Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу  Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature / Part 1 (of 2)

автор John Addington Symonds

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature, by

John Addington Symonds

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature

Part 1 (of 2)

Author: John Addington Symonds

Release Date: April 8, 2011 [EBook #35792]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RENAISSANCE IN ITALY: LITERATURE ***

Produced by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber's Notes: Obvious printer errors have been corrected without note.

This e-book contains a few phrases in ancient Greek, which may not display properly depending on the fonts the user has installed. Hover the mouse over the Greek phrase to view a transliteration, e.g., βιβλος.

This e-book contains external links to other works by John Addington Symonds on Project Gutenberg. These links are not guaranteed to be functional in perpetuity.

CONTENTS

RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

ITALIAN LITERATURE

In Two Parts

BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Author of
"Studies of the Greek Poets," "Sketches in Italy and Greece," etc.

"Questa provincia pare nata per risuscitare le cose morte, come si è visto della Poesia, della Pittura e della Scultura."

Mach.: Arte della Guerra

PART I

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1888

PREFACE.

This work on the Renaissance in Italy, of which I now give the last two volumes to the public, was designed and executed on the plan of an essay or analytical inquiry, rather than on that which is appropriate to a continuous history. Each of its four parts—the Age of the Despots, the Revival of Learning, the Fine Arts, and Italian Literature—stood in my mind for a section; each chapter for a paragraph; each paragraph for a sentence. At the same time, it was intended to make the first three parts subsidiary and introductory to the fourth, for which accordingly a wider space and a more minute method of treatment were reserved. The first volume was meant to explain the social and political conditions of Italy; the second to relate the exploration of the classical past which those conditions necessitated, and which determined the intellectual activity of the Italians; the third to exhibit the bias of this people toward figurative art, and briefly to touch upon its various manifestations; in order that, finally, a correct point of view might be obtained for judging of their national literature in its strength and limitations. Literature must always prove the surest guide to the investigator of a people's character at some decisive epoch. To literature, therefore, I felt that the plan of my book allowed me to devote two volumes.

The subject of my inquiry rendered the method I have described, not only natural but necessary. Yet there are special disadvantages, to which progressive history is not liable, in publishing a book of this sort by installments. Readers of the earlier parts cannot form a just conception of the scope and object of the whole. They cannot perceive the relation of its several sections to each other, or give the author credit for his exercise of judgment in the marshaling and development of topics. They criticise each portion independently, and desire a comprehensiveness in parts which would have been injurious to the total scheme. Furthermore, this kind of book sorely needs an Index, and its plan renders a general Index, such as will be found at the end of the last volume, more valuable than one made separately for each part.

Of these disadvantages I have been rendered sensible during the progress of publication through the last six years. Yet I have gained some compensation in the fact that the demand for a second edition of the first volume has enabled me to make that portion of the work more adequate.

With regard to authorities consulted in these two concluding volumes, I have special pleasure in recording none—with only insignificant exceptions—but Italian names. The Italians have lately made vigorous strides in the direction of sound historical research and scientific literary criticism. It is not too much to say that the labors of this generation are rapidly creating a radical change in the views hitherto accepted concerning the origins and the development of Italian literature. Theories based on rational investigation and philosophical study are displacing the academical opinions of the last century. The Italians are forming for themselves a just conception of their past, at the same time that they are consolidating their newly-gained political unity.

To dwell upon the works of Francesco de Sanctis and Pasquale Villari is hardly necessary here. The former is perhaps less illustrious by official dignity than by his eloquent Storia della Letteratura Italiana. The latter has gained European reputation as the biographer of Savonarola and Machiavelli, the historian of Florence at their epoch. But English readers are probably not so familiar with acute and accurate criticism of Giosuè Carducci; with the erudition of Alessandro d'Ancona, and the voluminous history of the veteran Cesare Cantù; with the intelligence and facile pen of Adolfo Bartoli; with the philological researches of Napoleone Caix, and Francesco Fiorentino's philosophical studies; with Rajna's patient labors in one branch of literary history, and Monaci's discoveries in another; with the miscellaneous contributions to scholarship and learning made by men like Comparetti, Guasti, D'Ovidio, Rubieri, Milanesi, Campori, Passano, Biagi, Pitré, Tigri, Vigo, Giudici, Fracassetti, Fanfani, Bonghi, Grion, Mussafia, Morsolin, Del Lungo, Virgili. While alluding thus briefly to students and writers, I should be sorry to omit the names of those publishers—the Florentine Lemonnier, Barbèra, Sansoni; the Neapolitan Morano; the Palermitan Lauriel; the Pisan Vico and Nistri; the Bolognese Romagnoli and Zanichelli—through whose spirited energy so many works of erudition have seen the light.

I have mentioned names almost at random, passing over (not through forgetfulness, but because space compels me) many writers to whom I owe weighty obligations. The notes and references in these volumes will, I trust, contain acknowledgment sufficient to atone for omissions in this place.

Not a few of these distinguished men hold professorial appointments; and it is clear that they are forming students in the great Italian cities, to continue and complete their labors. Very much remains to be explored in the field of Italian literary history. The future promises a harvest of discovery scarcely less rich than that of the last half-century. On many moot points we can at present express but partial or provisional judgments. The historian of the Renaissance must feel that his work, when soundest, may be doomed to be superseded, and when freshest, will ere long seem antiquated. So rapid is the intellectual movement now taking place in Italy.

In conclusion, it remains for me to add that certain passages in Chapter II. have been reproduced from an article by me in the Quarterly Review, while some translations from Poliziano and Boiardo, together with portions of the critical remarks upon those poets, were first published, a few years since, in the Fortnightly Review. From the Fortnightly Review, again, I have extracted the translation of ten sonnets by Folgore da San Gemignano.

In quoting from Italian writers, in the course of this literary history, I have found it best to follow no uniform plan; but, as each occasion demanded, I have given the Italian text, or else an English version, or in some cases both the original and a translation. To explain the motives for my decision in every particular, would involve too much expenditure of space. I may, however, add that the verse-translations in these volumes are all from my pen, and have been made at various times for the special purpose of this work.

Davos: March, 1881.

CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST PART.

 

PAGE 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'Oïl cultivated by Italians—Franco-Italian Hybrid—Provençal Lyrics—French Chansons de Geste—Carolingian and Arthurian Romances—Formation of Italian Dialects—Sicilian School of Court Poets—Frederick II.—Problem of the

Lingua Aulica

—Forms of Poetry and Meters fixed—General Character of the Sicilian Style—Rustic Latin and Modern Italian—Superiority of Tuscan—The

De Eloquio

—Plebeian Literature—Moral Works in Rhyme—Emergence of Prose in the Thirteenth Century—Political Songs—Popular Lyrics—Religious Hymns—Process of Tuscanization—Transference of the Literary Center from Sicily to Tuscany—Guittone of Arezzo—Bolognese School—Guido Guinicelli—King Enzio's Envoy to Tuscany—Florentine Companies of Pleasure—Folgore de San Gemignano—The Guelf City

1 CHAPTER II. THE TRIUMVIRATE.

Chivalrous Poetry—Ideal of Chivalrous Love—Bolognese Erudition—New Meaning given to the Ideal—Metaphysics of the Florentine School of Lyrists—Guido Cavalcanti—Philosophical Poems—Popular Songs—Cino of Pistoja—Dante's

Vita Nuova

—Beatrice in the

Convito

and the

Paradiso

—The Preparation for the

Divine Comedy

in Literature—Allegory—The

Divine Comedy

—Petrarch's Position in Life—His Conception of Humanism—Conception of Italy—His Treatment of Chivalrous Love—Beatrice and Laura—The

Canzoniere

—Boccaccio, the Florentine Bourgeois—His Point of View—His Abandonment of the Chivalrous Standpoint—His Devotion to Art—Anticipates the Renaissance—The

Decameron

—

Commedia Umana

—Precursors of Boccaccio—Novels—

Carmina Vagorum

—Plan of the Book—Its Moral Character—The

Visione Amorosa

—Boccaccio's Descriptions—The

Teseide

—The

Rime

—The

Filocopo

—The

Filostrato

—The

Ameto

,

Fiammetta

,

Ninfale

,

Corbaccio

—Prose before Boccaccio—

Fioretti di San Francesco

and

Decameron

compared—Influence of Boccaccio over the Prose Style of the Renaissance—His Death—Close of the Fourteenth Century—Sacchetti's Lament

59 CHAPTER III. THE TRANSITION.

The Church, Chivalry, the Nation—The National Element in Italian Literature—Florence—Italy between 1373 and 1490—Renascent Nationality—Absorption in Scholarship—Vernacular Literature follows an Obscure Course—Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular Currents—Renascence of Italian—The Italian Temperament—Importance of the Quattrocento—Sacchetti's Novels—Ser Giovanni's

Pecorone

—Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry—Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza—Nicolò Soldanieri—Alesso Donati—His Realistic Poems—Followers of Dante and Petrarch—Political Poetry of the Guelfs and Ghibellines—Fazio degli Uberti—Saviozzo da Siena—Elegies on Dante—Sacchetti's Guelf Poems—Advent of the

Bourgeoisie

—Discouragement of the Age—Fazio's

Dittamondo

—Rome and Alvernia—Frezzi's

Quadriregio

—Dantesque Imitation—Blending of Classical and Medieval Motives—Matteo Palmieri's

Città di Vita

—The Fate of

Terza Rima

—Catherine of Siena—Her Letters—S. Bernardino's Sermons—Salutati's Letters—Alessandra degli Strozzi—Florentine's Annalists—Giov. Cavalcanti—Corio's

History of Milan

—Matarazzo's

Chronicle of Perugia

—Masuccio and his

Novellino

—His Style and Genius—Alberti—Born in Exile—His Feeling for Italian—Enthusiasm for the Roman Past—The Treatise on the Family—Its Plan—Digression on the Problem of its Authorship—Pandolfini or Alberti—The

Deiciarchia

—

Tranquillità dell'Animo

—

Teogenio

—Alberti's Religion—Dedication of the Treatise on Painting—Minor Works in Prose on Love

—Ecatomfila, Amiria, Deifiria, etc.—Misogynism—Novel of Ippolito and Leonora—Alberti's Poetry—Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the Age—Francesco Colonna—The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—Its Style—Its Importance as a Work of the Transition—A Romance of Art, Love, Humanism—The Allegory—Polia—Antiquity—Relation of this Book to Boccaccio and Valla—It Foreshadows the Renaissance 139 CHAPTER IV. POPULAR SECULAR POETRY.

Separation between Cultivated Persons and the People—Italian despised by the Learned—Contempt for Vernacular Literature—The

Certamen Coronarium

—Literature of Instruction for the Proletariate—Growth of Italian Prose—Abundance of Popular Poetry—The People in the Quattrocento take the Lead—Qualities of Italian Genius—Arthurian and Carolingian Romances—

I Reali di Francia

—Andrea of Berberino and his Works—Numerous Romances in Prose and Verse—Positive Spirit—Versified Tales from Boccaccio—Popular Legends—Ginevra degli Almieri—Novel of

Il Grasso

—Histories in Verse—

Lamenti

—The Poets of the People—

Cantatori in Banca

—Antonio Pucci—His

Sermintesi

—Political Songs—Satires—Burchiello—His Life and Writings—Dance-Songs—Derived from Cultivated Literature, or produced by the People—Poliziano—Love-Songs—

Rispetti

and

Stornelli

—The Special Meaning of

Strambotti

—Diffusion of this Poetry over Italy—Its Permanence—Question of its Original Home—Intercommunication and Exchange of Dialects—

Incatenature

and

Rappresaglie

—Traveling in Medieval Italy—The Subject-Matter of this Poetry—Deficiency in Ballad Elements—Canti Monferrini—The Ballad of

L'Avvelenato

and Lord Ronald

234 CHAPTER V. POPULAR RELIGIOUS POETRY.

The Thirteenth Century—Outburst of Flagellant Fanaticism—The

Battuti

,

Bianchi

,

Disciplinati

—Acquire the name of

Laudesi

—Jacopone da Todi—His Life—His Hymns—The

Corrotto

—Franciscan Poetry—Tresatti's Collection—Grades of Spiritual Ecstasy—Lauds of the Confraternities—Benivieni—Feo Belcari and the Florentine Hymn-writers—Relation to Secular Dance-songs—Origins of the Theater—Italy had hardly any true Miracle Plays—Umbrian

Divozioni

—The Laud becomes Dramatic—Passion

Plays—Medieval Properties—The Stage in Church or in the Oratory—The Sacra Rappresentazione—A Florentine Species—Fraternities for Boys—Names of the Festa—Theory of its Origin—Shows in Medieval Italy—Pageants of S. John's Day at Florence—Their Machinery—Florentine Ingegnieri—Forty-three Plays in D'Ancona's Collection—Their Authors—The Prodigal Son—Elements of Farce—Interludes and Music—Three Classes of Sacre Rappresentazioni—Biblical Subjects—Legends of Saints—Popular Novelle—Conversion of the Magdalen—Analysis of Plays 279 CHAPTER VI. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI AND POLIZIANO.

Period from 1470 to 1530—Methods of treating it—By Chronology—By Places—By Subjects—Renascence of Italian—At Florence, Ferrara, Naples—The New Italy—Forty Years of Peace—Lorenzo de' Medici—His Admiration for and Judgment of Italian Poetry—His Privileges as a Patron—His

Rime

—The Death of Simonetta—Lucrezia Donati—Lorenzo's Descriptive Power—The

Selve

—The

Ambra

—

La Nencia

—

I Beoni

—His Sacred Poems—Carnival and Dance Songs—Carri and Trionfi—Savonarola—The Mask of Penitence—Leo X. in Florence, 1513—Pageant of the Golden Age—Angelo Poliziano—His Place in Italian Literature—

Le Stanze

—Treatment of the Octave Stanza—Court Poetry—Mechanism and Adornment—The

Orfeo

—Orpheus, the Ideal of the Cinque Cento—Its Dramatic Qualities—Chorus of Mænads—Poliziano's Love Poems—

Rispetti

—Florentine Love—La Bella Simonetta—Study and Country Life

359 CHAPTER VII. PULCI AND BOIARDO.

The Romantic Epic—Its Plebeian Origin—The Popular Poet's Standpoint—The Pulci Family—The Carolingian Cycle—Turpin—

Chanson de Roland

—Historical Basis—Growth of the Myth of Roland—Causes of its Popularity in Italy—Burlesque Elements—The

Morgante Maggiore

—Adventures in Paynimry—Roncesvalles—Episodes introduced by the Poet—Sources in Older Poems—The Treason of Gano—Pulci's Characters—His Artistic Purpose—His Levity and Humor—Margutte—Astarotte—Pulci's

bourgeois

Spirit—Boiardo—His Life—Feudalism in Italy—Boiardo's Humor—His Enthusiasm for Knighthood—His Relation

to Renaissance Art—Plot of the Orlando Innamorato—Angelica—Mechanism of the Poem—Creation of Characters—Orlando and Rinaldo—Ruggiero—Lesser Heroes—The Women—Love—Friendship—Courtesy—Orlando and Agricane at Albracca—Natural Delineation of Passions—Speed of Narration—Style of Versification—Classical and Medieval Legends—The Punishment of Rinaldo—The Tale of Narcissus—Treatment of Mythology—Treatment of Magic—Fate of the Orlando Innamorato 425 CHAPTER VIII. ARIOSTO.

Ancestry and Birth of Ariosto—His Education—His Father's Death—Life at Reggio—Enters Ippolito d'Este's Service—Character of the Cardinal—Court Life—Composition and Publication of the

Furioso

—Quiet Life at Ferrara—Comedies—Governorship of Garfagnana—His Son Virginio—Last Eight Years—Death—Character and Habits—The Satires—Latin Elegies and Lyrics—Analysis of the Satires—Ippolito's Service—Choice of a Wife—Life at Court and Place-hunting—Miseries at Garfagnana—Virginio's Education—Autobiographical and Satirical Elements—Ariosto's Philosophy of Life—Minor Poems—Alessandra Benucci—Ovidian Elegies—Madrigals and Sonnets—Ariosto's Conception of Love

493

APPENDICES.

No. I.

—Note on Italian Heroic Verse

523 No. II.

—Ten Sonnets translated from Folgore da San Gemignano

526 No. III.

—Translations from Alesso Donati

531 No. IV.

—Jacopone's "Presepio," "Corrotto," and "Cantico dell'Amore Superardente," translated into English Verse

532 No. V.

—Passages translated from the "Morgante Maggiore" of Pulci

543 No. VI.

—Translations of Elegiac Verses by Girolamo Benivieni and Michelangelo Buonarroti

561

RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.

CHAPTER I.

THE ORIGINS.

The period from 1300 to 1530—Its Division into Three Sub-Periods—Tardy Development of the Italian Language—Latin and Roman Memories—Political Struggles and Legal Studies—Conditions of Latin Culture in Italy during the Middle Ages—Want of National Legends—The Literatures of Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oïl cultivated by Italians—Franco-Italian Hybrid—Provençal Lyrics—French Chansons de Geste—Carolingian and Arthurian Romances—Formation of Italian Dialects—Sicilian School of Court Poets—Frederick II.—Problem of the Lingua Aulica—Forms of Poetry and Meters fixed—General Character of the Sicilian Style—Rustic Latin and Modern Italian—Superiority of Tuscan—The De Eloquio—Plebeian Literature—Moral Works in Rhyme—Emergence of Prose in the Thirteenth Century—Political Songs—Popular Lyrics—Religious Hymns—Process of Tuscanization—Transference of the Literary Center from Sicily to Tuscany—Guittone of Arezzo—Bolognese School—Guido Guinicelli—King Enzio's Envoy to Tuscany—Florentine Companies of Pleasure—Folgore da San Gemignano—The Guelf City.

Between 1300, the date of Dante's vision, and 1530, the date of the fall of Florence, the greatest work of the Italians in art and literature was accomplished. These two hundred and thirty years may be divided into three nearly equal periods. The first ends with Boccaccio's death in 1375. The second lasts until the birth of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1448. The third embraces the golden age of the Renaissance. In the first period Italian literature was formed. In the second intervened the studies of the humanists. In the third, these studies were carried over to the profit of the mother tongue. The first period extends over seventy-five years; the second over seventy-three; the third over eighty-two. With the first date, 1300, we may connect the jubilee of Boniface and the translation of the Papal See to Avignon (1304); with the second, 1375, the formation of the Albizzi oligarchy in Florence (1381); with the third, 1448, the capture of Constantinople (1453); and with the fourth, 1530, the death of Ariosto (1533) and the new direction given to the Papal policy by the Sack of Rome (1527).

The chronological limits assigned to the Italian Renaissance in the first volume of this work would confine the history of literature to about eighty years between 1453 and 1527; and it will be seen by reference to the foregoing paragraph that it would not be impossible to isolate that span of time. In dealing with Renaissance literature, it so happens that strict boundaries can be better observed than in the case of politics, fine arts, or learning. Yet to adhere to this section of literary history without adverting to the antecedent periods, would be to break the chain of national development, which in the evolution of Italian language is even more important than in any other branch of culture. If the renascence of the arts must be traced from Cimabue and Pisano, the spirit of the race, as it expressed itself in modern speech, demands a still more retrogressive survey, in order to render the account of its ultimate results intelligible.

The first and most brilliant age of Italian literature ended with Boccaccio, who traced the lines on which the future labors of the nation were conducted. It was succeeded by nearly a century of Greek and Latin scholarship. To study the masterpieces of Dante and Petrarch, or to practice their language, was thought beneath the dignity of men like Valla, Poggio, or Pontano. But toward the close of the fifteenth century, chiefly through the influence of Lorenzo de' Medici and his courtiers, a strong interest in the mother-tongue revived. Therefore the vernacular literature of the Renaissance, as compared with that of the expiring middle ages, was itself a renascence or revival. It reverted to the models furnished by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and combined them with the classics, which had for so long a while eclipsed their fame. Before proceeding to trace the course of the revival, which forms the special subject of these volumes, it will be needful to review the literature of the fourteenth century, and to show under what forms that literature survived among the people during the classical enthusiasm of the fifteenth century. Only by this antecedent investigation can the new direction taken by the genius of the combined Italian nation, after the decline of scholarship, be understood. Thus the three sub-periods of the two hundred and thirty years above described may be severally named the medieval, the humanistic, and the renascent. To demonstrate their connection and final explication is my purpose in this last section of my work on the Renaissance.

In the development of a modern language Italy showed less precocity than other European nations. The causes of this tardiness are not far to seek. Latin, the universal tongue of medieval culture, lay closer to the dialects of the peninsula than to the native speech of Celtic and Teutonic races, for whom the official language of the Empire and the Church always exhibited a foreign character. In Italy the ancient speech of culture was at home: and nothing had happened to weaken its supremacy. The literary needs of the Italians were satisfied with Latin; nor did the genius of the new people make a vigorous effort to fashion for itself a vehicle of utterance. Traditions of Roman education lingered in the Lombard cities, which boasted of secular schools, where grammarians and rhetoricians taught their art according to antique method, long after the culture of the North had passed into the hands of ecclesiastics.[1] When Charlemagne sought to resuscitate learning, he had recourse to these Italian teachers; and the importance of the distinction between Italians and Franks or Germans, in this respect, was felt so late as the eleventh century. Some verses in the Panegyric addressed by Wippo to the Emperor Henry III. brings the case so vividly before us that it may be worth while to transcribe them here[2]:

Tunc fac edictum per terram Teutonicorum,

Quilibet ut dives sibi natos instruat omnes.

Litterulis, legemque suam persuadeat illis,
Ut, cum principibus placitandi venerit usus,
Quisque suis libris exemplum proferat illis.
Moribus his dudum vivebat Roma decenter:
His studiis tantos potuit vincire tyrannos.
Hoc servant Itali post prima crepundia cuncti;
Et sudare scholis mandatur tota juventus.
Solis Teutonicis vacuum vel turpe videtur,
Ut doceant aliquem nisi clericus accipiatur.

While the Italians thus continued the rhetorical and legal studies of the ancients, they did not forget that they were representatives and descendants of the Romans. The Republic and the Empire were for them the two most glorious epochs of their own history; and any attempt which they made to revive either literature or art, was imitative of the past. They were not in the position to take a new departure. No popular epic, like the Niebelungen of the Teuton, the Arthurian legend of the Celt, the Song of Roland of the Frank, or the Spanish Cid, could have sprung up on Italian soil. The material was wanting to a race that knew its own antiquity. Even when an Italian undertook a digest of the Tale of Troy or of the Life of Alexander, he converted the metrical romances of the middle ages into prose, obeying an instinct which led him to regard the classical past as part of his own history.[3] In like manner, the recollection of a previous municipal organization in the communes, together with the growing ideal of a Roman Empire, which should restore Italy to her place of sovereignty among the nations, proved serious obstacles to the unification of the people. We have already seen that this reversion of the popular imagination to Rome may be reckoned among the reasons why the victory of Legnano and the Peace of Constance were comparatively fruitless.[4] Politically, socially, and intellectually, the Italians persisted in a dream of their Latin destiny, long after the feasibility of realizing that vision had been destroyed, and when the modern era had already formed itself upon a new type in the federation of the younger races.

Of hardly less importance, as negative influences, were the failure of feudalism to take firm hold upon Italian soil, and the defect of its ideal, chivalry. The literature of trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers grew up and flourished in the castles of the North; nor was it until the Italians, under the sway of the Hohenstauffen princes, possessed something analogous to a Provençal 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 Cæsars; and while the Papacy was their own handiwork, they, alone of European nations, viewed it politically rather than religiously, and so weakened it as to prepare the way for the Babylonian captivity at Avignon.

Thus, through the people's familiarity with Latin; through the survival of Roman grammar schools and the memory of Roman local institutions; through a paramount and all-pervading enthusiasm for the Roman past; through the lack of new legendary and epical material; through the failure of feudalism, and through the political ferment attending on the Wars of Investment and Independence, the Italians were slow to produce a modern language and a literature of modern type. They came late into the field; and when they took their place at last, their language presented a striking parallel to their political condition. As they failed to acquire a solid nationality, but remained split up into petty States, united by a Pan-Italic sentiment; so they failed to form a common speech. The written Italian of the future was used in its integrity by no one province; each district clinging to its dialect with obstinate pride.[5] Yet, though the race was tardy in literary development, and though the tongue of Ariosto has never become so thoroughly Italian as that of Shakspere is English or that of Molière is French; still, on their first appearance, the Italian masters proved themselves at once capable of work maturer and more monumental than any which had been produced in modern Europe. Their education during two centuries of strife was not without effect. The conditions of burghership in their free communes, the stirring of their political energies, the liberty of their popolo, and the keen sense of reality developed by their legal studies, prepared men like Dante and Guido Cavalcanti for solving the problems of art in a resolute, mature and manly spirit, fully conscious of the aim before them, and self-possessed in the assurance of adult faculties.

In the first, or, as it may be termed, the Latin period of medieval culture, there was not much to distinguish the Italians from the rest of Europe. Those Lombard schools, of which mention has already been made, did indeed maintain the traditions of decadent classical education more alive than among the peoples of the North. Better Latin, and particularly more fluent Latin verse, was written during the dark ages in Italy than elsewhere.[6] Still it does not appear that the whole credit of medieval Latin hymnology, and of its curious counterpart, the songs of the wandering students, should be attributed to the Italians. While we can refer the Dies Iræ, Lauda Sion, Pange Lingua and Stabat Mater with tolerable certainty to Italian poets; while there is abundant internal evidence to prove that some of the best Carmina Burana were composed in Italy and under Italian influences; yet Paris, the focus of theological and ecclesiastical learning, as Bologna was the center of legal studies, must be regarded as the headquarters of that literary movement which gave the rhyming hexameters of Bernard of Morlas and the lyrics of the Goliardi to Europe.[7] It seems clear that we cannot ascribe to the Italians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries any superiority in the use of Latin over the school of France. Their previous vantage-ground had been lost in the political distractions of their country. At the same time, they were the first jurists and the hardiest, if not the most philosophical, freethinkers of Europe.

This is a point which demands at least a passing notice. Their practical studies, and the example of an emperor at war with Christendom, helped to form a sect of epicureans in Italy, for whom nothing sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority was sacred. To these pioneers of modern incredulity Dante assigned not the least striking Cantos of the Inferno. Their appearance in the thirteenth century, during the ascendancy of Latin culture, before the people had acquired a language, is one of the first manifestations of a national bias toward positive modes of thought and feeling, which we recognize alike in Boccaccio and Ariosto, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Pomponazzi and the speculators of the South Italian School. It was the quality, in fact, which fitted the Italians for their work in the Renaissance. As metaphysicians, in the stricter sense of that word, they have been surpassed by Northern races. Their religious sense has never been so vivid, nor their opposition to established creeds so earnest. But throughout modern history their great men have manifested a practical and negative good sense, worldly in its moral tone, impervious to pietistic influences, antagonistic to mysticism, contented with concrete reality, which has distinguished them from the more fervent, boyish, sanguine, and imaginative enthusiasts of Northern Europe. We are tempted to speculate whether, as they were the heirs of ancient civility and grew up among the ruins of Roman greatness so they were born spiritually old and disillusioned.

Another point which distinguished the Italians in this Latin period of their literature, was the absence of the legendary or myth-making faculty. It is not merely that they formed no epic, and gave birth to no great Saga; but they accepted the fabulous matter, transmitted to them from other nations, in a prosaic and positive spirit. This does not imply that they exercised a critical faculty, or passed judgment on the products of the medieval fancy. On the contrary, they took legend for fact, and treated it as the material of history. Hector, Alexander, and Attila were stripped of their romantic environments, and presented in the cold prose of a digest, as persons whose acts could be sententiously narrated. This attitude of the Italians toward the Saga is by no means insignificant. When their poets came to treat Arthurian or Carolingian fables in the epics of Orlando, they apprehended them in the same positive spirit, adding elements of irony and satire.

For the rest, the Italians shared with other nations the common stock of medieval literature—Chronicles, Encyclopædias, Epitomes, Moralizations, Histories in verse, Rhetorical Summaries, and prose abstracts of Universal History—the meager débris and detritus of the huge moraines carried down by extinct classic glaciers. It is not needful to dwell upon this aspect of the national culture, since it presents no specific features. What is most to our purpose, is to note the affectionate remembrance of Rome and Roman worthies, which endured in each great town. The people, as distinguished from the feudal nobility, were and ever felt themselves to be the heirs of the old Roman population. Therefore the soldiers on guard against the Huns at Modena in 924, sang in their barbarous Latin verse of Hector and the Capitol[8]:

Dum Hector vigil exstitit in Troïa,

Non eam cepit fraudulenta Græcia:

Prima quiete dormiente Troïa,

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 Cæsar[9]:

L'altra, traendo alla rocca la chioma,

Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia

De' Troiani e di Fiesole e di Roma.

A rhyming chronicler of Pisa compared the battles of the burghers against the Saracens with the Punic wars. The tomb of Virgil at Naples was an object for pilgrimage, and one of the few spots round which a group of local legends clustered. The memory of Livy added luster to Padua, and Mussato boasted that her walls, like those of Troy, her mother-city, were sacrosanct. The memory of the Plinies ennobled Como, that of Ovid gave glory to Sulmona, that of Tully to Arpino. Florence clung to the mutilated statue of Mars upon her bridge with almost superstitious reverence, as proof of Roman origin; while Siena adopted for her ensign the she-wolf and the Roman twins. Pagan customs survived, and were jealously maintained in the central and southern provinces; and the name of the Republic sufficed to stir Arnold's revolution in Rome, long before the days of Rienzi. To the mighty German potentate, King Frederick Barbarossa, attended with his Northern chivalry, a handful of Romans dared to say: "Thou wast a stranger; I, the City, gave thee civic rights. Thou camest from transalpine regions; I have conferred on thee the principality."[10] It would be easy to multiply these instances. Enough, however, has been said to show that through the gloom of medieval history, before humanism had begun to dawn, and while the other nations were creating legends and popular epics, Italy maintained a dim but tenacious sense of her Roman past. This consciousness has here to be insisted on, not merely because it stood in the way of mythopœic activity, but because it found full and proper satisfaction in that Revival of Learning which decided the Renaissance.

While the Italians were fighting the Wars of Investiture and Independence, two literatures had arisen in the country which we now call France. Two languages, the langue d'oc and the langue d'oïl, gave birth to two separate species of poetry. The master-product of the latter was the Song of Roland, which, together with the after-birth of Arthurian romance, flooded Europe with narratives, embodying in a more or less epical form the ideals, enthusiasms, and social creed of Chivalry. The former, cultivated in the southern provinces that border on the Mediterranean, yielded a refined and courtly fashion of lyrical verse, which took the form of love-songs, battle-songs, and satires, and which is now known as Provençal literature. The influence of feudal culture, communicated through these two distinct but closely connected channels, was soon felt in Italy. The second phase of Italian development has been called Lombard, because it was chiefly in the north of the peninsula that the motive force derived from France was active. Yet if we regard the matter of this new literature, rather than its geographical distribution, we shall more correctly designate it by the title Franco-Italian. In the first or Latin period, the Italians used an ancient language. They now adopted not only the forms but also the speech of the people from whom they received their literary impulse. It is probable that the Lombard dialects were still too rough to be accommodated to the new French style. The cultivated classes were familiar with Latin, and had felt no need of raising the vernacular above the bare necessities of intercourse. But the superior social development of the French courts and castles must be reckoned the main reason why their language was acclimatized in Italy together with their literature. Just as the Germans before the age of Herder adopted polite culture, together with the French tongue, ready-made from France, so now the Lombard nobles, bordering by the Riviera upon Provence, borrowed poetry, together with its diction, from the valley of the Rhone. Passing along the Genoese coast, crossing the Cottian Alps, and following the valley of the Po, the languages of France and Provence diffused themselves throughout the North of Italy. With the langue d'oïl came the Chansons de Geste of the Carolingian Cycle and the romances of the Arthurian legend. With the langue d'oc came the various forms of troubadour lyric. Without displacing the local dialects, these imported languages were used and spoken purely by the nobles; while a hybrid, known as franco-italian, sprang up for the common people who listened to the tales of Roland and Rinaldo on the market-place. The district in which the whole mass of this foreign literature seems to have flourished most at first, was the Trevisan March, stretching from the Adige, along the Po, beyond the Brenta and past Venice, to the base of the Friulian Alps. The Marches of Treviso were long known as La Marca Amorosa or Gioiosa, epithets which strongly recall the Provençal phrases of Joie and Gai Saber, and which are familiar to English readers of Sir Thomas Mallory in the name of Lancelot's castle, Joyous Gard. Exactly to define the period of Trevisan culture would be difficult. It is probable that it began to flourish about the end of the twelfth, and declined in the middle of the thirteenth century. Dante alludes to it in a famous passage of the Purgatory[11]:

In sul paese ch'Adige e Po riga,

Solea valore e cortesia trovarsi

Prima che Federigo avesse briga.

There are many traces of advanced French civilization in this district, among which may be mentioned the exhibition of Miracle Plays upon the French type at Civitale in the years 1298 and 1304, and the Castello d'Amore at Treviso described by Rolandini in the year 1214. Yet, though the Trevisan Marches were the nucleus of this Gallicizing fashion, the use of French and Provençal spread widely through the North and down into the center of Italy. Numerous manuscripts in the langue d'oïl attest the popularity of the Arthurian romances throughout Lombardy, and we know that in Umbria S. Francis first composed poetry in French.[12] It was in French, again, that Brunetto Latini wrote his Tesoro. So late as the middle of the fourteenth century this habit had not died out. Dante in the Convito thought it necessary to stigmatize "those men of perverse mind in Italy who commend the vulgar tongue of foreigners and depreciate their own."

We have seen that the language and the matter of this imported literature were twofold; and we can distinguish two distinct currents, after its reception into Italy. The Provençal lyric, as was natural, attracted the attention of the nobles; and since feudalism had a stronger hold upon the valley of the Po than on any other district, Lombardy became the chief home of this poetry. Not to mention the numerous Provençal singers who sought fortune and adventure in northern Italy, about twenty-five Italians, using the langue d'oc, may be numbered between the Marchese Alberto Malaspina, who held Lunigiana about 1204, and the Maestro Ferrara, who lived at the Court of Azzo VII. of Este.[13] These were for the most part courtiers and imperial feudatories; and only two were Tuscans. The person of one of them, Sordello, is familiar to every reader of the Purgatory.

The second tide of influence passed from Northern France together with the epics of chivalry. But its operation was not so simple as that of the Provençal lyric. We can trace for instance a marked difference between the effect produced by the Chansons de Geste and that of the Arthurian tales. The latter seem to have been appropriated by the nobles, while the former found acceptance with the people. Nor was this unnatural. At the opening of the twelfth century the Carolingian Cycle had begun to lose its vogue among the polished aristocracy of France. That uncompromising history of warfare hardly suited a society which had developed the courtesy and the romance of chivalry. It represented the manners of an antecedent age of feudalism. Therefore the tales of the Round Table arose to satisfy the needs of knights and ladies, whose thoughts were turned to love, the chase, the tournament, and errantry. The Arthurian myth idealized their newer and more refined type of feudal civility. It was upon the material of this romantic Epic that the nobles of North Italy fastened with the greatest eagerness. No one has forgotten how the tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere proved, in a later day, the ruin of Francesca and her lover.[14] The people, on the other hand, took livelier interest in the songs of Roland and Charlemagne. The Chansons de Geste formed the stock in trade of those Cantatores Francigenarum, who crowded the streets and squares of Lombard cities.[15] The exchange of courtesies and refined sentiments between a Tristram and Iseult or a Lancelot and Guinevere must naturally have been less attractive to a rude populace than narratives of battle with the Infidel, and Roland's horn, and Gano's treason, and Rinaldo's quarrels with his liege. In the Arthurian Cycle names and places alike—Avalon, Camelot, Winchester, Gawain, Galahaut—were distant and ill-adapted to Italian ears.[16] The whole tissue of the romance, moreover, was imaginative. The Carolingian Cycle, on the contrary, introduced personages with a good right to be considered historical, and dwelt upon familiar names and traditional ideas. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that this Epic took a strong hold on the popular imagination, and so penetrated the Italian race as to assume a new form on Italian soil, while the Arthurian romance survived as a pastime of the upper classes, and underwent no important metamorphosis at their hands. In the course of this volume, I shall have to show how, when Italian literature emerged again from the people after nearly a century of neglect, it was the transformed tale of Charlemagne and Roland which supplied the Italian nation with its master-works of epic poetry—the Morgante and the two Orlandos.

The Lombard, or rather the Franco-Italian period is marked by the adoption of a foreign language and foreign fashions. Literature at this stage was exotic and artificial; but the legacy transmitted to the future was of vast importance. On the one side, the courtly rhymers who versified in the Provençal dialect, bequeathed to Sicily and Tuscany the chivalrous lyric of love, which was destined to take its final and fairest form from Dante and Petrarch. On the other hand, the populace who listened to the Song of Roland on the market-place, prepared the necessary conditions for a specific and eminently characteristic product of Italian genius. Without a national epic, the Italians were forced to borrow from the French. But what they borrowed, they transmuted—not merely adding new material, like the tale of Gano's treason and the fiction of Orlando's birth at Sutri, but importing their own spirit, positive, ironical and incredulous, into the substance of the legend.

In the course of Italianizing the tale of Roland, the native dialects made their first effort to assume a literary form. We possess sufficient MS. evidence to prove that the Franco-Italian language of the songs recited to the Lombard townsfolk, was composed by the adaptation of local modes of speech to French originals. The process was not one of pure translation. The dialects were not fit for such performance. It may rather be described as the attempt of the dialects to acquire capacity for studied expression. With French poems before them, the popular rhapsodes introduced dialectical phrases, substituted words, and, where this was possible, modified the style in favor of the dialect they wished to use. French still predominated. But the hybrid was of such a nature that a transition from this mixed jargon to the dialect, presented in a literary shape, was imminent.

There is sufficient ground for presuming that the Italian dialects triumphed simultaneously in all parts of the peninsula about the middle of the thirteenth century.[17] This presumption is founded partly on the quotations from dialectical poetry furnished by Dante in the De Eloquio, which prove a wide-spread literary activity; partly on fragments recovered from sources which can be referred to the second half of the century. The peculiar problems offered by the conditions of poetry at Frederick II.'s Court, though these are open to many contradictory solutions, render the presumption more than probable. It is difficult to understand the third or Sicilian period of literature without hypothesizing an antecedent stage of vulgar poetry produced in local dialects. But, owing to the scarcity of documents, no positive facts regarding the date and mode of their emergence can be adduced. We have on this point to deal with matters of delicate conjecture and minute inference; and though it might seem logical to introduce at once a discussion on the growth of the Italian language, and its relation to the dialects which were undoubtedly spoken before they were committed to writing, special reasons induce me to defer this topic for the present.

While the North of Italy was deriving the literature both of its cultivated classes and of the people from France, a new and still more important phase of evolution was preparing in the South. Both Dante and Petrarch recognize the Sicilian poets as the first to cultivate the vulgar tongue with any measure of success, and to raise it to the dignity of a literary language. In this opinion they not only uttered the tradition of their age, but were also without doubt historically correct. Whatever view may be adopted concerning the formation of the lingua illustre, or polished Italian, from the dialectical elements already employed in local kinds of poetry, there is no disputing the importance of the Sicilian epoch. We cannot fix precise dates for its duration. Yet, roughly speaking, it may be said to have begun in 1166, when troubadours of some distinction gathered round the person of the Norman king, William II., at Palermo, and to have ended in 1266, when Manfred was killed at the battle of Benevento. It culminated during the reign of the Emperor Frederick II. (1210-1250), who was himself skilled in Latin and the vulgar tongues of France and Italy, and who drew to his court men distinguished for their abilities in science and literature. Dante called Frederick, Cherico grande. The author of the Cento Novelle described him as veramente specchio del mondo in parlare et in costumi, and spoke of his capital as the resort of la gente ch'avea bontade ... sonatori, trovatori, e belli favellatori, uomini d'arti, giostratori, schermitori, d'ogni maniera gente.[18] The portrait drawn of him by Salimbene in his contemporary Chronicle, though highly unfavorable to the schismatic enemy of Holy Church, proves that his repute was great in Italy as a patron of letters and himself a poet of no mean pretensions.[19]

It is impossible in these pages to inquire into the views of this great ruler for the resuscitation of culture in Italy, which, had he not been thwarted in his policy by the Church, might have anticipated the Renaissance by two centuries. Yet the opinion may be hazarded that the cultivation of Italian as a literary language was due in no small measure to the forethought and deliberate intention of an Emperor, who preferred his southern to his northern provinces. Unlike the Lombard nobles, Frederick, while adopting Provençal literature, gave it Italian utterance. This seems to indicate both purpose and prevision on his part. Wishing to found an Italian dynasty, and to acclimatize the civilization of Provence in his southern capitals, he was careful to promote purely Italian studies. There can at any rate be no doubt that during his reign and under his influence very considerable progress was made towards fixing the diction and the forms of poetry. He found dialects, not merely spoken, but already adapted to poetical expression, in more than one district of Italy. From these districts the most eminent artists flocked to his Court. It was there that a common type of speech was formed, which, when the burghers of Central Italy began to emulate the versifiers of Palermo, furnished them with an established style.

How the lingua aulica came into being admits of much debate. But we may, I think, maintain that the fundamental dialect from which it sprang was Sicilian, purified by comparison with Provençal and Latin, and largely modified by Apulian elements. The difficulty of understanding the problem is in part removed when we remember the variety of representatives from noble towns of Italy who met in Frederick's circle, the tendencies of a dialect to refine itself when it assumes a literary form, and the continuous influences of Court-life in common. Italians gathered round the person of the sovereign at Palermo from their native cities, must in ordinary courtesy have abandoned the crudities of their respective idioms. This sacrifice could not but have been reciprocal; and since Provençal was not spoken to the exclusion of the mother-tongue, a generic Italian had here the best chance of development. That this generic or Court Italian was at root Sicilian, we have substantial reasons to believe; but that it exactly resembled the Sicilian of to-day, which does not greatly differ from extant documents of thirteenth and fourteenth century Sicilian dialect, seems too crude a supposition.[20] Unfortunately, our evidence upon this point is singularly scanty. Few poems of the Sicilian period, as will appear in the sequel, have descended to us in their primitive form.

Not only was a common language instituted in the Court of Frederick; but the metrical forms of subsequent Italian poetry were either fixed or suggested by the practice of these early versifiers. Few subjects are involved in darker obscurity than the history of meters—the creation of rhythmical structures whereby one national literature distinguishes itself from another.[21] Just as each writer who can claim an individual style seems to possess his own rhythm, his peculiar tune, to which his sentences are cadenced, so each nation appropriates and adheres to its own meter. The Italian hendecasyllabic, the French Alexandrian, the English heroic iambic, are obvious examples. This selection of a characteristic meter, and the essays through which the race arrives at its perfection, seem to imply some instinct, planted within the deeps of national personality, whereof the laws have not been formulated. When we speak of the genius of a language, we do but personify this instinct, which appears to exercise itself at an early period of national development, leaving for subsequent centuries the task of refining and completing what had been projected at the outset. Therefore, nothing very distinct can be asserted about the origin of the hendecasyllable iambic line, which marks Italian poetry.[22] Yet it certainly appears among the early specimens of the Sicilian period. The rhyming system of the octave stanza may possibly be traced in Ciullo d'Alcamo's tenzone between the lover and his mistress; though it still needed a century of elaboration at the hands of popular rispetti-writers, to present it in completed form to Boccaccio's muse.[23] This poem is Alexandrine in rhythm. Terza rima seems to be suggested by the sonnet of the Sparviere; while a perfect sonnet, differing very little either in structure or in diction from the type of Petrarch's, is supplied in Piero delle Vigne's Perocchè amore. At the same time the highwrought structure of the Canzone, destined to play so triumphant a part during the whole period of the trecento, receives its essential outlines from the rhymers of this age, especially from Jacopo da Lentino and Guido delle Colonne.

Though the forms and language of Sicilian poetry decided the destinies of Italian, the substance of this literature was far from being national. Under its Italian garb, it was no less an exotic than the Provençal and French compositions of the Lombard period. After running a brilliant course in Provence, the poetry of chivalrous love was now declining to its decadence. It had ceased to be the spontaneous expression of a dominant ideal, and had degenerated into a pastime for dilettanti. Its style had become conventional; its phrases fixed. The visionary science upon which it was based, had to be studied in codes of doctrine and repeated with pedantic precision. Frederick and his courtiers received it at the point of its extinction. They adhered as closely as possible to traditional forms, imitated time-honored models, and confined their efforts to the reproduction of the old art in a new vehicle of language. Therefore, vernacular Italian poetry in this first stage of its existence presents the curious spectacle of literature decrepit in the cradle, hampered with the euphuism of an exhausted manner before it could move freely, and taught to frame conceits and cold antitheses before it learned to lisp.

Such, in general, may be said to have been the character of the Sicilian or Italo-Provençal style. Yet a careful student of these Canzoni, Serventesi, and Tenzoni, will discover much that is both natural and graceful, much that is elevated in thought, much again that belongs to the crude sensuousness of Southern temperament. There is an unmistakable blending of the Provençal tradition with indigenous realism, especially in such compositions as the Lament of Odo delle Colonne, the Lament of Ruggieri Pugliese, and the Tenzone of Ciullo d'Alcamo.[24] We can trace a double current of inspiration: the one passing downward from the learned writers of the Court, the judges, notaries, and men of state, who followed Provençal tradition; the other upward from the people, who rhymed as nature taught them: both mingling in the compositions of those more genial poets, who were able to infuse reality into the labored form of their adoption. What might have been the destiny of Italian literature, if the Suabian House had maintained its hold on the Two Sicilies, and this process of fusion had been completed at Naples or Palermo, cannot even be surmised.

Our knowledge of the earliest Italo-Provençal poetry is vague, owing to lack of genuine Sicilian monuments. We can only trace faint indications of a progress toward greater freedom and more spontaneous inspiration, as the "courtly makers" yielded to the singers of the people. The battle of Benevento extinguished at one blow both the hopes of the Suabian dynasty and the development of Sicilian poetry. When Manfred's body had been borne naked on a donkey from the battle-field to his nameless grave, amid the cries of Chi compra Manfredi? a foreign troubadour, Amerigo di Peguilhan, composed his lament, bidding the serventese pass through all lands and over every sea to find the man who knew where Arthur dwelt and when he would return. Arthur was dead, and would never come again. Chivalry and feudalism had held their brief and feeble sway in Italy, and that was over. Neither in Lombardy among the castles, nor in Sicily within the Court, throbbed the real life of the Italian nation. That life was in the Communes. It beat in the heart of the people—especially of that people who had made nobility a crime beside the Arno, and had outlawed the Scioperati from their City of the Flower. What the Suabian princes gave to Italy was the beginning of a common language. It remained for Tuscany to stamp that language with her image and superscription, to fix it in its integrity for all future ages, and to render it the vehicle of stateliest science and consummate art.

The question of the origin of the Italian language pertains rather to philology than to the history of culture.[25] Yet I cannot pass it wholly by in silence, since it was raised at an early period by the founders of Italian literature, who occupied themselves with singular sagacity concerning the relations of the literary to the dialectical forms of speech. Dante's De Eloquio, though based on unscientific principles of analysis, opened a discussion which exercised the acutest intellects of the sixteenth century.

During the whole Roman period, it is certain that literary Latin differed in important respects from the vulgar, rustic or domestic, language. Thus while a Roman gentleman would have said habeo pulchrum equum, his groom probably expressed the same thought in words like these: ego habeo unum bellum caballum. Between a graffito scribbled on the wall of some old Roman building—Alexander unum animal est, for instance—and one now chalked in the same district, Alessandro è un animale, there is hardly as much difference as between a literary Latin sentence and either of these rustic epigrams; while the use of such intensitives as multum and bene, to express the superlative degree, indicate in vulgar Latin the presence of a principle alien to literary Latin but sympathetic to modern speech. The vulgar or rustic Latin continued, side by side with its literary counterpart, throughout the middle ages, forming in the first centuries of imperial decline the common speech of the Romance peoples, and gradually assuming those specific forms which determined the French, Spanish, and Italian types. There is little doubt that, could we possess ourselves of sufficient documents, we should be able to trace the stages in this process. Both literary and vulgar Latin suffered transformation—the former declining in purity, variety, and vigor; the latter diverging dialectically into the constituents of the three grand families of modern Latin. But the metamorphosis was not of the same nature in both cases. While the literary language had been fixed, arrested, and delivered over to death, the vulgar tongue retained a vivid and assimilative life, capable of biological transmutation. French, Spanish, and Italian are modes of its existence continued under laws of organic variety and change.

It would be unscientific to suppose that rustic Latin, even in the most flourishing period of the Roman Empire, was identical in all provinces. From the first it must have held within itself the principles of differentiation. And when we consider the varying conditions of soil, climate, ethnological admixture and political development in the several regions of the Roman world, together with the divers influences of contiguous or invasive races, we shall form some notion of the process by which the three languages in question branched off from the common stock of rustic Latin.

The same laws of differentiation hold good with regard to the dialects in each of these new languages. It is improbable that absolutely the same vulgar Latin was at any epoch spoken in two remote districts of the same province—on the Tuscan sea-coast, for example, and on the banks of Padus. Even when the Roman empire used one language, intelligible from the Ægean to the German Ocean, the Italic districts must have differed in their local vernacular. Again, the same conditions (climatic, ethnological, political, and so forth) which helped to determine the generic distinctions of French, Spanish, and Italian, determined also the specific distinctions of one Italian dialect from another. Those of the north-west, for instance, inclined to Gallic, and those of the north-east to Illyrian idiom. Those of Lombardy in general exhibit a mixture of German words. Those of Sicily and the south approximate more to a Spanish type, and share the effects of Greek and Arab occupation. The dialects of the center, especially the Tuscan, show marked superiority both in grammatical form and phonetic purity over the more disintegrated and corrupted idioms of north and south. It might be suggested that Tuscan, being less modified by foreign contact, continued the natural life of the old rustic Latin according to laws of unimpeded self-development. But, however we may attempt to explain this problem, the fact remains that, while the Italian dialects present affinities which show them to be of one linguistic family, it is Tuscan that completes and interprets them collectively. Tuscan stands to Italian in the same relation as Castilian to Spanish, or the speech of the Ile de France to French. It is a dialect, but a dialect that realized the bent and striving of the language. We find it difficult to feel, far more to state, what qualities in a dialect and in the people of the district who use it, render one idiom more adapted to literary usage, more characteristic of the language it helps to constitute, more plastic and expressive of national peculiarities, than those around it. But the fact is certain that this superiority in Tuscan was early recognized;[26] and that too without any political advantages in favor of its triumph. Boniface VIII. unconsciously expressed, perhaps, the truth, when he called the Florentines il quinto elemento. It was something spiritually quintessential, something complementary to the sister dialects, which caused the success of Tuscan.

Thus, while literary Latin, though dying and almost dead, was taught in the grammar schools and used by learned men, the rustic Latin in the thirteenth century had disappeared. But this disappearance was not death. It was transformation. The group of dialects which represented the new phase in its existence, shared such common qualities as proved them to have had original affinity; and fitted them for being recognized as a single family. The position, therefore, of the Italians at the close of the thirteenth century with regard to language, was this. They possessed the classic Latin authors in a bad state of preservation, and studied a few of them with some minuteness, basing their own learned style upon the imitation of Virgil and Ovid, Cicero, Boethius, and the rhetoricians of the lower empire. But at home, in their families, upon the market-place, and in the prosecution of business, they talked the local dialects, each of which was more or less remotely representative of the ancient vulgar Latin. However these dialects might differ, they formed in combination a new language, distinct from the parent stock of Rustic Latin, and equally distinct from French and Spanish.[27] Whatever difficulty an Italian of Calabria or Friuli might have felt in understanding the Divine Comedy, he would have recognized an element in its diction which defined it from French or Spanish, and marked it out as proper to his mother-tongue. If this was true of the refined type of Tuscan used by a great master, it was no less true of dialectical compositions selected for the express purpose of exhibiting their rudeness. Dante clearly expected contemporary readers not only to interpret, but to appreciate the shades of greater and lesser nicety in the examples he culled from Roman, Apulian, Florentine and other vernacular literatures. This expectation proves that he felt himself to be dealing with a group of dialects which, taken collectively, formed a common idiom. In these circumstances it was the problem of writers, at the close of the thirteenth century, to construct the ideal vulgar tongue, to discover its capacities for noble utterance, to refine it for artistic usage by the omission of cruder elements existing in each dialect, and to select from those store-houses of living speech the phrases which appeared well suited to graceful utterance. The desideratum, to use Dante's words, was "that illustrious, cardinal, courtly, curial mother-tongue, proper to each Italian State, special to none, whereby the local idioms of every city are to be measured, weighed, and compared."[28] Dante saw that this selection of a literary language from the fresh shoots sent up by the antique vulgar Latin stock could best be accomplished in a capital or Court, the meeting-place of learned people and polished intelligences. But such a metropolis of culture, corresponding to Elizabeth's London or the Paris of Louis XIV., was ever wanting in Italy. "We have no Court," he says: "and yet the members that should compose a Court are not absent."[29] He refers to men of education and good manners, upon whom, in the absence of a local center of refinement, fell the duty of reforming the vernacular. The peculiar conditions of Italy, as he described them, were destined to subsist throughout the next two centuries and a half, when men of learning, taking Tuscan as their standard, sought by practice and example to form a national language. The self-consciousness of the Italians front to front with this problem, as revealed to us in the pages of the De Eloquio, and the decision with which the great authors of the fourteenth century fixed a certain type of diction, accurately spoken nowhere, though nearer to the Tuscan than to any other idiom, may be reckoned among the most interesting phenomena in the history of literature. Tuscan predominated; but that the masterpieces of the trecento were not composed in any one of the unadulterated Tuscan dialects is clear, not merely from the contemporary testimony of Dante himself, but also from the obstinate discussions raised upon this subject by Bembo at a later period. A guiding and controlling principle of taste determined the instinctive method of selection whereby Tuscan was adapted to the common needs of Italy.

While treating of the Latin, the Lombard or Franco-Italian, and the Sicilian or Italo-Provençal periods of national development, I have hitherto neglected that plebeian literature which, although its monuments have almost perished, must have been diffused in dialects through Italy after the opening of the thirteenth century. Written for and by the people, the relics of this prose and poetry are valuable, not merely for the light they throw on the formation of language, but also for their indications of national tendencies. In the northern dialects we meet with treatises of religious, ethical and gnomic import, among which the Gerusalemme Celeste and Babilonia Infernale of Fra Giacomino of Verona, the Bible History of Pietro Bescapè of Milan, the Contention between Satan and the Virgin of Bonvesin da Riva, and two other dialogues by the same author, one between the Soul and Body, the other between a son and his father in hell, deserve mention. To this class again belongs Bonvesin's Cinquanta Cortesie da Tavola, a book of etiquette adapted to the needs of the small bourgeoisie upon their entrance into social life.

It is impossible to fix even an approximate date for the emergence of Italian prose. Law documents, deeds of settlement, contracts, and public acts, which can be referred with certainty to the first half of the thirteenth century, display a pressure of the vulgar speech upon the formal Latin of official verbiage. The effort to obtain precision in designating some particular locality or some important person, forces the scribe back upon his common speech; and these evidences of difficulty in wielding the Latin which had now become a dying language, prove that, long before it was written, Italian was spoken. From the year 1231 we possess accounts of domestic expenditure written by one Mattasalà di Spinello dei Lambertini in the Sienese dialect. Then follow Lucchese documents and letters of Sienese citizens, which, though they have no literary value, show that people who could write had begun to express their thoughts in spoken idiom. The first essays in Italian composition for a lettered public were translations from works already written by Italians in langue d'oïl. Among these a prominent place must be assigned to the version of Marco Polo's travels, which Rusticiano of Pisa first published in French, having possibly received them in Venetian from the traveler's own lips. The Tesoro of Brunetto Latini and Egidio's De Regimine Principum were Italianized in this way; while numerous digests of Frankish romances, including the collection known as Conti di antichi Cavalieri, appeared to meet the same popular demand. Religious history and ethics furnished another library in the vernacular. The Dodici Conti Morali, the Introduzione alle Virtù, the Giardino della Consolazione, and the Libra di Cato supplied the people with specimens from works already famous. After a like manner, books of rhetoric and grammar in vogue among the medieval students were popularized in abstracts for Italian readers. We may cite a version of Orosius, and a Fiore di Retorica based upon the Ad Herennium and Cicero. Of scientific compilations, the Composizione del Mondo by Ristoro of Arezzo, embracing astronomical and geographical information, takes rank with the ethical and rhetorical works already mentioned. The note of all these compositions is that they are professedly epitomes of learning, already possessed in more authentic sources by scholars. As such, they prove that there existed a class of readers eager for instruction, to whom books written in Latin or in French were not accessible. In a word, they indicate the advent of the modern tongue, with all its exigencies and with all its capabilities. To deal with the Chronicles of this period is no easy matter; for those which are professedly the oldest—Matteo Spinelli's Ricordano Malespini's, and Lu Ribellamentu di Sicilia—have been proved in some sense fabrications. On the other hand, it is clear from the Cento Novelle that the more dramatic episodes of history and myth were being submitted to the same epitomizing treatment. Finally we have to mention Guittone of Arezzo's epistles as the first serious attempt to treat the vulgar tongue rhetorically, for a distinct literary purpose.

From the dry records of incipient prose it is refreshing to turn to another species of popular poetry; for poetry in the period of origins is always more adult than prose. Numerous fragments of political songs have been disinterred from chronicles, which can be referred to the thirteenth century. Thus an anonymous Genoese rhymster celebrated the victories of Laiazzo (1294) and Curzola (1298), while Giovanni Villani preserved six lines upon the siege of Messina (1282).[30] Verses in the vulgar tongue commemorating the apostasy of Fra Elia, General of the Franciscans, in 1240, and the coming of the Florentine Lambertesco dei Lamberteschi as Podestà to Reggio in 1243, with scraps of song relating to Pisan and Florentine history, may be read in Carducci's monumental work upon this period of literature.[31] These relics, though precious, are singularly scanty; nor can a Northern student pass them by without remarking the absence of that semi-historical, semi-mythical poetry, which is so familiar to us under the name of Ballad. More important, because of greater extent, are the laments and amorous or comic poems, which can be attributed to the same century. The Lament of the Paduan woman for her husband, who has journeyed to Holy Land in the Crusade preached by Urban IV., may be compared with Rinaldo d'Aquino's Farewell.[32] Both of these compositions were written under Provençal influence, though the former at least is strictly dialectical and popular. Passing to satirical poems, I may mention two pieces extracted from a Bolognese MS. of 1272 which paint with vivid force of humor the manners of women.[33] One represents a drinking-party of more than Aristophanic freedom; the other, a wrangling match between two sisters-in-law—the Cognate. Each displays facility of composition and a literary style already formed. They are not without French parallels; but the mode of presentation is Italian, and the phrases have been transplanted without change from vulgar dialogue. Two romantic lyrics extracted from the same MS. prove that the fashionable style of Provence had descended from the nobles to the common folk and taken a new tincture of realism.[34] The complaint of an unwedded maiden to her mother is a not uncommon motive in this early literature, turning either to pathos or suggesting a covert coarseness in the climax.[35] To the same class may be referred some graceful lyrics and dance-songs, combining the artlessness of popular inspiration with reminiscences of French originals.[36] Of these the Nightingale and the Song of Love in Dreams might be selected for their close sympathy with the rispetti made in Italian country districts at the present day. Lastly, I have to mention two obscene poems of great popularity, Il Nicchio and L'Ugellino.[37] These were known to Boccaccio, for he refers to them by name at the close of the fifth day in the Decameron. Each of the ditties bears a thoroughly Italian stamp, and anticipates by its peculiar style of double entendre a whole department of national poetry—the Florentine Carnival Songs and the Capitoli of the Roman academies being distinctly foreshadowed in their humorous and allusive treatment of a vulgar topic. Hence we may take occasion to observe that those who accuse Lorenzo de' Medici and his contemporaries of debasing popular taste by the deliberate introduction of licentiousness into art, exceed the limits of just censure. What is called the Paganism of the Renaissance, was indigenous in Italy. We find it inherent in vulgar literature before the date of Boccaccio; and if, with the advance of social luxury, it assumed, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a more objectionable prominence, this should not be exclusively ascribed to the influence of humanistic studies or to the example of far-sighted despots. Indeed, it can be asserted that the specific quality of the popular Italian genius—its sensuous realism, qualified with irony—emerges unmistakably in five most important relics of the thirteenth century, the Cognate, the Comadri, the Tenzone of the Maiden and her Mother (Mamma lo temp'è venuto), the Nicchio, and the Ugellino.[38] They yield the common stuff of that magnificent art which shall afterwards be developed into the Decameron and the Novelle, out of which shall proceed the comedies and Bernesque lyrics of the Cinque Cento, and which is destined to penetrate the golden cantos of the Orlando Furioso. To an unprejudiced student of Italian arts and letters nothing seems more clearly proved than the fact that a certain powerful objective quality—call it realism, call it sensuousness—determines their most genuine productions, sinking to grossness, ascending to sublimity, combining with religious feeling in the fine arts, blending with the definiteness of classic style, but never absent. It is this objectivity, realism, sensuousness, which constitutes the strength of the Italians, and assigns the limitations of their faculty.

In quite a different region, but of no less importance for the future of Italian literature, must be reckoned the religious hymns, which, during the thirteenth century, began to be composed in the vernacular. The earliest known specimen is S. Francis' famous Cantico del Sole, which, even as it is preserved to us, after undergoing the process of modernization, retains the purity and freshness of a bird's note in spring. After S. Francis, but at the distance of half a century, followed Jacopone da Todi, with his passionate and dithyrambic odes, which seem to vibrate tongues of fire. To this religious lyric the Flagellant frenzy (1260) and the subsequent formation of Companies of Laudesi gave decisive impulse. I shall have in a future chapter to discuss the relation between the Umbrian Lauds and the origins of the Drama. It is enough here to notice the part played in the evolution of the language by so early a transition from the Latin Hymns of the Church to Hymns written in the modern speech for private confraternities and domestic gatherings.

We learn from this meager review of ancient popular poetry that during the thirteenth century the dialects of each district had begun to seek literary expression. There are many indications that the products of one province speedily became the property of the rest. Spontaneous motives were mingled with French and Provençal recollections; and already we can trace the unconscious effort to form a common language in the process known as Toscaneggiamento, or the translation of local songs into Tuscan idiom.[39] It would, therefore, be incorrect to imagine either that the Sicilian poets were blank imitators of Provençal models, or that the Italian language started into being at Palermo. What really happened was, that Frederick's Court became the center of a widespread literary movement. The Sicilian dialect predominating at Palermo over the rest, the poets of different provinces who assembled round the Emperor were subsequently known as Sicilian. Their songs, passing upward through the peninsula, bore that name, even when they had, as at Florence, been converted, by dialectical modifications, to the use of Tuscan folk.[40] The aristocratic tone of the Court made Provençal literature fashionable; and a refined diction, softening the crudities of more than one competing dialect, was formed to express the subtleties of the Provençal style. We must bear in mind that the poets of this Court were men of learned education—judges, notaries, officials. Dante makes dottori nearly synonymous with trovatori. At the same time, one of the earliest specimens of Sicilian poetry, Ciullo d'Alcamo's Tenzone, is popular, free from Provençal affectation, inclining to comedy in some of its marked motives and to coarseness at its close. This proves that in the island, side by side with "courtly makers" and dottori, there flourished an original and vulgar manner of poetry.

The process of Tuscanization referred to in the preceding paragraph is too important in its bearings on the problems of Italian language and literature, to be passed over without further discussion. Nearly all the poetry of the Sicilian epoch has been transmitted to us in Florentine MSS., after undergoing Toscaneggiamento. We possess but a few stanzas in a pure condition. There is, therefore, reason to believe that when Dante treated of the courtly Sicilian poets in his essay De Vulgari Eloquio, he knew their writings in a form already Tuscanized.[41] In commending the curial and illustrious vernacular, as something distinct from the dialects, he was in truth praising the dialect of his own province, refined by the practice of polite versifiers. At the date of the composition of that essay, the Suabian House had been extinguished; the literary society of the south was broken up; and to Florence had already fallen the heritage of art. What is even more remarkable, the Bolognese poets, who preceded Dante and his peers by one generation, had abandoned their own dialect in favor of the purified Tuscan. Consequently the new Italian literature was already Tuscan either by origin, or by adoption, or by a process of transformation, before the Florentines assumed the dictatorship of letters. It seems paradoxical to hint that Dante should not have perceived what has been here stated as more than a mere possibility. How came it that he included Florentine among the peccant idioms, and maintained that the true literary speech was still to seek? These doubts may in part at least be removed, when we remember the peculiar conditions under which the courtly poetry he praised had been produced; and the indirect channels by which it had reached him. In the first place, we have seen that it was composed in avowed imitation of Provençal models, by men of taste and learning drawn from several provinces. They culled, for literary purposes, a vocabulary of colorless and neutral words, which clothed the same conventional ideas with elegant and artificial monotony. When these compositions underwent the further process of Tuscanization (which was easy, owing to certain dialectical affinities between Sicilian and Tuscan), they lost to a large extent what still remained to them of local character, without acquiring the true stamp of Florentine. Even a contemporary could not have recognized in the verse of Jacopo da Lentino, thus treated, either a genuine Sicilian or a genuine Tuscan flavor. His language presented the appearance of being, as indeed it was, different from both idioms. The artifice of style made it pass for superior; and, in purely literary quality, it was in truth superior to the products of plebeian inspiration. We may prefer the racy stanzas of the Cognate to those frigid and exhausted euphuisms. But the critical taste of so great a master as even Dante was not tuned to any such preference. Though he recognized the defects of the Sicilian poets, as is manifest from his dialogue with Guido in the Purgatory, he gave them all credit for elevating verse above the vulgar level. Their insipid diction seemed to him the first germ of a noble lingua aulica. Its colorlessness and strangeness hid the fact that it had already, at the close of the thirteenth century, assumed the Tuscan habit, and that from the well-springs of Tuscan idiom the Italian of the future would have to draw its aliment.

The downfall of the Hohenstauffens and the dispersion of their Court-poets proved a circumstance of decisive benefit to Italian literature, by removing it from a false atmosphere into conditions where it freely flourished and expanded its originality. Feudalism formed no vital part of the Italian social system, and chivalry had never been more than an exotic, cultivated in the hotbed of the aristocracy. The impulse given to poetry in the south, under influences in no true sense of the phrase national—a Norman-German dynasty attempting to acclimatize Provençal forms upon Italian soil—could hardly have produced a vigorous type of literature. It is from the people, in centers of popular activity, or where the spirit of the people finds full play in representative society, that characteristic art must be developed. When we say this, we think inevitably of Periclean Athens, Elizabeth's London, the Paris of Louis XIV. If the chances of our drama had been confined to Court-patronage or Sidney's Areopagus, instead of being extended to the nation by free competition in the wooden theaters where Marlowe and Shakspere appealed to popular taste, there is little doubt but that England would only have boasted of a mediocre and academical stage. When Italian poetry deserted Palermo for the banks of the Arno, it exchanged the Court for the people; the subtleties of decadent chivalry for the genuine impulses of a free community; the pettiness of culture for the humanities of a public conscious of high destinies and educated in a masculine political arena. Here the grand qualities of the Italian genius found an open field. Literature, abandoning imitative elegance, expressed the feelings, thoughts, and aspirations of a breed second to none in Europe for acuteness of intellect, intensity of emotion, and greatness of purpose. At Palermo the princes and their courtiers had been reciprocally auditors and poets. At Florence the people listened; and the poets, sprung from them, were speakers. Except at Athens in the golden age of Hellas, no populace has equaled that of Florence both for the production of original genius, and also for the sensitiveness to beauty, diffused throughout all classes, which brings the artist and his audience into right accord.

Two stages in the transition from Sicily to Florence need to be described. Guittone of Arezzo (1230-1294) strikes the historian of literature as the man who first attempted to nationalize the polished poetry of the Sicilian Court, and to strip the new style of its feudal pedantry.[42] It was his aim, apparently, dismissing chivalrous conventions, to use the diction and the forms of literary art in an immediate appeal to the Italian people. He wrote, however, roughly. Though he practiced vernacular prose, and assumed in verse the declamatory tone which Petrarch afterwards employed with such effect in his addresses to the consciousness of Italy, yet Dante could speak of him with cold contempt[43]; nor can we claim for him a higher place than that of precursor. He attempted more than he was able to fulfill. But his attempt, when judged by the conditions of his epoch, deserves to rank among achievements.

With a poet of Bologna the case is different. Placed midway between Lombardy and Tuscany, Bologna shared the instincts of the two noblest Italian populations—the Communes who wrested liberty from Frederick Barbarossa, and the Communes who were to give arts and letters to the nation. Bologna, moreover, was proud of her legal university, and had already won her title of "the learned." Here Guido Guinicelli solved the problem of rendering the Sicilian style at once national in spirit and elevated in style.[44] He did so by making it scientific. Receiving from his Italo-Provençal predecessors the material of chivalrous love, and obeying the genius of his native city, Guido rhymed of love no longer as a fashionable pastime, but as the medium of philosophic truth. Learning was the mother of the national Italian poetry. From Guido started a school of transcendental singers, who used the ancient form and subject-matter of exotic poetry for the utterance of metaphysical thought. The Italians, born, as it were, old, were destined thus to pass from imitation, through speculation, to the final freedom of their sensuous art. Of this new lyric style—logical, allegorical, mystical—the first masterpiece was Guido's Canzone of the Gentle Heart. The code was afterwards formulated in Dante's Convito. The life it covered and interpreted was painted in the Vita Nuova. Its apocalypse was the Paradiso. If Guido Guinicelli did not succeed in writing from the heart, if he was more of an analyst than a lover, it is yet clear that the euphuisms of the Italo-Provençal imitators have yielded in his verse to genuine emotion, while, speaking technically, the complex structure of the true Italian Canzone now appears in all its harmony of grace and grandeur. Guido's language is Tuscan; not the Tuscan of the people, but the Tuscan of the Toscaneggiamenti. Herein, again, we note the importance of this poet in the history of literature. Working outside Florence, but obeying Florentine precedent, he stamps Italian with a Tuscan seal, and helps to conceal from Tuscans themselves the high destinies of their idiom.

Dante puts us at the right point of view for estimating Guido's service. Though he recognized the Sicilians as the first masters of poetic style in Italy, Dante saluted the poet of Bologna as his father[45]:

Quando i' udi' nomar sè stesso il padre

Mio, e degli altri miei miglior, che mai

Rime d'amor usâr dolci e leggiadre.

On the authority of this sentence we hail in Guido the founder of the new and specifically national literature of the Italians. If not the master, he was the prophet of that dolce stil nuovo, which freed them from dependence on foreign traditions, and led, by transmutation, to the miracles of their Renaissance art. He divined that sincere source of inspiration, whereof Dante speaks[46]:

Io mi son un che quando

Amore spira, noto; ed a quel modo

Ch'ei detta dentro, vo significando.

The happy instinct which led him to use Tuscan, has secured his place upon the roll of poets who may still be read with pleasure. And of this, too, Dante prophesied[47]:

Li dolci detti vostri,

Che, quanto durerà l'uso moderno,

Faranno cari ancora i loro inchiostri.

Bologna could boast of many minor bards—of the excellent Onesto, of Fabrizio and Ghislieri, qui doctores fuerunt illustres et vulgarium discretione repleti.[48] Her erudition was further illustrated by the work of one Guidotto, who composed a treatise on the new vernacular, which he dedicated to King Manfred. Thus both by example and precept, by the testimony of Dante and the fair fame of her own writers, this city makes for us a link between Sicilian and Tuscan literature.

Manfred was slain at Benevento in 1266, and with him expired the prospects of Sicilian poetry. Dante, destined to inaugurate the great age, was born at Florence in 1265. Guido Guinicelli died in 1277, when Dante had completed his twelfth year. From 1249 until 1271, during the whole childhood of Dante, Enzo, King of Sardinia, Manfred's half-brother and Frederick II.'s son, remained a prisoner in the public palace of Bologna. In one of those years of preparation and transition, while the learned stanzas of Guido Guinicelli were preluding the "new sweet style" of Tuscany, this yellow-haired scion of the Suabian princes, the progenitor of the Bentivogli, sent a song forth from his dungeon's loggie to greet the provinces of Italy:—

Va, Canzonetta mia,

E saluta Messere,

Dilli lo mal ch'i' aggio.

Quella che m'ha in balia

Si distretto mi tene,

Ch'eo viver non poraggio.

Salutami Toscana,

Quella ched è sovrana,

In cui regna tutta cortesia;

E vanne in Puglia piana,

La magna Capitana,

Là dove è lo mio core notte e dia.

These lines sound a farewell to the old age and a salutation to the new. Enzo's heart is in the lowlands of Apulia and the great Capitanate, where his father built castles and fought mighty wars. He belongs, like his verses, like his race, like the chivalrous sentiments he had imbibed in youth, to the past; and now he is dreaming life away, a captive with the burghers of Bologna. Yet it is Tuscany for which he reserves the epithet of Sovereign—Tuscany where all courtesy holds sway. The situation is pathetic. The poem is a prophecy.

Raimond of Tours, one of the earlier French minnesingers, bade his friend seek hospitality "in the noble city of the Florentines, named Florence; for it is there that joy and song and love are perfected with beauty crowned."[49] The delicate living and graceful pastimes of Valdarno were famous throughout Europe. In the old French romance of "Cléomadés," for example, we read a rhymed description of the games and banquets with which Florence welcomed May and June[50]:—

Pour May et Gayn honorer;

Le May pour sa jolivité,

Et le Gayn pour la planté.

Villani, writing of the year 1283, when the Guelfs had triumphed and the nobles had been quelled, speaks thus of those festivities[51]:—"In this happy and fair state of ease and peaceful quiet so wealth-giving to merchants and artificers, and specially to the Guelfs, who ruled the land, there was formed in the quarter of S. Felicità beyond the Arno, where the family De' Rossi took the lead, together with their neighborhood, a company or band of one thousand men and upwards, all attired in white, with a Lord named the Lord of Love. This band had no other purpose than to pass the time in games and solace, and in dances of ladies, knights and other people of the city, roaming the town with trumpets and divers instruments of music, in joy and gladness, and abiding together in banquets at mid-day and eventide." From another chronicle it appears that this company was called the Brigata bianca, or Brigata amorosa.[52] "There," says a rhymer who had seen the sports, "might one behold the rich attire of silk and gold, of samite, white and blue and violet, with fair velvets; and trappings of all colors I beheld that day. The young men mid the women went with gaze fixed upon those eyes angelical, that turn the midnight into noon. Over their blonde tresses the maidens wore gems and precious garlands; lilies, violets and roses were their charming faces. You would not have said: 'Yon are mortal beings.' They rather seemed a thousand paradises."[53]

The amusements lasted two months, from May 1 until the end of the midsummer feast of S. John, patron of Florence. Later on, we read of two companies, the one dressed in yellow, the other in white, each led by their King, who filled the city with the sound of music, and wore garlands on their heads, and spent their time in dances and banquets.[54]

Again, when the nobles, after the battle of Campaldino, had been finally suppressed, Villani once more returns to the subject of these companies, describing the booths of wood adorned with silken curtains, which were ranged along the streets and squares, for the accommodation of guests.[55] It will be observed that Villani connects the gladness of this season with the successive triumphs of the Guelf party and the suppression of the nobles by the Popolo. Not only was Florence freed from grave anxieties and heavy expenses, caused by the intramural quarrels between Counts and Burghers, but the city felt the advent of her own prosperity, the realization of her true type, in their victorious close. Then the new noble class, the popolani grassi, assumed the gentle manners of chivalry, accommodating its customs to their own rich jovial ideal. Feudalism was extinguished; but society retained such portions of feudal customs as shed beauty upon common life. Tranquillity succeeded to strife, and the medieval city presented a spectacle similar to that which an old Greek lyrist has described among the gifts of Peace:

To mortal men Peace giveth these good things:

Wealth, and the flowers of honey-throated song;

The flame that springs

On carven altars from fat sheep and kine,

Slain to the gods in heaven; and, all day long,

Games for glad youths, and flutes, and wreaths, and circling wine.

Then in the steely shield swart spiders weave

Their web and dusky woof:

Rust to the pointed spear and sword doth cleave;

The brazen trump sounds no alarms;

Nor is sleep harried from our eyes aloof,

But with sweet rest my bosom warms:

The streets are thronged with beauteous men and young,

And hymns in praise of Love like flames to heaven are flung.

Goro di Stagio Dati, writing at the end of the fourteenth century, has preserved for us an animated picture of Florence in May.[56] "When the season of spring appears to gladden all the world, every man bethinks him how to make fair the day of S. John, which follows at midsummer, and there is none but provides himself betimes with clothes and ornaments and jewels. Marriages and other joyous occasions are deferred until that time, to do the festival honor; and two months before the date, they begin to furnish forth the decorations of the races—dresses of varlets, banners, clarions, draperies, and candles, and whatsoever other offerings should be made. The whole city is in a bustle for the preparation of the Festa; and the hearts of young men and women, who take part therein, are set on naught but dancing, playing, singing, banqueting, jousting, and other fair amusements as though naught else were to be done in those weeks before the coming of S. John's Eve." The minute account of the ceremonies observed on S. John's Day which follows, need not be transcribed. Yet it may be well to call attention to a quattrocento picture in the Florentine Academy, which illustrates the customs of that festival. It is a long panel representing the marriage of an Adimari with a daughter of the Ricasoli. The Baptistery appears in the background; and on the piazza are ladies and young men, clad in damask and rich stuffs, with jewels and fantastic head-dresses, joining hands as though in act of dancing. Under the Loggia del Bigallo sit the trumpeters of the Signory, blowing clarions adorned with pennons. The lily of Florence is on these trappings. Serving men carry vases and basins toward the Adimari palace, in preparation for the wedding feast. A large portion of the square is covered in with a white and red awning.

If the chroniclers and painters enable us to form some conception of Florentine festivity, we are introduced to the persons and pastimes of these jovial companies by the poet Folgore da San Gemignano.[57] Two sets of his Sonnets have been preserved, the one upon the Months, addressed to the leader of a noble Sienese company; the other on the Days, to a member of a similar Florentine society. If we are right in reckoning Folgore among the poets of the thirteenth century, the facility and raciness of his style, its disengagement from Provençalizing pedantry, and the irony of his luxurious hedonism, prove to what extent the Tuscans had already left the middle age behind them.[58] Folgore, in spite of his spring fragrance and auroral freshness, anticipates the spirit of the Renaissance. He is a thirteenth-century Boccaccio, without Boccaccio's enthusiasm for humane studies. Ideal love, asceticism, religion, the virtues of the Christian and the knight, are not for him. His soul is set on the enjoyment of the hour. But this materialism is presented in a form of art so temperate, with colors so refined and outlines so delicately drawn, that there is nothing repulsive in it. His selfishness and sensuality are related to Aretino's as the miniatures of a missal to Giulio Romano's Modes of Venus.[59]

In his sonnets on the Months, Folgore addresses the Brigata as "valiant and courteous above Lancelot, ready, if need were, with lance in rest, to spur along the lists of Camelot." In January he gives them good fires and warm chambers, silken coverlids for their beds, and fur cloaks, and sometimes in the day to sally forth and snow-ball girls upon the square:

Uscir di fora alcuna volta il giorno,

Gittando della neve bella e bianca A le donzelle, che staran dattorno.

February brings the pleasures of the chase. March is good for fishing, with merry friends at night, and never a friar to be seen:

Lasciate predicar i Frati pazzi,

Ch'hanno troppe bugie e poco vero.

In April the "gentle country all abloom with fair fresh grass" invites the young men forth. Ladies shall go with them, to ride, display French dresses, dance Provençal figures, or touch new instruments from Germany, or roam through spacious parks. May brings in tournaments and showers of blossoms—garlands and oranges flung from balcony and window—girls and youths saluting with kisses on cheeks and lips:

E pulzellette, giovene, e garzoni

Basciarsi nella bocca e nelle guance; D'amore e di goder vi si ragioni.

In June the company of youths and maidens quit the city for the villa, passing their time in shady gardens, where the fountains flow and freshen the fine grass, and all the folk shall be love's servants. July finds them in town again, avoiding the sun's heat and wearing silken raiment in cool chambers where they feast. In August they are off to the hills, riding at morn and eve from castle to castle, through upland valleys where streams flow. September is the month of hawking; October of fowling and midnight balls. With November and December winter comes again, and brings the fireside pleasures of the town. On the whole, there is too much said of eating and drinking in these sonnets; and the series concludes with a piece of inhumane advice:

E beffe far dei tristi cattivelli,

E miseri cattivi sciagurati Avari: non vogliate usar con elli.

The sonnets on the Days breathe the same quaint medieval hedonism.[60] Monday is the day of songs and love; our young man must be up betimes, to make his mistress happy:

Levati su, donzello, e non dormire;

Chè l'amoroso giorno ti conforta, E vuol che vadi tua donna a fruire.

Tuesday is the day of battles and pitched fields; but these are described in mock-heroics, which show what the poet really felt about the pleasure of them. Wednesday is the day of banquets, when ladies and girls are waited on by young men wearing amorous wreaths:

E donzelletti gioveni garzoni

Servir, portando amorose ghirlande.

Thursday is the day of jousts and tourneys; Friday of hounds and horses; Saturday, of hawks and fowling-nets; Sunday, of "dances and feats of arms in Florence":

Danzar donzelli, armeggiar cavalieri,

Cercar Fiorenza per ogni contrada, Per piazze, per giardini, e per verzieri.

Such then was the joyous living, painted with colors of the fancy by a Tuscan poet, and realized in Florence at the close of that eventful century which placed the city under Guelf rule, in the plenitude of peace, equality, and wealth by sea and land. Distinctions of class had been obliterated. The whole population enjoyed equal rights and equal laws. No man was idle; and though the simplicity of the past, praised by Dante and Villani, was yielding to luxury, still the pleasure-seekers were controlled by that fine taste which made the Florentines a race of artists.[61] This halcyon season was the boyhood of Dante and Giotto, the prime of Arnolfo and Cimabue. The buildings whereby the City of the Flower is still made beautiful above all cities of Italian soil, were rising. The people abode in industry and order beneath the sway of their elected leaders. Supreme in Tuscany, fearing no internal feuds, strong in their militia of thirty thousand burghers to repel a rival State, the Florentines had reached the climax of political prosperity. Not as yet had arisen that little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, above Pistoja, which was destined to plunge them into the strife of Blacks and Whites. During that interval of windless calm, in that fair city, where the viol and the lute were never silent through spring-tide and summer, the star of Italian poetry, that "crowning glory of unblemished wealth," went up and filled the heavens with light.

CHAPTER II.

THE TRIUMVIRATE.

Chivalrous Poetry—Ideal of Chivalrous Love—Bolognese Erudition—New Meaning given to the Ideal—Metaphysics of the Florentine School of Lyrists—Guido Cavalcanti—Philosophical Poems—Popular Songs—Cino of Pistoja—Dante's Vita Nuova—Beatrice in the Convito and the Paradiso—The Preparation for the Divine Comedy in Literature—Allegory—The Divine Comedy—Petrarch's Position in Life—His Conception of Humanism—Conception of Italy—His Treatment of Chivalrous Love—Beatrice and Laura—The Canzoniere—Boccaccio, the Florentine Bourgeois—His Point of View—His Abandonment of the Chivalrous Standpoint—His Devotion to Art—Anticipates the Renaissance—The Decameron—Commedia Umana—Precursors of Boccaccio—Novels—Carmina Vagorum—Plan of the Book—Its Moral Character—The Visione Amorosa—Boccaccio's Descriptions—The Teseide—The Rime—The Filocopo—The Filostrato—The Ameto, Fiammetta, Ninfale, Corbaccio—Prose before Boccaccio—Fioretti di San Francesco and Decameron compared—Influence of Boccaccio over the Prose Style of the Renaissance—His Death—Close of the Fourteenth Century—Sacchetti's Lament.

The Sicilians followed closely in the track of the Provençal poets. After, or contemporaneously with them, the same Italo-Provençal literature was cultivated in the cities of central Italy. The subject-matter of this imitative poetry was love—but love that bore a peculiar relation to ordinary human feeling. Woman was regarded as an ideal being, to be approached with worship bordering on adoration. The lover derived personal force, virtue, elevation, energy, from his enthusiastic passion. Honor, justice, courage, self-sacrifice, contempt of worldly goods, flowed from that one sentiment; and love united two wills in a single ecstasy. Love was the consummation of spiritual felicity, which surpassed all other modes of happiness in its beatitude. Thus Bernard de Ventadour and Jacopo da Lentino were ready to forego Paradise unless they might behold their lady's face before the throne of God. For a certain period in modern history, this mysticism of the amorous emotion was no affectation. It formulated a genuine impulse of manly hearts, inflamed by beauty, and touched with the sense of moral superiority in woman, perfected through weakness and demanding physical protection. By bringing the cruder passions into accord with gentle manners and unselfish aspirations, it served to temper the rudeness of primitive society; and no little of its attraction was due to the conviction that only refined natures could experience it. This new aspect of love was due to chivalry, to Christianity, to the Teutonic reverence for women, in which religious awe seems to have blended with the service of the weaker by the stronger.

Sincere and beautiful as the ideal of chivalrous love may have been, it speedily degenerated. Chivalry, though a vital element of feudalism, existed, even among the nations of its origin, more as an aspiration than a reality. In Italy it never penetrated the life or subdued the imagination of the people. For the Italo-Provençal poets that code of love was almost wholly formal. They found it ready made. They used it because the culture of a Court, in sympathy with feudal Europe, left them no other choice. Not Arthur, but the Virgilian Æneas, was still the Italian hero; and instead of S. Louis, the nations of the South could only boast of a crusading Frederick II. Frederick the troubadour was a no less anomalous being than Frederick the crusader. He conformed to contemporary fashion, but his spirit ran counter to the age. Curiosity, incipient humanism, audacious doubt, the toleration which inclined him to fraternize with Saracens and seek the learning of the Arabs, placed him outside the sphere of thirteenth century conceptions. His expedition to the East appears a mere parade excursion, hypocritical, political, ironical. In like manner his love-poetry and that of his courtiers rings hollow in our ears.

It harmonized with the Italian genius, when Guido Guinicelli treated chivalrous love from the standpoint of Bolognese learning. He altered none of the forms; he used the conventional phraseology. But he infused a new spirit into the subject-matter. His poetry ceased to be formal; the phrases were no longer verbiage. The epicureanism of Frederick's life clashed with the mystic exaltation of knighthood. There was no discord between Guido's scientific habit of mind and his expression of a philosophical idea conveyed in terms of amorous enthusiasm. Upon his lips the words:

Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore,

Come l'augello in selva alla verdura; Nè fe' Amore anti che gentil core, Nè gentil cor anti che Amor, Natura:

acquire reality—not the reality of passion, but of sincere thought. They do not convey the spontaneity of feeling, but a philosopher's contemplation of love and beauty in their influence on human character. Guido's mood might be compared with that of the Greek sage, when he exclaimed that neither the morning nor the evening star is so wonderful as Justice, or when he thus apostrophized Virtue:

Virtue, to men thou bringest care and toil;

Yet art thou life's best, fairest spoil!

O virgin goddess, for thy beauty's sake

To die is delicate in this our Greece,

Or to endure of pain the stern, strong ache.

For the chivalrous races, Love had been an enthusiastic ideal. For the Italo-Provençal euphuists it supplied an artificial inspiration. At Bologna it became the form of transcendental science; and here the Italian intellect touched, by accident or instinct, the same note that had been struck by Plato in the "Phædrus" and "Symposium."

A public trained in legal and scholastic studies, whose mental furniture was drawn from S. Thomas and Accursius, hailed their poet in Guido Guinicelli. For them it was natural that poetry should veil philosophy with verse; that love should be confounded with the movement of the soul toward truth; that beauty should be treated as the manifestation of a spiritual good. Dante in his Canzone, Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore, appeals, not to emotion, but to intelligence. He tells us that understanding was the ancient name of love, and describes the effect of passion in a young man's heart as a revelation raising him above the level of common experience. Thus the transmutation of the simpler elements of the chivalrous code into philosophical doctrine, where the form of the worshiped lady transcends the sphere of sense, and her spirit is identified with the lover's deepest thought and loftiest aspiration, was sincere in medieval Florence. The Tuscan intellect was too virile and sternly strung to be satisfied with amorous rhymes. The contemporary theory of æsthetics demanded allegory, and imposed upon the poet erudition; nor was it easy for the singer of that epoch to command his own immediate emotions, or to use them for the purposes of a direct and plastic art. Enjoying neither the freedom of the Greek nor the disengagement of the modern spirit, he found it more proper to clothe a scientific content with the veil of passion, than to paint the personality of the woman he loved with natural precision. Between the mysticism of a sublime but visionary adoration on the one side, and the sensualities of vulgar appetite or the decencies of married life on the other, there lay for him no intermediate artistic region. He understood the love of the imagination and the love of the senses; but the love of the heart, familiar to the Northern races, hardly existed for him.

And here it may be parenthetically noticed that the Italians, in the middle ages, created no feminine ideal analogous to Gudrun or Chriemhild, Iseult or Guinevere. When they left the high region of symbolism, they descended almost without modulation to the prose of common life. Thus the Selvaggia of Cino, the Beatrice of Dante, the Laura of Petrarch, made way for the Fiammetta of Boccaccio and the women of the Decameron, when that ecstasy of earlier enthusiasm exhausted. For a while, however, the Florentines were well prepared to give an intellectual significance, and with it a new life, to the outworn conventions of the Italo-Provençal lyrists. Nor must it be thought that the emotions thus philosophized were unreal. Dante loved Beatrice, though she became for him an allegory. The splendid vision of her beauty and goodness attended him through life, assuming the guidance of his soul in all its stages. Difficult as it may be to comprehend this blending of the real and transcendental, we must grasp it if we desire to penetrate the spirit of the fourteenth century in Italy.

The human heart remains unchanged. No metaphysical sophistication, no allegory, no scholastic mysticism, can destroy the spontaneity of instinct in a man who loves, or cloud a poet's vision. Love does not cease to be love because it is sublimed to the quintessence of a self-denying passion. It still retains its life in feeling, and its root in sense. Beauty does not cease to be beautiful because it has been moralized and identified with the attraction that lifts men upward to the sphere of the eternal truths. Nor is poetry extinguished because the singer deems it his vocation to utter genuine thought, and scorns the rhyming pastimes of the simple amorist. The Florentine school presents us with a poetry which aimed at being philosophical, but which at the same time vibrated with life and delineated moods of delicate emotion. To effect a flawless fusion between these two strains in the new style, was infinitely difficult; nor were the poets of that epoch equally successful. Guido Cavalcanti, the leader of the group which culminates in Dante, won his fame by verse that savors more of the dialectician than the singer. Ranking science above poetry, he is said to have disdained even Virgil. His odes are dryly scholastic—especially that famous Donna mi priega, which contemporaries studied clause by clause, and which, after two centuries, served Dino del Garbo for the text of a metaphysical discourse.[62] At the same time, certain lyrics, composed in a lighter mood by the same poet, have in them the essence of spontaneous and natural inspiration. His Ballate were probably regarded by himself and his friends as playthings, thrown off in idle moments to distract a mind engaged in thorny speculations. Yet we find here the first full blossom of genuine Italian verse. Their beauty is that of popular song, starting flowerlike from the soil, and fragrant in its first expansion beneath the sun of courtesy and culture. Nothing remained, in this kind, for Boccaccio and Poliziano, but to echo the Ballata of the country maidens, and to complete the welcome to the May.[63]

Two currents of verse, the one rising from the senses, the other from the brain, the one deriving force and fullness from the people, the other nourished by the schools, flowed apart in Guido Cavalcanti's poetry. They were combined into a single stream by Cino da Pistoja.[64] Cino was a jurist of encyclopædic erudition, as well as a sweet and fluent singer.[65] His verses have the polish and something of the chill of marble. His Selvaggia deserves a place with Beatrice and Laura. From Cino Petrarch derived his mastery of limpid diction. In Cino the artistic sense of the Italians awoke. He produced something distinct both from the scientific style of Guido Guinicelli, and also from the wilding song which Guido Cavalcanti's Ballate echoed. He seems to have applied himself to the main object of polishing poetical diction, and rendering expression at once musical and lucid.[66] Though his hold upon ideas was not so firm as Cavalcanti's, nor his passion so intense, he achieved a fusion of thought and feeling in an artistic whole of sympathetic suavity. We instinctively compare his work with that of Mino da Fiesole in bass-relief.

Dante was five years older than Cino. To him belongs the glory of having effected the same fusion in a lyric poetry at once more comprehensive and more lofty. Dante yields no point as a dialectician and subtle thinker to Guido Cavalcanti. He surpasses Cino da Pistoja as an artist. His passion and imagination are more fiery than Guido's. His tenderness is deeper and more touching than Cino's. Even in those minor works with which he preluded the Divine Comedy, Dante soars above all competition, taking rank among the few poets born to represent an age and be the everlasting teachers of the human soul. Yet even Dante, though knowing that he was destined to eclipse both the Guidi, though claiming Love alone for his inspirer, was not wholly free from the scholasticism of his century. In the earlier lyrics of the Vita Nuova and in the Canzoni of the Convito, he allows his feeling to be over-weighted by the scientific content. Between his emotion and our sympathy there rises, now and again, the mist of metaphysic. While giving them intenser meaning, he still plays upon the commonplaces of his predecessors. Thus in the sonnet Amor e 'l cor gentil son una cosa he rehandles Guinicelli's theme; while the following stanza repeats the well-worn doctrine that Love should be the union of beauty and of excellence[67]:

Che la beltà che Amore in voi consente,

A virtù solamente

Formata fu dal suo decreto antico,

Contro lo qual fallate.

Io dico a voi che siete innamorate,

Che se beltate a voi

Fu data, e virtù a noi,

Ed a costui di due potere un fare,

Voi non dovreste amare,

Ma coprir quanto di beltà vi è dato,

Poichè non è virtù, ch'era suo segno.

Dante's concessions to the mannerism of the school weigh as nothing in the scales against the beauty and the truth of that most spiritual of romances, to which the Vita Nuova gives melodic utterance. Within the compass of one little book is bound up all that Florence in the thirteenth century contributed to the refinement of medieval manners, together with all that the new school of poets had imagined of highest in their philosophical conception. The harmony of life and science attains completion in the real but idealized experience, which transcends and combines both motives in a personality uniquely constituted for this blending. It is enough for the young Dante to meet Beatrice, to pass her among her maidens in the city-ways, to receive her salute, to admire her moving through the many-colored crowd, to meditate upon her apparition, as of one of God's angels, in the solitude of his chamber. She is a dream, a vision. But it is the dream of his existence, the vision that unfolds for him the universe—more actual, more steeped in emotion, more stimulative of sublime aspiration and virile purpose than many loves which find fruition in long years of intercourse. We feel that the man's true self has been revealed to him; that he has given his life-blood to the ideal which, without this nourishment, would have ranked among phantoms, but is now reality. Students who have not followed the stages through which the doctrine of chivalrous love reached Dante, and the process whereby it was transmuted into science for the guidance of the soul, will regard the records of the Vita Nuova as shadowy or sentimental. Or if they only dwell upon the philosophical aspect of Dante's work, if they do not make allowance for the natural stirring of a heart that throbbed with liveliest feeling, they will fail to comprehend this book, at once so complex and so simple. The point lies exactly in the fusion of two elements—in the truth of the passion, the truth of the idealization, and the spontaneity of the artistic form combining them. What is most intelligible, because most common to all phases of profound emotion, in the Vita Nuova, is its grief—the poet's sympathy with Beatrice in the house of mourning for her father's death, the vision of her own passage from earth to heaven, and the apostrophe to the pilgrims who thread the city clothed with mourning for her loss.[68] No one, reading these poems, will doubt that, though Beatrice did but cross the path of Dante's life and shed her brightness on it for a season from afar, the thought of her had penetrated heart and fiber, making him a man new-born through love, and striking in his soul a note that should resound through all his years, through all the centuries which grow to understand him.

Dante was born in 1265 of poor but noble parents, who reconciled themselves to the Guelf party. He first saw Beatrice in his ninth year; and, when a man, he well remembered how her beauty dawned upon him.[69] "Her dress, on that day, was of a most noble color, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very tender age. At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: Ecce deus fortior me qui veniens dominabitur mihi." Beatrice died in 1290, and Dante closed the Vita Nuova with these words[70]: "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 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 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 qui est per omnia sæcula, benedictus. Laus Deo."

This passage was written possibly in Dante's twenty-eighth year. The consecration of his younger manhood was the love of Beatrice. She made him a poet. Through her came to him the "sweet new style," which shone with purest luster in his verse; and the songs he made of Beatrice were known through all the City of the Flower. Yet love had not absorbed his energies. He studied under Brunetto Latini, and qualified himself for the career of a Florentine citizen by entering the Guild of Speziali. After Beatrice's death a great and numbing sorrow fell upon him. From this eclipse he recovered by the help of reading, and also by the distractions of public life. He fought in the battle of Campaldino, and married his wife Gemma Donati. He went as ambassador to San Gemignano in 1299; and in the year 1300, when Florence was divided by the parties of Cerchi and Donati, he fulfilled the functions of the Priorate. These ten years between Beatrice's death and Dante's election as Prior were a period of hesitation and transition. He was no longer the poet of Divine Love, inspired by spontaneous emotion, mastering and glorifying the form which tradition imposed on verse. He had become a student of philosophy; and this change makes itself felt in the more abstruse and abstract odes of the Convito. Yet he was still attended, through those years of study, civic engagements and domestic duties, by the vision of Beatrice. This is how he speaks of science in the second part of the Convito: "After some time my mind, which strove to regain strength, bethought itself (since neither my own consolations nor those of friends availed me aught) of having recourse to the method which had helped to comfort other spirits in distress. I took to reading the book, not known to many students, of Boethius, wherewith, unhappy and in exile, he had comforted himself. And hearing also that Tully had written another book in which, while treating of friendship, he had used words of consolation to Lælius in the death of his friend Scipio, I read that also, and as it happens that a man goes seeking silver, and far from his design finds gold, which hidden causes yield him, not perchance without God's guidance, so I who sought for consolation found not only comfort for my tears, but also words of authors and of sciences and of books, weighing the which, I judged well that philosophy, the lady of these authors, of these sciences and of these books, was a thing supreme. And I imagined her in fashion like a gentle lady, nor could I fancy her otherwise than piteous; wherefore so truly did I gaze upon her with adoring eyes that scarcely could I turn myself away. And having thus imagined her I began to go where she displayed her very self, that is, in the schools of the religious, and the disputations of philosophers; so that in short time, about thirty months, I began so much to feel her sweetness that her love chased away and destroyed all other thought in me."

Beatrice, who in her lifetime had been the revelation of beauty and all good, lifting her lover above the region of sordid thoughts, and opening a sphere of spiritual intelligence, now accompanied him through the labyrinths of speculation. She was still the form, the essence, of all he learned; and the vow which closes the Vita Nuova had not been forgotten.

Through the transition period, marked by the Convito, we are led to the third stage of Dante's life—those twenty-one years, during which he roamed in exile over Italy, and wrote the poem of medieval Christianity. The studies of which the Convito forms a fragment, and the political career which ended in the embassy to Boniface, were both necessary for the Divine Comedy. Had it not been for Dante's exile, the modern world might have lacked its first and greatest epic; Beatrice might have missed her promised apotheosis. As her hand had guided him through the paths of love and the labyrinths of science, so now the brightness of her glorified face lifted him from sphere to sphere of Paradise. By gazing on her eyes, he rose through heaven, and stood with her before the splendor of the Beatific Vision. To identify Beatrice with Theology in this last stage of Dante's spiritual life is a facile but inadequate expedient of criticism. From the earliest she had been for him the light and guidance of his soul; and at the last he ascribed to her the best and the sublimest of his inspirations.

Since its origin Italian poetry had pursued one line of evolution, first following and then transmuting the traditions of Provence. In the Divine Comedy it took a new direction. Chivalry, insufficient for the nation and ill-adapted to its temper, yielded to a motive force derived from the religious sentiment. The Bible history, the Lives of the Saints, and the doctrine of the Church concerning the future of mankind, together with the emotions of piety, had hitherto received but partial exposition at the hands of a few poets of the people. S. Francis struck the keynote of popular Italian poetry in his Cantico del Sole, which can be accepted as the first specimen of composition in the vulgar tongue. Guittone of Arezzo, already mentioned as the earliest learned poet who attempted to nationalize his style, acquired fame as the writer of one sublime sonnet to Madonna and two Canzoni to the Mother and her Son.[71] But the most decisive impulse toward religious poetry was given by the Flagellants, who, starting from the Umbrian highlands in 1290, diffused their peculiar devotion over Italy. I shall have occasion to return in a future chapter to the history of this movement and to trace its influence over popular Italian literature. It is enough, at present, to have mentioned it among the forces tending toward religious poetry upon the close of the thirteenth century.

The spirit of the epoch inclined to Allegory and Vision. When we remember the prestige of Virgil in the middle ages, both as a philosopher and also as the precursor of Christianity, it will be understood how his descent into Hades fascinated the imagination, and prepared the mind to accept the Vision as a proper form for conveying theological doctrine.[72] The Journey of S. Brandan, the Purgatory of S. Patrick, and the Visions of Tundalus and Alberic pretended to communicate information concerning the soul's state after death, the places of punishment, and the method of salvation. In course of time the Vision was used for political or ecclesiastical purposes by preachers who averred that they had seen the souls of eminent sinners in torment. It became an engine of terrorism, assumed satiric tone, and finally fell into the hands of didactic or merely fanciful poets.[73]

The chief preoccupation of the medieval mind was with the future destiny of man. This life came to be regarded as a preparation for eternity. Like a foreground, the actual world served to relieve the picture of the world beyond the grave. Therefore popular literature abounded in manuals of devotion and discipline, some of which set forth the history of the soul in allegorical form. Among other examples may be cited three stories of the spiritual life, corresponding to its three stages of Nature, Purification, and Restoration, conveyed under the titles of Umano, Spoglia, Rinuova. Many prelusions of this class were combined in one religious drama called Commedia dell'Anima, the substance of which is certainly old, though the form yields evidence of sixteenth-century rifacimento.[74]

The object of the foregoing paragraphs has been to show that the popular intellect was well prepared for religious poetry, and had appropriated the forms of Allegory and Vision. Not in order to depreciate the originality of Dante, but to prove in how vital a relation he stood toward his age, I have here insisted on those formless preludes to his work of art. In the Epistle to Can Grande he thus explains the theme of the Commedia: "The subject of the whole work, taken literally, is the state of souls after death, regarded as fact; for the action deals with this, and is about this. But if the work be taken allegorically, its subject is man, in so far as by merit or demerit in the exercise of free will he is exposed to the rewards or punishments of justice." Attending to the letter, we find in the Commedia a vision of that life beyond the tomb, in relation to which alone our life on earth has value. It presents a picture of the everlasting destiny of souls, so firmly apprehended and vividly imagined by the medieval fancy. But since this picture has to set forth mysteries seen and heard by none, the revelation itself, like S. John's Apocalypse, is conveyed in symbols fashioned to adumbrate the truths perceived by faith. The same symbols portray another reality, not apprehended merely by faith, but brought home to the heart by experience. Attending to the allegory, we find in the Commedia a history of the soul in this life—an ethical analysis of sin, purgation and salvation through grace. The poem is a narrative of Dante's journey through the region into which all pass after death; but at the same time it describes the hell and heaven and the transition through repentance from sin to grace, which are the actual conditions of the soul in this life. The Inferno depicts unmitigated evil. The Paradiso exhibits goodness, absolute and free from stain. In the one there is no relief, in the other no alloy; the one is darkness, the other light. The intermediate region of the Purgatorio is a realm of expectation and conversion, where sin is no longer possible, but where the fruition of goodness is delayed by the necessity of purification. Here then are the natural alternations of day and night, the relative twilight of a world where all is yet transition rather than fulfillment. It may be observed that Purgatory belongs to the order of things which by their nature pass away; while Hell and Heaven are both eternal. Therefore the Commedia, considered as an apocalypse of the undying soul, reveals absolute damnation and absolute salvation, both states being destined to endure so long as God's justice and love exist; but it also reveals a state of purifying pain, which ceases when the men who need it have been numbered. Considered as an allegory of the spiritual life on earth, it describes the process of escape from eternal condemnation through grace into eternal happiness.

A theme so vast and all-embracing enabled Dante to inform the whole knowledge of his epoch. The Commedia is the poem of that scholastic theology which absorbed every branch of science and brought the world within the scope of one thought, God. As the Summa of S. Thomas combined philosophy and revelation, so Dante included both the Pagan and Christian dispensations in his scheme. He starts from the wood of terror, where men are assailed by the wild beasts of their passions; and two guides lead him, by the light of knowledge, up to God. The one is Virgil, the other Beatrice—Virgil, who stands for human reason, science, the four cardinal virtues; Beatrice, who symbolizes divine grace, faith formulated in theology, the virtues bestowed on man through Christ for his salvation. Virgil cannot lead the poet beyond Purgatory; because thus far only is human knowledge of avail to elevate and guide the soul. Beatrice lifts him through the spheres of Paradise by contemplation; because the highest summit attained by reason and natural virtue is but the starting point of the true Christian's journey.

The Commedia is thus the drama or the epos of the soul. It condenses all that man has thought or done, can think or do; all that he knows about the universe around him, all that he hopes or fears from the future; his intuition of an incorruptible and ideal order, underlying and controlling the phenomenal world. God, the world and man are brought into one focus; and the interest of the poem is the relation of the individual soul to them, the participation of each human personality in the dramatic action. It need hardly be observed that Dante's solutions of the problems which arise in the development of this theme, are medieval. His physical science has been superseded. His theology is far from approving itself to the general consciousness of Christians in our age. Yet while all must recognize this obvious truth, the essence of the Commedia is indestructible because of its humanity, because of the personality which animates it. Men change far less than the hypotheses of religion and philosophy, which take form from experience as shadows fly before the sun. However these may alter, man remains substantially the same; and Dante penetrated human nature as few have done—was such a man as few have been. The unity and permanence of his poem are in himself. Never was a plan so vast and various permeated so completely with a single self. At once creator and spectator of his vision, neophyte and hierophant, arraigned and judge, he has not only seen hell as the local prison-house of pain, but has felt it as the state of sin within his heart. He has passed through purifying fires; and the songs of Paradise have sounded by anticipation in his ears. Dante is both the singer and the hero of his epic. In him the universal idea of mankind becomes concrete. The continuous experience of this living person who is at one and the same time a figure of each and every soul that ever breathed, and also the real Dante Alighieri, exile from Florence without blame, sustains as on one thread the medley of successive motives which else might lack poetic unity, gives life to a scheme which else might be too abstract. Expanding to embrace the universe, contracting to a point within one breast, the Commedia combines the general and the particular in an individual commensurate with man.

It may be conjectured that Dante, obeying the scholastic impulse of his age, started from the abstract or universal. Therein lay the reality of things, not in the particular. What has been already quoted from the letter to Can Grande justifies this supposition. He meant to lay bare the scheme of the universe, as understood by medieval Christianity, and viewed from the standpoint of the human agent. That scheme presented itself in a series of propositions, a logic or a metaphysic apprehended as truth. Each portion of the poem was mapped out with rigorous accuracy. Each section illustrated a thought, an argument, a position. The whole might be surveyed as a structure of connected syllogisms. To this scientific articulation of its leading motives corresponds the architectural symmetry, the simple outlines and severe masses of the Commedia. The plan, however minute in detail, is comprehended at a glance. The harmonies of the design are as geometrical as some colossal church imagined by Bramante. But Dante had no intention of re-writing the Summa in verse. He meant to be a poet, using the vulgar speech of "that low Italy" in the production of an epic which should rank on equal terms with the Æneid, and be for modern Christendom what that had been for sacred Rome. Furthermore he had it in his heart to yield such honor to Virgil, "leader, lord, and master," as none had ever paid, and to write concerning Beatrice "what had not before been written of any woman." His poem was to be the storehouse of his personal experience. His love and hatred, his admiration of greatness and his scorn for cowardice, his resentment of injury, his gratitude for service rendered, his political creed and critical opinions, the joy he had of nature, and the pain he suffered when he walked with men: all this was to find expression at right seasons and in seemly order. Upon the severe framework of abstract truth, which forms the skeleton of the Commedia and is the final end of its existence, Dante felt free to superimpose materials of inexhaustible variety. Following the metaphor of building more exactly, we may say that he employed these materials as the stones whereby he brought his architectural design to view. The abstract thought of the Commedia, tyrannous and all-controlling as it is, could not lay claim to reality but for the dramatic episodes which present it to the intellect through the imagination.

Some such clothing of abstractions with concrete images was intended in the medieval theory of allegory. The Church proscribed the poets of antiquity; and it had become an axiom that poetry was the art of lies.[75] Poetry was hardly suffered to exist except as a veil to cloak some hidden doctrine; and allegory presented a middle way of escape, whereby the pleasure of art could be enjoyed with a safe conscience. Virgil, whom the middle ages would not have relinquished, though a General Council had condemned him, received the absolution of allegorical interpretation. Dante, who defined poetry as the art "which publishes the truth concealed beneath a veil of fable," frequently interrupts the story to bid his readers note the meaning underneath the figures of his verse. In composing the Commedia, he had moral edification and scientific truth for his end. The dramatic, narrative, descriptive, and lyrical beauties of his poem served to bring into relief or to shroud in appropriate mystery—since allegory both elucidates and obscures the matter it conveys—the doctrines he designed to inculcate. Still Dante stood, as a poet, at a height so far above his age and his own theories, that the cold and numbing touch of symbolism rarely mars the interest of his work. We may, perhaps, feel a certain confusion between the personalities of Virgil and Beatrice and the thoughts they represent, which chills our sympathy, raising a feeling of indignation when Virgil returns unwept to Hell, and removing Beatrice into a world of intangible ideas. We may find the pageant at the close of the "Purgatory" unattractive; nor will the sublimity of the "Paradiso" save the figures by which spiritual meanings are here suggested, from occasional grotesqueness. Thus much can be conceded. Dante, though born to be the poet of all time, was still a scion of his epoch. He could not altogether escape the influences of a misleading conception. But, apart from allegory, apart from didactic purpose, the Commedia takes highest rank for the episodes, the action, the personal interest which never flags. No poet ever had a finer sense of reality, and none commanded the means of expressing it in all its forms more fully. Dante's own theory of symbolism offered an illimitable sphere for the exercise of his imagination, since it led him to give visible and palpable shape to the thoughts of his brain. And here it may be noted that the allegorical heresy proved less pernicious than another form of false opinion based upon an ideal of classical purity might have been. Since the poem was to present truth under a cloak of metaphor, it did not signify what figures were used. The purpose they served, justified them. Therefore Dante found himself at liberty to mingle satire with the hymns of angels; to seek illustrations from vulgar life no less than from nature in her sublimest moods; to delineate the horrible, the painful, the grotesque, and the improbable with the same sincerity as the beautiful, the charming, and the familiar. His dramatic faculty was exercised on themes so varied that to classify them is impossible—on the pathos of Francesca and the terror of Ugolino; the skirmish of the fiends in Malebolge and the meeting of Statius with Virgil; the pride of Farinata and the penitence of Manfred; the agonies of Adamo da Brescia and the calm delights of Piccarda dei Donati. He tells the stories of Ulysses and S. Francis, describes the flight of the Roman eagle and Cacciaguida's manhood, with equal energy of brief but ineffaceably impressive narration. This license inherent in the use of allegory justified his classing the fameless folk of his own days with the heroes of Biblical and classical antiquity, and permitted him to mingle ancient history with his censure of contemporary politics. All times, ages, countries, races of men are alike before the tribunal of God's justice. Accordingly, the poet who had taken man's moral nature for his theme, and was bound by his theory to present this theme symbolically, could bring to view a multitude of concrete persons, arranged (whatever else may issue from their converse with the protagonist) according to gradations of merit or demerit. Thus the Divine Comedy, though written with a didactic object and under the influence of allegory, surpasses every other epic in the distinctness of its motives and the realism of their presentation. The brief and pregnant style which scorns rhetorical adornment, the accurate picture-painting which aims at vivid delineation of the thing to be discerned, harmonize with its inflexible ethics, its uncompromising sincerity, its intense human feeling.

The Commedia is too widely commensurate with its theme, the Human Soul, to be described or classified. The men of its era called it the Divine; and this title it has preserved, in spite of the fierce censures of the Church which it contains. They called it La Divina because of its material doubtless, but also, we may dare to think, because of its unfathomable depth and height and breadth of thought. In course of time chairs were established at Florence, Padua, and in other cities, for its explanation; and the labor of the commentator was applied to it. That labor has been continued from Boccaccio's down to our own day; yet the dark places of the Commedia have not been illuminated, nor is learning likely to solve some problems which perplex a careful student of its cantos. That matters, indeed, but little; for the main scope and purpose of the poem are plain, and its spirit is such that none who read can fail to recognize it.

Before Dante the Christian world had no poet, and Italy had no voice. The gift of Dante to Europe was an Epic on the one subject which united the modern nations in community of interest. The gift of Dante to his country was a masterpiece which placed her on a par with Homer's Hellas and with Virgil's Rome. If the first century of Italian literature could have produced three men of the caliber of Dante, Italy would have run her future course, as she began, abreast with ancient Greece. That was not, however, destined to be. The very conditions of the mission she had to fulfill in the fourteenth and two following centuries, rendered the emergence of a race of heroes impossible. Italy was about to recover the past. Her energies could not be concentrated on the evolution of herself in a new literature. To Dante succeeded Petrarch and Boccaccio.

Petrarch was born at Arezzo in the year 1304, when his father, like Dante, and in the same cause, had been expelled from Florence. His youth, passed partly in Tuscany and partly at Avignon, coincided with the years spent by Dante in the composition of the Commedia. He was a student at Montpellier, neglecting his law-books for Cicero and Virgil, when Dante died at Ravenna in 1321. During those seventeen years of Dante's exile and Petrarch's boyhood, a change had passed over the political scene. The Papacy was transferred from Rome to France. The last attempts of the German Emperors to vindicate their authority below the Alps had failed. The Communes were yielding to anarchy and party feuds, or fast becoming the prey of despots. A new age had begun; and of this new age Petrarch was the representative, as Dante had been the poet of the ages which had passed away. Petrarch's inauguration of the classical Revival has been already described in this work; nor is it necessary to repeat the services he rendered to the cause of humanism.[76] In a volume dealing with Italian literature the poet of the Canzoniere must engage attention rather than the resuscitator of antique learning. It is Petrarch's peculiar glory to have held two equally illustrious places in the history of modern civilization, as the final lyrist of chivalrous love and as the founder of the Renaissance. Yet this double attitude, when we compare him with Dante, constitutes the chief cause of his manifest inferiority.

The differences between Dante's and Petrarch's education were marked, and tended to accentuate the divergence of their intellectual and moral qualities. Dante, who lived until maturity within sight of his bel San Giovanni, grew up a Florentine in core and fiber. In his earliest work, the Vita Nuova, there is a home-bred purity of style, as of something which could only have been perfected in Florence; a beauty akin to that of Giotto's tower; a perfume as of some flower peculiar to a district whence it will not bear transplanting. In his latest, the Paradiso, he devotes one golden canto to the past prosperity of Florence, another to her decadence through the corruption of her citizens. While wandering like "the world's rejected guest" away from that fair city of his birth, the unrest of his pilgrimage, contrasted with the peace of earlier manhood, only strengthened the Florentine within him. Though he traversed Italy in length and breadth, though the Commedia furnishes an epitome of her landscapes and her local customs, describes her cities and resumes her history, the thought of national unity was not present to his mind. Italy remained for him the garden of the empire, the unruly colt whom Cæsar should bestride and curb. Elsewhere than in Florence Dante felt himself an alien. He refused the poet's crown unless it could be taken by the font of baptism upon the square of Florence. He chose banishment with honor and the stars of heaven, rather than ignominious entrance through the gates he loved so well; and yet from the highest sphere of Paradise he turned his eyes down to Florence and her erring folk:

Io, ched era al divino dall'umano,

Ed all'eterno dal tempo venuto,

E di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano.

Petrarch, called to perform another mission, had a different training. Brought up from earliest infancy in exile, transferred from Tuscany to France, deprived of civic rights and disengaged from the duties of a burgher in those troublous times, he surveyed the world from his study and judged its affairs with the impartiality of a philosopher. Without a city, without a home, without a family, consecrated to the priesthood and absorbed in literary interests, he spent his life in musings at Vaucluse or in the splendid hospitalities of the Lombard Courts. Through all his wanderings he was a visitor, the citizen of no republic, but the freeman of the City of the Spirit. Without exaggeration he might have chosen for his motto the phrase of Marcus Aurelius: "I will not say dear city of Cecrops but dear city of God!" Avignon, where his intellect was formed in youth, had become through the residence of the Popes the capital of Christendom, the only center of political and ecclesiastical activity where an ideal of universal culture could arise. Itself in exile, the Papacy still united the modern nations by a common bond; but its banishment from Rome was the sign of a new epoch, when the hegemony of civilization should be transferred from the Church to secular control. In this way Petrarch was enabled to shape a conception of humanism which left the middle age behind; and when his mind dwelt on Italy at a distance, he could think of her as the great Italic land, inheritor of Rome, mother of a people destined to be one, born to rule, or if not rule, at least to regenerate the world through wisdom. From his lips we hear of Florence nothing; but for the first time the passionate cry of Italia mia the appeal of an Italian who recognized his race, yet had no local habitation on the sacred soil, vibrates in his oratorical canzoni. Petrarch's dreams of a united Italy and a resuscitated Roman republic were hardly less visionary than Dante's ideal of universal monarchy with Rome for the seat of empire. Yet in his lyrics the true conception of Italy, one intellectually in spite of political discord and foreign oppression, the real and indestructible unity of the nation in a spirit destined to control the future of the human race, came suddenly to consciousness. There was an out-cry in their passion-laden strophes which gathered volume as the years rolled over Italy, until at last, in her final prostration beneath Spanish Austria, they seemed less poems than authentic prophecies.

Thus while Dante remained a Florentine, Petrarch was the first Italian. Nor is it insignificant that whereas Dante refused the poet's crown unless he could place the laurels on his head in Florence, Petrarch ascended the Capitol among the plaudits of the Romans, and, in the absence of Pope and Emperor, received his wreath from the Senator Romanus. Dante's renunciation and Petrarch's acceptance of this honor were equally appropriate. Dante, as was fitting for a man of his era, looked still to the Commune. Petrarch's coronation on the Capitol was the outward sign that the age of the Communes was over, that culture was destined to be cosmopolitan, and that the Eternal City, symbolizing the imperishable empire of the intellect, was now the proper throne of men marked out to sway the world by thoughts and written words.

In Petrarch the particular is superseded by the universal. The citizen is sunk in the man. The political prejudices of the partisan are conspicuous by absence. His language has lost all trace of dialect. He writes Italian, special to no district, though Tuscan in its source; and his verse fixes the standard of poetic diction for all time in Italy. These changes mark an important stage in literature emerging from its origins, and account for Petrarch's unequaled authority during the next three centuries. Dante's Epic is classical because of its vivid humanity and indestructible material; but its spirit is medieval and its details are strictly localized. Petrarch's outlook over the world and life is, in form at least, less confined to the limitations of his age. Consequently the students of a period passing rapidly beyond the medieval cycle of ideas, found no bar between his nature and their sympathies.

In his treatment of chivalrous love we may notice this tendency to generalization. The material transmitted from the troubadours, handled with affectation by the Sicilians, philosophized by the Florentines, loses transient and specific quality in the Canzoniere. It takes rank at last among simply human emotions; and, though it has not lost a certain medieval tincture, the Canzoniere rather than the Vita Nuova, the work of distinguished rather than of supreme genius, has on this account been understood and appropriated by all lovers in all ages and in every land. Petrarch's verses, to use Shelley's words, "are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is the grief of love." And while we admit that "Dante understood the secrets of love even more than Petrarch," there is no doubt that the Canzoniere strikes a note which vibrates more universally than the Vita Nuova. The majority of men cannot but prefer the comprehensive to the intense expression of personal emotion.

Death rendered Beatrice's apotheosis conceivable; and Dante may be said to have rediscovered the Platonic mystery, whereby love is an initiation into the secrets of the spiritual world. It was the intuition of a sublime nature into the essence of pure impersonal enthusiasm. It was an exaltation of womanhood similar to that attempted less adequately by Shelley in Epipsychidion. It was a real instinct like that which pervades the poetry of Michelangelo, and which sustains some men even in our prosaic age. Still there remained an ineradicable unsubstantiality in Dante's point of view, when tested by the common facts of feeling. His idealism was too far removed from ordinary experience to take firm hold upon the modern mind. In proportion as Beatrice personified abstractions, she ceased to be a woman even for her lover; nor was it possible, except by diminishing her individuality, to regard her as a symbol of the universal. She passed from the sphere of the human into the divine; and though her face was still beautiful, it was the face of Science rather than of one we love. There was even too little alloy of earth in Dante's passion for Beatrice.

Petrarch's love for Laura was of a different type. The unrest of earthly desire, for ever thwarted but recurring with imperious persistence, and the rebellion of the conscience against emotions which the lover recognized as lawless, broke his peace. It is true that, using the language of the earlier poets and obeying a sanguine mood of his own mind, he from time to time spoke of Laura as of one who led his soul to God. But his sincerest utterances reveal the discord of a heart divided between duty and inclination, the melancholy of a man who knows himself the prey of warring powers. His love for Laura seemed an error and a sin because it clashed with an ascetic impulse which had never been completely blunted. In his Hymn to the Virgin he referred to this passion as the Medusa that had turned his better self to stone:

Medusa e l'error mio m'han fatto un sasso

D'umor van stillante.

There is a passage in the De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ, where the lyrist of chivalrous love pours such contempt on women as his friend Boccaccio might have envied. In the Secretum, again, he describes his own emotion as a torment from which he had vainly striven to emancipate himself by solitude, by journeys, by distractions, and by obstinate studies. In truth, he rarely alludes to the great passion of his life without a strange blending of tenderness and sore regret. Herein he proved himself not only a true child of his age, but also the precursor of the modern world. While he was still bound by the traditions of medieval asceticism, a Christian no less devout and only less firm than Dante, his senses and his imagination, stirred possibly by contact with classic literature, rebelled against the mysticism of the Florentine School. This rebellion, but dimly apprehended by the poet himself, and complicated with the yearnings of a deeply religious nature after purity of thought and deed, gave its supreme strength and beauty to his verse. The Canzoniere is not merely the poetry of love but the poetry of conflict also. The men of the Renaissance overleaped the conflict, and satisfied themselves with empty idealizations of sensual desire. But modern men have returned to Petrarch's point of view and found an echo of their own divided spirit in his poetry. He marks the transition from a medieval to a modern mood, the passage from Cino and Guido to Werther and Rousseau.

That Laura was a real woman, and that Petrarch's worship of her was unfeigned; that he adored her with the senses and the heart as well as with the head; but that this love was at the same time more a mood of the imagination, a delicate disease, a cherished wound, to which he constantly recurred as the most sensitive and lively wellspring of poetic fancy, than a downright and impulsive passion, may be clearly seen in the whole series of his poems and his autobiographical confessions. Laura appears to have treated him with the courtesy of a somewhat distant acquaintance, who was aware of his homage and was flattered by it. But her lover enjoyed no privileges of intimacy, and it may be questioned whether, if Petrarch could by any accident have made her his own, the fruition of her love would not have been a serious interruption to the happiness of his life. He first saw her in the church of S. Claire, at Avignon, on April 6, 1327. She passed from this world on April 6, 1348. These two dates are the two turning-points of Petrarch's life. The interval of twenty-one years, when Laura trod the earth, and her lover in all his wanderings paid his orisons to her at morning, evening, and noonday, and passed his nights in dreams of that fair form which never might be his, was the storm and stress period of his checkered career. There is an old Greek proverb that "to desire the impossible is a malady of the soul." With this malady in its most incurable form the poet was stricken; and, instead of seeking cure, he nursed his sickness and delighted in the discord of his spirit. From that discord he wrought the harmonies of his sonnets and canzoni. That malady made him the poet of all men who have found in their emotions a dreamland more wonderful and pregnant with delight than in the world which we call real. After Laura's death his love was tranquilized to a sublimer music. The element of discord had passed out of it; and just because its object was now physically unattainable, it grew in purity and power. The sensual alloy which, however spiritualized, had never ceased to disturb his soul, was purged from his still vivid passion. Laura in heaven looked down upon him from her station mid the saints; and her poet could indulge the dream that now at last she pitied him, that she was waiting for him with angelic eyes of love, and telling him to lose no time, but set his feet upon the stairs that led to God and her. The romance finds its ultimate apotheosis in that transcendent passage of the Trionfo della Morte which describes her death and his own vision. Throughout the whole course of this labyrinthine love-lament, sustained for forty years on those few notes so subtly modulated, from the first sonnet on his primo giovenile errore to the last line of her farewell, tu starai in terra senza me gran tempo, Laura grows in vividness before us. She only becomes a real woman in death, because she was for Petrarch always an ideal, and in the ideal world beyond the tomb he is more sure of her than when "the fair veil" of flesh was drawn between her and his yearning.

Petrarch succeeded in bringing the old theme of chivalrous love back from the philosophizing mysticism of the Florentines to simple experience. He forms a link between their transcendental science and the positive romance of the Decameron, between the spirit of the middle ages and the spirit of the Renaissance. Guided by his master, Cino da Pistoja, the least metaphysical and clearest of his immediate predecessors, Petrarch found the right artistic via media; and perhaps we may attribute something to that double education which placed him between the influences of the Tuscan lyrists and the troubadours of his adopted country. At any rate he returned from the allegories of the Florentine poets to the directness of chivalrous emotion; but he treated the original motive with a greater richness and a more idealizing delicacy than his Provençal predecessors. The marvelous instruments of the Italian Sonnet and Canzone were in his hands, and he knew how to draw from them a purer if not a grander melody than either Guido or Dante. The best work of the Florentines required a commentary; and the structure of their verse, like its content, was scientific rather than artistic. Petrarch could publish his Canzoniere without explanatory notes. He laid his heart bare to the world, and every man who had a heart might understand his language. Between the subject-matter and the verbal expression there lay no intervening veil of mystic meaning. The form had become correspondingly more clear and perfect, more harmonious in its proportions, more immediate in musical effects. In a word, Petrarch was the first to open a region where art might be free, and to find for the heart's language utterance direct and limpid.

This was his great achievement. The forms he used were not new. The subject-matter he handled was given to him. But he brought both form and subject closer to the truth, exercising at the same time an art which had hitherto been unconceived in subtlety, and which has never since been equaled. If Dante was the first great poet, Petrarch was the first true artist of Italian literature. It was, however, impossible that Petrarch should overleap at one bound all the barriers of the middle ages. His Laura has still something of the earlier ideality adhering to her. She stands midway between the Beatrice of Dante and the women of Boccaccio. She is not so much a woman with a character and personality, as woman in the general, la femme, personified and made the object of a poet's reveries. Though every detail of her physical perfections, with the single and striking exception of her nose, is carefully recorded, it is not easy to form a definite picture even of her face and shape. Of her inner nature we hear only the vaguest generalities. She sits like a lovely model in the midst of a beautiful landscape, like one of our Burne-Jones's women who incarnate a mood of feeling while they lack the fullness of personality. The thought of her pervades the valley of Vaucluse; the perfume of her memory is in the air we breathe. But if we met her, we should find it hard to recognize her; and if she spoke, we should not understand that it was Laura.

Petrarch had no strong objective faculty. Just as he failed to bring Laura vividly before us, until she had by death become a part of his own spiritual substance, so he failed to depict things as he saw them. The pictures etched in three or four lines of the Purgatorio may be sought for vainly in his Rime. That his love of nature was intense, there is no doubt. The solitary of Vaucluse, the pilgrim of Mont Ventoux, had reached a point of sensibility to natural scenery far in advance of his age. But when he came to express this passion for beauty, he was satisfied with giving the most perfect form to the emotion stirred in his own subjectivity. Instead of scenes, he delineates the moods suggested by them. He makes the streams and cliffs and meadows of Vaucluse his confidants. He does not lose himself in contemplation of the natural object, though we feel that this self found its freest breathing-space, its most delightful company, in the society of hill and vale. He never cares to paint a landscape, but contents himself with such delicate touches and such cunning combinations of words as may suggest a charm in the external world. At this point the humanist, preoccupied with man as his main subject, meets the poet in Petrarch. What is lost, too, in the precision of delineation, is gained in universality. The Canzoniere reminds us of no single spot; wherever there are clear fresh rills and hanging mountains, the lover walks with Petrarch by his side.

If the poet's dominant subjectivity weakened his grasp upon external things, it made him supreme in self-portraiture. Every mood of passion is caught and fixed precisely in his verse. The most evanescent shades of feeling are firmly set upon the exquisite picture. Each string of Love's many-chorded lyre is touched with a vigorous hand. The fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise; the "yea and nay twinned in a single breath;" the struggle of conflicting aspirations in a heart drawn now to God and now to earth; the quiet resting-places of content; the recrudescence of the ancient smart; the peace of absence, when longing is luxury; the agony of presence, adding fire to fire—all this is rendered with a force so striking, in a style so monumental, that the Canzoniere may still be called the Introduction to the Book of Love. Thus, when Petrarch's own self was the object, his hand was steady; his art failed not in modeling the image into roundness.

Dante brought the universe into his poem. But "the soul of man, too, is a universe:" and of this inner microcosm Petrarch was the poet. It remained for Boccaccio, the third in the triumvirate, to treat of common life with art no less developed. From Beatrice through Laura to La Fiammetta; from the Divine Comedy through the Canzoniere to the Decameron; from the world beyond the grave through the world of feeling to the world in which we play our puppet parts; from the mystic terza rima, through the stately lyric stanzas, to Protean prose—such was the rapid movement of Italian art within the brief space of some fifty years.

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, the eleventh year of Dante's exile, the first of Petrarch's residence at Avignon. His grandfather belonged originally to Certaldo; but he removed to Florence and received the rights of burghership among those countryfolk whom Dante reckoned the corrupters of her ancient commonwealth[77]:

Ma la cittadinanza, ch'è or mista

Di Campi e di Certaldo e di Figghine,

Pura vedeasi nell'ultimo artista.

Certaldo was a village of Valdelsa, famous for its onions. This explains the rebuff which the author of the Decameron received from a Florentine lady, whom he afterwards satirized in the Corbaccio: "Go back to grub your onion-beds, and leave gentlewomen alone!" Boccaccio was neither born in wedlock nor yet of pure Italian blood. His mother was a Frenchwoman, with whom his father made acquaintance during a residence on business at Paris. These facts deserve to be noted, since they bear upon the temper of his mind and on the quality of his production.

It has been observed that the three main elements of Florentine society—the popolo vecchio, or nobles who acquiesced in the revolution of 1282; the popolo grasso, or burghers occupying a middle rank in the city, who passed the Ordinances of 1293; and the popolo minuto, or artisans and contadini admitted to the franchise, who came to the front between 1343 and 1378—are severally represented by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.[78] So rapid are the political and intellectual mutations in a little state like Florence, where the vigor of popular life and the vivacity of genius bear no proportion to the size of the community, that within the short span of fifty years the center of power may be transferred from an aristocracy to the proletariate, and the transition in art and literature from the Middle Age to the Renaissance may not only be accomplished but copiously illustrated in detail.[79]

Boccaccio was the typical Italian bourgeois, the representative of a class who finally determined the Renaissance. His prose and poetry contain in germ the various species which were perfected during that period. Studying him, we study in its immaturity the spirit of the next two centuries. He was the first to substitute a literature of the people for the literature of the learned classes and the aristocracy. He freed the natural instincts from ascetic interdictions and the mysticism of the transcendental school. He exposed the shams of chivalrous romance and the hypocrisies of monkery with ridicule more deadly than satire or invective. He brought realism in art and letters back to honor by delineating the world as he found it—sensual, base, comic, ludicrous, pathetic, tender, cruel—in all its crudities and contradictions. He replaced the abstractions of the allegory by concrete fact. He vindicated the claims of appetite and sensuous enjoyment against ideal aspirations and the scruples of a faith-tormented conscience. He taught his fellow-countrymen that a life of studious indifference was preferable to the strife of factions and the din of battle-fields.

Boccaccio did not act consciously and with fixed purpose to these ends. He was rather the spokesman of his age and race—the sign in literature that Italian society had entered upon a new phase, and that the old order was passing away. If the Decameron seemed to shake the basis of morality; if it gained the name of Il Principe Galeotto or the Pandar; if it was denounced as the corrupter of the multitude; this meant, not that its author had a sinister intention, but that the medieval fabric was already sapped, and that the people whom Boccaccio wrote to please were disillusioned of their previous ideals. The honest easy-going man, Giovanni della Tranquillità, as he was called, painted what he saw and made himself the mouthpiece of the men around him.[80]

For the work he had to do, he was admirably fitted by nature and education. He combined the blood of a Florentine tradesman and a Parisian grisette. He had but little learning in his youth, and was the first great Italian writer who had not studied at Bologna. His early manhood was passed in commerce at Naples, where he gained access to the dissolute Court of Joan, and made love to her ladies. At his father's request he applied himself for a short while to legal studies; but he does not appear to have practiced as a lawyer in real earnest. Literature very early became the passion, the one serious and ennobling enthusiasm of his life. We have already seen him at the tomb of Virgil, vowing to devote his powers to the sacred Muses; and we know what services he rendered to humanism by his indefatigable energy in the acquisition and diffusion of miscellaneous learning.[81] This is not the place to treat of Boccaccio's scholarship. Yet it may be said that, just as his philosophy of life was the philosophy of a jovial and sensuous plebeian, so his conception of literature lacked depth and greatness. He repeated current theories about the dependence of poetry on truth, the dignity of allegory, the sacredness of love, the beauty of honor. But his own work showed how little he had appropriated these ideas. As a student, a poet, and a man, he lived upon a lower plane of thought than Petrarch; and when he left the concrete for the abstract, his penetrative insight failed him.

From this point of view Boccaccio's Life of Dante is instructive. It is crammed with heterogeneous erudition. It bristles with citations and opinions learned by rote. It reveals the heartiest reverence for all things reckoned worthy in the realm of intellect. The admiration for the divine poet expressed in it is sincere and ungrudging. Yet this book betrays an astonishing want of sympathy with Dante, and transforms the sublime romance of the Vita Nuova into a commonplace novella. Dante told the world how he first felt love for Beatrice at the age of nine. His biographer is at a loss to understand this miracle. He supposes that the sweet season of May, the good wines and delicate dishes of the Portinari banquet, all the sensuous delights of a Florentine festival, combined to make the boy prematurely a man.[82] Dante called Beatrice "youngest of the angels." Boccaccio draws a lively picture of an angel in the flesh, as he imagined her; and in his portrait there is far less of the angelic than the carnal nature visible. This he does in perfect good faith, with the heartfelt desire to exalt Dante above all poets, and to spread abroad the truth of his illustrious life. But the hero of Renaissance literature was incapable of comprehending the real feeling of the man he worshiped. Between him and the enthusiasms of the middle ages a nine-fold Styx already poured its waves.

Boccaccio's noblest quality was the recognition of intellectual power. It was this cult of great men, if we may trust Filippo Villani, which first decided him to follow literature.[83] His devotion to the memory of Dante, and his frank confession of inferiority to Petrarch, whom he loved and served through twenty years of that exacting poet's life, are equally sincere and beautiful. These feelings inspired some of his finest poems, and penetrated the autobiographical passages of his minor works with a delicacy that endears the man to us.[84] No less candid was his worship of beauty—not beauty of an intellectual or ideal order, but sensuous and real—the beauty which inspired the artists and the poets of the following centuries. Nor has any writer of any age been gifted with a stronger faculty for its expression. From this service of the beautiful he derived the major impulse of his activity as an artist. If he lacked moral greatness, if he was deficient in philosophical depth and religious earnestness, his devotion to art was serious, intense, profound, absorbing. He discharged his duties as a citizen with easy acquiescence, but no stern consciousness of patriotic purpose. He conformed to the Church, and allowed himself in old age to be frightened into a kind of half-repentance. But the homage he rendered to art was of a very different and more exacting nature. With his best energies he labored to make himself, at least in this sphere, perfect. How amply he succeeded must be acknowledged by all men who have read the Decameron, and who have seen that here Boccaccio forms the legends of all ages and all lands into one harmonious whole, brings a world of many-sided human interest and varied beauty out of the chaos of medieval materials, finishing every detail with love, inspiring each particle with life, and setting the dædal picture of society in a framework of delicate romance. The conception and the execution of this masterpiece of literature are equally artistic. If the phrase "art for art" can be used in speaking of one who was unconscious of the theory it implies, Boccaccio may be selected as the typical artist for art's sake. Within the sphere of his craft, he is impassioned, enthusiastic, sincere, profound. His attitude with regard to all else is one of amused or curious indifference, of sensuous enjoyment, of genial ridicule, of playful cynicism.

Boccaccio was a bourgeois of the fourteenth century; but his character, as stamped on the Decameron, was common to Italy during the next two hundred years. The whole book glows with the joyousness of a race discarding dreams for realities, scorning the terrors of a bygone creed, reveling in nature's liberty, proclaiming the empire of the senses with a frankness which passes over into license. In Boccaccio, the guiding genius of the Italian Renaissance arrives at consciousness. That blending of moral indifference with artistic seriousness, which we observe in him, marks the coming age. He is not the precursor but the inaugurator of the era. The smile which plays around his mouth became, though changeful in expression, fixed upon the lips of his posterity—genial in Ariosto, gracious in Poliziano, mischievous in Pulci, dubious in Lorenzo de' Medici, sardonic in Aretino, bitter in Folengo, toned to tragic irony in Machiavelli, impudent in Berni, joyous in Boiardo, sensual in Bandello—assuming every shade of character, Protean, indescribable, until at last it fades from Tasso's brow, when Italy has ceased to laugh except in secret.

The Decameron has been called the Commedia Umana.[85] This title is appropriate, not merely because the book portrays human life from a comic rather than a serious point of view, but also because it is the antithesis of Dante's Commedia Divina. As poet and scene-painter devised for our ancestors of the Elizabethan period both Mask and Anti-mask, so did the genius of Italy provide two shows for modern Europe—the Mask and Anti-mask of human nature. Dante's Comedy represents our life in relation to the life beyond the grave. Boccaccio in his Comedy depicts the life of this earth only, subtracting whatsoever may suggest a life to come. It would be difficult to determine which of the two dramas is the more truthful, or which of the two poets had a firmer grasp upon reality. But the realities of the Divine Comedy are spiritual; those of the Human Comedy are material. The world of the Decameron is not an inverted world, like that of Aristophanes. It does not antithesize Dante's world by turning it upside down. It is simply the same world surveyed from an opposite point of view—unaltered, uninverted, but seen in the superficies, presented in the concrete. It is the prose of life; and this justifies the counterpoise of its form to that of Dante's poem. It is the world as world, the flesh as flesh, nature as nature, without intervention of spiritual agencies, without relation to ideal order, regarded as the sphere of humor, fortune, marvelous caprice. It is everything which the Church had banned, proscribed, held in abhorrence, without that which the Church had inculcated for the exaltation of the soul. This world, actual and unexplained, Boccaccio paints with the mastery of an accomplished artist, molding its chaotic elements into a form of beauty which compels attention.

Dante condemned those "who submit their reason to natural appetite."[86] Boccaccio celebrates the apotheosis of natural appetite, of il talento, stigmatized as sin by ascetic Christianity.[87] His strongest sympathies are reserved for those who suffer by abandoning themselves to impulse, and in this self-abandonment he sees the poetry of life. This is the very core of the antithesis presented by the Human to the Divine Comedy. The Decameron is an undesigned revolt against the sum of medieval doctrine. Like all vehement reactions, it is not satisfied with opposing the extravagances of the view it combats. Instead of negativing asceticism, it affirms license. Yet though the Divine Comedy and the Decameron are antithetical, they are both true, and true together, inasmuch as they present the same humanity studied under contradictory conditions. Human nature is vast enough to furnish the materials for both, inexplicable enough to render both acceptable to reason, tolerant enough to view with impartial approbation the desolate theology of the Inferno and the broad mirth of the Decameron.[88]

The Decameron did not appear unheralded by similar attempts. No literary taste was stronger in the middle ages than the taste for stories. This is proved by the collection known as Gesta Romanorum, and by the Bestiarii, Lapidarii, Physiologi and Apiarii, which contain a variety of tales, many of them surprisingly indecent, veiling spiritual doctrine under obscenities which horrify a modern reader.[89] From the hands of ecclesiastical compilers these short stories passed down to popular narrators, who in France made the fabliaux a special branch of vulgar literature. The follies and vices of the clergy, tricks practiced by wives upon their husbands, romantic adventures of lovers, and comic incidents of daily life, formed the staple of their stock in trade. When the fabliau reached Italy, together with other literary wares, from France, it was largely cultivated in the South; and the first known collection of Italian stories received the name of Il Novellino, or Il Fiore del parlar gentile. The language of this book was immature, and the tales themselves seem rather memoranda for the narrator than finished compositions to be read with pleasure.[90] It may therefore be admitted that the rude form of the Decameron was given to Boccaccio. Not to mention the larger chivalrous romances, Conti di antichi Cavalieri, and translations from French Chansons de Geste, which have no genuine link of connection with the special type of the Novella, he found models for his tales both in the libraries of medieval convents and upon the lips of popular raccontatori. Yet this must not be taken to imply any lack of originality in Boccaccio. Such comparisons as Professor Bartoli has instituted between the Decameron and some of its supposed sources, prove the insignificance of his debt, the immeasurable inferiority of his predecessors.[91]

The spirit of the Decameron no less than the form, had been long in preparation. Satire, whether superficial, as in the lays of the jongleurs, or searching, as in the invectives of Dante and Petrarch, was familiar to the middle ages; and the popular Latin poems of the wandering students are steeped in rage against a corrupt hierarchy, a venal Curia.[92] Those same Carmina Vagorum reveal the smoldering embers of unextinguished Paganism, which underlay the Christian culture of the middle ages. Written by men who belonged to the clerical classes, but who were often on bad terms with ecclesiastical authorities, tinctured with the haughty contempt of learning for the laity, yet overflowing with the vigorous life of the proletariate, these extraordinary poems bring to view a bold and candid sensuality, an ineradicable spontaneity of natural appetite, which is strangely at variance with the cardinal conceptions of ascetic Christianity.[93] In the sect of the Italian Epicureans; in the obscure bands of the Cathari and Paterini; in the joyous companies of Provençal Court and castle, the same note of irrepressible nature sounded. Side by side with the new-built fabric of ecclesiastical idealism, the old temples of unregenerate human deities subsisted. They were indeed discredited, proscribed, consigned to shame. They formed the mauvais lieux of Christendom. Yet there they stood, even as the Venusberg of Tannhäuser's legend abode unshaken though cathedrals rose by Rhine. All that was needed to restore the worship of these nature-gods was that a great artist should decorate their still substantial temple-walls with the beauty of a new, sincere, and unrepentant style, fitting their abandoned chambers for the habitation of the human spirit, free now to choose the dwelling that it listed. This Boccaccio achieved. And here it must again be noticed that the revolution of time was about to bring man's popular and carnal deities once more, if only for a season, to the throne. The murmured songs of a few wandering students were about to be drowned in the pæan of Renaissance poetry. The visions of the Venusberg were to be realized in Italian painting. The coming age was destined to live out Boccaccio's Human Comedy in act and deed. This is the true kernel of his greatness. As poet, he ranked third only, and that at a vast interval, in the triumvirate of the fourteenth century. But the temper of his mind, the sphere of his conceptions, made him the representative genius of the two following centuries. Awaiting the age when science should once more co-ordinate the forces of humanity in a coherent theory, men in the Renaissance exchanged superfluous restraint for immoderate license. It is not to be wondered at that Boccaccio and not Dante was their hero.

The description of the Plague at Florence which introduces the Decameron, has more than a merely artistic appropriateness. Boccaccio may indeed have meant to bring his group of pleasure-seeking men and maidens into strong relief by contrast with the horrors of the stricken city. Florence crowded with corpses, echoing to the shrieks of delirium and the hoarse cries of body-buriers, is the background he has chosen for that blooming garden, where the birds sing and the lovers sit by fountains in the shade, laughing or weeping as the spirit of each tale compels them. But independently of this effect of contrast, which might be used to illustrate the author's life-philosophy, the description of the Plague has a still deeper significance, whereof Boccaccio never dreamed. Matteo Villani dates a progressive deterioration of manners in the city from the Plague of 1348, and justifies us in connecting the Ciompi riots of 1378 with the enfeeblement of civic order during those thirty years. The Plague was, therefore, the outward sign, if not the efficient cause, of those very ethical and social changes which the Decameron immortalized in literature. It was the historical landmark between two ages, dividing the Florence of the Grandi from the Florence of the Ciompi. The cynicism, liberated in that time of terror, lawlessness, and sudden death, assumed in Boccaccio's romance a beautiful and graceful aspect. It lost its harsh and vulgar outlines, and took the air of genial indulgence which distinguished Italian society throughout the years of the Renaissance.

Boccaccio selects seven ladies of ages varying from eighteen to twenty-eight, and three men, the youngest of whom is twenty-five. Having formed this company, he transports them to a villa two miles from the city, where he provides them with a train of serving-men and waiting-women, and surrounds them with the delicacies of medieval luxury. He is careful to remind us that, though the three men and three of the ladies were acknowledged lovers, and though their conversation turned on almost nothing else but passion, "no stain defiled the honor of the party." Stories are told; and these unblemished maidens listen with laughter and a passing blush to words and things which outrage Northern sense of decency. The remorseless but light satire of the Decameron spares none of the ideals of the age. All the medieval enthusiasms are reviewed and criticised from the standpoint of the Florentine bottega and piazza. It is as though the bourgeois, not content with having made nobility a crime, were bent upon extinguishing its spirit. The tale of Agilulf vulgarizes the chivalrous conception of love ennobling men of low estate, by showing how a groom, whose heart is set upon a queen, avails himself of opportunity. Tancredi burlesques the knightly reverence for a stainless scutcheon by the extravagance of his revenge. The sanctity of the Thebaid, that ascetic dream of purity and self-renunciation for God's service, is made ridiculous by Alibech. Ser Ciappelletto brings contempt upon the canonization of saints. The confessional, the worship of relics, the priesthood, and the monastic orders are derided with the deadliest persiflage. Christ himself is scoffed at in a jest which points the most indecent of these tales.[94] Marriage affords a never-failing theme for scorn; and when, by way of contrast, the novelist paints an ideal wife, he runs into such hyperboles that the very patience of Griselda is a satire on its dignity. Like Balzac, Boccaccio was unsuccessful in depicting virtuous womanhood. Attempting this, he fell, like Balzac, into the absurdities of sentiment. His own conception of love was sensual and voluptuous—not uniformly coarse, nay often tender, but frankly carnal. Without having recourse to the Decameron, this statement might be abundantly substantiated by reference to the Filostrato, Fiammetta, Amorosa Visione, Ninfale Fiesolano. Boccaccio enjoyed the painting of licentious pleasure, snatched in secret, sometimes half by force, by a lover after moderate resistance from his paramour. He imported into these pictures the plebeian tone which we have already noticed in the popular poetry of the preceding century, and which was destined to pervade the erotic literature of the Renaissance. There is, therefore, an ironical contrast between the decencies observed by his brigata and their conversation; a contrast rooted in the survival from chivalrous times of conventional ideals, which have lost reality and been persistently ignored in practice. This effect of irony is enhanced by the fact that many of the motives are such as might have been romantically treated, but here are handled from the popolano grasso's point of view. A skeptical and sensuous imagination plays around the sanctities and sublimities which have for it become illusory.

We observe the same kind of unconscious hypocrisy, the same spontaneous sapping of now obsolete ideals, in the Amorosa Visione.[95] Here Love is still regarded as the apotheosis of mortal experience. It is still said to be the union of intelligence and moral energy in an enthusiasm of the soul. Yet the joys of love revealed at the conclusion of the poem are such as a bayadère might offer.[96] The bourgeois effaces the knight; the Italian of the Renaissance has broken the leading strings of mystical romance. This vision, composed in terza rima, was assuredly not meant to travesty Dante. Still it would be difficult to imagine a more complete inversion of the Dantesque point of view, a more deliberate substitution of an Earthly Paradise for the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy. It is as though Boccaccio, the representative of the new age, in all the fullness of his sensuous naïveté, appealed to the poets of chivalry, and said: "See here how all your fancies find their end in nature!"

It will not do to over-strain the censure implied in the foregoing paragraphs. Natural appetite, no less than the ideal, has its elements of poetry; and the sensuality of the Decameron accords with plastic beauty in a work of art incomparably lucid. Shelley, no lenient critic, wrote these words about the setting of the tales[97]: "What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us." Boccaccio's sense of beauty has already been alluded to; and it so pervades his work that special attention need scarcely be called to it. His prose abounds in passages which are perfect pictures after their own kind, like the following, selected, not from the Decameron, but from an earlier work, entitled Filocopo[98]:

Con gli orecchi intenti al suono, cominciò ad andare in quella parte ove il sentiva; e giunto presso alla fontana, vide le due giovinette. Elle erano nel viso bianchissime, la quale bianchezza quanto si conveniva di rosso colore era mescolata. I loro occhi pareano mattutine stelle, e le picciole bocche di colore di vermiglia rosa, più piacevoli diveniano nel muoverle alle note della loro canzone. I loro capelli come fila d'oro erano biondissimi, i quali alquanto crespi s'avvolgevano infra le verdi frondi delle loro ghirlande. Vestite per lo gran caldo, come è detto sopra, le tenere e dilicate carni di sottilissimi vestimenti, i quali dalla cintura in su strettissimi mostravano la forma delle belle mamme, le quali come due ritondi pomi pignevano in fuori il resistente vestimento, e ancora in più luoghi per leggiadre apriture si manifestavano le candide carni. La loro statura era di convenevole grandezza, in ciascun membro bene proporzionata.

Space and nineteenth-century canons of propriety prevent me from completing the picture made by Florio and these maidens. It might be paralleled with a hundred passages of like intention, where the Italian artist is revealed to us by touches curiously multiplied.[99] We find in them the sense of color, the scrupulous precision of form, and something of that superfluous minuteness which belongs to painting rather than to literature. The writer has seen a picture, and not felt a poem. In rendering it by words, he trusted to the imagination of his reader for suggesting a highly-finished work of plastic art to the mind.[100] The fêtes champêtres of the Venetian masters are here anticipated in the prose of the trecento. Such descriptions were frequent in Italian literature, especially frequent in the works of the best stylists, Sannazzaro, Poliziano, Ariosto, the last of whom has been severely but not unjustly criticised by Lessing for overstepping the limits of poetry in his portrait of Alcina. It may be pleaded in defense of Boccaccio and his followers that they belonged to a nation dedicated to the figurative arts, and that they wrote for a public familiar with painted form. Their detailed descriptions were at once translated into color by men habituated to the sight of pictures. During the Renaissance, painting dominated the Italian genius, and all the sister arts of expression felt that influence, just as at Athens sculpture lent something even to the drama.

As a poet, Boccaccio tried many styles. His epic, the Teseide, cannot be reckoned a great success. He is not at home upon the battle-field, and knew not how to sound the heroic trumpet.[101] Yet the credit of discovery may be awarded to the author of this poem. He introduced to the modern world a tale rich in romantic incidents and capable of still higher treatment than he was himself able to give it. When we remember how Chaucer, Shakspere, Fletcher and Dryden handled and rehandled the episode of Palamon's rivalry with Arcite for the hand of Emilia, we dare not withhold from Boccaccio the praise which belongs to creative genius.[102] It is no slight achievement to have made a story which bore such noble fruit in literature. The Teseide, moreover, fulfilled an important mission in Italian poetry. It adapted the popular ottava rima to the style of the romantic epic, and fixed it for Pulci, Poliziano, Boiardo, and Ariosto. That Boccaccio was not the inventor of the stanza, as used to be assumed, may now be considered beyond all question. That he had not learned to handle it with the majestic sweetness of Poliziano, or the infinite variety of Ariosto, is evident. Yet he deserves credit for having discerned its capacity and brought it into cultivated use.

Though unequal in quality, his sonnets and ballate, whether separately published or scattered through his numerous prose works, have a higher merit. The best are those in which, following Guido Cavalcanti's path, he gives free scope to his incomparable sense of natural beauty. The style is steeped in sweetness, softness and the delicacy of music. From these half-popular poems I might select the Ballata Io mi son giovinetta; the song of the Angel from the planet Venus, extracted from the Filocopo; a lament of a woman for her lost youth, Il fior che 'l valor perde; and the girl's prayer to Love, Tu se' nostro Signor caro e verace.[103] It is difficult for the critic to characterize poems so true to simple nature, so spontaneously passionate, and yet so artful in the turns of language, molded like wax beneath the poet's touch. Here sensuousness has no vulgarity, and the seductions of the flesh are sublimed by feeling to a beauty which is spiritual in refinement. It may be observed that Boccaccio writes his best love-poetry to be sung by girls. He has abandoned the standpoint of the chivalrous lover, though he still uses the phraseology of the Italo-Provençal school. What arrests his fancy is, not the ideal of womanhood raising man above himself, but woman conscious of her own supreme attractiveness. He delights in making her the mirror of the feelings she inspires. He bids her celebrate in hymns the beauty of her sex, the perfume of the charms that master man. When the metaphysical forms of speech, borrowed from the elder style, are used, they give utterance to a passion which is sensual, or blent at best with tenderness—a physical love-longing, a sentiment born of youth and desire. A girl, for instance, speaks about herself, and says:[104]

Colui che muove il cielo et ogni Stella

Mi fece a suo diletto Vaga leggiadra graziosa e bella, Per dar qua giù ad ogni alto intelletto Alcun segno di quella Biltà che sempre a lui sta nel cospetto.

On the lips of him who wrote the tale of Alibech, this language savors of profanity. Yet we are forced to recognize the poet's sincerity of feeling. It is the same problem as that which meets us in the Amorosa Visione.[105] The god Boccaccio worshiped was changed: but this deity was still divine, and deserved, he thought, the honors of mystic adoration. At the same time there is nothing Asiatic in his sensuous inspiration. The emotion is controlled and concentrated; the form is pure in all its outlines.

The Decameron was the masterpiece of Boccaccio's maturity. But he did not reach that height of excellence without numerous essays in styles of much diversity. While still a young man, not long after his meeting with Fiammetta, he began the Filocopo and dedicated it to his new love.[106] This romance was based upon the earlier tale of Floire et Blanceflor.[107] But the youthful poet invested the simple love-story of his Florio and Biancofiore with a masquerade costume of mythological erudition and wordy rhetoric, which removed it from the middle ages. The gods and goddesses of Olympus are introduced as living agents, supplying the machinery of the romance until the very end, when the hero and heroine are converted to Christianity, and abjure their old protectors with cold equanimity. We are left to imagine that, for Boccaccio at any rate, Venus, Mars and Cupid were as real as Christ and the saints, though superseded as objects of pious veneration. This confusion of Pagan and Christian mythology is increased by his habit of finding classical periphrases for the expression of religious ideas. He calls nuns Sacerdotesse di Diana. God the Father is Quell'eccelso e inestimabile principe Sommo Giove. Satan becomes Pluto, and human sin is Atropos. The Birth of Christ is described thus: la terra come sentì il nuovo incarco della deità del figliuol di Giove. The Apostles appear as nuovi cavalieri entrati contro a Plutone in campo.[108] The style of the Filocopo was new; and in spite, or perhaps because of, its euphuism, it had a decided success. This encouraged Boccaccio to attempt the Teseide. The Filostrato soon followed; and here for the first time we find the future author of the Decameron. Under Greek names and incidents borrowed from the War of Troy, we are in fact studying some episode from the chroniques galantes of the Neapolitan Court, narrated with the vigor of a perfect master in the art of story telling. Nothing could be further removed in sentiment from the heroism of the Homeric age or closer to the customs of a corrupt Italian city than this poem. In Troilo himself a feverish type of character, overmastered by passion which is rather a delirium of the senses than a mood of feeling, has been painted with a force that reminds us of the Fiammetta, where the same disease of the soul is delineated in a woman. Pandaro shows for the first time in modern literature an utterly depraved nature, reveling in seduction, and glutting a licentious imagination with the spectacle of satiated lust. The frenzied appetite of Troilo, Pandaro's ruffian arts, and the gradual yieldings of Griselda to a voluptuous inclination, reveal the master's hand; and though the poem is hurried toward the close (Boccaccio being only interested in the portrayal of his hero's love-languors, ecstasies and disappointment), the Filostrato must undoubtedly be reckoned the finest of his narratives in verse. The second and third Cantos are remarkable for dramatic movement and wealth of sensuous imagination, never rising to sublimity nor refined with such poetry as Shakspere found for Romeo and Juliet, but welling copiously from a genuinely ardent nature. The love described is nakedly and unaffectedly luxurious; it is an overmastering impulse, crowned at last with all the joys of sensual fruition. According to Boccaccio the repose conferred by Love upon his votaries is the satiety of their desires.[109] Between Dante's Signore della nobilitade and his Sir di tutta pace there is indeed a wide gulf fixed.[110]

After the Filostrato, Boccaccio next produced the Ameto, Amorosa Visione, Fiammetta, Ninfale Fiesolano, and Corbaccio, between the years 1343 and 1355. The Ameto is a tissue of pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style and affected with pedantic erudition. To read it attentively is now almost impossible, in spite of frequent passages where the luxuriant word-painting of the author is conspicuous. In the Amorosa Visione he attempted the style which Petrarch had adopted for his Trionfi. After reviewing human life under the several aspects of learning, glory, love, fortune, the poet finally resigns himself to a Nirvana of sensual beatitude. The poem is unsuccessful, because it adapts an obsolete form of art to requirements beyond its scope. Boccaccio tries to pour the new wine of the Renaissance into the old bottles of medieval allegory. In the Fiammetta Boccaccio exhibited all his strength as an anatomist of feeling, describing the effects of passion in a woman's heart, and analyzing its varying emotions with a subtlety which proved his knowledge of a certain type of female character. It is the first attempt in modern literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer. Since Virgil's Dido, or the Heroidum Epistolæ of Ovid, nothing of the sort had been essayed upon an equal scale. Taken together with Dante's Vita Nuova and Petrarch's Secretum, each of which is a personal confidence, the Fiammetta may be reckoned among those masterpieces of analytic art, which revealed the developed consciousness of the Italian race, at a moment when the science of emotion was still for the rest of Europe an undiscovered territory. This essay exercised a wide and lasting influence over the descriptive literature of the Renaissance. Yet when we compare its stationary monologues with the brief but pregnant touches of the Decameron, we are forced to assign it the rank of a study rather than a finished picture. The Fiammetta is to the Decameron what rhetoric is to the drama. This, however, is hardly a deduction from its merit. The delineation of an unholy and unhappy passion, blessed with fruition for one brief moment, cursed through months of illness and despair with all the furies of vain desire and poignant recollection, is executed with incomparable fullness of detail and inexhaustible richness of fancy. The reader rises from a perusal of the Fiammetta with impressions similar to those which a work of Richardson leaves upon the mind. At the same time it is full of poetry. The Vision of Venus, the invocation to Sleep, and the description of summer on the Bay of Baiæ relieve a deliberate anatomy of passion, which might otherwise be tedious.[111] The romance is so rich in material that it furnished the motives for a score of tales, and the novelists of the Renaissance availed themselves freely of its copious stores.[112]

The Corbaccio or Laberinto d'Amore is a satire upon women, animated with the bitterest sense of injury and teeming with vindictive spite. It was written with the avowed purpose of reviling a lady who had rejected Boccaccio's advances, and it paints the whole sex in the darkest colors. We could fancy that certain passages had been penned by a disappointed monk. Though this work is in tone unworthy of its author, it bore fruits in the literature of the next century. Alberti's satires are but rhetorical amplifications of themes suggested by the Corbaccio. Nor is it without value for the student of Italian manners. The list of romances read by women in the fourteenth century throws light upon Francesca's episode in Dante, and proves that the title Principe Galeotto was not given without precedent to Boccaccio's own writings.[113] The discourse on gentle birth in the same treatise should be studied in illustration of the Florentine conception of nobility.[114] Boccaccio, though he follows so closely in time upon Dante, already anticipates the democratic theories of Poggio.[115] Feudal feeling was extinct in the bourgeoisie of the great towns; nor had the experience of the Neapolitan Court suppressed in Boccaccio's mind the pride of a Florentine citizen. At the same time he felt that contempt of the literary classes for the common folk which was destined in the next century to divide the nation and to check the development of its vulgar literature. He apologizes for explaining Dante, and for bringing poetry down to the level of the feccia plebeia, the vulgo indegno, the ingrati meccanici, and so forth.[116]

It remains to speak of yet another of Boccaccio's minor works, the Ninfale Fiesolano. This is a tale in octave stanzas, which, under a veil of mythological romance, relates the loves of a young man and a nun, and their subsequent tragic ending. It owes its interest to the vivid picture of seduction, so glowingly painted as to betray the author's personal enjoyment of the motive. The story is thrown back into a time antecedent to Christianity and civil life. The heroine, Mensola, is a nymph of Diana; the hero, Affrico, a shepherd. The scene is laid among the mountains above Florence; and when Mensola has been changed into a fountain by the virgin goddess, whose rites she violated, the poem concludes with a myth invented to explain the founding of Fiesole. Civil society succeeds to the savagery of the woodland, and love is treated as the vestibule to culture.[117] The romantic and legendary portions of this tale are ill-connected. The versification is lax; and except in the long episode of Mensola's seduction, which might have formed a passage of contemporary novel-writing, the genius of Boccaccio shines with clouded luster.[118] Yet the Ninfale Fiesolano occupies a not unimportant place in the history of Italian literature. It adapts the pastoral form to that ideal of civility dependent upon culture, which took so strong a hold upon the imagination of the cinque cento. Its stanzas are a forecast of the Arcadia and the Orfeo.

In the minor poems and romances, which have here been passed in review, except perhaps in the Fiammetta, Boccaccio cannot be said to take a place among European writers of the first rank. His style is prolix; his versification, if we omit the Canzoni a Ballo and some sonnets, is slovenly; nor does he show exceptional ability in the conception and conduct of his stories. He is strongest when he paints a violent passion or describes voluptuous sensations, weakest when he attempts allegory or assumes the airs of a philosopher. We feel, in reading these productions of his earlier manhood, that nearly all were what the Germans call Gelegenheits-gedichte. The private key is lost to some of these works, which were intended for the ears of one among the multitude. On others it is plainly written that they were the outpourings of a personal desire, the self-indulgence of a fancy which reveled in imagined sensuality, using literature as the safety-valve for subjective longings. They lack the calm of perfect art, the full light falling on the object from without, which marks a poem of the highest order. From these romances of his youth, no less than from the Latin treatises of his maturity, we return to the Decameron when we seek to place Boccaccio among the classics. Nothing comparable with this Human Comedy for universal interest had appeared in modern Europe, if we except the Divine Comedy; and it may be questioned whether any work of equal scope was given to the world before the theater of Shakspere and the comedies of Molière. Boccaccio, though he paints the surface of life, paints it in a way to suggest the inner springs of character, and to bring the motives of action vividly before us. Quicquid agunt homines is the matter of his book. The recoil from medieval principles of conduct, which gives it a certain air of belonging to a moment rather than all time, was necessary in the evolution of intellectual freedom. In this respect, again, it faithfully reflected the Florentine temperament. At no epoch have the Italians been sternly and austerely pious. Piety with them is a passionate impulse rather than a deeply-reasoned habit based upon conviction. Their true nature is critical, susceptible to beauty, quick at seizing the ridiculous and exposing shams, suspicious of mysticism, realistic, pleasure-loving, practical. These qualities, special to the Florentines, but shared in large measure by the nation, found artistic expression in the Decameron, and asserted their supremacy in the literature of the Renaissance. That a sublime ideal, unapprehended by Boccaccio, and destined to remain unrepresented in the future, should have been conceived by Dante; that Petrarch should have modulated by his masterpiece of poetic workmanship from the key of the Divine Comedy to that of the Decameron; that one city should have produced three such men, and that one half-century should have witnessed their successive triumphs, forms the great glory of Florence, and is one of the most notable facts in the history of genius.

It remains to speak about Boccaccio's prose, and the relation of his style to that of other trecentisti. If we seek the origins of Italian prose, we find them first in the Franco-Italian romances of the Lombard period, which underwent the process of toscaneggiamento at Florence, next in books of morality and devotion, and also in the earlier chronicles. Among the Tuscanized tales of chivalry belonging to the first age of Italian literature are the Conti di antichi cavalieri and the Tavola Ritonda, both of which bear traces of translation from Provençal sources.[119] The Novellino, of which mention has already been made, betrays the same origin. The style of these works offers a pretty close parallel to the English of Sir Thomas Mallory. At the same time that the literature of France was assuming an Italian garb, many versions of Roman classics appeared. Orosius, Vegetius, Sallust, with parts of Cicero, Livy and Boethius were adapted to popular reading. But the taste of the time, as we have already seen in the preceding chapter, inclined the authors of these works to make selections with a view to moral edification. Their object was, not to present the ancients in a modern garb, but to cull notable examples of conduct and ethical sentences from the works that found most favor with the medieval intellect. Passing under the general titles of Fiori, Giardini, Tesori and Conviti—Fiori di filosofi e molto savi, Giardino di Consolazione, Fiore di Rettorica, Fiore del parlar gentile—these collections supplied the laity with extracts from Latin authors, and extended culture to the people. The Libro di Cato might be chosen as a fair example of their scope.[120] The number of such books, ascribed to Bono Giamboni, Brunetto Latini, and Guidotto of Bologna, proves that an extensive public was eager for instruction of this sort; and it is reasonable to believe that they were studied by the artisans of central Italy. The bass-reliefs and frescoes of incipient Italian art, the pavement of the Sienese Cathedral, the Palazzo della Ragione at Padua, bear traces of the percolation through all social strata of this literature. A more important work of style was the De Regimine Principum, of Egidio Colonna, translated from the French version by an unknown Tuscan hand; while Giamboni's Florentine version of Latini's Tesoro introduced the erudition of the most learned grammarian of his age to the Italians. Contemporaneously with this growth of vernacular treatises on rhetorical and ethical subjects, we may assume that memoirs and chronicles began to be written in the vulgar tongue. But so much doubt has recently been thrown upon the earliest monuments of Italian historiography that it must here suffice to indicate the change which was undoubtedly taking place in this branch also of composition toward the close of the thirteenth century.[121] Literature of all kinds yielded to the first strong impact of the native idiom. Epistles, for example, whether of private or of public import, were now occasionally written in Italian, as can be proved by reference to the published letters of Guittone d'Arezzo.[122]

The works hitherto mentioned belong to the latter half of the thirteenth century. Their style, speaking generally, is dry and tentative. Except in the versions of French romances, which borrow grace from their originals, we do not find in them artistic charm of diction. The Fiori and Giardini are little better than commonplace books, in which the author's personality is lost beneath a mass of extracts and citations. The beginning of the fourteenth century witnessed the growth of a new Italian prose. Of this second stage, the masterpieces are Villani's Chronicle, Dante's Vita Nuova, the Fioretti di S. Francesco, the Leggende dei Santi Padri of Domenico Cavalca, and Jacopo Passavanti's Specchio della vera Penitenza.[123] These writers have no lack of individuality. Their mind moves in their style, and gives a personal complexion to their utterance. The chief charm of their manner, so far as it is common to characters so diverse, is its grave and childlike spontaneity. For vividness of description, for natural simplicity of phrase, and for that amiable garrulity which rounds a picture by innumerable details and unconscious touches of graphic force, not one of the books of this period surpasses the Fioretti. Nor are the Leggende of Cavalca less admirable. Modern, especially Northern, students may discover too much suavity and unction in the writer's tone—a superfluity of sweetness which fatigues, a caressing tenderness that clogs. After reading a few pages, we lay the book down, and wonder whether it could really have been a grown man, and not a cherub flown from Fra Angelico's Paradise, who composed it. This infantine note belongs to the cloister and the pulpit. It matches the simple credulity of the narrator, and well befits the miracles he loves to record. We seem to hear a good old monk gossiping to a party of rosy-cheeked novices, like those whom Sodoma painted in his frescoes of S. Benedict at Monte Oliveto. It need hardly be observed that neither in Villani's nor in Dante's prose do we find the same puerility. But all the trecentisti have a common character of limpidity, simplicity, and unaffected grace.

The difficulties under which even the best Italian authors labor while using their own language, incline them to an exaggerated admiration for these pearls of the trecento. They look back with envy to an age when men could write exactly as they thought and felt and spoke, without the tyranny of the Vocabolario or the fear of an Academy before their eyes. We, with whom the literary has always closely followed the spoken language, and who have, practically speaking, no dialects, while we recognize the purity of that incomparably transparent manner, cannot comprehend that it should be held up for imitation in the present age. To paint like Giotto would be easier than to write like Passavanti. The conditions of life and the modes of thought are so altered that the style of the trecento will not lend itself to modern requirements.

Among the prosaists of the fourteenth century—Cavalca, Villani, the author of the Fioretti, and Passavanti—Boccaccio meets us with a sudden surprise. They aimed at finding the readiest and most appropriate words to convey their meaning in the simplest, most effective manner. Without artistic purpose, without premeditation, without side-glances at the classics, they wrote straightforward from their heart. There is little composition or connection in their work, no molding of paragraphs or rounding of phrases, no oratorical development, no gradation of tone. Boccaccio, on the contrary, sought to give the fullness and sonority of Latin to the periods of Italian prose. He had the Ciceronian cadence and the labyrinthine sentences of Livy in view. By art of style he was bent on rendering the vulgar language a fit vehicle for learning, rhetoric, and history. In order to make it clear what sorts of changes he introduced, it will be necessary to compare his prose with that of his contemporaries. Dante used the following words to describe his first meeting with Beatrice[124]:

Nove fiate già, appresso al mio nascimento, era tornato lo cielo della luce quasi ad un medesimo punto, quanto alla sua propria girazione, quando alli miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa Donna della mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice, i quali non sapeano che si chiamare. Ella era già in questa vita stata tanto che nel suo tempo lo cielo stellato era mosso verso la parte d'oriente delle dodici parti l'una d'un grado: sì che quasi dal principio del suo anno nono apparve a me, ed io la vidi quasi alla fine del mio nono anno.

Boccaccio, relating his first glimpse of Fiammetta on April 17, 1341, spins the following cocoon of verbiage:[125]

Avvenne che un giorno, la cui prima ora Saturno avea signoreggiata, essendo già Febo co' suoi cavalli al sedecimo grado del celestiale Montone pervenuto, e nel quale il glorioso partimento del figliuiolo di Giove dagli spogliati regni di Plutone si celebrava, io, della presente opera componitore, mi trovai in un grazioso e bel tempio in Partenope, nominato da colui che per deificarsi sostenne che fosse fatto di lui sacrificio sopra la grata, e quivi con canto pieno di dolce melodia ascoltava l'uficio che in tale giorno si canta, celebrato da' sacerdoti successori di colui che prima la corda cinse umilmente esaltando la povertade quella seguendo.

Dante's style is analytic and direct. The sentences follow each other naturally; and though the language is stiff, from scrupulous precision, and in one place intentionally obscure, it is free from affectation. Boccaccio aims at a synthetic presentation of all he means to say; and he calls nothing by its right name, if he can devise a periphrasis. The breathless period pants its labored clauses out, and dwindles to a lame conclusion. The Filocopo was, however, an immature production. In order to do its author justice, and at the same time to compare his style with a graceful piece of fourteenth-century composition, I will select a passage from the Fioretti di S. Francesco, and place it beside one taken from the first novel of the Decameron. This is the episode of S. Anthony preaching to the fishes[126]:

E detto ch'egli ebbe così, subitamente venne alla riva a lui tanta moltitudine di pesci, grandi, piccoli e mezzani, che mai in quel mare nè in quel fiume non ne fu veduta sì grande moltitudine: e tutti teneano i capi fuori dell'acqua, e tutti stavano attenti verso la faccia di santo Antonio, e tutti in grandissima pace e mansuetudine e ordine: imperocchè dinanzi e più presso alla riva stavano i pesciolini minori, e dopo loro stavano i pesci mezzani, poi di dietro, dov'era l'acqua più profonda, stavano i pesci maggiori. Essendo dunque in cotale ordine e disposizione allogati i pesci, santo Antonio cominciò a predicare solennemente, e disse così: Fratelli miei pesci, molto siete tenuti, secondo la vostra possibilitade, di ringraziare il nostro Creatore, che v'ha dato così nobile elemento per vostra abitazione; sicchè, come vi piace, avete l'acque dolci e salse; e havvi dati molti rifugii a schifare le tempeste; havvi ancora dato elemento chiaro e transparente, e cibo, per lo quale voi possiate vivere, etc., etc.... A queste e simiglianti parole e ammaestramenti di santo Antonio, cominciarono li pesci ad aprire la bocca, inchinaronli i capi, e con questi ed altri segnali di riverenza, secondo li modi a loro possibili, laudarono Iddio.

This is a portion of the character of Ser Ciapelletto:

Era questo Ciapelletto di questa vita. Egli essendo notajo, avea grandissima vergogna quando uno de' suoi strumenti (come che pochi ne facesse) fosse altro che falso trovato; de' quali tanti avrebbe fatti, di quanti fosse stato richesto, e quelli più volentieri in dono, che alcun altro grandemente salariato. Testimonianze false con sommo diletto diceva richesto e non richesto; e dandosi a' que' tempi in Francia a' saramenti grandissima fede, non curandosi fargli falsi, tante quistioni malvagiamente vincea, a quante a giurare di dire il vero sopra la sua fede era chiamato. Aveva oltre modo piacere, e forte vi studiava, in commettere tra amici e parenti e qualunque altra persona mali et inimicizie e scandali; de' quali quanto maggiori mali vedeva seguire, tanto più d'allegrezza prendea. Invitato ad uno omicidio o a qualunque altra rea cosa, senza negarlo mai, volenterosamente v'andava; e più volte a fedire et ad uccidere uomini colle proprie mani si trovò volentieri.

These examples will suffice to show how Boccaccio distinguished himself from the trecentisti in general. When his style attained perfection in the Decameron, it had lost the pedantry of his first manner, and combined the brevity of the best contemporary writers with rhetorical smoothness and intricacy. The artful structure of the period, and the cadences of what afterwards came to be known as "numerous prose," were carried to perfection. Still, though he was the earliest writer of a scientific style, Boccaccio failed to exercise a paramount influence over the language until the age of the Academies.[127] The writers of the fifteenth century, partly no doubt because these were chiefly men of the people, appear to have developed their manner out of the material of the trecento in general, modified by contemporary usage. This is manifest in the Reali di Francia, a work of considerable stylistic power, which cannot probably be dated earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century. The novelist Masuccio modeled his diction, so far as he was able, on the type of the Decameron, and Alberti owed much to the study of such works as the Fiammetta. Yet, speaking broadly, neither the excellences nor the defects of Boccaccio found devoted imitators until the epoch when the nation at large turned their attention to the formation of a common Italian style. It was then, in the days of Bembo and Sperone, that Boccaccio took rank with Petrarch as an infallible authority on points of language. The homage rendered at that period to the Decameron decided the destinies of Italian prose, and has since been deplored by critics who believe Boccaccio to have established a false standard of taste.[128] This is a question which must be left to the Italians to decide. One thing, however, is clear; that a nation schooled by humanistic studies of a Latin type, divided by their dialects, and removed by the advance of culture beyond the influences of the purer trecentisti, found in the rhetorical diction of the Decameron a common model better suited to their taste and capacity than the simple style of the Villani could have furnished.

Boccaccio died in 1375, seventeen months after the death at Arquà of his master, Petrarch. The painter Andrea Orcagna died about the same period. With these three great artists the genius of medieval Florence sank to sleep. A temporary torpor fell upon the people, who during the next half century produced nothing of marked originality in literature and art. The Middle Age had passed away. The Renaissance was still in preparation. When Boccaccio breathed his last, men felt that the elder sources of inspiration had failed, and that no more could be expected from the spirit of the previous centuries. Heaven and hell, the sanctuaries of the soul, the garden of this earth, had been traversed. The tentative essays and scattered preludings, the dreams and visions, the preparatory efforts of all previous modern literatures, had been completed, harmonized and presented to the world in the master-works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. What remained but to make a new start? This step forward or aside was now to be taken in the Classical Revival. Well might Sacchetti exclaim in that canzone[129] which is at once Boccaccio's funeral dirge and also the farewell of Florence to the fourteenth century:

Sonati sono i corni

D'ogni parte a ricolta;

La stagione è rivolta:

Se tornerà non so, ma credo tardi.

CHAPTER III.

THE TRANSITION.

The Church, Chivalry, the Nation—The National Element in Italian Literature—Florence—Italy between 1373 and 1490—Renascent Nationality—Absorption in Scholarship—Vernacular Literature follows an obscure Course—Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular Currents—Renascence of Italian—The Italian Temperament—Importance of the Quattrocento—Sacchetti's Novels—Ser Giovanni's Pecorone—Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry—Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza—Nicolò Soldanieri—Alesso Donati—His Realistic Poems—Followers of Dante and Petrarch—Political Poetry of the Guelfs and Ghibellines—Fazio degli Uberti—Saviozzo da Siena—Elegies on Dante—Sacchetti's Guelf Poems—Advent of the Bourgeoisie—Discouragement of the Age—Fazio's Dittamondo—Rome and Alvernia—Frezzi's Quadriregio—Dantesque Imitation—Blending of Classical and Medieval Motives—Matteo Palmieri's Città di Vita—The Fate of Terza Rima—Catherine of Siena—Her Letters—S. Bernardino's Sermons—Salutati's Letters—Alessandra degli Strozzi—Florentine Annalists—Giov. Cavalcanti—Corio's History of Milan—Matarazzo's Chronicle of Perugia—Masuccio and his Novellino—His Style and Genius—Alberti—Born in Exile—His Feeling for Italian—Enthusiasm for the Roman Past—The Treatise on the Family—Its Plan—Digression on the Problem of its Authorship—Pandolfini or Alberti—The Deiciarchia—Tranquillità dell'Animo—Teogenio—Alberti's Religion—Dedication of the Treatise on Painting—Minor Works in Prose on Love—Ecatomfila, Amiria, Deifiria, etc.—Misogynism—Novel of Ippolito and Leonora—Alberti's Poetry—Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the Age—Francesco Colonna—The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—Its Style—Its Importance as a Work of the Transition—A Romance of Art, Love, Humanism—The Allegory—Polia—Antiquity—Relation of this Book to Boccaccio and Valla—It Foreshadows the Renaissance.

The two preceding chapters will have made it clear that the Church, Chivalry, and the Nation contributed their several quotas to the growth of Italian literature.[130] The ecclesiastical or religious element, so triumphantly expressed in the Divine Comedy, was not peculiar to the Italians. They held it in common with the whole of Christendom; and though the fabric of the Roman Church took form in Italy, though the race gave S. Francis, S. Thomas, and S. Bonaventura to the militia of the medieval faith, still the Italians as a nation were not specifically religious. Piety, which is quite a different thing from ecclesiastical organization, was never the truest and sincerest accent of their genius. Had it been so, the history of Latin Christianity would have followed another course, and the schism of the sixteenth century might have been avoided.

The chivalrous element they shared, at a considerable disadvantage, with the rest of feudal Europe. Chivalry was not indigenous to Italian soil, nor did it ever flourish there. The literature which it produced in France, became Italian only when the Guidi and Dante gave it philosophical significance. Petrarch, who represents this motive, as Dante represents the ecclesiastical, generalized Provençal poetry. His Canzoniere cannot be styled a masterpiece of chivalrous art. Its spirit is modern and human in a wider and more comprehensive sense.

To characterize the national strain in this complex pedigree of culture is no easy task—chiefly because it manifested itself under two apparently antagonistic forms; first in the recovery of the classics by the scholars of the fifteenth century; secondly in the portraiture of Italian character and temperament by writers of romance and fiction. The divergence of these two main currents of literary energy upon the close of the middle ages, and their junction in the prime of the Renaissance, are the topics of my present volume.

We have seen how tenaciously the Italians clung to memories of ancient Rome, and how their history deprived them of that epical material which started modern literature among the northern races. While the vulgar language was being formed from the dialects into which rustic Latin had divided, a new nationality grew into shape by an analogous process out of the remnants of the old Italic population, fused with recent immigrants. Absorbing Greek blood in the south and Teutonic in the north, this composite race maintained the ascendancy of the Romanized people, in obedience to laws whereby the prevalent and indigenous strain outlives and assimilates ingredients from without. Owing to a variety of causes, among which must be reckoned geographical isolation and imperfect Lombard occupation, the purest Italic stock survived upon the Tuscan plains and highlands, between the Tyrrhene Sea and the Apennines, and where the Arno and the Tiber start together from the mountains of Arezzo. This region was the cradle of the new Italian language, the stronghold of the new Italian nation. Its center, political, commercial and intellectual, was Florence, which gave birth to the three great poets of the fourteenth century. Though Florence developed her institutions later than the Lombard communes, she maintained a civic independence longer than any State but Venice; and her popolo may be regarded as the type of the popular Italian element. Here the genius of Italy became conscious of itself, and here the people found a spokesman in Boccaccio. Abandoning ecclesiastical and feudal traditions, Boccaccio concentrated his force upon the delineation of his fellow-countrymen as he had learned to know them. The Italians of the new age start into distinctness in his work, with the specific qualities they were destined to maintain and to mature during the next two centuries. Thus Boccaccio fully represents one factor of what I have called the national element. At the same time, he occupies a hardly less important place in relation to the other or the humanistic factor. Like his master Petrarch, he pronounced with ardor and decision for that scholarship which restored the link between the present and the past of the Italian race. Independently of their achievements in modern literature, we have to regard the humanistic efforts of these two great writers as a sign that the national element had asserted itself in antagonism to the Church and chivalry.

The recovery of the classics was, in truth, the decisive fact in Italian evolution. Having attained full consciousness in the Florence of Dante's age, the people set forth in search of their spiritual patrimony. They found it in the libraries. They became possessed of it through the labors of the scholars. Italian literature during the first three quarters of the fifteenth century merged, so far as polite society was concerned, in Humanism, the history of which has already been presented to the reader in the second volume of this work.[131] For a hundred years, from the publication of the Decameron in 1373 to the publication of Poliziano's Stanze, the genius of Italy was engaged in an exploratory pilgrimage, the ultimate end of which was the restoration of the national inheritance in ancient Rome. This process of renascent classicism, which was tantamount to ranascent nationality, retarded the growth of the vulgar literature. Yet it was imperatively demanded not only by the needs of Europe at large, but more particularly and urgently by the Italians themselves, who, unlike the other modern races, had no starting-point but ancient Rome. The immediate result of the humanistic movement was the separation of the national element into two sections, learned and popular, Latin and Italian. The common people, who had repeated Dante's Canzoni, and whose life Boccaccio had portrayed in the Decameron, were now divided from the rising class of scholars and professors. Cultivated persons of all ranks despised Italian, and spent their time in studies beyond the reach of the laity. Like some mountain rivers after emerging from the highlands of their origin, the vernacular literature passed as it were for a season underground, and lost itself in unexplored ravines. Absorbed into the masses of the people, it continued an obscure but by no means insignificant course, whence it was destined to reappear at the right moment, when the several constituents of the nation had attained the sense of intellectual unity. This sense of unity was the product of the classical revival; for the activity of the wandering professors and the fanatical enthusiasm for the ancients were needed to create a common consciousness, a common standard of taste and intelligence in the peninsula. It must in this connection be remembered that the vernacular literature of the fourteenth century, though it afterwards became the glory of Italy as a whole, was originally Florentine. The medium prepared by the scholars was demanded in order that the Tuscan classics should be accepted by the nation as their own. Toward the close of the fifteenth century, a fusion between the humanistic and the vulgar literatures was made; and this is the renascence of Italian—no longer Tuscan, but participated by the race at large. The poetry of the people then received a form refined by classic learning; and the two sections of what I have called the national element, joined to produce the genuine Italian culture of the golden age.

It is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to insist upon this point, which forms the main motive of my present theme. After the death of Boccaccio the history of Italian literature is the history of that national element which distinguished itself from the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous, and at last in the Decameron asserted its superiority over both. But the stream of intellectual energy bifurcates. During the fifteenth century, the Latin instincts of the new Italic people found vigorous expansion in the humanistic movement, while the vernacular literature carried on a fitful and obscure, but potent, growth among the proletariate. At the end of that century, both currents, the learned and the popular, the classical and the modern, reunited on a broader plane. The nation, educated by scholarship and brought to a sense of its identity, resumed the vulgar tongue; and what had hitherto been Tuscan, now became Italian. In this renascence neither the religious nor the feudal principle regained firm hold upon the race. Their influence is still discernible, however, in the lyrics of the Petrarchisti and the epics of Orlando; for nothing which has once been absorbed into a people's thought is wholly lost. How they were transmuted by the action of the genuine Italic genius, triumphant now upon all quarters of the field, will appear in the sequel of these volumes; while it remains for another work to show in what way, under the influences of the Counter-Reformation, both the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous elements reasserted themselves for a brief moment in Tasso. Still even in Tasso we recognize the Italian courtier rather than the knight or the ascetic. For the rest, it is clear that the spirit of Boccaccio—that is, the spirit of the Florentine people—refined by humanistic discipline and glorified by the reawakening of Italy to a sense of intellectual unity, determined the character of literature during its most brilliant period.[132]

Many peculiarities of the Renaissance in Italy, and of the Renaissance in general, as communicated through Italians to Europe, can be explained by this emergence of the national Italic temperament. Political and positive; keenly sensitive to natural beauty, and gifted with a quick artistic faculty; neither persistently religious nor profoundly speculative; inclined to skepticism, but accepting the existing order with sarcastic acquiescence; ironical and humorous rather than satirical; sensuous in feeling, realistic in art, rhetorical in literature; abhorring mysticism and ill-fashioned for romantic exaltation; worldly, with a broad and genial toleration; refined in taste and social conduct, but violent in the indulgence of personal proclivities; born old in contrast with the youth of the Teutonic races; educated by long experience to expect a morrow differing in no essentials from to-day or yesterday; demanding, therefore, from the moment all that it can yield of satisfaction to the passions—the Italians, thus constituted, in their vigorous reaction against the middle ages, secularized the Papacy, absorbed the Paganism of the classics, substituted an æsthetic for an ethical ideal, democratized society, and opened new horizons for pioneering energy in all the fields of knowledge. The growth of their intelligence was precocious and fore-doomed to a sudden check; nor was it to be expected that their solutions of the deepest problems should satisfy races of a different fiber and a posterity educated on the scientific methods of investigation. Unexpected factors were added to the general calculation by the German Reformation and the political struggles which preceded the French Revolution. Yet the influence of this Italian temperament, in forming and preparing the necessary intellectual medium in modern Europe, can hardly be exaggerated.

When the Italian genius manifested itself in art, in letters and in scholarship, national unity was already an impossibility.[133] The race had been broken up into republics and tyrannies. Their political forces were centrifugal rather than centripetal. The first half of the fifteenth century was the period when their division into five great powers, held together by the frail bond of diplomacy, had been accomplished, and when Italy was further distracted by the ambition of unprincipled condottieri. Under these conditions of dismemberment, the Renaissance came to perfection, and the ideal unity of the Italians was achieved. The space of forty years' tranquillity and equilibrium, which preceded Charles VIII.'s invasion, marked an epoch of recombination and consolidation, when the two currents of national energy, learned and popular, met to form the culture of the golden age. After being Tuscan and neo-Latin, the literature which expressed the nation now became Italian. Such is the importance of the Quattrocento in Italian history—long denied, late recognized, but now at length acknowledged as necessary and decisive for both Italy and Europe.

In the present chapter I propose to follow the transition from the middle ages effected by writers who, though they used the mother tongue, take rank among cultivated authors. The two succeeding chapters will be devoted to the more obscure branches of vernacular literature which flourished among the people.

Franco Sacchetti, who uttered the funeral dirge of the fourteenth century, was also the last considerable writer of that age.[134] Born about the year 1335, of one of the old noble families of Florence, he lived until the end of the century, employed in various public duties and assiduous in his pursuit of letters.[135] He was a friend of Boccaccio, and felt the highest admiration not only for his novels but also for his learning, though he tells us in the preface to his own three hundred tales that he was himself a man of slender erudition—uomo discolo e grosso.[136] From this preface we also learn that enthusiasm for the Decameron prompted him to write a set of novels on his own account.[137] Though Sacchetti loved and worshiped Boccaccio, he did not imitate his style. The Novelle are composed in the purest vernacular, without literary artifice or rhetorical ornament. They boast no framework of fiction, like that which lends the setting of romance to the Decameron; nor do they pretend to be more than short anecdotes with here and there a word of moralizing from the author. Yet the student of Italian, eager to know what speech was current in the streets of Florence during the last half of that century, will value Sacchetti's idiomatic language even more highly than Boccaccio's artful periods. He tells us what the people thought and felt, in phrases borrowed from their common talk. The majority of the novels treat of Florentine life, while some of them bring illustrious Florentines—Dante and Giotto and Guido Cavalcanti—on the scene. Sacchetti's preface vouches for the truth of his stories; but, whether they be strictly accurate or not, we need not doubt their fidelity to contemporary customs, domestic manners, and daily conversation. Sacchetti inspires a certain confidence, a certain feeling of friendliness. And yet what a world is revealed in his Novelle—a world without tenderness, pathos, high principle, passion, or enthusiasm—men and women delighting in coarse humor, in practical jokes of inconceivable vulgarity, in language of undisguised grossness, in cruelty, fraud, violence, incontinence! The point is almost always some clever trick, a burla or a beffa, or a piece of subtly-planned retaliation. Knaves and fools are the chief actors in this comic theater; and among the former we find many friars, among the latter many husbands. To accept the Novelle as adequate in every detail to the facts of Florentine society, would be uncritical. They must chiefly be used for showing what passed for fun among the burghers, and what seemed fit and decent topics for discussion. Studied from that point of view, and also for the abundant light they throw on customs and fashions, Sacchetti's tales are highly valuable. The bourgeoisie of Florence lives again in their animated pages. We have in them a literature written to amuse, if not precisely to represent, a civic society closely packed within a narrow area, witty and pleasure-loving, acutely sensitive to the ridiculous, with strongly-denned tastes and a decided preference for pungent flavors. One distinctive Florentine quality emerges with great clearness. That is a malicious and jibing humor—the malice Dante took with him to the Inferno; the malice expressed by Il Lasca and Firenzuola, epitomized in Florentine nicknames, and condensed in Rabelaisian anecdotes which have become classical. It reaches its climax in the cruel but laughter-moving jest played by Brunelleschi on the unfortunate cabinet-maker, which has been transmitted to us in the novel of Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo.

Somewhat later than Sacchetti's Novelle, appeared another collection of more or less veracious anecdotes, compiled by a certain Ser Giovanni.[138] He called it Il Pecorone, which may be interpreted "The Simpleton:"

Ed è per nome il Pecoron chiamato, Perchè ci ha dentro novi barbagianni;

Ed io son capo di cotal brigata,

E vo belando come pecorone, Facendo libri, e non ne so boccata.

Nothing is known about Ser Giovanni, except what he tells us in the Sonnet just quoted. From it we learn that he began his Novelle in the year 1378—the year of the Ciompi Revolution at Florence. As a framework for his stories, he devised a frigid romance which may be briefly told. Sister Saturnina, the prioress of a convent at Forlì, was so wise and beautiful that her fame reached Florence, where a handsome and learned youth, named Auretto, fell in love with her by hearsay. He took orders, journeyed across the Apennines, and contrived to be appointed chaplain to Saturnina's nuns. In due course of time she discreetly returned his affection, and, managing their affairs with prudence and decorum, they met for private converse and mutual solace in a parlor of the convent. Here they whiled away the hours by telling stories—entertaining, instructive, or romantic. The collection is divided into twenty-five days; and since each lover tells a tale, there are fifty Novelle, interspersed with songs after the fashion of Boccaccio. In the style, no less than in the method of the book, Ser Giovanni shows himself a closer follower of the Decameron than Sacchetti. His novels have a wide range of incidents, embracing tragic and pathetic motives no less than what is humorous. They are treated rhetorically, and, instead of being simple anecdotes, aim at the varied movement of a drama. The language, too, is literary, and less idiomatic than Sacchetti's. Antiquarians will find in some of these discourses an interest separate from what is common to works of fiction. They represent how history was communicated to the people of that day. Saturnina, for example, relates the myth of Troy and the foundation of Fiesole, which, as Dante tells us, the Tuscan mothers of Cacciaguida's age sang to their children. The lives of the Countess Matilda and Frederick Barbarossa, the antiquity and wealth of the Tuscan cities, the tragedy of Corso Donati, Giano della Bella's exile, the Angevine Conquest of Sicily, the origin of Guelfs and Ghibellines in Italy, Attila's apocryphal siege of Florence, supply materials for narratives in which the true type of the Novella disappears. Yet Ser Giovanni mingles more amusing stories with these lectures;[139] and the historical dissertations are managed with such grace, with so golden a simplicity of style, that they are readable. Of a truth it is comic to think of the enamored monk and nun meeting in the solitude of their parlor to exchange opinions upon Italian history. Though he had the good qualities of a trecentisto prosaist, Ser Giovanni was in this respect but a poor artist.

Both Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni were poets of no mean ability. As in his prose, so also in his Canzoni a Ballo, the author of the Pecorone followed Boccaccio, without, however, attaining to that glow and sensuous abandonment which renders the lyrics no less enchanting than the narratives of the Decameron. His style is smooth and fluent, suggesting literary culture rather than spontaneous inspiration.[140] Yet it is always lucid. Through the transparent language we see straight into the hearts of lovers as the novelist of Florence understood them. Written for the most part in the seven-lined stanza with recurring couplet, which Guido Cavalcanti first made fashionable, these Ballate give lyrical expression to a great variety of tender situations. The emotion of first love, the pains and pleasures of a growing passion, the anguish of betrayal, regrets, quarrels, reconciliations, are successively treated. In short, Ser Giovanni versified and set to music all the principal motives upon which the Novella of feeling turned, and formed an ars amandi adapted to the use of the people. In this sense his poems seem to have been accepted, for we find MSS. of the Ballate detached from the prose of Il Pecorone.[141] Among the most striking may be mentioned the canzonet Tradita sono, which retrospectively describes the joy of a girl in her first love; another on the fashions of Florentine ladies, Quante leggiadre; and the lamentation of a woman whose lover has abandoned her, and who sees no prospect but the cloister—Oi me lassa.[142]

Ser Giovanni's lyrics are echoes of the city, where maidens danced their rounds upon the piazza in May evenings, and young men courted the beauty of the hour with songs and visits to her chamber:

Con quanti dolci suon e con che canti

Io era visitata tutto 'l giorno! E nella zambra venivan gli amanti, Facendo festa e standomi intorno: Ed io guardava nel bel viso adorno, Che d'allegrezza mi cresceva il core.

Franco Sacchetti carries us to somewhat different scenes. The best of his madrigals and canzonets describe the pleasures of country life. They are not genuinely rustic; nor do they, in Theocritean fashion, attempt to render the beauty of the country from the peasant's point of view. On the contrary, they owe their fascination to the contrast between the simplicity of the villa and the unrest of the town, where:

Mai vi si dice e di ben far vi è caro.

They are written for and by the bourgeois who has escaped from shops and squares and gossiping street-corners. The keynote of this poetry, which has always something of the French école buissonnière in its fresh unalloyed enjoyment, is struck in a song describing the return of Spring[143]:

Benedetta sia la state

Che ci fa sì solazzare! Maladetto sia lo verno Che a città ci fa tornare!

The poet summons his company of careless folk, on pleasure bent:

No' siam una compagnia,

I' dico di cacciapensieri.

He takes them forth into the fields among the farms and olive-gardens, bidding them leave prudence and grave thoughts within the lofty walls of Florence town:

Il senno e la contenenza

Lasciam dentro all'alte mura Della città di Fiorenza.

This note of gayety and pure enjoyment is sustained throughout his lyrics. In one Ballata he describes a country girl, caught by thorns, and unable to avoid her admirer's glance.[144] Another gives a pretty picture of a maiden with a wreath of olive-leaves and silver.[145] A third is a little idyll of two girls talking to their lambs, and followed by an envious old woman.[146] A fourth is a biting satire on old women—Di diavol vecchia femmina ha natura.[147] A fifth is that incomparably graceful canzonet, O vaghe montanine pasturelle, the popularity of which is proved by the fact that it was orally transmitted for many generations, and attributed in after days to both Lorenzo de' Medici and Angelo Poliziano.[148] Indeed, it may be said in passing that Poliziano owed much to Sacchetti. This can be seen by comparing Sacchetti's Ballata on the Gentle Heart, and his pastoral of the Thorn-tree with the later poet's lyrics.[149]

The unexpressed contrast between the cautious town-life of the burgher poet and his license in the villa, to which I have already called attention, determines the character of many minor lyrics by Sachetti.[150] We comprehend the spirit of these curious poems, at once popular and fashionable, when we compare them with medieval French Pastourelles, or with similar compositions by wandering Latin students. In the Carmina Burana may be found several little poems, describing the fugitive loves of truant scholars with rustic girls, which prove that, long before Sacchetti's age, the town had sought spring-solace in the country.[151] Men are too apt to fancy that what they consider the refinements of passion and fashion (the finer edge, for example, put upon desire by altering its object from the known and trivial to the untried and exceptional, from venal beauties in the city to shepherd maidens on the village-green) are inventions of their own times. Yet it was precisely a refinement of this sort which gave peculiar flavor to Sacchetti's songs in the fourteenth century, and which made them sought after. They had great vogue in Italy, enjoying the privilege of popularity among the working classes, and helping to diffuse that sort of pastoral part-song which we still know as Madrigal.[152] Sacchetti was himself a good musician; many of his songs were set to music by himself, and others by his friends. This gives a pleasant old-world homeliness to the Latin titles inscribed beneath the rubrics—Franciscus de Organis sonum dedit; Intonatum per Francum Sacchetti; Francus sonum dedit; and so forth.

The Ballads and Madrigals of Niccolò Soldanieri should be mentioned in connection with Sacchetti; though they do not detach themselves in any marked way from the style of love poetry practiced at the close of the fourteenth century.[153] The case is different with Alesso Donati's lyrics. In them we are struck by a new gust of coarse and powerful realism, which has no parallel among the elder poets except in the savage sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri. Vividly natural situations are here detached from daily life and delineated with intensity of passion, vehement sincerity. Sacchetti's gentleness and genial humor have disappeared. In their place we find a dramatic energy and a truth of language that are almost terrible. Each of the little scenes, which I propose to quote in illustration of these remarks, might be compared to etchings bitten with aquafortis into copper. Here, for example, is a nun, who has resolved to throw aside her veil and follow her lover in a page's dress[154]:

La dura corda e 'l vel bruno e la tonica

Gittar voglio e lo scapolo Che mi tien qui rinchiusa e fammi monica; Poi teco a guisa d'assetato giovane, Non già che si sobarcoli, Venir me 'n voglio ove fortuna piovane:

E son contenta star per serva e cuoca,

Chè men mi cocerò ch'ora mi cuoca.

Here is a dialogue at dawn between a woman and her paramour. The presence of the husband sleeping in the chamber is suggested with a brutal vigor[155]:

Dè vattene oggimai, ma pianamente,

Amor; per dio, sì piano Che non ti senta il mal vecchio villano. Ch'egli sta sentecchioso, e, se pur sente
Ch'i' die nel letto volta,
Temendo abbraccia me no gli sie tolta.
Che tristo faccia Iddio chi gli m'à data
E chi spera 'n villan buona derrata.

Scarcely less forcible is the girl's vow against her mother, who keeps her shut at home[156]:

In pena vivo qui sola soletta

Giovin rinchiusa dalla madre mia, La qual mi guarda con gran gelosia. Ma io le giuro alla croce di Dio Che s'ella mi terrà qui più serrata, Ch'i' diro—Fa' con Dio, vecchia arrabiata;

E gitterò la rocca, il fuso e l'ago,

Amor, fuggendo a te di cui m'appago.

To translate these madrigals would be both difficult and undesirable. It is enough to have printed the original texts. They prove that aristocratic versifiers at this period were adopting the style of the people, and adding the pungency of brief poetic treatment to episodes suggested by novelle.[157]

While dealing with the Novelle and the semi-popular literature of this transition period, I have hitherto neglected those numerous minor poets who continued the traditions of the earlier trecento.[158] There are two main reasons for this preference. In the first place, the novelle was destined to play a most important part in the history of the Renaissance, imposing its own laws of composition upon species so remote as the religious drama and romantic epic. In the second place, the dance-songs, canzonets and madrigals of Sacchetti's epoch lived upon the lips of the common folk, who during the fifteenth century carried Italian literature onward through a subterranean channel.[159] When vernacular poetry reappeared into the light of erudition and the Courts, the influences of that popular style, which drew its origin from Boccaccio and Sacchetti rather than from Dante or the Trovatori, determined the manner of Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano. Meanwhile the learned poems of the latest trecentisti were forgotten with the lumber of the middle ages. For the special purpose, therefore, of this volume, which only regards the earlier stages of Italian literature in so far as they preceded and conditioned the Renaissance, it was necessary to give the post of honor to Boccaccio's followers. Some mention should, however, here be made of those contemporaries and imitators of Petrarch, in whom the traditions of the fourteenth century expired. It is not needful to pass in review the many versifiers who treated the old themes of chivalrous love with meritorious conventional facility. The true life of the Italians was not here; and the phase of literature which the Sicilian School inaugurated, survived already as an anachronism. The case is different with such poetry as dealt immediately with contemporary politics. In the declamatory compositions of this age, we hear the echoes of the Guelf and Ghibelline wars. The force of that great struggle was already spent; but the partisans of either faction, passion enough survived to furnish genuine inspiration. Fazio degli Uberti's sermintese on the cities of Italy, for example, was written in the bitter spirit of an exiled Ghibelline.[160] His ode to Charles IV. is a torrent of vehement medieval abuse, poured forth against an Emperor who had shown himself unworthy of his place in Italy[161]:

Sappi ch'i' son Italia che ti parlo,

Di Lusimburgo ignominioso Carlo!

After detailing the woes which have befallen her in consequence of her abandonment by the imperial master, Italy addresses herself to God:

Tu dunque, Giove, perchè 'l santo uccello ...

Da questo Carlo quarto

Imperador non togli e dalle mani

Degli altri lurchi moderni germani,

Che d'aquila un allocco n'hanno fatto?

The Italian Ghibellines had, indeed, good reason to complain that German gluttons, Cæsars in naught but name, who only thought of making money by their sale of fiefs and honors, had changed the eagle of the Empire into an obscene night-flying bird of prey. The same spirit is breathed in Fazio's ode on Rome.[162] He portrays the former mistress of the world as a lady clad in weeds of mourning, "ancient, august and honorable, but poor and needy as her habit showed, prudent in speech and of great puissance." She bids the poet rouse his fellow-countrymen from their sleep of sloth and drunkenness, to reassert the majesty of the empire owed to Italy and Rome:

O figliuol mio, da quanta crudel guerra

Tutti insieme verremo a dolce pace,

Se Italia soggiace

A un solo Re che al mio voler consente!

This is the last echo of the De Monarchiâ. The great imperial idea, so destructive to Italian confederation, so dazzling to patriots of Dante's fiber, expires amid the wailings of minstrels who cry for the impossible, and haunt the Courts of petty Lombard princes.

In another set of Canzoni we listen to Guelf and Ghibelline recriminations, rising from the burghs of Tuscany. The hero of these poems is Gian Galeazzo Visconti, rightly recognized by the Guelfs of Florence as a venomous and selfish tyrant, foolishly belauded by the Ghibellines of Siena as the vindicator of imperial principles. The Emperors have abandoned Italy; the Popes are at Avignon. The factions which their quarrels generated, agitate their people still, but on a narrower basis. Sacchetti slings invectives against the maladetta serpe, aspro tiranno con amaro fele, who shall be throttled by the Church and Florence, leagued to crush the Lombard despots.[163] Saviozzo da Siena addresses the same Visconti as novella monarchia, giusto signore, clemente padre, insigne, virtuoso. By his means the dolce vedovella, Rome or Italy, shall at last find peace.[164] This Duke of Milan, it will be remembered, had already ordered the crown of Italy from his Court-jeweler, and was advancing on his road of conquest, barred only by Florence, when the Plague cut short his career in 1402. The poet of Siena exhorts him to take courage for his task, in lines that are not deficient in a certain fire of inspiration:

Tu vedi in ciel la fiammeggiante aurora,

Le stelle tue propizie e rutilanti,

E' segni tutti quanti

Ora disposti alla tua degna spada.

In another strophe he refers to the Italian crown:

Ecco qui Italia che ti chiama padre,

Che per te spera omai di trionfare,

E di sè incoronare

Le tue benigne e preziose chiome.

An anonymous sonnetteer of the same period uses similar language[165];

Roma vi chiama—Cesar mio novello,

I' son ignuda, e l'anima pur vive;

Or mi coprite col vostro mantello.

The Ghibelline poets, whether they dreamed like Fazio of Roman Empire, or flattered the Visconti with a crown to be won by triumph over the detested Guelfs, made play with Dante's memory. Some of the most interesting lyrics of the school are elegies upon his death. To this class belong two sonnets by Pieraccio Tedaldi and Mucchio da Lucca.[166] Nor must Boccaccio's noble pair of sonnets, although he was not a political poet, be here forgotten.[167] That Dante was diligently studied can be seen, not only in the diction of this epoch, but also in numerous versified commentaries upon the Divine Comedy—in the terza rima abstracts of Boson da Gubbio, Jacopo Alighieri, Saviozzo da Siena, and Boccaccio.[168]

Tuscan politics are treated from the Guelf point of view in Sacchetti's odes upon the war with Pisa, upon the government of Florence after 1378, and against the cowardice of the Italians.[169] His conception of a burgher's duties, the ideal of Guelf bourgeoisie before Florence had become accustomed to tyrants, finds expression in a sonnet—Amar la patria.[170] We frequently meet with the word Comune on his lips:

O vuol rè o signore o vuol comune,

Chè per comune dico ciò ch'io parlo.

A like note of municipal independence is sounded in the poems of Antonio Pucci, and in the admonitory stanzas of Matteo Frescobaldi.[171] Considerable interest attaches to these political compositions for the light they throw on party feeling at the close of the heroic age of Italian history. The fury with which those factions raged, prompts the bards of either camp to curses. I may refer to this passage from Folgore da San Gemignano, when he sees the Ghibelline Uguccione triumphant over Tuscany:[172]

Eo non ti lodo Dio e non ti adoro,

E non ti prego e non ti ringrazio, E non ti servo ch'io ne son più sazio Che l'aneme de star en purgatoro;

Perchè tu ai messi i Guelfi a tal martoro

Ch'i Ghibellini ne fan beffe e strazio, E se Uguccion ti comandasse il dazio, Tu 'l pagaresti senza peremptoro!

Yet neither in the confused idealism of the Ghibellines nor in the honest independence of the Guelfs lay the true principle of national progress. Sinking gradually and inevitably beneath the sway of despots, the Italians in the fifteenth century were destined to become a nation of scholars, artists, litterati. The age of Dante, the uncompromising aristocrat, was over. The age of Boccaccio, the easy-going bourgeois, had begun. The future glories of Italy were to be won in the field of culture; and all the hortatory lyrics I have mentioned, exerted but little influence over the development of a spirit which was growing quietly within the precincts of the people. The Italian people at this epoch cared far less for the worn-out factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines than for home-comforts and tranquillity in burgher occupations. The keener intellects of the fifteenth century were already so absorbingly occupied with art and classical studies that there was no room left in them for politics of the old revolutionary type. Meanwhile the new intrigues of Cabinets and Courts were left to a class of humanistic diplomatists, created by the conditions of despotic government. Scarcely less ineffectual were the moral verses of Bambagiuoli and Cavalca, or the Petrarchistic imitations of Marchionne Torrigiani, Federigo d'Arezzo, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto di Battifolle, and Bonaccorso da Montemagno.[173] The former belonged to a phase of medieval culture which was waning. The elegant but lifeless Petrarchistic school dragged through the fifteenth century, culminating in the Canzoniere of Giusto de' Conti, a Roman, which was called La bella mano. The revival of their mannerism, with a fixed artistic motive, by Bembo and the purists of the sixteenth century, will form part of my later history of Renaissance literature.

One note is unmistakable in all the poetry of these last trecentisti. It is a note of profound discouragement, mistrust, and disappointment. We have already heard it sounded by Sacchetti in his lament for Boccaccio. Boccaccio had raised it himself in two noble sonnets—Apizio legge and Fuggit'è ogni virtù.[174] It takes the shrillness of a threnody in Tedaldi's Il mondo vile and in Manfredi di Boccaccio's Amico il mondo.[175] The poets of that age were dimly conscious that a new era had opened for their country—an era of money-getting, despotism, and domestic ease. They saw the people used to servitude and sunk in common pleasures—dead to the high aims and imaginative aspirations of the past. The turbulence of the heroic age was gone. The men of the present were all Vigliacci. And as yet both art and learning were but in their cradle. It was impossible upon the opening of the fifteenth century, in that crepuscular interval between two periods of splendor, to know what glories for Italy and for the world at large would be produced by Giotto's mighty lineage and Petrarch's progeny of scholars. We who possess in history the vision of that future can be content to wait through a transition century. The men of the moment not unnaturally expressed the querulousness of Italy, distracted by her struggles of the past and sinking into somnolence. Cosimo de' Medici, the molder of Renaissance Florence, was already born in 1389; and men of Cosimo's stamp were no heroes for poets who had felt the passions that moved Dante.

The Divine Comedy found fewer imitators than the Canzoniere; for who could bend the bow of Ulysses? Yet some poets of the transition were hardy enough to attempt the Dantesque meter, and to pretend in a prosaic age that they had shared the vision of the prophets. Among these should be mentioned Fazio degli Uberti, a scion of Farinata's noble house, who lived and traveled much in exile.[176] Taking Solinus, the antique geographer, for his guide, Fazio produced a topographical poem called the Dicta Mundi or Dittamondo.[177]

From the prosaic matter of this poem, which resembles a very primitive Mappamondo, illustrated with interludes of history and excursions into mythological zoölogy, based upon the text of Pliny, and not unworthy of Mandeville, two episodes emerge and arrest attention. One is the description of Rome—a somber lady in torn raiment, who tells the history of her eventful past, describes her triumphs and her empire, and points to the ruins on her seven crowned hills to show how beautiful she was in youth[178]:

Ivi una dama scorsi; Vecchia era in vista, e trista per costume.

Gli occhi da lei, andando, mai ton torsi;

Ma poichè presso le fui giunto tanto Ch'io l'avvisava senza nessun forsi,

Vidi il suo volto, ch'era pien di pianto,

Vidi la vesta sua rotta e disfatta, E roso e guasto il suo vedovo manto.

E con tutto che fosse così fatta,

Pur nell'abito suo onesto e degno Mostrava uscita di gentile schiatta.

Tanto era grande, e di nobil contegno,

Ch'io diceva fra me: Ben fu costei, E pare ancor da posseder bel regno.

Fazio addresses the mighty shadow with respectful sympathy. Rome answers in language which is noble through its simple dignity:

Non ti maravigliare s'io ho doglia,

Non ti maravigliar se trista piango, Nè se me vedi in sì misera spoglia;

Ma fatti maraviglia, ch'io rimango,

E non divento qual divenne Ecuba Quando gittava altrui le pietre e il fango.

The second passage of importance, more noticeable for a sense of space and largeness than for its poetical expression, is a description of the prospect seen from Alvernia, that high station of the "topless Apennines," where S. Francis took the Stigmata, and where Dante sought a home in the destruction of his earthly hopes[179]:

Noi fummo sopra il sasso dell Alverna

Al faggio ove Francesco fue fedito Dal Serafin quel dì ch'ei più s'interna.

Molto è quel monte devoto e romito,

Ed è sì alto che il più di Toscana Mi disegnò un frate col suo dito.

Guarda, mi disse, al mare, e vedi piana

Con altri colli la maremma tutta Dilettevole molto e poco sana.

Ivi è Massa, Grosseto e la distrutta

Cività vecchia, ed ivi Populonia Ch'appena pare, tanto è mal condutta.

The whole of Tuscany and Umbria, their cities, plains, rivers and mountain summits, are unrolled; and the friar concludes with a sentence which well embodies the feeling we have in gazing over an illimitable landscape:

Io so bene che quanto t'ho mostrato,

La vista nol discerna apertamente, Per lo spazio ch'è lungo dov'io guato:

Ma quando l'uom che bene ascolta e sente,

Ode parlar di cosa che non vede, Immagina con l'occhio della mente.

Such value as the Dittamondo may still retain for students, it owes partly to the author's enthusiasm for ancient Rome, and partly to the sympathy with nature he had acquired during his wandering as an exile over the sacred soil of Italy.

Another poem of Dantesque derivation was the Quadriregio of Federigo Frezzi, Bishop of Foligno.[180] It is an allegorical account of human life; and the four regions, which give their name to the book, are the realms of Love, Satan, Vice and Virtue.[181] To cast the moralizations of the middle ages in a form imitated from Dante, after Dante had already condensed the ethics and politics, the theology and science of his century in the Divine Comedy, was little less than a hopeless task. Nor need a word be spent upon the Quadriregio, except by way of illustrating the peculiar conditions of the poetic art, here upon the border-land between the middle age and the Renaissance. Federigo Frezzi was intent on depicting the victories of virtue over vice, and on explaining the advantage offered to the Christian by grace. Yet he chose a mythological framework for his doctrine. Cupid, Venus and Minerva are confused with Satan, Enoch and Elijah. Instead of Eden there is the golden age. Nymphs of Diana, Juno, and the like, are used as emblems. Pallas discourses about Christ, and expounds the Christian system of redemption. The earthly Paradise contains Helicon, with all the antique poets. Jupiter is contrasted with Satan. It is the same blending of antique with Christian motives which we note in the Divine Comedy; but the tact of the great artist is absent, and the fusion becomes grotesque. After reading through the poem we lay it down with the same feeling as that produced in us by studying some pulpit of the Pisan School, where a Gothic Devil, all horns and hoofs and grinning jaws, squats cheek by jowl with a Madonna copied from a Roman tomb. The following description of Cupid recalls the manner of the Sienese frescanti[182]:

Appena questo priego havea io decto

quando egli apparve ad me fresco et giocondo, in un giardino ove io stava solecto.

Di mirto coronato il capo biondo

in forma pueril con si bel viso che mai piu bel fu visto in questo mondo.

Creso haverai che su del paradiso

fusse el suo aspecto, tanto era sovrano, se non che quando a lui mirai fiso

Vidi che haveva uno archo orato in mano

col quale Achille et Hercole percosse.

Here is the picture of the Golden Age, transcribed from Latin poetry, much as it was destined to control the future of Italian fancy[183]:

Vergine saggia e bella el ciel adorna

di cui Virgilio poetando scripse, nuova progenie al mondo dal ciel torna,

Rexe già el mondo et si la gente visse

socto lei in pace che la età dell oro et seculo giusto et beato si disse.

La terra allora senza alcun lavoro

dava li fructi, et non faceva spine, ne ancho al giogo si domava el thoro;

Non erano divisi per confine

anchora i campi, et nesun per guadagno cercava le contrade pelegrine;

Ognuno era fratello, ognun compagno,

et era tanto amor, tanta pietade, che ad un fonte bevea el lupo et l'agno;

Non eran lancia, non erano spade,

non era anchor la pecunia peggiore che 'l guerigiante ferro piu si fiade;

La invidia allor vedendo tanto amore

di questo bene ad se genero pene e desto gaudio ad se diede dolore.

A little while beyond this foretaste of the cinque cento, we find Charon copied, without addition, but with a fatal loss of poetry, from the Inferno[184]:

Vidi Caron non molto da lontano

con una nave in mezo la tempesta, che conducea con un gran remo in mano:

Et ciaschuno occhio chelli havea in testa,

pareva come di nocte una lumiera, o un falo quando si fa per festa.

Quando egli fu appresso alla riviera

un mezo miglio quasi o poco mancho, scacci sua faccia grande vizza e nera.

Egli havea el capo di canuti biancho,

el manto adosso rapezato et uncto, el volto si crudel non vidi un quancho.

Last upon the list of Dantesque imitators stands Matteo Palmieri, a learned Florentine, who composed his Città di Vita in the middle of the fifteenth century. This poem won for its author from Marsilio Ficino the title of Poeta Theologicus.[185] Its chief interest at the present time is that the theology expressed in it brought suspicion of heresy on Palmieri. He held Origen's opinion that the souls of men were rebel angels. How a doctrine of this kind could be rendered in painting is not clear. Yet Giorgio Vasari tells us that a picture executed for Matteo Palmieri by Sandro Botticelli, which represented the Assumption of the Virgin into the celestial hierarchy—Powers, Princedoms, Thrones and Dominations ranged around her in concentric circles—fell under the charge of heterodoxy. The altar in S. Pietro Maggiore where it was placed had to be interdicted, and the picture veiled from sight.[186] The story forms a curious link between this last scion of medieval literature and the painting of the Renaissance. After Palmieri the meter of the Divine Comedy was chiefly used for satire and burlesque. Lorenzo de' Medici adapted its grave rhythms to parody in I Beoni. Berni used it for the Capitoli of the Pesche and the Peste. At Florence it became the recognized meter for obscene and frivolous compositions, which delighted the Academicians of the sixteenth century. The people, meanwhile, continued to employ it in Lamenti, historical compositions, and personal Capitoli.[187] Thus Cellini wrote his poem called I Carceri in terza rima, and Giovanni Santi used it for his precious but unpoetical Chronicle of Italian affairs. Both Benivieni and Michelangelo Buonarroti composed elegies in this meter; and numerous didactic eclogues of the pastoral poets might be cited in which it served for analogue to Latin elegiacs. In the Sacre Rappresentazioni it sometimes interrupted ottava rima, on the occasion of a set discourse or sermon.[188] Both Ariosto and Alamanni employed it in their satires. From these brief notices it will be seen that terza rima during the Renaissance period was reserved for dissertational, didactic and satiric themes, the Capitoli of the burlesque poets being parodies of grave scholastic lucubrations. But no one now attempted an heroic poem in this verse.[189]

To give a full account of Italian prose during this period of transition from the middle age to the Renaissance is not easy. At the close of the fourteenth century, S. Catherine of Siena sustained the purity and "dove-like simplicity" of the earlier trecento style, with more of fervor and personal power than any subsequent writer. Her letters, whether addressed to Popes and princes on the politics of Italy, or dealing with private topics of religious experience, are models of the purest Tuscan diction.[190] They have the garrulity and over-unctuous sweetness of the Fioretti and Leggende. But these qualities, peculiar to medieval piety among Italians, are balanced by untutored eloquence which borders on sublimity. Without deliberate art or literary aim, the spirit of a noble woman speaks from the heart in Catherine's letters. The fervor of her feeling suggests poetic imagery. The justice of her perception dictates weighty sentences. The intensity with which she realizes the unseen world of spiritual emotion, gives dramatic movement to her exhortations, expositions and entreaties. These rare excellences of a style, where spontaneity surpasses artifice, are combined in the famous epistle to her confessor, Raimondo da Capua, describing the execution of Niccolò Tuldo.[191] He was a young man of Perugia, condemned to death for some act of insubordination. Catherine visited him in prison, and induced him to take the Sacrament with her for the first time. He besought her to be present with him at the place of execution. Accordingly she waited for him there, praying to Mary and to Catherine, the virgin saint of Alexandria, laying her own neck upon the block, and entering into harmony so rapt with those celestial presences that the multitude of men who were around her disappeared from view. What followed, must be told in her own words:

Poi egli giunse, come uno agnello mansueto: e vedendomi, cominciò a ridere; e volse che io gli facesse il segno della croce. E ricevuto il segno, dissi io: "Giuso! alle nozze, fratello mio dolce! chè tosto sarai alla vita durabile." Posesi quì con grande mansuetudine; e io gli distesi il collo, e chinàmi giù, e rammentalli il sangue dell'Agnello. La bocca sua non diceva se non, Gesù, e Catarina. E, così dicendo, ricevetti il capo nelle mani mie, fermando l'occhio nella divina bontà e dicendo: "Io voglio."

Allora si vedeva Dio-e-Uomo, come si vedesse la chiarità del sole; e stava aperto, e riceveva il sangue; nel sangue suo uno fuoco di desiderio santo, dato e nascosto nell'anima sua per grazia; riceveva nel fuoco della divina sua carità. Poichè ebbe ricevuto il sangue e il desiderio suo, ed egli ricevette l'anima sua, la quale mise nella bottiga aperta del costato suo, pieno di misericordia; manifestando la prima Verità che per sola grazia e misericordia egli il riceveva, e non per veruna altra operazione. O quanto era dolce e inestimable a vedere la bontà di Dio!

The sudden transition from this narrative of fact to the vision of Christ—from the simple style of ordinary speech to ecstasy inebriated with the cross—is managed with a power that truth alone could yield. A dramatist might have conceived it; but only a saint who lived habitually in both worlds of loving service and illumination, could thus have made it natural. This is the noblest and the rarest realism.

If we trust the testimony of contemporary chroniclers, S. Bernardino of Siena in the pulpit shared Catherine's power of utterance, at once impressive and simple.[192] No doubt the preachers of the quattrocento were influential in maintaining a tradition of prose rhetoric. But it is not in the nature of sermons, even when ably reported, to preserve their fullness and their force. Not less important for the formation of a literary style were the letters and dispatches of embassadors. Though at this period all ceremonial orations, briefs, state documents and epistles between Courts and commonwealths were composed in Latin, still the secret correspondence of envoys with their home governments gave occasion for the use of the vernacular; and even humanists expressed their thoughts occasionally in the mother tongue. Coluccio Salutati, for example, whose Latin letters were regarded as models of epistolary style, employed Italian in less formal communications with his office. These early documents of studied Tuscan writing are now more precious than his formal Ciceronian imitations. Private letters may also be mentioned among the best sources for studying the growth of Italian prose, although we have not much material to judge by.[193] The correspondence of Alessandra degli Strozzi, recently edited by Signor Cesare Guasti, is not only valuable for the light it casts upon contemporary manners, but also for the illustration of the Florentine idiom as written by a woman of noble birth.[194] Of Poliziano's, Pulci's and Lorenzo de' Medici's letters I shall have occasion to speak in a somewhat different connection later on.

The historiographers of the Renaissance thought it below their dignity to use any language but Latin.[195] At the same time, vernacular annalists abounded in Italy, whose labors were of no small value in forming the prose-style of the quattrocento. After the Villani, Florence could boast a whole chain of writers, beginning with Marchionne Stefani, including Gino Capponi, the spirited chronicler of the Ciompi rebellion, and extending to Goro Dati in the middle of the fifteenth century. A little later, Giovanni Cavalcanti, in his Florentine Histories, proved how the simple diction of the preceding age was being spoiled by false classicism.[196] This work is doubly valuable—both as a record of the great Albizzi oligarchy and their final conquest by the Medici, and also as a monument of the fusion which was being made between the popular and humanistic styles. The chronicles of other Italian cities—Ferrara, Cremona, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, and even Siena—show less purity of language than the Florentine.[197] Italian is often mixed with vulgar Latin, and phrases borrowed from unpolished local dialects abound. It was not until the close of the century that two great writers of history in the vernacular arose outside the walls of Florence. These were Corio, the historian of Milan, and Matarazzo, the annalist of Perugia.[198] In Corio's somewhat stiff and cumbrous periods we trace the effort of a foreigner to gain by study what the Tuscans owed to nature. Yet he never suffered this stylistic preoccupation to spoil his qualities as an historian. His voluminous narrative is a mine of accurate information, illustrated with vivid pictures of manners and carefully considered portraits of eminent men. Reading it, we cannot but regret that Poggio and Bruno, Navagero and Bembo, judged it necessary to tell the tales of Florence and of Venice in a pseudo-Livian Latin. The "History of Milan" is worth twenty of such humanistic exercises in rhetoric. Matarazzo displays excellences of a different, but of a rarer order. Unlike Corio, he was not anxious to show familiarity with rules of Tuscan writing, or to build again the periods of Boccaccio's ceremonious style. His language bears the stamp of its Perugian origin. It is, at the same time, unaffectedly dramatic and penetrated with the charm of a distinguished personality. No one can read the tragedy of the Baglioni in this wonderful romance without acknowledging that he is in the hands of a great writer. The limpidity of the trecento has here survived, and, blending with Renaissance enthusiasm for physical beauty and antique heroism, has produced a work of art unrivaled in its kind.[199]

Having advanced so far as to speak in this chapter of Corio and Matarazzo, I shall take occasion to notice a book which, appearing for the first time in 1476, may fairly be styled the most important work of Italian prose-fiction belonging to the fifteenth century. This is the Novellino of Masuccio Guardato, a nobleman of Salerno, secretary to the Prince Roberto Sanseverino, and resident throughout his life at the Court of Naples.[200] The Novellino is a collection of stories, fifty in number, arranged in five parts, which treat respectively of hypocrisy and the monastic vices, jealousy, feminine incontinence, the contrasts of pathos and of humor, and the generosity of princes. Each Novella is dedicated to a noble man or woman of Neapolitan society, and is followed by a reflective discourse, in which the author personally addresses his audience. Masuccio declares himself the disciple of Boccaccio and Juvenal.[201] Of the Roman poet's spirit he has plenty; he gives the rein to rage in language of the most indignant virulence. Of Boccaccio's idiom and style, though we can trace the student's emulation, he can boast but little. Masuccio never reached the Latinistic smoothness of his model; and while he wrote Italian, his language was far from being Tuscan. Phrases culled from southern dialects are frequent; and the structure of the period is often ungrammatical. Masuccio was not a member of any humanistic clique. He lived among the nobles of a royal Court, and knew the common people intimately. This double experience is reflected in his language and his modes of thought. Both are unalloyed by pedantry, and precious for the student of contemporary manners.

The interest of the Novellino is great when we regard it as the third collection of Novelle, coming after Boccaccio's and Sacchetti's, and, from the point of view of art, occupying a middle place between them. The tales of the Decameron were originally recited at Naples; and though Boccaccio was a thorough Tuscan, he borrowed something from the south which gave width, warmth and largeness to his writing. Masuccio is wholly Neapolitan in tone; but he seeks such charm of presentation and variety of matter as shall make his book worthy to take rank in general literature. Sacchetti has more of a purely local flavor. He is no less Florentine than Masuccio is Neapolitan; and, unlike Masuccio, he has taken little pains to adapt his work to other readers than his fellow-citizens. Boccaccio embraces all human life, seen in the light of vivid fancy by a bourgeois who was also a great comic romantic poet. Sacchetti describes the borghi, contrade, and piazze of Florence; and his speech is seasoned with rare Tuscan salt of wit. Masuccio's world is that of the free-living southern noble. He is penetrated with aristocratic feeling, treats willingly of arms and jousts and warfare, telling the tales of knights and ladies to a courtly company.[202] At the same time, the figures of the people move with incomparable vivacity across the stage; and his transcripts from life reveal the careless interpenetration of classes to which he was accustomed in Calabria.[203] Some of his stories are as simply bourgeois as any of Sacchetti's.[204]

When we compare Masuccio with Boccaccio we find many points of divergence, due to differences of temperament, social sympathies and local circumstance. Boccaccio is witty and malicious; Masuccio humorous and poignant. Boccaccio laughs indulgently at vices; Masuccio scourges them. Boccaccio makes a jest of superstition; Masuccio thunders against the hypocrites who bring religion into contempt. Boccaccio turns the world round for his recreation, submitting its follies to the subtle play of analytical fancy. Masuccio is terribly in earnest; whether sympathetic or vituperative, he makes the voice of his heart heard. Boccaccio's pictures are toned with a rare perception of harmony and delicate gradation. Masuccio brings what strikes his sense before us by a few firm touches. Boccaccio shows far finer literary tact. Yet there is something in the unpremeditated passion, pathos, humor, grossness, anger and enjoyment of Masuccio—a chord of masculine and native strength, a note of vigorous reality—that arrests attention even more imperiously than the prepared effects of the Decameron. One point of undoubted excellence can be claimed for Masuccio. He was a great tragic artist in the rough, and his comedy displays an uncouth Rabelaisian realism. The lights and shadows cast upon his scene are brusque—like the sunlight and the shadow on a Southern city; whereas the painting of Boccaccio is distinguished by exquisite blendings of color and chiaroscuro in subordination to the chosen key.

Masuccio displays his real power in his serious Novelle, when he gives vent to his furious hatred of a godless clergy, or describes some dreadful incident, like the tragedy of the two lovers in the lazar-house.[205] Scarcely less dramatic are his tales of comic sensuality.[206] Nor has he a less vivid sense of beauty. Some of his occasional pictures—the meeting of youths and maidens in the evening light of Naples; the lover who changed his jousting-badge because his lady was untrue; the tournament at Rimini; the portrait of Eugenia disguised as a ragazzo de omo d'arme—break upon us with the freshness of a smile or sunbeam.[207] We might almost detect a vein of Spanish imagination in certain of his episodes—in the midnight ride of the living monk after the dead friar strapped upon his palfrey, and in the ghastly murder of the woman and the dwarf.[208] The lowest classes of the people are presented with a salience worthy of Velasquez—cobblers, tailors, prostitutes, preaching friars, miracle-workers, relic-mongers, bawds, ruffians, lepers, highway robbers, gondoliers, innkeepers, porters, Moorish slaves, the panders to base appetites and every sort of sin.[209] Masuccio felt no compunction in portraying vicious people as he knew them; but he reserved language of scathing vituperation for their enormities.[210]

From so much that is coarse, dreadful, and revolting, the romance of Masuccio's more genial tales detaches itself with charming grace and delicacy. Nothing in Boccaccio is lovelier than the story of the girl who puts on armor and goes at night to kill her faithless lover; or that of Mariotto and Giannozza, which is substantially the same as Romeo and Juliet; or that of Virginio Baglioni and Eugenia, surprised and slain by robbers near Brescia; or that of Marchetto and Lanzilao, the comrades in arms, which has points in common with Palamon and Arcite; or, lastly, that of the young Malem and his education by Giudotto Gambacorto.[211]. It is the blending of so many elements—the interweaving of tragedy and comedy, satire and pathos, grossness and sentiment, in a style of unadorned sincerity, that places Masuccio high among novelists. Had his language been as pure as that of the earlier Tuscan or the later Italian authors, he would probably rank only second to Boccaccio in the estimation even of his fellow-countrymen. A foreigner, less sensitive to niceties of idiom, may be excused for recognizing him as at least Bandello's equal in the story-teller's art. In moral quality he is superior not only to Bandello, but also to Boccaccio.

The greatest writer of Italian prose in the fifteenth century was a man of different stamp from Masuccio. Gifted with powers short only of the very highest, Leo Battista Alberti exercised an influence over the spirit of his age and race which was second to none but Lionardo's.[212] Sacchetti, Ser Giovanni, Masuccio, and the ordinary tribe of chroniclers pretended to no humanistic culture.[213] Alberti, on the contrary, was educated at Bologna, where he acquired the scientific knowledge of his age, together with such complete mastery of Latin that a work of his youth, the comedy Philodoxius, passed for a genuine product of antiquity. This man of many-sided genius came into the world too soon for the perfect exercise of his singular faculties. Whether we regard him from the point of of art, of science, or of literature, he occupies in each department the position of precursor, pioneer and indicator. Always original and always fertile, he prophesied of lands he was not privileged to enter, leaving the memory of dim and varied greatness rather than any solid monument behind him.[214] Of his mechanical discoveries this is not the place to speak; nor can I estimate the value of his labors in the science of perspective.[215] It is as a man of letters that he comes before us in this chapter.

The date of Alberti's birth is uncertain. But we may fix it probably at about the year 1405. He was born at Venice, where his father, exiled with the other members of his noble house by the Albizzi, had taken refuge. After Cosimo de' Medici's triumph over the Albizzi in 1434, Leo Battista returned to Florence.[216] It was as a Florentine citizen that his influence in restoring the vulgar literature to honor, was destined to be felt. He did not, however, reside continuously in the city of his ancestors, but moved from town to town, with a restlessness that savored somewhat of voluntary exile. It is, indeed, noteworthy how many of the greatest Italians—Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Alberti, Lionardo, Tasso: men who powerfully helped to give the nation intellectual coherence—were wanderers. They sought their home and saw their spiritual patria in no one abiding-place.[217] Thus, amid the political distractions of the Italian people, rose that ideal of unity to which Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Ferrara contributed, but which owned no metropolis. Florence remained to the last the brain of Italy. Yet Florence, by stepmotherly ingratitude, by Dante's exile, by the alienation of Petrarch, by Alberti's homeless boyhood, prepared for the race a new culture, Tuscan in origin, national by diffusion and assimilation. Alberti died at Rome in 1472, just when Poliziano, a youth of eighteen, was sounding the first notes of that music which re-awakened the Muse of Tuscany from her long sleep, and gave new melodies to Italy.

In his proemium to the Third Book of the Family, addressed to Francesco degli Alberti, Leo Battista enlarges on the duty of cultivating the mother tongue.[218] After propounding the question whether the loss of the empire acquired by their Roman ancestors—l'antiquo nostro imperio amplissimo—or the loss of Latin as a spoken language—l'antiqua nostra gentilissima lingua latina—had been the greater privation to the Italian race, he gives it as his opinion that, though the former robbed them of imperial dignity, the latter was the heavier misfortune. To repair that loss is the duty of one who had made literature his study. If he desires to benefit his fellow-countrymen, he will not use a dead language, imperfectly comprehended by a few learned men, but will bend the idiom of the people to the needs of erudition. "I willingly admit," he argues, "that the ancient Latin tongue is very copious and of beauty polished to perfection. Yet I do not see what our Tuscan has in it so hateful that worthy matter, when conveyed thereby, should be displeasing to us." Pedants who despise their mother speech, are mostly men incapable of expressing themselves in the latter; "and granted they are right in saying that the ancient tongue has undisputed authority, because so many learned men have employed it, the like honor will certainly be paid our language of to-day, if men of culture take the pains to purify and polish it." He then declares that, meaning to be useful to the members of his house, and to bequeath a record of their ancient dignity to their descendants, he has resolved to choose the tongue in which he will be generally understood.

This proemium explains Alberti's position in all his Italian writings. Aiming at the general good, convinced that a living nation cannot use a dead language with dignity and self-respect, he makes the sacrifice of a scholar's pride to public utility, and has the sense to perceive that the day of erudite exclusiveness is over. No one felt more than Alberti the greatness of the antique Roman race. No one was prouder of his descent from those patricians of the Commonwealth, who tamed and ruled the world. The memory of that Roman past, which turned the generation after Dante into a nation of students, glowed in Alberti's breast with more than common fervor.[219] The sonorous introduction to the first book of the Family reviews the glories of the Empire and the decadence of Rome with a pomp of phrase, a passion of eloquence, that stir our spirit like the tramp of legions waking echoes in a ruined Roman colonnade.[220] Yet in spite of this devotion to the past, Alberti, like Villani, felt that his Italians of the modern age had destinies and auspices apart from those of ancient Rome. He was resolved to make the speech of that new nation, heiress of the Latin name, equal in dignity to Cicero's and Livy's. What Rome had done, Rome's children should do again. But the times were changed, and Alberti was a true son of the Renaissance. He approached his task in the spirit of a humanist. His style is over-charged with Latinisms; his periods are cumbrous; his matter is loaded with citations and scholastic instances drawn from the repertories of erudition.[221] The vivida vis of inspiration fails. His work is full of reminiscences. The golden simplicity of the trecento yields to a studied effort after dignity of diction, culture of amplitude. Still the writer's energy is felt in massive paragraphs of powerful declamation. His eloquence does not degenerate into frothy rhetoric; and when he wills, he finds pithy phrases to express the mind of a philosopher and poet. That he was born and reared in exile accounts for a lack of racy Tuscan in his prose; and the structure of his sentences proves that he had been accustomed to think in Latin before he made Italian serve his turn.[222] Still, though for these and other reasons his works were not of the kind to animate a nation, they are such as still may be read with profit and with pleasure by men who seek for solid thoughts in noble diction.

Alberti's principal prose work, the Trattato della Famiglia, was written to instruct the members of his family in the customs of their ancestors, and to perpetuate those virtues of domestic life which he regarded as the sound foundation of a commonwealth. The first three books are said to have been composed within the space of ninety days in Rome, and the fourth added at a later period.[223] It is a dialogue, the interlocutors being relatives of the Alberti blood. Nearly all the illustrative matter is drawn from the biographies of their forefathers. The scene is laid at Padua, and the essay contains frequent allusions to their exile.[224] No word of invective against the Albizzi who had ruined them, no vituperation of the city which had permitted the expulsion of her sons, escapes the lips of any of the speakers. The grave sadness that tempers the whole dialogue, is marred by neither animosity nor passion. Yet though the Family was written in exile for exiles, the ideal of domestic life it paints, is Florentine.[225] Taken in its whole extent, this treatise is the most valuable document which remains to us from the times of the oligarchy, when Florence was waging war with the Visconti, and before the Medici had based their despotism upon popular favor. From its pages a tolerably complete history of a great commercial family might be extracted; and this study would form a valuable commentary on the public annals of the commonwealth during the earlier portion of the fifteenth century.[226]

The first book of the Famiglia deals with the duties of the elder to the younger members of the household, and the observance owed by sons and daughters to their parents. It is an essay De Officiis within the circle of the home, embracing minute particulars of conduct, and suggesting rules for education from the cradle upwards.[227] The second book takes up the question of matrimony. The respective ages at which the sexes ought to marry, the moral and physical qualities of a good wife, the maintenance of harmony between a wedded couple, their separate provinces and common duty to the State in the procreation of children, are discussed with scientific completeness. The third book, modeled on the Œconomicus of Xenophon, is devoted to thrift. How to use our personal faculties, our wealth, and our time to best advantage, forms its principal theme. The fourth book treats of friendship—family connections and alliances, the usefulness of friends in good and evil fortune, the mutual benefits enjoyed by men who live honestly together in a social state.[228] It may be seen from this sketch that the architecture of the treatise is complete and symmetrical. The first book establishes the principles of domestic morality on which a family exists and flourishes. The second provides for its propagation through marriage. The third shows how its resources are to be distributed and preserved. The fourth explains its relations to similar communities existing in an organized society. Many passages in the essay have undoubtedly the air of truisms; but this impression of commonplaceness is removed by the strong specific character of all the illustrations. Alberti's wisdom is common to civilized humanity. His conception of life is such as only suits a Florentine, and his examples are drawn from the annals of a single family.

I have already dwelt at some length in a former volume on the most celebrated section of this treatise—the Padre di Famiglia or the Economico.[229] To repeat those observations here would be superfluous. Yet I cannot avoid a digression upon a matter of much obscurity relating to the authorship of that book.[230] Until recently, this discourse upon the economy of a Florentine household passed under the name of Agnolo Pandolfini, and was published separately as his undoubted work. The interlocutors in the dialogue, which bore the title of Governo della Famiglia, are various members of the Pandolfini family, and all allusions to the Alberti and their exile are wanting. The style of the Governo differs in many important respects from that of Alberti; and yet the arrangement of the material and the substance of each paragraph are so closely similar in both forms of the treatise as to prove that the work is substantially identical. Pandolfini's essay, which I shall call Il Governo, passes for one of the choicest monuments of ancient Tuscan diction. Alberti's Economico, though it is more idiomatic than the rest of his Famiglia, betrays the Latinisms of a scholar. It is clear from a comparison of the two treatises either that Alberti appropriated Pandolfini's Governo, brought its style into harmony with his own, and gave it a place between the second and the fourth books of his essay on the Family; or else that this third book of Alberti's Famiglia was rewritten by an author who commanded a purer Italian. In the former case, Alberti changed the dramatis personæ by substituting members of his own house for the Pandolfini. In the latter case, the anonymous compiler paid a similar compliment to the Pandolfini by such alterations as obliterated the Alberti, and presented the treatise to the world as part of their own history. That Agnolo Pandolfini was himself guilty of this plagiarism is rendered improbable by a variety of circumstances. Yet the problem does not resolve itself into the simple question whether Pandolfini or Alberti was the plagiary. Supposing Alberti to have been the original author, there is no difficulty in believing that the Governo was a redaction made from his work by some anonymous hand in honor of the Pandolfini family. On the contrary, if we assume Agnolo Pandolfini to have been the author, then Alberti himself was guilty of a gross and open plagiarism.[231]

It will be useful to give some account of the MSS. upon which the editions of the Governo and the Economico are based.[232] In the first edition of the Governo (Tartini e Franchi, Firenze, 1734) six codices are mentioned. Of these the Codex Pandolfini A, on which the editors chiefly relied, has been removed from Italy to Paris. The Codex Pandolfini B was written in 1476 at Poggibonsi by a certain Giuliano di Niccolajo Martini. Whether the Codex Pandolfini A professed to be an autograph copy, I do not know; but the editors of 1734, referring to it, state that the Senator Filippo Pandolfini, member of the Della Crusca, corrected the errors, restored the text, and improved the diction of the treatise by the help of a still more ancient MS. This admission on their part is significant. It opens, for the advocates of Alberti's authorship, innumerable suspicions as to the part played by Filippo Pandolfini in the preparation of the Governo. Nor can it be denied that the lack of an autograph of the Governo renders the settlement of the disputed question very difficult.

Of Alberti's Trattato della Famiglia we have three autograph copies; (i) Cod. Magl. Classe iv. No. 38 in folio; (ii) Riccardiana 1220; (iii) Riccardiana 176. The first of these is the most important; but it presents some points of singularity. In the first place, the third book, which is the Economico, has been inserted into the original codex, and shows a different style of writing. In the second place, the first two books contain numerous corrections, additions, erasures and recorrections, obviously made by Alberti himself. Some of the interpolated passages in the first two books are found to coincide with parts of the Governo; and Signor Cortesi, to whose critical Study I have already referred, argues with great show of reason that Alberti, when he determined to incorporate the Governo in his Famiglia, enriched the earlier books of that essay with fragments which he did not find it convenient to leave in their original place. Still it should be remembered that this argument can be reversed; for the anonymous compiler of the Governo, if he had access to Alberti's autograph, may have chosen to appropriate sentences culled from the earlier portions of the Famiglia.

It is noticeable that the Economico, even though it forms the third book of the Treatise on the Family, has a separate title and a separate introduction, with a dedication to Francesco Alberti, and a distinct peroration.[233] It is, in fact, an independent composition, and occurs in more than one MS. of the fifteenth century detached from the rest of the Famiglia. In style it is far freer and more racy than is usual with Alberti's writing. Of this its author seems to have been aware; for he expressly tells his friend and kinsman Francesco that he has sought to approach the purity and simplicity of Xenophon.[234]

The anonymous writer of Alberti's life says that he composed three books on the Family at Rome before he was thirty, and a fourth book three years later. If we follow Tiraboschi in taking 1414 for the date of his birth, the first three books must have been composed before 1444 and the fourth in 1447. The former of these dates (1444) receives some confirmation from a Latin letter written by Leonardo Dati to Alberti, acknowledging the Treatise on the Family, in June 1443. Dati tells him that he finds fault with the essay for being composed "in a more majestic and perhaps a harsher style, especially in the first book, than the Florentine language and the judgment of the laity would tolerate." He goes on, however, to observe that "afterwards the language becomes far more sweet and satisfactory to the ear"—a criticism which seems to suit the altered manner of the third book. With reference to the date 1447, in which the Famiglia may have been completed, Cortesi remarks that Pandolfini died in 1446. He suggests that, upon this event, Alberti appropriated the Governo and rewrote it, and that the Economico, though it holds the place of the third book in the treatise, is really the fourth book mentioned by the anonymous biographer. The suggestion is ingenious; and if we can once bring ourselves to believe that Alberti committed a deliberate act of larceny, immediately after his friend Pandolfini's death, then the details which have been already given concerning the autograph of the Famiglia and the discrepancies in its style of composition add confirmation to the theory. There are, however, good reasons for assigning Alberti's birth to the year 1404 or even 1402.[235] In that case Alberti's Roman residence would fall into the third decade of the century, and the last book of the Famiglia (which I am inclined to believe is the one now called the third) would have been composed before Pandolfini's death. That Alberti kept his MSS. upon the stocks and subjected them to frequent revision is certain; and this may account for one reference occurring in it to an event which happened in 1438.

Is it rational to adopt the hypothesis of Alberti's plagiarism? Let us distinctly understand what it implies. In his own preface to the Economico Alberti states that he has striven to reproduce the simple and intelligible style of Xenophon[236]; and there is no doubt that this portion of the Famiglia, whether we regard it as Alberti's or as Pandolfini's property, was closely modeled on the Œconomicus. Cortesi suggests that the reference to Xenophon was purposely introduced by Alberti in order to put his readers off the scent. Nor, if we accept the hypothesis of plagiarism, can we restrict ourselves to this accusation merely. In the essay Della Tranquillità dell'Animo Alberti introduces Agnolo Pandolfini as an interlocutor, and makes him refer to the third book of the Famiglia as a genuine production of Alberti.[237] In other words, he must not only have appropriated Pandolfini's work, and laid claim to it in the preface to his Economico; but he must also have referred to it as his own composition in a speech ascribed to the real author, which he meant for publication. That is to say, he made the man whose work he stole pronounce its panegyric and refer it to the thief. That Pandolfini was dead when he committed these acts of treason would not be sufficient to explain Alberti's audacity; for according to the advocates of Pandolfini's authorship, the MS. formed a known and valued portion of his sons' inheritance. Is it primâ facie probable that Alberti, even in those days of looser literary copyright than ours, should have exposed himself to detection in so palpable and gross a fraud?

Before answering this question in the affirmative, it may be asked what positive grounds there are for crediting Pandolfini with the original authorship. At present no autograph of Pandolfini is forthcoming. His claim to authorship rests on tradition, and on the Pandolfini cast of the dialogue in certain MSS. At the same time, the admissions made by the editors of 1734 regarding their most trusted codex have been already shown to be suspicious. It is also noticeable that Vespasiano, in his Life of Agnolo Pandolfini, though he professes to have been intimately acquainted with this excellent Florentine burgher, does not mention the Governo della Famiglia.[238] The omission is singular, supposing the treatise to have then existed under Pandolfini's name, for Vespasiano was himself a writer of Italian in an age when Latin scholarship claimed almost exclusive attention. He would, we should have thought, have been eager to name so distinguished a man among his fellow-authors in the vulgar tongue.

Granting the force of these considerations, it must still be admitted that there remain grave objections to accepting the Economico of Alberti as the original of these two treatises. In the first place, the Governo is a masterpiece of Tuscan; and it is far more reasonable to suppose that the Economico was copied from the Governo with such alterations as adapted it to the manner of the Famiglia, than to assume that the Economico received a literary rehandling which reduced it from its more rhetorical to a popular form. The passage from simple to complex in literature admits of easier explanation than the reverse process. Moreover, if Alberti admired a racy Tuscan style and could command it for the Economico, why did he not continue to use it in his subsequent compositions? In the second place, the Governo, as it stands, is suited to what Vespasiano tells us about Agnolo Pandolfini. He was a scholar trained in the humanities of the earlier Renaissance and a statesman who retired from public life, disgusted with the times, to studious leisure at his villa. Now, Giannozzo Alberti, who takes the chief part in the Economico, proclaims himself a man of business, without learning. Those passages of the Governo which seem inappropriate to such a character are absent from the Economico; but some of them appear in Alberti's other works, the Teogenio and Della Tranquillità. From this circumstance Signor Cortesi infers that Alberti, working with Pandolfini's essay before him, made such alterations as brought the drift of the discourse within the scope of Giannozzo's acquirements. The advocates of Alberti's authorship are bound to reverse this theory, and to assume that the author of the Governo suited the Economico to Pandolfini by infusing a tincture of scholarship into Giannozzo's speeches.[239]

We have still to ask who could the author of the Governo, if it was not Agnolo Pandolfini, have been? The first answer to this question is: Alberti himself. The anonymous biographer tells us that he wrote the first three books at Rome, and that he afterwards made great efforts to improve his Tuscan style and render it more popular. It is not, therefore, impossible that he should himself have fitted that portion of his Famiglia with new characters, omitted the Alberti, and given the honors of the dialogue to Pandolfini. The treatise, as he first planned it (according to this hypothesis), has a passionate digression upon the exile of the Alberti, followed by a declamation against public life and politicians. To have circulated these passages in an essay intended for Florentine readers, after Alberti's recall by Cosimo de' Medici, would have been unwise. Alberti, therefore, may only have retained such portions of them as could rouse no animosity, revive no painful reminiscences, and be appropriately placed upon the lips of Pandolfini. As it stands in the Governo, the invective against statecraft is scarcely in keeping with Pandolfini's character. Though he retired from public life disgusted and ill at ease, the conclusion that no man should seek to serve the State except from a strict sense of duty, sounds strange when spoken by this veteran politician. Taken as the climax to the history of the wrongs inflicted upon the Alberti, this passage is dramatically in harmony with Giannozzo's experience.[240] With regard to the noticeable improvement of style in the Economico, we might argue that after Alberti had enjoyed facilities at Florence of acquiring his native idiom, he remodeled that section of his earlier work which he intended for the people. And the same line of argument would account for the independence of the Economico and its occurrence in separate MSS. Had Alberti designed what we now call a plagiarism, what need was there to call attention to it by prefixing an introduction to the third book of a continuous treatise?

It is not, however, necessary to defend Alberti from the charge of fraud by suggesting that he was himself the author of the Governo. There existed, as we shall soon see, a class of semi-cultivated scribes at Florence, whose business consisted in manufacturing literature for the people. They re-wrote, re-fashioned, condensed, abstracted whatever seemed to furnish entertainment and instruction for their public. Their style was close to the vulgar speech and frankly idiomatic. That one of these men should have made the necessary alterations in the third book of the Famiglia to remove the recollection of the Alberti exile, and to prepare it for popular reading, is by no means impossible. The Governo is shorter and more condensed than the Economico. The rhetorical and dramatic elements are reduced; and the material is communicated in a style of gnomic pregnancy. If it was modeled upon the Economico in the way I have suggested, the writer of the abstract was a man of no common ability, with a very keen sense of language and a faculty for investing a work of art and fine literature with the naïveté and grace of popular style. He also understood the necessity of providing his chief interlocutor, Agnolo Pandolfini, with a character different from that of Giannozzo Alberti; and he had the tact to realize that character by innumerable touches. Great additional support would be given to this hypothesis, if we could trust Bonucci's assertion that he had seen and transcribed a MS. of the Governo adapted with a set of characters selected from the Pazzi family. It would then seem clear that the Governo was an essay which every father of a family wished to possess for the instruction of his household, and to connect with the past history of his own race. Unluckily, Signor Bonucci, though he prints this Pazzi rifacimento, gives no information as to the source of the MS. or any hint whereby its existence can be ascertained.[241] We must, therefore, omit it from our reckoning.

As the case at present stands, it is impossible to form a decisive opinion regarding the authorship of this famous treatise. The necessary critical examination of MSS. has not yet been made, and the arguments used on either side from internal evidence are not conclusive. My own prepossession is still in favor of Alberti. I may, however, observe that after reading Signor Cortesi's inedited essay, I perceive the case in favor of Pandolfini to be far stronger than I had expected.[242]

Space will not permit a full discussion of Alberti's numerous writings; and yet their bearing on the best opinion of his time is so important that some notice of them must be taken. Together with the Famiglia we may class the Deiciarchia, or, as it should probably be written, the De Iciarchia.[243] This, like the majority of his moral treatises, is a dialogue, and its subject is civic virtue. Having formed the ideal family, he next considers the functions of householders, born to guide the State. The chief point of the discourse is that no one should be idle, but that all should labor in some calling worthy of the dignity of man.[244] This seems a simple doctrine; but it is so inculcated as to make us remember the Guelf laws of Florence, whereby scioperati were declared criminals. It must not, however, be supposed that Alberti confines himself to the development of this single theme. His Deiciarchia is rather to be regarded as a treatise on the personal qualities of men to whom the conduct of a commonwealth has been by accident of birth intrusted.

A second class of Alberti's dialogues discuss the contemplative life. In the Famiglia and the Deiciarchia man is regarded as a social and domestic being. In the Tranquillità dell'Animo and the Teogenio the inner life of the student and the sage comes under treatment. The former of these dialogues owes much of its interest to the interlocutors and to the scene where it was laid.[245] Leon Battista Alberti, Niccolò di Veri dei Medici, and Agnolo Pandolfini meet inside the Florentine Duomo, which is described in a few words of earnest admiration for its majesty and strength.[246] These friends begin a conversation, which soon turns upon the means of preserving the mind in repose and avoiding perturbations from the passions. The three books are enriched with copious allusions to Alberti's works and personal habits—his skill as a musician and a statuary, the gymnastic feats of his youth, and his efforts to benefit the State by intellectual labor. They form a valuable supplement to the anonymous biography. The philosophical material is too immediately borrowed from Cicero and Seneca to be of much importance. The Teogenio is a more attractive, and, as it seems to me, a riper work.[247] Of Alberti's ethical discourses I am inclined to rate this next to the Famiglia; nor did the Italian Renaissance produce any disquisition of the kind more elevated in feeling, finer in temper, or glowing with an eloquence at once so spontaneous and so dignified. We have to return to Petrarch to find the same high humanistic passion; and Alberti's Italian is here more winning than Petrarch's Latin. Had Pico condescended to the vulgar tongue, he might have produced work of similar quality; for the essay on the Dignity of Man is written in the same spirit.

The Teogenio was sent with a letter of dedication to Lionelle d'Este not long after his father's death.[248] Alberti apologizes for its Italian style and assures the prince it had been written merely to console him in his evil fortunes. The speakers are two, Teogenio and Microtiro.[249] The dialogue opens with a passage on friendship, and a somewhat labored description of the grove where Teogenio intends to pass the day. Microtiro has come from the city. His friend, the recluse, welcomes him to the country with these words: "Ma sediamo, se così ti piace, qui fra questi mirti, in luogo non men delizioso che vostri teatri e tempi amplissimi e sontuosissimi." This strikes the keynote of the treatise, the theme of which is the superiority of study in the country over the distractions of the town. Reading it, we see how rightly Landino assigned his part to Alberti in the Camaldolese Discussions.[250] That ideal of rural solitude which the Italian scholars inherited from their Roman forefathers, receives its earliest and finest treatment in this dialogue. It is not communion with nature so much as the companionship of books and the pursuit of study in a tranquil corner of the Tuscan hills, that Alberti has selected for his panegyric.[251] "The society of the illustrious dead," he says in one of the noblest passages of the essay, "can be enjoyed by me at leisure here; and when I choose to converse with sages, politicians or great poets, I have but to turn to my bookshelves, and my company is better than your palaces with all their crowds of flatterers and clients can afford."[252] After enlarging on the manifold advantages of a student's life, he concludes the book with a magnificent picture of human frailty, leading up to a discourse on death.

It is noticeable that Alberti, though frequently approaching the subject of religion, never dilates upon it, and in no place declares himself a Christian. His creed is that of the Roman moralists—a belief in the benignant Maker of the Universe, an intellectual and unsubstantial theism. We feel this even in that passage of the Famiglia when Giannozzo and his wife pray in their bed-chamber to God for prosperity in life and happiness in children.[253] There is not a word about spiritual blessings, no allusion to Christ or Madonna, though a silver statue of the Saint with ivory hands and face is standing in his tabernacle over them[254]—nothing, indeed, to indicate that this grave Florentine couple, whom we may figure to ourselves like Van Dyck's merchant and wife in the National Gallery, were not performing sacrifice and praying to the Di Lares of a Roman household. The Renaissance had Latinized even the religious sentiments, and the elder faiths of the middle ages were extinct in the soundest hearts of the epoch.[255]

A third group of Alberti's prose works consists of his essays on the arts.[256] One of these, the Treatise on Painting, was either written in Italian or translated by Alberti soon after its composition in Latin.[257] The Treatises on Perspective, Sculpture, Architecture and the Orders are supposed to have been rendered by their author from the Latin; but doubt still rests upon Alberti's share in this translation. It is not my present business to inquire into the subject-matter of his artistic essays, but rather to note the fact that Alberti should have thought it fitting to use Italian for at least the most considerable of them. We have already seen that his chief motive to composition was utility and that he recognized the need of bringing the results of learning within the scope of the unlettered laity. We need not doubt that this consideration weighed with him when he rehandled the matter of Vitruvius and Pliny for the use of handicraftsmen. Nothing is more striking in the whole series than the business-like simplicity of style, the avoidance of rhetoric, and the adaptation of each section to some practical end. We have not here to do with æsthetical criticism, but with the condensed experience of a student and workman. In his exposition of theory Alberti corresponds to the practice of Florence, where Ghirlandajo kept a bottega open to all comers, and Michelangelo began his apprenticeship by grinding colors.

Though the subject of these essays lies beyond the scope of my work, it is impossible to pass over the dedication to Filippo Brunelleschi, which is prefixed to the Italian version of the Pittura. Alberti begins by saying that the wonder and sorrow begotten in him by reflecting on the loss of many noble arts and sciences, had led him to believe that Nature, wearied and out-worn, had no force left to generate the giant spirits of her youth. "But when I returned from the long exile in which we of the Alberti have grown old, to this our mother-city, which exceeds all others in the beauty of her monuments, I perceived that many living men, but first of all you, Filippo, and our dearest friend the sculptor Donatello, and Lorenzo Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia and Masaccio, were not of less account for genius and noble work than any ancient artist of great fame." After some remarks upon industry and the advantages of scientific theory, he proceeds: "Who is there so hard and envious of temper as not to praise the architect Filippo, when he saw so vast a structure, raised above the heavens, spacious enough to cover with its shadow all the Tuscan folks, built without any aid from beams and scaffoldings, a miracle of art, if I judge rightly, which might in this age have been deemed impossible, and which even among the ancients was perhaps unknown, undreamed of?" After this exordium, he commits to Brunelleschi's care his little book on painting, quale a tuo nome feci in lingua toscana. The interest of this dedication lies not only in the mention of the five chief quattrocento artists by Alberti, and in the record of the impression first produced on him by Florence, but also in the recognition that, great as were the dead arts of antiquity, the modern arts of Italy could rival them. It is an intuition parallel to that which induced Alberti to compose the Famiglia in Italian, and proves that he could endure the blaze of humanism without blindness.

In the fourth group of Alberti's prose-works we come across a new vein of semi-moral, semi-satirical reflection. These are devoted to love and matrimony, giving rhetorical expression to the misogynistic side of the Novelle. Alberti professes himself a master in the lore of love. He knows its symptoms, diagnoses and describes the stages of the malady, and pretends to intimate acquaintance with the foibles of both sexes. Yet we seem to feel that his knowledge is rather literary than real, derived from books and pranked with a scholastic show of borrowed learning. Two lectures addressed by women to their own sex on the art of love, take the first place in this series. The one is called Ecatomfila, or the lady of the hundred loves; the other Amiria, or the lady of the myriad.[258] The former tells her female audience what kind of lover to choose, neither too young nor too old, not too rich nor yet too handsome; how to keep him, and in what way to make the most of the precious acquisition. She is comparatively modest, and the sort of passion she implies may pass for virtuous. Yet her large experience of men proves she has arrived at wisdom after many trials. Her virtue is a matter of prudent egoism. Amiria takes a different line. Heliogabalus might have used her precepts in his Concio ad Meretrices. Her discourse turns upon the subsidiary aids to beauty and the arts of coquetry. Recipes for hair-dyes, depilatories, eye-lotions, tooth-powders, soaps, lip-salves, ointments, cosmetics, skin-preservers, wart-destroyers, pearl-powders, rouges, are followed up with sound advice about craft, fraud, force, feigned passion, entangling manœuvres, crocodile tears, and secrecy in self-indulgence. The sustained irony of this address, and the minute acquaintance with the least laudable secrets of an Italian lady's toilet it reveals, place it upon the list of literary curiosities. Did any human beings ever plaster their faces with such stuff as Amiria gravely recommends?[259]

The Deifira is a dialogue on the cure of a distempered passion, which adds but little to Ovid's Remedium Amoris; while two short treatises on marriage only prove that Alberti took the old Simonidean view of there being at least nine bad women to one good one.[260] His misogyny, whether real or affected, reaches its climax in an epistle to Paolo Codagnello, which combines the worst things said by Boccaccio in the Corbaccio with Lucian's satire on female uncleanliness in the Amores.[261] The tirade appears to be as serious as possible, and, indeed, Alberti's generalities might be illustrated ad libitum from the Novelle. It is no wonder that women resented his treatment of them; and one of his most amusing lesser tracts is a dialogue between himself and a lady called Sofrona, who took him to task for this very epistle. In answer to her reproaches he is ceremoniously polite. He also gives her the last word in the argument, not without a stroke of humor. "It is all very well of you, men of letters, to take our characters away, so long as we can rule our husbands and make choice of lovers when and how we choose. All you men run after us; and if you do but see a pretty girl, you stand as stock still as a statue."[262] After this fashion runs Sofrona's reply.

Alberti's misogynistic essays remind us how very difficult it is to understand or explain the tone of popular literature in that century with regard to women. That the Novelle were written to amuse both sexes seems clear; and we must imagine that the women who read so much vituperation of their manners, regarded it as a conventional play with words. Like Sofrona, they knew their satirists to be fair husbands, fathers, brothers, and, in the capacity of lovers, ludicrously blind to their defects. The current abuse of women, in which Petrarch no less than Alberti and Boccaccio indulged, seems to have been a scholastic survival of the coarse and ignorant literature of the medieval clergy. Cloistered monks indulged their taste for obscenity, and indemnified themselves for self-imposed celibacy, by grossly insulting the mothers who bore them and the institution they administered as a sacrament.[263] Their invective tickled the vulgar ear, and passed into popular literature, where it held its own as a commonplace, not credited with too much meaning by folk who knew the world.

The pretty story of Ippolito and Leonora, could we believe it to be Alberti's, might pass for a palinode to these misogynistic treatises.[264] It is the tale of two Florentine lovers, born in hostile houses, and brought after a series of misadventures, to the fruition of honorable love in marriage. The legend must have been very popular. Besides the prose version, in which the lovers are called Ippolito de' Buondelmonti and Leonora de' Bardi, we have a poem in ottava rima, where the heroine's name becomes Dianora. A Latin translation of the same novel was produced by Paolo Cortesi, with the title Hyppolyti et Deyaniræ Historia. But since Alberti's authorship has not been clearly proved, it is more prudent to class both Italian versions among those anonymous products of popular literature which will form the topic of my next chapter.

Of Alberti's poems few survive; and these have no great literary value. Out of the three serious sonnets, one beginning Io vidi già seder deserves to be studied for a certain rapidity of movement and mystery of emotion.[265] It might be compared to an allegorical engraving by some artist of the sixteenth century—Robeta or the Master of the Caduceus. Two burlesque sonnets in reply to Burchiello have this interest, that they illustrate a point of literary contact between the people and the cultivated classes. But, on the whole, the Sestines and the Elegy of Agiletta must be reckoned Alberti's best performances in verse.[266] Here his gnomic wisdom finds expression in pregnant, almost epigrammatic utterances. There are passages in the Agiletta, weighty with packed sentences, which remind an English reader of Bacon's lines on human life.[267] Still it is the poetry of a man largely gifted, but not born to be a singer. It may be worth adding to this brief notice of Alberti's rhymes, that he essayed Latin meters in Italian. The following elegiac couplet belongs to him[268]:

Questa per estremo miserabile epistola mando

A te che spregi miseramente noi.

It is not worth printing. But it illustrates that endeavor to fuse the forms of ancient with the material of modern art, which underlay Alberti's practical experiments in architecture.

It may seem that too much attention has already been given to Alberti and his works. Yet when we consider his peculiar position in the history of the Renaissance, when we remember the singular beauty of his character, and reflect that, first among the humanists of mark, he deigned to labor for the public and to cultivate his mother tongue, a certain disproportion in the space allotted him may be excused. What his immediate successors in the field of erudition thought of him, can be gathered from a passage in Poliziano's preface to the first edition of his work on Architecture.[269] "To praise the author is beyond the narrow limits of a letter, beyond the poor reach of my powers of eloquence. Nothing, however abstruse in learning, however remote from the ordinary range of scholarship, was hidden from his genius. One might question whether he was better fitted for oratory or for poetry, whether his speech was the more weighty or the more polished." These great qualities Alberti placed freely at the service of the unlettered laity. He is therefore the hero of that age which I have called the period of transition.

In Alberti, moreover, we study the best type of the Italian intellect as it was molded, on emergence from the middle ages, by those double influences of humanism and fine art which determined the Renaissance. Though his genius was rather artistic than scientific, all problems of nature and of man attracted him; and he dealt freely with them in the spirit of true modern curiosity. His method shows no trace either of mystical theology or of crooked scholasticism. He surveyed the world with a meditative but observant glance, avoiding the deeper questions of ontology, and depicting what he noticed with the realism of a painter. This powerful pictorial faculty made his sketches from contemporary life—the description of the gambler in the Deiciarchia; the portrait of the sage in the Teogenio; the domestic colloquies of Giannozzo with his wife in the Famiglia; the interior of a coquette's chamber in the Amiria—surprising for sincerity and fullness. As a writer, he has the same merit that we recognize in Masaccio and Ghirlandajo among the fresco-painters of that age. But Alberti's touch is more sympathetic, his humanity more loving.

He was not eminent as a metaphysician. From Plato he only borrowed something of his literary art, and something of ethical elevation, leaving to Ficino the mysticism which then passed for Platonic science. His ideal of the virtuous man is a Florence burgher, honorable but keen in business, open to culture of all kinds, untainted by the cynicism that marred Cosimo de' Medici, lacking the licentious traits of the Novelle. Alberti's Padre di Famiglia might have stepped from the walls of the Riccardi Chapel or the Choir of S. Maria Novella, in his grave red lucco, with the cold and powerful features. The life praised above all others by Alberti is the life of a meditative student, withdrawn from State affairs, and corresponding with men of a like tranquil nature. This ideal was realized by Sannazzaro in his Mergellina, by Ficino at Montevecchio, by Pico at Querceto. Just as his science and his philosophy were æsthetic, so were his religion and his morality. He conformed to the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. But the religious sentiment had already become in him rational rather than emotional, and less a condition of the conscience than of the artistic sensibility. Honor in men, honesty in women, moved his admiration because they are comely. The splendor of the stars, the loveliness of earth, raised him in thought to the supreme source of beauty. Whatever the genius of man brings to perfection of grace, he called divine, realizing for the first time the piety that finds God in the human spirit.[270]

The harmonious lines and the vast spaces of the Florentine Duomo thrilled him like music, merging the charm of art in the high worship of a cultivated nature. "This temple," he writes in a passage that might be quoted as the quintessential exposition of his mind,[271] "has in it both grace and majesty, and I delight to notice that union of slender elegance with full and vigorous solidity, which shows that while every member is designed to please, the whole is built for perpetuity. Inside these aisles there is the climate of eternal spring—wind, frost, and rime without; a quiet and mild air within—the blaze of summer on the square; delicious coolness here. Above all things I delight in feeling the sweetness of those voices busied at the sacrifice, and in the sacred rites our classic ancestors called mysteries. All other modes and kinds of singing weary with reiteration; only religious music never palls. I know not how others are affected; but for myself, those hymns and psalms of the Church produce on me the very effect for which they were designed, soothing all disturbance of the soul, and inspiring a certain ineffable languor full of reverence toward God. What heart of man is so rude as not to be softened when he hears the rhythmic rise and fall of those voices, complete and true, in cadences so sweet and flexible? I assure you that I never listen in these mysteries and funeral ceremonies to the Greek words which call on God for aid against our human wretchedness, without weeping. Then, too, I ponder what power music brings with it to soften us and soothe."

It would be difficult with greater spontaneity and truth to delineate the emotions stirred in an artistic nature by the services of a cathedral. It is the language, however, not of a devout Christian, but one who, long before Goethe, had realized the Goethesque ideal of "living with fixed purpose in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful."

Alberti both in his width of genius and in his limitations—in his all-embracing curiosity and aptitude for knowledge, his sensitiveness to every charm, his strong practical bias, the realism of his pictures, the objectivity of his style, his indifference to theology and metaphysic, the largeness of his love for all things that have grace, the substitution of æsthetical for moral standards, the purity of his taste, the tranquillity and urbanity of his spirit, his Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of the world where man may be content to dwell and build himself a home of beauty—was a true representative of his age. What attracts us in the bronze-work of Ghiberti, in the bass-reliefs of Della Robbia, in Rossellino's sleeping Cardinal di Portogallo, in Ghirlandajo's portraits and the airy space of Masaccio's backgrounds, in the lives of Ficino and Pomponio Leto, in the dome of Brunelleschi, in the stanzas of Poliziano, arrives at consciousness in Alberti, pervades his writing, and finds unique expression in the fragment of his Latin biography. Yet we must not measure the age of Cosimo de' Medici and Roderigo Borgia by the standard of Alberti. He presents the spirit of the fifteenth century at its very best. Philosophical and artistic sympathy compensate in his religion for that period's lack of pious faith. Its political degradation assumes in him the shape of a fastidious retirement from vulgar strife. Its lawlessness, caprice, and violence are regulated by the motto "Nothing overmuch" which forms the keystone of his ethics. Its realism is tempered by his love for man and beast and tree—that love which made him weep when he beheld the summer fields and labors of the husbandman. Its sensuality finds no place in his harmonious nature. Many defects of the century are visible enough in Alberti; but what redeemed Italy from corruption and rendered her capable of great and brilliant work amid the chaos of States ruining in infidelity and vice—that free energy of the intellect, open to all influences, inventive of ideas, creative of beauty, which ennobled her Renaissance—burned in him with mild and tranquil radiance.

This is perhaps the fittest place to notice a remarkable book, which, though it cannot be reckoned among the masterpieces of Italian literature, is too important in its bearing on the history of the Renaissance to be passed in silence. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or "Poliphil's Strife of Love in a Dream," was written by Francesco Colonna, a Dominican monk, at Treviso in 1467.[272] There is some reason to conjecture that he composed it first in Latin;[273] but when it appeared in print in 1499, it had already assumed the garb of a strange maccaronic style, blending the euphuisms of affected rhetoric with phrases culled from humanistic pedantry. The base of the language professes to be Italian; but it is an Italian Latinized in all its elements, and interlarded with scraps of Greek and Hebrew. The following description of the Dawn, with which the book opens, serve as a specimen of its peculiar dialect[274]:

Phoebo in quel hora manando, che la fronte di Matuta Leucothea candidava, fora gia dalle Oceane unde, le volubile rote sospese non dimonstrava. Ma sedulo cum gli sui volucri caballi, Pyroo primo, & Eoo al quanto apparendo, ad dipingere le lycophe quadrige della figliola di vermigliante rose, velocissimo inseguentila, non dimorava. Et coruscante gia sopra le cerulee & inquiete undule, le sue irradiante come crispulavano. Dal quale adventicio in quel puncto occidua davase la non cornuta Cynthia, solicitando gli dui caballi del vehiculo suo cum il Mulo, lo uno candido & laltro fusco, trahenti ad lultimo Horizonta discriminante gli Hemisperii pervenuta, & dalla pervia stella ari centare el di, fugata cedeva. In quel tempo quando che gli Rhiphaei monti erano placidi, ne cum tanta rigidecia piu lalgente & frigorifico Euro cum el laterale flando quassabondo el mandava gli teneri ramuli, & ad inquietare gli mobili scirpi & pontuti iunci & debili Cypiri, & advexare gli plichevoli vimini & agitare gli lenti salici, & proclinare la fragile abiete sotto gli corni di Tauro lascivianti. Quanta n el hyberno tempo spirare solea. Similmente el iactabondo Orione cessando di persequire lachrymoso, lornato humero Taurino delle sete sorore.

Whether Francesco Colonna prepared the redaction from which this paragraph is quoted, admits of doubt. A scholar, Leonardo Crasso of Verona, defrayed the cost of the edition. Manutius Aldus printed the volume and its pages were adorned with precious wood-cuts, the work of more than one anonymous master of the Lombardo-Venetian school.[275] It was dedicated to Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino.

For the student of Italian literature in its transition from the middle age to the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia has special and many-sided interest. It shows that outside Florence, where the pure Italian idiom was too vigorous to be suppressed, humanistic fashion had so far taken possession of the literary fancy as to threaten the very existence of the mother tongue. But, more than this, it represents that epoch of transition in its fourfold intellectual craving after the beauty of antiquity, the treasures of erudition, the multiplied delights of art, and the liberty of nature. These cravings are allegorized in a romance of love, which blends medieval mysticism with modern sensuousness. Like the style, the matter of the book is maccaronic, parti-colored and confused; but the passion which controls so many elements is genuine and simple. The spirit of the earlier Renaissance reflects itself, as in a mirror, in the Dream of Poliphil. So essentially is it the product of a transitional moment that when the first enthusiasm for its euphuistic pedantry and æsthetical rapture had subsided, the key to its most obvious meaning was lost. In the preface to the fourth French edition (1600), Beroald de Verville hinted that the volume held deep alchemistic secrets for those who could discover them. After this distortion the book passed into not altogether unmerited oblivion. It had done its work for the past age. It now remains an invaluable monument for those who would fain reconstruct the century which gave it birth.

The Hypnerotomachia professes to relate its author's love for Polia, a nun, his search after her, and their union, at the close of sundry trials and adventures, in the realm of Venus. Poliphil dreams that he finds himself in a wild wood, where he is assailed by monstrous beasts, and suffers great distress of mind. He prays to Diespiter, and comes forthwith into a pleasant valley, through which he wanders in the hope of finding Polia. At the outset of his journey he meets five damsels, Aphea, Offressia, Orassia, Achoe, Geussia, who conduct him to their queen, Eleuterilyda.[276] She understands his quest, and assigns the maidens, Logistica and Thelemia, to be his guides into the palace of Telosia. They journey together and arrive at the abode of Dame Telosia, which has three gates severally inscribed in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin characters with legends, the meaning whereof is God's Glory, Mother of Love, and Worldly Glory. Poliphil enters the first door, and finds the place within but little to his liking. Then he tries the third, and is no better pleased. Lastly he gains admittance to the demesne of Love's Mother, where he is content to Stay. Lovely and lascivious maidens greet him kindly; and while he surrenders to their invitation, one of his attendants, Logistica, takes her flight. He is left with his beloved Thelemia to enjoy the pleasures of this enchanting region.

Thus far the allegory is not hard to read. Poliphil, or the lover of Polia, escapes from the perils of the forest where his earlier life was passed, by petition to the Father of Gods and Men. He places himself in the hands of the five senses, who conduct him to freewill. Freewill appoints for his further guidance reason and inclination, who are to lead him to the final choice of lives. When he arrives at the point where this choice has to be made, he perceives that God, the world, and beauty, who is mother of love, compete for his willing service. He rejects religion and ambition; and no sooner has his preference for love and beauty been avowed, than the reasoning faculty deserts him, and he is abandoned to inclination.

While Poliphil is dallying with the nymphs of pleasure and his own wanton will, he is suddenly abandoned by these companions, and pursues his journey alone.[277] Before long, however, he becomes aware of a maiden, exceedingly fair to look upon, who carries in her hand a lighted torch. With her for guide, he passes through many pleasant places, arriving finally at the temple of Venus Physizoe. This maiden, though as yet he cannot recognize her, is the Polia he seeks, and on their way together he feels the influences of her love-compelling beauty. They enter the chapel of Venus, and are graciously received by the prioress who guards that sanctuary. Mystical rites of initiation and consecration are performed. Polia lays down her torch, and is discovered by her lover. Then they are wedded by grace of the abiding goddess; and having undergone the ceremony of spousal, they resume their wanderings together. They pass through a desolate city of tombs and ruins, named Polyandrion, where are the sepulchers and epitaphs of lovers. Here, too, they witness the pangs of souls tormented for their crimes against the deity of Love. Afterwards they reach a great water, where Cupid's barge comes sailing by, and takes them to the island of Cythera. It is a level land of gardens, groves and labyrinths, adorned with theaters and baths, and watered by a mystic font of Venus. Near the Tomb of Adonis in this demesne of Love, Polia and Poliphil sit down to rest among the nymphs, and Polia relates the story of their early passion.

It is here, if anywhere, that we come across reality in this romance. Polia tells how the town of Treviso was founded, and of what illustrious lineage she came, and how she vowed herself to the service of Diana when the plague was raging in the city. In Dian's temple Poliphil first saw her, and fainted at the sight, and she, made cruel by the memory of her vows, left him upon the temple-floor for dead. But when she returned home, a vision of women punished for their hard heart smote her conscience; and her old nurse, an adept in the ways of love, counseled her to seek the Prioress of Venus, and confess, and enter into reconcilement with her lover. What the nurse advised, Polia did, and in the temple of Venus she met Poliphil. He, while his body lay entranced upon the floor of Dian's church, had visited the heavens in spirit and obtained grace from Venus and Cupid. Therefore, the twain were now of one accord, and ready to be joined in bonds of natural affection. At the end of Polia's story, the nymphs leave both lovers to enjoy their new-found happiness. But here the power of sleep is spent, and Poliphil, awakened by the song of swallows, starts from dreams with "Farewell, my Polia!" upon his lips.

Such is the frail and slender basis of romance, corresponding, in the details of Polia's narrative, to an ordinary novella, upon which the bulky edifice of the Hypnerotomachia is built. This love-story, while it gives form to the book, is clearly not the author's main motive. What really concerns him most deeply is the handling of artistic themes, which, though introduced by way of digressions, occupy by far the larger portion of his work. The Hypnerotomachia is an encyclopædia of curious learning, a treasure-house of æsthetical descriptions and discussions, vividly reflecting the two ruling enthusiasms of the earlier Renaissance for scholarship and art. Minute details of inexhaustible variety, bringing before our imagination the architecture, sculpture, and painting of the fifteenth century, its gardens, palaces and temples, its processions, triumphs and ceremonial shows, its delight in costly jewels, furniture, embroidery and banquets, its profound feeling for the beauty of women, and its admiration for the goodliness of athletic manhood, are massed together with bewildering profusion. Not one of the technical arts which flourished in the dawn of the Renaissance but finds due celebration here; and the whole is penetrated with that fervent reverence for antiquity which inspired the humanists. Yet the Hypnerotomachia, though sometimes tedious, is never frigid. With the precision of a treatise and the minuteness of an inventory, it combines the ardor of impassioned feeling, the rapture of anticipation, the artist's blending with the lover's ecstasy. It is a dithyramb of the imagination, inflamed by no Oriental lust of mere magnificence, but by the fine sense of what is beautiful in form, rare in material, just in proportion, exquisite in workmanship.

Whether the Hypnerotomachia exercised a powerful influence over the productions of the Italian genius, can be doubted. But that it presents an epitome or figured abstract of the Renaissance in its earlier luxuriance, is unmistakable. Reading it, we wander through the collections of Paul II., rich with jewels, intagli, cameos and coins; we enter Amadeo's chapels, Filarete's palaces, Bramante's peristyles and loggie; we pace the gardens of the Brenta and the Sforza's deer-parks at Pavia; we watch Lorenzo's Florentine trionfi and Pietro Riario's festivals in Rome; Giorgione's fêtes champêtres are set for us in framework of the choicest fruits and flowers; we hear Ciriac of Ancona discoursing on his epigraphs and broken marbles; before our eyes, as in a gallery, are ranged the bass-reliefs of Donatello wrought in bronze, Mantegna's triumphs, Signorelli's arabesques, the terra-cotta of the Lombard and the stucco of the Roman schools, the carved-work of Alberti's church at Rimini, the tarsiatura of Fra Giovanni da Verona's choir-stalls, doorways from Milanese and chimneys from Urbino palaces, Vatican tapestries and trellis-work of beaten iron from Prato—all that the Renaissance in its bloom produced, is here depicted with the wealth and warmth of fancy doting on anticipated beauties.

Of the author, Francesco Colonna, very little is known, except that he was born in 1433 at Venice, that he attached himself to Ermolao Barbaro, spent a portion of his manhood in the Dominican cloister of S. Niccolò at Treviso, and died at Venice in 1527. Whether the love-tale of the Hypnerotomachia had a basis of reality, or whether we ought to regard it wholly from the point of view of allegory, cannot be decided now. It is, however, probable that a substratum of experience underlay the vast mass of superimposed erudition and enthusiastic reverie. The references to Polia's name and race; her epitaph appended to the first edition; the details of her narrative, which somewhat break the continuity of style and introduce a biographical element into the romance; the very structure of the allegory which assigns so large a part in life to sensuous instinct—all these points seem to prove that Poliphil was moved by memory of what had really happened, no less than by the desire to express a certain mood of feeling and belief. Such mingling of actual emotion with ideal passion in a work of imagination, dedicated to a woman who is also an emblem, was consistent with the practice of medieval poets. Polia belongs, under altered circumstances, to the same class as Beatrice. The hypothesis that, whoever she may have been, she had become for her lover a metaphor of antique beauty, is sufficiently attractive and plausible. If we adopt this theory, we must interpret the dark wood where Poliphil first found himself, to mean the anarchy of Gothic art; while his emancipation through the senses and Thelemia characterizes the spirit in which the Italians achieved the Revival. The extraordinary care lavished upon details, interrupting the course of the romance and withdrawing our sympathy from Polia, meet from this point of view with justification. Veiling his enthusiasm for the renascent past beneath the fiction of a novel, Francesco Colonna invests the lady of his intellectual choice, the handmaid of Aphrodite, evoked from the sepulcher where arts and sciences lie buried, with rich Renaissance trappings of elaborate device. Beneath those exuberant arabesques, within that labyrinth of technically perfect details, suave outlines, delicate contours devoid of content, a real woman would be lost. But if Polia be not merely a woman, if she be, as her name πολια seems to indicate, at the same time the vision of resurgent classic beauty, then the setting which her lover has contrived is adequate to the influences which inspired him. The multiform and labored frame-work of his picture acquires a meaning from the spirit of the goddess whom he worships, and the presiding genius of his age dwells in a shrine, each point of which is brilliant with the splendor which that spirit radiates.

It is, therefore, as an allegory of the Renaissance, conscious of its destiny and strongest aspirations in the person of an almost nameless monk, that we should read the Hypnerotomachia. Still, even so, the mark of indecision, which rests upon the many twy-formed masterpieces of this century, is here discernible. Francesco Colonna has one foot in the middle ages, another planted on the firm ground of the modern era. He wavers between the psychological realism of romance and the philosophical idealism of allegory. Polia is both too much and too little of a woman. At one time her personality seems as distinct as that of any heroine of fiction; at another we lose sight of her in the mist of symbolism. Granting, again, that she is a metaphor, she lends herself to more than one conception. She is both an emblem of passion, sanctified by nature, and liberated from the bondage of asceticism, and also an emblem of ideal beauty, recovered from the past, and worshiped by a scholar-artist.

This confusion of motives and uncertainty of aim, while it detracts from the artistic value of the Hypnerotomachia, enhances its historical importance. In form, the book has to be classed with the Visions of the middle ages—the Divine Comedy, the Amorosa Visione, and the Quadriregio. But though the form is medieval, the inspiration of this prose-poem is quite other. We have seen already how Francesco Colonna, traveling in search of Polia, prayed to Jupiter, and how the senses and freewill guided him to the satisfaction of his deepest self in the service of Beauty. It is in the temple of Venus Physizoe (Venus the procreative source of life in Nature) that he meets with his love and is wedded to her in the bonds of mutual desire.[278] Christianity is wholly, we might say systematically, ignored. The ascetic standpoint of the middle age is abandoned for another, antagonistic to its ruling impulses. A new creed, a new cult, are introduced. Polia, whether we regard her as the poet's mistress or as the spirit of antiquity which has enamored him, is won by worship paid to deities of natural appetite. In its essence, then, the Hypnerotomachia corresponds to the most fruitful instinct of the Renaissance—to that striving after emancipation which restored humanity to its heritage in the realms of sense and reason. Old ideals, exhausted and devoid of vital force, are exchanged for fresh and beautiful reality. The spirituality of the past, which has become consumptive and ineffectively lapse of time and long familiarity, yields to vigorous animalism. The cloister is quitted for the world, religious for artistic ecstasy, celestial for earthly paradise, scholasticism for humane studies, the ascetic for the hedonistic rule of conduct. Criticised according to its deeper meaning, the Hypnerotomachia is the poem of which Valla's De Voluptate was the argument, of which Lorenzo de' Medici's life was the realization, and the life of Aretino the caricature. If it assumes the form of a vision, reminding us thereby that the author was born upon the confines of the middle ages and the modern era, it deals with the vision in no Dantesque spirit, but with the geniality of Apuleius. Allegory is but a transparent veil, to make the nudity of natural impulse fascinating. As in Boccaccio, so here the hymn of il talento, simple appetite, is sung; but the fusion of artistic and humanistic enthusiasms with this ground-motive adds peculiar quality, distinctive of the later age which gave it birth.

The secret of its charm, which, indeed, it shares with earlier Renaissance art in general, is that this yearning after freedom has been felt with rapture, but not fully satisfied. The season of repletion and satiety is distant. Venus Physizoe appears to Francesco Colonna radiant above all powers of heaven or earth, because he is a monk and may not serve her. Had he his whole will, she might have been for him Venus Volgivaga, and he the author of another Puttana Errante. Nor has she yet assumed the earnest mask of science. This element of unassuaged desire, indulged in longings and outgoings of the fancy, this recognition of man's highest good and happiness in nature by one who has forsworn allegiance to the laws of nature, adds warmth to his emotion and penetrates his pictures with a kind of passion. The arts and scholarship, which divide the empire of his soul with beauty, have no less attraction of romance than love itself. Nor are they separated in his mind from nature. Nature and antiquity, knowledge and desire, the reverence for abstract beauty and the instincts of a lover are fused in one enthusiasm. Thus Francesco Colonna makes us understand how Italy used both art and erudition as instruments in the liberation of human energies. For the thinkers and actors of that period, antiquity and the plastic arts were aids to the recovery of a paradise from which man had been exiled. They could not dissociate the conception of nature from studies which revealed their human dignity and freedom, or from arts whereby they expressed their vivid sense of beauty. The work they thus inaugurated, had afterwards to be continued by the scientific faculties.

One word may finally be said about the peculiar delicacy of this book. The Hypnerotomachia is no less an apotheosis of natural appetite than the Amorosa Visione. But it is more sentimental and imaginative, because its author had not Boccaccio's crude experience. It anticipates the art of the great age—the art of Cellini and Giulio Romano, goldsmith-sculptors and palace-builders; but it is more refined and passionate, because its author enjoyed those beauties of consummate craft in reverie instead of practice. It interprets the enthusiasm of Ciriac and Poggio, discoverers of manuscripts, decipherers of epigraphs; but it is more naïf and graceful than their work of erudition, because its author dealt freely with his learning and subordinated scholarship to fancy. In short the Hypnerotomachia is a foreshadowing of the Renaissance in its prime—the spirit of the age foreseen in dreams, embodied in imagination, purged of material alloy, and freed from the encumbrances of actuality.

CHAPTER IV.

POPULAR SECULAR POETRY.

Separation between Cultivated Persons and the People—Italian despised by the Learned—Contempt for Vernacular Literature—The Certamen Coronarium—Literature of Instruction for the Proletariate—Growth of Italian Prose—Abundance of Popular Poetry—The People in the Quattrocento take the Lead—Qualities of Italian Genius—Arthurian and Carolingian Romances—I Reali di Francia—Andrea of Barberino and his Works—Numerous Romances in Prose and Verse—Positive Spirit—Versified Tales from Boccaccio—Popular Legends—Ginevra degli Almieri—Novel of Il Grasso—Histories in Verse—Lamenti—The Poets of the People—Cantatori in Banca—Antonio Pucci—His Sermintesi—Political Songs—Satires—Burchiello—His Life and Writings—Dance-Songs—Derived from Cultivated Literature, or produced by the People—Poliziano—Love-Songs—Rispetti and Stornelli—The Special Meaning of Strambotti—Diffusion of this Poetry over Italy—Its Permanence—Question of its Original Home—Intercommunication and Exchange of Dialects—Incatenature and Rappresaglie—Traveling in Medieval Italy—The Subject-Matter of this Poetry—Deficiency in Ballad Elements—Canti Monferrini—The Ballad of L'Avvelenato and Lord Ronald.

During the fifteenth century there was an almost complete separation between the cultivated classes and the people. Humanists, intent upon the exploration of the classics, deemed it below their dignity to use the vulgar tongue. They thought and wrote in Latin, and had no time to bestow upon the education of the common folk. A polite public was formed, who in the Courts of princes and the palaces of noblemen amused themselves with the ephemeral literature of pamphlets, essays, and epistles in the Latin tongue. For these well-educated readers Poggio and Pontano wrote their Latin novels. The same learned audience applauded the gladiators of the moment, Valla and Filelfo, when they descended into the arena and plied each other with pseudo-Ciceronian invectives. To quit this refined circle, and address the vulgar crowd, was thought unworthy of a man of erudition. Even Alberti, as we have seen, felt bound to apologize for sending his Teogenio in Italian to Lionello d'Este. Only here and there a humanist of the first rank is found who, like Bruni, devoted a portion of his industry to the Italian lives of Dante and Petrarch, or like Filelfo, lectured on the Divine Comedy, or again like Landino, composed a Dantesque commentary in the mother tongue. Moreover, Dante and Petrarch passed for almost classical; and in nearly all such instances of condescension, pecuniary interest swayed the scholar from his wonted orbit. It was want of skill in Latin rather than love for his own idiom which induced Vespasiano to pen his lives of great men in Italian. Not spontaneous inspiration, but the whim of a ducal patron forced Filelfo to use terza rima for his worthless poem on S. John, and to write a commentary upon Petrarch in the vernacular.[279] One of this man's letters reveals the humanist's contempt for the people's language, and his rooted belief in the immortality of Latin. It is worth translating.[280] "I will answer you," he says, "not in the vulgar language, as you ask, but in Latin and our own true speech; for I have ever had an abhorrence for the talk of grooms and servants, equal to my detestation of their life and manners. You, however, call that dialect vernacular which, when I use the Tuscan tongue, I sometimes write. All Italians agree in praise of Tuscan. Yet I only employ it for such matters as I do not choose to transmit to posterity. Moreover, even that Tuscan idiom is hardly current throughout Italy, while Latin is far and wide diffused throughout the habitable world." From this interesting epistle we gather that even professional scholars in the middle of the fifteenth century recognized Tuscan as a quasi-literary language, superior in polish to the other Italian dialects, but not to be compared for dignity and durability with Latin. It also proves that the language of Boccaccio was for them almost a foreign speech.

This attitude of learned writers produced a curious obtuseness of critical insight. Niccolò Niccoli, though he was a Florentine, called Dante "a poet for bakers and cobblers." Pico della Mirandola preferred Lorenzo de' Medici's verses to Petrarch. Landino complained, not, indeed, without good reason in that century, that the vulgar language could boast of no great authors. Filippo Villani, in the proem to his biographies, apologized for his father Matteo, who exerted humble faculties and scanty culture to his best ability. Lorenzo de' Medici defended himself for paying attention to an idiom which men of good judgment blamed for "lowness, incapacity and unworthiness to deal with high themes or grave material." Benedetto Varchi, who lived to be an excellent though somewhat cumbrous writer of Italian prose, gives this account of his early training[281]: "I remember that when I was a lad, the first and strictest rule of a father to his sons, and of a master to his pupils, was that they should on no account and for no object read anything in the vulgar speech (non legesseno cose volgari, per dirlo barbaramente come loro); and Master Guasparre Mariscotti da Marradi, who was my teacher in grammar, a man of hard and rough but pure and excellent manners, having once heard, I know not how, that Schiatta di Bernardo Bagnesi and I were wont to read Petrarch on the sly, gave as a sound rating for it, and nearly expelled us from his school." Some of Varchi's own stylistic pedantries may be attributed to this Latinizing education.

Even when they wrote their mother tongue, it followed that the men of humanistic culture had a false conception of style. Alberti could not abstain from Latinistic rhetoric. Cristoforo Landino went the length of asserting that "he who would fain be a good Tuscan writer, must first be a Latin scholar." The Italian of familiar correspondence was mingled in almost equal quantities with Latin phrases. Thus Poliziano, writing from Venice to Lorenzo de' Medici, employs the following strange maccaronic jargon[282]:

Visitai stamattina Messer Zaccheria Barbero; e mostrandoli io l'affezione vostra ec., mi rispose sempre lagrimando, et ut visum est, de cuore; risolvendosi in questo, in te uno spem esse. Ostendit so nosse quantum tibi debeat; sicchè fate quello ragionaste, ut favens ad majora. Quello Legato che torna da Roma, et qui tecum locutus est Florentiæ, non è punto a loro proposito, ut ajunt.

Poliziano, however, showed by his letters to the ladies of the Medicean family, and by some sermons composed for a religious brotherhood of which he was a member, that he had no difficulty in writing Tuscan prose of the best quality.[283] It seems to have been a contemptuous fashion among men of learning, when they used the mother tongue for correspondence, to load it with Latin—just as a German of the age of Frederick proved his superiority by French phrases. The acme of this affectation was reached in the Hypnerotomachia, where the vice of Latinism sought perpetuation through the printing press. Meanwhile, the genius of the Florentine people was saving Italian literature from the extreme consequences to which caricatures of this kind, inspired by humanistic pedantry and sciolism, exposed it.

A characteristic incident of the year 1441 brings before us a set of men who, though obscure and devoted to the service of the common folk, exercised no slight influence over the destinies of the Italian language. After the reinstatement of the Medici, and while Alberti was resident in Florence, it occurred to him to propose the prize of a silver crown for the best poem upon Friendship, in the vulgar tongue. Piero de' Medici approving of this scheme, it was arranged that the contest for the prize should take place in S. Maria del Fiore, the competitors reciting their own compositions. The secretaries of Pope Eugenius IV. consented to be umpires. Eight poets entered the lists—Michele di Noferi del Gigante, Francesco d'Altobianco degli Alberti, and six others not less unknown to fame. We still possess their compositions in octave stanzas, terza rima, sapphics, hexameters and lyric strophes.[284] The poems were so bad that even the judges of that period refused to award the crown; nor could the most indulgent student of forgotten literature arraign this verdict for severity. Yet the men who engaged in Alberti's Certamen Coronarium, as it was called, fairly represented a class of literary workers, who occupied a middle place between the learned and the laity, and on whom devolved the task of writing for the people.

Since that unique moment in the history of Tuscan civilization when the lyrics of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti were heard upon the lips of blacksmiths, the artisans of Florence had not wholly lost their thirst for culture. Style and erudition retired into the schools of the humanists and the studies of the nobles. But this curiosity of the volgo, as Boccaccio contemptuously called them, was satisfied by the production of a vernacular literature, which brought the ruder elements of knowledge within their reach. Mention has already been made of Latini's Tesoro and Tesoretto, Uberti's Dittamondo and similar encyclopædic works of medieval learning. To these may now be added Leonardo Dati's cosmographical history in octave stanzas, the Schiavo da Bari's aphorisms on morality, and Pucci's terza rima version of Villani's Chronicle. Genealogical poems on popes, emperors and kings; episodes from national Italian history; novels, romances and tales of chivalry; pious biographies; the rudiments of education, from the Dottrinale of Jacopo Alighieri down to Feo Belcari's A B C, helped to complete the handicraftsman's library. Further to describe this plebeian literature is hardly necessary. The authors advanced no pretensions to artistic elegance or stateliness of style. They sought to render knowledge accessible to unlettered readers, or to please an open-air audience with stirring and romantic narratives. Their language broke only at rare intervals into poetry and rhetoric, when the subject-matter forced a note of unaffected feeling from the improvisatore. Yet it has always the merit of purity, and, in point of idiom, is superior to the Latinistic periods of Alberti. By means of the neglected labors of these nameless writers, the style of the fourteenth century, so winning in its infantine grace, was gradually transformed and rendered capable of stronger literary utterance. Those who have studied a single prose-work of this period—I Reali di Francia, for instance, or Belcari's Vita del Beato Colombino, or the Governo della Famiglia ascribed to Pandolfini—will be convinced that a real progress toward grammatical cohesion and massiveness of structure was made during those years of the fifteenth century which are usually counted barren of achievement by literary historians. Italian prose had entered on the period of adolescence, leading to the manhood of Machiavelli.

The popular poetry of the quattrocento is still more interesting than its prose. No period of Italian history was probably more fruitful of songs poured forth from the very heart of the people, on the fields and in the city. The music of these lyrics still lingers about the Tuscan highlands and the shores of Sicily, where much that now passes for original composition is but the echo of most ancient melody stored in the retentive memory of peasants. To investigate the several species of this poetry, together with kindred works of prose fiction, under the several classes of (i) epics and romances, (ii) histories in verse and satires, (iii) love-poems, (iv) religious lyrics, and (v) dramas, will be my object in the present and the following chapters. This survey of popular literature forms a necessary introduction to the renascence which was simultaneously effected for Italian at Florence, Ferrara and Naples during the last years of the century. The material prepared by the people was then resumed and artistically elaborated by learned authors.

It has been well said that Italian poetry exhibits a continual reciprocity of exchange between the cultivated classes and the proletariate. In this respect the literature of the Italians corresponds to their fine art. Taken together with painting, sculpture, and music, it offers a more complete embodiment of the national spirit than can be shown by any other modern race. Dante's Francesca and Count Ugolino, Ariosto's golden cantos, and the romantic episodes of the Gerusalemme are known by heart throughout the length and breadth of the Peninsula. The people have appropriated these masterpieces of finished art. On the other hand, the literary poets have been ever careful to borrow subjects, forms, and motives from the populace. The close rapport which thus connects the tastes and instincts of the proletariate with the culture of the aristocracy, is rooted in peculiar conditions of Italian society. Traditions of a very ancient civilization, derived without apparent rupture from the Roman age, have penetrated and refined the whole nation. From the highest to the lowest, the Italians are born with sensibility to beauty. This people and its poets live in sympathy so vital that, though their mutual good understanding may have been suspended for short intervals, it has never been broken. The vibrations of intercourse between the peasant and the learned writer are incessant; and if we notice some intermittency of influence on one side or the other, it is only because at one epoch the destinies of the national genius were committed to the people, at another to the cultivated classes. In the fifteenth century, one of these temporary ruptures occurred. The Revival of Learning had to be effected by an isolation of the scholars. Meanwhile, the people carried on the work of literary transmutation, which was to connect Boccaccio with Pulci and Poliziano. Their instinct rejected all elements alien to the national temperament. Out of the many models bequeathed by the fourteenth century, only those which suited the sensuous realism of the Florentines survived. The traditions of Ciullo d'Alcamo and Jacopone da Todi, of Rustico di Filippo and Lapo Gianni, of Folgore da S. Gemignano and Cene dalla Chitarra, of Cecco Angiolieri and Guido Cavalcanti, of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, of Ser Giovanni and Alesso Donati, triumphed over the scholasticism of those learned poets—"half Provençal and half Latin, half chivalrous, and half bourgeois, half monastic and half sensual, half aristocratic and half plebeian"[285]—who had unsuccessfully experimentalized in the dawn of Tuscan culture. The artificial chivalry, lifeless mysticism, barren metaphysics, and hypocritical piety of the rhyming doctors were eliminated. Common sense expressed itself in a reaction against their conventional philosophy. Giotto's blunt critique of Franciscan poverty, Orcagna's burlesque definition of Love, not as a blind boy with wings and arrows, but thus:

L'amore è un trastullo;

Non è composto di legno nè d'osso;

E a molta gente fa rompere il dosso:

struck the keynote of the new literature.[286] It is true that much was sacrificed. Both Dante and Petrarch seemed to be forgotten. Yet this was inevitable. Dante represented a bygone age of faith and reason. Petrarch's humanity was too exquisitely veiled. The Florentine people required expression more simple and direct, movement more brusque, emotion of a coarser fiber. Meanwhile the Divine Comedy and the Canzoniere were the inalienable possessions of the nation. They had already taken rank as classics.

The Italians had no national Epic, if we except the Æneid. We have seen how the romances of Charlemagne and Arthur were imported with the languages of France and Provence into Northern Italy, and how they passed into the national literature of Lombardy and Tuscany.[287] Both cycles were eminently popular. The Tavola Ritonda ranks among the earliest monuments of Tuscan prose.[288] The Cento Novelle contain frequent references to Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram. Folgore da S. Gemignano compares the members of his Joyous Company to King Ban's children. In the Laberinto d'Amore Boccaccio speaks of Arthurian tales as the favorite studies of idle women, and Sacchetti bids his blacksmith turn from Dante to legends of the Round Table. Yet there is no doubt that from a very early period the Carolingian cycle gained the preference of the Italian people.[289] It is also noticeable that, not the main legend of Roland, but the episode of Rinaldo, and other offshoots from the history of the Frankish peers, furnished plebeian poets with their favorite material.[290] MSS. written in Venetian and Franco-Italian dialects before the middle of the fourteenth century attest to the popularity of these subordinate romances, and reveal an independent handling of the borrowed subject. In form they do not diverge widely from French originals. Yet there is one prominent characteristic which distinguishes the Italian rifacimenti. A Christian hero falls in love with a pagan heroine on pagan soil. His pursuit of her, their difficulties and adventures, and the evangelization of her people by the knightly lover, furnish a series of incidents which recur with singular persistence.[291] When the romances in question had been translated into Tuscan, a destiny of special splendor was reserved for two of them, in no way distinguished by any apparent merit above the rest. These were the tales of Buovo d'Antona, of which we possess an early version in octave stanzas, and of Fioravante, which exists in still older prose. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Buovo and the Fioravante, together with other material drawn from the Carolingian epic, were combined into the great prose work called I Reali di Francia.[292] Since its first appearance to the present day, this romance has never ceased to be the most widely popular of all books written in Italian. "There is nothing," says Signor Rajna, "so assiduously read from the Alps to the furthest headlands of Sicily. Wherever a reader exists, there is it certain to be found in honor."[293] Not the earliest but the latest product of a long elaboration of romantic matter by the people, it seems to have assimilated the very essence of the popular imagination. When we inquire into its authorship, we find good reason to ascribe it to Andrea dei Mangalotti of Barberino in the Val d'Elsa, one of the best and most indefatigable workmen for the literary market of the proletariate.[294] It was he who compiled the Aspromonte, the Aiolfo, the seven books of Storie Nerbonesi, the Ugone d'Avernia, and the Guerino il Meschino, reducing these tales from elder poems and prose sources into Tuscan of sterling lucidity and vigor, and attempting, it would seem, to embrace the whole Carolingian cycle in a series of episodical romances.[295] Guerino il Meschino rivaled for a while the Reali in popularity; but for some unknown reason, which would have to be sought in the instinctive partialities of the people, it was gradually superseded by the latter. The Reali alone has descended in its original form through the press to this century.[296]

Andrea da Barberino, if we are right in ascribing the Reali to his pen, conferred a benefit on the Italians parallel to that which the English owed to Sir Thomas Mallory in his "Mort d'Arthur." He not only collected and condensed the scattered tales of numerous unknown predecessors, but he also bequeathed to the nation a monument of unaffected prose at a moment when the language was still ingenuous and plastic. It would be not uninteresting to compare the fate of the Reali with that of our own "Mort d'Arthur." The latter was the more artistic performance of the two. It achieved a truer epical unity, and was composed in a richer, more romantic style. The former remained episodical and incomplete; and its language, though solid and efficient, lacked the charm of Mallory's all golden prose. Yet the Reali is still a household classic. It is found in every contadino's cottage, and supplies the peasantry with subjects for their Maggi. The "Mort d'Arthur," on the contrary, has become the plaything of medievalizing folk in modern England. Read for its unique beauty by students, it is still unknown to the people, and, in the opinion of the dull majority, it is reckoned inferior to Tennyson's smooth imitations.

When we come to consider the romantic poems of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, we shall be able to estimate the service rendered by men like Andrea da Barberino to polite Italian literature. The popularity of the cycle to which the Reali belonged, decided the choice of the Carolingian epic by the poets of Florence and Ferrara. Nor were the above-mentioned romances by any means the only works of their kind produced for a plebeian audience in the quattrocento. It is enough to mention La Regina Ancroja, La Spagna, Trebisonda con la Vita e Morte di Rinaldo. Both in prose and verse an abundant literature of the kind was manufactured. Without being positively burlesqued, the heroes of chivalrous story were travestied to suit the taste of artisans and burghers. The element of the marvelous was surcharged; comic and pathetic episodes were multiplied; beneath the armor of the Paladins Italian characters were substituted with spontaneous malice for the obsolete ideals of feudalism. It only needed a touch of conscious irony to convert the material thus elaborated by the people into the airy fabric of Ariosto's art. At the same time the form which the epic of romance was destined to assume, had been determined. The streets and squares of town and village rang with the chants of improvisatori, turning the prose periods of Andrea da Barberino and his predecessors into wordy octave stanzas, rehandling ancient Chansons de Geste, and adapting the mannerism of chivalrous minstrelsy to the requirements of a subtle-witted Tuscan crowd. The old-fashioned invocations of God, Madonna, or some saint were preserved at the beginning of each canto, while the audience received their congé from the author at its close. When the poems thus produced were committed to writing, the plebeian author feigned at least the inspiration of a bard.

While the traditions of medieval song were thus preserved, the prose-romances followed, as closely as possible, the style of a chronicle, and aimed at the verisimilitude of authentic history. The Reali, for example, opens with this sentence: "Fuvvi in Roma un santo pastore della Chiesa, che aveva nome papa Silvestro." The Fioravante, recently edited by Signor Rajna, begins: "Nel tempo che Gostantino imperadore regiea & mantenea corte in Roma grandissima." This parade of historic seriousness, observed by the subsequent romantic poets, contributed in no small measure to the irony at which they aimed. But with the story-tellers of the quattrocento it was no mere affectation. Like their predecessors of the fourteenth century, they treated legend from the standpoint of experience. It was due in no small measure to this circumstance that the Italian prose-romances are devoid of charm. Nowhere do we find in them that magic touch of poetry which makes the forests, seas and castles of the "Mort d'Arthur" enchanted ground. Notwithstanding all their extravagances, they remain positive in spirit, presenting the material of fancy in the sober garb of fact. The Italian genius lacked a something of imaginative potency possessed in overflowing measure by the Northern nations. It required the stimulus of satire, the infusion of idyllic sentiment, the consciousness of art, to raise the romantic epic to the height it reached in Ariosto. Then, and not till then, when the matter of the legend had become the sport of the æsthetic sense, were the inexhaustible riches of Italian fancy, dealing delicately and humorously with a subject which could no longer be apprehended seriously, revealed to the world in a masterpiece of beauty. But that work of consummate art was what it was, by reason of the master's wise employment of a style transmitted to him through generations of plebeian predecessors.

The same positive and workmanly method is discernible in the versified novelle of this period.[297] The popular poets were wont to recast tales from the Decameron and other sources in octave stanzas. Of such compositions we have excellent specimens in Girolamo Benivieni's version of the novel of Tancredi, and in an anonymous rhymed paraphrase of Patient Grizzel.[298] The latter is especially interesting when we compare it with the series of panels attributed to Pinturicchio in the National Gallery, where a painter of the same period has exercised his fancy in illustrating the legend which the poet versified. Detached episodes of semi-mythical Florentine history were similarly treated. Allusion has already been made to the love-tale of Ippolito and Leonora, attributed on doubtful grounds to Alberti.[299] But by far the most beautiful is the story of Ginevra degli Almieri, told in octave stanzas by Agostino Velletti.[300] This poem has rare value as a genuine product of the plebeian muse. The heroine Ginevra's father was a pork-butcher, says the minstrel, and lived in the Marcato Vecchio, where he carried on the best business of the sort in Florence. It is also important for students of comparative literature, because it clearly illustrates the difference between Italian and Northern treatment of an all but contemporary incident. The events narrated are supposed to have really happened in the year 1396. On the Scotch Border they would have furnished materials for a ballad similar to Gil Morrice or Clerk Saunders. In Florence they take the form of a novella, and the novella is expanded in octave stanzas.[301] Ginevra had two lovers, Antonio de' Rondinelli and Francesco degli Agolanti. Antonio loved her the more tenderly; but her parents gave her in marriage to Francesco. Soon after the ceremony, she sickened and fell into a trance; and since Florence was then threatened with the plague, the girl was buried over-hastily in this deep slumber. Her weeping parents laid her in a cippus or avello between the two doors of S. Reparata, where the workmen, unable to finish their job before sunset, left the lid of her sepulcher unsoldered. In the middle of the night Ginevra woke, and discovered to her horror that she had been sent to the grave alive. Happily the moon was shining, and a ray of light fell through a chink upon her bier. She arose, wrapped her shroud around her, and struggled from her marble chest into the silent cathedral square. Giotto's bell tower rose above her, silvery and beautiful, and slender in the moonlight. Like a ghost, sheeted in her grave-clothes, Ginevra ran through the streets, and knocked first at Francesco's door. He was seated awake by the fireside, sorrowing for his young bride's loss:

Andonne alla finestra e aprilla un poco:

Chi è là? Chi batte? Io son la tua Ginevra;

Non m'odi tu? Col suo parlar persevera.

Her husband doubts not that it is a spirit calling to him, bids her rest till masses shall be said for her repose, and shuts the window. Then she turns to her mother's house. The mother, too, is sitting sorrowful by the hearth, when she is startled by Ginevra's cry:

E spaventata e piena di paura

Disse: va in pace, anima benedetta,

Bella figliuola mia, onesta e pura;

E riserrò la finestra con fretta.

Rejected by husband and mother, Ginevra next tries her uncle, and calls on him for succor in God's name:

Fugli risposto; anima benedetta,

Va che Dio ti conservi in santa pace.

The poor wretch now feels that there is nothing left for her but to lie down on the pavement and die of cold. But while she is preparing herself for this fate, she bethinks her of Antonio. To his house she hurries, cries for aid, and falls exhausted on the doorstep. Then comes the finest touch in the poem. Antonio knows Ginevra's voice; and loving her so tenderly, he hurries with delight to greet her risen from the grave. He alone has no fear and no misgiving; for love in him is stronger than death. At the street door, when he reaches it, he finds no ghost, but his own dear lady yet alive. She is half frozen and unconscious; yet her heart still beats. How he calls the women of his household to attend her, prepares a bed, and feeds her with warm soups and wine, and how she revives, and how Antonio claims her for his wife, and wins his cause against her former bridegroom in the Bishop's court, may be read at length in the concluding portion of the tale. The intrinsic pathos of this story makes it a real poem; for though the wizard's wand of Northern imagination lay beyond the grasp of the Italian genius, the novelle are rarely deficient in poetry evoked by sympathy with injured innocence and loyal love.

Of truly popular novelle belonging to the fifteenth century, none is racier or more characteristic than the anonymous tale of Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo.[302] It is written in pure Florentine dialect, and might be selected as the finest extant specimen of homespun Tuscan humor. We have already seen that the point of Sacchetti's stories is nearly always a practical joke, where comedy combines with heartless cruelty in almost equal parts. The theme of Il Grasso is a superlatively comic beffa of this sort, played by Filippo Brunelleschi on a friend of his. The incident is dated 1409, and is supposed to have really occurred. Manetto Ammannatini, a tarsiatore or worker in carved and inlaid wood, was called Il Grasso, because he was a fine stout fellow of twenty-eight years. He had his bottega on the Piazza S. Giovanni and lived with his brother in a house hard by. Among his most intimate associates were Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, Donatello, intagliatore di marmi, Giovanni di Messer Francesco Rucellai, and others, partly gentlemen and partly handicraftsmen; for there was no abrupt division of classes at Florence, and this story shows how artisans and men of high condition dwelt together in good fellowship. The practical joke devised by Brunelleschi consisted in persuading Manetto that he had been changed into a certain Matteo. The whole society of friends were in the secret, and the affair was so cunningly conducted that at last they attained the desired object. They caused Manetto to be arrested for a debt of Matteo, sent Matteo's brothers and then the clergyman of the parish to reason with him on his spendthrift habits, and fooled him so that he fairly lost his sense of identity. The whole series of incidents, beginning with Manetto's indignant assertion of his proper personality, passing through his doubts, and closing with his mystification, is conducted by fine gradations of irresistibly comic humor. At last the poor man resolves to quit Florence and to seek refuge with King Mathias Corvinus in Hungary; which it seems he subsequently did, in company with a certain Lo Spano. There is no reason to suppose that this practical joke did not actually take place.

I have enlarged upon the novella of Il Grasso, because it is typical of the genuinely popular literature, written to delight the folk of Florence, appealing to their subtlest as well as broadest sense of fun, and bringing on the scene two famous artists, Brunelleschi, whose cupola is "raised above the heavens," and Donatello, whose S. George seems stepping from his pedestal to challenge all the evil of the world and conquer it. Unfortunately, our published collections are not rich in novels of this date; and next to the anonymous tale of Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo it is difficult to cite one of at all equal value, till we come to Luigi Pulci's story of Messer Goro and Pius II. This is really a satire on the Sienese, whom Pulci represents with Florentine malice as almost inconceivably silly. The Tuscan style is piquant in the extreme, and the picture of manners very brilliant.[303]

From epical and narrative literature to poems written for the people upon contemporary events and public history, is not an unnatural transition. These compositions divide themselves into Storie and Lamenti. We have abundant examples of both kinds in lyric measures and also in octave stanzas and terza rima.[304] A few of their titles will suffice to indicate their scope. Il Lamento di Giuliano de' Medici relates the tragic ending of the Pazzi conspiracy; Il Lamento del Duca Galeazzo Maria tells how that Duke was murdered in the church of S. Stefano at Milan; El Lamento di Otranto is an echo of the disaster which shook all Italy to her foundations in the year 1480; El Lamento e la Discordia de Italia universale sounds the death-note of Italian freedom in the last years of the century. After that period the Pianti and Lamenti, attesting to the sorrows of a nation, increase in frequency until all voices from the people are hushed in the leaden sleep of Spanish despotism.[305] The Storie in like manner are more abundant between the years 1494 and 1530, when the wars of foreign invaders supplied the bards of the market-place with continual matter for improvisation. Among the earliest may be mentioned two poems on the Battle of Anghiari and the taking of Serezana.[306] Then the list proceeds with the tale of the Borgias, Guerre Orrende, Rotta di Ravenna, Mali deportamenti de Franciosi fato in Italia, and so forth, till it ends with La Presa di Roma and Rotta di Ferruccio. A last echo of these Storie and Lamenti—for alas! in Italy of the sixteenth century history and lamentation were all one—still sounds about the hillsides of Siena[307]:

O Piero Strozzi, 'ndù sono i tuoi bravoni?

Al Poggio delle Donne in que' burroni.

O Piero Strozzi, 'ndù sono i tuoi soldati?

Al Poggio delle Donne in quei fossati.

O Piero Strozzi, 'ndù son le tue genti?

Al Poggio delle Donne a côr le lenti.

It may be well to say how these poems reached the people, before they were committed to writing or the press. There existed a professional class of rhymsters, usually blind men, if we may judge by the frequent affix of Cieco to their names, who tuned their guitar in the streets, and when a crowd had gathered round them, broke into some legend of romance, or told a tale of national misfortune. The Italian designation of these minstrels is Cantatore in Banca or Cantore di piazza. In the high tide of Florentine freedom the Cantore di piazza exercised a noble calling; for through his verse the voice of the common folk made itself heard beneath the very windows of the Signoria. In 1342, when the war with Pisa turned against the Florentines owing to the incompetence of their generals, Antonio Pucci, who was the most celebrated Cantatore of the day, took his lute and placed himself upon the steps beneath the Palazzo, and having invoked the Virgin Mary, struck up a Sermintese on the duty of making peace[308]:

Signor, pognàm ch'i' sia di vil nascenza,

I' pur nacqui nel corpo di Firenza, Come qual c'è di più sofficienza: Onde 'l mi duole

Di lei, considerando che esser suole

Tenuta più che madre da figliuole; Oggi ogni bestia soggiogar la vuole E occupare.

Other poems of the same kind by Antonio Pucci belong to the year 1346, or celebrate the purchase of Lucca from Mastino della Scala, or the victory of Messer Piero Rosso at Padua, or the expulsion of the Duke of Athens from Florence in 1348. It must not be supposed that the Cantatori in Banca of the next century enjoyed so much liberty of censure or had so high a sense of their vocation as Antonio Pucci. Yet the people made their opinions freely heard in rhymes sung even by the children through the streets, as when they angered Martin V. in 1420 by crying beneath his very windows[309]:

Papa Martino, Signor di Piombino,

Conte de Urbino, non vale un quattrino.

During the ascendency of Savonarola and the party-struggles of the Medici the rival cries of Palle and Viva Cristo Rè were turned into street songs[310]; but at last, after the siege and the victory of Clement, the voice of the people was finally stifled by authority.[311]

The element of satire in these ditties of the people leads me to speak of one very prominent poet of the fifteenth century—Domenico di Giovanni, called Il Burchiello, the rhyming barber.[312] He was born probably in 1403 at Florence, where his father, who was a Pisan, had acquired the rights of citizenship and followed the trade of a barber. Their shop was situated in Calimala, and formed a meeting-place for the wits, who carried Burchiello's verses over the town. The boy seems to have studied at Pisa, and acquired some slight knowledge of medicine.[313] At the age of four-and-twenty we find him married, with three children and no property.[314] Soon after this date, he separated from his wife; or else she left him on account of his irregular and dissolute habits. Peering through the obscurity of his somewhat sordid history, we see him getting into trouble with the Inquisition on account of profane speech, and then espousing the cause of the Albizzi against the Medicean faction. On the return of Cosimo de' Medici in 1434, Burchiello was obliged to leave Florence. He settled at Siena, and opened a shop in the Corso di Camollia, hoping to attract the Florentines whose business brought them to that quarter. Here he nearly ruined his health by debauchery, and narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a certain Ser Rosello.[315] Leaving Siena about 1440, Burchiello spent the last years of his life in wandering through the cities of Italy. We hear of him at Venice entertained by one of the Alberti family, then at Naples, finally in Rome, where he died in 1448, poisoned probably by Robert, a bastard of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, at the instigation of his ancient enemy, Cosimo de' Medici.[316] Such long arms and such retentive memory had the merchant despot.

Burchiello's sonnets were collected some thirty years after his death and published simultaneously at various places.[317] They owed their popularity partly to their political subject-matter, but more to their strange humor. A foreigner can scarcely understand their language, far less appreciate their fun; for not only are they composed in Florentine slang of the fifteenth century, but this slang itself consists of detached phrases and burlesque allusions, chipped as it were from current speech, broken into splinters, and then wrought into a grotesque mosaic. That Burchiello had the merit of originality, and that he caught the very note of plebeian utterance, is manifest from the numerous editions and imitations of his sonnets.[318] His Muse was a volgivaga Venus bred among the taverns and low haunts of vulgar company, whose biting wit introduced her to the society of the learned. Yet her utterances, at this distance of time, are so obscure and their point has been so blunted that to profess an admiration for Burchiello savors of literary affectation.[319] He was a poet of the transition; and the burlesque style which he made popular was destined to be superseded by the more refined and subtle Bernesque manner. Il Lasca, writing in the sixteenth century, expressed himself strongly against those who still ventured to compare Burchiello with the author of Le Pesche. "Let no one talk to me of Burchiello; to rank him with Berni is no better than to couple the fiend Charon with the Angel Gabriel."[320]

Not the least important branch of popular poetry in its bearing on the future of Italian literature was the strictly lyrical. In treating of these Volkslieder, it will be necessary to consider them under the two aspects of secular and religious—the former destined to supply Poliziano and Lorenzo de' Medici with models for their purest works of literary art, the latter containing the germs of the Florentine Sacred Play within the strophes of a hymn.

If we return to the golden days of the fourteenth century, we find that Dante's, Boccaccio's and Sacchetti's Ballate descended to the people and were easily adapted to their needs.[321] Minute comparison of Dante's dance-song of the Ghirlandetta with the version in use among the common folk will show what slight alterations were needed in order to render it the property of 'prentice lads and spinning maidens, and at the same time how subtle those changes were.[322] Dante's song might be likened to a florin fresh from the mint; the popular ditty to the same coin after it had circulated for a year or two, exchanging something of its sharp lines for the smoothness of currency and usage. The same is true of Boccaccio's Ballata, Il fior che 'l valor perde; except that here the transformation has gone deeper, and, if such a criticism may be hazarded, has bettered the original by rendering the sentiment more universal.[323] Sacchetti's charming song O vaghe montanine pasturelle underwent the same process of metamorphosis before it assumed the form in which it passed for a composition of Poliziano.[324] Starting with poems of this quality, the rhymsters of the market-place had noble models, and the use they made of them was adequate. We cannot from the wreck of time recover very many that were absolutely written for the people by the people; but we can judge of their quality by Angelo Poliziano's imitations.[325] He borrowed so largely from all sources, and his debts can be so accurately traced in his rispetti, that it is fair to credit the popular Muse with even such delicate work as La Brunettina, while the disputed authorship of the May-song Ben venga Maggio and of the Ballata Vaghe le montanine e pastorelle is sufficient to prove at least their widespread fame.[326] Whoever wrote them, they became the heirlooms of the people. If proof were needed of the vast number of such compositions in the fifteenth century—erotic, humorous, and not unfrequently obscene—it might be derived from the rubrics of the Laude or hymns, which were almost invariably parodies of popular dance-songs and intended to be sung to the same tunes.[327] Every festivity—May-morning tournaments, summer evening dances on the squares of Florence, weddings, carnival processions, and vintage-banquets at the villa—had their own lyrics, accompanied with music and the Carola.

The dance-songs and canzonets, of which we have been speaking, were chiefly of town growth and Tuscan. Another kind of popular love-poem, common to all the dialects of Italy, may be regarded as a special production of the country. Much has lately been written concerning these Rispetti, Strambotti and Stornelli.[328] Ample collections have been made to illustrate their local peculiarities. Their points of resemblance and dissimilarity have been subjected to critical analysis, and great ingenuity has been expended on the problem of their origin. It will be well to preface what has to be said about them with some explanation of terms. There are, to begin with, two distinct species. The Stornello Ritornello or Fiore, called also Ciure in Sicily, properly consists of two or three verses starting with the name of a flower. Thus[329]:

Fior di Granato!

Bella, lo nome tuo sta scritto in cielo,

Lo mio sta scritto sull'onda del mare.

Rispetto and Strambotto are two names for the same kind of song, which in the north-eastern provinces is also called Villotta and in Sicily Canzune.[330] Strictly speaking, the term Strambotto should be confined to literary imitations of the popular Rispetto. In Tuscany the lyric in question consists, in its normal form, of four alternately rhyming hendecasyllabic lines, followed by what is technically called the ripresa, or repetition, which may be composed of two, four, or even more verses. Though not strictly an octave stanza, it sometimes falls into this shape, and has then two pairs of three alternate rhymes, finished up with a couplet. In the following instance the quatrain and the ripresa are well marked[331]:

Quando sarà quel benedetto giorno,

Che le tue scale salirò pian piano?

I tuoi fratelli mi verranno intorno,

Ad un ad un gli toccherò la mano.

Quando sarà quel dì, cara colonna,

Che la tua mamma chiamerò madonna?

Quando sarà quel dì, caro amor mio?

Io sarò vostra, e voi sarete mio!

In Sicily the Canzune exhibits a stanza of eight lines rhyming alternately throughout upon two sounds. Certain peculiarities, however, in the structure of the strophe render it probable that it was originally a quatrain followed by a ripresa of the same length. Thus[332]:

Quannu nascisti tu, stidda lucenti,

'N terra calaru tri ancili santi;

Vinniru li Tri Re d'Orienti,

Purtannu cosi d'oru e di brillanti;

Tri aculi vularu prestamenti,

Dannu la nova a punenti e a livanti;

Bella, li to' billizzi su' putenti!
Avi nov'anni chi ti sugnu amanti.

In the north-east the Villotta consists of a simple quatrain. Of this form the following is an example[333]:

Quanti ghe n'è, che me sente a cantare,

E i dise;—Custia canta dal bon tempo.—

Che prego 'l ciel che me possa agiutare;

Quando che canto, alora me lamento.

Though these are the leading types of the Rispetto, Canzune and Villotta, each district exhibits a variety of subordinate and complex forms. The same may be said about the Stornello, Ritornello and Ciure. The names, too, are very variously applied; nor without pedantry would it be possible to maintain perfect precision in their usage.[334] It is enough to have indicated the two broad classes into which popular poetry of this kind is divided. For the future I shall refer to the one sort as Rispetti, to the other as Stornelli.

Comparative analysis makes it clear that the Rispetti and Stornelli scattered over all the provinces of Italy, constitute a common fund. That is to say, we do not meet with the Rispetti of each dialect confined to their own region; but the same original Rispetto, perhaps now lost to sight, has been adapted and transformed to suit the taste and idiom of the several provinces. To reconstitute the primitive type, to decide with certainty in each case the true source of these lyrics, is probably impossible. All we know for certain is that beneath apparent dialectical divergences the vulgar poetry of the Italians presents unmistakable signs of identity.[335] Which province was the primitive home of the Rispetti; whether Sicily, where the faculty for reproducing them is still most vivid[336]; or Tuscany, where they certainly attain their purest form and highest beauty; or whether all Italian country districts have contributed their quota to the general stock; are difficult questions, as yet by no means satisfactorily decided. Professor d'Ancona advances a theory, which is too plausible to be ignored in silence. Rispetti, he suggests, were first produced in Sicily, whence they traveled through Central Italy, receiving dialectical transmutation in Tuscany, and there also attaining to the perfection of their structure.[337] Numerous slight indications lead to the conclusion that their original linguistic type was southern. The imagery also which is common in verses sung to this day by the peasants of the Pistoja highlands, including frequent references to the sea with metaphors borrowed from orange-trees and palms, seems to indicate a Sicilian birthplace.[338] We have, moreover, the early evidence of six Napolitane copied from a Magliabecchian MS. of the fourteenth century, which exhibit the transition from southern to Tuscan idiom and structure.[339] One of these still exists in several dialects, under the title of La Rondinella importuna.[340] It is therefore certain that many Rispetti are very ancient, dating from the Suabian period, when Sicilian poetry, as we have seen, underwent the process of toscaneggiamento. However, D'Ancona's theory is too hypothetical, and it may also be said, too neat, to be accepted without reservation.

One point, at any rate, may be considered certain. Though the Rispetti are still alive upon the lips of contadini; though we may hear them echoing from farm and field through all the length and breadth of Italy; though the voluminous collections we possess have recently been gathered from viva voce recitation; yet they are perhaps as ancient as the dialects. The proof of this antiquity lies in the fact that whether we take the literary Strambotti of Poliziano for our standard, or the pasticci, incatenature and intrecciature of the sixteenth century for guides, we find the phrases and the style that are familiar to us in the rural lyrics of to-day.[341] Bronzino's Serenata and the Incatenatura of Bianchino contain, embedded in their structure, ditties which were universally known in the sixteenth century, and which are being sung still with unimportant alterations by the people. The attention of learned men was directed in the renascence of Tuscan literature to the beauty of these lyrics. Poliziano, writing to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1488, and describing his journey with Pietro through Montepulciano and Acquapendente in the month of May, says that he and his companions amused themselves with rappresaglie or adaptations of the songs they heard upon the way.[342] His road took him through what is still one of the best sources of local verse and music; and we may believe that at the close of the fifteenth century, the contadini of that district were singing nearly the same words as now. Nor, when we examine the points of similarity and difference in the Italian Rispetti and Stornelli, as they now exist, is there anything improbable in this antiquity. Nothing but great age can account for their adaptation to the tone, feeling, fancy, habits and language of so many regions. It must have taken more than a century or two to rub down their original angles, to efface the specific stamp of their birthplace, and to make them pass for home productions in Venice no less than Palermo, in Tuscan Montalcino and Ligurian Chiavari.

The retentiveness of the popular memory, before it has been spoiled by education, is quite sufficient to account for the preservation of these lyrics through several hundred years. Nor need their wide diffusion suggest difficulties. Italy in the middle ages offered readier means of intercommunication between the inhabitants of her provinces than she has done since the settlement of the country in 1530. When the liberation of the Communes gave a new impulse to intellectual and commercial activity, there began a steady and continually increasing movement from one city to another. Commercial enterprise led the burghers of Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Venice, Genoa, to establish themselves as bankers and middle-men, brokers and manufacturers, in Rome and Naples. Soldiers of adventure flocked from the south, and made the northern towns their temporary home. The sanctuaries of Gargano, Loretto and Assisi drew pilgrims from all quarters. Noblemen of Romagna acted as podestà beyond the Apennines, while Lombards opened shops in Palermo. Churchmen bred upon the Riviera wore the miter in the March; natives of the Spoletano taught in the schools of Bologna and Pavia. Men of letters, humanists and artists had no fixed dwelling-place, but wandered, like mercenary soldiers, from town to town in search of better pay. Students roamed from school to school according as the fame of great professors drew them. Party-quarrels in the commonwealths drove whole families, such as the Florentine Uberti, Alberti, Albizzi, Strozzi, into exile. Conquered cities, like Pisa, sent forth their burghers by hundreds as emigrants, too proud to bear the yoke of foes they had resisted. Nor were the Courts of princes without their influence in mingling the natives of different districts. Whether, then, we study the Novelle, or the histories of great houses, or the biographies of eminent Italians, or the records of the universities, we shall be led to the conclusion that from the year 1200 to the year 1550 there was a perpetual and lively intercourse by land and sea between the departments of Italy. This reciprocity of influence did not cease until the two despotic races, Austrian and Spaniard, threw each separate province into solitary chains. Such being the conditions of social exchange at the epoch when the language was in process of formation, there is nothing strange in finding the rural poetry of the south acclimatized in central and northern Italy. But the very facility of communication and the probable antiquity of these lyrics should make us cautious in adopting any rigid hypothesis about their origin. It is reasonable to suppose that such transferable property as love-poems might have been everywhere produced and rapidly diffused, the best from each center surviving by a natural process of selection. Lastly, whatever view may be taken of their formation and their age, we have every reason to believe that the fifteenth century was a fruitful period of production and accumulation. Toward the close of the quattrocento they attracted the curiosity of lettered poets, who began to imitate them, and in the next hundred years they were committed in large numbers to the press.[343]

In addition to the influence exercised by these popular lyrics over polite literature in the golden age of the Renaissance, extraordinary interest attaches to them as an indigenous species of verse, dating from remote antiquity and still surviving in all corners of the country. In them we analyze the Italian poetic genius at its source and under its most genuine conditions. Both from their qualities and their defects inferences may be drawn, which find application and illustration in the solemn works of laureled singers. The one theme of Rispetti and Stornelli is love; but love in all its phases and with all its retinue of associated emotions—expectation, fruition, disappointment, jealousy, despair, rejection, treachery, desertion, pleading, scorn—the joys of presence, the pangs of absence, the ecstasy of union, the agony of parting—love, natural and unaffected, turbulent or placid, chaste or troubled with desire, imperious or humble, tempestuously passionate or toned to tranquil acquiescence—love varying through all moods and tempers, yet never losing its note of spontaneity, sincerity and truth. The instincts of the people are pure, and their utterances of affection are singularly free from grossness. This at least is almost universally the case with lyrics gathered from the country. Approaching town-life, they lose their delicacy; and the products of the city are not unfrequently distinguished by the crudest obscenity.[344] The literary form of many of these masterpieces exhibits the beauty of rhythm, the refinement of outline, which we associate with melodies of the best Italian period—with chants of Pergolese, songs of Salvator Rosa. When we compare their subject-matter with that of our Northern Ballads, we notice a marked deficiency of legend, superstition or grotesque fancy. There are no witches, dragons, demon-lovers, no enchanted forests, no mythical heroes, no noble personages, few ghosts, few dreams and visions, in these songs poured forth among the olive-trees and myrtle-groves of Italy. Human nature, conscious of pleasure and of pain, finding its primitive emotion an adequate motive for verse subtly modulated through a thousand keys, is here sufficient to itself. The echoes imported from an outer world of passion and romance and action into this charmed region of the lover's heart are rare and feeble. Through all their national vicissitudes, the Italian peasants followed one sole aim in verse. The Rispetti of all times, localities and dialects form one protracted, ever-varying Duo between Thou and I, the dama and the damo, the eternal protagonists in the play of youth and love.

This absence of legendary and historical material marks a main difference between Italian and Teutonic inspiration. Among the Italic communities the practical historic sense was early developed, and sustained by the tradition of a classic past. It demanded a positive rather than imaginative treatment of contemporary fact and mythus. Among the people this requirement was satisfied by Storie, Lamenti, and prose Chronicles. Very few, indeed, are the relics of either romantic or actual history surviving in the lyrics of the rural population. Only here and there, in dim allusions to the Sicilian Vespers and the Norman Conquest, in the tale of the Baronessa di Carini, or in the Northern legend of Rosmunda, under its popular form of La Donna Lombarda, do we find a faint analogy between the Italian and Teutonic ballads.[345] Dramatic, mythical and epical elements are almost wholly wanting in the genuine lyrics of the people.

This statement requires some qualification. The four volumes of Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti recently published by Signor Pitrè, prove that the Sicilians in prose at least have a copious literature corresponding to German Märchen and Norse tales.[346] This literature, however, has not received poetic treatment in any existing southern songs that have been published, excepting in the few already noticed. At the same time, it must be mentioned that the collections of lyrics in north-western dialects—especially the Canti Monferrini, Canzoni Comasche, and Canti Leccesi—exhibit specimens of genuine ballads. It would seem that contact with French and German borderers along the Alpine rampart had introduced into Piedmont and Lombardy a form of lyric which is not essentially Italian. Had I space sufficient at disposal, I should like to quote the Donna Lombarda, Moglie Infedele, Giuseppina Parricida, Principessa Giovanna, Giuliano della Croce Bianca, Cecilia, Rè Carlino, Morando, and several others from Ferraro's collection.[347] They illustrate, what is exceedingly rare in popular Italian poetry, both the subject-matter and the manner peculiar to the Northern Ballad. Let the following verses from La Sposa per Forza suffice[348]:

Ra soi madona a r'ha brassaja

Suvra u so coffu a r'ha minèe; Uardèe qui, ra me noiretta, Le bele gioje che vi vôi dunèe.

Mi n'ho csa fè dle vostre gioje;

E manc ancur dla vostra cà; Cma ca voja dir bel gioje Ra me mama m' na mandirà.

To comparative mythologists in general, and to English students in particular, the most interesting of these rare Italian Ballads is undoubtedly one known as L'Avvelenato.[349] So far as I am aware, it is unique in the Italian language; nor had its correspondences with Northern Ballad-literature been noticed until I pointed them out in 1879.[350] In his work on popular Italian poetry, Professor D'Ancona included the following song, which he had heard upon the lips of a young peasant of the Pisan district[351]:

Dov'eri 'ersera a cena

Caro mio figlio, savio e gentil?

Mi fai morire Ohimè!

Dov'eri 'ersera a cena

Gentile mio cavalier?—

Ero dalla mia dama;

Mio core stà male, Che male mi stà!

Ero dalla mia dama;

'L mio core che se ne và.—

Che ti diènno da cena,

Caro mio figlio, savio e gentil?

Mi fai morire, Ohimè!

Che ti diènno da cena,

Gentile mio cavalier?—

Un anguilletta arrosto,

Cara mia madre; Mio core stà male, Che male mi stà!

Un anguilletta arrosto,

'L mio core che se ne và.

Other versions of the same poem occur in the dialects of Venice, Como and Lecco with such variations as prove them all to be the offshoots from some original now lost in great antiquity. That it existed and was famous so far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, is proved by an allusion in the Cicalata in lode della Padella e della Frittura, recited before the Accademia della Crusca by Lorenzo Panciatichi in 1656.[352] A few lines are also quoted in the incatenatura of the Cieco Fiorentino, published at Verona in 1629.[353] Any one who is familiar with our Border Minstrelsy will perceive at once that this is only an Italian version of the Ballad of Lord Donald or Lord Randal.[354] The identity between the two is rendered still more striking by an analysis of the several Lombard versions. In that of Como, for example, the young man makes his will; and this is the last verse[355]:

Cossa lassè alla vostra dama,

Figliuol mio caro, fiorito e gentil,

Cossa lassè alla vostra dama?

La fôrca da impiccarla,

Signora mama, mio cor sta mal!

La fôrca da impiccarla:

Ohimè, ch'io moro, ohimè!

The same version furnishes the episode of the poisoned hounds[356]:

Coss'avì fâ dell'altra mezza,

Figliuol mio caro, fiorito e gentil?

Cossa avì fâ dell'altra mezza?

L'hô dada alla cagnòla:

Signôra mama, mio core sta mal!

L'hô dada alla cagnòla:

Ohimè, ch'io moro, ohimè!

Cossa avì fâ della cagnòla,

Figliuol mio caro, fiorito e gentil?

Cossa avì fâ della cagnòla?

L'è morta drê la strada;

Signôra mama, mio core sta mal!
L'è morta drê la strada:
Ohimè, ch'io moro, ohimè!

It is worth mentioning that the same Ballad belongs under slightly different forms to the Germans, Swedes, and other nations of the Teutonic stock; but so far as I have yet been able to discover, it remains the sole instance of that species of popular literature in Italy.[357] The phenomenon is singular, and though conjectures may be hazarded in explanation, it is impossible, until further researches for parallel examples have been made, to advance a theory of how this Ballad penetrated so far south as Tuscany.

CHAPTER V.

POPULAR RELIGIOUS POETRY.

The Thirteenth Century—Outburst of Flagellant Fanaticism—The Battuti, Bianchi, Disciplinati—Acquire the name of Laudesi—Jacopone da Todi—His Life—His Hymns—The Corrotto—Franciscan Poetry—Tresatti's Collection—Grades of Spiritual Ecstasy—Lauds of the Confraternities—Benivieni—Feo Belcari and the Florentine Hymn-writers—Relation to Secular Dance-songs—Origins of the Theater—Italy had hardly any true Miracle Plays—Umbrian Divozioni—The Laud becomes Dramatic—Passion Plays—Medieval Properties—The Stage in Church or in the Oratory—The Sacra Rappresentazione—A Florentine Species—Fraternities for Boys—Names of the Festa—Theory of its Origin—Shows in Medieval Italy—Pageants of S. John's Day at Florence—Their Machinery—Florentine Ingegnieri—Forty-three Plays in D'Ancona's Collection—Their Authors—The Prodigal Son—Elements of Farce—Interludes and Music—Three Classes of Sacre Rappresentazioni—Biblical Subjects—Legends of Saints—Popular Novelle—Conversion of the Magdalen—Analysis of Plays.

The history of popular religious poetry takes us back to the first age of Italian literature and to the discords of the thirteenth century. All Italy had been torn asunder by the internecine struggle of Frederick II. with Innocent III. and Gregory IX. The people saw the two chiefs of Christendom at open warfare, exchanging anathemas, and doing each what in him lay to render peace and amity impossible. Milan resounded to the shrieks of paterini, burned upon the public square by order of an intolerant pontiff. Padua echoed with the groans of Ezzelino's victims, doomed to death by hundreds and by thousands in his dungeons, or cast forth maimed and mutilated to perish in the fields. The southern provinces swarmed with Saracens, whom an infidel Emperor had summoned to his aid against a fanatical Pope. It seemed as though the age, which had witnessed the assertion of Italian independence and the growth of the free cities, was about to end in a chaos of bloodshed, fire and frantic cruelty. The climax of misery and fury was reached in the Crusade launched by Alexander IV. against the tyrants of the Trevisan Marches. When Ezzelino died like a dog in 1259, the maddened populace believed that his demon had now been loosed from chains of flesh, and sent forth to the elements to work its will in freedom. The prince of darkness was abroad and menacing. Though the monster had perished, the myth of evil that survived him had power to fascinate, and was intolerable.

The conscience of the people, crazed by the sight of such iniquity and suffering, bereft of spiritual guidance, abandoned to bad government, made itself suddenly felt in an indescribable movement of religious terror. "In the year 1260," wrote the Chronicler of Padua,[358] "when Italy was defiled by many horrible crimes, a sudden and new perturbation seized at first upon the folk of Perugia, next upon the Romans, and lastly on the population of all Italy, who, stung by the fear of God, went forth processionally, gentle and base-born, old and young, together, through the city streets and squares, naked save for a waist-band round their loins, holding a whip of leather in their hands, with tears and groans, scourging their shoulders till the blood flowed down. Not by day alone, but through the night in the intense cold of winter, with lighted torches they roamed by hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands, through the churches, and flung themselves down before the altars, led by priests with crosses and banners. The same happened in all villages and hamlets, so that the fields and mountains resounded with the cries of sinners calling upon God. All instruments of music and songs of love were hushed; only the dismal wail of penitents was heard in town and country."

It will be noticed that this fanaticism of the Flagellants began among the Umbrian highlands, the home of S. Francis and the center of pietistic art, where the passions of the people have ever been more quickly stirred by pathos than elsewhere in Italy. The Battuti, as they were called, formed no mere sect. Populations of whole cities, goaded by an irresistible impulse, which had something of the Dionysiac madness in it, went forth as though a migration of the race had been initiated. Blind instinct, the intoxication of religious frenzy, urged them restlessly and aimlessly from place to place. They had no Holy Land, no martyr's shrine, in view. Only the ineffable horror of a coming judgment, only the stings of spiritual apprehension, the fierce craving after sympathy in common acts of delirium, the allurements of an exaltation shared by thousands, drove them on, lugubrious herds, like Mænads of the wrath of God. This insurgence of all classes, swelling upward from the lowest, gaining the middle regions, and confounding the highest in the flood of one promiscuous multitude, threatened the very fabric of society.[359] Repentance and compunction, exhibited upon a scale of such colossal magnitude, attended by incidents of such impassioned frenzy, assumed the aspect of vice and of insanity. Florence shut her gates to the half-naked Battuti. At Milan the tyrants of the Della Torre blood raised 600 gibbets as a warning. Manfred drew a military cordon round his southern States to save them from contagion. The revival was diagnosed by cold observers as an epidemic, or as a craving akin to that which sets in motion droves of bisons on a trackless plain. It needed drastic measures of Draconian justice to curb a disease which threatened the whole nation. Gradually, the first fury of this fanatical enthusiasm subsided. It was but the symptom of moral and intellectual bewilderment, of what the French would call ahurissement, in a race of naturally firm and patient fiber. Yet, when it passed, durable traces of the agitation remained. Lay fraternities were formed, not only in Umbria and Tuscany, but in almost all provinces of the peninsula, who called themselves Disciplinati di Gesù Cristo. These societies aimed at continuing the ascetic practices of the Flagellants, and at prolonging their passion of penitence in a more sober spirit. Scourging formed an essential part of their observances, but it was used with decency and moderation. Their constitution was strictly democratic, within limits sanctioned by the clergy. They existed for the people, supplementing and not superseding the offices of the Church. From the date of their foundation they seem to have paid much attention to the recitation of hymns in the vernacular. These hymns were called Laude. Written for and by the people, they were distinguished from the Latin hymns of the Church by greater spontaneity and rudeness. No limit of taste or literary art was set to the expression of a fervent piety. The Lauds dwelt chiefly on the Passion of our Lord, and were used as a stimulus to compunction. In course of time this part of their system became so prominent that the Battuti or Disciplinati acquired the milder title of Laudesi.[360]

From the Laudesi of the fourteenth century rose one great lyric poet, Jacopone da Todi, whose hymns embrace the whole gamut of religious passion, from tender emotions of love to somber anticipations of death and thrilling visions of judgment. Reading him, we listen to the true lyrical cry of the people's heart in its intolerance of self-restraint, blending the language of erotic ecstasy with sobs and sighs of soul-consuming devotion, aspiring to heaven on wings sped by the energy of human desire. The flight of his inebriated piety transcends and out-soars the strongest pinion of ecclesiastical hymnology. Such lines as—

Fac me plagis vulnerari,

Cruce hâc inebriari

Ob amorem filii—

do but supply the theme for Jacopone's descant. Violently discordant notes clash and mingle in his chords, and are resolved in bursts of ardor bordering on delirium. He leaps from the grotesque of plebeian imagery to pictures of sublime pathos, from incoherent gaspings to sentences pregnant with shrewd knowledge of the heart, by sudden and spontaneous transitions, which reveal the religious sentiment in its simplest form, unspoiled by dogma, unstiffened by scholasticism. None, for example, but a true child of the people could have found the following expression of a desire to suffer with Christ[361]:

O Signor per cortesia

Mandame la malsania

A me la freve quartana

la contina e la terzana, la doppia cottidiana Colla grande ydropesia.
A me venga mal de dente
Mal de capo e mal de ventre,
a lo stomaco dolor pungente
en canna l'asquinantia.
Mal de occhi e doglia de fianco
e la postema al lato manco
tyseco me ionga enalco
e omne tempo la frenesia.
Agia el fegato rescaldato
la milza grossa el ventre enfiato,
lo polmone sia piagato
Con gran tossa e parlasia.

In order to understand Jacopone da Todi and to form any true conception of the medium from which his poems sprang, it is necessary to study the legend of his life, which, though a legend, bears upon its face the stamp of truth. It is an offshoot from the Saga of S. Francis, a vivid utterance of the times which gave it birth.[362] Jacopone was born at Todi, one of those isolated ancient cities which rear themselves upon their hill-tops between the valleys of the Nera and the Tiber, on the old post-road from Narni to Perugia. He belonged to the family of the Benedetti, who were reckoned among the noblest of the district. In his youth he followed secular studies, took the degree of Doctor of Laws, and practiced with a keen eye for gain and with not less, his biographer hints, than the customary legal indifference for justice. He married a beautiful young wife, whom he dressed splendidly and sent among his equals to all places of medieval amusement. She was, however, inwardly religious. The spirit of S. Francis had passed over her; and unknown to all the crowd around her, unknown to her husband, she practiced the extremities of ascetic piety. One day she went, at her husband's bidding, to a merry-making of the nobles of Todi; and it so happened that "while she was dancing and taking pleasure with the rest, an accident occurred, fit to move the greatest pity. For the platform whereupon the party were assembled, fell in and was broken to pieces, causing grievous injury to those who stood upon it. She was so hurt in the fall that she lost the power of speech, and in a few hours after died. Jacopo, who by God's mercy was not there, no sooner heard the sad news of his wife than he ran to the place. He found her on the point of death, and sought, as is usual in those cases, to unlace her; but she, though she could not speak, offered resistance to her husband's unlacing her. However, he used force and overcame her, and unlaced and carried her to his house. There, when she had died, he unclothed her with his own hands, and found that underneath those costly robes and next to her naked flesh she wore a hair-shirt of the roughest texture. Jacopone, who up to now had believed his wife, since she was young and beautiful, to be like other women, worldly and luxurious, stood as it were astonished and struck dumb when he beheld a thing so contrary to his opinion. Wherefore from that time forward he went among men like to one who is stunned, and appeared no longer to be a reasonable man as theretofore. The cause of this his change to outward view was not a sudden infirmity of health, or extraordinary sorrow for the cruel death of his wife, or any such-like occurrence, but an overwhelming compunction of the heart begotten in him by this ensample, and a new recognition of what he was and of his own wretchedness. Wherefore turning back to his own heart, and reckoning with bitterness the many years that had been spent so badly, and seeing the peril in which he had continued up to that time, he set himself to change the manner of his life, and even as he had lived heretofore wholly for the world, so now he resolved to live wholly for Christ."

Jacopone's biographer goes on to tell us how, after this shock, he became an altered man. He sold all his goods and gave away his substance to the poor, retaining nothing for himself, but seeking by every device within his power to render himself vile and ridiculous in the eyes of men. At one time he stripped himself naked, and put upon his back the trappings of an ass, and so appeared among the gentles of his earlier acquaintance. On another occasion he entered a company of merry-making folk in his brother's house without clothes, smeared with turpentine and rolled in feathers like a bird.[363] By these mad pranks he acquired the reputation of one half-witted, and the people called him Jacopone instead of Messer Jacopo de' Benedetti. Yet there was a keen spirit living in the man, who had determined literally to become a fool for Christ's sake. A citizen once bought a fowl and bade Jacopone carry it to his house. Jacopone took the bird and placed it in the man's family vault, where it was found. To all remonstrances he answered with a solemnity which inspired terror, that there was the citizen's real home. At the end of ten years spent in self-abasement of this sort, Jacopone entered the lowest rank of the Franciscan brotherhood. The composition of a Laud so full of spiritual fire that its inspiration seemed indubitable, won for the apparent madman this grace. There was something noble in his bearing, even though his actions and his utterance proved his brain distempered. No fear of hell nor hope of heaven, says his biographer, but God's infinite goodness and beauty impelled him to embrace the monastic life and to subject himself to the severest discipline. Meditating on the Divine perfection, he came to regard himself as "entirely hideous, vile and stinking, beyond the most abominable carrion." It was part of his religious exaltation to prove this to himself by ghastly penances, instead of seeking to render his body a fit temple for God's spirit by healthy and clean living. He had a carnal partiality for liver; and in order to mortify this vile affection he procured the liver of a beast and hung it in his cell. It became putrid, swarmed with vermin, and infected the convent with its stench. The friars discovered Jacopone rejoicing in the sight and odor of this corruption. With sound good sense they then condemned him to imprisonment in the common privies; but he rejoiced in this punishment, and composed one of his most impassioned odes in that foul place. Still, though he was clearly mad, he had the soul of a Christian and a poet. His ecstasies were not always repugnant to our sense of delicacy. Contemplating the wounds of Christ, it entered into his heart to desire all suffering which it could be possible for man to undergo—the pangs of all the souls condemned to purgatory, the torments of all the damned in hell, the infinite anguish of all the devils—if only by this bearing of the pains of others he might be made like Christ, and go at length, the last of all the world, to Paradise. Not only the passion but the love of Jesus inflamed him with indescribable raptures. He spent whole days in singing, weeping, groaning, and ejaculation. "He ran," says the biographer, "in a fury of love, and under the impression that he was embracing and clasping Jesus Christ, would fling his arms about a tree." It is not possible to imagine more potent workings of religious insanity in a distempered and at the same time nobly-gifted character. That obscene antipathy to nature which characterized medieval asceticism, becomes poetic in a lunatic of genius like Jacopone. Nor was his natural acumen blunted. He discerned how far the Papacy diverged from Christianity in practice, and assailed Boniface VIII. with bitterest invectives. Among other prophetic sayings ascribed to him, we find this, which corresponds most nearly to the truth of history: "Pope Boniface, like a fox thou didst enter on the Papacy, like a wolf thou reignest, and like a dog shalt thou depart from it." For his free speech Boniface had him sent to prison; and in his dungeon, rejoicing, Jacopone composed the finest of his Canticles.

Such was the man who struck the key-note of religious popular poetry in Italy, and whose Lauds may be regarded as the germ of a voluminous literature. Passing from his life to his writings, it will suffice to give a few specimens of those hymns which are most characteristic of his temper. We have already seen how he brought together the most repulsive details of disease, in order to express his desire to suffer with Christ.[364] Here is the beginning of a canticle in praise of the madness he embraced with a similar object[365]:

Senno me pare e cortesia

empazir per lo bel messia.

Ello me fa sì gran sapere

a chi per dio vol empazire en parige non se vidde ancor si gran phylosofia.

These words found an echo after many years in Benivieni's even more hysterical hymn upon divine madness, which was substituted in Savonarola's Carnivals for the Trionfi of Lorenzo de' Medici.

A trace of the Franciscan worship of poverty gives some interest to a hymn on the advantages of pauperism. The theme, however, is supported with solid arguments after the fashion of Juvenal's vacuus viator[366]:

Povertate muore en pace,

nullo testamento face, lassa el mondo como jace e la gente concordate.

Non a judice ne notaro

a corte non porta salaro, ridese del omo avaro che sta en tanta anxietate.

Truer to the inebriation of Jacopone's piety are the following stanzas, incoherent from excess of passion, which seem to be the ebullition of one of his most frenzied moments[367]:

Amore amore che si mai ferito

altro che amore non posso gridare, amore amore teco so unito altro non posso che te abbracciare, amore amore forte mai rapito lo cor sempre si spande per amore per te voglio pasmare: Amor ch'io teco sia amor per cortesia: Fammi morir d'amore.

Amor amor Jesu so gionto aporto

amor amor Jesu tu m'ai menato, amor amor Jesu damme conforto amor amor Jesu si m'ai enflammato, amor amor Jesu pensa lo porto fammete star amor sempre abracciato, con teco trasformato: En vera caritate en somma veritate: De trasformato amore.

Amor amore grida tuttol mondo

amor amore omne cosa clama, amore amore tanto se profondo chi piu t'abraccia sempre piu t'abrama, amor amor tu se' cerchio rotondo con tuttol cor chi c'entra sempre t'ama, che tu se' stame e trama: chi t'ama per vestire cusi dolce sentire: Che sempre grida amore.

Amor amor Jesu desideroso

amor voglio morire a te abracciando, amor amor Jesu dolce mio sposo amor amor la morte l'ademando, amor amor Jesu si delectoso tu me t'arendi en te transformando, pensa ch'io vo pasmando: Amor non so o me sia Jesu speranza mia: Abyssame en amore.

A still more mysterious depth is sounded in another hymn in praise of self-annihilation—the Nirvana of asceticism[368]:

Non posso esser renato

s'io en me non so morto, anichilato en tucto
el esser conservare,
del nihil glorioso
nelom ne gusta fructo,
se Dio non fal conducto
che om non cia que fare,
o glorioso stare
en nihil quietato,
lontellecto posato
e laffecto dormire.

Ciocho veduto e pensato
tutto e feccia e bruttura
pensando de laltura
del virtuoso stato,
nel pelago chio veggio
non ce so notatura
faro somergitura
del om che anegato
sommece inarenato
nonor de smesuranza
vincto de labundanza
del dolce mio sire.

One of Jacopone's authentic poems so far detaches itself in character and composition from the rest, and is so important, as will shortly be seen, for the history of Italian dramatic art, that it demands separate consideration.[369] It assumes the form of dialogue between Mary and Christ upon the cross, followed by the lamentation of the Virgin over her dead Son. A messenger informs the Mother that Christ has been taken prisoner:

Donna del Paradiso,

Lo tuo figliolo è priso, Jesu Cristo beato.

Accurre, donna, e vide

Che la gente l'allide;
Credo che llo s'occide,
Tanto l'on flagellato.

Attended by the Magdalen, whom she summons to her aid, Mary hurries to the judgment-seat of Pilate, and begs for mercy:

O Pilato, non fare

'L figlio mio tormentare, Ch'io te posso mostrare Como a torto è accusato.

But here the voices of the Chorus, representing the Jewish multitude, are heard:

Crucifige, crucifige!

Omo che se fa rege, Secondo nostra lege, Contradice al Senato.

Christ is removed to the place of suffering, and Mary cries:

O figlio, figlio, figlio,

Figlio, amoroso figlio, Figlio, chi dà consiglio Al cor mio angustiato!

Figlio, occhi giocondi,

Figlio, co' non rispondi? Figlio, perchè t'ascondi Dal petto o' se' lattato?

They show her the cross:

Madonna, ecco la cruce

Che la gente l'adduce, Ove la vera luce De' essere levato.

They tell her how Jesus is being nailed to it, sparing none of the agonizing details. Then she exclaims:

E io comencio el corrotto;

Figliolo, mio deporto, Figlio, chi mi t'à morto, Figlio mio delicato!

Meglio averien fatto

Che 'l cor m'avesser tratto, Che nella croce tratto Starci desciliato.

Jesus now breaks silence, and comforts her, pointing out that she must live for His disciples, and naming John. He dies, and she continues the Corrotto[370]:

Figlio, l'alma t'è uscita,

Figlio de la smarrita, Figlio de la sparita, Figlio [mio] attossicato!

Figlio bianco e vermiglio,

Figlio senza simiglio, Figlio, a chi m'apiglio, Figlio, pur m'hai lassato!

Figlio bianco e biondo,

Figlio, volto jocondo, Figlio, perchè t'à el mondo, Figlio, cusì sprezato!

Figlio dolce e piacente,

Figlio de la dolente, Figlio, à te la gente Malamente trattato!

Joanne, figlio novello,

Morto è lo tuo fratello; Sentito aggio 'l coltello Che fo profetizzato,

Che morto à figlio e mate,

De dura morte afferrate; Trovârsi abbracciate Mate e figlio a un cruciato.

Upon this note of anguish the poem closes. It is conducted throughout in dialogue, and is penetrated with dramatic energy. For Passion Music of a noble and yet flowing type, such as Pergolese might have composed, it is still admirably adapted.

Each strophe of Fra Jacopone's Canticles might be likened to a seed cast into the then fertile soil of the Franciscan Order, which bore fruit a thousand-fold in its own kind of spiritual poetry. The vast collection of hymns, published by Tresatti in the seventeenth century, bears the name of Jacopone, and incorporates his genuine compositions.[371] But we must regard the main body of the work as rather belonging to Jacopone's school than to the master. Taken collectively, these poems bear upon their face the stamp of considerable age, and there is no reason to suppose that their editor doubted of their authenticity. A critical reader of the present time, however, discerns innumerable evidences of collaboration, and detects expansion and dilution of more pregnant themes in the copious outpourings of this cloistral inspiration. What the Giotteschi are to Giotto, Tresatti's collection is to Salviano's imprint of Jacopone. It forms a complete manual of devotion, framed according to the spirit of S. Francis. In its pages we read the progress of the soul from a state of worldliness and vice, through moral virtue, into the outer court of religious conviction. Thence we pass to penitence and the profound terror of sin. Having traversed the region of purgatory upon earth, we are introduced to the theory of Divine Love, which is reasoned out and developed upon themes borrowed from each previous step gained by the spirit in its heavenward journey. Here ends the soul's novitiate; and we enter on a realm of ecstasy. The poet bathes in an illimitable ocean of intoxicating love, summons the images of sense and makes them adumbrate his rapture of devotion, reproducing in a myriad modes the Oriental metaphors of the soul's marriage to Christ suggested by the Canticle of Canticles. A final grade in this ascent to spiritual perfection is attained in the closing odes, which celebrate annihilation—the fusion of the mortal in immortal personality, the bliss of beatific vision, Nirvana realized on earth in ecstasy by man. At this final point sense swoons, the tongue stammers, language refuses to perform her office, the reason finds no place, the universe is whirled in spires of flame, we float in waves of metaphor, we drown in floods of contemplation, the whole is closed with an O Altitudo!

It is not possible to render scantiest justice to this extraordinary monument of the Franciscan fervor by any extracts or descriptions. Its full force can only be felt by prolonged and, if possible, continuous perusal. S. Catherine and S. Teresa attend us while we read; and when the book is finished, we feel, perhaps for the first time, the might, the majesty, the overmastering attraction of that sea of faith which swept all Europe in the thirteenth century. We understand how naufragar in questo mar fù dolce.

Though the task is ungrateful, it behooves the historian of popular Italian poetry to extract some specimens from this immense repertory of anonymous lyrics. Omitting the satires, which are composed upon the familiar monastic rubrics of vanity, human misery, the loathsomeness of the flesh, and contempt of the world, I will select one stanza upon Chastity from among the moral songs[372]:

O Castità bel fiore,

Che ti sostiene amore.

O fior di Castitate,

Odorifero giglio,

Con gran soavitate,

Sei di color vermiglio,

Et a la Trinitate

Tu ripresenti odore.

Chastity in another place is thus described[373]:—

La Castitate pura,

Più bella che viola,

Cotanto ha chiaro viso

Che par un paradiso.

Poverty, the Cardinal Virtues, and the Theological Virtues receive their full meed of praise in a succession of hymns. Then comes a long string of proverbs, which contain much sober wisdom, with passages of poetic feeling like the following[374]:

Li pesciarelli piccoli

Scampan la rete in mare;

Grand'ucel prende l'aquila,
Non può 'l moscon pigliare;
Enchinasi la vergola,
L'acqua lassa passare;
Ma fa giù cader l'arbore,
Che non si può inchinare.

Among the odes we may first choose this portion of a carol written to be sung before the manger, or presepe, which it was usual to set up in churches at Christmas[375]:

Veggiamo il suo Bambino

Gammettare nel fieno,

E le braccia scoperte

Porgere ad ella in seno,

Ed essa lo ricopre

El meglio che può almeno,

Mettendoli la poppa

Entro la sua bocchina.

Cioppava lo Bambino

Con le sue labbruccia;

Sol la dolciata cioppa

Volea, non minestruccia;

Stringeala con la bocca

Che non avea dentuccia,

Il figliuolino bello,

Ne la dolce bocchina.

A la sua man manca,

Cullava lo Bambino,

E con sante carole

Nenciava il suo amor fino....

Gli Angioletti d'intorno

Se ne gian danzando,

Facendo dolci versi

E d'amor favellando.

There is a fresco by Giotto behind the altar in the Arena Chapel at Padua, which illustrates part of this hymn. A picture attributed to Botticelli in our National Gallery illustrates the rest. The spirit of the carol has been reproduced with less sincerity in a Jesuit's Latin hymn, Dormi, fili, dormi, mater.

Close upon the joys of Mary follow her sorrows. The following is a popular echo of the Stabat Mater[376]:

Or si incomincia lo duro pianto

Che fa la Madre di Christo tanto;

Or intendete l'amaro canto,

Fu crocifisso quel capo santo.

Ma quando che s'inchiodava,

Presso al figliuolo la Madre stava;

Quando a la croce gli occhi levava,

Per troppa doglia ci trangosciava.

La Madre viddelo incoronato,

Et ne la croce tutto piagato,

Per le pene e pel sangue versato

Sitibondo gridar Consummato.

Many of the odes are devoted to S. Francis. One passage recording the miracle of the Stigmata deserves to be extracted[377]:

La settima a Laverna,

Stando in orazione,

Ne la parte superna,

Con gran divozione,

Mirabil visione

Seraphin apparuto

Crucifisso è veduto,

Con sei ale mostrato:

Incorporotti stimmate

A lato piedi e mano;

Duro già fora a credere

Se nol contiam di piano,

Staendo vivo et sano

Molti l'han mirate,

L'ha morte dichiarate,

Da molti fu palpato.

La sua carne bianchissima
Pareva puerile;
Avanti era brunissima
Per gli freddi nevili;
La fe amor si gentile,
Parea glorificata,
Da ogni gente ammirata
Del mirabil ornato.

The Penitential Hymns resound with trumpets of Judgment and groans of lost souls. There is one terrible lament of a man who repented after death; another of one arising from the grave, damned.[378] The Day of Judgment inspires stanzas heavy with lugubrious chords and a leaden fall[379]:

Tutta la terra tornerà a niente,

Le pietre piangeranno duramente,

Conturbaronsi tutti i monumente,

Per la sententia di Dio onnipotente

Che tutti sentiranno.

. . . . . . . . .

Allora udrai dal ciel trombe sonare,

Et tutti morti vedrai suscitare,

Avanti al tribunal di Christo andare,

E 'l fuoco ardente per l'aria volare

Con gran velocitate.

. . . . . . . . .

Porgine aiuto, alto Signor verace,

E campane da quel foco penace,

E danne penitentia si verace

Che 'n ciel possiam venir a quella pace

Dove in eterno regni.

This is the Dies Iræ adapted for the people, and expanded in its motives.

The exposition and the expression of Divine Love occupy a larger space than any other section of the series. Mystical psychology, elaborated with scholastic subtlety of argument and fine analysis of all the grades of feeling, culminates in lyric raptures, only less chaotic than the stanzas already quoted from Jacopone. The poet breaks out into short ejaculations[380]:

O alta Nichilitate,

Dhe mi di dove tu stai!

He faints and swoons before the altar in the languors of emotion[381]:

Languisco per amore

Di Gesù mio Amatore.

We see before our eyes the trances of S. Catherine, so well portrayed with sensuous force by Sodoma. Then he resumes the Song of Solomon in stanzas to be counted by the hundred, celebrates the marriage of Christ and the soul, or seeks crude carnal metaphors to convey his meaning[382]:

Del tuo bacio, amore,

Degnami di baciare.

Dhe baciami, dolcezza

Di contrizione,

Et dolce soavezza

Di compunzione,

O santa allegrezza

Di devozione,

Per nulla stagione

Non m'abandonare.

Poì che 'l bacio sento,

Bevo a le mammelle

C'hanno odore d'unguento;

Pur le tue scintille

A bever non so lento

Con le mie maxille,

Più che volte mille

Vò me inebriare.

Let this suffice. With the language of sweetness and monastic love we are soon surfeited. Were it not that the crescendo of erotic exaltation ends at last in a jubilee of incomprehensible passion, blending the incoherence of delirium with fragments of theosophy which might have been imported from old Alexandrian sources or from dim regions of the East, a student of our century would shrink aghast from some of these hermaphroditic hymns, as though he had been witness of wild acts of nympholepsy in a girl he reckoned sane.

Through the two centuries which followed Jacopone's death (1306?) the Lauds of the Confraternities continued to form a special branch of popular poetry; and in the fifteenth century they were written in considerable quantities by men of polite education. Like all hymns, these spiritual songs are less remarkable for literary quality than devoutness. It is difficult to find one rising to the height of Jacopone's inspiration. Many of the later compositions even lack religious feeling, and seem to have been written as taskwork. Those, for example, by Lorenzo de' Medici bear the same relation to his Canti Carnascialeschi as Pontano's odes to the Saints bear to his elegies and Baian lyrics. This was inevitable in an age saturated with the adverse ideals of the classical Revival, when Platonic theism threatened to supplant Christianity, and society was clogged with frigid cynicism. Yet even in the sixteenth century, those hymns which came directly from the people's heart, thrilling with the strong vibrations of Savonarola's preaching, are still remarkable for almost frantic piety. Among the many Florentine hymn-writers who felt that influence, Girolamo Benivieni holds the most distinguished place, both for the purity of his style and for the sincerity of his religious feeling. I will set side by side two versions from his book of Lauds, illustrating the extreme limits of devout emotion—the calmness of a meditative piety and the spasms of passionate enthusiasm. The first is a little hymn to Jesus, profoundly felt and expressed with exquisite simplicity[383]:

Jesus, whoso with Thee

Hangs not in pain and loss

Pierced on the cruel cross,

At peace shall never be.

Lord, unto me be kind:

Give me that peace of mind,

Which in this world so blind

And false dwells but with Thee.

Give me that strife and pain,

Apart from which 'twere vain

Thy love on earth to gain

Or seek a share in Thee.

If, Lord, with Thee alone

Heart's peace and love be known,

My heart shall be Thine own,

Ever to rest with Thee.

Here in my heart be lit

Thy fire, to feed on it,

Till burning bit by bit

It dies to live with Thee.

Jesus, whoso with Thee

Hangs not in pain or loss,

Pierced on the cruel cross,

At peace shall never be.

The second is an echo of Jacopone's eulogy of madness, prolonged and developed with amorous extravagance[384]:

Never was there so sweet a gladness,

Joy of so pure and strong a fashion,

As with zeal and love and passion

Thus to embrace Christ's holy madness.

They who are mad in Jesus, slight

All that the wise man seeks and prizes;

Wealth and place, pomp, pride, delight,

Pleasure and fame, their soul despises:

Sorrow and tears and sacrifices,

Poverty, pain, and low estate,

All that the wise men loathe and hate,

Are sought by the Christian in his madness.

They who are fools for Christ in heaven,

Should they be praised peradventure, mourn,

Seeing the praise that to them is given

Was taken from God; but hate and scorn

With joy and gladness of soul are borne:

The Christian listens and smiles for glee

When he hears the taunt of his foe, for he

Glories and triumphs in holy madness.

Many collections of Lauds were early committed to the press; and of these we have an excellent modern reprint in the Laude spirituali di Feo Belcari e di altri, which includes hymns by Castellano Castellani, Bernardo Giambullari, Francesco Albizzi, Lorenzo de' Medici, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, and the Pulci brothers.[385] Studying this miscellany, we perceive that between the Laude and Ballate of the people there is often little but a formal difference. Large numbers are parodies of amatory or obscene songs, beginning with nearly the same words and intended to be sung to the same tunes. Thus the famous ballad, O vaghe montanine e pastorelle becomes O vaghe di Gesù, o verginelle.[386] The direction for singing Crucifisso a capo chino is Cantasi come—Una donna di fino amore, which was a coarse street song in vogue among the common folk.[387] Vergine, alta regina, is modeled upon Galantina, morosina; I' son quella pecorella upon I' son quella villanella; Giù per la mala via l'anima mia ne va on Giù per la villa lunga la bella se ne va.[388] Others are imitations of carnival choruses noted for their grossness and lewd innuendoes.[389] It is clear that the Laudesi, long before the days of Rowland Hill, discerned the advantage of not letting the devil have all the good tunes. Other parallels between the Florentine Lauds and the revival hymns of the present century might be pointed out. Yet in proportion as the Italian religious sentiment is more sensuous and erotic than that of the Teutonic nations, so are the Lauds more unreservedly emotional than the most audacious utterances of American or English Evangelicalism. As an excellent Italian critic has recently observed, the amorous and religious poems of the people were only distinguished by the difference of their object. Expression, versification, melody, pitch of sentiment, remained unaltered. "Men sang the same strambotti to the Virgin and the lady of their love, to the rose of Jericho and the red rose of the balcony."[390] No notion of impropriety seems to have been suggested by this confusion of divergent feelings. Otherwise, Savonarola would hardly have suffered his proselytes to roam the streets chanting stanzas which are little better than echoes from the brothel or travesties of Poliziano's chorus of the Mænads. The Italians have never been pious in the same sense as the Northern nations. Their popular religious poetry is the lyric of emotion, the lyric of the senses losing self-restraint in an outpouring of voluptuous ecstasy. With them "music is a love-lament or a prayer addressed to God;" and both constituents of music blend and mingle indistinguishably in their hymns. As they lack the sublime Chorales of the Reformation period in Germany, so they lack the grave and meditative psalms for which Bach made his melodies.

The origins of the Italian theater were closely connected with the services of the Laudesi. And here it has to be distinctly pointed out that the evolution of the Sacred Drama in Italy followed a different course from that with which we are familiar in France and England. Miracle-plays and Mysteries, properly so called, do not appear to have been common among the Italians in the early middle ages. There is, indeed, one exception to this general statement which warns us to be cautious, and which proves that the cyclical sacred play had been exhibited at least in one place at a very early date. At Cividale, in the district of Friuli, a Ludus Christi, embracing the principal events of Christian history from the Passion to the Second Advent, was twice acted, in 1298 and 1303. From the scanty notices concerning it, we are able to form an opinion that it lasted over three days, that it was recited by the clergy, almost certainly in Latin, and that the representation did not take place in church.[391] The Friulian Ludi Christi were, in fact, a Mystery of the more primitive type, corresponding to Greban's Mystère de la Passion and to our Coventry or Widkirk Miracles. But, so far as present knowledge goes, this sacred play was an isolated phenomenon, and proved unfruitful of results. We are only able to infer from it, what the close intercourse of the Italians with the French would otherwise make evident, that Mysteries were not entirely unknown in the Peninsula. Yet it seems clear, upon the other hand, that the two forms of the sacred drama specific to Italy, the Umbrian Divozione and the Florentine Sacra Rappresentazione, were not a direct outgrowth from the Mystery. We have to trace their origin in the religious practices of the Laudesi, from which a species of dramatic performance was developed, and which placed the sacred drama in the hands of these lay confraternities.

At first the Disciplinati di Gesù intoned their Lauds in the hall of the Company, standing before the crucifix or tabernacle of a saint, as they are represented in old wood-cuts.[392] From simple singing they passed to antiphonal chanting, and thence made a natural transition to dialogue, and lastly to dramatic action. To trace the steps of this progress is by no means easy; nor must we imagine that it was effected wholly within the meeting-places of the confraternities without external influence. Though the Italians may not have brought the Miracle-play to the perfection it attained among the Northern nations, they were, as we have seen, undoubtedly aware of its existence. Furthermore, they were familiar with ecclesiastical shows but little removed in character from that form of medieval art. Representations of the manger at Bethlehem made part of Christmas ceremonies in Umbria, as we learn from a passage in the works of S. Bonaventura referring to the year 1223.[393] Nor were occasions wanting when pageants enlivened the ritual of the Church. Among liturgical dramas, enacted by priests and choristers at service time, may be mentioned the descent of the Angel Gabriel at the feast of the Annunciation, the procession of the Magi at Epiphany, the descent of the dove at Pentecost, and the Easter representation of a sepulcher from which the body of Christ had been removed. Thus the Laudesi found precedents in the Liturgy itself for introducing a dramatic element into their offices.

Having assumed a more or less dramatic form, the Laud acquired the name of Divozione as early as the middle of the fourteenth century. It was written in various lyric meters, beginning with six-lined stanzas in ottonari, passing through hendecasyllabic sesta rima, and finally settling down into ottava rima, which became the common stanza for all forms of popular poetry in the fifteenth century.[394] The passion of our Lord formed the principal theme of the Divozioni; for the Laudesi were bound by their original constitution to a special contemplation of His suffering upon the cross for sinners. The Perugian Chronicles refer to compositions of this type under the name of Corrotto, or song of mourning. In its highest form it was the passionate outpouring of Mary's anguish over her crucified Son—the counterpart in poetry to the Pietà of painting, for which the Giottesque masters, the Umbrian school, Crivelli, and afterwards Mantegna, reserved the strongest exhibition of their powers as dramatists. We have already seen with what a noble and dramatic dialogue Jacopone da Todi initiated this species of composition.[395] At the same time, the Divozioni and the Lauds from which they sprang, embraced a wide variety of subjects, following the passages of Scripture appointed to be read in church on festivals and Sundays. Thus the Laud for Advent dramatized the Apocalypse and introduced the episode of Antichrist. The story of the Prodigal furnished a theme for the vigil when that parable was used. It was customary to sing these compositions in the oratories after the discipline of the confraternity had been duly performed; and that they were sung, is a fact of importance which must never be forgotten. Every Company had its own collection of dramatic Lauds, forming a cycle of sacred melodramas, composed with no literary end and no theatrical effect in view, but with the simple purpose of expressing by dialogue the substance of a Scripture narrative.

An inventory of the Perugian Confraternity of S. Domenico, dated in the year 1339, includes wings and crowns for sixty-eight angels, masks for devils, a star for the Magi, a crimson robe for Christ, black veils for the Maries, two lay figures of thieves, a dove to symbolize the Holy Ghost, a coat of mail for Longinus, and other properties which prove that not Passion-plays alone but dramas suited to Epiphany, Pentecost and the Annunciation must have been enacted at that period. Yet we have no exact means of ascertaining when the Laudesi left their oratories and began to recite Divozioni with action in church or on the open square. The Compagnia del Gonfalone are said to have presented a play to the Roman people in the Coliseum in 1260; but though the brotherhood was founded in that year, it is more than doubtful whether their famous Passion dates from so early an epoch.[396] By the year 1375 it had become customary for Laudesi to give representations in church, accompanied by a sermon from the pulpit. The audience assembled in the nave, and a scaffold was erected along the screen which divided the nave and transepts from the choir. Here the brethren played their pieces, while the preacher at appropriate intervals addressed the people, explaining what they were about to see upon the stage or commenting on what had been performed.[397] The actors were the Chorus, the preacher the Choregus. The stage was technically called talamo.[398] It had a large central compartment, corresponding to the "Logeion" of the Attic theater, with several smaller rooms termed luoghi deputati, and galleries above reserved for the celestial personages. The actors entered from a central and two side doors called reggi.

These Umbrian Divozioni form a link between the Laud of the thirteenth and the Sacra Rappresentazione of the fifteenth century. They still—in form at least, if not in sacred character—survive in the Maggi of the Tuscan peasantry, which are yearly acted among the villages of the Lucchese and Pistojese highlands.[399] It is difficult to say how far we are justified in regarding them as wholly different in type from the Northern Miracle-plays. That they originated in the oratories of lay brotherhoods, and that they retained the character of Lauds to be sung after they had assumed dramatic shape, may be reckoned as established points. Moreover, they lack the cyclical extension and the copious admixture of grotesquely comic elements which mark the French and English Mysteries. Yet we have already seen that such Mysteries were not entirely unknown in Italy, and that the liturgical drama, performed by ecclesiastics, had been from early times a part of Church ceremonial on holy days. We are, therefore, justified in accepting the Divozioni as the Italian species of a genus which was common to the medieval nations. The development of Gothic architecture in Central Italy might furnish an illustration. Its differentiation from the grander and more perfect type of French and English Gothic does not constitute a separate style.

To bridge the interval between the Divozione, used in Umbria, and the Sacra Rappresentazione, as it appeared at Florence, is rendered impossible by the present lack of documents. Still there seems sufficient reason to believe that the latter was evolved from the former within the precincts of the confraternities. In the Sacra Rappresentazione the religious drama of Italy reached its highest point of development, and produced a form of art peculiar to Florence and the Tuscan cities. Though it betrays certain affinities to the Northern Miracle-play, which prove familiarity with the French Mystères on the part at least of some among the playwrights, it is clearly a distinct kind. As in the case of the Umbrian Divozioni, so here the absence of grotesque episodes is striking; nor do we find connected series of Sacre Rappresentazioni, embracing the Christian history in a cyclical dramatic work. This species flourished for about fifty years, from 1470 to 1520. These dates are given approximately; for though we know that the Sacred Drama of Florence did not long survive the second decade of the sixteenth century, we cannot ascertain the period of its origin. The Sacre Rappresentazioni we possess in print, almost all written within the last thirty years of the fifteenth century, present so marked a similarity of style and structure that they must have been preceded by a series of experiments which fixed and conventionalized their form. Like the Divozioni, they were in the hands of confraternities, who caused them to be acted at their own expense. Since these Companies were wealthy, and included members of the best Florentine families, their plays were put upon the stage with pomp. The actors were boys belonging to the brotherhoods, directed by a Chorodidascalus called Festajuolo. S. Antonino, the good archbishop, promoted the custom of enrolling youths of all classes in religious Companies, seeking by such influences to encourage sound morality and sober living. The most fashionable brotherhoods were those of San Bastiano or Del Freccione, Del Vangelista or Dell'Aquila, Dell'Arcangelo Raffaello or Della Scala—the name of the saint or his ensign being indifferently used. Representations took place either in the oratory of the Company, or in the refectory of a convent. Meadows at Fiesole and public squares were also chosen for open-air performances.[400] The libretti were composed in octave stanzas, with passages of terza rima, and were sung to a recitative air. Interludes of part-songs, with accompaniment of lute and viol, enlivened the simple cantilena; and there is no doubt, from contemporary notices, that this music was of the best. The time selected was usually after vespers. The audience were admitted free of cost, but probably by invitation only to the friends and relatives of the young actors. Sacra Rappresentazione was the generic name of the show; but we meet with these subordinate titles, Festa, Mistero, Storia, Vangelo, Figura, Esemplo, Passione, Martirio, Miracolo, according to the special subject-matter of the play in question.

D'Ancona, in his book on the Origins of the Italian Drama, suggests that the Sacre Rappresentazioni were developed by a blending of the Umbrian Divozioni with the civic pageants of S. John's day at Florence. This theory is plausible enough to deserve investigation; especially as many points relating to the nature of the performances will be elucidated in the course of the inquiry. We must, however, be cautious not to take for granted that D'Ancona's conclusions have been proved. The researches of that eminent literary antiquarian, in combination with those made by Professor Monaci, are but just beginning to throw light on this hitherto neglected topic.

From the Chroniclers of the fifteenth century we have abundant testimony that in all parts of Italy sacred and profane shows formed a prominent feature of municipal festivals, and were exhibited by the burghers of the cities when they wished to welcome a distinguished foreigner, or to celebrate the election of their chief magistrates.[401] Thus Sigismund, King of the Romans, was greeted at Lucca in 1432 by a solemn triumph. Perugia gratified Eugenius IV. in 1444 with the story of the Minotaur, the tragedy of Iphigenia, the Nativity and the Ascension.[402] The popular respect for S. Bernardino found expression at Siena in a pageant, when the Papal Curia, in 1450, issued letters for his canonization.[403] Frederick III. was received in 1452 at Naples with the spectacle of the Passion. Leonora of Aragon, on her way through Rome in 1473 to Ferrara, witnessed a series of pantomimes, profane and sacred, splendidly provided by Pietro Riario, the Cardinal of San Sisto.[404] The triumphs of the Popes on entering office filled the streets of Rome with dramatic exhibitions, indifferently borrowed from Biblical and classic history. At Parma in 1414 the students celebrated the election of Andrea di Sicilia to a chair in their university by a procession of the Magi.[405] When the head of S. Andrew entered Rome in 1462, the citizens and prelates testified their joy with figurative pomps.[406] Viterbo in the same year enjoyed a variety of splendid exhibitions, Cardinal vying with Cardinal in magnificence, upon the festival of Corpus Domini.[407]

The pageants above-mentioned formed but prolusions to the yearly feast of S. John at Florence.[408] Florence had, as it were, the monopoly of such shows; and we know from many sources that Florentine artists were employed in distant cities for the preparation of spectacles which they had brought to perfection in their own town. An extract from Matteo Palmieri's Chronicle, referring to the year 1454, brings this Midsummer rejoicing vividly before the reader's mind.[409] It is an accurate description of the order followed at that period in the exhibition of pantomimic pageants by the guilds and merchants of the town. "On the 22d day of June the Cross of S. Maria del Fiore moved first, with all the clergy and children, and behind them seven singing men. Then the Companies of James the wool-shearer and Nofri the shoe-maker, with some thirty boys in white and angels. Thirdly, the Tower (edifizio) of S. Michael, whereupon stood God the Father in a cloud (nuvola); and on the Piazza, before the Signoria, they gave the show (rappresentazione) of the Battle of the Angels, when Lucifer was cast out of heaven. Fourthly, the Company of Ser Antonio and Piero di Mariano, with some thirty boys clothed in white and angels. Fifthly, the Tower of Adam, the which on the Piazza gave the show of how God created Adam and Eve, with the Temptation by the serpent and all thereto pertaining. Sixthly, a Moses upon horseback, attended by many mounted men of the chiefs in Israel and others. Seventhly, the Tower of Moses, which upon the Piazza gave the show of the Delivery of the Law. Eighthly, many Prophets and Sibyls, including Hermes Trismegistus and others who foretold the Incarnation of our Lord." With this list Palmieri proceeds at great length, reckoning in all twenty-two Towers. The procession, it seems, stopped upon its passage to exhibit tableaux; and these were so arranged that the whole Scripture history was set forth in dumb show, down to the Last Day. The representation of each tableau and the moving of the pageant through the streets and squares of Florence lasted sixteen hours. It will be observed that, here at least, a cyclical exposition of Christian doctrine, corresponding to the comprehensive Mysteries of the North, was attempted in pantomime. The Towers, we may remark in passing, were wooden cars, surmounted with appropriate machinery, on which the actors sat and grouped themselves according to their subject. They differed in no essentials from the Triumphal Chariots of carnival time, as described by Vasari in his Lives of Piero di Cosimo and Pontormo. From an anonymous Greek writer who visited Florence in the train of John Palæologus, we gather some notion of the effect produced upon a stranger by these pageants.[410] He describes the concourse of the Florentines, and gives the measure of his own astonishment by saying: "They work prodigies in this feast, and miracles, or at least the representation of miracles."

Vasari in his life of Il Cecca contributes much valuable information concerning the machinery used in the shows of S. John's Day.[411] The Piazza of the Duomo was covered in with a broad blue awning—similar, we may suppose, to that veil of deeper and lighter azure bands which forms the background to Fra Lippi's "Crowning of the Virgin." This was sown with golden lilies, and was called a Heaven. Beneath it were the clouds, or Nuvole, exhibited by various civic guilds. They were constructed of substantial wooden frames, supporting an almond-shaped aureole, which was thickly covered with wool, and surrounded with lights and cherub faces. Inside it sat the person who represented the saint, just as Christ and Madonna are represented in the pictures of the Umbrian school. Lower down, projected branches made of iron, bearing children dressed like angels, and secured by waist-bands in the same way as the fairies of our transformation scenes. The wood-work and the wires were hidden from sight by wool and cloth, plentifully sprinkled with tinsel stars. The whole moved slowly on the backs of bearers concealed beneath the frame. Vasari attributes the first invention of these and similar ingegni to Filippo Brunelleschi. Their similarity to what we know about the pegmata of Roman triumphs, renders this assertion probable. Brunelleschi's study of ancient art may have induced him to adapt a classical device to the requirements of Christian pageantry. When designed on a colossal scale and stationary, these Nuvole were known by the name of Paradiso. Another prominent feature in the Midsummer Show was the procession of giants and giantesses mounted upon stilts, and hooded with fantastic masks. Men marched in front, holding a pike to balance these unwieldy creatures; but Vasari states that some specialists in this craft were able to walk the streets on stilts six cubits high, without assistance. Then there were spiritelli—lighter and winged beings, raised aloft to the same height, and shining down like genii from their giddy altitude in sunlight on the crowd.

Whether we are right or not in assuming with D'Ancona that the Sacra Rappresentazione was a hybrid between the Umbrian Divozione and these pageants, there is no doubt that the Florentine artists, and Ingegnieri, were equal to furnishing the stage with richness. The fraternities spared no expense, but secured the services of the best designers. They also employed versifiers of repute to compose their libretti. It must be remembered that these texts were written for boys, and were meant to be acted by boys. Thus there came into existence a peculiar type of sacred drama, displaying something childish in its style, but taxing the ingenuity of scene-painters, mechanicians, architects, musicians, and poets, to produce a certain calculated theatrical effect. When we remember how these kindred arts flourished in the last decades of the fifteenth century, we are justified in believing that the Sacre Rappresentazioni offered a spectacle no less beautiful than curious and rare.

An examination of a few of these plays in detail will help us to understand one of the most original products of the popular Italian literature. With this object, I propose to consider the three volumes of reprints, edited with copious illustrations by Professor Alessandro d'Ancona.[412] But before proceeding to render an account of the forty-three plays included in this collection, it will be well to give some notice of the men who wrote them, to describe their general character, and to explain the manner of their presentation on the stage.

The authors of Sacre Rappresentazioni are frequently anonymous; but Lorenzo de' Medici, Antonio Alamanni, Bernardo Pulci and his wife Monna Antonia contribute each a sacred drama. The best were written by Feo Belcari and Castellano Castellani. Of the latter very little is known, except that in the year 1517 he exercised the priestly functions at Florence and was a prolific writer of Lauds. Feo Belcari, a Florentine citizen, born in 1410, held civic offices of distinction during the ascendency of Casa Medici. He was a man of birth and some learning, who devoted himself to the production of literature in prose and verse intended for popular edification. His Lauds are among the best which have descended from the fifteenth century, and his translation of the Lives of the Fathers into Tuscan is praised for purity of style. When he died, in 1484, "poor, weak, and white-haired," Girolamo Benivieni, the disciple of Savonarola and the greatest sacred singer of that age, composed his elegy in verses of mingled sweetness and fervor[413]:

Tace il celeste suon, già spenta e morta

È l'armonia di quella dolce lira, Che 'l mondo afflitto or lascia, e 'l ciel conforta.

E come parimenti si sospira

Qui la sua morte, così in ciel s'allegra Chi alla nuova armonia si volge e gira.

Felice lui che dalla infetta e negra

Valle di pianti al ciel n'è gito, e 'n terra Lasciata ha sol la veste inferma ed egra,

Ed or dal mondo e dall'orribil guerra

De' vizi sciolto, il suo splendor vagheggia Nel volto di Colui che mai non erra.

As regards their form, the Sacre Rappresentazioni are never divided into acts; but the copious stage-directions prove that the scenes were shifted, and in one or two instances secular interludes are introduced in the pauses of the action.[414] The drama follows the tale or legend without artistic structure of plot; nor do the authors appear to have aimed, except in subordinate episodes, at much development of character. What they found ready to their hand in prose, they versified. The same fixed personages, and the same traditional phrases recur with singular monotony, proving that a conventional framework and style had become stereotyped. The end in view was religious edification. Therefore mere types of virtue in saints and martyrs, types of wickedness in tyrants and persecutors, sufficed alike for authors, actors, and audience. True dramatic genius emerges only in the minor parts, where a certain freedom of handling and effort after character-drawing are discernible. The success of the play depended on the movement of the story, and the attractions of the scenery, costumes and music. It was customary for an angel to prologize and to dismiss the audience[415]; but his place is once at least taken by a young man with a lute.[416] A more dramatic opening was occasionally attempted in a conversation between two boys of Florence, the one good and the other bad; and instead of the licenza the scene sometimes closed with a Te Deum, or a Laud sung by the actors and probably taken up by the spectators. Castellani in his Figliuol Prodigo made good use of the dramatic opening, gradually working the matter of his play out of a dialogue which begins with a smart interchange of Florentine chaff.[417] It would be useless even to attempt a translation of this scene. The raciness of its obsolete street-slang would evaporate, and the fiber of the piece is not strong enough to bear rude handling. It must suffice to indicate its rare dramatic quality. Students of our own Elizabethan literature may profitably compare this picture of manners with similar passages in Hycke Scorner or Lusty Juventus. But the Florentine interlude is more fairly representative of actual life than any part of our Moralities. Castellani's Prodigal Son, however, rises altogether to a higher artistic level than the ordinary; and the same may be said about the Miracolo di S. Maria Maddalena, where a simple dramatic motive is interwoven with the action of the whole piece and made to supply a proper ending.[418]

As a rule, the Sacre Rappresentazioni partook of the character of a religious service. Their tone is uniformly pious. Yet the spirit of the age and the nature of the Italians were alike unfavorable to piety of a true temper. Here it is unctuous, caressing, sentimental—anything but vigorous or virile. The monastic virtues are highly extolled; and an unwholesome view of life seen from the cloister by some would-be saint, who "winks and shuts his apprehension up" to common facts of experience, is too often presented. Vice is sincerely condemned; yet the morality of these exhibitions cannot be applauded. Instead of the stern lessons of humanity conveyed in a drama like that of Athens or of England, the precepts of the pulpit and confessional are enforced with a childish simplicity that savors more of cloistral pietism than of true knowledge of the world. Mere belief in the intercession of saints and the efficacy of relics is made to cover all crimes; while the anti-social enthusiasms of dreamy boys and girls are held up for imitation. We feel that we are reading what a set of feeble spiritual directors wrote with a touch of conscious but well-meaning insincerity for children. The glaring contrast between the professed asceticism of the fraternities and the future conduct of their youthful members in the world of the Renaissance leaves a suspicion of hypocrisy.[419] This impression is powerfully excited by Lorenzo de' Medici's Rappresentazione di S. Giovanni e Paolo, which was acted by his children. The tone is not, indeed, so unctuous as that of Castellani. Yet when we remember what manner of man was Lorenzo; when we reflect what parts were played by his sons, Piero and Leo X., upon the stage of Italy; the sanctimonious tone of its frigid octave stanzas fails to impose on our credulity.

An adequate notion of the scenic apparatus of the Rappresentazioni may be gathered from the stage-directions to S. Uliva and from the interludes described in Giovanmaria Cecchi's Esaltazione della Croce.[420] The latter piece was acted in Florence on the occasion of Ferrando de' Medici's marriage to Cristina of Lorraine, in 1589. It belongs, therefore, to the very last of these productions. Yet, judging by Vasari's account of the Ingegni, we may assume that the style of presentation was traditional, and that a Florentine Company of the fifteenth century might have put a play upon the stage with at least equal pomp. The prose description of the apparatus and the interludes reads exactly like the narrative portion of Ben Jonson's Masks at Court, in which the poet awards due praise to the "design and invention" of Master Inigo Jones and to the millinery of Signor Forobosco.[421] It was indeed, a custom derived by England from Italy for the poet to set forth a minute record of his own designs together with their execution by the co-operating architects, scene-painters, musicians, dress-makers, and morris-dancers. The architect, says Cecchi, was one Taddeo di Leonardo Landini, a member of the Compagnia, skilled in sculpture as well as an excellent machinist. He arranged the field, or prato, of the Compagnia di S. Giovanni in the form of a theater, covered with a red tent, and painted with pictures of the Cross considered as an instrument of shameful death, as a precious relic, and as the reward of virtue in this life. Emblems, scrolls and heraldic achievements completed the adornment of the theater. When the curtain rose for the first time, Jacob was seen in a meadow, "asleep with his head on certain stones, dressed in costly furs slung across his shoulder, with a thin shirt of fine linen beneath, cloth-of-silver stockings and fair buskins on his feet, and in his hand a gilt wand." While he slept, heaven opened, and seven angels appeared seated upon clouds, and making "a most pleasant noise with horns, greater and less viols, lutes and organ ... the music of this and all the other interludes was the composition of Luca Bati, a man in this art most excellent." When they had played and sung, the cloud disclosed, and showed a second heaven, where sat God the Father.[422] All the angels worshiped Him, and heaven increased in splendor. Then a ladder was let down, and God, leaning upon it, turned to Jacob and "sang majestically to the sound of many instruments, in a sonorous bass voice." Thereupon angels descended and ascended by the ladder, singing a hymn in honor of the Cross; and at last the clouds closed round, heaven disappeared and Jacob woke from sleep. Such was the introduction to the drama. Between the first and second acts was shown, with no less exuberance of scenical resources, the exodus of Israel from Egypt; between the second and third, the miracle of Aaron's rod that blossomed; between the third and fourth, the elevation of the Brazen Serpent; between the fourth and fifth, the ecstasy of David dancing before the ark "to the sound of a large lute, a violin, a trombone, but more especially to his own harp." After the fifth act the play was concluded with a pageant of religious chivalry—the Knights of Malta, S. James, S. Maurice, and the Teutonic Order—who had fought for the Cross, and to whom, amid thunderings and lightnings, as they stood upon the stage, was granted the vision of "Religion, habited in purest white, full of majesty, with the triple tiara and the crossed keys of S. Peter, holding in her hand a large and most resplendent cross, adorned with diamonds, rubies and emeralds." The resources of a theater which could place so many actors on the stage at once, and attempt the illusion of clouds and angels, bringing into play the machinery of transformation scenes, and enriching the whole with a varied accompaniment of music, must have been considerable. Those who have spent an hour in the Teatro Farnese at Parma, erected of wood for a similar occasion, may be able to summon by the aid of the imagination a shadow of this spectacle before their eyes. That the effect was not wholly grotesque, though the motives were so hazardous, can be understood from Milton's description of the descent of Mercy in his Christmas Ode.[423]

For the play of S. Uliva, though first known to us in a Florentine reprint of 1568, we may assume a more popular origin than that of Cecchi's Mystery of the Cross. It abounds in rare Renaissance combinations of pagan with Christian mythology. The action extended over two days and was interrupted at intervals by dumb shows and lyrical interludes connected only by a slight thread with the story. At one time a chase was brought upon the stage. On other occasions pictures, described with minute attention to details, were presented to the audience in Tableaux Vivants. These pictures vividly recall the style of Florentine masters, Piero di Cosimo or Sandro Botticelli. "In the interval," say the stage-directions to the players, "you will cause three women, well-beseen, to issue, one of them attired in white, one in red, the other in green, with golden balls in their hands, and with them a young man robed in white; and let him, after looking many times first on one and then on another of these damsels, at last stay still and say the following verses, gazing at her who is clad in green." This is the Mask of Hope. In another part the fable of Narcissus has to be presented, and directions are given for the disappearance of Echo, who is to repeat the final syllables of the boy's lament. "After he has uttered all these complaints, let him thrice with a loud voice cry slowly Ahimè, Ahimè, Ahimè! and let the nymph reply, and having thus spoken let him stretch himself upon the ground and lie like one dead; and within a little space let there issue forth four or more nymphs clad in white, without bows and with dishevelled hair, who, when they have come where the youth lies dead, shall surround him in a circle and at last having wrapped him in a white cloth, carry him within, singing this song[424]:

"Fly forth in bliss to heaven,

Thou happy soul and fair,

To find thy planet there, and haunt the skies;

Leaving the tears and sighs

Of this low-lying earth,

Where man hath sorry mirth, as thou dost know!

Bask in the fervent glow

Of that pure light divine,

Which on thy path shall shine, and be thy guide.
Nay, soul, thou hast not died,
But still more life hast thou,
Albeit unbodied now thou art at rest.
O soul, divinely blest,
Enjoy the eternal mind,
There dwelling unconfined through nights and days!
Heaven's angels stand and gaze
Upon thy glorious eyes,
Up there in Paradise! In crowds they come!
Now hast thou found thy home;
Now art thou blithe and blest;
Dwell now for aye at rest, pure placid soul!"

For another interlude a May-day band of girls attired in flower-embroidered dresses and youths with crowns of ivy on their heads are marshaled by Dan Cupid. They sing a song of which the following is a free translation:

Let earth herself adorn

With grasses and fresh flowers,

And let cold hearts, these hours, in love's fire burn.

Let field, let forest turn

To bloom this morn of May,

That the whole world to-day may leap and sing.

Let love within us spring,

Banishing winter's smart,

Waking within our heart sweet thoughts and fair.

Let little birds in air

Sing yonder boughs above;

Each young man tell his love to his own maid;

And girls through mead and glade,

With honest eyes and meek

Fixed on their lovers, seek true troth to plight.

From field and mountain height

To-day cold snows are fled;

No clouds sail overhead; up springs clear morn.

Let violets be born,

Let leaves and grasses sprout,

And children wander out, garlands to twine.
In every dingle shine
Flowers white and blue and red,
Roses and lilies shed perfume around.
Maidens with May-blooms crowned
Through copse and meadow stray,
Singing their thoughts to-day, their sweet thoughts pure.
Let none be too demure;
Innocence marries mirth,
And from the jocund earth green laurels spring.
Come, Love, and blessings bring;
Chase sorrow, scatter care;
Make all men happy there, soul-full of ease.
Soothe pain, soothe jealousies,
That with their restless flame
Feed on man's heart: no shame, no grief be near.

Night and the God of Sleep again amuse the audience with an allegorical mask; and the seven deadly sins, figured as men, women and beasts, march across the stage. At no great distance from a vision of Judgment, the Sirens are introduced after this fashion: "Now goes the King to Rome; and you, meanwhile, make four women, naked, or else clothed in flesh-colored cloth, rise waist-high from the sea, with tresses to the wind, and let them sing as sweetly as may be the ensuing stanzas twice; in the which while shall two or three of you come forth, and seem to fall asleep on earth at the hearing of the song, except one only, who shall be armed, and with closed ears shall pass the sea unstayed, and let the said women take those who sleep and cast them in the waves." When we reach Uliva's wedding, we meet with the following quaint rubric: "If you wish to beguile the weariness caused by the length of the show, and to make the spectators take more delight in this than in any other interlude, then you must give them some taste of these bridals by providing a general banquet; but if you mislike the expense, then entertain the players only." It would seem that S. Uliva was acted on the prato of the confraternity, where a booth had been erected.

The forty-three plays comprised in D'Ancona's volumes may be arranged in three classes—those which deal with Bible stories or Church doctrine based on Scripture; dramatized Legends of the saints; and Novelle transformed into religious fables. Among the first sort may be mentioned plays of Abraham and Isaac, Joseph, Tobias and Raphael, and Esther; the Annunciation, the Nativity, S. John in the Desert, Christ preaching in the Temple, the Conversion of the Magdalen, the Prodigal Son, the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord, and the Last Judgment. The Natività di Cristo opens with a pastoral reminding us of French Mystères and English Miracle-plays.[425] The shepherds are bivouacking on the hills of Bethlehem when the angel appears to them. For Tudde, Harvye, Houcken, and Trowle of our Chester play, we find these southern names, Bobi di Farucchio, Nencio di Pucchio, Randello, Nencietto, and so forth. But the conduct of the piece is the same. The Italian hinds discuss their cheese and wine and bread just as the clowns of Cheshire talk about "ale of Hatton," "sheep's head sowsed in ale," and "sour milk." Such points of similarity are rare, however; for the Rappresentazioni were the growth of more refined conditions, and showed their origin in sentiment and pathos. The anonymous play of Mary Magdalen rises to a higher level of dramatic art than any sacred play in English.[426] Her story, as told in these scenes, is the versified novella of a Vittoria Accoramboni or a Bella Imperia converted by the preaching of S. Bernardino or Savonarola. It might have happened in Rome or Florence or Perugia. Magdalen, the lady of noble blood but famous with ill-fame, fair of person and of heaven-bright countenance, who dresses splendidly and lives with many lovers, spending her days in the pleasure of rich banquets and perfumed baths, delighting her heart with the music of lyres and flutes and the voices of young men, appears before us with a reality that proves how deep a hold upon the poet's fancy her picturesque tale had taken. Martha, her good but commonplace sister, forms a foil to the more impassioned and radiant figure of Magdalen. She has been cured by Christ, and has heard Him preach. Now she entreats her sister but to go and listen, for never man spake words like His. Magdalen scoffs: "Why should I be damned because I do not follow your strange life? There is time for me to enjoy my youth, and then to make my peace with God, and Paradise will open wide for me at last." Her friend Marcella enters with another argument: "O Magdalen, if you did but know how fair and gracious are his eyes! Surely he has come forth straight from heaven; could you but see him once, your heart would never be divided from him." This touches the right spring in Magdalen's mind. She will not go to hear the words of Christ, but the face and form that came from Paradise allure her. Besides, in the church where Christ will preach, there will be found new lovers and men in multitudes to gaze at her. Her maidens array her in gold and crimson, and bind up her yellow hair; and forth she rides in all her bravery surrounded by her suitors. What follows may best be told by a translation of the stage-directions and a passage of the play itself.

And at these last verses Jesus enters the temple; and having gone up into the pulpit, he begins to preach and to say with a loud voice, "Homo quidam peregre proficiscens vocavit servos suos et tradidit illis bona sua." Now comes Magdalen with her company, and her young men prepare for her a seat before the pulpit, and she in all her pomp takes her place upon it, regarding her own pleasure, nor paying heed as yet to Jesus. Afterward, Jesus looks at her and goes on preaching, always keeping his most holy gaze bent upon her; and she, after the first stanza of the sermon, looks at him, and her eyes meet those of Jesus. Then he goes on preaching, and says as follows:

A certain lord who on a journey went,

Called unto him each of his serving men,

And of his goods gave them arbitrament:

To one he dealt five talents, to one ten,

To another two, to try their heart's intent,

And see how far they should be careless; then

Unto the last he left but one alone:

According to their powers, he charged each one.

And when he had departed, instantly

That servant unto whom he gave the five,

Went forth, and laboring with much industry,

Increased them, and therewith so well did thrive

That other five he gained immediately,

To render when his master should arrive;

He who received but twain, did even so,

And added to his sum another two.

But he on whom one talent was bestowed,

Went forthwith and concealed it in the soil:

Careless, unthankful for the debt he owed,

While he hath peace, he seeks but strife and toil:

Called like his fellows in that lord's abode,

He answers not, but doth himself despoil;

And, as a worthless steward, hides away
The money of his master day by day.

Woe to thee, slothful servant and remiss,
That hast thy talent buried in the ground!
When reckoning comes, thou'lt yield account for this
Nay, think how stern and rigorous he'll be found!
Weep, then, in time for what thou'st done amiss,
Before the trumpets of the judgment sound:
O soul, I tell thee thou hast gone astray,
Hiding thy talent in the earth away!

He who on earth sets his affections still,
Forgetful of the promised heavenly treasure;
He who loves self more than his Maker's will,
And in ill-doing finds continual pleasure;
He who remembers not that sin must kill,
Nor thinks how Hell will plague him above measure;
He who against himself makes fast heaven's gate;
Hideth in earth his talent till too late.

He who loves father, mother, more than God,
Not reckoning His great gifts bestowed on man;
He who the path of worldly gain hath trod,
Publishes for himself damnation's ban:
Woe, woe to that bad servant sunk in fraud,
Who leaves the good and doth what ill he can!
He who on this world seeks his joy to find,
His talent hides in earth, perversely blind.

He who is grasping, proud, discourteous, base,
Who dreameth not that he may come to want,
Who seeks for flattery, praise, and pride of place,
Lording it with high airs and arrogant;
Who to the world gives all, and still doth chase
Delight in songs and pomps exorbitant;
Who in this life is fain to rest and sleep—
His talent in the earth lies hidden deep.

Woe for that servant who through negligence
Hath hearkened not to the command divine!
Yea, he shall hear the dreadful doom: Go hence!
Go forth, accursed, in endless fire to pine!
There shall be then no time for penitence:
Bound hand and foot with punishment condign,
He shall abide among lost souls beneath,
Where is great weeping and great gnashing of teeth.

O soul, so full of sins, what shalt thou do?
Of all thy countless crimes abominable,
Look to the end! Look to it! Hell for you
Lies open, with damned folk innumerable!
Whence thou shalt never issue, ever rue
In vain remorse and pangs intolerable!
Weep, soul, ah weep for thy most vile estate,
Now that repentance need not come too late!

Seek in this life to feel sincere contrition,
Before the judge so just and so severe
Summons thee to his throne, for inquisition
Into each sin, each thought that wandered here;
There shalt thou find no merciful remission,
But justice shall be dealt with truth austere;
And he who fails shall go to burn with shame
For ever, ever, in eternal flame.

Quis ex vobis centum oves habens,
Si forte unam ex illis perdiderit,
Nonne nonagintas novem dimittens
Et illam querit, donec ipsam invenerit?
Et cum invenerit, in humeros ponens,
Gaudens, in domum suam cito venerit,
And calls his kinsfolk and his friends to make
Festival for the new-found wanderer's sake?

The soul, she is that lost and wandering sheep;
Eternal God is the true shepherd: He
Seeks her, lest on his lamb the wolf should leap,
The fiend, who slays with guile and treachery.
He spends his life, her safe to seek and keep,
And leaves those ninety-nine in bliss to be;
And when he finds her, makes great joy in heaven,
With all the angelic host, o'er one forgiven.

There was a father who had children twain;
The younger son began to speak and pray
That he might take his share, for he was fain,
Furnished therewith, from home to wend his way:
The father gently urged him to remain,
But at the last was bounden to obey:
Far, far away he roamed, and spent his all,
Sad wretch, on carnal joys and prodigal.

But when he came to want, repenting sore,
Unto his father, all ashamed, he knelt;
His father clothed him with new robes, and bore
Even more tender love than first he felt:
So doth high God, who lives for evermore,
Unto the souls that with repentance melt;
Let them but seek his love with contrite will,
He is most merciful, and pardons still.

Soul, thou hast wounded many hearts, I wis,
Dwelling in delicate and vain delight;
With many a lover thou wouldst toy and kiss
And art o'erfull of evil appetite;
Thy heart is big with strifes and jealousies:
Turn unto me; I wait to wash thee white;
That with the rest thy talent thou mayst double,
And dwell with them in heaven secure from trouble.

After the blessing of Jesus, Magdalen, weeping, and with her head covered, can have no rest for the great confusion that she felt; and all the people wept, and in great astonishment were waiting agaze to see what should ensue.

O alma peccatrice, che farai?—Christ's voice with its recurrences of gravely sweet persuasion melts Magdalen's heart. She may not speak one word, until her sister has led her home and comforted her a space. Then she answers:

Deh, priega Iddio che m'allumini il core!

After this, left alone with her own soul, awakened to the purer consciousness that Christ has stirred, she takes the box of ointment, and, despoiled of all her goodly raiment, with her hair disheveled, goes to the house of the Pharisee. There at last, with the breaking of the alabaster, she dissolves in tears, and her heart finds peace. In these scenes, if anywhere, we have the stuff from which the drama might have been evolved. Magdalen is a living woman, such as Palma might have painted; and Christ is a real man gifted with power to penetrate the soul.

The Figliuol Prodigo illustrates the same effort on the poet's part to steep an old-world story in the vivid colors of to-day.[427] In the Prodigal himself we find a coarse-hearted villain, like Hogarth's Idle Apprentice—vain, silly, lustful, gluttonous, careless of the honor and love that belong to him in his father's home. The scenes with the innkeeper, the gamblers, and the ruffians, among whom he runs to ruin, portray the vulgar dissipations of Florence, and justify the common identification of taverns with places of ill-fame.[428] There is a touch of true pathos at the end of the play in the grief of the father who has lost his son. The conflict of feelings in the heart of the elder brother, vexed at first with the prodigal's reception, but melting into love and pity at the fervor of his penitence, is also not without dramatic spirit. At the very end "a boy with the lyre" enters and "speaks the moral of the parable."[429]

The movement of these two plays is not impeded by the sanctity of the subject. When, however, the legend belongs more immediately to the narrative of Christ's life, the form of the Representation is more severe. This is especially true of Castellani's Cena e Passione, where the incidents of the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, the trials before Pilate and Caiaphas, the Flagellation, and the Crucifixion are narrated with reverential brevity.[430] In reading these scenes, we must summon to our memory Luca della Robbia's bass-reliefs or the realistic groups of the Lombard Sacri Monti. The colored terra-cotta figures in those chapels among the chestnut trees above the Sesia are but Castellani's poetry conveyed in tableaux, while the Florentine actors undoubtedly aimed at presenting by their grouping, dresses and attitudes a living image of such plastic work. But the peculiar pathos of the Italians found finer expression in picture or fresco—in Luini's "Flagellation" at S. Maurizio or the pallid anguish of Tintoretto's women sunk beneath the Cross in the Scuola di San Rocco—than in the fluent stanzas of the sacred playwrights. On the walls of church or oratory the sweetness and languor of emotion became as dignified in beauty as the melodies of Pergolese, and its fervor touched at times the sublimity of tragic passion. Not words but plastic forms were ever the noblest vehicle of Italian feeling. Yet each kind of art may be profitably used to illustrate the other, and the simple phrases of the Rappresentazioni are often the best comments on finished works of painting. Here, for example, is Raphael's Lo Spasimo in words[431]:

Oimè, figliuol, è questo il viso

Ch'era tanto formoso e tanto bello?

Omè, dove si specchia el paradiso

Oggi è percosso in tanto gran flagello!
Io vengo a morte, figliuol mio diletto,
Se non ti tengo nelle braccia stretto.

Mary faints, and the Magdalen supports her, weeping[432]:

Omè, che per dolor Maria vien meno:

Noi perderem la madre col figliuolo.

Pallido è il volto già tanto sereno,

Quale è tutto mutato pel gran duolo.

El polso manca, e nel sacrato seno

El cuor suo resta respirante solo.

Soccorso, aiuto; ognun gli dia conforto,

Sendo aghiacciato il corpo e quasi morto.

The hearts of these rude poets were very tender for Mary, Mother of our Lord. There is a touching passage in the Disputa al Tempio, when Joseph and the Virgin are walking toward the temple with the boy who is to them a sacred charge[433]:

Iosef.

I' guido e son guidato, e reggo quello

Che regge me, e muovo chi mi muove:

Pastor mi fo di quel ch'io son agnello;

O quanta grazia in questo servo piove!

Maria.

S'i' alzo gli occhi alquanto per vederlo,

Contemplo nel mirar cose alte e nuove.

Per la virtù di sua divina forma

L'amante ne l'amato si trasforma.

Something artless and caressing in these words brings before us Luini's Joseph with his golden-brown robes and white hair, Mary in her blue and crimson with the beautiful braided curls of gold. The Magdalen, again, moves through all these solemn scenes with a grace peculiar to her story. The poet, like the painter, never forgets that her sins were forgiven quia multum amavit. She who in Luini's fresco at Lugano kneels with outstretched arms and long fair rippling loosened hair, beneath the Cross, is shown in the Resurrezione di Gesù Cristo upon her knees before the gardener whose one word tells her that she sees her risen Lord.[434] It is a scene from Fra Angelico, a touch of tenderness falling like a faint soft light athwart the mass of orthodox tradition.

The sympathy between these shows and the plastic arts may be still further traced in Belcari's Dì del Giudizio.[435] After the usual prologue an angel thrice blows the trumpet blast that wakes the dead, crying aloud Surgite! Minos assembles his fiends, and Christ bids the archangel separate the good from the bad.[436] Michael, obedient to this order, seeks a hypocrite hidden among the just and sets him on the left hand, while Trajan is taken from the damned and placed among the saved. Solomon rises alone,[437] and remains undecided in the middle space, till Michael, charging him with carnal sin, forces him to take his station with the goats. S. Peter now disputes with wicked friars who think to save themselves by pointing to their cowls and girdles. The poor appeal to S. Francis, but he answers that poverty is no atonement for a sinful life. Magdalen refuses help to women who have lived impenitent. Christ and Mary reply that the hour of grace is past. Then the representatives of the seven deadly sins step forth and reason with the virtuous—the proud man with the humble, the glutton with the temperate. Sons upbraid their fathers for neglect or evil education. Others thank God for the discipline that saved them in their youth. At the last Christ awards judgment, crying to the just: "Ye saw me hungry and ye fed me, naked and ye clothed me!" and to the unjust: "I was hungry and ye fed me not, naked and ye clothed me not." Just and unjust answer, as in Scripture, with those words whereof the double irony is so dramatic. The damned are driven off to Hell, and angels open for the blessed the doors of Paradise.

The Rappresentazioni of the second class offer fewer points of interest; almost the sole lesson they inculcate being the superiority of the monastic over the secular life. S. Anthony leaves the world in which he has lived prosperous and wealthy, incarcerates his sister in a convent, and becomes a hermit.[438] Satan assembles the hosts of hell and makes fierce war upon his resolution; but the temptation is a poor affair, and Anthony gets through it by the help of an angel. The play ends with an assault of the foiled fiend of Avarice upon three rogues—Tagliagambe, Scaramuccia, and Carabello—who cut each other's throats over their ill-gotten booty. S. Guglielmo Gualtero, like S. Francis, sells all that he possesses, embraces poverty, and becomes a saint.[439]. S. Margaret subdues the dragon, and is beheaded by a Roman prefect for refusing homage to the pagan deities.[440] SS. Giovanni e Paolo are Latin confessors of the conventional type.[441] The legends of the Seven Sleepers, S. Ursula, and S. Onofrio are treated after a like fashion. S. Eufrasia still further illustrates the medieval ideal of monastic chastity.[442] She leaves her betrothed husband and her mother to enter a convent. Nothing befalls her, and her life is good for nothing, except that she exhales the odor of conventual sanctity and dies. S. Teodora is a variation on the same theme.[443] She refuses Quintiliano, the governor of Asia, in marriage; and is sent to a bad house, whence Eurialo, a Christian, delivers her. Both are immediately dispatched to execution. It is probable that the two last-mentioned plays were intended for representation within the walls of a nunnery. S. Barbara presents the same motive, with a more marked theological bias.[444] Dioscoro, the father of the saint, hears from his astrologers that she is fated to set herself against the old gods of his worship. To avert this calamity, he builds a tower with two windows, where he shuts her up in the company of orthodox pagan teachers. Barbara becomes learned in her retirement, and refuses, upon the authority of Plato, to pay homage to idols. Faith, instead of Love, finds this new Danaë, in the person, not of Zeus, but of a priest dispatched by Origen from Alexandria to convert her to Christianity. The princess learns her catechism, is baptized, and adds a third window to her tower, in recognition of the Trinity. It only remains for her father to torture her cruelly to death.

The outline of these stories is often singularly beautiful, and capable of poetic treatment. Remembering what Massinger and Decker made of the Virgin Martyr, we turn with curiosity to S. Teodora or S. Ursula. Yet we are doomed to disappointment. The ingenuous charm, again, which painters threw over the puerilities of the monastic fancy, is absent from these plays. Sodoma's legend of S. Benedict in fresco on the walls of Monte Oliveto, Carpaccio's romance of S. Ursula painted for her Scuola at Venice, are touched with the grace of a child's fairy-story. The Rappresentazioni eliminate all elements of mystery and magic from the fables, and reduce them to bare prose. The core of the myth or tale is rarely reached; the depths of character are never penetrated; and still the wizardry of wonderland is gone. In the hands of these Italian playwrights the most pregnant story of the Orient or North assumed the thin slight character of ordinary life. Its richness disappeared. Its beauty evanesced. Nothing remained but the dry bones of a novella. Indeed, the prose legends of the fourteenth century are far more fascinating than these dramatized tales of the Renaissance, which might be used to prove, if further proof were needed, that the Italian imagination is not in the highest sense romantic or fantastic, not far-reaching by symbol or by vision into the depths of nature human and impersonal. The sense of infinity which gives value to Northern works of fancy, is unknown in Italy. Sir Thomas Mallory wrote of Arthur's passage into dreamland[445]: "And when they were at the water's side, even fast by the banke hoved a little barge with many faire ladies in it, and among them all was a queene, and all they had blacke hoods, and they wept and shriked when they saw King Arthur." The author of the Tavola Ritonda makes the event quite otherwise precise[446]: