A History of
ITALIAN LITERATURE

BY
RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D.

London
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MDCCCXCVIII

“I think,” says Jowett, writing to John Addington Symonds (August 4, 1890), “that you are happy in having unlocked so much of Italian literature, certainly the greatest in the world after Greek, Latin, English. To have interpreted one such literature and made it accessible to English-speaking people seems to me a sufficient result of a life.”

It seems, however, peculiarly appropriate that a history of Italian literature should follow and should precede other and parallel histories. Symonds himself had long before pointed out that no man, at least in a single work of moderate compass, can fully deserve the credit of having unlocked Italian literature. The study of Italian letters, he had reminded us, cannot be profitably pursued by itself. The literature of Italy requires to be constantly considered in connection with other literatures, both those from which it is itself derived, and those which it has deeply influenced. It is more intimately affiliated to antiquity than any other European literature, and may indeed be regarded as a continuation or revival of the Latin. Its advent was long and unaccountably delayed—it is the youngest of all the chief European literatures; but when at length it did appear, its form, already classical, dispensed it from an infancy[Pg i] of rudeness and barbarism. It may be compared to Hermes, the youngest but most precocious of the Gods; not, like Pallas, born adult, but equal to any achievement from the cradle:

Entering at once upon a heritage of classical tradition, Italians began to teach foreign nations long before they found anything to learn from them; and this influence is so large a part of the glory of Italy that her literature cannot be fully unlocked to the foreigner unless he is shown, not only what she has herself effected in letters, but how greatly she has modified the intellectual development of other countries. She owes nothing to Chaucer, Spenser, or Milton; but Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton are infinitely indebted to her. The position she so long retained as the instructor and exemplar of civilised nations invests her literature with an importance more considerable than that attaching to the merits of her individual authors, illustrious as these are. Yet it is impossible to elucidate this momentous department of the subject in a manual of four hundred pages. All that can be done is to indicate by continual reference and allusion that the need exists, and must be satisfied elsewhere. The influence upon Italy herself of foreign writers, and of movements common to Europe in general, has required and received fuller treatment.

Other circumstances, and these not attributable to the restricted scale of his undertaking, conspire to afflict the historian of Italian literature with a feeling of insufficiency.[Pg ii] From causes which will appear in the course of this history, many of the most gifted Italians wrote in Latin. From Petrarch down to Nicius Erythræus a succession of books which would have adorned the vernacular literature if they had belonged to it, appeared in the common idiom of scholars. Petrarch’sCanzoniere, as respects mere dimension, is as nothing to the mass of his Latin works. Politian writes just enough Italian to prove that he might have revived Boccaccio or anticipated Ariosto. Pontano, one of the brightest intellects of Italy, writes entirely in Latin. To exclude the Latin books of such men entirely from consideration is impossible; but they cannot be adequately treated in a professed history of vernacular literature; and much else of deep significance must be passed over without a hint of its existence.

Another circumstance places the Italian mind at a disadvantage when contemplated solely through a literary medium. Literature in Italy is a less exhaustive manifestation than elsewhere of the intellect of the nation. The intellectual glory of England, France, and Germany depends mainly upon their authors and men of science; their illustrious artists, the succession of great German composers since Handel excepted, are for the most part isolated phenomena. In the ages of Italian development, whether of the imitative arts or of music, artists far outnumber authors, and the best energies of the country are employed in artistic production. Of this super-abundant vitality mere literary history affords no trace. Michael Angelo, one of the greatest men the world has seen, can here claim no more than a paragraph on the strength of a handful of sonnets. It is indeed remarkable that out of the nine Italians most brilliantly con[Pg iii]spicuous in the very first rank of genius and achievement—Aquinas, Dante, Columbus, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, Galileo, Napoleon—only one should have been a man of letters. The reader, therefore, who may deem the field of Italian literature infertile in comparison with the opulence of England or France, must remember that it expresses a smaller proportion of the country’s benefaction to humanity. Yet Jowett is perfectly justified in claiming for the Italian a front place among the literatures of the world, but only on condition that its great representatives shall be weighed rather than counted.

The comparative—though only comparative—paucity of authors in Italy is so far favourable to the historian working on a small scale, that it allows a more expansive treatment of the greatest men, and at the same time the inclusion of minor writers not always of high distinction, but indispensable to the continuity of the narrative. This is essential in a book which does not profess to be a string of biographies, but a biography of Italian Literature herself regarded as a single entity revealed through a succession of personages, the less gifted among whom may be true embodiments of her spirit for the time being. Many remarkable manifestations of the national intellect are, nevertheless, necessarily excluded. Writers in dialect are omitted, unless when acknowledged classics like Meli or Belli. Academies and universities are but slightly mentioned. Theologians, jurists, and men of science have been passed over, except in so far as they may also have been men of letters. There is, in fact, no figure among them like Luther, who, though not inspired by the love of letters as such, so embodied the national spirit and exerted so mighty[Pg iv] an influence upon the language, that he could no more than Goethe be omitted from a history of German literature.

Some want of proportion may be charged against the comparatively restricted space here allotted to Dante. It is indeed true that if genius prescribed the scale of treatment, at least a third of the book ought to have been devoted to him; but this very fact refutes the censure it seems to support, since, the limits assigned admitting of no extension, all other authors must have suffered for the sake of one. In a history, moreover, rather dealing with Italian literature as a whole than with writers as individuals, the test is not so much greatness as influence upon letters, and in this respect Dante is less significant than Petrarch and Boccaccio. Preceding the Renaissance, he could not profoundly affect its leading representatives, or the succeeding generations whose taste was moulded by it; and although at all times admired and venerated, it was only at the appearance of the romantic school and the Revolution that he became a potent literary force. Another reason for a more compendious treatment of Dante is that while in the cases of other Italian writers it is difficult to remedy defects by reference to any special monograph, English literature possesses several excellent handbooks to the Divine Comedy, resort to which would be expedient in any case.

The books to which the writer has been chiefly indebted are enumerated in a special bibliography. He is obliged to Mr. W. M. Rossetti and to Messrs. Ellis and Elvey for permission to use the exquisite translations from theDante and his Circle of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, cited in the early chapters of the book. The [Pg v] graceful versions from Boiardo and other poets contributed by Miss Ellen Clerke have not, with one exception, been previously printed. Where no acknowledgment of indebtedness is made, translations are by the author of the volume.

RICHARD GARNETT.

December 1897.

CONTENTS

[Pg vii]

Great literatures, like great rivers, seldom derive their origin from a single fountain, but rather ooze from the soil in a multitude of almost imperceptible springs. The literature of Greece may appear an exception, but we know that the broad stream of Homeric song in which we first behold it must have been fed by a number of rills which it has absorbed into itself, and whose original sources lie beyond the range of scrutiny. In no literature is this general maxim better exemplified than the Italian, if, at least, as the economy of this little history demands, we restrict this appellation to its modern period. It might be plausibly contended that the Latin and Italian literatures, like the Roman and Byzantine empires, are, in truth, a single entity, but the convenience of the student precludes a view in support of which much might be adduced by the critic and philologist. Defining Italian literature, therefore, so as to comprise whatsoever is written in any dialect of that “soft bastard[Pg 2] Latin” which bears the Italian name, and to exclude all compositions in a language which a Roman would have called Latin, we find none among great literatures whose beginnings are more humble and obscure, or, which at first seems surprising, more recent. The perfection of form which the literature of Italy had attained while all others, save the Provençal, were yet devoid of symmetry and polish, the comparative intelligibility of the diction of “Dante and his circle” at the present day, while the contemporary writers in other tongues require copious glossaries, lead to the tacit and involuntary assumption of a long antecedent period of development and refinement which did not in fact exist. In truth, the earliest literary compositions definable as Italian are scarcely older than the thirteenth century.

There is, perhaps, no other such example in history of the obliteration of literary taste and method as that which in Italy befell one of the most gifted peoples of the world for nearly six hundred years. After Boethius (about 530 A.D.) the little that is left of literature becomes entirely utilitarian, and is, with rare exceptions, restricted to theology, jurisprudence, and monkish chronicles. There is still much evidence that the Latin classical writers had not passed out of the knowledge of men; but—except when like Virgil they became heroes of popular legend—little that they exercised any appreciable influence upon men’s ideas and imaginations. One unfortunate precursor of the Renaissance, indeed, Vilgardus of Ravenna (about A.D. 1000), was led by his admiration for the classics to disparage Christianity, and suffered death in consequence. As a rule, however, the Latin poets merely served as a magazine of commonplace quotations and an arsenal of metri[Pg 3]cal rules, which some of the least degenerate writers of the period apply with considerable skill. The explanation of this paralysis of Latin literature in Italy, while Greek was still an efficient organ of thought in the Eastern Empire, is no doubt to be found in the fact that it had never been a robust national growth. The property of the learned and cultivated, it had taken no deep hold upon the mass of the people; and when culture and learning perished amid the vicissitudes of barbarian conquest, it was only preserved, apart from the services of the Church, by the absolute necessity of maintaining some vestiges of law, physic, and divinity, and the impossibility of conveying instruction in the debased dialects into which the old Latin language was resolving itself.

It might have been expected, nevertheless, that these dialects would have become the vehicles of popular legend and poetry, and that, as anciently in Greece, a literature would at length have been evolved from the tales of the story-tellers and the songs of the minstrels. The very existence of vernacular minstrels and story-tellers is but matter of inference, the little which we possess in any sense referable to this department being in Latin. The instances laboriously accumulated by Rubieri to prove the existence of popular poetry throughout the Dark Ages seem to be all in this language; and centuries pass without any indication that the ancestors of Dante thought it possible to write in any other, and scarcely any that they cared for written composition at all, except as a medium for instruction in such knowledge as the age possessed, and the transaction of the ordinary business of life. The symptoms of vitality became more evident after the[Pg 4] Christian world had turned the corner of its first millennium. The eleventh century was in Italy an age of eminent theologians; it also beheld the musical reforms of Guido of Arezzo; and towards its conclusion poets of some note arose to chant in Latin hexameters the triumphs of Genoa and Pisa over the Saracens. Still, although, as has been well remarked, the enthusiasm for the Crusades excited by itinerant preachers goes far to prove that public addresses were delivered in the popular dialects, there is not a trace of any written Italian language, or a hint of any such vernacular literature as existed, if it hardly flourished, among the Germans, the French, and the Anglo-Saxons. When at length in the twelfth century Poetry unmistakably presents herself in the songs of the wandering students (Goliardi), her attire is still Latin. But it was much that any class of society should now be making its own songs, and the transition to a vernacular lyric was not long or difficult, although, instead of taking birth among the people, it was fostered into life by the patronage of Courts.

The first of the Latin nations to acquire a cultivated vernacular literature was the Provençal. Many reasons, singly insufficient, but cumulatively of great force, may be adduced for this unquestionable priority. The language, which may be roughly but accurately described as a connecting link between French and Italian, as its Catalan and Valencian congeners form one between French and Spanish, is better adapted for poetical composition than French; while, the Latin influence being less oppressively overwhelming than in the land of the Romans, it escaped the ban of provinciality which so long prohibited serious literary composition in the vernacular speech of Italy. Before the demon of religious[Pg 5] persecution was unchained by the Popes, the country enjoyed remarkable prosperity and tranquillity; the harsher features of the feudal system were mitigated by industry and commerce, while the aristocratical organisation of society ensured literature that patronage without which it could hardly have flourished in the absence of a reading class.

The early poets of Provence were almost without exception the favourites of princes and noblemen, whose exploits they celebrated, whose enemies they satirised, whose own political course they sometimes inspired, and for whose gratification they vied with each other in improvised poetical contests (tenzons). Their strains, though occasionally lighted up by some bright thought which Petrarch subsequently did not disdain to appropriate, appear to us in general artificial and constrained. This is partly owing to the exaggeration of a virtue, that attention to “strictest laws of rhyme and rule,” in which, as an English poet truly declares, the bard finds “not bonds, but wings.” But the cultivation of form is carried too far when it becomes the end instead of the means, and the Provençal poets allowed themselves to be seduced by their language’s unequalled facilities for rhyming into an idolatry of the elaborate, which offered great impediments to the simple expression of feeling. Some of their strophes contain no fewer than twenty-eight verses, the same set of rhymes being carried through the whole stanza, and very frequently through the entire poem. Out of four hundred pieces in a single manuscript collection Ginguené found only two in the simple quatrain. It was fortunate for the Italians that their language, fluent and supple as it is, is incapable of such feats, and that, while[Pg 6] adopting their lyrical measures from the Provençals, they could not, had they wished, cramp themselves by the reproduction of the latter’s tours de force.

It is in the last quarter of the twelfth century that we find Provençal troubadours established at the Courts of the North Italian princes, writing exactly such poems as they would have written at home, and apparently just as well understood and equally popular, a proof that neither in Provence nor in Italy had the culture of belles lettres progressed beyond the highest circles. One or two of them occasionally mingled an Italian strophe with their Provençal substance, and at a somewhat later date Bonvesin da Riva and others wrote in a curiously mixed dialect of French and Italian. There is, however, no proper Italian literature until, about 1220, we suddenly find a school of vernacular poetry flourishing at Palermo under the patronage of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany, an Italian on his mother’s side, and by his tastes and sympathies more of an Italian than of a German prince. The character of its productions is in general wholly Provençal, but the language is Italian of the Tuscan type, and it is a highly interesting question whether this was the case from the first, or whether the pieces as we possess them are adaptations from the Sicilian dialect, which appears from contemporary prose monuments to have existed at the time nearly in its present form. We cannot attempt to decide the controversy, which does not affect the position of the pieces as the earliest undoubted examples of vernacular Italian literature. Their poetical merit cannot in general be rated very highly, and they contain hardly anything which might not have been written in Provence as well as in Sicily. Frederick himself was one of the principal [Pg 7] writers, and his canzone on his Lady in Bondage might appear to the English reader to possess considerable merit, but for the suspicion that the great poet who translated it infused more poetical inspiration than he found. It would gain considerably in significance if Rossetti could be proved right in conjecturing that the immured lady is a symbol of Frederick’s empire in captivity to the Pope:

Of the few really Sicilian poets whose verses remain, the most remarkable is Cielo dal Carno, more commonly known from the misreading of an ill-written text as Ciullo d’Alcarno. The mention of Saladin has till recently caused hisDialogue between Lover and Lady to be ascribed to the close of the twelfth century, but more unequivocal indications prove that it cannot have been written before 1231. It is a piece of rare merit in its way, exempt from the insipid gallantry of the typical troubadour or minnesinger, and full of humour at once robust and sly at the expense of slippery suitors and complacent damsels. Nothing can be more delightfully[Pg 8] naïve, for instance, than the knight’s unsolicited confession that he has stolen his Bible:

Some of the nearly contemporary Tuscan poets may have belonged to Frederick’s circle, but it will be convenient to treat of them in the next chapter among the precursors of Dante. Of the undoubted Sicilian poets the most remarkable is Jacopo, the notary of Lentino, depreciated by Dante on account of the rusticity of his style, a defect which disappears when he is rendered into another language. Rossetti, speaking from Lentino’s mask, frequently thrills with strokes of true magic, as when he names

In some of Lentino’s sonnets also the germs and groundwork of Dante’s lyrical poetry are manifestly to be discovered.

Something should be said here of the lyrical forms used by the Italian poets of the best ages. The principal are the canzone, the sonnet, and the ballata. The canzone admits of several varieties of structure, but usually commences with three unrhymed lines of eleven syllables each, followed by three similar lines rhyming to their predecessors, a seventh of a discretionary number of syllables rhyming to the third and sixth, and five or six lines on a different rhyming system, short or long at the poet’s discretion, yet generally having the last rhyme[Pg 9] of the preceding system once repeated. The following stanza from Guido Cavalcanti may serve as an example:

By this highly intelligent system the vagrant overgrowth of the Provençal stanza was pruned, and a lyrical form constituted, which was unsurpassed for the combination of dignity with melodious grace. The sonnet, unmatched as the most appropriate form for the harmonious development of a single thought, is one of Italy’s most precious gifts to the world of letters. It is too thoroughly naturalised in this country to need detailed description; but the caution is not superfluous that a Shakespearian sonnet, a sonnet on the French model, or a very irregular sonnet, are strictly speaking not sonnets, but quatorzains; and that, although it would be pedantic to insist upon unvarying conformity to one of the four legitimate Italian structures of the sestet, they will seldom be widely departed from without injury to the music and architecture of the poem. The name sonnetto—a little sound—(cf. sonnette) admirably expresses the pealing effect of a well-mani[Pg 10]pulated sestet. The ballata is less confined by strict rules. “It is properly a lyric of two or more stanzas, in the first of which is set out the theme to be amplified in the following” (Boswell). It often terminates with an envoy or quasi summing-up, as is frequently the case with the canzone also. The octave, familiar to English readers as the metre ofDon Juan, was generally reserved for narrative poetry, but was also converted by the Sicilian poets into a lyrical form by merging the final couplet in the preceding sestet, as described and exemplified by an English imitator:

The sestine, a favourite form with the Provençals, and frequently used by Dante and Petrarch, is too complicated to be well understood without an example.

The same phenomenon is observed in Italian literature as in English—the decay, after the language had begun to receive a high scholastic cultivation, of the simple spontaneous melody which had originally characterised it. Italian prose probably never possessed the majestic rhythm and sonorous cadences which came unsought to English poets of the time of Elizabeth and James; but Italian verse had its Campions, and these, like ours, left no successors. Without disparaging the tunefulness of late writers like Chiabrera, it must still be owned that this is in a measure artificial, and that the cause is the divorce of poetry and music. “It seems,” says Panizzi, “that the art of writing lines in which so much simplicity, smoothness, and strength were united to so delicate a proportion of sounds, is lost; and the reason is that in our days canzoni and sonnets have nothing but the name of a song.” The most melodious modern poetry, accordingly, is the portion of Metastasio’s plays which was actually written to be sung.

It is too early to speak as yet of Italian prose, of which no important example will be found until we reach Dante’sVita Nuova, near the end of the thirteenth century. It need only be remarked that the grace of diction and the intricacy of metrical form which Italian poets had attained by the middle of the thirteenth century, show that the language was already capable of fine prose, and that it was only needful to dispel the superstition that serious subjects must be treated in a learned tongue. Poetry prospered in the vernacular for the obvious reasons that the bards were in general ignorant of Latin, and that if they had been acquainted with it their accomplishment would have been wasted upon the lords and ladies for whom they principally wrote. The historical or philosophical writer, however, best reached the classes he addressed through the medium of Latin. Hence, though for different reasons, we observe in early Italian literature the same phenomenon as in early Greek—a brilliant poetical activity in the almost total absence of prose composition. Yet, when Tuscan prose fairly begins, its productions are the purest examples of diction—testi di lingua. This elegance testifies at once to the innate refinement of the people and to the continuous operation of intellectual influences latent in the obscurest deeps of the Dark Ages.

It was inevitable that the light thus kindled at the Sicilian Court should spread to other parts of Italy, those especially where the vernacular tongue had already obtained the greatest degree of refinement, and had developed most aptitude for the purposes of literature.

Dante, examining the dialects of Italy about the beginning of the fourteenth century, affirms, indeed, that none of them can be identified as the ideal or pattern language, which is the common property of educated Italians everywhere. But he evidently regards Tuscany and Bologna as greatly in advance of other parts of Italy; and speaks of the impediments offered by the local speech of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio to the acquisition of pure Italian, in consequence of which, he says, these cities have produced no poets. Evidently, therefore, some districts of Italy were more congenial than others to the Court poetry transplanted from Sicily; and we find it flourishing exactly where, on Dante’s principles, this might have been expected, that is, in Tuscany and the Romagna. About the same time, Antonio da Tempo, a Paduan, writing on vernacular poetry, admits that “Lingua Tusca magis apta est ad literam sive literaturam quam aliæ linguæ, et ideo magis est communis et intelligibilis.” Almost the same words[Pg 13] are employed by an anonymous contemporary translator of the excerpts from the gospels read as lessons for the day, with the addition that the Tuscan speech is also the most agreeable. It is no wonder, therefore, that many of the so-called Sicilian poets should have been Tuscans, or that Tuscans at home should have been the first and chief cultivators of Italian poetry, so soon as this began to be written elsewhere than in Sicily, where the destruction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty put an end to it shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century. The transfer of literary composition from a Court circle to a republican community was of high importance as a substitution of freer influences for those by which it had hitherto been moulded, and we speedily see the new literature ceasing to be a mere amusement, and becoming in some measure an organ of thought and opinion. Political poems, satires, didactic pieces, moral exhortations in verse become frequent. The literary worth of these, indeed, is not in general comparable to that of the amorous strains which had formerly monopolised the field of poetry, but they show that literature was beginning to lay hold of the national life, and bear within them the germs of better things.

The most remarkable representative of the new tendency, who had previously been a leading representative of the old, the most influential and the most conspicuous figure, indeed, among Dante’s forerunners, though far from the best poet, was GUITTONE DI AREZZO, born probably about 1235. In his youth Guittone had been a love poet, after the manner of the troubadours, and obtained sufficient distinction in the sonnet—to which, indeed, he seems to have first given what was to prove its durable form—to be afterwards regarded as the[Pg 14] precursor of Petrarch; but towards middle age, under the influence of religious emotion, he renounced the world, including his wife and family, and entered the military, not monastic, order of the Cavalieri di Santa Maria, known, from the free-and-easy deportment of some of the brethren, as the Jolly Friars, Frati Gaudenti. Guittone, however, seems to have been perfectly serious in the step he took. He condemned his former course of life, renounced poetical pursuits, and dispensed prescriptions against secular lore and poetry in all their branches. He continued, nevertheless, to write in verse, and employed the Provençal metrical forms as of old; but the themes of his muse are now morality, religion, and, occasionally, politics. His sentiments entitle him to respect, but his verse is dreary: Rossetti has been able to find only one piece of his to repay translation, and this, even in Rossetti’s hands, does not repay it. He was, nevertheless, much admired in his own day, and many contemporary poets were much influenced by him, especially by his Latinisms; for Guittone was acquainted with such of the classical writers as were then accessible, and imitated their constructions with servility and without judgment. He has a claim to priority as one of the first writers of Italian prose, on the strength of his epistles. They are otherwise only remarkable for the Latinised affectation of their style.[2]

A much more important writer, in a purely literary [Pg 15]point of view, and the first Italian who can be esteemed a poet of high merit, is GUIDO GUINICELLI of Bologna (1220-1276), of whom little is known, except that, like most men of light and leading in those unquiet times, he was banished from his native city. His rank in Italian poetry is prominent, he gave it a more serious and philosophical character than the troubadours had been capable of imparting, and his amorous sentiment is more spirited and impressive. The masterpiece among Dante’s sonnets—Tanto gentil e tanto onesta pare—is undoubtedly adumbrated in one of Guinicelli’s. Dante calls him “the Sage,” and the canzone of theGentle Heart, to which the great Florentine is alluding, justifies his admiration. The following is the first of six beautiful stanzas:

Much might be said of many other precursors of Dante, but space admonishes us to restrict ourselves to two—Guido delle Colonne, a Sicilian, chiefly known for his Latin romance on the Fall of Troy, but also a vernacular lyrist of considerable merit; and Rustico di Filippo (1200-1274), eulogised by Brunetto Latini as a man of great worth, but whose place among poets is mainly that of a satirist. Very biting are his lines on a[Pg 16] certain Messer Ugolino, a member by anticipation of what Carlyle called “the Heaven and Hell Amalgamation Society,” “who has good thoughts, no doubt, if they would stay,” and

One other writer among Dante’s predecessors may be mentioned, not for his claims as a poet, but as a man so illustrious that he honoured poetry even by attempting what he was unqualified to perform. He is no less a man than St. Francis of Assisi, whoseSong of the Creatures is pronounced by Renan “the most perfect expression given by the modern world of its feeling for religion.”

Some way past the middle of the century (1265) the greatest poet of Italy was born, and ere his eyes were closed Italian literature, in virtue of his works alone, had taken place among the great literatures of the world. The distance between Dante and his immediate contemporaries is much wider than usual in the case of similar groups of intellectual and gifted men, even if, leaving Dante’s great poem and his prose works out of sight, we consider him simply as a lyrist. Yet they do constitute a group around him, and evince a general development both in thought and command of language, testifying to the upheaval which made a Dante possible. Many might be noticed did space permit, but it will be necessary to restrict ourselves to two typical instances, with an additional section on the cultivators of humorous and satirical poetry, whose writings perhaps afford surer testimony than those of more ambitious bards that poetry had actually entered into the life of the people.[Pg 17] The two men who, but for the existence of Dante, would have stood forth as the poetical representatives of their age, are Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia. By the time of their appearance, about 1290, Italian literature had become for the time entirely concentrated in Tuscany, and the phenomena which had attended the similar isolation of Greek literary talent in Attica were destined to reproduce themselves.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI would be memorable if only for his youthful friendship with Dante, celebrated in many poems of both, and more especially in the sonnet, so well known in England from Shelley’s more poetical than accurate version, in which Dante wishes for his company, along with Lapo Gianni and their respective ladies, on a voyage with him and his Beatrice. Vanna, Cavalcanti’s lady-love in those days, is mentioned in another sonnet as the chosen companion of Beatrice:

Cavalcanti had the reputation of a free-thinker, and the charge seems hardly refuted by his having made a pilgrimage to Compostella, even if he ever arrived there, which may be questioned. It is supposed to have been on this journey that he made the acquaintance of the pretty Mandetta of Toulouse, the theme of much of his verse. He was a leading personage in the Florentine republic, and his strifes with inimical factions eventually led to his exile to Sarzana, where he contracted a disease which carried him off after his return to his native city.

Guido’s merits as a poet were highly estimated by his contemporaries. Dante mentions him in his treatise De Vulgari Eloquio among the masters of Italian litera[Pg 18]ture, and declares that he has eclipsed Guido Guinicelli, whom also he greatly admired. Benevento da Imola, the commentator on theDivine Comedy, names him along with Dante as one of the two great lights of the age. That these praises were not undeserved will appear from a comparison of his lyrics with Dante’s, remembering that he was the older man and that the obligation was entirely on the side of the younger. Dante, especially in his sonnets, is continually borrowing thoughts which, whether original with Cavalcanti or not, had been previously expressed by him. The expression is indeed greatly improved, but even Cavalcanti’s comparatively rude form is full of charm. In his ballate he has the great merit of having exalted a popular carol to the dignity of literature with little injury to its simplicity. Of the canzoni ascribed to him only two are recognised as undoubtedly genuine. Both are instinct with the philosophical spirit which he imported into poetry. The objections to the genuineness of the others derived from external evidence do not always appear very conclusive; but it must be admitted that there is an almost entire lack of external testimony in their favour. Four of them, from one of which we have already borrowed a quotation, have been translated by Rossetti. The most celebrated of Guido’s genuine compositions, the canzone beginning “Donna mi prega; perch’ io voglio dire,” was considered by his contemporaries the ne plus ultra of poetry, but rather for its erudition than its strictly poetical merits: it had eight separate commentaries, which indeed were by no means superfluous.

Guittoncino de’ Sinibuldi, commonly called CINO DA PISTOIA, a poet of somewhat later date (1270-1336), possessed less originality than Guido Cavalcanti, but having[Pg 19] a better standard of taste, is perhaps more generally pleasing. Like Cavalcanti, he was a man of varied accomplishments, and it is his special renown to have been among the first jurists of his time. Like Dante, he was exiled from his native city, and went to Paris; he subsequently professed law in several of the chief cities of Italy, and was eventually restored to his own. His verse, like Cavalcanti’s, bears a strong affinity to Dante’s lyrical poetry, and, in the opinion of so accomplished a judge as Lorenzo de’ Medici, is even more completely divested of primitive rudeness. His most celebrated composition is the canzone consoling Dante for the loss of Beatrice, from which we quote a stanza in Rossetti’s version:

Here, and in the remainder of the poem, there is a clear prefiguration of Petrarch, who admired Cino, and wrote a sonnet on his death. The following is a favourable example of Cino’s own sonnets:

Several other good poets, such as Lapo Gianni, Dino Frescobaldi, and Gianni Alfani, would deserve notice in a more elaborate history. They all wrought in the spirit of Cavalcanti and Dante himself, spiritualising the earthly passion of the troubadours, and endowing the ladies of their songs with such superhuman perfections as to incur the risk of appearing mere types of ideal virtue. We must, however, pass to a different order of poetry, the gay and satirical. Here Folgore di San Geminiano is the leading figure. His political sonnets are very forcible; but he is better known for two sets of sonnets on the pleasures of the months and the days of the week, celebrating, not without an undercurrent of satire, the luxurious extravagance of a set of wild young men at Siena, who, another poet informs us, reduced themselves to beggary thereby. Another humorous poet, justly defined by Rossetti as the scamp of the Dante circle, is Cecco Angioleri, who is irreverent enough to call Dante himself a pinchbeck florin, and whose favourite theme is his quarrels with his parents:

Another class of poetry, forming a connecting link with prose, should be briefly mentioned, the didactic. TheTesoretto of BRUNETTO LATINI (1210-1294), celebrated as an encyclopædist of the knowledge of his time, and still more so as the preceptor or rather Mentor of Dante, describes a vision in which the poet supposes the secrets of nature to be revealed to him, and is interesting as in some measure prefiguring the machinery of theDivina Commedia. Francesco Barberino, a notary, wrote both in prose and verse on the bringing-up of girls, and although he is an indifferent writer his work is valuable as a picture of manners. He seriously discusses the question whether girls should be taught to read, and decides it in the negative. An anonymous poem entitled La Intelligenzia, treating philosophically of the emanation of Divine Wisdom, a conception resembling that of the Logos, attains a higher grade of poetical merit, but the best passages appear to be translated from the French and Provençal. The religious lyric of St. Francis of Assisi and of the Umbrian school, more interesting in a psychological than in a literary point of view, culminated about the end of the thirteenth century in the lays of Jacopino di Todi, remarkable examples of impassioned mysticism, and sometimes of satiric force. He is particularly interesting as a popular poet who owes nothing to culture, but derives all his inspiration from the ecstatic devotion [Pg 22]which in his day animated a large portion of the Italian common people. The same spirit inspired theRappresentazioni of a rather later period, which will be more appropriately considered along with the Italian drama.

Dante’s prose works demand separate treatment; of earlier examples of prose there is very little to be said. Historians and theologians continued to compose in Latin, and the few writings in the vernacular were chiefly translations from that language. The principal contemporary book in Italian, theTesoro or great encyclopædia of Brunetto Latini, is an important monument of culture, but not of literature. It was, moreover, originally composed in French.

Italian literature had sprung up from nothingness and made enormous progress during three-quarters of a century without having produced a pout of the first or even of the second rank. There was no want of singers; rather there seemed reason for apprehension lest, as Tansillo declared with truth in the Cinque Cento,

a complaint anticipated by the anonymous writer of a clever ballata in the thirteenth century:

But the great poet was about to arise who may almost be said to have created two literatures—his country’s and that specially devoted to himself—and whose own works are such, that if every other production of Italian literature were to perish, it would, on their account alone, continue to deserve a place among the great literatures of the world.

Creditable as were their essays in the new literary instrument of thought, Dante’s predecessors can be regarded as his forerunners only in so far as they had helped to create an intellectual atmosphere congenial to the special bent of his genius. The general character of this may be defined as an alliance of the chivalrous and impassioned sentiment which had come down from the troubadours with the science of Aristotle and the thought of Aquinas. Guido Cavalcanti had shown how these might be combined, and Dante followed in his steps without, perhaps, any clear consciousness of his own infinite superiority; of which, however, a well-known passage in theInferno seems to intimate that he eventually came to entertain a sufficient notion.

DANTE (DURANTE) ALIGHIERI was born at Florence in 1265, in the later part of May. The origin of his family is variously attributed to Rome, Ferrara, Parma, and Verona. The first of his ancestors whom he mentions, Cacciaguida degli Elisei, a crusader in 1147, had bestowed his wife’s surname of Alighieri upon his son, and it had continued in the family. Dante’s relatives belonged to the Guelf party, and had had their share in the turmoils which for half a century had distracted Florence no less than most other Italian cities. Of his[Pg 25] boyhood we know nothing, except that he lost his mother at an early age, and that he profited by the instructions of the most learned of the Florentines, Brunetto Latini. He appears to have taken part in several military expeditions in his youth, and the glimpses of his personal circumstances which he allows us in theVita Nuova exhibit him as a man of means, mingling on equal terms with the wealthy and polished society of prosperous Florence.

If our knowledge of Dante’s outer life at this period of his history is imperfect, it is otherwise with his spiritual life, which he has revealed as no other could, in the above-mentionedVita Nuova, written probably about 1292. This alone would have immortalised him as the author of the earliest modern book of its class—though it had a prototype in theConfessions of Saint Augustine—and of the first book of genius, or indeed of any real importance, written in Italian prose. Nothing can more forcibly proclaim the superiority of Dante’s mind than the uniqueness of his first production, unless it be the fact that, high as is its place in literature, its chief interest for us is its concern with the man. It is simply the record of his attachment to a young lady whom he calls Beatrice, and whom Boccaccio enables us to identify with one whom we know from other sources to have actually existed, Beatrice de’ Portinari. The notion that Beatrice is but an abstraction is utterly refuted, to adduce no other testimony, by Cino’s consolatory poem on her death, quoted in the preceding chapter, and can only be entertained by those who know little of love, or are entirely possessed by the passion for allegorising. If ever intense affection was conveyed in intense language it is here, while at the same time the[Pg 26] passion is purely Platonic, and there is no proof that it was in any degree shared by its object, who appears to have been already married.

Dante’s biographers, except the late and untrustworthy Filelfo, cast no doubt on the real existence of Beatrice, and it would require very strong evidence to overthrow the testimony of the chief among them, Boccaccio, who lived near Dante’s age, whose veneration for him was boundless, and who was personally acquainted with his daughter. We can perceive no adequate reason for the scepticism of Scartazzini and others respecting Boccaccio’s trustworthiness. It is true that the use which he made of his opportunities falls sadly below the modern standard. Not only is he careless in collecting and verifying authorities, but he makes no attempt to think himself back into the period of his hero. “Between him and the enthusiasms of the Middle Ages,” says Symonds, “a ninefold Styx already rolled its waves.” Yet his faults are offences of defect, not of excess in statement, though he sins by introducing many useless disquisitions. His work exists in two shapes, a longer and a shorter recension. The latter is undoubtedly an unauthorised abridgment of the former, and the novel statements which it occasionally introduces can claim no authority from Boccaccio. It seems to have been made by some Florentine who was offended by the severity of Boccaccio’s strictures upon his city for her ingratitude to Dante.

The biography by Filippo Villani, one of hisLives of Illustrious Florentines, written about 1400, is mainly taken from Boccaccio, but is important for its vindication of Dante from the charge of profligacy, and for its particular details of his last illness. The valuable life by[Pg 27] Leonardo Bruni (1369-1414) is avowedly designed as a supplement to Boccaccio, who in Bruni’s opinion had neglected weighty matters for love stories and such-like frivolities. He therefore, while omitting all mention of Beatrice and theVita Nuova, gives a much fuller account than Boccaccio of Dante’s share in the affairs of Florence, and even cites an autograph letter of his, now lost like all others. He is entitled to much respect as a sensible and impartial writer, who took pains to obtain information; while the later mediæval biographers, Manetti and Filelfo, have some literary merit, but no historical value. Of the other three it may be said that a statement in which any two of them agree may usually be received, and that the assertion of any one is entitled to a fair amount of credit when it is not contradicted by another’s. The absolute trustworthiness of the chronicle long attributed to Dinoi Campagni must now be given up; it is, nevertheless, most probably of sufficient antiquity to have preserved some authentic notices.

No biographer of Dante, however, could possibly have compared with Dante himself, and it is much to be lamented that the entire disappearance of what must have been for his time an extensive body of correspondence has deprived us of all autobiographic record except theVita Nuova, which, almost devoid of incident, paints the inner man with lively force. Except Shelley’s Epipsychidion, the world has nothing to set beside this dithyrambic of purely Platonic passion. We must recur to it, and need only here fix the death of Beatrice, one of the great landmarks of Dante’s life, at June 9, 1290. Somewhat more than a year afterwards we find Dante moved, as a noble soul might well be, not by the attrac[Pg 28]tions but by the spiritual sympathy of a compassionate lady. It is impossible to entertain the least doubt of the reality of an episode described by himself with such tenderness of self-excuse and poignancy of self-reproach, but to admit it is to admit the actuality of all the rest of theVita Nuova:

Dante appears to say that he entirely overcame this rather regrettable than reprehensible lapse from his ideal, and we believe him. If so, the pitiful lady cannot be identified with Gemma Donati, whom, at latest in 1293, if she had really borne him seven children by 1300, he married by the persuasion of his friends. TheVita Nuova was in all probability written by this time, and from its conclusion we learn that Dante was even then preparing to celebrate Beatrice in theDivina Commedia. It is therefore exceedingly improbable that he would have wedded one at all likely to impair or efface the freshness of her image in his soul; and though his union with Gemma was apparently untroubled by discord, it probably lacked all consecration but the ceremonial. It[Pg 29] was brought to a close by Dante’s exile from his native city in 1301. Gemma and the children did not accompany him, and he never saw them more. The reason is not difficult to discover: it prefigured the case of Milton. Gemma’s family, the Donati, had come to belong to a party opposed to Dante. The interests of her numerous children, mostly of very tender age, undoubtedly counselled Gemma to cleave to the winning side, and she can scarcely be blamed if she declined to forsake her blood relations for a husband whom she had probably found unsympathetic. Whether Dante approved her course, or rejoiced in his liberty (Short-sighted Devil, not to take his spouse!), or was simply choked by indignation, he never honours or dishonours her by a single word. Gemma Donati’s portrait hangs in the gallery of poets’ wives, like Marshal Marmont’s in the gallery of French marshals, covered by a veil of crape.

Few of the more distinguished Italian men of letters have been able to keep themselves clear of public employment. Dante’s wealth and social eminence in the days of his prosperity did not allow him to decline the invidious office of Prior, to which he was raised in 1300. It was only tenable for two months, but this was long enough for his ruin. Florence was then rent by dissensions between two factions, the Whites and Blacks. The Government, by Dante’s courageous and probably wise advice, resolved to banish the leaders of both. As the chiefs of the Guelfic Blacks were Dante’s own connections, the Donati, while the Ghibelline Whites included Guido Cavalcanti, his most intimate friend, his counsel must have been patriotic and disinterested. Unfortunately, it was not unflinchingly carried out, some of the Whites being shortly afterwards allowed[Pg 30] to return. Pope Boniface VIII., fearing that the Ghibelline or Imperialist party would thus obtain the upper hand in the city, incited Charles de Valois, brother of the French King, Philip the Fair, whom he had allured into Italy to attack the King of Naples, to make himself master of Florence. This he accomplished, and the consequent return of Dante’s adversaries led to the sacking of his house, the ruin of his fortune, and his life-long exile from his native city. He was at the time absent on an embassy at the Papal Court, from which he retired to Arezzo, where the other exiles had assembled, and must henceforth be reckoned among the Ghibellines.

For some years Dante participated in their endeavours to reinstate themselves by force; but eventually, well-nigh as disgusted with his friends as with his enemies, scorning the ignominious terms on which alone return would have been permitted, and especially discouraged by the failure of the Emperor Henry VII., whose advent to Italy he had welcomed with enthusiasm, he became a wanderer among the courts of the princes and nobles of Northern Italy, generally finding honour and protection, which he frequently repaid by diplomatic services. There seems no doubt of his having visited Paris and studied in the University. The alleged extension of his journey to Oxford is unsupported by convincing evidence, but is not impossible or improbable. A writer near his own day seems to assert that he had been in England. During all this time, like his ancient prototype Thucydides, he was devoting himself to his immortal work, which, published as the respective parts were completed, brought him celebrity and wondering reverence even in his lifetime. His most distinguished patron in his later years was Cane della Scala, surnamed the[Pg 31] Great, Lord of Verona, from whose court he retired in 1320 to that of Guido Novello da Polenta, at Ravenna. In the following year he undertook a mission to Venice, and there contracted a fever, which, aggravated it is said by the inhospitality of the Venetians in compelling him to return by land, carried him off on September 14, 1321, shortly after he had completed his great epic. His funeral obsequies were celebrated with magnificence; but political troubles delayed for a hundred and sixty years the erection of the monument ultimately raised by the piety of Cardinal Bembo’s father, then governing Ravenna for the Venetians, and inscribed with six rhyming Latin verses attributed without adequate evidence to Dante’s own pen, but sufficiently ancient to have been expanded by Boccaccio into a noble sonnet:

It is usual to commence a review of an author’s productions by his most important work; but theDivina Commedia requires a chapter to itself, and precedence must consequently be given to Dante’s minor writings. Of these theVita Nuova stands first both in time and[Pg 32] in importance. It is epoch-making in many ways, as the first great example of Italian prose, the first revelation of the genius of the greatest mediæval poet, and the incarnation of that romantic conception of ideal love by which the Middle Age might fairly claim to have augmented the heritage bequeathed by antiquity. The main note of Dante’s genius here is its exquisite and unearthly spirituality, which, indeed, is visible in much of the poetry and art of the time, but attains its most intense expression in him. Something like it has occasionally been seen since, as in John Henry Newman; but it is in our day too much out of keeping with the legitimate demands of a busy and complicated society to occur except as a temporary and individual phenomenon.

Nothing is more remarkable in a composition apparently so fanciful than the entire sincerity and straightforwardness of theVita Nuova: grant that Beatrice was a real person, and it is impossible to doubt the literal truth of the entire narrative. This is the more extraordinary in consideration of the impersonality alike of the enamoured poet and of the object of his passion. Dante, indeed, speaking throughout in his own character, cannot help portraying himself in some measure, though our conception of him is probably largely made up of involuntary associations with the more palpable Dante of theDivina Commedia. But Beatrice remains what he meant her to be, a spiritual presence, visible but intangible. No heroine of fiction conveys a stronger impression of perfection; but we see her as Andromeda saw Medusa, merely reflected in the mind of her lover.

More extraordinary works than theVita Nuova have[Pg 33] been composed at even an earlier age, but there is perhaps no other book in the world in which a young man appears as asserting by his first attempt so unchallenged a superiority over predecessors and contemporaries, with whom he has nevertheless much in common. The evolution of Italian poetry has up to this point proceeded gradually and systematically; all of a sudden it makes a bound, and seems as it were to have sprung across a chasm. The prose is of more equable desert than the interspersed poetry, some of which is inferior; while, on the other hand, the best poetry far transcends the prose. The finest among the sonnets and canzoni, if sometimes rivalled, have not hitherto been surpassed in Italian literature, while the most famous of the former still stands at the head of its own class:

The length of Italian canzoni renders it extremely difficult to do them justice in a work of necessarily contracted limits. Two stanzas, however, of Dante’s canzone on the death of his lady are, as it were, a little[Pg 34] poem complete in themselves, and may be cited in Rossetti’s matchless version:

Although the Vita Nuova is essentially true history, the same cannot be said of a later work preferred to it by the author himself, albeit posterity has reversed his judgment. This is theConvito, orBanquet, in which Beatrice appears as an allegory of divine philosophy. The process of this mutation is not difficult to discover.[Pg 35] Not long after her death, Dante, as he tells us at the end of theVita Nuova, had resolved, under the influence of a wondrous vision, “di dire di lei quello che mai non fu detto d’alcuna.” The mortal maiden thus necessarily becomes a type of supernatural glory and perfection, as we see her in theDivina Commedia, and the metamorphosis inevitably extends to the lyrics in which Dante celebrates her. She is no longer Beatrice de’ Portinari, but Philosophy, and unfortunately in too many instances Dante’s poetry has become philosophy also. The nobility of the form still assures it pre-eminence over all contemporary verse but the author’s own; but the substance is often mere reasoning in rhyme. Two canzoni, however, are of distinguished beauty, “Voi ch’ intendendo il terzo ciel movete” (translated by Shelley), and “Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute,” which Coleridge says, in 1819, he is at length beginning to understand after reading it over twelve times annually for the last fourteen years. “Such a fascination had it in spite of its obscurity!”

The former of these pieces is shown by internal evidence to have been written as early as 1295, and the latter was composed after Dante’s banishment, to which period most of the other canzoni and the prose commentary probably belong. This commentary constitutes the substance of the work. It was intended to have expounded fourteen canzoni, but treats only of three, apart from a general introduction. More remarkable, perhaps, than the philosophical subtleties of which it consists, is Dante’s appeal to a new public. He writes no longer for literary circles, but for the world of persons of worth wherever found, especially persons of rank. Hence the treatise is necessarily composed in Italian, which has the good[Pg 36] effect of drawing from Dante a spirited vindication of his native tongue. It was probably completed up to the point where the author left it by 1308 or 1309. The exceedingly corrupt text has been revised by the last editor, Dr. Moore, upon the authority of two manuscripts in England.

The literary merits of the Italian language are more fully expounded in another work of Dante’s, which, however, he composed in Latin, that his arguments might reach those who would not have condescended to read the vernacular. TheDe Vulgari Eloquio, originally entitledDe Eloquentia Vulgari, orOf the Vulgar Tongue, is shown by historical allusions to have been composed by 1304. Like theConvito it is unfinished, only two books of the four of which it was to have consisted having been written. Dante’s conception of the capabilities of his native tongue does him honour, even though he restricts the number of subjects adapted to it, and would deny its use to all but gifted writers. It is a still higher honour to have recommended it more effectually by his example than by his reasonings, which, as was inevitable in his age, frequently rest upon entirely fanciful and visionary data. His account, nevertheless, of the Italian dialects as they existed in his day, and his precepts on the metrical structure of Italian poetry, which he seems not to have then contemplated as capable of existing apart from music, retain a substantial value for all time.

The hopes founded upon the appearance of the Emperor in Italy in 1311 probably induced Dante to publish a work written some years previously, his treatiseDe Monarchia, embodying the best mediæval conception of the spheres of temporal and spiritual[Pg 37] government upon earth. So powerfully had the universality of Roman sway impressed men’s minds, that the Roman people were believed to have obtained the empire of the earth by the donation of Heaven, and the Emperor of Germany was regarded as their lawful representative. This belief, so strange to us, was, nevertheless, salutary in its time, by repressing the champions of universal despotism who made the Pope the fountain of secular as well as spiritual authority. By numerous arguments satisfactory to himself, but which would now be considered entirely irrelevant, Dante proves that universal monarchy is a portion of the Providential scheme, that the Romans possessed by divine appointment jurisdiction over the entire earth. The inheritance of this prerogative by the Emperor of Germany is taken for granted, and it is next demonstrated that the Emperor does not derive his authority from the Church, any more than the Church hers from the Emperor. Yet Cæsar is to be reverent to Peter, as the first-born son to his father. There is no trace of religious heterodoxy in the treatise, though nothing can be more uncompromising than its limitation of the Papal authority to its legitimate sphere.

The amount of fugitive poetry ascribed to Dante is inconsiderable. Bruni, in his biography, remarks that there are two classes of poets—those who sing by inspiration and those who compose by art—and that Dante belongs to the second. It cannot be admitted that Dante was devoid of inspiration, but it is certainly true that he was one of those who possess a special power of regulating this divine gift. A Shelley or a Coleridge must write when the impulse seizes him; but a Milton, with the conception ofParadise Lost in his mind, can[Pg 38] defer putting pen to paper for seventeen years, and, with consummate lyric power, is but unfrequently visited by the lyric impulse. Dante, so marvellously similar to Milton in many respects, also, if we may trust his account of the genesis of the pieces in theVita Nuova, but seldom found himself under an irresistible impulse to lyrical composition. Something suggests to him that a sonnet or a canzone would be expedient or decorous; he plots it out, and fills up the outline with unerring fidelity to his first conception. The gigantic plan of the Divine Comedy is similarly carried out without interruption or misgiving; and but for the death of Beatrice, it is by no means certain that it would have existed, any more than that Milton would have writtenComus if the noble children had never been lost in the wood.

A poet of this stamp was not likely to enrich literature with much fugitive verse. A few occasional poems glitter here and there, to employ Wordsworth’s simile, like myrtle leaves in his chaplet of bay. The most remarkable among them is a sestine, the finest example of its artificial and elaborate class, and superbly translated by Rossetti; this and other pieces are supposed to refer to a certain Pietra, otherwise unknown. These poems seem to breathe the language of genuine passion, but are too few and of too uncertain date to contribute much to the solution of the question whether Dante was, as Boccaccio asserts, remarkable for susceptibility to female charms, or a paragon of continence, as Villani will have him. It is at least certain that, after Beatrice, no woman exercised any noteworthy influence upon his writings. He moves through life a great, lonely figure, estranged from human fellowship at every point: a citizen of eternity, misplaced and[Pg 39] ill-starred in time; too great to mingle with his age, or, by consequence, to be of much practical service to it; too embittered and austere to manifest in action the ineffable tenderness which may be clearly read in his writings; one whose friends and whose thoughts are in the other world, while he is yet more keenly alive than any other man to the realities of this; one whose greatness impressed the world from the first, and whom it does not yet fully know, after the study of six hundred years.

To have assumed a position so far in advance of, and so decisively discriminated from, that of any of his contemporaries, as in theVita Nuova, would alone have ensured Dante immortality as a poet. But his lyrical works are to his epic as Shakespeare’s sonnets to Shakespeare’s dramas.

Any narrative in verse not familiar or humorous, nor of extreme brevity, may be entitled an epic; although we might do well to naturalise, as we have done in the case of idyll, the pretty Greek word epyll to denote a narrative composition of such compass as Keats’sEve of St. Agnes or Wordsworth’sLaodamia. But there are at least three classes of epics, excluding the merely romantic like theOrlando, and the mock-heroic, from consideration. The most important in every point of view is the national, originally not the work of a man but of a people; sometimes, as in theIliad andOdyssey, indebted for its final form to the shaping hand of the most consummate genius; sometimes, as in the Finnish Kalevala, an agglomeration of legends, united by community of spirit, but not fashioned into an artistic whole. At the remotest point from these stands the artificial epic, like theTeseide of Boccaccio or theJason of William Morris, where the poet has selected for its[Pg 41] mere picturesqueness a subject which stands in no vital relation to himself and his times; and such epics are necessarily the most numerous.

Yet there is an intermediate class of epic, partly national, partly artificial, where the poet, conscious of a high patriotic purpose, has, like Virgil and Camoens, sung the glories of his country at their zenith; or, like Lucan, actually related contemporary history; or, like Shelley in theRevolt of Islam, bodied this forth under the veil of allegory; or, like Tasso, embalmed ere too late the feeling of an age passing away. Two great epic poets of the intermediate class have done more than this: they have preserved and expressed the sentiment of their age, its replies to the deepest questions which man can propound; have clothed these abstractions with form, colour, and music, and have lent fleeting opinion an adamantine immortality. These are Dante and Milton.

“Dante,” says Shelley, “was the second epic poet, that is, the second poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived. Milton was the third.” Hence Shelley in another place calls Milton “the third among the sons of light.” Both these great men, in truth, versed in all the learning of their ages, and entertaining a conviction of the indefeasible truth of what they believed themselves to know which no successor will be able to share, applied themselves to embody these beliefs in works of genius. Even as great empires have vanished from the earth, and left nothing but the works of art which were not the greatness itself but merely its testimonies and symbols, so here the opinions have gone while the works remain. It almost[Pg 42] seems a law that every great poem which thus resumes the thought of an age shall be a song, not of Carlyle’s phœnix “soaring aloft, hovering with outstretched wings, filling earth with her music,” but rather of the same phœnix “with spheral swan-song immolating herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer.” Homer’s theology, we may be sure, was already obsolete for the higher Greek mind when, or not long after,

Our own national epic, Shakespeare’s series of historical plays, could not be written until the state of society it depicted was ceasing to exist.

Dante himself has told us the origin of his poem. In the last sonnet of hisVita Nuova he represents himself as having in thought followed Beatrice from earth to heaven:

Here is the germ of theParadiso, at all events; but, to preclude all misapprehension, Dante adds: “After[Pg 43] this sonnet there appeared to me a wondrous vision, wherein I beheld things which made me resolve to say no more concerning my Blessed One until I could treat of her more worthily. And that I may attain unto this I study with all my might, as she truly knoweth. Wherefore if it shall be the pleasure of Him by whom all things live that my life shall yet endure for some years, I hope to say concerning her that which has never been said concerning any woman.” TheVita Nuova is believed to have been written about 1294. At this time, therefore, Dante was meditating a poetical apotheosis of Beatrice on a scale surpassing anything attempted before, although the natural inference from his words would seem to be that he had not yet begun to write.

He would probably at first contemplate nothing more than the expansion of the thought of his sonnet into a vision somewhat resembling that of Laura in Petrarch’s Trionfi; but ere long he might say to himself, inverting the question which Ellwood the Quaker addressed to Milton: “Thou hast told us of Paradise gained, what hast thou to tell us of Paradise lost?” and, granted the existence of the intermediate realm of Purgatory, the entire scheme of theDivina Commedia would be present to his mind. As poets but rarely “imitate the example of those two prudent insects the bee and the spider,” he would begin with theInferno, where, notwithstanding the inscription, offensive to an age as far in advance of its sentiment as Dante himself was in advance of Homer’s polytheism and anthropomorphism, which he has thought fit to place upon the portal, Beatrice could have neither part nor lot. It must be long indeed before he could rejoin her.

It can hardly be said, then, that Beatrice is the heroine[Pg 44] of his poem, unless Helen of Troy is the heroine of the Iliad. Neither poem could have existed without the woman; the action of each turns entirely upon her; but the appearance of each is infrequent until, in Beatrice’s case, she appears as the pervading spirit of the Paradiso. Yet, had we merely known her from theDivina Commedia, their opinion who regard her as a mere symbol would not have appeared so groundless as it must in the light of the transparent autobiography of theVita Nuova. If the great epic has given her her world-wide fame, she is indebted for her personality to the brief lyrics and snatches of impassioned prose. The old love, though not extinct, had been transformed into something far more expansive, as alchemists are said to revive a glowing rose from the ashes of a faded one. When Dante himself essays to give Can Grande some insight into the purpose of his poem, he does not mention Beatrice, but says: “The object of the whole work is to make those who live in this life leave their state of misery, and to lead them to a state of happiness.” By this, as Symonds points out, is not to be understood that the purpose of the poem was the admonition of individuals. “It was both moral and political. The status miseriæ was the discord of divided Christendom as well as of the unregenerate will; the status felicitatis was the pacification of the world under the coequal sway of Emperor and Pope in Rome, as well as the restoration of the human soul to faith.”

The conception, therefore, was essentially mediæval. It expressed the beliefs and aspirations of the Middle Age. It was in poetry what the work of another of the greatest of the Italians, St. Thomas Aquinas, had been in theology and philosophy—an endeavour to stereotype[Pg 45] the dominant convictions of the age. And therefore, although not among the only genuine epics in the highest sense—those which the nations have written for themselves—theDivina Commedia approaches these more nearly than any other epic of the second class; for, although the utterance of a single voice, it says what the average mediæval man would have said had he known how. The nearest parallel is Milton’s epic, which sets forth the view of divine things which had commended itself to a large portion of the Christian world, but still only to a portion, and therefore a less memorable deliverance than Dante’s. One needs only to consider how much lower the Middle Ages would stand in our estimation if their great interpreter had never written, to appreciate the enormous importance of Dante’s work for history and culture.

Dante’s great position, nevertheless, in this point of view, somewhat detracts from his originality in other respects. He is the man of his age, not a man in advance of his age. He does not, like Goethe, point the path of progress along an illimitable future. He has no prevision of Bacon and Galileo; nor is he fertile in germs, hints, or prefigurements of greater things to come. His philosophy is that of Aquinas, and his science that of Aristotle. This in no way impairs his poetical power, and it still remains the greatest of marvels that the transcendent poet and the most representative thinker of the age should have met in the same person. Much that appears original in him is really not peculiar to him, as, for instance, his generous treatment of the heathen world. There was nothing in this that could surprise any contemporary. The beatification of the Emperor Trajan was already an approved legend,[Pg 46] and similar promotions in the instances of Ripheus and Statius only carry the principle somewhat further. His astonishing treatment of Ulysses might be regarded as a strong counterpoise, but it must be remembered that he was unacquainted with Homer, and probably took his view of the character of Ulysses from theÆneid. On the whole, his attitude towards the classical world is highly to his credit; but it merely expresses the dim perception of his age, that greater men and greater civilisations had flourished before them, and that inspiration from these was wanting to transform the semi-barbarism around them into a well-ordered society. Hence Dante’s loving devotion to Virgil, the only portrait in his epic that evinces any considerable power of character painting; and his tenderness to all things classical. Had he flourished along with Petrarch and Boccaccio, Dante would have been a great humanist, his scholarship and statesmanship would have found wider and more profitable fields of action than his own age vouchsafed to them; but we should not have had theDivine Comedy, towering above every other work of the age much higher even than Shakespeare towers above contemporary dramatists; and all his own, even to its metrical structure, since terza rima appears to have been Dante’s invention.

The thought at the foundation of theDivina Commedia, nevertheless, is more ancient than Dante, although the details evince marvellous fertility of invention. The idea of a descent to the underworld is the groundwork of a primitive Assyrian epic in comparison with whose antiquity the similar narratives in the Buddhistic and other scriptures are but of yesterday. It is found in Plato’sRepublic and theOdyssey, both unknown to Dante,[Pg 47] who had, however, the sixth book of theÆneid by heart, and implies his obligation by making Virgil his guide. This is a much more likely source for his poem than the vision of Tundal and other similar mediæval legends, which are nevertheless important as showing how strong was the hold of the conception upon the popular mind. The vast difference between Virgil’s treatment and Dante’s needs no elucidation. Virgil writes like a philosopher, and Dante like a prophet. There is, no doubt, abundance of allegory in theDivina Commedia, but, generally speaking, the poet’s vision is direct and immediate. Symonds puts the essence of the poem into a word by calling it apocalyptic, and perhaps there is no other great work to which on the whole it presents so close an analogy as the Revelation of St. John; but neither this nor any forerunner affords any precedent for Dante’s astonishing innovation of peopling the unseen worlds mainly with his own and his readers’ contemporaries, men whose hands he had clasped or repelled, with whom he had sat at the council-board or whom he had encountered in conflict, or who, personally unknown, had thrilled him with the report of their fortunes or misfortunes, their good deeds or their crimes.

Let any one try to imagine a modern poet treating the nineteenth century in the same manner, and he will be penetrated by a sense of the gigantic nature of the attempt, success in which could only be possible to an intense realist capable of making his phantoms as substantial as when they walked the earth. Yet this is only one side of Dante’s mighty task, which was not only to render the unseen world visible and almost palpable, but to embody what he fondly believed to be a system of infallible dog[Pg 48]matic truth. It need hardly be said that it is to the consummate execution of the former part of his mission that he is chiefly indebted for his fame with the world at large. TheInferno, where description and portraiture predominate, has impressed the imagination of mankind far more powerfully than the more mystical and doctrinal Purgatorio and Paradiso.

This is not the judgment of the most refined readers. “The acutest critics,” says Shelley, “have justly reversed the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of theDivina Commedia is the measure of the admiration which they accord to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.” “The whole Purgatorio,” says Symonds, “is a monument to the beauty and tranquillity of Dante’s soul. The whole Paradiso is a proof of its purity and radiance and celestial love.” This is true, and yet it is indisputable that in thinking of Dante the Inferno always comes first to the mind, and that this portion of his poem, had one part only been published, would have done far more to preserve his name than either of the others in the like case, and this although it is far more tainted than they are with his most characteristic and least pardonable faults. The chief causes, no doubt, are that the material sublime is always more impressive to the mass of men than the moral; that there is an element of risk and adventure in the poet’s journey among the shades absent from the other two parts; and that Virgil is a more tangible and human personage than Beatrice. Yet it must also be admitted that the diviner beauty of the two latter parts suffers from an admixture of theological and philosophical disquisition, not the less tedious because it was impossible for the poet to avoid it. Milton tells us[Pg 49] that the fallen spirits reasoned “of fate, freewill, fore-knowledge absolute,” but judiciously avoids reporting their observations.

Dante’s place in comparison with the other chief poets of the world is difficult to determine, for none but he has written an apocalypse. He is emphatically the Seer among them, the “Soothsayer” in the original sense of the term, the most independent of poetical fiction and convention. He is also by far the most individual and autobiographic, and the only one who is the hero of his own poem. Milton, who is most naturally paralleled with him, does not deliver a revelation, but records a history. This at once places Dante in a higher category than Milton as an elementary force, and when we consider the circumstances of their respective ages it seems impossible to deny that Dante was by far the more wonderful man. This does not necessarily establish the superiority of theDivina Commedia toParadise Lost. Isaiah presents himself in a more august and venerable character than Homer, but his prophecy is not as majestic as theIliad. It is also difficult, when assigning the relative ranks of poets, to discriminate strictly between the claims that arise from mere poetical endowment and the significance of their position in history. One may stand upon the higher pedestal, and the other may have the sweeter voice.

In one point of view, Dante’s figure is the most imposing of any poet’s; for, intensely local as he is, he yet interprets all mediæval Europe. When, however, he is compared with his closest analogue, Milton, simply as a poet, it is not so clear that the comparison is to his advantage. The great characteristics which chiefly discriminate him from all other poets are an[Pg 50] ineffable purity, such as we see in the early Italian painters, and an intensity of minute description which surpasses the similar performances of others, except England may say with pride, Robert Browning’s, as the work of the etching tool surpasses the work of the pen. These gifts are best displayed upon a small scale, and hence Dante’s cabinet pieces are more successful than his vast pictures. They depend, too, in the last resort upon the poet’s own fidelity of observation, and hence his best delineations retrace what he has actually seen. His general description of theInferno is more impressive from its unflinching realism than from its imaginative sublimity. There is no grandeur in his picture of Lucifer, though much quaint ingenuity, Milton’s “not less than archangel ruined” tells us more and affects us more profoundly than all Dante’s elaborate word-painting. If Milton has nothing so beautiful as the exquisite comparison of Beatrice to a bird awaiting the dawn that she may gather food for her young, neither has Dante anything so sublime as Milton’s comparison of the flying fiend to a fleet discerned afar off as hanging in the clouds, or of Satan equipped for battle to the comet “that fires the length of Ophiuchus huge.” The magnificent lines in which Tennyson has celebrated the might and music of Milton would seem inappropriate to Dante. In an age when minute description is in fashion, Dante’s virtuoso-like skill in graphic delineation has been favourable to his renown; but a reaction must ensue when a bolder and ampler style of handling is again appreciated at its worth.

If, however, Dante is on the whole inferior to Milton in poetry pure and simple, he is more important as a[Pg 51] representative of a great era of mankind. In him the Middle Age lives as it does in its cathedrals; and when the cathedrals have crumbled, theDivine Comedy will be as fresh as it is now. Nor is this significance merely historical or antiquarian. From the very first it was appreciated by contemporaries. Repentant Florence endowed lectures upon theDivine Comedy, and Boccaccio was the first lecturer. In the next century Frezzi tries to transpose it into another key; and Attavanti cites from the pulpit Dantes ille noster as copiously and reverentially as any of the Fathers. Even in the age of the Renaissance, Pius the Fourth’s cardinals cap quotations from Dante as the last notes of Palestrina’s Mass of Pope Marcellus die down the aisles of St Peter’s. If he afterwards fell into comparative abeyance for a time, it must be remembered that Italy lay prostrate in the seventeenth century, and that his genius did not sort well with the especial mission assigned to her in the eighteenth.

There can be no surer proof of Dante’s eternal vitality than that the revival of his fame coincided with the manifestation of ideas apparently the reverse of his own. The French Revolution brought the mediæval poet into fashion; and although his best expositors, whom it is upon the whole most profitable to study, have been those so nearly at his own intellectual standpoint as Dean Church and Maria Rossetti, his most eloquent champions have been those who, on a superficial view, might seem to have least in common with him—Lamennais, Shelley, Carlyle, Symonds, Mazzini, Leopardi. The feelings of the man of the nineteenth century, attracted by the divine and eternal elements in Dante with a vehemence proportioned to his repulsion by the tran[Pg 52]sient and accidental, are thus powerfully expressed by the greatest of living Italian poets:

Although, hardly less than Shakespeare, born not for an age but for all time, Dante was nevertheless in an especial sense the poet of the mediæval period. The vast advance which he effected in the poetic art had no counterpart in a corresponding progress in the world of intellect. Powerful as his mind was, it seemed as an organ of thought rather architectural than creative; more intent on combining the materials it found into the most august edifice which their constitution admitted, than on gaining new channels for feeling and intelligence. This was to be the work of a mind far less original than Dante’s, but happily placed at the confluence of mediæval ideas with an element by which they were destined to be submerged and transformed. In the year 1304, on the very day when Dante and his exiled companions were making their desperate attempt to fight their way back into Florence, FRANCESCO PETRARCA, the child of one of their number, was born a humanist by the grace of God in the Tuscan town of Arezzo. Six years after Dante’s death a casual encounter with a lady who awoke the faculty of song within him made the scholar the first poet of his age. But neither the innate love of letters nor the awakened faculty of poetry would have exalted Petrarch to the literary supremacy[Pg 54] he attained if he had not lived at the very juncture when literature, hitherto cultivated in some of its branches for mere utility, in others as an ornament of courtly life, was beginning to revive as a profession. Dante, a statesman, a philosopher, a prophet, was not in a true sense a man of letters, and neither his ideals nor his contemporary influence extended beyond the limits of Italy. Petrarch was the first modern literary dictator, the first author to receive the unanimous homage of a world of culture. Such a world had not existed since the decay of antique civilisation, and he may be said to have been in a manner both its cause and its effect. As the Erasmus, the Voltaire, the Goethe of his age, he claims a more distinguished place in literary history than even his exquisite poetry, much less his but relatively ample erudition, could have secured for him.

Seven months after Petrarch’s birth his mother was allowed to return to her patrimonial estate near Florence, where she was sometimes secretly visited by her husband. The elder Petrarca (or, as the name was then spelt, Petracco) might have returned to his native city on the same dishonourable terms as those offered to Dante, but, like Dante, spurned them. Despairing of repatriation, he betook himself to Avignon, then the seat of the Papal Court, where he followed the profession of the law.

Petrarch was successively educated at Carpentras, at Montpellier, and at the University of Bologna, where his father’s commands compelled him to the study of jurisprudence. The death of his parent in 1326 recalled him to Avignon, and restored him to letters. To qualify himself for ecclesiastical preferment he received the tonsure without taking orders, a step not unusual in[Pg 55] those days, and devoted himself entirely to literature. The “Babylonish captivity” of the Church at Avignon, violently as he denounces it in his writings, was highly favourable to his interests, for it helped him to the patronage of Cardinal Colonna, whose brother, afterwards Bishop of Lombès, he had known intimately at the University of Bologna. It was probably from this source that he derived means to mingle with gay society and indulge in the fashionable follies of eccentric costume, which he ridicules in his later writings; for letters as yet afforded him no sure subsistence, and his scanty patrimony had been embezzled or wasted by his guardians. On April 6, 1327[4], occurred the most momentous event of his life, his vision of Laura in church “at the hour of prime,” which made him a poet. But for this, he might never have written in the vernacular. Cicero and Virgil, his literary idols, enjoined Latin composition, to which in all probability he would have exclusively addicted himself but for the need of celebrating Laura in a language which she understood.

The question of Laura’s identity will be best considered along with the poems devoted to her praise and her adorer’s passion. Neither love nor society, meanwhile, kept Petrarch from letters, and his reputation waxed daily. He displayed a happy faculty for maintaining relations with the great, equally honourable to both parties, exempt alike from presumption and servility. In 1330 he spent a considerable time with Bishop Colonna at his Pyrenean diocese of Lombès, and on his return was formally enrolled as a member [Pg 56]of the Cardinal’s household. His residence at Avignon made him known to the learned English prelate, Richard de Bury, and other distinguished visitors at the Papal Court, and he began to enjoy the favour of Robert, King of Naples. His vernacular poetry, though far inferior to that which he was destined to produce, was nevertheless making him and Laura famous, for he exclaims in an early sonnet:

he made a journey to Paris, Belgium, and the Rhine, of which he has given us a lively account in his correspondence, and which produced at least one sonnet which showed that by this time he wanted but little of perfection:

In the same year Petrarch graduated as a patriotic poet by composing his fine Latin metrical epistle on the woes of Italy. In 1335 he received from the Pope a canonry in the cathedral of his patron the Bishop of[Pg 57] Lombès. In 1336 he achieved his celebrated ascent of Mount Ventoux, which marks an era as the inauguration of mountain-climbing for pleasure’s sake. In 1336 and 1337 he undertook his first journey to Rome, which he found in a most lamentable condition from rapine and civil war. Attributing this to the absence of the Popes in France, he began his long series of exhortations to them to return, to which, being throughout his lifetime Frenchmen, they naturally turned deaf ears. Hence in a measure the disgust with Avignon which led him to seclude himself more and more in Vaucluse (shut valley), the picturesque retreat on the Sorga whither he betook himself in 1337, a beautiful description of which by Ugo Foscolo may be read in Reeve’s biography. His adoration of Laura had not prevented his contracting less spiritual ties, for two children were born to him about this time.

Petrarch’s rural leisure was largely employed in the composition of a Latin history of Rome, which can have had no critical value, but would have been deeply interesting as exhibiting the classical feeling of the representative of the early Renaissance. He ultimately destroyed it, and turned to the composition of his Latin epic on the Punic war,Africa, for and from which he long expected immortality. His detestation of the Papal Court breaks out about this time in some powerful sonnets. His Italian poems, meanwhile, had made their way with the world to a degree surprising in an age unacquainted with printing. In 1340 he received on the same day the offer of the poetic laurel from the cities of Paris and Rome. Deciding for the latter, he embarked at Marseilles in February 1341, voyaged to Naples, received signal marks of favour from the King, and,[Pg 58] repairing to Rome, was invested with the laurel by the Senator of the city, April 8, 1341. From this day the history of modern literature as a recognised power may be said to date. Ere his return at the beginning of 1342, he had finished hisAfrica, and bought a house at Parma to give himself a footing in his native land.

In 1343 Petrarch was again in Italy, discharging an important diplomatic mission with which he had been entrusted by the new Pope Clement VI. to the Court of Naples; the state of which he describes in dark colours, not too dark, as the history of the hapless Queen Joanna, Robert’s successor, sufficiently proves. He nevertheless rendered himself acceptable to her, and, his mission honourably discharged, repaired to Parma, where (1344) he wrote the first of his great political odes,Italia mia benche il parlar sia indarno, and whence he was chased by civil discord. He did not, however, return to Avignon until towards the end of this year. The next few years were chiefly spent in literary occupations, the most remarkable of which was the composition (1347) of his ode to the Tribune Cola di Rienzi, in whom he saw the deliverer of his country. Petrarch’s course was not free from the imputation of ingratitude to his old friends and patrons, the Colonna family; yet it would have been worse to have been silent at the prospect, however brief and delusive, of the resurrection of Rome. Other poets before him had written on Italian politics, but none, not even Dante, had so exalted their theme by eloquence and ennobling largeness of view:

The next year, 1348, was one of havoc and desolation for Europe, through the ravages of the Black Death, which swept away a larger proportion of her inhabitants than any similar visitation recorded in history. Laura was among the victims, dying on April 6, the anniversary of her meeting with Petrarch. Cardinal Colonna, his chief patron since the death of the Bishop of Lombès, was also carried off on July 3. Nothing can be added to his own words:

Petrarch’s demeanour after the death of his Laura presents a strong contrast to Dante’s after the like[Pg 60] bereavement, nor does he suffer by the comparison. Nothing can surpass the poignancy of Dante’s first grief as depicted in theVita Nuova; but he soon forms another tie, and though the memory of Beatrice is ever with him, the human affection sublimates more and more into an abstract spiritual type. Petrarch’s utterances, on the other hand, wear at first something of a conventional semblance, but constantly increase in depth and tenderness, and while he remains the humanist in his studies and the diplomatist in active life, his poetry, as of old, is all but monopolised by his one passion. As his attachment to Laura in her life had been compatible with frequent and long absences, so her death did not prevent him from discharging the public functions fitly entrusted to the most eminent scholar of his age.

Although he often expresses in his verse his delight in revisiting the banks of the Sorga, his life from this time was chiefly spent in Upper Italy, much occupied by the discharge of diplomatic commissions from the Pope, the Venetian Republic, and the Lords of Milan and Padua; constantly appealing to the Avignon Popes to terminate the “Babylonish captivity” of the Church; vexed by the undutifulness of his natural son, but finding comfort in his daughter; indefatigable in collecting and transcribing manuscripts; giving, though himself ignorant of Greek, a powerful impulse to Hellenic studies by commissioning a Latin translation of Homer; producing many of his most pleasing minor Latin writings; and throwing his last energies into the apotheosis of Laura in hisTrionfi. He went to Paris to congratulate John, King of France, on his release from captivity in England; and was present at the marriage of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, at Milan, where or soon afterwards[Pg 61] he may possibly have encountered Chaucer. Boccaccio followed him with respectful homage, and almost his last literary labour was the Latin translation of the Florentine’s tale ofPatient Griselda. The last four years of his life, though with many intervals of public business, were chiefly spent in his retirement at Arquá, a village in the Euganean Hills, where death overtook him as he bent over a book, July 20, 1374. He had virtually finished theTrionfi about three months previously.

We have devoted more space to the biography of Petrarch than to that of Dante, because, although Dante towers above him as a poet, Petrarch is the more important figure in Italian literary history. Dante stands alone: venerated as he was by his countrymen, and not wholly destitute of imitators, he yet founded no school, and his influence on the development of the Italian intellect is slight in comparison with Petrarch’s. Together with the great schoolman who quitted the world as he entered it, he sums up the Middle Age, which in him and Aquinas attains its highest development. Petrarch, on the other hand, is the representative Italian. He does not, like Dante, deliver, but is himself a prophecy: the future of Italian culture is prefigured in him. He was also the first to bestow on Italy an unquestioned supremacy in the world of literature, and was the earliest restorer of the republic of letters, a conception extinct in the ages of barbarism. In this restoration, transcending the limits of his own country, his Latin writings were necessarily more influential than his Italian[5], and although they do not properly belong to [Pg 62]our subject, their great importance in the history of culture entitles them to a few words.

The chief causes of Petrarch’s failure as a Latin poet are evident. In the infancy of vernacular literature it was not sufficiently understood that compositions in a dead language, however exquisite, must fail to bestow immortality. Nor could Petrarch himself be fully aware how impossible it was to write like a Roman poet in the new dawn of reviving classical studies. It took two centuries of culture to produce a Vida and a Sannazaro, and if their names are undying, the same can hardly be said of their Latin works. But there was a deeper reason. Petrarch attempted epic composition without epic inspiration. His genius was entirely lyric, and his poetry has little value except where it palpitates with lyrical feeling. When he writes on the misfortunes of his country, he is a poet even when writing in Latin; and his great Latin epic, theAfrica, too often tame, notwithstanding its true natural feeling, sometimes, especially when near the end of the poem he speaks of himself, kindles into poetry. The Latin verses placed by Coleridge on the half-title of his own love-poems inSibylline Leaves are almost as exquisite as the tenderest passages of the Canzoniere itself[6]:

Although Petrarch preferred Latin to Italian in the abstract, and even affected to undervalue Dante because his chief works were composed in the vulgar tongue, he acknowledged that he had missed the perfection in Latin which he was conscious of having attained in Italian. His only prose-writings with any significance for us now are the autobiographic. Some of his ethical disquisitions, however, if they had come down from classic times, would have been regarded as precious monuments of antiquity. The most important of these is theDe Remediis utriusque Fortunæ (1356), in two books, the first treating of the snares of prosperity, the second arming the soul against adversity. The reflections are forcibly expressed, but in themselves somewhat trite. His tractDe sua et aliorum Ignorantia (1361), on the other hand, abounds with energy, and gives a lively picture of the strife in his bosom between the humanistic scholar and the orthodox Christian. More vital still, at least after some pedantic digressions have been discarded, is hisSecretum, sive de Contemptu Mundi (1342), where the conflict in his mind between the sense of moral obligation and his passion for Laura is so depicted as to render him the prototype of Rousseau, and entitle us to derive one of the most characteristic departments of modern literature from him. He is no less the father of modern autobiography by the slight but charming sketch he has left of himself in his[Pg 64] Epistola ad Posteros, prefixed to the general collection of his letters. It was a great discovery that the external circumstances of a remarkable life are not the only ones worth relating.

The most important of all Petrarch’s Latin works is his collection of Epistles, partly formed by himself in his lifetime, and greatly enriched by the diligence of recent editors, especially Fracassetti. These are not only of high interest from the portrait they convey of the man himself, equally as an individual and as the ideal type of the man of letters, but form a perpetual commentary on the manners and customs of his age. Many, though composed by Petrarch, are written in the names of sovereigns or public bodies; others are letters of warm encouragement or warmer remonstrance to popes, emperors, and others who then seemed, but only seemed, to have the world’s destinies in their hands. In all his correspondence with the great, Petrarch, like Dante, appears as the idealist, inspired by the remembrance of antiquity, and urging upon the rulers of the day a more exalted course of action than suited their dispositions, or, it must be admitted, was compatible with the circumstances of the time. They on their parts seem to have appreciated the honour of being lectured by such a man, and to have permitted him to say what he pleased, satisfied that he could exert no practical influence upon the course of politics. Printing and the liberty of the press have now made the humblest newspaper scribe more potent than the first man of letters of the fourteenth century. Some of Petrarch’s epistles are of unique interest, such as the description of his ascent of Mount Ventoux, of the great tempest at Naples, and of the apparition of the ghost of the Bishop of Lombès, the first circumstantial narrative of the kind, and perhaps to this day the best authenticated.

Petrarch’s encouragement of classical study is not the least among his titles to fame. He was the Erasmus of his age in so far as the rudimentary condition of criticism allowed, and, in so far as his means permitted, its Mæcenas. He discovered Cicero’s epistles to Atticus, and, by his own statement, which there seems no sufficient reason for rejecting, had at one time the lost treatise De Gloria in his hands. He yearned towards Homer and Plato, whom he could not read in the original, but perused in translations. The fullest information respecting his literary tastes, the extent of his library and his knowledge of the classics, his borrowings and loans of manuscripts, his copyists and his bindings, will be found in the excellent monograph of Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’Humanisme (Paris, 1892). Many manuscripts known to have belonged to him still exist, chiefly in French public libraries. The story of the destruction of his books by the neglect of the Venetians is groundless; they ought to have been made over to the Republic after his death, but they never reached Venice. The Aldine Italic type is said to have been modelled after Petrarch’s handwriting, and the first book in which it was used was an edition of the author whom he principally annotated, Virgil.

Petrarch’s activity as a scholar claimed so much larger a portion of his time and thoughts than his Canzoniere, and the bulk of the latter, considerable as it is, is so small in comparison with that of the mass of his writings, that Symonds seems almost justified in depreciating his work as an Italian lyrist in comparison with his influence as a humanist. Yet Petrarch’s Latin works were like the falling rain, which passes away as a distinct existence, though long invisibly operative as a fertilising agent; while his poetry, confined to a definite channel by the restraints of consummate diction and style, flows in a crystal stream for ever. Here and there in other men’s books, no doubt, an isolated love-strain of higher quality may be found, but nothing approaching theCanzoniere as an epitomised encyclopædia of passion. The best is transcendently excellent; and if many of the pieces, especially near the beginning, might well have been dispensed with as far as their individual desert is concerned, they still have their value as notes in a great harmony. As his translator Cayley well remarks, “No poet has so fully represented the whole world of love in every tone and variety of play and earnest, delight and pain,[Pg 67] enthusiasm and self-reproach, expostulation, rebellion, submission, adoration, and friendship, or regret and religious consolations leading gradually to another sphere of hope and devotion.” One thing only is wanting to this encyclopædia of emotion, the rapture of possession. This was not for Petrarch: throughout the first part he is the yearning suitor, throughout the second the dejected mourner. Hardly another man ever sighed or wept with so much constancy or so little recompense.

Who was the object of this unique passion and perpetual grief? So obscure are the circumstances that some have deemed Laura, like the candlemaker’s widow at Père la Chaise, “une métaphore, un symbole.” Petrarch’s friend, the Bishop of Lombès, suspected as much, but Petrarch indignantly protested, and after a while refuted the surmise by a manuscript note in his Virgil, to be treated more fully hereafter. Apart from this, it seems strange that scepticism should have survived his avowal, on a serious occasion, the composition of his address to posterity; where he speaks of his affection for Laura as his sole incitement to worthy fame, and of her own reputation as something entirely independent of his praises. “What little I am, such as it is, I am through her; and if I have attained to any fame or glory, I had never possessed it if the few grains of virtue which Nature had deposited in my soul had not been cultivated by her with such noble affection. What else did I desire in my youth than to please her, and her alone, who alone had pleased me?” The strongest testimony, however, is that of the poems themselves, which are full of traits and descriptions evidently derived from real life, and which would lose[Pg 68] all their charm if they could be deemed imaginary. Take this for example:

How natural and pleasing if the incident be real! and how marvellous the poetical power which can raise such an edifice out of such a trifle! On the other hand, how insipid if the little event, instead of a ripple on the surface of life arrested by the poet’s art ere it has had time to pass into nothingness, be but a fiction to enable him to say a pretty thing! The author of so frigid a contrivance could never have been the author of theCanzoniere.

But though Laura’s actual existence is certain, her identity is a subject of everlasting controversy. The popular belief near to Petrarch’s own day is expressed by an anonymous biographer, who, writing, as is thought, near the end of the fourteenth century, calls her Loretta, and, by adding that the Pope offered Petrarch a dispensation from his ecclesiastical vows in order to marry her, clearly indicates that she was believed to be a single woman. The Abbé de Sade, however, in his life of[Pg 69] Petrarch, published in 1767, adduces much documentary and other evidence to identify her with Laura, born De Noves, wife of Hugo de Sade, and an ancestress of the Abbé’s own. With one important exception, to be mentioned shortly, the Abbé’s proofs are of little weight; they establish the existence of a Laura de Sade, but by no means that she was Petrarch’s Laura. An account of the discovery of Laura de Sade’s tomb in 1533, authenticated by some very bad verses attributed to Petrarch found within it, although itself genuine, evidently records a clumsy fabrication.

One advantage the Abbé’s theory certainly has, the production of an unanswerable reason why Petrarch did not marry Laura; but, on the other hand, his ecclesiastical orders might be a sufficient impediment. The Papal dispensation which might have relieved him of them must surely have relieved him of his preferments also; and if the story is authentic, the offer came in all probability from Clement VI., the Pope by whom he was chiefly favoured, who did not attain the tiara until 1342, fifteen years after his first acquaintance with Laura, when Laura’s health seems to have been much impaired, and he may well have thought the time gone by. The objections to his suit having been addressed to a married woman seem almost insurmountable. If his flame was Laura de Sade, she was the mother of a very numerous family, and it appears all but incredible that he should have inscribed so much verse to her both in her lifetime and after her death, and discussed his passion so freely in his Dialogae without the slightest allusion to husband or children; or that the identity of a lady holding so high a position, and celebrated in verses read all over Italy, should so long[Pg 70] have remained obscure; or that he should have enjoyed such freedom of access to her as he evidently did. The idea, moreover, seems quite inconsistent with the tenor of the celebrated sonnet,Tranquillo porto avea mostrato Amore:

The thought manifestly is, that if Laura had lived a short time longer their intimacy would have given no occasion for scandal. This might be true of an unmarried lady or a widow, hardly of a wife. The sonnet also proves that Petrarch and Laura were nearly of an age, refuting Vellutello’s opinion on this point. Salvatore Betti, moreover, has found another Laura, fulfilling, in his estimation, all requisites as well as the Abbé de Sade’s.

It must, notwithstanding, be acknowledged that there is one piece of documentary evidence almost sufficient to prove the Abbé’s theory in the teeth of all objections, could we but be certain of its genuineness. This is the will of Laura de Sade, made in a condition of extreme sickness on April 3, 1348. We know on Petrarch’s own authority that his Laura died on April 6, for the genuineness of the note in his Virgil where he records this fact[Pg 71] is now regarded as incontestable. That two ladies of the name of Laura were dying at or near Avignon at the same time is clearly improbable. But is the will itself authentic? or may it not have been altered or interpolated? The Abbé cites it as a document in his family archives; its existence is attested by several persons in the eighteenth century; but it does not appear to have been submitted to the scrutiny of any expert, nor can we learn whether such an examination has ever been made since, or whether the testament is now producible[7]. Should its authenticity ever be demonstrated, but hardly otherwise, we shall be almost compelled to embrace a belief liable in every other point of view to formidable objections.

Although Laura, as depicted by Petrarch, is the most ethereal feminine ideal ever conceived, his passion was certainly not of the Platonic kind. The contrary has been asserted, but is contradicted by every page of the Canzoniere, which is full of reproaches to Laura for her cruelty, incomprehensible if she was not withholding very substantial favours. He certainly did not want for encouragements of a more spiritual nature:

Long after this, which surely should have satisfied a Platonic lover, he is looking forward to a more perfect consummation of his wishes:

What hope’s fruition was we learn from numerous sonnets composed after the death of Laura, in which the poet expresses his thankfulness that his mistress did not yield to his too ardent entreaties, but kept him in order by her frowns, a function attributed to her even in the first book of sonnets:

Laura’s attitude towards Petrarch seems not ill expressed in the sonnet composed in the eighteenth century by Ippolito Pindemonte:

This peculiar relation of Laura to Petrarch as a monitress, no less than an object of adoration, goes far to establish the reality of his passion, which is exactly that which men frequently entertain for women a little older than themselves, and whom they deem in some measure or some respect their superiors. He feels himself ennobled by his love, a sentiment expressed with great force in the tenth sonnet, one of the earliest, and in many others, especially the beautiful Sonnet clii.:

We do not know whether Petrarch had written any poetry before he tuned his lyre to hymn Laura. His beginnings (the exquisite initial sonnet being in fact the last written of any) are at first feeble and uncertain. It[Pg 74] is not until arriving at Sonnet xxii. that he strikes a note worthy of his mature power, and he continues unequal up to about Sonnet lx., when masterpieces begin to occur with frequency; from this point onwards the proportion of absolutely insignificant poems is comparatively small. The interspersed sestines and ballate add little to his reputation; not so the canzoni, which are among his noblest productions. Traces of a chronological arrangement are evident; thus his secession to the Sorga gives birth to a group of sonnets with which those denouncing the Papal Court at Avignon are intimately connected; and in general the poems show a continuous development of style, but there are some signal exceptions. Towards the end of the first book his Muse would seem in danger of flagging, were she not stimulated by forebodings of the death of Laura. The pieces expressing this apprehension form a well-marked group, which may be associated with the doubts and fears which, after Laura’s decease, he tells us beset him on his last parting with her (1347):

Mestica, the most critical of Petrarch’s editors, seems to think that he wrote no more on Laura in her lifetime after the great spiritual change which he supposes him to have undergone in 1343, when he wrote his dialogue with St. Augustine. We see but slight evidence of any such metamorphosis.

[Pg 75]

The second book of theCanzoniere, comprising the pieces composed after the death of Laura, resembles the first in their comparative inferiority at the beginning, after a fine introductory sonnet. Either Petrarch’s grief had paralysed his powers, or he had not fully realised his loss, or he had not yet hit upon the fitting tone. In a short time, however, he regains his true self, and the second part is generally deemed to excel the first, as pathos excels passion. It is not that the artist is more consummate, but the capabilities of his instrument are greater. The poems generally fall into two groups—laments for Laura’s loss, or consolation derived from the realisation of her presence on earth or in heaven. An example of each must be given:

This latter mood is in general the more characteristic of Petrarch. Towards the end it prevails more and more, but the same falling-off is observable as in the former book. Petrarch’s religious sonnets are exquisite when they involve a direct vision of Laura, but otherwise they are apt to become tame and conventional. It is almost a pity that the most notable exception should ever have been written, though it ranks among his masterpieces:

Were this more than a passing mood, it would be painful indeed that Petrarch should have lived to deem his devotion to Laura misspent, and nothing short of ludicrous that he should have accused himself of missing by hisCanzoniere the renown which epics or tragedies might have ensured him. Such a passing mood it must[Pg 77] have been, for it is contradicted by the succeeding pieces. The book concludes with an impassioned hymn to the Virgin, which may have suggested to Goethe the analogous conclusion ofFaust.

TheCanzoniere is completed by theTrionfi, allegorical shows entirely in the taste of the Middle Ages, which we shall find repeated in Francesco Colonna’sPolifilo. Petrarch successively sings the might of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity, set forth in the long processions of their captives or votaries. A certain circumscription is essential to the full display of Petrarch’s genius, andterza rima, a metre favourable to diffuseness, does not exhibit his powers to such advantage as the severe restriction of his sonnets and canzoni. The poem, nevertheless, if a little garrulous, charms by deep feeling and a succession of delightful if not transcendent beauties. The finest portion is the Triumph of Death, when Laura appears, and addresses the poet to much the same effect as in his sonnets written after her decease. “L’on est vraiment touché de voir que dans un âge avancé Pétrarque ne se consolait encore de l’avoir perdue qu’en se rappelant et se retraçant dans ses vers tout ce qui lui faisait croire que Laura en effet l’avait aimé” (Ginguené). It was begun in 1357, and is not entirely complete, though Petrarch continued to add and retouch until within a very short time of his death. The last lines relate to Laura, who, present or absent, is always the inspiration of the poem. Petrarch evidently wrote greatly under the influence of his reminiscences of Dante, and this may account for his unwillingness, frequently attributed to unworthy jealousy, to concern himself with his predecessor in his latter years. He knew that Dante’s spirit was more potent than his,[Pg 78] and feared to be subjugated by it, as has happened to many. He has himself been imitated by Shelley in the Triumph of Life.

The odes with which theCanzoniere is interspersed are no less beautiful than the sonnets, but are less adapted for quotation, since it is impossible to give any one in its entirety, and they must greatly suffer by abridgement. There is, however, a certain completeness in the first three stanzas ofChiare, fresche, e dolci acque, excellently translated by Leigh Hunt:

Not much need be said of Petrarch’s character, whether as poet, scholar, or man. As a poet he deserves to be numbered among the few who have attained absolute perfection within a certain sphere; to whom within these limits nothing can be added, though much may be taken away. The subtraction of the trivial or fantastic from Petrarch’s verse leaves, nevertheless, a mass of love-poetry transcending in amount no less than in loveliness all poetry of the same class from the pen of any other man. If immortality is deservedly awarded to a single masterpiece like theBurial of Sir John Moore or thePervigilium Veneris, it should not be difficult to estimate his claims whose similar masterpieces are counted by scores. Perhaps the greatest of his beauties is the complete naturalness of his ceaseless succession of thoughts transcendently exquisite. If Petrarch has not the thrilling note or transparent spirituality of Dante, his perfect form represents a higher stage of artistic development—too high, indeed, to be maintained by his successors. A just parallel might be drawn between the three great sonnet-writers of the Latin peoples, Dante, Petrarch,[Pg 80] Camoens; the three orders of architecture, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian; and the three great ancient dramatists.

It is noteworthy that Petrarch does not appear as the representative poet of the mediæval or of any other period. Horace and Ovid would have admired him as much as his contemporaries did, and he is as fresh and bright in the nineteenth as in the fourteenth century. Many have pursued him, none have overtaken him. His prose works, on the contrary, bear the stamp of their age, and exist for ours mainly as curiosities and documentary illustrations of bygone manners and ways of thinking. This was inevitable; he could not have been the literary sovereign of his age had he been very greatly in advance of it. He looked down upon it sufficiently to dislike it, as he tells us, and prepare a better. As a man he had shining virtues and few faults, except such as are almost inseparable from the characters of poets, orators, and lovers, and which men like Dante only avoid at the cost of less amiable failings. His nearest parallel is perhaps with Cicero, and would appear closer if Petrarch had, or Cicero had not, been called upon to take a highly responsible part in public affairs.

Of Petrarch’s vast influence upon English poetry since the time of Wyatt and Surrey, who may be justly called his disciples, it is needless to say anything, except that it is even more to be traced in the general refinement of diction than by the imitation of particular passages.

The best critical edition is Mestica’s, founded mainly upon scrupulous examination of a manuscript partly written by Petrarch himself, partly by an amanuensis under his direction. It may almost be wished that Mestica had not such good authority for some of his disturbances of time-hallowed readings. By much the best exegetical commentary is Leopardi’s, a model of pregnant conciseness, and invaluable for clearing up difficulties, although frequently proffering explanation where explanation seems needless. The late Henry Reeve’s English biography, though condensed, is fully adequate. The appreciation of the Petrarchan sonnet-forms, never to be tampered with without detriment, has been mainly promoted in England by the late Charles Tomlinson.

If the works of the third great Italian writer cannot be compared to Dante’s for sublimity, or to Petrarch’s for perfection of style, the most important of them is of even greater significance in the history of culture. By hisDecameron GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO[8] endowed his country with a classic prose, and won for himself a unique place as the first modern novelist.

Boccaccio always speaks of himself as “of Certaldo,” a small Tuscan town under Florentine dominion, where he possessed some properly. It would seem, however, from his own expressions, not to have been his birthplace. This was most probably Florence. The early legend of his birth at Paris rests upon a too absolute identification of himself with a character in hisAmeto. His birth probably took place in 1313; and, if not early orphaned of his mother, he must have been an illegitimate child. His father, a Florentine merchant of the prudent and thrifty type, had him taught grammar and arithmetic, sent him into a counting-house at thirteen, and four years afterwards placed him with a mercantile firm at Naples. When, after two years, the youth’s distaste to trade proved insuperable, the father made him study law [Pg 83]at the Neapolitan University. It is not likely that he gave much attention to so dry a subject amid the distractions of the lively city, where he was insensibly receiving the inspiration of his future poetry and fiction.

Notwithstanding the accusation of stinginess brought against his father, Boccaccio must apparently have possessed considerable means, mixing in the best society of Naples. He probably owed much to the Florentine extraction of Nicola Acciajuoli, a leading personage, and subsequently Grand Seneschal of the kingdom. By 1338 he had progressed so far as to fall in love with the lady he has celebrated as Fiammetta, but whose real name was Maria, putative daughter of the Count of Aquino, but generally believed to be the offspring of King Robert himself. Fiammetta was married. The degree in which she returned his passion is uncertain, but she appears to have exerted considerable influence upon his career as an author. He composed theFilocopo for her entertainment about 1339, and the close of his activity as an imaginative writer about twelve years afterwards coincides with the probable period of her death. Ameto andFiammetta, in both of which she is celebrated were written after Boccaccio’s return to Florence whither he was recalled by his unsympathising father about 1340; here the wild oats sown at Naples came up in a plentiful crop of fiction and poetry. Literary productions must have occupied most of Boccaccio’s time until 1345, when, probably on account of his father’s remarriage, he returned to Naples, where he is said to have begun theDecameron under the patronage of Queen Joanna. In 1348 the pestilence which devastated Florence carried off his father. Boccaccio returned in 1349 to arrange family affairs, and thenceforth appears in[Pg 84] quite a new light, as a trusty diplomatist, the author of various manuals (Genealogiæ deorum gentilium,De casibus virorum illustrium, &c.) of the information most sought for in the age, and, under Petrarch’s direction, a chief agent in the promotion of humanistic studies. Copies of Terence and Apuleius are extant in his handwriting.

One of Boccaccio’s first duties after he had settled himself in his native city was to entertain Petrarch upon his visit in 1350, and one of his first public missions, performed in the following year, was to solicit him to fix his residence at Florence and enter the service of the Republic. Petrarch declined to entrust his repose to so unstable a community, but his acquaintance with Boccaccio ripened into an intimacy which might have been compared to that of Goethe and Schiller if Boccaccio had not gracefully and judiciously assumed a tone of deference to the acknowledged sovereign of contemporary literature. He is indefatigable in literary suit and service. His piety towards Dante as well as Petrarch leads him to transcribe for the latter theDivine Comedy. His equal affection for Petrarch and classical studies made him at Petrarch’s instigation entertain an erudite but uncomfortable Greek, Leontius Pilatus, who rendered Homer for him into very lame Latin; but still it was Homer that he read; while the mediæval epicist of the Trojan war, Josephus Iscanus, had known his theme only in Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis.

Landor has delightfully depicted a supposed visit of Petrarch to Boccaccio at Certaldo; one only regrets that the conversation of the poets should turn so exclusively on Dante. Petrarch rendered his friend one inestimable service in dissuading him from the renunciation of the world, into which he had been almost scared[Pg 85] by the prophecies and denunciations of an expiring monk. Boccaccio nevertheless so far profited by these admonitions as to write nothing more to which morality could take exception. Shortly before his end he received one of the most honourable and appropriate commissions with which he could have been entrusted, that of delivering public lectures on Dante, which he had carried down to the seventeenth canto of theInferno, when death overtook him on December 21, 1375.

TheFilocopo, Boccaccio’s first and longest work of fiction, would be thought intolerably tedious at the present day, when one must be indeed [Greek: philokopos] to get through it. It forms nevertheless a most important landmark in the history of literature, for it signalises the transition from the metrical romance to the pure novel. Something similar had been attempted two centuries earlier in the delightful miniature romance of mingled prose and verse,Aucassin and Nicolette, but the example had not been followed. About the middle of the thirteenth century theNovellino had been compiled with a distinct moral purpose, but its hundred tales are rather anecdotes than novelettes. TheFilocopo is founded upon the ancient lay of Floris and Blanchefleur, which Boccaccio has converted into prose, with a copious admixture of new incidents, characters, and descriptions. There is little semblance of probability in the incidents, or accurate delineation in the characters, while the diction, though polished, is full of what would now be justly considered affectation and bad taste. In the fourteenth century it was neither, but the faithful image of the mental ferment inevitably produced by the irruption of the classical spirit into the contracted world of the Middle Age. Everything, indeed, was confused and[Pg 86] bewildered; as the blind man suddenly restored to sight saw men as trees, so the classical forms appeared most strangely distorted in the mediæval atmosphere. This ignorance, which might have excited the reprehension of critics in Boccaccio’s age, had such then existed, is the salvation of his book in ours: his mistaken erudition has become charming naïveté, and the eloquence which no longer impresses at least amuses. For its own day theFilocopo was an epoch-making work, and traces of its style may be met with until the displacement of the ideal romance by the novel of manners, a development of which the fourteenth century had no notion; although Petronius, as yet unknown, had given an example as early as the age of Nero. Boccaccio’s affinities are rather with Apuleius, whom he frequently follows in theDecameron.

TheAmeto of Boccaccio also possesses considerable importance in literary history, being the first well-defined modern instance of an important genre, the pastoral romance, afterwards carried to perfection by Sannazaro and Montemayor; and also of a literary artifice, the interweaving of several stories to compose a whole. The stories are not very attractive, and the combination is not very well managed, but the idea was an important contribution to literature, and, though Longus is more likely to find emulators than Boccaccio, the pastoral romance still has a future before it. The tales are supposed to record the experiences of shepherdesses who personify the virtues, and that placed in the mouth of Fiammetta is certainly in some measure autobiographical.

More autobiographical still, and consequently nearer to the truth of nature, is the romance called after Fiammetta, the precursor of the modern psychological novel,[Pg 87] although a germ that long remained unproductive in unkindly soil. Written, probably, about 1346, it is half-way in style between theFilocopo and theDecameron, and the plot is simplicity itself in comparison with the bewildering intricacy of the former. It is merely Fiammetta’s own detail of her unfortunate passion for a young Tuscan, and her lamentation for his inconstancy after his recall to his home by a stern father. The auto-biographical element is unquestionable, but it is extremely unlikely that Boccaccio would have accused himself of infidelity in the person of Pamfilo. It has been conjectured to be the work of some anonymous writer who took him as a hero; but had this been so, the fact would assuredly have come to light. It is more probable that it represents, not Fiammetta’s feelings, but his own, and that, to avoid gossip, or for artistic reasons, he inverted the situation and the characters. Fiammetta undoubtedly excites more interest than Pamfilo could have done, and her sufferings appear in a more tragic light as the penalty of her breach of conjugal fidelity.

It may also well be the case that Boccaccio, finding his affection for Fiammetta on the wane, anticipated Goethe by hastening to cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff while it yet retained sufficient vitality for the purposes of art. However this may be, Fiammetta has the merits and defects of Werther, real pathos and truth to nature associated with the tedium hardly separable from a long monologue, however well composed; and Boccaccio’s style here, although a great advance on that of theFilocopo, still suffers from ambitious rhetoric and a superfluity of adjectives. Great part of the book, nevertheless, attains the level of true eloquence; and Boccaccio did much for prose when he proved it to be[Pg 88] an apt medium for the expression of passions heretofore chiefly restricted to verse.

His fame, nevertheless, rests on hisDecameron, for here he attained the perfection which elsewhere he only indicated. Among many lights in which this epoch-making book may be regarded is that of an alliance between the elegant but superfine literature of courts and the vigorous but homely literature of the people. Nobles and ladies, accustomed to far-fetched and ornate compositions like theFilocopo, heard the same stories which amused the common people, told in a style which the uneducated too could apprehend and enjoy, but purged of all roughness and vulgarity, and, in truth, such masterpieces of clear, forcible prose as the greatest scholars had till then been unable to produce. All that we know of Boccaccio leads to the conclusion that his true mission was to have been a poet of the people, such an one as the unknown balladists who in simple ages have given immortal form to popular traditions, or as the Burnses and Heines who in artificial periods have gone back to the fountains of popular song. Neither of these was a possible part in the fourteenth century; but if Boccaccio is in no respect archaic, the sap of his best work is drawn from the soil of popular interest and sympathy.

Few of the stories are of Boccaccio’s invention; the originals of some may be discovered in traditionary folk-lore, of others in French fabliaux or classical or Oriental writers; very many are probably true histories in every respect but for the alteration of the names. This is Boccaccio’s best defence against the charge of licentiousness—he did not, like so many others, write with the express purpose of stimulating the passions, but reproduced the ordinary talk of hours of relaxation,[Pg 89] giving it the attraction of a pure and classic style. The share of the ladies as narrators of or listeners to these loose stories, so repugnant to ideal conceptions of the female character, is not only explained by the manners of the time, but has greatly contributed to the charm of his work by tempering its licence with a refinement best appreciated by comparison with such similar collections as theFacetiæ of Poggio. After all, the sensuous element, though conspicuous, is not predominant in the Decameron, and few books contain more or finer traits of courtesy, humanity, and generosity.

Prose fiction had existed before Boccaccio, and his manner had been in some measure anticipated by some of the tales which have found their way into theCento Novelle Antiche, but he was probably the first to employ in Europe the Oriental device of setting his stories in a frame. The structure of theDecameron is too generally known to render it necessary to more than barely mention its scheme as a succession of stories told by ten persons in ten successive days, on the feigned occasion of the retirement of a lieta brigata to a delightful retreat from the plague which devastated Florence in 1348. Many among us will think that they ought to have remained to aid their perishing fellow-countrymen, and, what is more, would themselves have done so. But it would be absurd to blame the fourteenth century for a conception of public duty and a completeness of organisation in public calamity which did not and could not exist in it. Mediæval Italy produced but one Florence Nightingale, and she was a saint. The step once taken, the exclusion of all unpleasant tidings was its indispensable corollary; and hence the scene of the story-telling, with its groves and orchards, gardens and fountains,[Pg 90] charming company and frank converse, has ever remained one of the green spots on which imagination loves to rest.

Such an ideal of cultivated society afforded no room for the vivacity of delineation so admirable in Chaucer’s portraits derived from all classes; yet the prologue and the little introductory passages to each day are, with their feeling for landscape and poetic truth, even more delightful than the stories themselves. If, as seems probable, some of these were composed at Naples before the pestilence, this lovely framework must have been an afterthought. Of Boccaccio’s greatness as a master of narrative, nothing need here be said, unless that his progressiveness is even more surprising than his talent. Ten years (1339-49) had sufficed to raise him from the eloquent but confused and hyperbolical style of the Filocopo to the perfection of Italian narrative. He was now the unapproached model of later story-tellers, who can, indeed, produce stronger effects by the employment of stronger means, but have never been able to rival him on his own ground of easy, unaffected simplicity.

Two minor works of Boccaccio, written subsequently to theDecameron, deserve a word of notice—theCorbaccio, a lampoon upon a widow who had jilted him, which does him no credit morally, but evinces much satiric force; and theUrbano, a pretty little romance of the identification of an emperor’s abandoned son—the genuineness of which, however, has sometimes been doubted.

It was the constant destiny of Boccaccio to make epochs—producing something absolutely or virtually new, and tracing out the ways in which his successors, far as they might outstrip him, were bound to walk.[Pg 91] We have seen that the heroic, the pastoral, the familiar romance owed, if not their actual birth, at least their first considerable beginnings to him; and his activity was no less important in the domain of narrative poetry. He may not have been the inventor of the octave stanza, but undoubtedly he was the first to show its supreme fitness for narrative, and thus mark out the channel in which the epic genius of Italy has flowed ever since. The peculiar grace of her language, and its affluence of rhymes, adapt it especially to this singularly elegant, if not massive or sublime, form of versification, superior for narrative purposes to the sinuous and digressive terza rima, or to Italian counterfeits of the majestic blank verse of England. It could not be expected that Boccaccio’s attempts should at first display all the perfection his metre is capable of receiving, he is undoubtedly lax and diffuse. Yet all the main recommendations of the octave are discoverable in hisTeseide andFilostrato, poems especially interesting to English readers from the imitation—frequently translation—of them in Chaucer’sKnight’s Tale andTroilus. TheTeseide is the earlier, having been composed shortly after Boccaccio’s return to Florence in 1340 for the gratification of his Neapolitan mistress; while theFilostrato, apparently composed upon his second visit to Naples about 1347, is a disguised satire upon her inconstancy.

Both from the acuteness of feeling thus engendered, and from the rapid progress Boccaccio had in the interim made in the poetic art, theFilostrato is the more powerful and poetical composition; the prosperity of Troilus’s love while returned, for example, is described in the liveliest colours and with the truest feeling. The Teseide, on the other hand, has the advantage of a more[Pg 92] dignified and heroic story, known to the English reader, not only from Chaucer, but from Dryden’s imitation of the latter in hisPalamon and Arcite. It also gave the plot to Fletcher’sTwo Noble Kinsmen. Boccaccio’s source is uncertain, but is believed to have been some Greek romance written under the later Roman Empire. If so, he can only have been acquainted with it in a Latin translation, now lost as well as the original. His own poem was translated back into Greek in a miserable Romaic version printed in 1529. For the tale of Troilus and Cressida he had Guido de Colonna’s history of the Trojan war, itself indebted for this episode to an ancient metrical romance.

The little idyllic narrativeNinfale Fiesolano is one of the most attractive of Boccaccio’s minor writings. It relates the breach of “Diana’s law” by one of her nymphs, and its tragical consequences—the suicide of the lover, and the metamorphosis, or rather the assumption of the nymph into the waters of a river; although the fruit of their union survives to become a hero and found the city of Fiesole. If, as is probable, somewhat later than theFilostrato, this pleasing little story evinces Boccaccio’s increasing mastery of the octave couplet, ease of narrative, and power of natural description. Had he continued to compose in verse, he would probably have ranked higher among Italian poets than he does now.

TheAmorosa Visione is an earlier and very different work. It is written in terza rima, and betrays an evident ambition to imitate Dante, while in its turn it has not been without influence on Petrarch’sTrionfi. Like the latter, it testifies to the mediæval love of allegories and stately shows, and may well have aided to inspire the[Pg 93] Polifilo of Francesco Colonna. The poet is conducted through a number of visions illustrative of the pomps and vanities of the world, and the poem leaves off just as, by command of his mistress, he is about to attempt the narrow way which he should have taken at first. Written apparently for the entertainment of a courtly circle, and encumbered with fantastic acrostics, it reveals little of the deep feeling of its predecessor or its successor; but if regarded simply as the description of a series of pageants, must be allowed the merits of fertile invention and glowing colour. Boccaccio’s enthusiastic praise of Dante, whom he calls the lord of all science, and the source of everything, if there be anything, excellent in himself, is highly honourable to him.

A good example of Boccaccio’s epic vein is afforded by the prayer of Emilia to Diana in theTeseide, uttered when Palamon and Arcite are about to fight for her sake. For this, as for several other versions, the writer is indebted to Miss Ellen Clerke:

Boccaccio thought little of his own poetry, would have destroyed his sonnets but for the remonstrances of Petrarch, and laments that even the incitement of Fiammetta is unavailing to spur him on to the Temple of Fame. Yet in another place he says that he has spared no pains to excel:

This judgment was unreasonably severe. It is true, nevertheless, that Boccaccio would have gained more[Pg 95] renown as a poet if the taste of his time had permitted him to seek inspiration among the people for his verses, as he did for his stories. How exquisite he could sometimes be is shown by two of the sonnets translated by Rossetti—versions, it must be owned, which surpass the originals:

Apart from the merits of his writings, Boccaccio might rest a claim to no ordinary renown as the creator of classic Italian prose; and even if he had found this instrument ready to his hand, his work with it might alone have assured him immortality. Perhaps he has a still higher title to fame in his quality as a great originator, achieving, indeed, no consummate work except the Decameron, but reconnoitring the unknown world through which the human spirit travels, and opening out new paths on every side as he steers “bound upon beating wing to golden bough.” As the first effective exemplar of the heroic and pastoral romance and of the epic in octave stanza, as the principal populariser of classical lore, his influence will be felt to the end of time. The books which gave him this power are, indeed, comparatively forgotten. On the other hand, the great marvel of hisDecameron is its undying freshness. The language is as terse and bright, the tale as readable as ever: the commentator may exercise his research in detecting the sources of the stories, but has little to do in explaining obsolete diction or obsolete manners.

In morals and conduct, until his latter days, Boccaccio seems to have been a perfect type of the gay and easy class of Florentine citizens, and as remote as possible from the wary and penurious burghers depicted in his tale of the Pot of Basil. Apart from the fair and courteous presence revealed in theDecameron, his principal titles to moral esteem are his disinterested love of culture, his enthusiasm for his master Dante, and his obsequious yet graceful demeanour towards Petrarch, embodying sentiments which could have found no entrance into an ungenerous breast.

A just remark of Coventry Patmore’s on the contrast between Dante and Shakespeare in their relation to their respective literatures might be extended to the Italian literature of the fourteenth century in general: it has lofty peaks, but little elevated table-land. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio tower above their contemporaries, who, viewed from such eminences, are almost indiscernible. It might have been expected, nevertheless, that the example of surpassing excellence, which could complain of no want of popularity or recognition, would have powerfully stimulated contemporaries and successors, and that, as Homer gave birth to the Cyclic poets, and Alcæus followed in the wake of Alcman, the great Italians would have appeared as the immediate progenitors of epicists, lyrists, and novelists of kindred if inferior power. On the contrary, the century from the death of Boccaccio to the appearance of Lorenzo de’ Medici as a poet is the most barren in Italian literary history. It produces no vernacular writer of genius, and but few of eminent talent. It is indeed no reproach to it to have brought forth no second Dante, or to have failed, like all other ages, to reproduce the inimitable perfection of Petrarch. But it might have been anticipated that the new ways opened [Pg 98] out by Boccaccio alike in metrical epic and in prose narrative would have been followed up, and that history and allied branches of literature would have assumed a classic form.

Little of the kind occurred, and classical study itself ceased to produce a vivifying effect upon letters. This may have been partly owing to excessive admiration for the ancient writers, degenerating into pedantic imitation; partly from the great demand for Latin translations from the Greek, and Latin official correspondence, encouraging Latin composition at the expense of the vernacular; but cannot be wholly explained by any cause peculiar to Italy, for the same phenomenon manifested itself over Europe. Chaucer, who had carried the poetry of England so high, had no successors; and it would be difficult to point to a work of genius anywhere, except theImitatio Christi, which might have been produced in any Christian age, and theAmadis of Gaul, the parent of the romances of chivalry, composed in Portugal or Spain about the beginning of the fifteenth century. How far this is to be ascribed to the Black Death, which, in sweeping away so much of the existing generation, blighted so much of the hope of the future; how far to calamities like the Great Schism and the Jacquerie; how far to causes unfathomable by the human intellect, will always be a question.

Certain it is that, while material civilisation continued to develop, and Leonardo Bruni, thinking only of the cultivation of Greek, is able to say, “Letters at this time grew mightily in Italy,” creative genius received a check; and the standard of public virtue in most countries fell lower than it had ever been, or has been[Pg 99] again. We can only note the few who in Italy, otherwise than as classical scholars, did anything to vindicate their age from the imputation of intellectual barrenness. Two didactic poems with epic affinities, produced, one shortly before, the other shortly after the death of Boccaccio, attest more than pages of panegyric the power with which Dante controlled the imaginations of his countrymen. FAZIO DEGLI UBERTI, a Florentine of whose life little is known, except that he spent most of it in exile, and died about 1367, seems to have thought that if Dante had appropriated heaven, hell, and purgatory, the earth at least remained for himself. He undertook to describe, in a number of cantos in terza rima, his perlustration of it under the escort of a singular guide, the Latin topographer Solinus. What Solinus is to Virgil, Uberti is to Dante; yet, though an uninspired, he is not a contemptible writer. His geographical epic theDittamondo (Discourse of the World) may be unduly prejudiced in the eyes of English readers from Rossetti’s rendering of a canto in blank verse. It would indeed have been a waste of time to have striven to reproduce the original metre, yet Uberti’s tercets glide with an ease and fluency of which the blank verse gives no notion. The poem is not altogether destitute of poetical spirit; one conception, that of the forlorn Genius of Rome herself guiding the poet to her ruins, is truly fine, but force was wanting to work it out. Otherwise it is chiefly interesting as a repertory of the geographical knowledge and fancies of the age. The canto on England has been translated by Rossetti, and is entertaining from its naïveté. Uberti must have been an accomplished man, for he intersperses French and Provençal verses with his Italian. He is more truly a[Pg 100] poet in his lyrical than in his epic performances, if, at least, the sonnets and canzoni which pass under his name are really his. One, translated by Rossetti, has so much poetical merit as to have been frequently ascribed to Dante:

Another writer of mark, nearer than Fazio to Dante both in style and subject, is FREDERICO FREZZI, citizen and bishop of Foligno, who died at the Council of Constance in 1416. HisQuatriregio, a moral poem describing the author’s progress through the realms of Love, Pluto, the Vices and Virtue, so close an imitation of Dante as to border upon servility, is, notwithstanding, not a mean performance. Frezzi has considerable rhetorical, if not much poetical power, and many passages are really impressive. The diction also is good; but the book’s chief repute at this day is among artists, on account of the remarkable designs adorning the edition of 1506, which[Pg 101] present an affinity to Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante, and have been attributed, although on insufficient authority, to Luca Signorelli. The poem was republished at Foligno in 1725, with a learned commentary, of which it was in great need. MATTEO PALMIERI’S poem,Città di Vita, probably much in Frezzi’s style, arouses interest from its having been suppressed as heretical, but its poetical merit has never yet sufficed to allure a publisher. “The object,” says Symonds, who read it in MS., “is to show how free-will is innate in men.” It is founded upon an actual vision, according lo the assertion of the author.

Many other poets might be mentioned, but they are now mere names, except SENUCCIO DEL BENE, chiefly renowned as Petrarch’s friend, but himself a graceful writer, and two of considerably later date, of one of whom it may be truly if paradoxically said that he is chiefly remembered for being forgotten. This is DOMENICO BURCHIELLO, a standing example of the fickleness of popular taste. He was a Florentine, who lived from about 1400 to 1448, and composed numerous burlesque sonnets alla coda (with a tag of three lines), which retained sufficient vitality to go through thirty editions soon after the invention of printing, but are now inevitably neglected, inasmuch as the Florentine slang in which they are mainly composed has ceased to be amusing, or even intelligible. The other poet of the period, GIUSTO DE’ CONTI, a jurist, who lived at the court of Sigismondo Malatesta, Prince of Rimini, and died there about 1452, is remarkable as the chief contemporary imitator of Petrarch, whom he followed with such servility as greatly to impair the credit otherwise due to him for the sweetness of his verse and the occasional[Pg 102] dignity of his style. His collection of sonnets, entitled La Bella Mano, from its perpetual reference to the beauties of his lady’s hand, stands out at all events, as even an inferior work might have done, from the almost total poetical barrenness of the middle of the fifteenth century, otherwise only relieved by the elegant sonnets of another Petrarchist, Bonaccorso da Montemagno, and the popular carols which gained Leonardo Giustiniani deserved reputation.

More genuine poetry is to be found in the occasional lyrics of two writers near the end of the fourteenth century, chiefly eminent in a different species of composition, the novelette. FRANCO SACCHETTI and GIOVANNI FIORENTINO are artists in words, and men of true poetic feeling. A canzonet of Sacchetti’s (the earliest Italian poet, says Rossetti, with whom playfulness was a characteristic), O vaghe montanine pastorelle, was so popular as to have been transmitted for some generations by oral recitation, while his novelettes, until printed in the eighteenth century, existed only in a single mutilated manuscript. This is the conclusion of Rossetti’s translation of this charming lyric:

This exquisite poem, however, rather belongs to the late fourteenth than to the early fifteenth century, as do other songs of equal beauty by Sacchetti and his contemporaries, which contrast favourably with earlier Italian lyrics by their brevity and simplicity. This is partly attributable to their having been in general written for music. Some of the most charming examples have been collected in Carducci’sStudi Letterari.

Sacchetti and Giovanni mark the termination of the Trecentisti period. Many writings of their contemporaries have been printed as models of pure diction, but are otherwise too unimportant to deserve independent notice in a literary history[9]. After the beginning of the fifteenth century Italian prose for a while declined, mainly from the false standard of excellence produced by exaggerated enthusiasm for the newly recovered classics. Neglecting the spirit, though only too attentive to the letter, of these models, writers corrupted their diction with Latinisms. The best books were histories, and the best of these were written in Latin. It might have been said that to find a really good vernacular historian we must go back to the fourteenth century, were it not for the doubts which beset the alleged chronicle of DINO COMPAGNI, which professedly details events at Florence from 1286 to 1318. The question of its genuineness has aroused the sharpest [Pg 104]controversy, which cannot be regarded as even yet absolutely determined: the prevailing opinion, however, seems to be that it is a fabrication dating from about 1450. It is so entertaining that one would wish it trustworthy.

GINO CAPPONI, a leading Florentine citizen of the latter fourteenth and earlier fifteenth century, has left valuable memoirs of some of the transactions in which he was engaged. The great Florentine historian of the age, however, is GIOVANNI VILLANI, a characteristic embodiment of all the better qualities of his city, who, inspired by ardent patriotism, wrote its history, including a review of the contemporary transactions of the world, from the Tower of Babel to 1346, on the verge of the Black Death of 1348, by which he was himself carried off. His work was continued by his brother Matteo and his nephew Filippo to 1368. Villani possessed every qualification which experience of public business could afford, having filled several important offices, among them those of Prior and Master of the Mint. His language is exceedingly pure, his fidelity and impartiality are beyond suspicion, and he is peculiarly valuable from his preservation of financial and economical details, and other matters affecting ordinary life. He would have been a model historian if he had lived when the spirit of critical inquiry was awake, and historians had learned the delineation of character and the artistic construction of narrative; he must, however, in this case have forfeited the golden simplicity which renders his narrative so delightful. His nephew Filippo, who lived far into the fifteenth century, wrote in Latin theLives of Illustrious Florentines, already cited as an authority on Dante. His memoir of Boccaccio has been frequently reprinted.

[Pg 105]

No place having hitherto occurred suitable for mention of theTravels of Marco Polo, they, although belonging to the thirteenth century, may find mention here. From the purely literary point of view they are of no great importance, but as the first book that opened the knowledge of the East to Europeans, their significance cannot be overrated. Mention should also be made of another traveller, CIRIACO DI ANCONA, the first archæologist, who, in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, set the example of collecting inscriptions and works of antiquity.

The next prose author whom it is necessary to mention, ENEA SILVIO PICCOLOMINI, afterwards Pope Pius the Second (1405-64), writing solely in Latin, has no place in the literary history of the Italian language, but is perhaps the most typical example of the fifteenth-century man of letters, accomplished, versatile, adroit, imperfectly restrained by principle, but inspired by a genuine zeal for culture and humanity. No literary personage since Petrarch had displayed such various activity, or, by his controversial, no less than by his diplomatic ability, had exerted an equal influence in the affairs of Church and State. Apart from the substantial merits of his writings, Æneas is a typical figure as indicating that the pen was beginning to govern the world, and that literary dexterity could make a Pope of a struggling adventurer. As an author he has come down to our day by his Commentaries of his own times, one of that valuable class of histories whose authors can say, “Pars magna fui”; and by hisEuryalus and Lucretia, a romance founded on an actual occurrence, and noteworthy as a precursor of the modern novel.

In LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI (1404-72) we at length[Pg 106] encounter a humanist accomplished alike in the learned and the vulgar tongue; while, like Leonardo da Vinci, to whom he offers a strong resemblance, less remarkable for any particular work than for the universality of his genius. An architect and mathematician, an engineer and the inventor of the camera obscura, he was almost the first of the moderns to treat these subjects scientifically, and extended his researches to painting and sculpture. His literary celebrity, however, arises rather from his treatiseDella Famiglia, a model of practical wisdom, couched in the clear and cheerful spirit of a Goethe, and affording a pleasing insight into the Italian family life of the period, as yet unspoiled by luxury. “What he says about the beauty of the body is worthy of a Greek, what he says about exercise might have been written by an Englishman” (Symonds). The third book, superior to the others in diction, has been attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini, a distinguished Florentine statesman of an earlier date, but Alberti’s claim to it seems satisfactorily established. HisIciarchia, a treatise on the ideal prince, is also a remarkable work; and his novelette,Ippolito and Leonora, founded on a Florentine tradition, is distinguished by pathos and simplicity. Alberti was the natural son of a Florentine exile, and was born at Genoa. His early years were years of hardship. Restored to his ancestral city, he there executed important architectural and engineering works, and subsequently metamorphosed into a splendid temple the old church at Rimini, which Sigismondo Malatesta dedicated in its altered form to the memory of his mistress Isotta. He was afterwards abbreviator of Papal briefs at Rome. Deprived of this office, along with sixty-nine other eminent scholars, by the Philistine but practical Pope Paul[Pg 107] II., he devoted himself to architecture at Florence and Mantua, and died at Rome in 1472.

The excellent VESPASIANO DA BISTICCI (1421-98), almost alone among his literary contemporaries, followed a trade, being a bookseller at Florence. He formed the great library of the first Duke of Urbino, and has left particulars of his zeal in the preparation of illuminated manuscripts, and a vigorous expression of his disesteem for printed books in comparison with them. We are indebted to him for no fewer than 105 biographies of contemporaries, most of whom were personally known to him. A few, of considerable length and elaboration, record the lives of popes, kings, and cardinals; the great majority are brief and simple notices of scholars and literary men, some of whom, but for Bisticci, would be almost unknown. All are charming from their unaffected simplicity and geniality, and the curious traits of the age which they preserve.

Had GIOVANNI PONTANO (1426-1503) written in the vernacular, he would have won a place equal to any contemporary’s as a poet, and a place among prose-writers entirely his own. Though a statesman and diplomatist, the confidant of the King of Naples, a philologist beside, and the life and soul of the Neapolitan Academy, he is none the less the Lucian and the Martial of his age; the lively satirist and delineator of popular manners in his dialogues; in his verse a genuine lyrist, careful of form as a Greek, animated and eager as if he had been a born Neapolitan. His prose and verse palpitate with feeling, and he gains life at the expense of Latinity. His historical writings, though respectable, are of less mark; but as a popular poet and satirist, Italian speech had an infinite loss in him. Even as it is, he[Pg 108] seems but one remove from a vernacular author. His dialogues had probably much influence upon Erasmus. Another contemporary figure is strange and enigmatical. We know but imperfectly who FRANCESCO COLONNA, the author of theHypnerotomachia Poliphili, was, and can only guess why he composed his visionary romance in a macaronic jargon neither Latin nor Italian. The book describes a vision in which Polifilo, after viewing magnificent processions and going through various adventures, ultimately obtains the hand of his lady, Polia, who has been identified with Lucrezia Lello, daughter of a jurisconsult at Treviso. It is barely readable, and yet its very inarticulateness gives it a charm which it would not have possessed if the author had been another Boccaccio. The soul of the Renaissance seems to have passed into it, and to be dumbly yearning for a manifestation never found, “moving apart in worlds not realised.” The impression is greatly assisted by the unique illustrations to which it owes its preciousness in artistic eyes, and whose origin is still an unsolved problem. Their lavish fancy and skill in rendering every variety of expression by mere outline are apparent to all; but behind these technical qualities lies the suggestion of a romantic and far-away world, comparable to the Hades adumbrated in the tender farewells on Greek sepulchral reliefs.

On the whole the literary harvest of the century following the death of Petrarch was poor, and the seed dispersed by him and Boccaccio seemed to have fallen upon barren ground. It was not, however, entirely thus: some of the Latin poets, such as Baptista Mantuanus, Campanus, Augurellus, whom we have been compelled to pass without special notice, might have won durable renown if they had written in Italian; and though there is little achievement in vernacular literature, several branches of human activity are for the first time in modern Europe brought under literary influence. The dearth of literary genius was paralleled by an equal paucity of statesmen and warriors of real greatness, though a Ziska or a Sforza appears here and there. Some mysterious cause had depressed the intellectual vitality of the age, which, nevertheless, continued to progress in social refinement and in opulence. Its æsthetic sensitiveness was chiefly expressed in the rapid development of pictorial and plastic art, and the renovation of architecture; its literary ideal was mainly manifested by the philological and critical apostles of the Renaissance, a remarkable band, who must find place in another chapter. As was to be expected under such circumstances, one of the features of the time was the improvement of the old universities and the formation of private societies of scholars, which expressed Italian intellectual needs as clearly as the foundation of the Royal Society expressed English needs at a later elate. Two achieved special celebrity—the Roman Academy, persecuted by Pope Paul II. for its relapse into paganism, and the Platonic Academy at Florence, cherished by the Medici. It fell to the lot of the latter to solemnly decide, under the auspices of Lorenzo de’ Medici, that the Italian language actually was on a par with the Latin, and that a man of wit or learning need not fear to lose caste by writing in it.

In characterising the original authors, apart from critics and commentators, whom Italy produced during the first half of the fifteenth century, we have omitted the men who really exerted the most important influence upon literature. These form a group by themselves—not one of Italian authors, for they rarely wrote in the vernacular; scarcely one of authors at all, for they worked chiefly as philologers. They are, however, much too important to be passed over without notice, representing as they did the Renaissance in its aspect as the rebirth of free thought and inquiry, a resurrection no less momentous than the revival of art and letters, and preparing the literary development which they were unable to effect. Few of them were men of extraordinary mental power, but all were passionate for the study of antiquity, and while, perhaps, intending to restore Latin to its rank as the sole literary language, set forces at work which deprived it of this primacy for ever. Even though Lorenzo de’ Medici might apologise for writing in a language condemned by men of good judgment, and Varchi’s schoolmaster might punish him for reading Petrarch, when men like Alberti took to cultivating the vernacular speech in emulation of[Pg 111] the Latin, it was clear that the latter had already lost its monopoly.

The humanists had nevertheless in their own domain the great advantage of being first in the field. They could hardly advance in any direction without initiating some movement momentous in its effect upon culture. Emanuel Chrysoloras brought the Greek language to Florence; his son-in-law, Filelfo, voyaged to Constantinople, and returned with a Greek library. Poggio Bracciolini, a most elegant Latinist and epistolographer—unfortunately best remembered by his virulent invectives, and by a book of facetiæ which does more credit to his gaiety than to his morals—rendered the greatest service by his assiduity in the collection of manuscripts. Leonardo Bruni accomplished even more by the simple step of making accurate translations of Plato and Aristotle, and thus delivering Western science from bondage to the Arabians, through whose paraphrases these writings had hitherto been chiefly known. Lorenzo Valla, an acute and intrepid critic and original thinker, enthusiastic for truth in the abstract, but not generally actuated by high principle, became the father of modern negative criticism by his overthrow of the scandalous Papal imposture of the Donation of Constantine. Gemistus Pletho, though a visionary, introduced Plato to Italy, and powerfully stimulated thought through the controversies aroused by his writings. Flavio Biondo was the first scientific archæologist, describing the monuments of pagan and Christian Rome, and investigating the topography of ancient Italy. Vittorino da Feltre showed practically by his school at Mantua what education ought to be, and Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote the lives of his fellows. Even men like Filelfo, whose restless pens pro[Pg 112]duced no work of real importance, kept the intellectual life alert by their incessant activity. For the time the age found what it needed in such men, and scholars enjoyed the consideration awarded to poets under Augustus, rhetoricians in the later Roman Empire, jurists under Justinian, and the founders of religious orders in the days of St. Dominic and St. Francis.

The deference shown to scholars is sufficiently attested by the honourable offices conferred upon them, the competition of princes and republics to obtain the most distinguished Latinists for their secretaries, and the throngs that attended their lectures and other public displays, vapid and empty as these frequently appear to us. The prevailing current of taste proved highly advantageous in raising the standard of university education. Bologna, in a former age the herald of Italian academic culture, latterly in a condition of decay, revived and asserted her supremacy, and her sister seats of learning competed vigorously with her and each other. The triumph of humanism seemed complete when in 1447 erudition made a Pope in the person of Nicholas V., the founder of the Vatican Library, whose love of erudition was such that it absolved in his eyes even Lorenzo Valla’s exposure of pious frauds. Two great events favourable to culture succeeded—the fall of Constantinople, which brought a fresh flight of learned Greeks into Europe; and the invention of printing, of which, however, Italy did not reap the benefit until 1464. The tardiness of so simple an invention, upon the verge of which antiquity had continually been hovering, is one of the most surprising facts in the history of the human mind; the indifference with which it was at first received is hardly less so; and the stimulus it imparted to literature long[Pg 113] fell below reasonable expectation. It is remarkable, however, that two complete versions of the Bible appeared at Venice in 1471, and significant that no vernacular Bible was allowed to be printed anywhere else. The general character of the productions of the Italian press is distinctly academical and utilitarian. Classics and classical commentaries, theology, canon and civil law, medicine, form the staple; imaginative vernacular literature, even of the past, is scanty; contemporary literature might hardly have existed so far as the early records of the press indicate. Apart from the studies which conduced to a livelihood, the period all over Europe was one of intellectual barrenness. But young men of lively genius were growing up, and one of these was in a position to be as serviceable to modern belles-lettres as Nicholas V. had been to the study of antiquity.

It rarely happens that Augustus is also Virgil; enough if he is also Mæcenas. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI (1448-92) united all these characters. A prince by position if not by descent, he was not only a patron of literature, but a highly intelligent and discriminating patron; nor only a favourer, but himself the producer of some of the best literature of his day. In character, in circumstances, in the bent of his policy and the general result of his activity, he might not unfairly be termed a miniature Augustus; like him he confiscated the liberties of his country as the sole alternative to anarchy, and repaid her by prosperity and peace. All the great qualities of Augustus were his, and few of the defects which history chiefly censures in his prototype. Both were stronger in the self-regarding than in the self-forgetting virtues, but Lorenzo once rose to heroism. History records no action of Augustus comparable to Lorenzo’s placing him[Pg 114]self in the power of the treacherous and unscrupulous King of Naples for the sake of his country. Nor had Lorenzo, like Augustus, ever occasion to pass the sponge over an abortive tragedy. His compositions are of different degrees of merit, but all are fluent and graceful.

We have entered a different period from that of the Uberti and Frezzi; the tree of poetry, so long stiff and dry, now swells with sap, and buds with the prophecy of a coming summer. Two distinct impulses are observable in Lorenzo and his literary mate, Politian: in one point of view the artistic, in the other the poetical spirit predominates. As artists, they strove successfully to attain perfect elegance of expression, and to improve the metrical forms which had descended from the fourteenth century. As poets, they seized upon the songs and catches current in the mouths of the people, and elevated them by judicious treatment into the region of art. This could be possible only to men of great poetic sensitiveness. Had Lorenzo and Politian been less refined by culture, had the one been no scholar and the other no prince, either might have been an Italian Burns; as it is, their work as lyric poets is more nearly comparable to Goethe’s. They made the popular Muse acceptable to men of breeding, while gratifying their own tastes by work marked with the stamp of study and erudition, and yet not beyond the intelligence of the average educated man.

Lorenzo’s part as the patron of art and letters is so considerable, that his writings, important as they are, appear almost insignificant in comparison. The most elaborate of his poems might be classed as idylls. They comprise theAmbra, a graceful and fanciful Ovidian allegory on the metamorphosis of the nymph Ambra into[Pg 115] a rock to escape the pursuit of a river-god;La Caccia col Falcone, a lively description of this aristocratic sport; andLa Nencia di Barberino, no less vivid in its portraiture of the humours of plebeian love-making. Lorenzo’s own love poetry consists chiefly of canzoni, more remarkable for elegance than depth of feeling, but perfectly in the character of a man of pleasure who is also a refined gentleman. The spirituality of Dante and his contemporaries, the romantic passion of Petrarch, no longer suited the age. The temple of Love, like the temple of the Church, had been secularised; in everything men habitually lived at a lower level. Yet this declension is compensated in a great degree by the enhanced feeling of reality: there can be no such controversy over Lorenzo’s innamorata as over Beatrice and Laura. The following is a fair example of his erotic style:

If there is more gallantry than passion in compositions of this nature, they show at least that the lute of Love had received a new string since the time of the troubadours.

[Pg 116]

Love of a sensuous kind is a chief ingredient in Lorenzo’sCanti Carnascialeschi, which are sometimes highly licentious. He is accused of having composed them with a special view of diverting the minds of the young Florentines from politics; but it seems unnecessary to go beyond the temptation to licence afforded by the general relaxation of the carnival. The gay and the serious Lorenzo were very different people, as remarked by that acute observer Machiavelli. His epistle to his own son Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., on his elevation to the Cardinalate at fourteen, is a model of wisdom and right feeling. His spiritual poems,Laudi, moreover, frequently speak the language of true religious emotion.

Lorenzo’s court, as is universally known, was the chosen abode of artists and men of letters. A twin star with Lorenzo himself, but even brighter in his literary aspect was ANGELO AMBROGINI (1454-92), known as POLIZIANO from his birth at Montepulciano. Politian, the most brilliant classical scholar of his age, was perhaps the first professed philologist whose scholarship was entirely divested of pedantry. With him classical studies were a vivifying influence, pervading and adorning his literary exercises in the vernacular, but implying no disparagement of the latter. There is little to choose between his Latin and his Italian poetry: the same poetic spirit inspires both, and each is an exemplar of the charm of a choice, yet not too ornate diction. He was accused of writing his Latin verses “with more heat than art”; but this is only another way of saying that while composing them he felt as an ancient, and might very well be taken for a poet of the Silver Age. His lyric tragedy or opera,Orfeo, will be treated along with the Italian drama, of which it was the first meritorious[Pg 117] example. HisGiostra, a poem on the tournament exhibited by Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano in 1475, and incidentally introducing its hero’s passion for the lovely Simonetta, remained unfinished in consequence of Giuliano’s untimely death. It is full of beauties, and is memorable in Italian poetry as the first example of the thoroughly successful employment of the octave stanza. Boccaccio had been too diffuse; but Politian exemplified the perfect fitness of this form for the combination of narrative poetry with an inexhaustible succession of verbal felicities, many of which, indeed, are appropriated from earlier poets, but all, old and new, seem fused into a glowing whole by the passion for classic form and sensuous beauty. But Politian and his successors did not emulate the classical poets’ accurate delineation of Nature. The materials of their descriptions are drawn from storehouses to which every scholar has a key. They bespeak reading and memory rather than actual observation.

This, in Miss Ellen Clerke’s version, is Politian’s rendering of the vision of perpetual Spring, first seen by Homer, after him by Lucretius, and in our time by Tennyson. Like Ariosto and Tasso, he places his enchanted garden on earth.

In Politian’s own eyes and those of his contemporaries his achievement as a poet was less important than his labour as a classical scholar. Nor, as respected the needs and interests of his contemporaries, was this judgment wholly mistaken. “Knowledge in that age,” says Symonds, “was the pearl of great price; not the knowledge of righteousness, not the knowledge of Nature and her laws, but the knowledge of the wonderful life which throbbed in ancient peoples, and which might make this old world young again.” Politian’s chief merits as a classical scholar were to have known how to excite a living interest in antiquity, and to have been the first to attempt a scientific classification of MSS. His translations from the Greek were admirable. So long as Lorenzo presided over Florence, Politian’s lot, though embittered by some violent literary controversies, had been brilliant and prosperous: his patron’s death exposed him to the general unpopularity of the supporters of Lorenzo’s incapable successor, the French invader stood at the doors, Savonarola’s followers began[Pg 119] to assail culture in its representatives, and within little more than two years Politian escaped the gathering storm either by a broken heart or a voluntary death.

To appreciate Politian’s services in imparting literary form to popular poetry, it will be necessary to bestow a glance on this poetry as it existed in Tuscany in his day, and in a measure exists still. We have previously remarked upon the absence of national ballad poetry at a very early period; and when at length we find traces of popular song, little resemblingChevy Chase is to be discovered, the staple being carols and love catches. Some of these may be as old as the thirteenth century, and the mass continued augmenting as one anonymous singer after another added something sufficiently attractive to be propagated from hamlet to hamlet, and treasured in the memory.

Similar lyrical production went on over most parts of Italy; the Sicilian songs, after the Tuscan, being the most numerous, or at least the best preserved. These ditties fall generally into two divisions, rispetti and stornelli: the former consisting of four or six verses rhyming alternately, followed by a couplet; the latter of three lines only, the last rhyming with the first. These soon developed into the madrigal, a form affected by persons of culture and professional musicians, but the people continued to carol as of old. Thus, spontaneous births of the instinct for love and song, undergoing countless modifications in passing from mouth to mouth, until the right form has been found at last, and sifted by the taste of generation after generation, these little songs have formed a really beautiful collection of verse, reflecting in their ardour, graceful fancy and purity of sentiment, the best characteristics[Pg 120] of the race from which they sprung. How good they are may be seen from a few of the specimens so admirably rendered by John Addington Symonds:[10]—

Two other leading poetical figures of the fifteenth century, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Luigi Pulci, authors of theOrlando Innamorato and theMorgante Maggiore, will be best treated along with the writers of chivalrous [Pg 121]romance in epic form. It is not quite clear how far Pulci had a share in the poems ascribed to his elder brother Luca (1431-70); but the latter’s verses on Giuliano de’ Medici, his crusading epic,Ciriffo Calvaneo, and his pastoral,Driadeo, undoubtedly owe much to Luigi. The heroic epistles in verse which pass under his name are no doubt by him. Another poet, GIROLAMO BENIVIENI, shines amid the Platonic circle of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. His verses might have given him no inconsiderable distinction if he could have attained to lucidity of diction; but his powers of expression are inadequate to the abstruseness of his themes. He does best when his idealism is embodied in an objective shape, as in the following sonnet, clearly suggested by the first in theVita Nuova:

The Italian writings of Benivieni’s friend Savonarola are chiefly theological. Their fervour gained them great influence at the time, but the celebrity which they still enjoy is due rather to the fame of the writer than to their literary qualities. Savonarola nevertheless affected[Pg 122] the literature of his day, partly by his war against classical and Renaissance culture, and partly by the impulse which he gave to the pamphlet, precursor of the newspaper press. Cristoforo Landino’s Camaldolese Dialogues would have been important contributions lo the national literature if they had been written in Italian.

The first writer of prose who presents us with a perfect example from which the new period may be dated is JACOPO SANNAZARO, as much as Politian the nursling of a court; to whom we are also indebted for the first example of the pastoral romance, and the first proof that excellent Italian prose could be written outside Tuscany. Sannazaro, born in 1458, was a Neapolitan of Spanish descent, as it is said, and the statement seems to be corroborated by the peculiar independence and dignity of character which distinguish him from the supple literati of his time. Even Pontano, whose obligations to the royal house of Naples were so extreme, played an ambiguous part upon the ephemeral French conquest of 1495. Sannazaro’s loyalty not only sustained that brief ordeal, but when four years later the cause of the Neapolitan dynasty was irrevocably lost, he accompanied his fallen master to France, and spent several years in exile. Returning to Naples, he inhabited a beautiful villa at Mergellina, and devoted himself to the poetry of which we shall have to speak in another place. After witnessing the destruction of his retreat in the French war (1528), he died in 1530 in the house of Cassandra, Marchesa Castriota, whom he had vainly defended against her husband’s attempt to repudiate her. Few of his contemporaries deserve equal respect as a man; and although as a writer but of the second rank, it was granted to him, alike in prose and verse, to mark[Pg 123] an era in literature signalising the triumph of Petrarch and Boccaccio over the pedantry of the fifteenth century, but at the same time the deliberate preference of form to matter, and the discouragement of irregular originality.

Sannazaro’sArcadia, historically the most important of his writings, is comparatively a youthful performance, having been substantially completed by 1489, though not published in a correct edition until 1504. It would in any case mark an epoch as the first perfect example of the pastoral romance, which Boccaccio had foreshadowed in hisAmeto, but which Sannazaro enriched by elements derived from Theocritus and Virgil. His landscape and personages are entirely classical; the shepherds contend with each other in song precisely as in the Greek and Latin eclogues, and no attempt is made to represent rustic manners as they really are. The descriptions, whether of nature or of humanity, on the other hand, are graceful and vivid, and informed by a most poetical sentiment; and it may be said that Sannazaro’s work would be more esteemed at this day if it had had fewer imitators. The style admits of but little variety, and pastoral fiction easily became insipid in the hands of a succession of followers who did not, like Shakespeare in theWinter’s Tale, resort to Nature for their delineations. Sannazaro himself is not exempt from the charge of monotony. More serious defects, however, are those of excessive Latinisation in the construction of sentences, and rhetorical exaggeration, arising from his too close adherence to the immature style of Boccaccio’s early writings, instead of the simple elegance of theDecameron. The resolution to achieve poetry in prose at any cost, causes a crabbed involution and overloads the diction[Pg 124] with adjectives; while there is yet enough of true feeling to overcome even the wearisomeness of the perpetual laments of the shepherds over the unparalleled cruelty of their innamoratas. Sannazaro had a mistress to whose memory he remained faithful all his life, and most of his fictitious characters veil actual personages. When this is understood, the romance loses its apparent artificiality; and Settembrini’s remark is justified, “Anche oggi si sente una dolcezza d’ affetto a leggere quel libro.”

The main literary interest, however, of theArcadia is that it marks an epoch and carries the reform which Lorenzo de’ Medici and Politian had initiated in verse into the domain of prose. It is perhaps the sole Italian prose composition of the fifteenth century which can be said to wear a classic stamp; and being received with enthusiasm and read by all, it fixed a standard which subsequent writers were compelled to maintain. It prescribed the rule for pastoral romance in all languages: not only did Sidney borrow its spirit and many of its episodes as well as its name for his own work, more, however, of a romance and less of a pastoral than Sannazaro’s; not only did the two great Portuguese pastoralists, Bernardim Ribeiro and Montemayor, model themselves upon it; but Shakespeare took from it the name of Ophelia, and traces of it may be found, not only in the pastoral part of Keats’sEndymion, but even in hisHyperion.

By Sannazaro’s time, then, it may be said that Italian literature was fairly despatched on the route which it was to follow throughout the golden Cinque Cento. Elegance, finish, polish were to be the chief aims; form was to be esteemed at least on a par with matter; the mediæval elements, as we find them in Dante, were to be kept in abeyance. The classical tradition was to be taken up, and Italy was to appear as the literary heiress of Rome; but not to the extent of corrupting her own language with Latinisms. Such a tacit resolution was admirable for raising and maintaining the standard of literary composition, but was hostile to the development of transcendent genius.

The history of the Italian chivalric epic is one of the most interesting departments of the story of literature, both on its own account, and because it reveals as in a mirror the growth of the more important epic of the tale of Troy. It arose out of a real event of the deepest importance to Europe, but this it so disfigured by romance and imagination as to be hardly recognisable. Charles Martel, the deliverer of France from the Saracens, is confounded with another and still more illustrious Charles, whose relations with the Saracen monarchs were usually amicable; and, by what seems to be a universal law, this hero comes to occupy but a corner of the temple nominally dedicated to him, and his renown is transferred to creatures of pure imagination. As Agamemnon, who at all events personifies the most powerful state of primitive Greece, yields as a poetic hero to such historically subordinate, if not absolutely fictitious personages as Achilles and Ulysses; as the terrible Attila, the portent of his time, shrinks in the Nibelungen Lied into the insignificant figure of Etzel; so, in the romancer’s eye, the real glories of Charlemagne dwindle to nothing before the petty skirmish of Roncesvalles.

In all these instances, and equally so in the cycle of Arthur, a germ of historical reality lies latent in the[Pg 127] human consciousness for centuries, and then suddenly becomes prolific of a wealth of imaginative detail. There can be no reasonable doubt that the writers of the Homeric epics, whether few or many, stood in the same relation to their sources as Malory and Boiardo to theirs, inheritors of a tradition in which they reposed genuine belief, but which at the same time they thought themselves at liberty to embellish and diversify as they deemed best. We should probably find the resemblance between the development of Trojan and of Arthurian legend to be very close, had we the same acquaintance with the intellectual history of ancient Greece as we possess with that of the mediæval period. Both were the result of a great poetical revival, when the awakening spirit grasped eagerly at the nutriment nearest to hand; and the Celtic romancers of the twelfth century were inspired by true Celtic yearnings for an irrevocable past, finding much of their material in the national historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth.

With the Italian romantic epic the case was somewhat different: it was largely influenced by a single book, and one composed with a direct polemical purpose. The fear and hatred entertained in the tenth and eleventh centuries for the Saracen invaders and the Danes, and other heathens frequently confounded with them, found expression at last in a remarkable book, the Latin Chronicles attributed to Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims in the eighth century, but really a fabrication of the eleventh, in which Charlemagne and his paladins were idealised as the vanquishers of the pagans. From the prominent position given to Charlemagne’s imaginary Spanish expeditions, the author is thought to have been a Spaniard, and he owed much to that “Iliad of the[Pg 128] Middle Ages,” theSong of Roland, also a production of the eleventh century. The panic passed away, but left behind it a rich deposit of romantic fiction, deriving a beauty unknown to former ages from the high estimate of woman which Christianity and Teutonic feeling had jointly contributed to the collective human consciousness. Utilised in many French narrative poems, this chivalric element first appeared in Italian in the elaborate prose-romance,I Reali di Francia. From this the step to metrical epic was easy, but the awkwardness of the Italian poets’ first attempts seems to indicate that it was not taken until the poetic art had reached its period of deepest depression in the early part of the fifteenth century, when the rude and tedious epics Buovo di Antona (Bevis of Hampton),La Spagna,Febus, andQueen Ancronja were probably composed.

Another epic of the same period, without a name, recently discovered, is to a considerable extent the groundwork of theMorgante Maggiore[11] of LUIGI PULCI (1432-87), a humorous poem with a serious purpose, or, at least, unconsciously expressing some of the most serious phenomena of the age. Its mixture of sincere religious feeling and genuine humanity with the most irreverent buffoonery has made it the stumbling-block of critics and literary historians, whose interpretation of its tendencies and estimate of its author’s character are usually determined by their own prepossessions. While it is impossible to deny that Morgante’s companion, the epicurean gourmand Margutte,[12] is the author’s [Pg 129]special creation, and the object of his chief predilection among his characters, other portions of the poem are couched in so lofty a strain, that he has been supposed to have had assistance from no less a philosopher than Ficino and no less a poet than Politian. Sarcastic sallies at the expense of the popular theology alternate with set passages of fervent orthodoxy. To us theMorgante appears a symbol of the intellectual anarchy then prevalent among the most intelligent Italians, among whom the religious sentiment survived, while its external vesture had become mere mythology; who had neither, like Benivieni, fallen under the influence of Savonarola, nor were disqualified by lack of classical culture from participating in the humanistic revival. Pulci’s opinions are probably expressed by Astaroth, a devil introduced to aid the paladins and talk divinity, and whose discourse contains a marvellous foreshadowing of the discovery of America.

There can, nevertheless, be no question that the frivolous and mocking element in theMorgante is the source of its celebrity and literary importance. It is the first really great modern example of burlesque poetry, and there are few literatures without traces of its influence. In our own, it was the father of Frere’sWhistlecraft, which was the father ofBeppo and theVision of Judgment, the first stanza of which latter poem inverts an idea of Pulci’s; and Byron accompanied these masterpieces by a translation of Pulci’s first canto, upon which he himself set a special value. It has been contended that Shakespeare was acquainted with Pulci, and certainly Panizzi’s portrait of the vindictive traitor Gano in theMorgante might almost serve for one of Iago, while Orlando’s unsuspecting magnanimity resembles Othello’s. Panizzi[Pg 130] justly praises the truth and dignity of the characters of Orlando and Rinaldo, and says of the general economy of the poem: “Pulci was the first who wrote a long and complicated poem which, diversified as it is by many incidents, has a principal subject and a principal character, on which all other parts and personages depend, without which the poem could not subsist, and which by itself alone forms an uninterrupted narrative. This hero and this subject are Gano and his treachery, which brings on the defeat of Roncesvalles.”

These are great merits. The principal defects are summed up by a genial admirer, Leigh Hunt (Stories from the Italian Poets, vol. i.), as the want of fine imagery and natural description, and frequent triviality and prolixity. The vulgarity objected to by the Italian critics must exist, but is not equally offensive to a foreigner. The poem is fully analysed by Panizzi in the first volume of his edition of Boiardo, and its general character may be very well caught from Byron’s translation of the first canto. Pulci’s higher strain is ably conveyed in the following portion of a translation of an episode by Lady Dacre:

Not much is known of Pulci’s life except that he was the intimate friend, correspondent, and confidential agent of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and is said to have composed his poem at the request of Lorenzo’s mother, whom he celebrated after her death. The disposition of his contemporaries to attribute the finest portions of his poem to Ficino and Politian may indicate some failure on his part to sustain the poetical character in his daily walk and conversation; while the more serious passages of his poetry, especially the noble pathos of the death of Orlando, disclose an elevated soul. Orlando, standing alone among his slaughtered friends on the battlefield of Roncesvalles, is visited by the angel Gabriel, who offers him a new army, and promises that earth and sea shall tremble at his name. But Orlando prefers to follow those who are gone. TheMorgante was not printed till the year after Pulci’s death. His minor works include a poem of humble life, in imitation of Lorenzo’sNencia, and a series of polemical sonnets against Matteo Franco, who was equally dyslogistic on his own part. Neither poet need be taken very seriously.

[Pg 132]

The year preceding the appearance of theMorgante (1486) saw the posthumous publication of the first part of another poem, which, from some points of view, is entitled to rank at the very head of romantic poetry. This is theOrlando Innamorato of MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO, Count of Scandiano. Little is known of his life except its simple and noble outline. He was born at his family seat of Scandiano, near Reggio, in the Modenese, about 1434. Like his successors, Ariosto and Tasso, he was a favourite at the court of the Duke of Ferrara, his sovereign. He celebrated Antonia Caprara in his lyrics, and bestowed his hand upon Taddea Novellara. In his later years he was successively governor of Modena and Reggio. In his disposition he was most generous, and too clement for his arduous public duties. He composed Latin poetry, and translated several classical and other authors; and died in 1494, on the eve of the invasion of Charles VIII., prophetically bewailing the consequent ruin of Italy at the end of his unfinishedOrlando Innamorato, which he is supposed to have begun about 1472. The greater part of this poem had been published in 1486, the continuation is said to have appeared in 1495, but the edition of 1506 is the earliest now extant.

Although Orlando and Rinaldo are the heroes, the story of Boiardo’s poem is original. “Turpino istesso la nascose,” he says. It is exceedingly graceful and ingenious. Argalia and his sister Angelica, the children of the King of Cathay, present themselves at Charlemagne’s court. The former has an enchanted lance, by the virtue of which he might have overthrown all Charles’s paladins; but the pig-headed Saracen Feraù persists, like Monsieur Jourdain’s servant, in thrusting tierce when he ought to thrust quarte, and Argalia is glad to make his escape,[Pg 133] leaving the lance behind him. It falls into the hands of Astolfo, the English knight, not hitherto especially distinguished in battle or tourney, but who at least possesses his countrymen’s characteristic of not knowing when they are beaten.

By means of this lance Astolfo performs the most signal exploits, delivering Charles from the invasion of Gradasso, King of Sericana, who makes war upon him to obtain Rinaldo’s steed Bajardo, and Orlando’s sword Durindana. Rinaldo and Orlando themselves are absent in pursuit of Angelica, who has returned to her own country. Angelica and Rinaldo are alternately wrought to fondness and antipathy through the spell of enchanted potions supplied by the poet ad libitum. Orlando, without obtaining any share of her affections, remains her humble slave. All are involved in a maze of adventures, most cunningly interwoven, replete with the endless delight of inexhaustible invention and the surprise of perpetual novelty. No motto for the poem could be more appropriate than that with which Panizzi prefaces his edition:

In spite of the wild and fanciful character of the incidents, a deep interest is excited for the principal personages, who are truly human, except when avowedly of[Pg 134] the fortisque Gyas fortisque Cloanthus order, or, as the Italian poet himself has it,

Avino, Avolio, Ottone, e Berlinghiero.

In this respect Boiardo has a great advantage over Spenser; his characters are actual people, not mere abstractions, and he is unencumbered with allegory. As a master of poetic language he is greatly inferior. Though both picturesque and tuneful, he is far from rivalling the colour and music of the Englishman. Compared to theFaerie Queene his poem is as his own clear-chiming octave to the sonorous magnificence of the Spenserian stanza. In general, his tone is much more easy and familiar than Spenser’s; when he chooses, however, his sentiment is more elevated and his pathos more moving. Poetry has few passages at once so nobly heroic and so exquisitely touching as the combat between Orlando and Agricane, epitomised by Leigh Hunt in hisStories from the Italian Poets. The pen fell from Boiardo’s hand just as he was bringing his errant heroes back to encounter the new invasion of the African king Agramante, and the powerful hand that took it up used it to delay the approaching denouement, and superimpose a new structure upon the original foundation. In every literary quality Ariosto excels Boiardo, but he is a remove further from the realms of chivalry and fairie, and

Both are poets of the Renaissance, but Ariosto has more of that aspect of pomp and luxury which estranged[Pg 135] Ruskin, and Boiardo of that half-erudite, half-ignorant naïveté which so fascinates in the pictures of Botticelli and Roselli. The following stanzas, translated by Miss Ellen Clerke, form an excellent specimen of Boiardo’s manner in general, and exemplify that delightful blending of classic and romantic feeling only possible in the youth of a literature:

[Pg 137]

The fastidious refinement of the Italians of the sixteenth century for a time obscured the fame of one of their most delightful authors. We have seen that Boiardo was a native of the district of Reggio; we have also seen that Reggio was among the places which, in the opinion of no less eminent a judge than Dante, were disqualified by their dialect from ever producing a poet. It is no wonder, therefore, that theOrlando Innamorato should teem with inelegances of diction, scarcely perceptible to a foreigner, but which seemed most flagrant in an age when priests pocketed their breviaries for fear of contaminating their style. Two other poets independently addressed themselves to the task of making Boiardo presentable. Domenichi, “a literary gentleman by trade,” did little good or harm; he neither added nor omitted a stanza, except in the first canto, and as he went on his emendations fell off. Berni, a great writer in his way, of whom much must be said when we treat of comic and familiar poetry, inserted many stanzas of his own, and altered so many throughout as to metamorphose the spirit no less than the diction of the poem. Chivalry and humour are nicely balanced throughout the original; the poet occasionally smiles at the extravagance of his own imaginations, but his irony never broadens into burlesque. In Berni’s rifacimento the element of humour greatly preponderates, and the elegance and grace of the adulteration make no sufficient amends for the transposition of a noble poem from an heroic into a familiar key. Although his rifacimento was not frequently reprinted, it attained such celebrity in literary circles that Boiardo was almost forgotten, and theOrlando Innamorato commonly passed under Berni’s name. No edition of the[Pg 138] original as Boiardo wrote it was published from 1544 to 1830, when Antonio Panizzi, doubtless stimulated by the circumstance that he himself was born near Reggio,[13] redeemed it from oblivion, and restored it to the place it has ever since maintained as a star of at least the second magnitude in the constellation of Italian epic poetry.

The almost simultaneous appearance of two such poems as theMorgante and theOrlando by two writers of such social and intellectual distinction as Pulci and Boiardo, indicates that the love of chivalrous fiction must have been very rife in Italy. It is remarkable that the Italian writers should have so rarely essayed the easier path of prose-romance, but this they left to the Spaniards, who on their part, excepting in ballads, in that age rarely ventured upon poetical composition. One only of the Italian romantic epics between Boiardo and Ariosto deserves mention. It is the Mambriano of FRANCESCO BELLO, known asIl Cieco d’Adria. The blind bard amused the court of Mantua with recitations which he afterwards stitched together into a long poem devoid of all pretence to epic unity. But, as he himself observes, he thought he had done enough in bringing all the paladins back to Paris, and rendering all the Saracens tributary to the Emperor. His diction is often as unshapen as his story; nevertheless, he is a real poet, and his description of the Temple of Mars in particular will compare not unfavourably with those of Statius, Chaucer, and Boccaccio.

Before parting with the predecessors of Ariosto, a word should be said of Boiardo’s minor poems. Besides a comedy,Timone, to be noticed hereafter, he wrote numerous canzoni and sonnets. Of these Panizzi justly says: “Boiardo’s poetry, although in the manner of Petrarch, has all the marks of originality, and resembles more the character of the predecessors of the Bard of Laura than of his successors. His poetry was not written to be read, but to be sung, and was submitted to those musical as well as metrical laws by which that of Petrarch had been governed. In his day, music was still subject to poetry, and the inanimate instruments were designed to support, not to drown, the human voice.” Panizzi, therefore, seems to consider Boiardo the last of the truly melodious lyrists of Italy; though it is just to point out that his remark respecting the predominance of the instrument over the voice did not become applicable until the seventeenth century, and that he elsewhere seems to confine the decay of Italian melody to the two centuries immediately preceding his own time (1830). His edition of Boiardo’s lyrics is almost inaccessible; but he has quoted enough in his memoir of the author to confirm his favourable judgment of their literary qualities.

Boiardo had accomplished a great work. He had raised the old chivalric romance to epic dignity, and shown its capability of classic form. This, impeded by his provincial education and the low standard of poetry prevailing in his time, he had not himself been able to impart. The achievement was reserved for one who has infinitely transcended him in reputation, though it may be questioned whether he has indeed greatly surpassed him in any respect but style and the gift of story-telling, and who is certainly inferior to him in sincerity and simplicity.

LODOVICO ARIOSTO was born at Reggio, near which town Boiardo also had first seen the light, on September 8, 1474. His family was noble, and his father, who survived his birth about twenty years, filled many important offices. Like the fathers of Petrarch and Boccaccio, he insisted that his son should follow the profession of the law, which the youth renounced after five years of fruitless, perhaps not very persevering study. His father’s death left Ariosto at the head of a large family, for which he had to provide out of a scanty patrimony. He solaced his cares by classical studies, which made him a fair Latin poet. About 1503 he entered the service of the Cardinal of Este, brother of the Duke of[Pg 141] Ferrara, and hence a member of that house whose glory it has been to have numbered two of the most illustrious poets of Italy in its train, and whose infelicity to have derived more obloquy than honour from the connection. Boiardo’sOrlando Innamorato had been designed for the glorification of the house of Este, but the purpose is not sufficiently obtrusive to spoil our pleasure in the poet’s ideal world. Ariosto took up the thread of the narrative where his predecessor had dropped it, and writing in the spirit of a courtier, produced in theOrlando Furioso a sequel related to Boiardo’s poem much as Virgil’s national epic on the wanderings of Æneas is related to Homer’s artless tale of the wanderings of Ulysses.

In so far as Ariosto’s objects were poetical fame and the honour of his native country they were attained to the full; but his toil was almost vain as respected recompense from the princes for whose sake he had blemished his poem. The Cardinal, a coarse, unscrupulous man, fitter for a soldier than an ecclesiastic, was apparently unable to discern any connection between Ruggiero’s hippogriff and the glories of his descendants, and upon the publication of theOrlando in 1510, asked the poet quite simply “where he had been for all that rot?” He is stated, however, to have presented Ariosto with a golden chain, rather for the ornament of his person than the relief of his necessities, as he could not venture to turn it into money. Ariosto further incurred his Eminence’s displeasure by hesitating to accompany him on a mission to Hungary, and found it advisable to exchange his service for the Duke’s. The Duke, a prince lavish in shows, economical in salaries, thought the poet abundantly rewarded by the governorship of the Garfagnana,[Pg 142] which it was necessary to confer upon somebody. The Garfagnana was a wild district overrun with poetical banditti, readers and admirers of their governor’s epic. Here Ariosto gained much honour, but little emolument.

His experience of his patrons generally justified his favourite motto,Pro bono malum. Even the munificent Leo X. did nothing for him but kiss him on both cheeks, and remit half the fees upon the brief that assured his copyrights, his particular friend Cardinal Bibbiena pocketing the other. His sole real benefactor was the Marquis del Vasto, husband of the lady whom we shall find celebrated by Luigi Tansillo, who settled an annuity of a hundred ducats upon him. Even this was consideration for value to be received, the Marquis, himself a poet, being properly impressed by theVixere fortes ante Agamemnona maxim. Ariosto acquitted himself of his obligation like a man, comparing his patron to Cæsar, Nestor, Achilles, Nireus, and Ladas. Great as was the renown which hisOrlando procured for him in his lifetime, its profits were not such as to render him independent of patronage; yet, after all, he was able to boast that the modest house which he built for himself, and where he died in 1533, was paid for by his own money.[14] It is kept to this day by the municipality of Ferrara; and Ariosto’s manuscripts, evincing his indefatigable care in the revision of his poem, are preserved in the public library.

The chief literary occupations of his latter years had been the composition of comedies, the superintendence of theatrical performances for the entertainment of the Duke, and the incessant revision of theOrlando Furioso, [Pg 143]enlarged from forty to forty-six cantos. The last edition published under his own inspection appeared in 1532, and was not regarded by him as definitive. He also began a continuation, intended to narrate the death of Ruggiero by the treachery of Gano, of which only five cantos were written.

So great is the variety of theOrlando Furioso, that it appears difficult at first to discover a clue to a main action among its thronging and complicated adventures. Ginguené and Panizzi, however, have shown that one exists, and that this is the union of Ruggiero and Bradamante, the fabulous ancestors of the house of Este. All the poet’s skill is exerted to keep them apart, that he may bring them together at last. Orlando, Rinaldo, Angelica, the chief personages of theInnamorato, have become subordinate characters; and, notwithstanding the title of the poem, Orlando’s madness is but an episode. The unfortunate consequence is the transfer of the main interest from personages whom Boiardo had made highly attractive, to Ruggiero and Bradamante, less impressive in the hands of Ariosto, whose forte is rather in depicting tender or humorous than heroic character. It would not be just to say that this occasions the chief disadvantage of the poem in comparison with theInnamorato, the loss of the elder poet’s delightful naïveté. Rather the change of plan and the falling off in simplicity spring from the same root, the taste and character of the author.

Ariosto was more of a courtier than a knight, and thought more of the house of Este than of the paladins of Charlemagne. He wrought upon Boiardo in the spirit of Dryden adapting Chaucer; while his predecessor, though himself courtly, may rather be likened to[Pg 144] William Morris. Boiardo, though also purposing the panegyric of the house of Este, sings for the delight of singing, and introduces no incongruous fifteenth-century figures into his romantic pageant. Ariosto mars his epic by contemporary allusions, as Spenser and Tennyson marred theirs by far-fetched allegory. It must be remembered, in justice to him, that his perpetual adulation of the court of Ferrara seemed less extravagant then than now. To us the importance attached to a family which would be forgotten if Ariosto and Tasso had not swelled its retinue, and if Lucrezia Borgia had not married into it, borders on the absurd. It seems preposterous that hosts should be equipped, and giants and dragons and enchanters set in motion, and paladins despatched on errands to the moon, that Ariosto may compliment a cardinal whose want of culture rather than his penetration led him to rate these compliments at their worth. But in Ariosto’s day that court was a bright and dazzling reality, and almost every member of his immediate circle depended upon it for his bread.

If we can forget his servility, or persuade ourselves to deem it loyalty, we shall find little to censure in Ariosto. Shelley’s assertion that he is only sometimes a poet implies a narrow conception of the nature of poetry. Rather may it be said that he is always a poet, always fanciful, always musical, always elevated, though not always to a very great altitude, above the level of the choicest prose. It is true that he has nothing of the seer in his composition, that his perfect technical mastery is rarely either exalted or disturbed by any gleam of the light that never was on sea or land, that his poem is destitute of moral or patriotic purpose, and that his standard in all things is that of his age.[Pg 145] This merely proves that he is not in the rank of supremely great poets—a position which he would not have claimed for himself; nor have his countrymen paralleled him with Dante. He is hardly to be called Homeric, though endowed with the Homeric rapidity, directness, conciseness, and, except when he voluntarily turns to humour and burlesque, much of the Homeric nobility.

Perhaps the nearest literary analogy to theOrlando Furioso in another language is theMetamorphoses of Ovid. In both poems appear the same perspicuity and facility of narration, the same sweetness of versification, the same art of interweaving episodes into a whole. Ariosto’s vigour and directness, nevertheless, are wanting to Ovid, and the palm of invention and of the delineation of character undoubtedly belongs to him, for Ovid was forbidden to introduce a new incident, or vary any of the personages afforded by his mythological repertory. The fact that theOrlando is not, like theJerusalem, a newÆneid, but a newMetamorphoses, entirely justifies the introduction of such burlesque satire as the abode of Discord among the monks, or such delightful extravagance as Astolfo’s flight to the moon in quest of Orlando’s brains, resulting in the recovery of no inconsiderable portion of his own. Such episodes are, indeed, the most characteristic passages of theFurioso; yet in others, such as the siege of Paris and the madness of Orlando, Ariosto shows himself capable of rising to epical dignity, which he could have assumed more frequently if it had entered into his plan. This rather required the gifts of the painter, whether of natural scenery or of human emotion, which he possessed in the most eminent degree; and of the ironic but kindly observer of human life, which he[Pg 146] exhibited so fully that even his descriptions are less popular and admired than the reflective and moralising introductions to his cantos. Never was such wildness of imagination ballasted with such solid good sense. Yet, when all is said, his most distinctive merit remains his unsurpassed talent of exposition, his unfaltering flow of energetic, perspicuous, melodious narrative; excellence apparently spontaneous and unstudied, but in truth due to the strenuous revision of one who judged himself severely, and deemed with Michael Angelo that trifles made perfection, and perfection was no trifle. Mr. Courthope, in an admirable parallel, has pointed out his great superiority as a narrator to his disciple Spenser, whose pictures, nevertheless, glow with deeper and softer tints, and whose voluminous melody tills the ear more perfectly than Ariosto’s ringing stanza.

The controversy whether Ariosto or Tasso’s poem is the greater epic, as it was one of the most obstinately interminable ever raised by academic pedantry, is also one of the idlest. They belong to different departments of art; it would be as reasonable to compare a picture with a statue. The question, nevertheless, which of the men was the greater poet, does admit of profitable discussion, though it may be difficult to establish any but a subjective criterion. If endowment with the poetical temperament is to be taken as the test, the palm certainly belongs to Tasso, whose actions, thoughts, and misfortunes are invariably those of a poet, and whose inward music is constantly finding expression in lyrical verse. Ariosto’s comparatively few lyrics generally wear a less spontaneous aspect than Tasso’s; the incidents of his life rather bespeak the man of affairs than the man of books; and if hisOrlando had perished, we should[Pg 147] hardly have surmised how great a poet had been lost in him.

If, on the other hand, the palm should be bestowed for mastery of art, it seems rather due to Ariosto, who handles his theme with more vigour, and has it more thoroughly under control. He is not obliged, like Tasso, to embellish his poem with episodes which, by their superior attractiveness, almost eclipse the main action: the few passages of the kind in theOrlando are strictly subordinate, and not among its principal ornaments. The chief artistic blots upon his poem could not well have been avoided. So completely, though unjustly, has he overshadowed his predecessor Boiardo, that we are apt to forget that his work is an example, unique in literature, of the successful continuation of another’s. The adulation of the house of Este was an inheritance from his precursor; it is only to be regretted that, contrary to the example of Boiardo and the subsequent practice of Tasso, he should have given it disproportionate prominence. The incurable defect of the action of theFurioso is also a legacy from the Innamorato. Ruggiero, the real hero of Ariosto’s part of the poem, wins the hand of Bradamante, and becomes the ancestor of the house of Este, by apostasy. The poem finds him a pagan, and leaves him a Christian. All that ingenuity can effect is employed to extenuate his desertion; nevertheless, the sympathies of every reader must be with the Saracen Rodomonte when he appears in the last canto to tax Ruggiero with his change of sides, and necessarily (for otherwise what would have become of the house of Este?) is slain for his loyalty, to the scandal of poetical justice.

That Ariosto, apart from his boundless invention and[Pg 148] command of language and narrative, was a true poet, is shown by the extreme beauty of the majority of the introductions to his cantos, where he appears even more at home than in the descriptions of the deeds of prowess of which he was at bottom so sceptical. Another strong point is the number, vividness, and originality of his similes, not in general copied from ancient poets, but peculiar to himself, and perfectly descriptive of the object designed to be illustrated. One of the most apparently characteristic similes of a great master of quaint comparison, the late Coventry Patmore, is borrowed from him.[15]

The sense of Ariosto is easily represented in English, but it is another matter to reproduce his felicity of phrase. The following stanzas in Miss Ellen Clerke’s version are from the description of Angelica’s flight from Rinaldo:

The morality of theOrlando Furioso, some licentious episodes excepted which stand quite apart from the main action, may be considered good, being that of a refined and courtly circle where lofty virtues were cordially recognised in theory, however they might fail to be[Pg 150] exemplified in practice. Ariosto does not, like Tasso, convey the impression of a man above his time, and only depressed to its level by unpropitious circumstances. He is the child of his age, at the summit of its average elevation, but not transcending this. Yet it would have been well for Italy if her princes and statesmen had generally acted upon those ideas of honour and loyalty which they found and doubtless admired in their favourite poet. Such precepts as the following, even though enforced by the teacher’s example, were in their view much too good for ordinary practice:

[Pg 151]

To appreciate Zerbino’s fidelity to his word, it must be known that, having been vanquished in a joust, he has been compelled to vow to escort a hideous old woman of singular depravity, and to maintain her beauty and virtue against all comers, with the prospect of being killed in her service. A more comic situation will hardly be found in any of the romances.

Ariosto’s comedies must be considered along with the Italian drama in general. The most important of his minor poetical works are the Satires, rather in the vein of Horace than of Juvenal, and, in truth, hardly satires at all in any proper sense of the term. They are good metrical talk on light subjects, elegant, chatty, and discursive. His own disappointments are alluded to very good-humouredly. His lyrical pieces are not remarkable, except one impressive sonnet, in which he appears to express compunction for the irregularities of his life:

Late in life the poet married; whether he also reformed seems doubtful. His amours, however, were unaccom[Pg 152]panied by tragedy or scandal. In fact, this most wildly imaginative of the Italian poets seems to have had less than most poets of the poetic temperament, and the amiability for which he is universally praised was not accompanied by any remarkable acuteness of feeling. His virtues were those of an excellent man of the world; he was liberal, courteous, sensible, just, and sincere.

The success of theOrlando Furioso, which Bernardo Tasso, writing in 1559, affirms to be better known and more talked of than Homer, naturally produced the same effect as the popularity of Scott and Byron produced in England—“All could raise the flower, for all had got the seed.” The two most important of these imitations, the Girone il Cortese of Luigi Alamanni and theAmadigi of Bernardo Tasso—both good poets, to be mentioned again in other departments of literature—resemble Pygmalion’s image before the interposition of Venus; all the constituents of a fine poem are there, but the breath of life is wanting. “TheGirone,” says Ginguené, “is a very dignified, very rational, and generally well-written poem, but cold and consequently somewhat tiresome.” If there is more warmth in theAmadigi, there is also more loquacity, and the power of the author, an excellent writer on a small scale, is quite inadequate to sustain continuous interest through a hundred cantos. The comparison which he necessarily courts with the old romance of Vasco Lobeira, the best work of its class, is always unfavourable to him. His copious employment of elfin machinery gave him opportunities of which he failed to avail himself. The best of him as an epic writer is his gift of brilliant description. The younger Tasso’sRinaldo is a very extraordinary production for a youth of eighteen, but the impulse towards the chival[Pg 153]rous epic was exhausted by his time, and he wisely found another way of rivalling Ariosto. TheOrlandino and theRicciardetto belong rather to the class of the mock heroic, to be treated hereafter. The names of a few of the most remarkable bona-fide attempts at chivalric poetry must suffice: theGuerino il Meschino of Tullia d’Aragona, theOgier the Dane of Cassiodoro Narni, theDeath of Ruggiero of Giambatista Pescatore, the Triumphs of Charlemagne of Francesco de’ Lodovici, the First Exploits of Orlando of Lodovico Dolce, and the Angelica Innamorata of Vincenzo Brusantini.

Apart from the poems of the chivalric cycles, Italy witnessed but few attempts at epic in the first half of the sixteenth century. Of the author of one of these, however, it might be said,Magnis excidit ausis. GIOVANNI GIORGIO TRISSINO was born of a noble family at Vicenza in 1478. He repaired the defects of a neglected education with singular industry, and endeared himself to the two Medici Popes, Leo and Clement, who entrusted him with important diplomatic missions. His most successful poetical work, the tragedy ofSophonisba (1515), brought him great fame, and actually does mark an era in the history of the drama. He wrote much on grammar, but could effect only one reform, the distinction between i and j and u and v. After his retirement from diplomacy Trissino lived many years among his fellow-citizens, wealthy and honoured; but his later years were embittered by a painful and disastrous lawsuit with his son by his first marriage. He died in 1549.

Trissino had commenced in 1525 the composition of his epic,The Deliverance of Italy from the Goths, which was published in 1547 and 1548. It has some[Pg 154] literary interest as the first attempt to write Italian epic poetry in blank verse, but its great misfortune is to be in verse of any kind. The diction is good, the exposition simple and clear; if turned into prose it would make a pleasant story for youth, something like Fénelon’sTelemachus. But how a man of Trissino’s cultivation could have persuaded himself that a mere metrical form, and this neither artful nor tuneful, could turn prose into poetry, is indeed difficult to understand. The disyllabic termination of the lines—almost inevitable in Italian—is not conducive to metrical majesty at the best; and Trissino seems to have had no idea of cadence or variety, and to have been content if he could scan his lines upon his fingers. There is no inspiration, and no pretence to inspiration, from exordium to peroration of his sober epic; his Pegasus is not only a pack-horse, but a pack-horse without bells.

In truth, the displacement of the Goths, making room for the Pope, the Lombard and the Byzantine Exarch, was no deliverance for Italy, but her great misfortune. A poet, however, is not obliged like a historian to distinguish nicely between Theodoric and Alaric; and Trissino, with all his pedantry, might have ranked as a bard if he could have felt as a patriot; if he could have depicted the Italy of the Goths as the prototype of the Italy of his own age, rent amid French and Spaniards and Germans. Whether he conceived the idea or not, he could not or dared not give it utterance. He nevertheless energetically denounced the abuses of the Papacy by a prophecy put into the mouth of an angel.

The history of chivalric poetry is especially interesting, as it in all probability exactly repeats that of the Homeric epic. While the great events, the siege of Troy and the Saracen invasion of France, are being really enacted, we have no poetry at all. After two or three centuries ballads appear, disfiguring genuine history, and shifting its centre of gravity to incidents unimportant in themselves, but susceptible of poetical treatment. After two or three more, poets arise who embellish these romances, bestow poetical form upon them, and work them into consistent wholes. Had Italy been no further advanced than Greece at the corresponding epoch, the poems of Boiardo and Ariosto would have braved two centuries of oral recitation, and come much corrupted and interpolated into the hands of some Aristarchus who would have given them their final form. The invention of printing suppressed this ultimate stage of development, but encouraged the growth of imitators, whom it preserved from annihilation, while unable to preserve them from oblivion.

We have now traversed nearly three centuries of Italian literature without encountering one really great prose-writer, Boccaccio only excepted. Unquestionably the development of Italian prose was retarded by the cultivation of Latin, which deprived it of ornaments in Petrarch, Pontano, and Æneas Sylvius—to say nothing of the buried talent which the example of such writers would have called into activity. With every allowance on these accounts, it is still remarkable how generally the path of the historian of early Italian literature lies amid the flowers of poetry and fiction. But the time had now come when, as in Greece, the national genius was about to assert itself in prose, and, also as in Greece, the movement was heralded by historians. After a long interval, due to the exclusive cultivation of ancient models, the Italian Herodotus, Giovanni Villani, was to be followed by two men who might dispute the character of the Italian Thucydides, who at all events belonged to that invaluable class of historians who, like Thucydides, in the events of which they are the narrators and the judges. This advantage was possessed in an eminent degree by FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI, the historian of contemporary times; and though NICCOLÓ [Pg 157] MACHIAVELLI did not write his principal work as a contemporary, his knowledge of the Florentine constitution was so intimate as almost to invest him with the authority of an eye-witness of the Florentine revolutions of the past.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the first Italian and almost the first modern to display eminent genius as an historical and political writer, was born at Florence, May 3, 1469. His family had been illustrious for public services; his father, whom he lost at sixteen, was a jurist; his mother was a poetess. Little is known of his life until we find him in 1494 secretary to Marcello Virgilio, a learned man who four years afterwards became head of the chancery of the Republic, a post somewhat resembling Milton’s Latin Secretaryship under the Commonwealth, but allowing more active participation in the business of diplomacy. Machiavelli rose along with his patron, and in 1500 was entrusted with a mission to France. In the following year he had a more arduous part to play as envoy to Cæsar Borgia, then consolidating his power in the Romagna, but for the moment pressed with great difficulties. Machiavelli’s reports of his mission have been preserved, and attest the impression made upon him by Cæsar’s supremacy in ability and villainy, which continued to fascinate him when years afterwards he composed his manual of political statecraft.

Judged in the sinister light which his writings have seemed to throw back upon his actions, he has been accused of having counselled and devised the coup by which Cæsar destroyed his treacherous condottieri at Sinigaglia, as if the Borgia needed any tuition for an exploit of this nature. He is also censured for recording it without disapproval; but if[Pg 158] Cæsar had never done anything worse than rid the Romagna of its vermin, history would not be severe with him. Two years later, employed upon a mission to Rome, he beheld Cæsar’s fall, and the elevation of Pope Julius, whom he accompanied on yet another mission to the conquest of Bologna. He was also despatched about this time on embassies to Germany and France, and his observations on the circumstances and characteristics of both nations exhibit great sagacity. Soon afterwards the affairs of the Republic became troubled, hemmed in as she was between the transalpine powers and the Pope and the exiled Medici. Machiavelli was actively engaged in organising her military resources, but his efforts were fruitless. The restoration of the Medici was effected in September 1512. Machiavelli lost his employments, and soon afterwards, upon suspicion of participation in a conspiracy, was thrown into prison, tortured, and owed his deliverance to an amnesty granted as an act of grace by the Medicean Pope Leo upon his election in 1513.

He retired to a small estate, where, as he tells us in a most interesting letter which has reached our times, he consoled himself with the study of the ancients, familiar intercourse with his rustic neighbours, and the composition of hisPrince. The chief purpose of this famous work certainly was not to recommend himself to the Medici, but he would willingly have made it subservient to that end. They neglected him, however, until 1519, when Cardinal Medici, afterwards Pope Clement VII., called upon him for a memoir on the best method of administering the Florentine government, in which Machiavelli showed much dexterity in reconciling the interests of the house of Medici with the interests of his country. His advice[Pg 159] was not followed; but the Cardinal commissioned him to write the history of Florence. He had previously employed his leisure in the production of his memorable discourses on Livy, his comedy theMandragola, and his life of Castruccio Castracani. In 1527 he was employed in fortifying Florence against an apprehended attack of the Imperial army, which fell upon Rome, and he afterwards accompanied the forces sent to make a show of delivering the Pope. During his absence the Medicean government was overthrown, an event highly agreeable to his secret wishes; but his compliances had rendered him odious to the patriotic party, and he returned to his native city to find himself the object of general aversion and suspicion. His mortification probably hastened his death, which took place on June 21, 1527.

Of all Machiavelli’s writings thePrince is the most famous, and deservedly, for it is the most characteristic. Few subjects of literary discussion have occasioned more controversy than the purpose of this celebrated book. Some have beheld in it a manual for tyrants, like the memoirs of Tiberius, so diligently perused by Domitian; others have regarded it as a refined irony upon tyranny, on the sarcastic plan of Swift’s Directions to Servants, if so humble an analogy be permissible. From various points of view it might alternately pass for either, but its purpose is accurately conveyed by neither interpretation. Machiavelli was a sincere though too supple a republican, and by no means desired the universal prevalence of tyranny throughout Italy. If he had written with the sole view of ingratiating himself with the Medici—probably in fact a subordinate motive with him, and the rather as there actually was a project for investing Giuliano de’ Medici with the sovereignty of[Pg 160] the Romagna, the theatre of Cæsar Borgia’s exploits—he would have been much more earnest in pressing it upon their attention. If, on the other hand, satire had been his chief object, this would have been more mordant and poignant; his power of contemptuous irony is only revealed in the short chapter on the Papal monarchy. His aim probably was to show how to build up a principality capable of expelling the foreigner and restoring the independence of Italy. But this intention could not be safely expressed, and hence his work seems repulsive, because the reason of state which he propounds as an apology for infringing the moral code appears not patriotic, but purely selfish.

In our day we have seen Italian independence won by appeals to the patriotism of the nation at large. This was impossible in Machiavelli’s time; nor, had it been otherwise, would his lips have been touched with the live coal of a Mazzini. He could only speak as a politician to politicians, and addressing himself as it were to a body of scientific experts, he designedly excludes all considerations of morality. His treatise appears antiquated in our day, when the national conscience is as easily manipulated as the conscience of the individual; in oligarchical ages it passed not unreasonably for a perfect manual of statecraft, and exercised great influence upon the statesmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Frederick the Great assailed it vehemently in his youth, but lived to compliment it by what has been described as the sincerest form of flattery. In Frederick’s century, when public affairs actually were in the hands of a few able rulers, it was worth attacking and defending; in the present democratic age, when a statesman who squared his conduct by its maxims would soon find himself the[Pg 161] object of popular odium, its interest, except as regards its weighty plea for a popular army, is mainly historical and psychological. There is an intimate connection between thePrince and the seven books on theArt of War, written about 1520. In thePrince Machiavelli insists particularly upon the part which the habit of relying upon treacherous and mutinous mercenaries, and the consequent decay of public spirit among the citizens, had had in bringing about the ruin of the Italian states. In theArt of War he shows how the citizen army he recommends is to be organised and led in battles and sieges. His experience of military affairs as an eye-witness, as well as an administrator, had been considerable, and he is by no means to be slighted as a tactical writer; but the military art was on the eve of great changes, which rendered much of his wisdom obsolete.

TheDiscourses on Livy’s Decades occupy a middle position between political and historical science. They are entirely grounded on the study of Livy; but their main importance consists not in the commentary upon the transactions Livy has related, but in the application of these to the general principles of politics and to the circumstances of the writer’s own country. They may be defined as in some sort thePrince rewritten on a larger scale, and copiously illustrated by historical examples; but the effect is much more pleasing. In the other book Machiavelli appears as the mere scientific analyst of politics, and his real purpose might be reasonably questioned; but theDiscourses leave no doubt of his genuine patriotism and of his preference of morality to obliquity, except where, as it seems to him, the interest of the state interferes. The problem[Pg 162] of the permissibility of an act reprehensible in the abstract, but required by the safety of the stale—as, for example, Mohammed Ali’s massacre of the Mamelukes—is a very difficult one, and Machiavelli cannot be fairly judged from the standpoint of the nineteenth century. He had not seen the trial and failure of his ideal prince on a colossal scale in the person of Napoleon. It was a cardinal error of his to deny a capacity of improvement to human nature and to assume that mankind would be essentially the same in all ages. We see, on the contrary, that the general standard of righteousness has been greatly raised since his time; and that, even if this were not so, the conditions of modern society are adverse to Machiavellian policy: to import this perception, however, into the criticism of his work would be but to reverse his own mistake. Many other criticisms might be addressed to him: he did not, for example, foresee that another set of patriots, from their own point of view, might arise, whose conception of the summum bonum in polity would be entirely different from his own; and that within a few years his maxims might serve as an arsenal for the Jesuits, whose objects would have been his utter abomination. With all his faults and oversights, nothing can deprive Machiavelli of the glory of having been the modern Aristotle in politics, the first, or at least the first considerable writer who derived a practical philosophy from history, and exalted statecraft into science.

Machiavelli’sHistory of Florence is not, like hisDiscourses, a work of profound thought, nor is it authoritative in any respect. It rather exhibits him as the elegant and accomplished man of letters, and is perhaps the first successful restoration of the classical style of[Pg 163] history to a European vernacular. His great contemporary Guicciardini had indeed anticipated him with a fragment on the same subject, but this long remained unpublished, and it is not likely that Machiavelli ever saw it. Machiavelli has not delved deep for materials; much of the early part of his history is taken almost literally from Flavio Biondo and other predecessors. He has sometimes departed unjustifiably from strict matter of fact, not by invention or serious misrepresentation, but by accentuating and slightly modifying actual incidents to give them the particular colour he desires. In the main, however, his work is a faithful as well as an animated picture of the public life of a community in its characteristics more nearly akin to the ancient commonwealth of Athens than any the earth has seen since this disappeared from her face. The quality which will preserve even a bad history, and without which a good one will only live as a book of reference, is never absent from Machiavelli’s—he entertains while he instructs. His work, which was composed after 1520 by order of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, is divided into eight books, and extends from the beginning of Florentine history to the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492. The intimate connection of Florence with the general course of Italian politics leads to frequent digressions and copious notices of neighbouring states. Another historical work of Machiavelli’s, the Life of Castruccio Castracani, Prince of Lucca in the fourteenth century, is little more than a romance, in which he has endeavoured to depict the ideal soldier and statesman.

Machiavelli’s plays and poems will be noticed elsewhere. They in no respect detract from his reputation. He came nearer than any contemporary, except Leonardo[Pg 164] da Vinci, to approving himself a universal genius. No man of his time stands higher intellectually, and his want of moral elevation is largely redeemed by his ample endowment with the one virtue chiefly needful to an Italian in his day, but of which too many Italians were destitute—patriotism.

Patriotism cannot be denied to Machiavelli’s great counterpart, Francesco Guicciardini, and if it seems colder and more stained by unworthy subserviency and political cynicism, it must be remembered that these defects are the defects of the qualities in which Guicciardini surpassed his rival. Machiavelli was a genius of the creative order, and hence, with all his astuteness, occasionally somewhat Utopian; his life was free, and his muse licentious. Guicciardini had a great practical genius, infallible within a narrow sphere. He does not invent or generalise; his wisdom comes mainly by experience, and he accepts things for what they are. “His originality,” says Signor Villari, “though doubtless considerable, was devoted to giving an exact and most lucid shape to the current doctrines of his day.” “A sound judgment,” he himself says in hisRicordi, “is better than a pregnant wit.” He is correct in all the relations of life, and has not the least turn for writing comedies. Machiavelli, after all his experiences, still hopes like an enchanted maiden for the ideal prince. Guicciardini knows that there is none such, and that, even if there were, the barbarians would be too strong for him. He coldly accepts the situation and hires himself out to a bad Government, with this redeeming quality, that it is still a Government of Italians by Italians. It may be said that Machiavelli was willing to enter the service of the Medici, and such is the fact; but[Pg 165] Florence had owed glorious days to Cosmo and Lorenzo, and Machiavelli could never have thought or written of them as Guicciardini did of his Papal employers:

“No one can have a stronger detestation than mine for the avarice, ambition, and sloth of the priesthood. Nevertheless, the position I have always held with several pontiffs has compelled me to love them for mine own advantage; and but for this consideration I should have loved Martin Luther as myself, not for the purpose of freeing myself from the laws introduced by the Christian religion, as it is generally interpreted and understood, but in order to see this herd of wretches reduced to their proper condition, namely, that of their being left either without vices or without authority.”

It had not always been so. The Papal satellite had been a trusted envoy of the Florentine Government. Born in 1483, he had studied law at Ferrara and Padua, become an advocate on his return to Florence, married advantageously, and in 1512 discharged a mission to Spain, where he graduated in diplomacy under the eye of the most crafty and faithless prince of the Age of Perfidy, Ferdinand the Catholic. The revolution which restored the Medici occurred in his absence. He accepted the situation, but instead of serving the Government at home, passed into the employment of the Medicean Pope, Leo X., to whom he must have been highly recommended, for he immediately received the government of Modena, Reggio, and Parma, recently added to the states of the Church, in which he showed the utmost energy and sagacity in suppressing malefactors and preserving order. From 1524 to 1527 he was President of the Romagna, and until 1534, when he retired from the Pope’s service, Governor of Bologna, and all evidence goes to show that the Papal power was[Pg 166] never more faithfully served than by the man who held it in such abhorrence. He cannot be acquitted of having favoured the overthrow of Florentine liberty in 1530, and is accused of acts of cupidity and vengeance which do not seem in harmony with his general character. He returned to his native city in 1534, hoping to play an important part under the restored dynasty; but the youthful Duke Cosmo, who needed no tutor in the arts of intrigue and dissimulation, gently thrust him aside, and the disappointed politician solaced his latter years with the composition of his history. Six years of literary leisure gave him a renown which his twenty years of active concern with the world’s business would never have procured him. He died in 1540, leaving his history still in want of the last touches.

It is, nevertheless, the leading fault of this very great book to have had too many touches already. Guicciardini, like Gibbon, thought much of his dignity, and assumed his historical as poets are said to assume their singing robes. He dropped the easy and vigorous style in which his fragment upon Florentine history had been composed in his youth, and wrote in a dignified and ambitious manner for which nature did not qualify him. Hence he is tedious, and the impression of tameness is enhanced by the unsatisfactory character of the incidents narrated, and the author’s general deficiency in enthusiasm. With all these defects it is still one of the most valuable histories ever written. It might be entitled the History of the Decline and Fall of Italy, from the French invasion in 1494. For us the sadness of the picture is relieved by our knowledge of the splendour of literature and art in an age of complete dissolution of the body politic; but these redeeming cir[Pg 167]cumstances do not enter into Guicciardini’s view: he can only write as Polybius wrote of the downfall of Greece. He has much in common with this historian: both men of affairs; both largely concerned with the events they describe; both embittered by public calamities and contemptuous of the capacity of their countrymen; both patriotic children of a ruined state, while compelled, and not wholly averse, to adopt intimate association with the conqueror; neither of them the master of a good style, but compensating this defect by good sense and the invaluable political lessons they derive from the transactions they record.

Another statesman-historian, Ranke, has brought heavy charges against Guicciardini, both of plagiarism and of wilful manipulation of facts, but he seems to have been successfully answered by Signor Villari in his Life of Machiavelli. Villari, who has had access to the archives of Guicciardini’s family, is able to show the extent to which he availed himself of MS. materials, and his care in working them up into his history. Many of his statements which have since been shown to be erroneous, were in conformity with the general belief of his time.

Guicciardini’s literary glory was enhanced, though his moral character suffered some injury, by the publication of his inedited writings in ten volumes in 1857 and following years. These include, with other important matter, the fragment of Florentine history to which reference has been made; his official correspondence as diplomatist and governor, full of historical information and practical sagacity; the considerations on Machiavelli, his friend and fellow-expert in politics, characteristic of the natures of the two men, so eminent respectively in[Pg 168] theory and in practice; theDialogue on the Government of Florence, avowing this ostensible partisan of the Medici’s secret preference for a republic, though an oligarchical one; most important of all, theRicordi politici e civili, maxims and memoranda of a statesman. These are purely aphoristic, without system or unity beyond that which they necessarily derive from the constitution of the mind upon which they have been impressed by experience and reflection.

“He fully understood,” says Villari, “that by this plan his counsels and political maxims became nothing more than simple observations, palliatives and tricks for the wiser or less wise guidance of the social machine, apart from all radical reform or the creation of any new system of political science or moral philosophy, and still less of any new state or new people. But he neither hoped nor desired to entertain hopes of so lofty a nature. System he did not seek, daring hypotheses were not to his taste; he merely gathered the fruit of his own and others’ daily experience.” In a word, Guicciardini was a realist; Machiavelli, for all his worldly wisdom, an idealist. As the Bishop of London has remarked: “It is the weakness of Machiavelli’s political method that, while professing to deal with politics in a practical spirit, he is not practical enough.” It would seem Guicciardini’s chief fault to have taken too limited a view of human affairs, and to have judged too exclusively from what was happening in his own corner. The imperfection of historical materials, however, rendered any attempt at a philosophy of history extremely difficult, and Guicciardini’s time was too much occupied by administrative labours for profound investigation. Notwithstanding his opportunism and political[Pg 169] pessimism, he had an ideal, and he tells us plainly what it was:

“I desire to see three things before my death—but I doubt I may live long enough without seeing any of them—a well-ordered republican mode of life in our own city, the deliverance of Italy from all barbarians, and the world freed from the tyranny of these execrable priests.”

The mutability of the world might almost seem to justify Guicciardini’s hand-to-mouth method of getting through it. We have seen Petrarch two centuries earlier calling for the Pope’s return to Rome as the panacea for all the ills of Italy. Guicciardini would have sided with him in that age; in his own the same genius of liberty which spoke by Petrarch’s mouth to demand the Pope’s restoration speaks by his to demand the Pope’s expulsion. It was not given to him to see the great value in evil times of the temporal power—in good times monstrous—as an asylum for what little of independence could still subsist in Italy, and a testimony, however feeble, to a moral and spiritual unity destined to develop into a national unity. But against the Papal sway on its own merits, apart from the accidental circumstances of the time, Guicciardini and Machiavelli prophesy like the two witnesses of the Apocalypse.

Italy now possessed a perfect standard of prose. She had already had one in the fourteenth century, when so rapid had been the development of the power of expression that the form had outrun the substance. She could say anything; but except by the mouth of the novelist Boccaccio, and that of Petrarch, who preferred to write his prose in Latin, had found little worthy of emphatic utterance. It may be partly owing to this poverty of matter in the vernacular literature, as well as to the passion for Latin, that style decayed so greatly during the fifteenth century. Yet, so far as the latter of these causes operated, the evil brought its own remedy: it was impossible to be as deeply versed as Pontano or Politian in the elegances of Latin without becoming impatient of barbarism and pedantry in Italian. Sannazaro, an exquisite Latin writer, was perhaps the first considerable man who insisted on an even standard of distinction in both languages. Fortunately for Italy, the Arcadia was a very popular book; fortunately, too, the Latin constructions with which it is replete were not so easily imitated as its general refinement of phrase. By the time of Leo X. inelegance had almost disappeared from Italian literature, and Italy might boast her[Pg 171]self the only country in Europe that possessed a perfect literary language; wanting, indeed, the golden simplicity of the thirteenth century, but still the prose of cultivated men, and adequate for every form of literary composition. The intellectual distinction thus conferred upon the nation, combined with her still more pronounced superiority in the arts, seemed, as with Greece in similar circumstances, to regain for her a dominion more illustrious than that of which she had been despoiled. For a hundred years her authors were the arbiters of taste and the models of Europe, a sovereignty which might have been prolonged had it been possible for her to place herself on the right and victorious side in the great battle for civil and religious freedom that resounded throughout the sixteenth century.

As in all countries at their first awakening to an era of literary culture, this culture had gone deep enough to produce a multitude of authors, but not deep enough to generate a literary public capable of supporting them. The appetite for fame and the delight in authorship filled the ranks of literature with aspiring recruits, but the commissariat, without which no army can keep the field, had to be supplied by patronage, either from individuals or the state. Hence, except when some wealthy noble like Angelo di Costanzo was smitten with the passion for literary fame, we usually find the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even when most illustrious, in a condition of dependence. When with this is considered the utter absence of civil freedom (for Venice, the one free city, hospitable to authors, allowed little liberty to printers), it is remarkable that the servility of the writers should have extended so little beyond their dedications. Especially is this the case with his[Pg 172]tory, which, notwithstanding the influences at work to disfigure and corrupt it, remained on the whole surprisingly impartial. This must be ascribed in great part to the influence of classic models; partly, also, to the real mental superiority of most of those who in the sixteenth century essayed this form of composition.

No form is more attractive than the historical to men ambitious to shine in letters, and conscious of high talent without creative genius. “No merita il nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta;” but delineation of character and representation of events are as it were an inferior kind of creation out of pre-existing material, like that ascribed by ancient theology to the Demiurgus. The literary genius of Italy addressed itself eagerly to the task. Ere long almost every considerable state had its vernacular historian. Some of the most important writers, nevertheless, continued to compose in Latin. Among these the most eminent was that very secular prelate and not very trustworthy historian PAOLO GIOVIO, Bishop of Nocera (1483-1552), one of the men whose chief title to fame in our day is to have been famous in their own, but who was certainly reckoned as the chief historian of his time, and whose biographies of eminent men of letters and illustrious captains are still found valuable. Part of his general history of his own times perished in the sack of Rome (1527), and, with a sensitiveness not dishonourable to him, he shrank from recording the transactions of a time when the vials of wrath seemed so visibly poured out upon the Papacy. Except for the gaps indicated, his history extends from 1494 to 1547. Literature sustained a heavy loss in the disappearance of the work of Andrea Navagero, another Latin historian (1483-1529), who had been entrusted by[Pg 173] the Venetian Government with the history of their Republic. The loss of another historian—Girolamo Borgia, who wrote the history of Italy in the days of Alexander VI. and Julius II.—is greatly to be deplored, not because he was distinguished as a writer, but because he was a Borgia.

The historian of Florence had given the first example of really classic Italian history, and Florence, though backward in comparison with Venice in the diffusion of literature by the art of printing, still took the lead among Italian cities in literary as well as artistic cultivation. A group of Florentine annalists sprung up, whose pens were chiefly exerted for the honour of their birthplace. Their candour generally prevented the publication of their works in their lifetime. Such is the case with JACOPO NARDI, who wrote the history of Florence from the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 to their final restoration in 1530, “with sincerity of intention and painstaking accuracy” (Symonds), but also with the acrimony to be expected from a banished patriot who fought for liberty to the last, and for the remainder of his life ate the bread of exile at Venice. The style is accused of aridity; but his translation of Livy is regarded as one of the best in the Italian language. His own history was not published until 1582, nor that of his continuator Segni until 1713, although this elegant historian, whose work occupies the period from 1527 to 1555, was a partisan of the Medici. A portion of the same epoch, from 1527 to 1538, is described much more diffusely by BENEDETTO VARCHI, one of the most prolific men of letters of his time. Varchi, though a devotee of the liberty of whose restoration he despaired, wrote by the special commission of the Grand Duke Cosmo, which neither affected[Pg 174] his impartiality nor protected him from being nearly murdered by some private persons who had been offended by his honesty, nor prevented his history from remaining in MS. until the eighteenth century. In 1570 SCIPIONE AMMIRATO, a Neapolitan, received a commission from the Grand Duke to write a general history of Florence, which he brought down to 1574. His free access to archives enabled him to be more accurate than any predecessor. He also compiled some valuable genealogical works. The history of Ferrara was written by Pigna, and that of Genoa by Foglietta and Bonfadio, all of whom may be considered standard historians. The same can hardly be said of any other of the numerous local writers whom Italy produced in this age, except Porzio, the historian of the conspiracy of the Neapolitan barons against King Ferdinand; Graziani, who recounted the Venetian wars in Cyprus; and three others who deserve notice not merely as historians but as typical figures.

Never since Petrarch’s day had the sceptre of Italian literature rested so unequivocally in one hand as in PIETRO BEMBO’S during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. In one respect Bembo’s pre-eminence is even more remarkable than his predecessor’s, for Petrarch towered immeasurably above any possible competitor except Boccaccio, while Bembo was so far from being the first man of his day that he was not even a man of genius. His wonderful gift for felicitous imitation, whether in prose or verse, was unaccompanied by any power of original thought. But he possessed beyond any contemporary the formal perfection of style, whether in Latin or Italian, demanded by the age. His History of Venice, which alone concerns us here, was originally[Pg 175] published in the former language, but Bembo vindicated his claim to a place among Italian historians by himself translating it into Italian. He had succeeded Andrea Navagero as Venetian historiographer in 1529.

Born at Venice in 1470, and son of the magistrate who so honourably distinguished himself by raising a monument to Dante at Ravenna, Bembo had all his life enjoyed the favour of the great. He had been the Platonic admirer of Lucrezia Borgia, who had honoured him with the shining tress and the dull letters religiously preserved in the Brera Library at Milan. Leo X. had made him his secretary before issuing from his own conclave, and, with munificence for once well applied, had provided him with means to occupy a delicious retreat at Padua, where he was residing when he received the Venetian commission. At a later period Paul III., who loved to surround himself with illustrious men, raised him to the Cardinalate and drew him to Rome, where he died in 1547, more admired and lamented than any man of letters of his time. His history, which extends from 1487 to 1513, and which he composed with his eye upon Cæsar, is the image of the writer, perfect in the harmony of its periods, and carrying the reader rapidly along its smooth surface, but surface alone, describing every occurrence as the ordinary man saw it and the statesman did not, with no attempt to search out the secret springs of action, no reference to documents public or private, and, which is more surprising, no effort to delineate a remarkable character. That this would not have exceeded his powers is shown by his beautiful portrait of the Duchess of Urbino, in his Latin life of her husband.

Bembo’s successor, PIETRO PARUTA (1540-98), who continued his history to 1551, typifies the statesman[Pg 176] historian, versed in diplomacy and public business, and so highly endowed with the qualifications demanded by such employments as to have become Procurator of the Republic, and to have been prevented only by his death from becoming Doge. He was consequently well fitted to write the annals of a state like Venice, and his work stands high among Italian histories. The third exceptional historian of the age, typical of the accomplished literary amateur, is ANGELO DI COSTANZO, a Neapolitan noble whom we shall meet again among the poets. He wrote the history of Naples from 1250 to 1486, and is interesting as the pupil of Sannazaro, the friend of Vittoria Colonna, a patrician whose love of letters led him to cultivate authorship, and a patriot whose love of country gave umbrage to the jealous Spanish viceroy, and subjected him to perpetual confinement to his estates. His history does not disappoint the favourable prepossessions thus aroused, being composed with great elegance and dignity, and a manifest love of truth; insomuch that the author of the modern standard history of Naples, Giannone, while supplying Costanzo’s defects by close attention to jurisprudence, public economy, and other subjects neglected by his predecessor, has transfused most of the latter’s narrative into his own.

Biography, the most attractive form of prose composition, was also well represented in this age, but inspired only two standard works, extremely unlike in style and spirit, but both possessions for all time, and both relating to the line arts. GIORGIO VASARI (1512-74), biographer-general of painters, sculptors, and architects, may be called the Herodotus of art; a practitioner himself, and acquainted with many of the persons whom he describes; lively and garrulous, appa[Pg 177]rently most artless, he possesses either the science or the knack of felicitous composition in an extraordinary degree. Living when picturesque stories about artists were accepted without question, he is entirely unembarrassed in relating such as commend themselves to him, to the joy of the readers and the scandal of the critics of the future. It is probable that scepticism of the truth of his anecdotes and the authority due to his attributions of pictures has gone much too far; but however this may be, criticism will never be able to turn his living book into a dead one, or to invalidate our debt to him for the mass of unquestionably authentic particulars which he has preserved. His good taste in art as well as in literature is evinced by his admiration for the first-fruits of the early Tuscan school, neglected in his day, and his character appears throughout his work in the most amiable light. His chief defect, a serious one, is the imperfection of his information respecting the important schools of Lombardy and Venice.

There is little amiability in a still more distinguished writer, whose pen has gained him the immortality which he expected from the chisel and the graver. BENVENUTO CELLINI (1501-71) was undoubtedly a very eminent artist; yet the autobiography which has preserved his name, while those of Pompeo Tarcone and Alessandro Cesati are forgotten, is a greater work of art than any he accomplished in his own vocation. It may be compared to the realistic sculpture of Donatello, surpassing in vigour and animation the ideal models of which it falls short in elegance and grace. It is the counterpart of a man, and a very manly man, all muscle and sinew and rude force, a boaster, a bully, a libertine, a duellist, almost an assassin, one whom a slight change of circum[Pg 178]stances would easily have made a brigand or a bravo but always the artist. No book, it is probable, gives a better idea of the general atmosphere of the Italy of the sixteenth century; assuredly no other delineation is nearly so vivid. With truly Pepysian unconsciousness the writer depicts in himself the man of turbulent and impracticable character moving among princes and nobles, outraging their forbearance by every action of his life, and revenging himself for their exhausted patience by malicious truth or reckless calumny. The general fidelity of the picture, however, does not depend upon the accuracy of particular statements, and Cellini’s untruths where his own vanity is concerned do not impair his claim to confidence as a delineator of his age. Of the literary merit of his performance it is needless to speak; if not at the very head of entertaining autobiographies, it is at least second to none. The English reader will be continually reminded of Haydon; although, however, Haydon’s confidence in himself was no less robust than Cellini’s, he had far less reason for it, nor, with all his vividness, is he the Italian’s equal in graphic power.

One other prose-writer of the period, and perhaps only one, may be considered as much an author for all time as Vasari and Cellini. This is BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE, whoseCortegiano depicts the ideal life of the accomplished Italian courtier—a character of more importance in that day than he can be in ours. In Castiglione’s time not only were the court and good society almost convertible expressions, but the relation of the courtier to the court was far more intimate than it can be now. It actually was his sphere, which he seldom forsook except when absent on military enterprises or public business; he was[Pg 179] in habits of daily intercourse with his sovereign, and professed courtesy and civility as others professed arts or trades. A competent writer on the court and its accomplishments, therefore, was necessarily an instructor in manners and refinement, and as such might exercise an important influence on his age. While the equally accomplished Casa, in hisGalateo, instructed the average gentleman in good manners, the courtier’s training fell to the lot of Castiglione, than whom no man could be better qualified either by actual disposition or the circumstances of his life. A Mantuan by birth, he had served the Duke of Urbino, had exemplified Italian refinement at the English court on a mission to receive the Garter for his sovereign, and when he wrote (1518), was envoy at the court of Leo X., and the intimate friend of the most cultivated men of his age.

The machinery of his book is a report, imaginary in form, but faithful in spirit, of dialogues held at the court of Urbino among the distinguished persons who frequented it at various times. They are by no means frivolous; Castiglione’s standard, not merely of deportment and manly exercise, but of intellectual accomplishment, is very high. The conversations deal with such themes as the preferable form of government and the condition of women, and are handled with signal elegance, acumen, and graceful but not cumbrous erudition. They are interspersed with pleasant stories admirably told, and would give a fascinating idea of Italian court life, were it not so evident that its darker features have been kept out of view, and that the general relation of Castiglione’s picture to reality is that of Sannazaro’s Arcadia to the actual life of shepherds. Yet the picture has many elements of truth, and it speaks well for the[Pg 180] age that it could produce even such an ideal. “Carried to the north of Europe,” says Mr. Courthope, “and grafted on the still chivalrous manners of the English aristocracy, the ideal of Castiglione contributed to form the character of Sir Philip Sidney.” The delicacy of Castiglione’s sentiments is shown by his bitter mortification at the unjust reproaches of Clement VII., into whose service he afterwards entered, and who accused him of failure as a diplomatist. These are said to have broken his heart. He died in 1529. Raphael had painted his portrait, his tomb was designed by Giulio Romano, and his epitaph was written by Bembo.

“Love rules the court, the camp, the grove.” The Asolani of Bembo, therefore, a disquisition on Love from different points of view, composed in imitation of Cicero’s Tusculan Questions, should take precedence of Castiglione’sCortegiano, but it can hardly be said that it does. TheCortegiano is a piece of real life, indicating, if not precisely what the highest Italian society was, at all events what it felt it ought to be. Bembo’s dialogues, or rather monologues, might have been composed in any age of refinement; they are purely academical in form, and the perpetual justice of the sentiments is purchased by perpetual commonplace. Seldom, however, have commonplaces been set off with such harmony and polish of style, or with more ingenious eloquence, especially at the conclusion, where the Hermit reconciles Love’s advocates and his accusers by descanting on the charms of ideal beauty. If it be true that to have read it was the indispensable passport to good society, the circumstance is creditable to the age’s literary taste, and still more so to its standard of ideal excellence. Bembo’s prose is more satisfactory than his poetry, perhaps be[Pg 181]cause it raises less expectation; in verse the wonder is that he attains no further, and in prose that he attains so far.Gli Asolani, first published in 1505, was written at the age of twenty-eight, and was dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. On the strength of it Bembo is made the chief interlocutor in Castiglione’sCortegiano when the question of love is touched upon.

The number of writers at this period who, if not always moral, may be described as moralists, is very considerable. ALESSANDRO PICCOLOMINI, afterwards Archbishop of Patras, wrote a complete institution of the citizen which is not devoid of merit; but he is better remembered by a sin of his youth, theDialogo della bella creauza delle donne, in which an Italian Martha successfully exhorts an Italian Margaret to add a lover to a husband. The literary merits of this otherwise reprehensible performance are considerable; it is also an authority on cosmetics. Sperone Speroni, eminent for the dignity of his life and the elegance of his style, has the further honour of having first employed the dialogue in the discussion of purely ethical questions. Lodovico Dolce and A. F. Doni, industrious littérateurs, obtained a reputation in their own day which posterity has not ratified. The former, says Tiraboschi, wrote much in every style and well in none; the latter is tersely characterised by Niceron as “grand diseur de riens.” Far superior is GIOVANNI BATTISTA GELLI, the learned tailor of Florence, who had the great advantage over the other moralists of being able to clothe his wit and wisdom in an objective form. In hisCirce, Ulysses is represented as unsuccessfully endeavouring to persuade his metamorphosed companions to reassume human shape. They know better, and their[Pg 182] argumentation might well have suggested the machinery of Dryden’sHind and Panther; even as that of Gelli’s Capricci, where Giusto disputes with his own soul, was very probably copied in Smollett’sAdventures of an Atom.

One of the most characteristic writers of the time is AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA (1497-1547), an authority “on the form and colour of the ear, and the proper way of wearing ornamental flowers,” whose elegant and frequently licentious stories, idiomatically Tuscan in style, fresh in humour, and brilliant in description, are interwoven with hisDialoghi d’Amore, and who also gained fame by his comedies, and as the translator, or rather adapter, of Apuleius. As the combination of the photographic portraits of several members of any class of society gives the mean average of its physiognomy, so Firenzuola represents the average constitution of such men of letters of his day as wrote with a real vocation for literature. It is doubtful whether any such vocation can be credited to another satirist who greatly surpassed him in celebrity, the notorious PIETRO ARETINO (1492-1556). Aretino was merely a literary blackmailer, whose profligate and venal pen was employed to extort or cajole money from the great men of the age. His indubitable success is difficult to understand, except as the irrepressible and irreversible decree of fashion. Apart from his comedies and his letters, an amazing record of the abasement of rank before impudence, only one of his works has any literary merit, and the genuineness of this is questionable. His other immoralities are as insipid as his moralities, and his personalities are of the kind best answered by a cudgel. Notwithstanding, he became a power in public life as well as in literature, rivalled the opulence and the pomp of his[Pg 183] friend Titian, and, like him, trained up disciples of his craft. The charm may have lain in some measure in the boldness of the man, who alone in his age made a show of free speech, although the real motor of his pen was cupidity, who lived libelling, and died laughing. Worthless as he was, he might have anticipated Pope’s boast that men not afraid of God were afraid of him.

Aretino is only one among a host of letter-writers, who included the most accomplished men of the age. Bembo appears as its typical representative, here as elsewhere, although the unfortunate historian Bonfadio is held to have written best. All wrote with an eye to the publication of their epistles, and asked themselves what Cicero would have said in their place. None had the delightful candour and exuberance of Petrarch; they are in consequence much less national, interesting, and human; and their letters, stripped of the complimentary phrases which eke them out, are in general brief. Yet it would be hard to refuse any among them the praise due to two excellent qualities, good style and good sense. Such were the general characteristics of the age, a period, but for Ariosto, almost devoid of creative power in letters, yet fully worthy to be ranked with the other great eras of artificial literature, the eras of Augustus, and Anne, and Louis XIV. Its truest praise is perhaps afforded by a comparison of it with the other contemporary literatures of Europe, then, the French excepted, which is immensely indebted to the Italian, almost equally destitute of genius and of art, although the magnificent rhythm of English prose even then showed what an instrument had been provided for performers yet to come. But temporal and spiritual tyranny were fast[Pg 184] destroying the elementary requisites of great literature in Italy. The hare was lamed, and the tortoises were overtaking her. A little while yet, and it would be needful to look beyond Alp and sea for the true Italy, and find her in the bosoms of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney.

We have seen that the definite result of the literary ferment which accompanied the revival of vernacular Italian literature after the long torpor of the fifteenth century was the recognition of literary form, rather than intellectual substance, as the principal object of cultivation, a conclusion completely in harmony with the national genius as well as the national traditions. Had this been otherwise, revolt would soon have made itself evident. On the contrary, however, we meet with scarcely any manifestation of the existence of a romantic spirit in Italian literature until Manzoni begins to be inspired by Scott and Byron, and Foscolo by Rousseau. The consequence is a great lack of richness and variety in comparison with a literature like the English, where all descriptions of tendencies have been allowed ample scope, and now one, now another, has successively seemed to be predominant; but none, except now and then for a time, has attained an absolute mastery.

On the other hand, the devotion of the Italian writers to elegance and symmetry of composition has rendered their literature a model for cultured writers in all languages, has deeply influenced contemporary literatures in their rudimentary stages, and has preserved many a writer from oblivion whose original power was not conspicuous,[Pg 186] whose themes have long since become antiquated, but who still challenges the attention of posterity by charm of style. “Cela qui n’est pas écrit ne dure pas” is a rule without exception, and the converse is often, though not always, true also. One highly important class of these writers is that large section of the poets who modelled themselves avowedly on the greatest master of style their literature possessed or possesses, the man whose thoughts, often most precious in themselves, are displayed to incomparable advantage by incomparable felicity of expression.

Very few Italian lyrical poets of the sixteenth century ventured to stray far from the traces of Petrarch, who became to them what Virgil and Homer and Ovid had necessarily become to writers in Latin verse. Had Petrarch excelled in epic as he excelled in lyric, Ariosto and Tasso too would have been his humble followers, and the whole of the poetical literature of the age would have been imitative, and consequently second-rate. Yet, although the mass of this derivative literature is intolerably empty and insipid, much is distinguished by a perfection of expression which makes it not merely delightful reading but a valuable study. The poets frequently seem to approach Petrarch very nearly, but none reproduce him. Those succeed best whose imitation is the least avowed, and who are most remote from their model in native temperament, such as Tansillo; on the other hand, Bembo, Molza, and their like, who in mere form have most nearly approached Petrarch by most completely suppressing their own individuality, present much less to interest modern readers, although their contemporaries, estimating them from another point of view, extolled them to the skies.

Bembo and Molza, nevertheless, only followed in the[Pg 187] track of the gifted man whom we have already seen so influential in the development of Italian prose—Jacopo Sannazaro. Sannazaro’s attention was, indeed, principally given to Latin poetry. But the qualifications of an eminent Latinist and of a pattern Petrarchist were much the same. Both abdicated all claim to originality by setting before themselves a model which it was taken for granted—and with justice—that they would be for ever unable to rival. Sannazaro was, notwithstanding, something more than a master of felicitous expression. His VirgilianDe Partu Virginis, in which he vied with the chief contemporary writers of Latin hexameters, Vida and Fracastoro, is less attractive than his elegies, into which he has introduced more of personal feeling, or his Piscatorian Eclogues, in which he has successfully revived the form, if not the spirit, of ancient composition, and from which Milton did not disdain to borrow ornaments forLycidas. As a follower of Petrarch, Sannazaro stands on a different footing from Bembo and Molza. Their excellence in their own way is indisputable, but monotonous: they neither rise nor sink; every poem of theirs is just as good as every other poem. Sannazaro, a man of noble character and strong feeling, imports a personal note into his poetry, and succeeds in proportion to the clearness with which he can render this audible. His praise of Petrarch’s Laura, for instance, is something more than conventionality, and these lines,Mors et Vita, translated by Glassford, express the sum of much serious meditation:

Among Sannazaro’s contemporaries, a little too early to have imbibed the full spirit of the Petrarchan revival, may be especially named Antonio Tebaldeo (1463-1537), an admired poet who survived his reputation; Serafino dell’ Aquila, imitated by Wyat, whose Neapolitan vehemence betrayed his lively talent into bombast; Antonio Cammelli, the political laureate of the Ferrarese court; Antonello Petrucci, who wrote as Damocles banqueted, with the headsman’s axe suspended over him; Notturno Neapolitano; and Filosseno, chiefly remarkable for the undisguised gallantry of his sonnets addressed to Lucrezia Borgia.

Bembo was a model man of letters, to whom in this capacity the Italian language and Italian culture are infinitely beholden. As a poet he is perhaps best characterised by the forty drawers through which he is said to have successively passed his sonnets, making some alteration for the better in every one of them. If there had been any originality in any of them, this would hardly have survived the twentieth drawer, but there never had been, and since the polish was always meant to be the merit, there hardly could be too much polishing. Bembo’s poetry at all events serves to refute the heresy which identities genius with industry; and if we admit with[Pg 189] Roscoe that “any person of good taste and extensive reading might, by a due portion of labour, produce works of equal merit,” we must nevertheless allow that it will probably be long ere such a capacity for labour reappears. He entirely fulfilled the requirements of his own age, by which he was simply idolised. The quintessence of his contemporaries’ admiration is concentrated in Vittoria Colonna’s humble yet dignified remonstrance with him for having failed to celebrate the death of her husband:

Bembo’s Latin poetry, of which charming specimens may be seen in Symonds’sRenaissance, is better than his Italian, for it does not disappoint. The fame of FRANCESCO MARIA MOLZA (1489-1544) was in his day hardly second to Bembo’s, and was based on much the same grounds. Like Bembo, he was an elegant Latin poet, who carried the maxims appropriate for composition in a dead language into a living one. Like Bembo’s, his vernacular poems, with one remarkable exception, are models of diction as inexpressive as harmonious—a perpetual silvery[Pg 190] chime which soothes the ear, but conveys nothing to the mind. The exception is a poem in which the usual vagueness and emptiness of sentiment assumes substance from its pastoral setting. TheNinfa Tiberina, in which one of Molza’s innumerable light loves is idealised as a shepherdess, is just such a piece of mosaic as Gray’s Elegy. The author has amassed all the commonplaces of pastoral poetry, and, without adding a single idea of his own, has combined them into so rich and glowing a picture that he may well claim to have superseded the entire school of pastoral versifiers, the few excepted who have derived their inspiration from Nature, like his predecessor Politian. “Molza is to Politian,” says Symonds, “as the rose to the rosebud.” He was born at Modena, but lived chiefly at Rome, leaving his wife and family in his native city. They would indeed have been much in the way, for he was continually involved in some amour, and his irregular ties ultimately proved fatal to him. He was a leading member of the brilliant literary circles of Rome and Florence, and as a companion and a man of letters his contemporaries have nothing but praise for him.

Petrarch is a poet as much within the scope of imitation as beyond the pursuit of rivalry. The swarms of Petrarchists stun the ear and darken the light of the period: Tansillo might well say that every hillock had grown a Parnassus. They may be found in the thesaurus of Dolce, a series whose continuous publication for so many years at all events affords proof that this appetite for imitative verse was not factitious. Some few stand forth from the crowd by some exceptional characteristics, and it is of these only that[Pg 191] we can speak. The first of these in chronological order is BERNARDO TASSO (1493-1568), whom we have already met as the author of theAmadigi. In his lyrical as in his epical attempts, Tasso is one of those provoking poets who are always trembling on the verge of excellence, ever good, hardly ever quite good enough. Even the famous sonnet on his renunciation of his lady, which, Dolce tells us, thrilled Italy, is less eminent for the beauty of the poetry than the nobility of the sentiment. Once, however, straying within the domain of pastoral poetry, he found and polished a gem worthy of the Greek Anthology:

Another poet of the time vies with Bernardo Tasso in nobility of character, evinced in his case by the fervour of his patriotism. The bulk of the verse of GUIDO GUIDICCIONI, Bishop of Fossombrone (1500-41), consists of insipid love-strains in the style of Bembo and Molza; but when he touches upon the wrongs and misfortunes of his country he becomes inspired, and speaks in tones of alternate majesty and pathos, to[Pg 192] which the following sonnet superadds the charms of fancy:

If other Italian poets felt like Guidiccioni, they shunned to give their sentiments utterance. The chief original poem of ANNIBALE CARO (1507-66), the accomplished translator of Virgil and Longus, and one of the best letter-writers of his age, was a panegyric on the house of Valois—Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro (“Hither, where spread the golden fleurs-de-lis”). A few years later, with equal genius and equal insensibility to the part that became an Italian, Caro turned to celebrate the Spanish conqueror. Whatever may be thought of the theme of his poem, it is in execution one of the great things of Italian poetry:

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA (1500-56) emulated Caro in the nobility of his style, which would scarcely have been expected, considering the licentious character of some of his verse and his ecclesiastical profession. He does, however, sometimes attain a dignity and gravity which, apart from the beauty of his diction, lift him high out of the crowd of Petrarchists; nor are his themes invariably amorous. HisGalateo, a treatise on politeness, has earned him the name of the Italian Chesterfield. He would have attained greater eminence as a man of letters but for the distractions of politics and business, which he deplores in the following sonnet:

ANGELO DI COSTANZO (1507-91), already noticed as an historian, is another example of a writer of sonnets who[Pg 194] rose from the crowd by the individuality which he contrived to impress upon his performances. His great characteristic is an exquisite elegance, not, as in some other instances, veiling inanity, but usually the accompaniment of something well worth saying. The following piece is a good instance of his power of enhancing, by ingenious embellishment, a thought interesting and attractive in itself:

The general passion for verse naturally extended to the refined and accomplished ladies of the time. Only two, however, have gained a permanent position in Italian literature, as much by their characters as by their poetry. The muse of VITTORIA COLONNA (1490-1547) chiefly prompted the apotheosis of her husband, the Marquis of Pescara, “a sworded man whose trade was blood,” and who, though a great captain, scarcely possessed a single amiable or magnanimous trait of character. The pathos of the situation surpasses that of the verse which it called forth. As a woman, Vittoria evoked the enthusiastic admiration of her contem[Pg 195]poraries, and lives for posterity more in the strains of Michael Angelo than in her own.

The unhappy fate of GASPARA STAMPA (1524-53), who literally died of love, would have preserved her name without her verse; she was, nevertheless, a true poetess, and might have been a great one had she not, like so many poetesses, struck upon the fatal rock of fluency. Could her centuries of sonnets be concentrated into a dozen, she would rank high.

More truly a poet than any of the stricter Petrarchists is a Neapolitan, LUIGI TRANSILLO, although his advantage is rather intensity of feeling than superiority in the poetic art. He must indeed be admitted to have derogated in some measure from the high standard of taste then generally prevalent, and to have foreshadowed, though but in a very trifling degree, the extravagances of the seventeenth century. This may be forgiven to his southern ardour and liveliness, and foreign critics are not likely to perceive the little technical defects so severely visited upon him by his countrymen. He had the unspeakable advantage over his competitors of being devoted to no ideal nymph, but to a real and very great and very cold lady, the Marchioness del Vasto, wife of the Viceroy of Naples. Such an attachment was necessarily Platonic on his part, and imaginary, if so much, on the lady’s. The first rapture is magnificently expressed in the sonnet in which the poor knight and military retainer, whose business in life was to help in clearing the Mediterranean of Turks, compares his rash love to the flight of Icarus:

Suspicion, jealousy, bitterly wounded feeling, open breach, and hollow reconciliation make up the remainder of the sonnets, the best of which have few superiors in any literature for fire and passion. His other poetical performances are far from inconsiderable. The best known is the sin of his youth, theVendemmiatore, whose ultra-Fescennine truth to rustic manners and the licence of the vintage brought it into the Index, and its author into gaol. In quite a different key are his delightful didactic poems,Il Podere, on the management of an estate, andLa Balía, on the care of children, translated by Roscoe. Some of his familiarCapitoli are very pleasing, and some of his miscellaneous poems are very fine, especially this on the Spaniards slain by the Turks at Castel Nuovo, on the coast of Dalmatia:

The graceful poets who thus tuned their harps to the notes of Petrarch sang within the hearing of a spirit of another sort, whose verses, had they known them, they would have compared unfavourably with their own elegance, but whose appearance in their circle would have been like that of Victor Hugo’s Pan at the banquet of the Olympians. MICHAEL ANGELO, the greatest Italian after Dante, had not, like Dante, acquired the secret of poetic form. He indites as on marble with mallet and chisel; but the inscription is everlasting. “Ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed or obscure in thought,” as Symonds describes them, Michael Angelo’s sonnets are yet priceless as a revelation of the man, more distinct than that vouchsafed by his painting or sculpture. These tell of his tremendous force; the deep springs of tenderness in his nature are only to be learned from the poems, the most important of which are consecrated to Love, now ideal and impersonal, now expending itself upon some fair object, masculine or feminine, but in either case Platonic. Vittoria Colonna and Tommmaso de’ Cavalieri are the objects of the poet’s deepest attachment. The following sonnet was most probably inscribed to Cavalieri:

The roughness of Michael Angelo’s verse was planed down by the first editor, his great-nephew, and the true text has only been retrieved in our time.

Two religious poets stand aloof from the class of Petrarchists, rather by the nature of their themes than the quality of their talent. CELIO MAGNO, a religious poet of Protestant tendencies, produced a hymn to the Almighty which ranks among the best canzoni of the period, and had anticipated Coleridge’s project, which with him as with Coleridge remained a project, for a series of similar compositions. GABRIELE FIAMMA, Bishop of Chioggia, is in general a tame versifier, but in two inspired moments produced two of the most beautiful sonnets in the language: one of which is remarkable for expressing in an ornate style the thought of Heine’s famous lyric, “Mein Herz gleicht ganz dem Meere”; the other, apart from its great beauty, as an instance of a sonnet which, beginning apparently in a commonplace style, is vivified through and through by the last tercet:

The Cinque Cento period of Italian poetry, which to the men of that day seemed the ne plus ultra of artistic achievement, has since received less praise and exerted less influence than fairly its due. It was a great thing to have produced works so perfect in form, and to have refined the language in so eminent a degree. The general belief, too, that the Italian poetry of this age was devoid of all but formal excellence involves a great exaggeration. It is true that the literature of the period is overloaded with masses of mechanical and conventional stuff, but Guidiccioni and Casa and Tansillo are capable on occasion of expressing themselves with an energy the more impressive from being restrained within the limits prescribed by a chastened taste, and many Italian sonnets are even better fitted to be breathed from the trumpet than warbled to the lute. A great development in this direction might have been expected, but for the extinction of political and spiritual liberty.

What the Italian lyric might have become we see in Milton, who could have written neither hisLycidas nor his sonnets without Tuscan models. He undoubtedly weighted, without overweighting, both canzone and sonnet with thought to a degree unparalleled in Italy, but how much he owed to Italians appears by a comparison of[Pg 200] his sonnets with those of Wordsworth, who neglected the traditions which Milton carefully observed. Wordsworth has even more ripeness of thought and moral elevation than his predecessor; but while Milton’s work is immaculate, Wordsworth’s is full of flaws.

With all its defects, the poetry of the Cinque Cento will survive as a proof that rules of art exist and may be ascertained, and cannot be safely departed from; no less than as an example of the embellishment which even ordinary thoughts may receive from nobility of diction and breadth of style; and as an instance of the great part which a literature not too original or too racy of the native soil may play in moulding and enriching the literatures of neighbouring and less advanced nations. Nor can it be fairly judged by itself as an isolated phenomenon. It was a part, and far from the most important part, of a stupendous artistic movement, which spoke more readily and eloquently with brush and chisel than with pen, and expressed through their medium much that in an age more exclusively literary would have been committed to paper.

Numerous as are the poets we have briefly passed in review, many more might have been added whom it would have been agreeable to have met in the barren fifteenth century. The Renaissance had by this time entered into the blood of Italy, and produced one of the best effects of impregnation with the classical spirit—a passion for fame. This we find as constantly assigned as a motive of action in public affairs in that day as humanitarian inducements are in ours; and when it is considered that the sincerity of the former motive is much less questionable than that of the latter, it is not clear that the comparison is wholly to the advantage of the nineteenth century. Almost every man of any mark was deeply influenced by it, and it was one of the most potent instruments in stimulating both literary and artistic production. The drawback was that the aspirant to fame was naturally inclined to take the easiest and most fashionable path, and thus the same impulse which braced effort suppressed originality.

The sentiment of an age mainly under the sway of Petrarch naturally encouraged the production of lyrical poetry, and other styles were neglected in comparison. Apart from the epical attempts which have been mentioned, and the dramatic and humorous poems to which[Pg 202] allusion remains to be made, the period has little to show apart from the lyric, with the exception of some didactic poems—theBalía and thePodere of Luigi Tansillo, theNautica of Baldi, theCaccia of Valvasone, and two others modelled after Virgil, theColtivazione of Luca Alamanni, and theApi of Giovanni Rucellai, both excellent examples of the description of poetry which owes most to artifice and least to inspiration. This might perhaps pass for a general character of the poetry of the period, which ranks with the ages of Augustus and Anne as an example of what exquisite culture can and cannot effect in the absence of creative power. It was of high value to succeeding periods by bequeathing to them a norm and standard of good taste by which to chasten their frequent aberrations; and, notwithstanding its almost academical character, it was actually in vital relation with the literary appetite of its limited but highly accomplished public. There was not, says Dolce, a cultivated person in Italy who could not repeat before it was in print Bernardo Tasso’s sonnet resigning his mistress to his successful rival, a fact which proves not only the existence of a general appreciation of poetry independent of the machinery of reviewing and the printing-press itself, but also a general preference for its most refined and dignified examples.

The didactic poems of which we have spoken claim the less attention, inasmuch as they were in no respect national. The rules for good didactic poetry are the same in all languages, and any accomplished versifier will instruct in agriculture or the chase in much the same manner in any country, however his local colouring may vary with his climate. It is otherwise with satirical, familiar, and mock-heroic poetry. In all these[Pg 203] styles Italian work is individual and characteristic. Satiric traits are frequent enough in the contemporaries of Dante, and from one point of view Dante himself may be regarded as a great satirist. The professed satire, nevertheless, of modern Italy derives from Horace rather than Juvenal; it aims at good-humoured raillery rather than scathing vehemence or corroding virulence; and its impetus is further moderated by its being generally composed in the easy and garrulous terza rima. Alessandro Vinciguerra (born 1480) appears to have first imparted this stamp; but the great exemplar is Ariosto, whose satires are not the least ornament of his poetic crown, yielding little in facetious urbanity to his model Horace.

The vigorous satires of Luigi Alamanni, imitated in English by Sir Thomas Wyat, evince a remarkable freedom of speech. Bentivoglio, Aretino, Anguillara, and other writers of note followed in his track with varying success. The first to employ blank verse in satire was Lodovico Paterno, who is perhaps more exceptionally distinguished for having achieved an epithalamium to Queen Mary of England without the least allusion to her restoration of the Roman Catholic religion. TheDecennali of Machiavelli, a highly-condensed sketch in verse of the events of his time, may also be regarded as a satire; but his reputation as a poet rather arises from hisCapitoli, disquisitions in verse in which Tansillo and many others also excelled, and whose easy familiarity is hardly to be paralleled in any other literature, and from his elegant versification of portions of Apuleius’sGolden Ass. FRANCESCO COPPETTA (1510-1554), an excellent writer of sonnets, extended the domain of poetry by constituting himself the first laureate of the feline species. His ode on the loss of his cat (di tutta la [Pg 204] Soria gloria e splendore, and consequently an Angora) is a curious blending of parodies of Petrarch with genuine feeling. He eventually finds comfort in the conclusion that the object of his affections has been appropriated by Jupiter and placed among the constellations. Two brilliant stars never seen before have of late been observable in the firmament, and the inference is obvious.

Ariosto and Machiavelli, nevertheless, although geniuses of the first order, rank in familiar poetry below FRANCESCO BERNI, better equipped for it by nature and entirely devoted to its practice. Berni, born at Lamporecchio, near Florence, about 1497, was a dependant of the Medici, successively attached to Cardinal Bibbiena and to Bishop Ghiberti, Papal datary. His life was consequently for a long time spent at Rome, where he enjoyed the friendship of the most eminent men of letters of the period, executed the remodelled version of Boiardo’sOrlando Innamorato by which his name is best known, and produced the numerousCapitoli, which would stand high as examples of easy familiar verse, were it not for their frequent indecency. They gave the pattern of the style (Bernesque) which has derived its name from him, and in which he has had many successors, but no absolute rival. Humour, as Roscoe remarks, is very local. Berni loses much, not merely by translation, but on perusal by a foreigner. It is enough for his fame if he continues to be appreciated in his own country, and that nothing worse happens to him abroad than must equally happen to the author of aHudibras or aJobsiad. How well some portions of his work lend themselves to translation in congenial hands may appear from a specimen, rendered by Leigh Hunt, of the poem whose subject is the author’s own[Pg 205] prodigious laziness. His portrait of himself is very lifelike, and probably very accurate:

Berni’s death did him more honour than his life. The suppressed dedication to the twentieth canto of his Orlando seems to prove that he had become serious in his later years, and fallen under Protestant influences; but this was unknown to Cardinal Cibo, who deemed him the right sort of man to commend a poisoned chalice to the lips of Cardinal Salviati; and his refusal, there is every reason to believe, cost him his own life (1535). He died with strong symptoms of poison, was[Pg 206] buried hastily without epitaph or monument, and, although his works were collected, nothing was said of the author. This sudden silence corroborates the suspicion of his Protestantism.

Berni’s chief characteristics as a poet are graceful ease and perfect mastery of style and diction. He is fluent and entirely unembarrassed, never at a loss for the right word, and handles the difficult terza rima with the facility of prose. This command of language would have raised him high if he had possessed any of the elements of greatness; but he is incapable of elevated sentiment, and has the good sense never to aspire to it. What is most admirable in him, his poetical gift apart, is the evident sincerity and consistency of his Epicurean view of life, and his eupeptic sanity. As regards his strictly original compositions, he occupies about the same position in Italian poetry as Goldsmith would have filled in English if he had written nothing butRetaliations andHaunches of Venison. In his rifacimento of Boiardo’sOrlando Innamorato he has attempted something more considerable, and, from his own point of view, with much success. Modern taste will hardly sympathise with his disfigurement of the romantic grace and simple sincerity of the original, for the mere sake of heightening the comic element and improving its style. In his own day men thought differently, and it must be admitted that the disparity between Boiardo’s comparatively unadorned groundwork and the brilliant superstructure of Ariosto marred the continuity of theOrlando as a whole, and that the chasm may well have seemed to require filling up. Berni could not impart the special qualities of Ariosto, but he could bring Boiardo’s style more nearly up to Ariosto’s level, and he could adorn his original by[Pg 207] graceful introductions to the respective cantos. Both these objects have been achieved with taste and success; and although Boiardo’s comparatively artless composition is still the best, as nearest to Nature, it cannot be denied that Berni’s alterations must have appeared to his contemporaries great improvements, and that his embellishments may be read with abundant pleasure. Conscious of his lack of poetical invention, he has abstained from interfering with the narrative. His work was not published until after his death, and there is reason to suspect that it was considerably adulterated by or at the instance of the great literary bully of the day, Pietro Aretino.

It does not appear that Berni had any intention of parodying theOrlando Innamorato in his rifacimento; he simply wished to bring it, in his conception, nearer to the literary level of the continuation which had superseded it, and deemed that this could be best effected by an infusion of humour and satire. It would be a still greater error to assume, with some modern Italian critics, an intention on the part of Boiardo and Ariosto of parodying the old chivalric romance. They merely desired to adapt it to the spirit of their own age, as Tennyson has adapted theMorte d’Arthur to ours, and their sprightliness is the correlative of his moral earnestness. Ariosto is less reverent of his original than Boiardo, but he keeps within bounds. The great success of his poem, however, was sure to evolve a bona-fide parodist, as in our day Mark Twain has capered with cap and bells in the wake of Tennyson. The Italian Mark Twain was TEOFILO FOLENGO (1491-1544), known under his pseudonym ofMerlinus Cocaius as a distinguished cultivator of macaronic poetry, a by-path of literature which we[Pg 208] are compelled to leave unexplored. He was a dissipated runaway monk, who repented, became serious, and resought his cell just as he seemed within an ace of turning Protestant. HisOrlandino is a burlesque upon the poems of chivalry, with pieces of genuine poetry interspersed, and many digressions on the corruptions of the age, especially the vices of the religious orders. It is unfinished. What was published is said to have been written in three months, a statement confirmed by the energy of the verse.

It was a great step in Greek comedy when the mythological parodies which had constituted the substance of the middle comedy were replaced by the picture of contemporary manners which formed the staple of the new. So great an advance could not be made by ALESSANDRO TASSONI (1565-1638), the chief representative of serio-comic poetry in the seventeenth century, for his age would not have tolerated it; but he effected much in the same direction by converting the mere parody of the chivalric romance which had satisfied his predecessors into the mock-heroic epic, a form of literature which, if he did not invent, he may claim to have perfected. Instead of contriving burlesque variations upon Ariosto, he took a real incident of a serio-comic nature—the war which in the thirteenth century had actually broken out between the republics of Modena and Bologna respecting a bucket carried off by the former. The treatment is admirable; the characters, some of whom are historical, and others sketched after Tassoni’s contemporaries, have an air of reality altogether wanting to the personages of Folengo’s parodies; there is enough of idyllic charm and tender pathos here and there to approve the writer a true poet, while humour domi[Pg 209]nates, and many of the sarcasms are really profound. A more biting irony on the wretched dissensions which had been the ruin of Italy cannot be conceived; and, notwithstanding a subordinate purpose of deriding Tasso’s languid imitators, and the personal quarrel which prompted composition in the first instance, such was probably the main purpose of the writer, in his political sentiments and aspirations a statesman of the type of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, who burned with hatred of the Spanish oppressor, but, except for the two Philippics he composed in demonstration of the real hollowness of the Spanish power, could find no other vent for his patriotism than his poetry, and wasted his life in the service of petty princes.La Secchia Rapita (The Rape of the Bucket) was published under a pseudonym at Paris in 1622, having long circulated in manuscript. Tassoni also showed himself a bold if bilious critic of Petrarch, against whose predominance a reaction was declaring itself, and participated in the general anti-Aristotelian movement of his times by a volume of miscellaneous reflections.

A contemporary of Tassoni is usually named along with him as a master of the heroi-comic style, but is in every respect greatly his inferior. This is FRANCESCO BRACCIOLINI (1566-1645), whose pen, if he really meant to serve the Church by ridiculing the classical mythology, should have been wielded a century sooner. Part of the humour of hisScherno degli Dei consists in the unconscious anachronism. It manifests considerable fertility of invention, and has survived the author’s four epics, placed as these were immediately after Tasso’s by good judges in his own day. TheMalmantile Racquistato of Lorenzo Lippi the painter, the delight[Pg 210] of the philologist for its idiomatic Tuscan, is remarkable for embalming much local folk-lore, and so many local phrases as to be shorter than its own glossary.

Two more recent examples of the mock-heroic epic maybe included here to complete the subject. TheRicciardetto of NICOCOLÒ FORTEGUERRI, published under the pseudonym of Carteromaco, has received much merited and more unmerited praise. The author (1670-1730) was a prelate of the Roman court, and so great a favourite of Pope Clement XII. that he is said to have died from mortification at having displeased his patron by neglecting to ask for a vacant appointment. His poem burlesques the chivalric epics of Ariosto and others, not with the refined raillery of a Berni, but in a style of broad, coarse buffoonery. It was published after his death, when his friends sought to extenuate its unclerical character by alleging that it had been undertaken for a wager, composed in spare intervals of time, and never designed for publication. All these statements seem to be groundless. It has considerable merit as a burlesque, and some passages indicate a talent for serious poetry which might have developed into something considerable; in the main, however, the ability displayed is of a low though drastic strain. The best idea is that of making the Saracen champion Feraù turn hermit, a character which he supports less in the fashion of St. Jerome than of Friar Tuck.

It seems an instance of apparent injustice in prevalent literary opinion that theRicciardetto should be so widely known, while no less a poem than Leopardi’s Supplement (Paralipomeni) to Homer’s Battle of the Frogs and the Mice is hardly mentioned. The wonder, however, is not so great as it seems. Forteguerri wrote[Pg 211] what all could understand, while Leopardi only cared to please exceptional readers, and was, moreover, compelled to shroud much of his satire in obscurity for fear of the ruling powers. The allegory, nevertheless, is sufficiently transparent. The vanquished mice are the people of Italy; the frogs are the priesthood and other accomplices of the powers of darkness; the crabs, who turn the scale in the latter’s favour, are the Austrians. The weakness and disunion of the oppressed, no less than the brutality of the oppressor, are depicted with the most refined sarcasm. Nothing can be more humorous, for example, than the crab’s exposition to the mouse of the principle of the balance of power; and through all the fancy and drollery pierce the grief and rage of a patriotic Italian. There are also fine flashes of true poetry, especially near the end, when the adventurous mouse visits the underworld of his species; and Ariosto is parodied as well as Dante. The satire, nevertheless, transcends the appreciation of ordinary readers; and it certainly does appear somewhat singular that the fastidious author, who composed so sparingly and with such difficulty upon the most exalted themes, should have bestowed so much labour upon a jeu d’esprit.

The novel presents one of the most remarkable examples in literary history of arrested development, and of all departments of literature is perhaps the only one which failed to attain perfection in the hands of the ancients. Great progress is indeed observable from its first artless beginnings under the Pharaohs, so recently recovered for us; but having advanced far along several lines, it becomes stationary upon all. The germ of the picaresque novel is clearly discernible in Petronius, of the novel of adventure in Apuleius, of erotic fiction in Longus; but these examples apparently remain ineffectual. Either the path is not prosecuted at all, or it leads to mere repetition. No new element appears until we encounter the chivalric romance, which in Spain produced an extensive prose literature, but in Italy ran almost entirely to verse. The more elaborate romances of Boccaccio, indeed, disclose influences from this quarter; but their reputation was slight in comparison with those short and familiar tales, commonly founded upon some anecdote and dealing with scenes and personages of real life, which prescribed the form for the national novelette. A more distinctively national type never existed. The extraordinary thing is that the nation never got beyond it. It should have seemed an obvious[Pg 213] advance to lengthen the stories; to stimulate surprise and suspense by greater intricacy of plot; to embellish by elaborate description; to depict character with fulness and exactness; to employ fiction for the ventilation of ideas. Precedents for all these improvements, except the last, might have been found in the classical romances, and it might have been expected that fiction would have experienced the same development as other branches of literature. On the contrary, the last Italian novelette is as far from the novel of the nineteenth century as the first, and the most powerful literary agent of good or evil, next to the equally modern newspaper, remained to be created in recent times. Whatever the defects of the Italian novel of the sixteenth century, it was nevertheless, unlike the drama, a thoroughly national form of composition, it was far in advance of anything of the kind existing elsewhere, and it exerted great influence on the literature of other countries as the general storehouse of dramatic plots.

It is no doubt to the credit of Italian novelists as artists that they did not overload their stories with didactic purpose; but this was an error which, writing mainly to amuse, they lay under little temptation to commit. None of them were endowed with creative imagination; none transcended the sphere of ordinary experience, or showed the least inclination to effect for prose fiction what Boiardo and Ariosto had accomplished for narrative poetry. Their notti piacevoli were not Arabian Nights. Their object of amusing could consequently only be achieved by keeping close to actual manners, and we may depend upon receiving from them a tolerably accurate picture of Italian society in so far as it suited them to present it; although the portion that[Pg 214] best lent itself to their objects was the most licentious and corrupt, and the loose women and salacious priests who recur in their tales from generation to generation, though by no means creatures of imagination, are still far from typical of the entire society of Italy. Like the masks of the Greek comedy, like the rakes and topers of the English comedy of the Restoration and Revolution, they are in a certain degree traditional and conventional. Modern fiction is encyclopædic: no class of the community is outside its scope. Italian fiction was eclectic, restricted by a tacit convention to what was deemed its appropriate sphere. The history of pictorial and plastic art has been reproduced in modern fiction; the property of the connoisseur has become the possession of the nation. Hence, whatever the literary merits of the Italian novelists of this period, whatever the fidelity with which they reproduce the social atmosphere of the time, their works all taken together count for less in the history of the human mind than those of a single first-class modern novelist such as Dickens or Balzac.

Boccaccio’s immediate successors as novelists are FRANCO SACCHETTI and GIOVANNI FIORENTINO, already mentioned as poets of the fifteenth century. Sacchetti (1335-1410) had in his youth been a merchant, and had travelled much both in Italy and in Slavonian countries. After his return he became a Florentine magistrate, and filled some important public offices. He was a man of solid and humorous wisdom, who instructed his times, partly by religious and moral discourses, which frequently display great liberality of feeling, partly by his stories, which, apart from their literary merits, afford a valuable picture of a society half-way on the road from barbarism to civilisation. The majority are founded[Pg 215] on real occurrences, generally humorous, though the humour is not always as visible to us as to his contemporaries; but sometimes tragic. Some, as with Boccaccio, are derived from folk-lore in theGesta Romanorum or theFabliaux. All are recounted with extreme simplicity and brevity. The art of working up a single incident into a long story by subtle delineation of character, elaborate description, and ingenious plot and underplot, was then unknown.[16] Sacchetti is the straightforward raconteur and nothing more, but he deserves as much praise for the ease of his narrative as for the purity of his style. He can hardly be considered as an imitator of Boccaccio, who is always the poet and man of letters, while Sacchetti rather produces the impression of an ordinary Florentine gentleman telling stories after dinner with no special care for artistic effect, which nevertheless he attains by the plain good sense which bids him go straight to his subject and subordinate minor details to the really essential. His tales are single, not set in a framework like Boccaccio’s.

This is not the case with his contemporary Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, author of thePecorone (Great Stupid), who has exposed himself to ridicule by the quaintness of his introductory machinery. A friar and a nun are supposed to meet weekly in the parlour of a convent, and console themselves for the insuperable obstacles to their attachment by telling stories, upon the merits of which they compliment each other extravagantly. The tales, however, are interesting, well told, and greatly esteemed [Pg 216]for the excellence of their style. Like Sacchetti’s, they are mostly genuine anecdotes, or at least founded upon fact or popular tradition; some are taken with little alteration from Villani’s Chronicles. Nothing is certainly known of the author, except that he began to write his tales in 1378 at the Castle of Dovadola, in compulsory or voluntary exile from his native city. He is believed to have been a notary, and a partisan of the Guelf faction.

Giovanni da Prato, author ofIl Paradin degli Alberti (about 1420) also deserves mention here, on account of the short stories inserted into his ethical dialogues; but the first novelist of much importance after Giovanni Fiorentino is MASSUCCIO of Salerno, a Neapolitan, who seems to have been a man of rank, and to have been for some time in the service of the Duke of Milan. He wrote about 1470, and his tales were first printed in 1476. The celebrity which he continues to enjoy is, it may be feared, mainly owing to his character as the most licentious of the Italian novelists in fact, although, if we may trust his own assurance, the most virtuous in intention. His tales are divided into five parts, each of the first three of which has what the writer considers to be a distinct moral purpose. In the first, in Dunlop’s words, “the scope of the stories is to show that God will sooner or later inflict vengeance on dissolute monks.” The second “proves that the monks of those days invented many frauds.” The third “is intended to show that the greatest and finest ladies of Italy indulged in gallantries of a nature which did them very little honour.” All these propositions might have been thought susceptible of demonstration without theNovellino, and much better established than Massuccio’s claim to a place[Pg 217] among moralists or reformers. He protests that his tales are “ower true,” and for the most part founded on recent transactions; and, in fact, he appears less indebted than any predecessor to folk-lore and the French fabliaux. The last two sections of his work, however, contain love adventures of too exceptional a nature to be founded upon actual incidents. Some of these manifest, not merely ingenuity of invention, but considerable tragic power. The style is somewhat barbarous; and the same remark applies to the lighter fiction, generally of the nature of anecdote, of his contemporary Sabadino degli Arienti, a native and historian of Bologna. Sabadino’s tales are much less objectionable than Massuccio’s, though no less than his in the author’s opinion moralissimi documenti. They are entitledPorrettane, from their having been composed for the amusement of the visitors to the baths of Porretta, which gives them some importance as an index to the taste of the more opulent and leisured classes of society.

The novels of the following century are exceedingly numerous, but in general too much upon one pattern to deserve especial notice until we arrive at those of Bandello, Cinthio, and Grazzini, each of whom is eminent for some special characteristic. Of Firenzuola, one of the most typical writers of his day, we have already spoken, his novelettes being generally interwoven with his other prose works. Two single novelettes by separate authors deserve special notice as world-famous, though not by the genius of their authors. TheRomeo and Giulietta of Luigi da Porto, a gentleman of Vicenza who died in 1529, is a powerful and well-told story, although it would have been little heard of but for Shakespeare, who nevertheless seems to have been unacquainted with[Pg 218] it, having founded his tragedy upon the inferior version made by Arthur Brooke after the French of Boistuau. The other story which has become a portion of the world’s repertory of fiction is theBelphegor of Giovanni Brevio, a subject also treated by Machiavelli, and revived in our own day by Thackeray. The idea of the devil’s aversion to matrimony, not as a divine ordinance, but as a nuisance inconsistent with his own peace and comfort, is so irresistibly comic that one is surprised to find it originally Slavonian.

The celebrity of Pietro Aretino requires the mention of his novels, which, however, possess no very distinctive features. To find these we must turn chiefly to Straparola, whose genre requires a distinct notice; and, among those who diverged less from the beaten track, Bandello, Cinthio, and Grazzini. Bandello, says Settembrini, depicts the Italian, Grazzini the Florentine, Cinthio humanity at large.

MATTEO BANDELLO (1480-1561) was a Lombard and a Dominican, who resided successively at Mantua and at Milan, the latter city in his time one of the most uncomfortable places in Italy from the oppressions and depredations of the Spanish soldiery. Popular commotions concurred to drive him to France, where Henry II. made him Bishop of Agen. His novelettes had been composed before this distinction befell him, but his episcopacy was no obstacle to their publication in 1554. Though frequently licentious, his stories indicate a considerable advance upon his forerunners in the power of depicting character and in seriousness of tone. He prefers historical narration to invention, and usually bases his tales upon some actual occurrence, often revolting for its cruelty or indecency. The story ofViolante,[Pg 219] analysed in No. 380 of theEdinburgh Review, is a good example of his tragic force, and many others might be given. The pathetic grace of the opening of hisGerardo and Elena, analysed in the same essay, is no less excellent in its more romantic and delicate way. He was a prolific writer, producing no fewer than eighty-nine novelettes, more esteemed by foreigners than by his own countrymen, who were offended by his Lombardisms. Settembrini, however, not in general favourable to the productions of the Cinque Cento, pronounces him the first Italian novelist after Boccaccio.

No imputation of rusticity can be attached to the diction of ANTONIO MARIA GRAZZINI, surnamedIl Lasca (1503-83), for here the style is the main recommendation of the work. Grazzini, an apothecary by profession, was one of the chief promoters of the movement for prescribing a standard of pure Tuscan, and as one of the founders of the celebrated Academy degli Umidi, each of whose members was bound to assume the name of some fish, he called himselfIl Lasca (the Roach), by which name he is best known. Such toys occupied the thoughts of Italians in an age of decay when great deeds had become impossible. Grazzini’s stories are mostly taken from Florentine private life, and as such have their value, apart from the idiomatic Tuscan, which is best apprehended by the writer’s countrymen. They are not of enthralling interest, and when tragical are sometimes revolting, but the exposition is easy and artistic.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA GIRALDI CINTHIO of Ferrara (1504-73) is better known by name to English readers than most of his fellow-novelists, since from him Shakespeare derived the plots ofOthello andMeasure[Pg 220] for Measure. The story on which the former drama is founded is not a bad specimen of Cinthio’s usual work. His subjects are frequently tragical, sometimes shocking, but the treatment is generally powerful, the narrative direct and forcible, and he is in great measure exempt from the grossness of his contemporaries. The tales, a hundred in number, whence their title ofEcatomithi, are supposed to be narrated on board a ship bound for Marseilles, and conveying a party of Romans escaping from the sack of the Eternal City. They are divided like Boccaccio’s into ten classes, each considered to illustrate some particular point of morals or manners. They are highly respectable performances; but by so much as they surpass Grazzini’s in matter they fall below them in style, which, though not incorrect, is devoid of colour and individuality.

STRAPAROLA, already briefly alluded to, was a native of Caravaggio, and published hisNotti Piacevoli in 1554. He is a good story-teller, although a bad stylist; but what gives him an epoch-making rank among Italian novelists is not his merit or demerit in either capacity, but his having been the first to avail himself of popular folk-lore as a groundwork for fiction. Nothing is more annoying than the almost complete neglect of popular mythology by men of culture in antiquity. Apuleius tells one inimitable tale, without saying where he got it. Synesius spends his evenings listening to the stories of the Libyan peasants, and is not at the trouble to preserve a single one. It is nevertheless clear that such tales must have been as rife in ancient times as in our own. Straparola was perhaps the first man who systematically turned them to literary account: it would have been well if he had gone much further, and proportionately[Pg 221] reduced his debt to Hieronymo Morlini, the chief recommendation of whose generally indecent and always ungrammatical Latin stories (Naples, 1520) is their exceeding rarity. Nearly a hundred years afterwards Straparola was completely eclipsed both as concerned the quantity and the quality of his folk-lore fictions, by thePentamerone of GIOVANNI BASILE, Count of Morone, a collection whose relation to the popular mythology of other nations has occasioned endless discussion. Puss in Boots, and Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and many another favourite owe to Basile their first appearance in literary costume. In narrative he is the breathless, loquacious, exuberant Neapolitan, too much in a hurry to trouble himself about style or art, but carrying all before him by his vigour and vehemence, and betraying, as his German translator has pointed out, strong traces of the influence of Rabelais.

It will be evident from the above brief sketch of the Italian novel that in the sixteenth century the art of novel-writing was nearly identical with the art of narrative. This was fully possessed by most writers of fiction; but characterisation, ingenuity of construction and development of plot, underplot, episode, artful suspension of interest, above all the application of the novelist’s art to weighty purposes, were all in the most rudimentary condition. Compared with the modern novel, the ancient story is as a simple air upon a flute to the complicated harmony of an organ. It is true that the old romances abound with hints and germs only needing development, but development was slow in coming, and even when about the beginning of the eighteenth century romance and novelette had grown into the novel, it was still long before the novel became a vehicle of ideas and a potent factor in civilisation. The reason probably is that while the novel may employ the highest human faculties, it is at the same time the best medium for conveying ideas to the less cultivated orders of society. The extension of reading and writing to these classes has called forth a tribe of readers which had no existence in the days of the Cinque Cento, and has invested the only description of literature which powerfully appeals to them with extraordinary significance. The influence of the novel in the modern sense grows, and will continue to grow; but there is still abundant room for the short and simple story, the consistent development of a single incident or situation, compensating in art for what it lacks in variety, yet, now that human life has become so much richer and more complex than of old, at a further remove from mere anecdote than seemed necessary for its Italian prototype.

Alone among the great nations of the modern world, Italy stands in the unenviable position of possessing no drama at the same time national and literary. From one point of view three classes of the drama may be distinguished, (1) The rude popular play entirely a creation of the people, such as the buffooneries of the Dionysiac festival, out of which the Athenian drama grew, or the dramatic exhibitions at fairs of itinerant actors barely distinguishable from mountebanks, like those whose puppet-plays originatedFaust. Performances of this nature have probably existed in every nation endowed with the rudiments of culture. (2) These crude beginnings elevated by men of genius into the sphere of art, and become literary without ceasing to be popular. This is the true national drama, when the pulses of the poet and the people beat in full unison, and of which Greece, England, and Spain have given the world the most brilliant examples. (3) The artificial drama, written by men of culture for men of culture, but neglecting, or at least failing to reach the heart of the people. With the exception of the musical drama of which Metastasio affords the type, and of the comedies of Goldoni and Gozzi, all of which belonged to a more recent period than that with which we are now engaged, the whole of the Italian drama[Pg 224] possessing any literary pretensions belongs to this class. It is true that, as in England and elsewhere, it is accompanied by a lower order of dramatic composition which may be regarded as popular. In the early days of the Italian drama we have theRappresentazioni, at a later period theCommedia dell’ Arte, of both of which some notice must be taken. But neither is, strictly speaking, literature.

It appears at first exceedingly surprising that a nation, not only so gifted as the Italian, but so dramatically gifted, should not merely never have achieved a national drama, but should have no dramatic writer meriting to be ranked among the chief masters of the art. Lively, emotional, capable of being worked up to the most violent degrees of passion; at the same time observant, sagacious, reflective; members of a society comprising every variety of character and profession, and inheritors of a history replete with moving and tragic incidents, Italians should seem to have wanted no requisite for the creation of a flourishing stage. Prolific they were indeed: more than five thousand plays were written between 1500 and 1734. Perhaps there are not five which enjoy any considerable reputation out of Italy, or which, whatever their literary merit, can be considered characteristically Italian. The most potent of probable causes will be adduced in its place, but no single explanation, or any accumulation of partially satisfactory explanations, will entirely account for so remarkable a circumstance. One reason was probably the great development of Italian culture at an early period, compared with that of other European nations. The ablest men had become fully acquainted with Seneca and Terence, and looked upon them as painters[Pg 225] looked upon Raphael, or sculptors upon Phidias. They deemed them the norm of excellence, and condemned themselves to a sterile imitation, which might and often did possess high literary merit, but which was entirely estranged from popular sympathies. Men like Politian and Pontano, who really could have created a national drama if they could have trusted their own instincts, were deterred from producing anything at variance with the canons in which they themselves believed. It must be said in extenuation of their error, that the classical school, with all its defects, was vastly in advance of the rude, amorphous beginnings of the romantic drama in every country but one. One little corner of Europe alone possessed in the early sixteenth century a drama at once living, indigenous, and admirable as literature. Nothing in literary history is more surprising than the gap between Gil Vicente and his contemporaries, whether classical or romantic. Had he been born an Italian instead of a Portuguese, the history of the Italian stage might possibly have been different. It nevertheless remains to be explained why no such person arose among so gifted a people, and why throughout their entire history, with one or two marked exceptions in particular departments, Italians have never had a drama that they could justly call their own.

In its first beginnings, notwithstanding, the Italian drama was as national as any other. As with all other modern European dramas, its origin was religious. Christianity found the need of replacing the heathen shows and spectacles it had suppressed, and amused the people with representations of Scriptural subjects, or of incidents in the lives of the saints. For centuries these were never[Pg 226] written down, but improvised or exhibited in dumb show. Gradually the miracle-play came into being, a more advanced development, compelling learning by rote and much drilling of the performers, and therefore of necessity committed to writing. In Italy this assumed a more polished form than elsewhere, the Rappresentazione Sacra, rude in construction, but composed frequently in elegant, sometimes in excellent octave verse. This was a development of the fifteenth century, the earliest of which the date is known being the Abraham and Isaac of Feo Belcari, 1449. It became exceedingly popular in the later part of the century, especially at Florence. No less distinguished a person than Lorenzo de’ Medici is enumerated among its authors. Numbers of such pieces were printed, down even to the end of the seventeenth century, and usually set off with wood-engravings, sometimes of great elegance. The materials were usually drawn from ecclesiastical legend. Constantine is represented as giving his daughter to his successful general Gallicanus, on condition of his becoming a Christian. Julian, marching to wage war with the Persians, is slain by an invisible saint. The histories of Tobit, of St. Agnes, of St. Cecilia, and numbers of similar legends, form the staple subjects. Sometimes romance is laid under contribution, as in the instance of the Emperor Octavian, but always with a religious motive. Dramatic force does not seem to have been much considered, the stately octave being better adapted for declamation than for dialogue; but the stage directions are very precise, and every effort seems to have been made to impress the spectators, so far as permitted by the rudeness of the open-air theatre, a mere scaffold with[Pg 227] perhaps a curtain for a background, yet often very splendidly decorated.

How near Italy came to creating a national drama is shown by the frequent representations of public events upon the stage, quite in the spirit of Shakespeare’s historical plays. Two types may be discriminated—one adhering very closely to that of theRappresentazioni, and composed in the vernacular; the latter following classical models, and in Latin. To the latter belongs the very tedious play of Carlo Verardi on the fall of Granada, performed before Cardinal Riario in 1492; but the very remarkable and unfortunately lost dramatic chronicle of the usurpations and downfall of the house of Borgia, acted before the Duke of Urbino on the recovery of his states in 1504, seems rather to have belonged to the former class. To this type also is allied the first Italian drama of genuine literary merit, theOrfeo of Politian, where the dialogue is mostly in octave stanzas, as in the Rappresentazioni, and the object is evidently rather to delight the spectators by a rapid succession of scenes admitting of musical accompaniment than to “purge the soul by pity and terror.” Slight as this juvenile work of Politian’s is, it is the work of a poet, and written with a swing and rush which recall the lyrical parts of the Bacchæ of Euripides. It indicates what theRappresentazioni might have become but for the competition of the more classical type of drama, and seems a prelude to the thoroughly national species of composition which arose in the seventeenth and prevailed in the eighteenth century, the opera.

The Italian stage had thus made a respectable beginning with the drama a hundred years before any drama worthy of the name existed in England. The disap[Pg 228]pointment of such auspicious promise is justly ascribed by Symonds, in great measure, to the want of a representative public and a centre of social life. The emulation of a number of independent cities, so favourable to the development of art, prevented the development of the national feeling essential to a national drama. The political circumstances of these communities, moreover, were inimical to the existence of a popular stage. Theatrical representations remained the amusement of courts; and when the general public was allowed to participate in them, the play itself was so enveloped in show and spectacle as to appear the least part of the entertainment. It was not possible that under such circumstances the drama could deviate far from conventional models. Tragedy continued to be composed after the pattern of Seneca, an imitation of an imitation. Comedy, though also in bondage to classical precedents, could not avoid depicting contemporary manners, and hence displays far more vitality and vigour.

Latin plays had been written by Italians from the beginning of the fifteenth century, and had included comedies, now lost, by persons of no less account than Petrarch and Æneas Sylvius. The first vernacular tragedies worthy of the name were composed for the entertainment of the court of Ferrara, and were written in the octave stanza orterza rima. No genius could have adapted this form to the exigencies of the stage, and a great step was taken when in 1515 Trissino, whose epic on the Gothic wars has been previously noticed, wrote his tragedy ofSophonisba in blank verse, retaining nothing of the lyrical element but the chorus. The piece marks an era, and as such remains celebrated, notwithstanding its total want of poetry and passion. It would have[Pg 229] been a good outline for an abler hand to have clothed with substance. Trissino had abundance of successors and imitators, most of whom had more poetical endowment, but few more genuine vocation, and all of whom are devoid of any impulse except the ambition of literary distinction. This could only be reached by the prescribed path; and no vestige of originality appears in any of them except Sperone Speroni’s innovation, not laudable in a tragedy, although a fruitful suggestion for the pastoral drama, of mingling lyrical metres with the regulation blank verse. The subject of his play, the incest of Macareus and Canace, infinitely overtaxed his elegant talent. Of the other tragedies of the time, the best known are theRosmunda of Rucellai, theMariamne of Lodovico Dolce, and theOrbecche of Cinthio the novelist, whoseEpitia contains the rude germ of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure[17]. At a later date tragedy was attempted by a true poet of great genius, who would assuredly have produced something memorable under favourable circumstances. Hut the composition of Tasso’sTorrismondo, commenced in his youth, was long interrupted, and the play was completed in 1586 under the depressing circumstances of his Mantuan exile. It thus wants energy; and, as Carducci remarks, Tasso is too much of an eclectic, striving by a combination of the advantages of all styles to supply the one indispensable gift of poetical inspiration, which misfortune had all but extinguished.

[Pg 230]

The first Italian comedies, like the tragedies, were written in rhyme. One early example is entitled to notice, both on account of the subject and as the work of an excellent poet, theTimone of Boiardo. It is little more than a translation of Lucian’s Dialogue, yet was, we feel confident, the channel through which Shakespeare gained the acquaintance with that work revealed in hisTimon of Athens. The history of Italian comedy as a recognised form of art should, however, be dated from theCalandra of Cardinal Bibbiena, first performed about 1508. It hardly attempts delineation of character, but, as Symonds remarks, “achieved immediate success by reproducing both the humour of Boccaccio and the invention of Plautus in the wittiest vernacular.” The plot is taken from theMenæchmi of Plautus, the source of Shakespeare’sComedy of Errors; but Bibbiena’s idea of making the indistinguishable twins brother and sister enhances the comic effect at the expense of morality, little considered by cardinals in those days.

The great success of Bibbiena’s comedy was calculated to encourage rivalry, and it chanced that two of the first men in Italy of the day possessed the dramatic instinct, combined with a decided gift for satire. In the year following the exhibition of theCalandra (1509), Ariosto gave theCassaria, a comedy of intrigue on the Plautine model. The same description is applicable to his other comedies, theSuppositi, theLena, theNegromante, and theScolastica. In all except theNegromante the action turns upon the stratagems of a knavish servant to obtain for his master the money indispensable for the gratification of his amorous desires. This style of comedy requires a well-contrived plot, and the maintenance of the interest throughout by a series of ingenious surprises and un[Pg 231]foreseen incidents. In these Ariosto fully attains his object. Writing for the amusement of a court, he does not care to stray from the conventions which he knows will satisfy, and his pieces afford no measure of the success he might have attained if he had appealed to the public and essayed to depict Italian society as it existed. One of the characters is exceedingly lifelike, the accommodating Dominican in theScolastica, who, armed with all imaginable faculties from the Pope, is ready to commute the fulfilment of an inconvenient vow into the performance of some good work profitable to his order. This play was left unfinished, but was written before theLena and theNegromante, which probably appeared about 1528.

The other Italian comic writer of genius was one of more powerful intellect and more serious character than Ariosto, if less richly endowed as a poet. Released from prison after the overthrow of his party and the loss of his political position in 1512, Machiavelli found solace in the composition of theMandragola (Mandrake), a piece acted before the Pope in that day, and which could hardly be represented anywhere in this. Its cynicism is worse than its immorality, the plot consisting in the stratagem by which an innocent young wife is persuaded to admit a lover; all the personages, including the husband, who is nevertheless himself deceived in a material point, co-operating for so laudable an end. Disagreeable as the situation is, it is probably founded upon fact; and at all events the play is no pale copy of Plautus or Terence, but full of consistent and strongly individualised characters, and scenes of the most drastically comic effect. The portrait of the rascally father confessor is particularly vigorous, and proves of itself[Pg 232] how ripe the times were for Luther. A dozen more plays of equal merit would have raised the Italian stage very high. But no successor to Machiavelli appeared; and his other play, theClizia, is deficient in originality, being little more than a paraphrase of theCasina of Plautus.

Many comedies of considerable merit succeeded Machiavelli’s, among which may be particularly mentioned those of Firenzuola, who followed Roman precedents, and of Cecchi, and Gelli, and Grazzini, who to a considerable extent disengaged themselves from tradition. Angelo Beolco, calledIl Ruzzante, struck upon a new vein in the delineation of rustic life, involving the employment of dialect; and, near the end of the century, the life of the people was represented with extreme vividness by Buonarotti, nephew of Michael Angelo, in hisFiera andTancia. One other comic dramatist takes an important place, the repulsive and decried Aretino. His claim to permanent significance is grounded, not on the scanty literary merits of his works, but on the unique characteristic thus expressed by Symonds, “They depict the great world from the standpoint of the servants’ hall.” They are the work of a low-minded man, who could see nothing but the baser traits of the society around him, but saw these clearly, and also saw no reason why he should not blazon what he saw. Hence his usefulness is in the ratio of his offensiveness.

It is significant of the difference between the Italian mind and the Spanish, and of the extent to which the former had emancipated itself from mediævalism, that theRappresentazione, touching so nearly on the confines of the SpanishAuto, never developed into that or any allied variety of the drama. The abstractions of the vices[Pg 233] and virtues, so natural to the Spaniard and the man of the Middle Age in general, were uncongenial to the Italian, whoseRappresentazioni were always peopled by definite, tangible persons, even if of the spiritual order. TheAdamo of Andreini, early in the seventeenth century, from which Milton undoubtedly derived his first idea of treating the Fall in a miracle play, might have led to a development in this direction, but remained an isolated eccentricity. The true national development lay in quite another path, the pastoral drama. Something like this might be found in Gil Vicente, but we may be certain that his works were totally unknown in Italy, and that the pastoral play grew out of such romances as the Arcadia, such eclogues as those of Baptista Mantuanus, and the court masques in which the principal parts were taken by shepherds and shepherdesses. Politian’sOrfeo is not very far from being such a piece, although it is a good deal more. A pastoral masque was composed as early as 1506 by Castiglione for the amusement of the court of Urbino. Others followed from time to time, and developed into a real pastoral drama by Beccari in 1554; but the literary pretensions of this class of composition continued to be very slender until it was virtually created by Tasso’sAminta in 1573. Few novel experiments in literature have enjoyed a more immediate or more permanent success. Numerous as were the Aminta’s imitators, its primacy has never but once been seriously challenged, and its nature and simplicity have in general been justly preferred to the more elaborate artifice of thePastor Fido. It is indeed deficient in the rich poetry of its English rival, theFaithful Shepherdess, “as inferior, poetically speaking,” says Leigh Hunt, “as a lawn with a few trees on it is to the depths of a forest.”[Pg 234] But Leigh Hunt confesses its superiority in “true dramatic skill, and flesh and blood interest”: it is indeed as far as anything can be from the insipidity usually associated with pastoral compositions. It has, moreover, more of the genuine yearning for the golden age, the spirit which inspires Keats’sEndymion, than is found in the fanciful dramas of Fletcher, or Milton, or Ben Jonson. “The central motive ofAminta and the Pastor Fido,” says Symonds, “is the contrast between the actual world of ambition, treachery, and sordid strife, and the ideal world of pleasure, loyalty, and tranquil ease.”

Although the pastoral drama is a legitimate as well as a beautiful kind of composition, it is not capable of very great extension or variety. Tasso’s successors might conceivably surpass him as poets, but could only repeat him as dramatists. His only serious competitor is his contemporary GIOVANNI BATTISTA GUARINI, the author of thePastor Fido (1537-1612).

Guarini, the descendant of a Veronese family already distinguished in letters, was, like Tasso, attached to the court of the Duke of Ferrara; but, unlike Tasso, was a man of the world, and was employed in several important missions, especially one to solicit the crown of Poland for his master, where he nearly died of a Polish inn. Like most of the Duke’s literary protégés, he became estranged from him, and spent the later part of his life in roaming from court to court in quest of employment, and litigating with his children and the world at large. His disposition was quarrelsome; literary disputes had long severed him from Tasso; it is to his honour that when the latter was unable to watch over his own works, he took care of and published his lyrical poems. The[Pg 235] most brilliant episode of Guarini’s life was the publication of hisPastor Fido in 1590; but not the least troublesome was the literary controversy in which it involved him. These disputes, born rather of the idleness than of the conscientiousness of the Italian literati, are now forgotten, and thePastor Fido, a direct challenge to the Aminta, is allowed an honourable though a second place. Its relation to its predecessor may be compared to that of the Corinthian order to the Ionic. Guarini has sought to compensate for the lack of natural, spontaneous inspiration by superior artifice of plot: his characters are more numerous, and his action more intricate and ingenious. This would not have availed him much if he had not been a poet, but this he certainly was, though with less of thenascitur and more of thefit than usual. Tasso was conscious of a truer inspiration, and conveys his claim to the virtual invention of a new mode in poetry in the verses which he has placed in the mouth of Love appearing in the disguise of a shepherd, thus rendered by Leigh Hunt:

Guarini frequently repeated Tasso’s ideas, striving to enhance their effect by careful elaboration. The poetry of one or both has passed into Calderon’sMagico Prodigioso, and originated the scene of the temptation of Justina, an ornament of English literature in the incomparable version of Shelley.