CHAPTER VI ITALIAN LITERATURE Our admiration for Italy is quickened with our knowledge. When Byron sang "O Rome! my country! city of the soul!" he was thinking perhaps of the glories of the ancient time. But it was the same Byron who knelt at the tomb of Dante in Ravenna and wept. When Browning wrote "Open my heart and you will see the medieval city of Florence was casting its spell over him; but Browning was also giving expression to his feeling for the beauty and magic of modern Italy. Countless associations have endeared this land to men of all generations and of all races. "Italy," says Carlyle, "has produced a far greater number of great men than any other nation, men distinguished in art, thinking, conduct." Richard Garnett names "the nine Italians most brilliantly conspicuous in the very first rank of genius and achievement-Aquinas, Dante, Columbus, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, Galileo, Napoleon," and he points out that only one of these is, properly speaking, a man of letters. It is well to remember, therefore, that in dealing with the literature of Italy we are exploring only a single aspect of Italy's achievements. The Italian language. The break-up of the Roman Empire left Italy a prey to the barbarian invaders. For a thousand years her political fortunes have been complex indeed. Political unity has been achieved only within the last sixty years, but unity of race, culture, and language came very much earlier. The Italian language is closer to Latin than are the other Romance languages because the cultural tradition was naturally strongest in Italy. As has been explained in the last chapter, Latin slowly merged in the later days of Rome into the softer Italian dialects-the speech of the people, which, although it was not the language of the courts or of letters FLORENCE IN THE DAYS OF LUCA DELLA ROBBIA or of the Church, in due time gained the ascendancy. The earliest Italian literature was written in various dialects. The Tuscan speech that Dante used, the purest and the most closely related to Latin of the dialects of Italy, became, through Dante's marvelous literary power and influence, the cultivated speech of all Italy. What Dante began, the great Humanist and poet Petrarch, and the first writer of classic Italian prose, Boccaccio, continued. The Italian language used by these three Tuscans continues to be the speech of Italy, and it possesses a unity greater than that of any other literary language of Europe. It is in every way the worthy successor of Latin. Dante himself voiced his admiration for it by commending "the smoothness of its syllables, the propriety of its rules, and the sweet discourses that are made of it." The Middle Ages. How curious a thing it is to recall that the people of Italy, richly gifted as they were, clung for so many centuries to the traditions of the past and, culturally speaking, produced so little! From Boethius to Dante is a longer interval than from Dante to our own times. The Papacy and the Empire, the Church and the State, were the two important factors of the Middle Ages. The Roman Church dominated the spiritual life of the people; the Holy Roman Empire represented the temporal power. It was but a pale reflection of the empire of Augustus, and yet the medieval mind attached great significance to it. The Church frequently craved temporal as well as spiritual overlordship. With so much at stake Papacy and Empire found themselves set over against each other. In Italy the term "Guelf" came to mean the popular and democratic element, supported by the Pope, favored by the cities, opposed to an Empire controlled largely by foreigners; the term "Ghibelline" the imperialist element, aristocratic and restrictive, favored by the nobles and the Emperor. When Dante began his work, Italy was distracted politically and was in danger of entire dismemberment. Florence was torn by two rival factions of the Guelfs. Yet the dawn of a new era might already be descried. Dante's century, the thirteenth, was destined to be famous. In addition to Dante himself, the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, and the painter Giotto were stars of the first magnitude. The rise of the free cities of Italy meant a greater degree of popular government. Learning, though still cramped within narrow bounds, was eagerly sought after. Life became richer. Literature found lyric expression in the language of the people. The precursors of Dante. For a generation or so before the century commenced, troubadours were familiar figures in northern Italy, and Provençal poems were common.1 The first authentic lyric poetry in Italian consisted of love poems produced in Sicily under the encouragement of the Emperor Frederick II. Some of the choicest of these and of the love songs of Tuscany, written after the middle of the century, have been exquisitely translated by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and gathered into a volume entitled "Dante and his Circle." Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia were the most gifted of these lyric poets and were close friends of Dante. The most common poetical forms were three: (1) the canzone, consisting of a poem made up of twelve-line or thirteen-line stanzas with an elaborate riming scheme; (2) the sonnet, a poetic form well known in English literature and borrowed by English writers from the Italian-a well-knit poem complete in fourteen lines; and (3) the ballata, consisting of a poem of two or more stanzas, of which the theme was set forth in the opening stanza. DANTE Of all the poets who have trod the soil of Italy, Dante is easily the greatest: greater than his predecessor Virgil, whose name he venerated so highly; greater than his near contemporary Chaucer, who was in Italy in 1372; greater than Milton, who visited Florence three centuries after Dante's death; greater than the German poet Goethe, who, after years of hope deferred, finally reached Italy in 1786; greater than Keats or Shelley or Browning, whose names we associate with the Italy of the nineteenth century. Dante's influence was profound in his own day, and after six centuries it is still increasing. Paget Toynbee's two large volumes on "Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary (1380-1844)" include quotations from almost six hundred authors who refer to Dante. The number of Dante studies since Cary's day has been legion. Americans may well be proud of their representatives among Dante scholars and of the Dante collections in this country-that of Cornell University, for example, with over seven thousand entries. As 1 See chapter on French literature. James Russell Lowell says, "Dante's readers turn students, his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes a religion.” Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and made his home in that city until his exile in 1302. His youth was glorified by his overmastering love for Beatrice Portinari, whom he first met at the end of his ninth year. She was clad, as he tells us, in a dress "of a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, and she was girt and adorned in such wise as befitted her youthful age." After the passage of another nine years "it happened," he says, "that this admirable lady appeared to me clothed in purest white, between two gentle ladies who were of greater age." The pure, idealizing love that he bore her is recorded in that most tender and poetic of autobiographies, the "Vita Nuova" ("New Life"). It gives few incidents beyond the salutations and gracious greetings that passed between them. Beatrice is really an abstract ideal of love and beauty. Dante wrote his "New Life," or "regeneration," in prose, with thirty-one verse interruptions, which are treated as deliberate studies in poetic expression. The poems are similar in form to those of his fellow poets but more intense and beautiful. As the "New Life" is fashioned under his hands, Dante gains in mastery and power. From passionate youth he moves toward thoughtful manhood.1 At the close, writing under the shadow of Beatrice's death at the age of twenty-four, Dante tells us that he has determined to write no further of her until such time as he can "discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labor 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 what hath not yet before been written of any woman." Like the other men of his day Dante had a passion for knowledge. The learning of the schools comprised seven fundamentals: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astrology. Higher education included physics, metaphysics, logic, ethics, and theology. Aristotle was the master in science and philosophy, and St. Thomas Aquinas in theology. The Ptolemaic ideas 1 This may be seen by a reading of Rossetti's sympathetic translation. |