The Oxford book of Italian verse

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The Oxford Book Of Italian Verse

xiiith Century—xixth Century

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Introduction I

I

THE earliest Italian poetry which has come down to us was written in Sicily during the brief but extremely important epoch of culture which was inaugurated by the Emperor Frederick II, himself a poet and an enthusiastic patron of all fine art. This poetry, as might be expected, is in some degree tainted with the formal graces of the Court; it lacks the personal note, and its conventions are an inheritance from the Provençal troubadours. Dante tells us in the Vita Nuova that the first poet who wrote in lingua volgare—in the spoken language that existed all through the early Middle Ages side by side with the sadly degraded Latin of the priests—employed that lowly medium in order to be understood by the lady whom he addressed; but the Sicilian school of poets probably made use of the volgare for a less interesting reason—it had become the fashion, or, possibly, the custom of writing it was encouraged by the Emperor because his ambition to unite the various Italian cities against the Pope made him realize the importance of cultivating a language which, except for a few local variations, was common to them all. In spite of a certain conventionality, however, there is a freshness and delicacy in the little garland of Sicilian court-poetry which is intrinsic, owing nothing to the art of Provence; the note of irony in the Tenzone of Ciullo d'Alcamo is new and real, and the other poets of the group occasionally achieve effects which are never found in completely derivative literature. To call them the Sicilian group does not imply that they were all Sicilians; there were many Tuscans, and probably many Lombards, at the Court of Frederick II, and thus the new art would be disseminated throughout Italy.

Provençal influence not only found its way into the country through Sicily; the gai saber was cultivated in Genoa, in the Trevisan March, and especially at the Court of Bonifazio di Monferrato, the friend of Raimbaut di Vaqueiras. Many Italians, Sordello amongst them, wrote in Provençal. The poetry of the langue d'oc was essentially 'courtly', but the epics of chivalry which were written in the langue d'oïl and were brought into Italy by wandering minstrels (who eventually became a public nuisance, in the manner of certain modern alien artists) had a more popular quality; the pig-headed paladins and bloodthirsty archbishops who ravened in those interminable laisses would no doubt seem singularly lifelike to a humble audience in that most troubled time. Besides the epic of chivalry, didactic poems in the manner of the 'Romance of the Rose' were popular; various versions of the Arthurian legends were recited both in the piazza and the Court, MS. copies of which (amongst them the famous book which Paolo and Francesca read together in the garden at Rimini) existed in the palace of every great noble. These poems in the langue d'oïl very soon lost their distinctively French quality, and borrowed many dialectic peculiarities of the provinces where they became popular. The book which Paolo and Francesca read was probably written in a jargon compounded of the langue d'oïl and the volgare of the Adriatic seaboard.

Not only French and Provençal, but the parent language itself, which remained alive in the Church and the Schools, influenced the earliest Italian writers. There was a school of 'Latinizing' poets at Pisa in the thirteenth century, and the work of Guittone of Arezzo and the scholastic bards of the University of Bologna derived much of its antique gravity, and lost all the spontaneous vigour that is the life of lyric poetry, from its attempt to adapt classical form. But all these are purely external, one may almost add pedantic influences. Italian poetry was not born in Rome or Paris or Toulouse, and the development of lyrical art in the thirteenth century was not the sudden cry of a voice which, like the voice of Virgil in Hell, through long silence had grown hoarse. All Italians sing—more or less melodiously—and there was singing in Italy long before the days of Frederick II, but the words ot the songs were not written down; they come to us as fragments quoted by Dante, by Villani, by the religious chroniclers. The singers of this popular poetry are not chained in the vicious circle of courtly mannerisms: the whole of life—family, municipal, national—is their province; they are satiric, amorous, obscene, patriotic, burlesque and elegiac; most important of all, they are completely spontaneous. It is in them, and not in the haughty masters of the gai saber, that we find the germ of the Italian lyric, and poems so completely different as the Lament for the Crusades of Rinaldo d'Aquino and the Crucifixion of Jacopone da Todi are direct continuations of the popular songs—of the early poetry of Italy which you may still hear as it rises from the sunburnt vineyards of Tuscany, or breaks the dreamy silence of the Campagna.

About the time when Frederick and Ciullo and the unhappy Pier' delle Vigne were writing, we lind a group of poets in Florence, where there was no court and therefore no courtly affectation. Their poems, of which the Tenzone by Ciacco d'Anguillaja is a good example, were remarkable for a sober simplicity, the appropriate language of the good old time extolled by Cacciaguida, when

Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchia antica... Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.

At Bologna, where the dreadful shade of Aristotle hovered over the University, a school of philosophical poetry flourished; Guido Guinizelli sang, or rather reasoned, of love in the detached and scholastic manner that is the privilege of the learned; whilst Umbria was the centre of the religious poetry, the laudi and the sacra rappresentazione.

Such were the antecedents of the dolce stil nuovo and of the Divine Comedy. The evolutionary view of literature has of late been advanced to painful extremes, for certainly nothing can be drearier than to regard any great work of art as the punctual flower on a particular branch of a vast genealogical tree. Yet it is well to remember that we may find one, at any rate, of the many keys which 'unlock the heart' of a great poet hidden away amid even the rubbish and lumber left by his predecessors—that a knowledge of the intellectual and artistic tendencies of his age may give us a fuller insight into his own mental pro , enabling us to distinguish between that which is vital in his work and that which is excrescent, and showing us exactly where he broke free from old conventions and became unique. Much of the lyric poetry of Dante, especially that of the Vita Nuova, itself Provençal in form, is overweighted with the scholasticism of Bologna and has more than a trace of the Troubadour conventions, and an Englishman who reads, for instance, the intricate Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute which troubled Coleridge for so long, may be forgiven if he finds the style nuovo rather than dolce. But a comparison of the lyrics of Cavalcanti and Dante with those of their contemporaries and immediate forerunners will convince him that the dolce stil was really a new voice that arose from the tentative confusion of the Middle Ages—a voice that had found the appropriate expression of real and often deep emotion. It would be unkind, of course, to deny that the learned men of Bologna were capable of emotion, but certainly their method of expressing it often strangely resembled a lecture on the Syllogism. Just as the work of a very young writer changes when, after imitating the whole tribe of modern poets, he discovers at last that he actually possesses an inner voice which says nothing resembling the words of these masters, but yet has a note of startling reality which seems, to his partial ear, to have escaped them utterly, so the poetry of Italy ceased to be an elegant experiment and became a vivid expression of deep feeling. This is the real miracle wrought by the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, and the Divina Commedia is its deathless memorial. With Dante, an art which had seemed capable of expressing only the trivial loves and conventions of courtiers and shepherdesses becomes the medium for presenting the vast and chaotic pageant of the Middle Ages, the depth of Hell and the height of Heaven, the angelic doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas and the greed of a glutton. The blood lust, the loves and hates, the arid pedantry, the grim dogma of damnation and salvation, the wild prejudices of a time when men were masters of logic but seldom reasonable, and saints were fiercer than sinners, and Christ's Vicars on Earth went armed in complete steel—all this weltering life is enshrined for ever in the Divine Comedy by one who often judged his age and his fellows, as we may think now, harshly, pedantically, sometimes even cruelly, but who had keener vision and felt more deeply than any one since the great Greek dramatists, and lends us his heart and his eyes. Dante expresses his time because he has the vision of genius; every aspect of the Middle Ages is of burning interest to him, and he is able to give his idea complete expression in the 'fair new style' which was partially discovered by his almost forgotten forerunners.

Whilst Dante follows the 'comedy' of the soul's progress towards heavenly wisdom from the selva oscura of ignorance and sensuality, he does not attempt to analyse the actual life of the soul, with its phantom fears and inexplicable yearnings—all that intricate history which every one of us is compiling day by day. Man, for him, is an individual only in the external sense; the soul of man is not an active agent possessing all Hell and Heaven within itself, but simply the object of divine grace, and is differentiated from other souls mainly by its capacity for receiving or rejecting that heavenly gift. And although the poem, in one of its aspects, is the history of his soul's progress from darkness to light, his allusions to his own emotions during that strange journey are brief; he is absorbed in a drama of which he is primarily a spectator, only indirectly an actor. He gazes on the torments of Hell with the eyes of a judge, and on the mystic rose of Heaven with the eyes of a child, but in Hell it is of Florence rather than of himself that he is ever thinking, and in Paradise all that he loved on earth is forgotten in the contemplation of ‘the love which moves the sun and other stars’. The ancient flame which had burnt him so long sears his heart again when Beatrice appears at last to him in Purgatory, but when they pass together into Heaven she seems to have become merely a guide—a somewhat didactic guide, more potent and more austere than the dolcissimo padre, Virgil. His minor poems are harmonious expressions of tranquil and beautiful thought, not vivid revelations of a mood; the great personality that is involuntarily self-revealed in the Commedia is far less intense in the Canzoni; for the deep analysis of the mystery of the solitary soul and the noble expression of that analysis we must turn to the poet who stands first in the dawn of the Renaissance—to Petrarch.

In the Trecento, which was inaugurated triumphantly by the Jubilee of Boniface VIII, the figures of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are the pre-eminent types of three aspects in the development of Italian civilization. Dante exemplifies the religious movement of the time, Petrarch the humanistic, and Boccaccio is the realist, the observer of the visible world who laughs at priestly inconsistencies between precept and practice and exalts the presentment of human folly and frailty to the height of fine art. Dante's learning is the old wisdom of the schools, but Petrarch is the modern scholar; with him the cult of classical literature becomes a passion which drives him to roam the world in quest of ancient MSS., to learn Greek in his old age, to live in a mental solitude thronged with the ghosts of Athens and Rome. His enthusiasm compels him to attempt, not only treatises such as Dante wrote, but works of art in Latin; and if he had never happened to meet the mysterious lady of Avignon who became the empress of his soul for so many years, he would be remembered, if he were remembered at all, merely as one of the obscure toilers who laid the foundations of modern enlightenment. But the Canzoniere, which he thought quite inferior to his paralysing epic on the Second Punic War, is immortal because it is the first record of all the secret melancholy of a human soul—a soul full of wistful desires and subtle changefulness, with an exquisite feeling for beauty and a poignant sense of the fleeting nature of all fair things—a soul, indeed, possessing all the delicate sensitiveness which we are accustomed to regard as characteristic of modernity. We may say, even, that it was the humanist in him which created the lover, for this student who was intent only on living the visionary life of the mind was for that reason master of an enchanted garden where any scarcely-seen earthly Laura might descend and abide, transfigured and immortalized by his imagination. The perfect lover, of course, is one who never wholly ceases to dream. It was humanism, too, which made him regard Italy as the rightful heir of the authority of ancient Rome. and inspired his enthusiasm for Cola di Rienzi's luckless efforts to revive the traditions of the Republic; it was humanism that made him hate the Papal secession to Avignon, for he realized that this miserable anticlimax to the rejoicings of the Jubilee must inevitably prolong the barbarous dissensions of his epoch and blind men's eyes to the new light. But though humanism made a patriot of this citizen of the world, it was love that made him a meditative poet, and the two aspects of his genius are revealed respectively in his Latin and vernacular writings: in the first, the scholarly enthusiast, the calm and self-confident king of learning who was crowned laureate on the Capitol; in the second, the man of a hundred moods, the victim of a restless melancholy which makes him oscillate perpetually between solitude and the city, and finds expression in that splendid sequence of sonnets and canzoni—nugae vulgares, accoiding to Petrarch the scholar—the intimate history of a troubled soul narrated in language of unsurpassable beauty.

The renaissance of civilization in Italy began with the first years of the Trecento. The eager flame of humanistic enthusiasm pierced through the old mist of scholastic learning, the dissensions between Pope and Emperor lost much of their importance, a literary language was formed, and the long-divided cities began to recognize a common bond in their descent from the Romans. Florence was the metropolis of this revival, but in all parts of the country—in the suzerainties of the north, the republics of the centre, and the monarchy of the south—life, for the moment, became fairer and more tranquil, and Guelfs and Ghibellines ceased to rage furiously together. The Re of which Cola di Rienzi dreamed—a confederation of all the Italian cities with Rome at its head—seemed within the bounds of possibility. But the instinct for unity was lacking in a race so long divided against itself, so long agitated by the incessant machinations of an esurient Papacy; Rienzi was murdered in Rome; Galeazzo and Bernabo Visconti, most bestial of tyrants, became lords of Lombardy; mercenaries began to infest the whole country, and an antipope elected by the French cardinals invoked the aid of foreign arms against Naples. The triumphs of the Trecento were intellectual and artistic, not political; it is well to forget the Popes and the Visconti, and to remember the great churches that were built, the great Universities that began to flourish, the schools of painting in Tuscany and Umbria, the Divina Commedia and the Canzoniere.

Introduction II

II

At the end of the Trecento Italian poetry already possessed a variety of verse-forms. The canzone, the canzonetta, the ballata, the sonetto and the terza rima were completely evolved, the ottava rima of Boiardo, Pulci and Ariosto was in existence, and the rispetto of popular poetry was about to become a literary form in Tuscany and Umbria. The first half of the Quattrocento, however, produced no lyric poet of importance; the delightful songs of Franco Sacchetti, that indefatigable writer of short stories, closed the great epoch of Dante and Petrarch; Fazio degli Uberti, with his mediocre Dittamondo, was

influenced, but certainly not inspired, by the Divine Comedy, and the various disciples of Petrarch merely prove the unapproachable excellence of the Canzoniere. The poet gives place to the humanist, and when the humanist becomes a poet, his songs, in spite of all their delicate charm, have a note of conscious art and a profusion of ornament which give the reader a premonition of the horrors of stucco and tinsel that belong to the seventeenth century.

The Italian humanists of the Quattrocento were the pioneers of modern European culture, and their work, accomplished at a time when France, Germany, and England were only beginning to emerge into the new light, bore fruit in a civilization as brilliant as it was unhappily brief. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks sent a crowd of Greek scholars to Italy, and the ‘uneasy memories’, in Symonds’ phrase, of Greece and Rome which had haunted the Middle Ages became marvellous reality. The world ceased to be a sombre antechamber of Heaven or Hell; man was no longer merely one of God's silly sheep, but an individual heir of ages of culture, free of will, aroused at last from the long nightmare of priestly or tyrannical authority; and his life, instead of being a narrow prison, became an intellectual adventure in which all his faculties were free to range. The Renaissance was no mere enthusiasm for coins and inscriptions; it was the reawakening of the curiosity of a world.

With this new enthusiasm came scepticism—a distrust of the Church which had darkened counsel for so long, clutching the key of knowledge as tightly as the keys of Heaven and Hell; an ironical toleration of the Popes who were so often masters of all dubious arts. A more or less strict observance of the outward forms of faith existed side by side with the most hearty paganism; we find Lorenzo de' Medici, whose brilliant and useful life was certainly not limited within the bounds of the Christian conception of virtue, writing Laudi and a very good Sacra rappresentazione, and perhaps a certain spirit of indifference is manifest in the fact that religious songs were sung to airs which were usually associated with effusions of quite another character. The graver spirits of the age attempted to prove that the Pagan and Christian doctrines were essentially the same; Ficino and Pico della Mirandola discovered Moses in Plato—but the general attitude was hedonistic: a blend of the sacred thirst for learning, for speculative inquiry which was a pleasure in itself quite apart from its result as a guide to living, and an eager intention to enjoy the bel viver italiano without fear or scruple.

The centre of this bel viver was Florence, that loveliest of cities where the spirit of the Quattrocento seems chiefly to linger, in spite of the annual horde of invaders and the atrocious bric-à-brac of modern shop-windows. And the central figure of all that comely life was the Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici, a wise ruler, a fervent lover of all that was fine in scholarship and art, and almost a great poet. We are not concerned here with his political qualities or defects, but it may be noted that probably far too much stress has been laid by stern moralists on his alleged deliberate debauchery of the Florentines with pageants and festivities; even if the charge were true, his early experience when the Pazzi daggers were gleaming in Santa Maria del Fiore was enough to excuse him for employing any method to strengthen his own position and to keep his hot-headed subjects in a state of tranquillity; and at least he preserved the balance of power in Italy until his death. His enthusiasm for scholarship had been awakened by the men who were his masters in early youth—by Agiropoulos, Landino, and Ficino. All the wise of Italy were his friends—Politian, Pico della Mirandola, Pulci, Alberti, and young Michelangelo—and with them he held high discourse in the Platonic Academy which Gemisthus Plethon founded for Cosimo, or rode on hunting expeditions such as he describes in La Caccia col Falcone or wandered in the cool gardens of the Rucellai, enjoying that delightful existence of scholarly friendship and emulation in a perfect environment for which the modern student who perspires in a hotel on the Lung' Arno or nurses a headache amid the vapours of the British Museum must sigh in vain.

Lorenzo and Politian were not only enthusiastic Platonists; they wrote a large amount of poetry in Italian, imitating Petrarch, yet bringing a distinctly new note to their country's literature. When he was only eighteen years old, Lorenzo had compiled a Codex of the old Italian poetry for his friend Frederick of Aragon, and in his Comento to his own poetry he gives his reasons for writing love sonnets and urges the claims of the Italian language as a vehicle of expression. His admiration for Petrarch did not prevent him from realizing the charm and freshness in the songs of the countryside; his canzoni a ballo have all the gaiety of the popular poetry; even his Sacra Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo is written in the fluent octave stanzas—rispetti continuati—which were sung throughout Italy to the music of lute and viol. In the Nencia di Barberino, that most delightful of Quattrocento idylls, the ardours of the rustic lover are revealed to us in his own language, yet seen through the eyes, half ironical, half sympathetic, of the highly cultured citizen of Florence, giving us the first really artistic example of that sense of the burlesque which was afterwards to become so important a factor in Italian poetry. Politian, too, the famous humanist and alter ego of Lorenzo, wrote rispetti continuati and spicciolati of great beauty, and his tragedy of Orfeo is a sequence of octave stanzas interspersed with brief songs. Lorenzo and Politian are sophisticated poets, perhaps, and their spirit, when they are themselves and not disciples of Petrarch, is the spirit of Boccaccio—of slightly ironical but quite good-natured realism; but though we may search their poetry in vain for high passion and great emotion, at its best it has a spontaneous gaiety, a keen delight in the comeliness of life and the earth, and, with Politian especially, an unerring tact in expression; it is the faithful mirror of the bel viver that was so soon to cease.

Whilst Lorenzo and Politian adapted to their own ends all that was best in the popular art of their time, Pulci was content to elaborate the popular Florentine conception of chivalry—a somewhat squalid conception, but one which was natural to a people whose troubles always began at home, and who had little sympathy to spare for crusaders and love-sick paladins. There is no idealism in the Morgante Maggiore; it is obviously written by a bourgeois for bourgeois; its innumerable characters are for the most part rogues—even Charlemagne is a besotted old dotard—and its events have no dramatic sequence. The importance of the Morgante lies in the fact that it is the first document in the long proof that the romance of Chivalry, as Germanic nations understand it, did not exist for the Italian. These ponderous and unique Italian poems are packed with all the paraphernalia of romance, enchanted islands, magicians, devils and hippogriffs—and in spite of it all there is not a single note of mystery, of the vague terror of the unseen, of the pathos of man's struggle with supernatural elements, from the first line to the last. The realization of this defect need not make us blind to the frequent beauty of description which adorns both the Morgante and the Orlando Innamorato especially the latter. The Court of Ercole d'Este at Ferrara was a more favourable field for the growth of the chivalrous epic than the democratic piazzas of Florence; and though Boiardo is concerned with events rather than with character, the personages of his poem are real knights-errant, not ruffians and imbeciles. Throughout the poem, however, we are conscious that he never takes them seriously; the whole work is a pleasant fairy tale which he has constructed without any larger aim than the amusement of an indolent audience and the glorification of the House of Este. This ironical treatment of the heroes of the old French epics is a most remarkable development in the Italian genius; we find it a short time later rising to the utmost limit of art in the Furioso.

The Innamorato was never finished; and the last lines of its 79th canto have a strange pathos for the student of Italian history:—

Mentre ch'io canto, O Dio Redentore, Vedo l'Italia tutta a fiamma e foco Per questi Galli, che con gran valore Vengon per desertar non so che loco...

The dark storm-cloud of reality sweeps across the skies of fairyland, and the voice of the singer is forgotten amid the rumours of war. The selfish folly of Lodovico Sforza, ‘Il Moro’, made him invite Charles VIII of France to enter Italy and to occupy Naples as heir of the Angevins who had formerly reigned there. The weakness or indolence of the Italian states became obvious to Europe; Charles met with little opposition during his sinister progress through the country; only, in Florence, Piero Capponi dared to defy him, tearing the scroll containing his conditions of treaty to pieces, and crying ‘Voi sonerete le vostre trombe e noi soneremo le nostre campane’. The avenger whose coming Savonarola had foretold was amongst them; ‘the sword has descended, the scourge has fallen; the Lord leads these armies’. The armies in question had to retire from Italy not long afterwards, but the days of her liberty were numbered. Alexander VI Borgia was elected Pope in 1494.

For a while, however, the tempest held aloof, and in the Cinquecento we see the spectacle of a splendid artistic and intellectual achievement which reaches its zenith in the last hours of Italy's freedom, amid a general corruption of all qualities but fine taste, that ultimate heritage of a morally bankrupt people. The accession of Leo X to the kingdom which had been founded for him by Cesare Borgia and Julius II marks the beginning of an epoch when Italy seems to spend the whole store of her Renaissance capital in a few years; painting reaches its climax in Michelangelo and Raphael; Bembo and Sadoleto are the high priests of the last refinement in scholarship; the Papal Court becomes the home of all elegance and luxury. Machiavelli in Florence, Ariosto and Tasso in Ferrara, are the supreme figures amid the innumerable writers of the Cinquecento.

The lyric poetry of the epoch is, however, disappointing. A careful study of Petrarch and a highly polished form are its chief characteristics; the spontaneous grace which Lorenzo learnt from the popular songs has disappeared, and instead we find an immense output of sonnets which, for all their melodious charm, make us wonder if it is altogether an advantage for a poet to possess an extremely musical language as his native speech. It is a relief to turn from the fluent elegance of Molza and della Casa to the rugged strength of Michelangelo, whose poems, in that age, seem like the cry of a giant breaking into a symphony of tuneful but expressionless voices. Even the lyrics of Ariosto, with the exception of one canzone, are not remarkable; it is in the Furioso and the satires that his unique irony, his insight into character, and his wealth of imagination find full scope.

It is idle to speculate as to what the result of this studied cultivation of language might have been if Italian liberty had not perished; actually, the last flower of the Cinquecento died in a wilderness of arid conceits, and two lyric forms only preserved any vestige of vitality: the ode of Bernardo Tasso, and the idyll which was developed in the pastoral dramas that followed Sannazaro's famous and tedious Arcadia. The fond resuscitation of the golden age—the idyllic existence of song and simplicity—is the natural solace of cultivated minds condemned to exist in a world of strife or tyranny; and it was to this enchanted precinct that the poets of Italy fled for refuge in the gloomy closing years of the Cinquecento.

O bella età dell'oro Quand'era cibo il latte Del pargoletto mondo, e culla il bosco...

The idyllic genre soon became as anæmic and affected as every other kind of poetry in Italy during the Seicento, but at any rate it rose to its finest height in the Aminta or Tasso, and its elegiac element is conspicuous throughout the Gerusalemme. Guarini's Pastor Fido, which resembles the Aminta in being a lyric recited by various characters rather than a drama of action, is the other famous memorial of this idyllic form of poetry.

The burlesque verses of Berni and his followers are remarkable for the perfection of their style and for their unblushing obscenity; the spirit of Boccaccio is still alive in them and in the ‘macaronic’ poetry of Folengo—the Merlinus Coccaius whose effusions were so well known to Rabelais. Elsewhere, the sorriso italiano, the ironical smile that dawned upon the lips of Ariosto even while he wrote his most pathetic or heroic lines, forsakes literature for the popular song and the pasquinade, and we look for it in vain in the ‘epic’ of the Jesuit-trained Tasso.