humane
studies. Ideal love, asceticism, religion, the virtues of the Christian
and the knight, are not for him. His soul is set on the enjoyment of the
hour. But this materialism is presented in a form of art so temperate,
with colors so refined and outlines so delicately drawn, that there is
nothing repulsive in it. His selfishness and sensuality are related to
Aretino's as the miniatures of a missal to Giulio Romano's Modes of
Venus.[59]
In his sonnets on the Months, Folgore addresses the Brigata as "valiant
and courteous above Lancelot, ready, if need were, with lance in rest,
to spur along the lists of Camelot." In January he gives them good fires
and warm chambers, silken coverlids for their beds, and fur cloaks, and
sometimes in the day to sally forth and snow-ball girls upon the square:
Uscir di fora alcuna volta il giorno,
Gittando della neve bella e bianca
A le donzelle, che staran dattorno.
February brings the pleasures of the chase. March is good for fishing,
with merry friends at night, and never a friar to be seen:
Lasciate predicar i Frati pazzi,
Ch'hanno troppe bugie e poco vero.
In April the "gentle country all abloom with fair fresh grass" invites
the young men forth. Ladies shall go with them, to ride, display French
dresses, dance Provencal figures, or touch new instruments from Germany,
or roam through spacious parks. May brings in tournaments and showers of
blossoms--garlands and oranges flung from balcony and window--girls and
youths saluting with kisses on cheeks and lips:
E pulzellette, giovene, e garzoni
Basciarsi nella bocca e nelle guance;
D'amore e di goder vi si ragioni.
In June the company of youths and maidens quit the city for the villa,
passing their time in shady gardens, where the fountains flow and
freshen the fine grass, and all the folk shall be love's servants. July
finds them in town again, avoiding the sun's heat and wearing silken
raiment in cool chambers where they feast. In August they are off to the
hills, riding at morn and eve from castle to castle, through upland
valleys where streams flow. September is the month of hawking; October
of fowling and midnight balls. With November and December winter comes
again, and brings the fireside pleasures of the town. On the whole,
there is too much said of eating and drinking in these sonnets; and the
series concludes with a piece of inhumane advice:
E beffe far dei tristi cattivelli,
E miseri cattivi sciagurati
Avari: non vogliate usar con elli.
The sonnets on the Days breathe the same quaint medieval hedonism.[60]
Monday is the day of songs and love; our young man must be up betimes,
to make his mistress happy:
Levati su, donzello, e non dormire;
Che l'amoroso giorno ti conforta,
E vuol che vadi tua donna a fruire.
Tuesday is the day of battles and pitched fields; but these are
described in mock-heroics, which show what the poet really felt about
the pleasure of them. Wednesday is the day of banquets, when ladies and
girls are waited on by young men wearing amorous wreaths:
E donzelletti gioveni garzoni
Servir, portando amorose ghirlande.
Thursday is the day of jousts and tourneys; Friday of hounds and horses;
Saturday, of hawks and fowling-nets; Sunday, of "dances and feats of
arms in Florence":
Danzar donzelli, armeggiar cavalieri,
Cercar Fiorenza per ogni contrada,
Per piazze, per giardini, e per verzieri.
Such then was the joyous living, painted with colors of the fancy by a
Tuscan poet, and realized in Florence at the close of that eventful
century which placed the city under Guelf rule, in the plenitude of
peace, equality, and wealth by sea and land. Distinctions of class had
been obliterated. The whole population enjoyed equal rights and equal
laws. No man was idle; and though the simplicity of the past, praised by
Dante and Villani, was yielding to luxury, still the pleasure-seekers
were controlled by that fine taste which made the Florentines a race of
artists.[61] This halcyon season was the boyhood of Dante and Giotto,
the prime of Arnolfo and Cimabue. The buildings whereby the City of the
Flower is still made beautiful above all cities of Italian soil, were
rising. The people abode in industry and order beneath the sway of their
elected leaders. Supreme in Tuscany, fearing no internal feuds, strong
in their militia of thirty thousand burghers to repel a rival State, the
Florentines had reached the climax of political prosperity. Not as yet
had arisen that little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, above
Pistoja, which was destined to plunge them into the strife of Blacks and
Whites. During that interval of windless calm, in that fair city, where
the viol and the lute were never silent through spring-tide and summer,
the star of Italian poetry, that "crowning glory of unblemished wealth,"
went up and filled the heavens with light.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Giesebrecht, _De Litterarum studiis apud Italos primis medii
aevi saeculis_, Berolini, 1845, p. 15.
[2] See Giesebrecht, _op. cit._ p. 19. Wippo recommends the Emperor to
compel his subjects to educate their sons in letters and law. It was
by such studies that ancient Rome acquired her greatness. In Italy at
the present time, he says, all boys pass from the games of childhood
into schools. It is only the Teutons who think it idle or disgraceful
for a man to study unless he be intended for a clerical career.
[3] See Adolfo Bartoli, _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_, vol. i.
pp. 142-158, and p. 167, on Guido delle Colonne and Qualichino da
Spoleto.
[4] See above, vol. i. _Age of the Despots_, 2nd ed. chap. 2.
[5] The Italians did not even begin to reflect upon their _lingua
volgare_ until the special characters and temperaments of their chief
States had been fixed and formed. In other words, their social and
political development far anticipated their literary evolution. There
remained no center from which the vulgar tongue could radiate,
absorbing local dialects. Each State was itself a center, perpetuating
dialect.
[6] See Du Meril, _Poesies Populaires Latines anterieures au douzieme
Siecle_, Paris, 1843.
[7] Regarding the authorship of Latin hymns see the notes in Mone's
_Hymni Latini Medii AEvi_, Friburgi Brisgoviae, 1853, 3 vols. For the
French origin of _Carmina Burana_ see _Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder
der Mittelalters_, von Oscar Hubatsch, Goerlitz, 1870.
[8] Du Meril, _op. cit._ p. 268.
[9] Dante, _Paradiso_, xv.
[10] See _Age of the Despots_, p. 65.
[11] xvi. 115.
[12] See D'Ancona, _Poesia Popolare_, p. 11, note.
[13] See Carducci, _Dello Svolgimento della Letteratura Nazionale_, p.
29.
[14] Romagnoli has reprinted some specimens of the _Illustre et Famosa
Historia di Lancillotto del Lago_, Bologna, 1862.
[15] Muratori in _Antiq. Ital. Diss._ xxx. p. 351, quotes a decree of
the Bolognese Commune, dated 1288, to the effect that _Cantatores
Francigenarum in plateis Communis omnino morari non possint_. They had
become a public nuisance and impeded traffic.
[16] In the _Cento Novelle_ there are several Arthurian stories. The
rubrics of one or two will suffice to show how the names were
Italianized. _Qui conta come la damigella di Scalot mori per amore di
Lanciallotto de Lac._ Nov. lxxxii. _Qui conta della reina Isotta e di
m. Tristano di Leonis._ Nov. lxv. In the _Historia di Lancillotto_,
cited above, Sir Kay becomes _Keux_; Gawain is _Gauuan_. In the
_Tavola Ritonda_, _Morderette_ stands for Mordred, _Bando di Benoiche_
for Ban of Benwick, _Lotto d'Organia_ for Lot of Orkeney.
[17] See Adolfo Bartoli, _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_, vol. ii.
chapters iii., iv., v., vi., for a minute inquiry into this early
dialectical literature.
[18] _Cento Novelle_, Milano, 1825, Nov. ii. and xxi.
[19] _Chronica Fr. Salimbene Parmensis, ord. min._, Parmae, 1857, p.
166.
[20] See the _Cronache Siciliane_, Bologna, Romagnoli, 1865, the first
of which bears upon its opening paragraph the date 1358. Sicilian, it
may be said in passing, presents close dialectical resemblance to
Tuscan. Even the superficial alteration of the Sicilian _u_ and _i_
into the Tuscan _o_ and _e_ (_e.g._ _secundu_ and _putiri_ into
_secondo_ and _potere_) effaces the most obvious differences.
[21] The Italians wavered long between several metrical systems,
before they finally adopted the hendecasyllabic line, which became the
consecrated rhythm of serious poetry. Carducci, in his treatise
_Intorno ad alcune Rime_ (Imola, Galeati, 1876), pp. 81-89, may be
profitably consulted with regard to early Italian Alexandrines. He
points out that Ciullo's _Tenzone_:
Rosa fresc' aulentissima--c'appar' in ver' l'estate:
and the Ballata of the Comari:
Pur bi' del vin, comadr'--e no lo temperare:
together with numerous compositions of the Northern Lombard school
(Milan and Verona), are written in Alexandrines. In the
Lombardo-Sicilian age of Italian literature, before Bologna acted as
an intermediate to Florence, this meter bid fair to become
acclimatized. But the Tuscan genius determined decisively for the
hendecasyllabic.
[22] See the Appendix to this chapter on Italian hendecasyllables.
[23] See Carducci, _Cantilene_, etc. (Pisa, 1871), pp. 58-60, for
thirteenth-century _rispetti_ illustrating the Sicilian form of the
Octave Stanza and its transformation to the Tuscan type.
[24] The poetry of this period will be found in Trucchi, _Poesie
Inedite_, Prato, 1846; _Poeti del Primo Secolo_, Firenze, 1816;
_Raccolta di Rime Antiche Toscane_, Palermo, Assenzio, 1817; and in a
critical edition of the _Codex Vaticanus_ 3793, _Le Antiche Rime
Volgari_, per cura di A. d'Ancona e D. Comparetti, Bologna, Romagnoli,
1875.
[25] The most important modern works upon this subject are three
Essays by Napoleone Caix, _Saggio sulla Storia della Lingua e dei
Dialetti d'Italia_, Parma, 1872; _Studi di Etimologia Italiana e
Romanza_, Firenze, 1878; _Le Origini della Lingua Poetica Italiana_,
Firenze, 1880. D'Ovidio's Essay on the _De Eloquio_ in his _Saggi
Critici_, Napoli, 1878, may also be consulted with advantage.
[26] "Lingua Tusca magis apta est ad literam sive literaturam quam
aliae linguae, et ideo magis est communis et intelligibilis." Antonio da
Tempo, born about 1275, says this in his Treatise on Italian Poetry,
recently printed by Giusto Grion, Bologna, Romagnoli, 1869. See p. 17
of that work.
[27] This fact was recognized by Dante. He speaks of the languages of
Si, Oil, and Oc, meaning Italian, French, and Spanish. _De Eloquio_,
lib. i. cap. 8. Dante points out their differences, but does not
neglect their community of origin.
[28] _De Vulg. Eloq._ i. 16.
[29] _Ibid._ i. 18.
[30] See _Archivio Glottologico Italiano_, vol. ii. Villani, lib. vii.
cap. 68.
[31] _Cantilene e Ballate, Strambotti e Madrigali nei Secoli xiii. e
xiv._ A cura di Giosue Carducci (Pisa, 1871), pp. 29-32.
[32] _Ibid._ pp. 18, 22.
[33] _Ibid._ pp. 39, 42.
[34] _Ibid._ pp. 43, 45.
[35] See _ibid._ p. 45, the stanza which begins, _Matre tant o_.
[36] _Ibid._ pp. 47-60.
[37] _Ibid._ pp. 62-66.
[38] The practical and realistic common sense of the Italians,
rejecting chivalrous and ecclesiastical idealism as so much nonsense,
is illustrated by the occasional poems of two Florentine
painters--Giotto's Canzone on _Poverty_, and Orcagna's Sonnet on
_Love_. Orcagna, in the latter, criticises the conventional blind and
winged Cupid, and winds up with:
L'amore e un trastullo:
Non e composto di legno ne di osso;
E a molte gente fa rompere il dosso.
[39] See Carducci, _op. cit._ pp. 52-60, for early examples of
Tuscanized Sicilian poems of the people.
[40] The Tuscanized Sicilian poems in Carducci's collection referred
to above, are extracted from a Florentine MS. called _Napolitana_, and
a Tenzone between man and woman (_ib._ p. 52), which has clearly
undergone a like process, is called _Ciciliana_.
[41] See Francesco d'Ovidio, _Sul Trattato De Vulgari Eloquentia_. It
is reprinted in his volume of _Saggi Critici_, Napoli, 1879. The
subject is fully discussed from a point of view at variance with my
text by Adolf Gaspary, _Die Sicilianische Dichterschule_, Berlin,
1878.
[42] _Rime di Fra Guittone d'Arezzo_, Firenze, Morandi, 1828, 2 vols.
[43] _De Vulg. Eloq._ ii. 6; ii. 1; i. 13, and _Purg._ xxvi. 124.
[44] His poems will be found in the collections above mentioned, p.
26, note.
[45] _Purg._ xxvi.
[46] _Purg._ xxiv.
[47] _Purg._ xxvi.
[48] _De Vulg. Eloq._ i. 15.
[49] Fauriel, _Dante et les origines_, etc. (Paris, 1854), i. 269.
[50] D'Ancona, _La Poesia Popolare Italiana_ (Livorno 1878), p. 36,
note.
[51] Giov. Vill. vii. 89.
[52] Stefani, quoted by D'Ancona, _op. cit._ p. 36.
[53] _Ibid._ p. 37, note.
[54] Giov. Vill. x. 216.
[55] Giov. Vill. vii. 132.
[56] _Storia di Firenze di Goro Dati_ (Firenze, 1735), p. 84.
[57] The date commonly assigned to Folgore is 1260, and the Niccolo he
addresses in his series on the Months has been identified with that
Nicolo, che la costuma ricca
Del garofano prima discoperse,
so ungently handled by Dante in the _Inferno_, Canto xxix. I am aware
that grave doubts, based upon historical allusions in Folgore's
miscellaneous sonnets, have been raised as to whether we can assign so
early a date to Folgore, and whether his Brigata was really the
_brigata godereccia, spendereccia_, of Siena alluded to by Dante. See
Bartoli, _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_, vol. ii. cap. II, for a
discussion of these points. See also Giulio Navone's edition of
Folgore's and Cene's _Rime_, Bologna, Romagnoli, 1880. This editor
argues forcibly for a later date--not earlier at all events than from
1300 to 1320. But, whether we choose the earlier date 1260 or the
later 1315, Folgore may legitimately be used for my present purpose of
illustration.
[58] This is equally true of Cene dalla Chitarra's satirical parodies
of the Months, in which, using the same rhymes as Folgore, he turns
each of his motives to ridicule. Cene was a poet of Arezzo. His series
and Folgore's will both be found in the _Poeti del Primo Secolo_, vol.
ii., and in Navone's edition cited above.
[59] These remarks have to be qualified by reference to an unfinished
set of five sonnets (Navone's edition, pp. 45-49), which are composed
in a somewhat different key. They describe the arming of a young
knight, and his reception by Valor, Humility, Discretion, and
Gladness. Yet the knight, so armed and accepted, is no Galahad, far
less the grim horseman of Duerer's allegory. Like the members of the
_brigata godereccia_, he is rather a Gawain or Astolfo, all love, fine
clothes, and courtship. Each of these five sonnets is a precious
little miniature of Italian carpet-chivalry. The quaintest is the
second, which begins:
Ecco prodezza che tosto lo spoglia,
E dice: amico e' convien che tu mudi,
Per cio ch'i' vo' veder li uomini nudi,
E vo' che sappi non abbo altra voglia.
This exordium makes one regret that the painter of the young knight in
our National Gallery (Giorgione?) had not essayed a companion picture.
Valor disrobing him and taking him into her arms and crying _Queste
carni m'ai offerte_ would have made a fine pictorial allegory.
[60] If I were writing the history of early Tuscan poetry, I should
wish here to compare the rarely beautiful poem of Lapo Gianni, _Amor
eo chero_, with Folgore, and the masterly sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri
of Siena, especially the one beginning _S'io fossi fuoco_, with Cene
dalla Chitarra, in order to prove the fullness of sensuous and
satirical inspiration in the age preceding Dante. Lapo wishes he had
the beauty of Absalom, the strength of Samson; that the Arno would run
balm for him, her walls be turned to silver and her paving-stones to
crystal; that he might abide in eternal summer gardens among thousands
of the loveliest women, listening to the songs of birds and
instruments of music. The voluptuousness of Folgore is here heightened
to ecstasy. Cecco desires to be fire, wind, sea, God, that he might
ruin the world; the emperor, that he might decapitate its population;
death, that he might seek out his father and mother; life, that he
might fly from both; being Cecco, he would fain take all fair women,
and leave the foul to his neighbors. The spite of Cene is deepened to
insanity.
[61] See _Paradiso_, xv.; Giov. Vill. vi. 69.