Renaissance in Italy
Chapter 78 : Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature.by John Addington Symonds.PART I NEW YORK HENR

Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature.

by John Addington Symonds.

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 a.n.a.lytical 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.sical 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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. .h.i.therto 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 scholars.h.i.+p and learning made by men like Comparetti, Guasti, D'Ovidio, Rubieri, Milanesi, Campori, Pa.s.sano, Biagi, Pitre, Tigri, Vigo, Giudici, Fraca.s.setti, 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 Zanich.e.l.li--through whose spirited energy so many works of erudition have seen the light.

I have mentioned names almost at random, pa.s.sing over (not through forgetfulness, but because s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sages 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 s.p.a.ce. 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._

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'Ol 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 a.s.signed 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 scholars.h.i.+p. 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 cla.s.sics, 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 cla.s.sical 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 scholars.h.i.+p, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sed 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, c.u.m 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 cla.s.sical past as part of his own history.[3] In like manner, the recollection of a previous munic.i.p.al 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 a.n.a.logous 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 inst.i.tutions; 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 burghers.h.i.+p 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 a.s.surance 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 cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.signed 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 surpa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.sic 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 n.o.bility, 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 exst.i.tit in Troa, Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia: Prima quiete dormiente Troa, 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 cl.u.s.tered. The memory of Livy added l.u.s.ter to Padua, and Mussato boasted that her walls, like those of Troy, her mother-city, were sacrosanct. The memory of the Plinies enn.o.bled 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 superst.i.tious 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 princ.i.p.ality."[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 Invest.i.ture and Independence, two literatures had arisen in the country which we now call France. Two languages, the _langue d'oc_ and the _langue d'ol_, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 t.i.tle 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 cla.s.ses 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 n.o.bles, bordering by the Riviera upon Provence, borrowed poetry, together with its diction, from the valley of the Rhone. Pa.s.sing 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'ol_ 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 n.o.bles; 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sage of the _Purgatory_[11]: