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