Part 15

Petrarch, who was born in 1304, and lived for seventy years, was both a poet and a scholar. He cared, in fact, more for his Latin writing in an epic like _Africa_, and for his collections of Latin MSS. than for those Italian poems which have made him famous to all Europe. We may render him hearty thanks for the immense help he gave towards bringing about the Renaissance; but we are here concerned with him only as the poet who expresses the Italian mind and expands the literature of England. Petrarch is the poet of love. He is the heir of the Provençal lyrics of chivalrous idealizing devotion. But his Laura is set upon a more human plane than Beatrice. The Laura de Noves, whom Petrarch first saw in the church at Avignon in the year 1327, and to whom he addressed some three hundred sonnets, was his inspiration, as Beatrice was Dante’s. “I owe to Laura all that I am,” he asserts. “She made to bud forth with the noblest sentiments all the seeds of virtue which nature had sowed in my heart.” Here we meet explicitly the accepted Italian attitude, as we met it in Dante, and as it was afterwards adopted—though with a change due to time and race and circumstances—by our English Surrey, and even by Shakespeare. Beatrice was a woman seen through all the grave piety and theology of Dante’s serious soul; Laura was a woman seen through a Platonic atmosphere which the humanist Petrarch was adopting from the Greek revival. Yet Laura, though an inspiration, is only a real woman; she does not become refined away, like Beatrice, into a mere personification of some abstract motive force. Petrarch’s sonnets are poems to Laura, so many polished gems, so many keleidoscopic aspects of a true and pure passion, of the fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise. He is an artist in words and in verbal music. He uses no artificial ornamentation, and he scarcely ever falls below himself. If taste, delicacy, and refinement, combined with ingenious fancy and with a purity of thought which spurns all vulgarity, can make a poet, Petrarch is a great poet. And it is no wonder if sonneteers of all nations have made him their model. Nor is it much wonder that, after the exhaustive manner in which he treats of the phases of his passion, its vicissitudes, and its inward and outward experiences, there was little room for novelty on the part of any but a more than ordinary genius.

After Dante there is one thing we shall never find in Italian poetry, and we do not find it in Petrarch. We shall find taste, melody, beauty of expression, descriptive power, but we shall not find deep passion, uncontrollable rapture, soarings of sublime inspiration. Yet, for what Petrarch’s sonnets are, they are perfect. His _Canzoniere_ contains works of graceful thought or of tender feeling, of brilliant and polished expression, such works as a more fertile Tennyson might have written in that age; but they have no claims to be more. The impression, however, must not be left that Petrarch’s poetry was all in sonnets. To this Sicilian form he joined a series of larger and freer _Canzoni_ after Provençal example, and also _Trionfi_, or allegorical visions, dealing more after the fashion of Dante with love, death, chastity, and other abstracts.

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From the _Divine Comedy_, through Petrarch, we come down to the Human Comedy of Boccaccio. Giovanni Boccaccio, the younger and more worldly-minded contemporary of Petrarch, the son of a Florentine merchant and a Paris _grisette_, educated at Naples and domiciled in his maturer years at Florence, is best known as the author of the first great prose work of Italy, the _Decameron_. In the year 1348 a terrible plague befell the city of Florence. Boccaccio, after opening with a powerful description of this pestilence, represents seven young ladies and three cavaliers as retiring to a delightful villa outside the walls in order to escape the contagion and their responsibilities, and to pass the time in idleness and amusement. Each of the ten persons relates ten stories, and thus we obtain a hundred short tales (or “novels,” as they then called them), tales pathetic, sportive, or licentious. We are not greatly concerned with these stories; they are not original, but are taken from current recital, from Oriental sources, from French _fabliaux_, and from scattered productions or collections of insignificant Italian writers, such as are found in the crude shapes of the _Cento Novelle_. The notion of a series of stories strung into some sort of connection with each other is as old as the _Book of Sinbad_ or the _Seven Sages_. Boccaccio’s chief merit is that he wrought such stories into artistic tales full of the varied life of his time, and gave them literary shape in language pure, elegant, and sonorous, if, perhaps, often too diffuse. It is he who sets the example for his immediate follower Sacchetti and for those novels of Bandello or Cinthio which were current in English in the Elizabethan age, and which so often supplied our dramatists, including Shakespeare, with plots. It particularly interests us that the plan of Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, where each pilgrim is to tell the same number of stories, is directly or indirectly borrowed from Boccaccio, as indeed are some of the tales themselves, besides hints hard to specify. Gower’s _Confessio Amantis_ is under the same kinds of obligation.

In this work Boccaccio shows the usual Italian love, and also power, of depicting in words whatever the eye sees, a love and power which recall the Italian fondness for realistic painting. There is in the Italian genius at all times this same quality. In Ariosto or in Tasso, as in Boccaccio, there appears this affection for word-painting, always skilful and complete, but often carried to excess and satiety.

Meanwhile, for students of English literature, there is other work of Boccaccio’s which possesses no small importance. His two heroic poems, _La Teseide_ and _Filostrato_, were the source of Chaucer’s _Knight’s Tale_ and his _Troilus and Cressida_, as well as of all the compositions for which these have served as models. _La Teseide_ is the story of Palamon and Arcite and their rivalry for the hand of Emilia; and Chaucer, Fletcher, and Dryden are among the English writers who have handled this theme. _Filostrato_ is the story of Troilus and Cressida, and to compare Chaucer with Boccaccio is to see how different is the characteristic Italian light-hearted and rather cynically objective contemplation of the struggle of innocence and vice, from the English tendency to the dramatic and subjective realization of the pathos of love and suffering. For other copying of Boccaccio it may be enough to refer to Lydgate’s _Falls of Princes_ and to the _Mirror for Magistrates_ (1559) based on the _De Casibus Illustrium Virorum_ of the Italian.

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Before leaving this great triumvirate of the most potent and golden period of Italian letters—a triumvirate which represents three steps, from the sublimity of poetic vision, through the higher experiences of the poetic real, down to unelevated or vulgar facts of the reality of prose; from a Beatrice through a Laura to a Fiammetta, who was very much flesh and blood; we must not forget to note their several vehicles of verse. Dante wrote in the _terza rima_, or stanza of three lines, linked in an arrangement which we may represent by _a b a_, _b c b_, _c d c_, and so on consistently. This is not found before him, though after him it became appropriated to Italian philosophic and satirical poetry. Petrarch’s chief vehicle was the sonnet. Boccaccio composed his poems in the _ottava rima_, which he did not, indeed, invent, but which he fixed for ever after as the orthodox verse of Italian romance and epic, whether to be used by Ariosto and Tasso or by lesser men. The Italians are characteristically imitators of set forms, and the metres of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio have bound their followers in a degree in which Englishmen have never been bound by any metres. When English writers adopted Boccaccio’s _ottava rima_, they modified it. Chaucer dropped a line; Spenser added one. Yet both the stanza of Chaucer’s _Troilus and Cressida_ and the stanza of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_ are none the less to be reckoned as borrowings from Italy, though both, we may believe, are improvements upon the original. That Spenser’s, at least, was such is shown by the unanimity with which Thomson, Byron, Shelley and Keats accepted it for sustained works of their own.

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The first three classics of Italy thus passed away. Boccaccio died in 1375, and the Italian literature of Italy practically stood still. This was the age of the revival of learning, when the Latin and Greek classics, and at first particularly the Latin classics, were engaging the attention of every man who pretended to scholarship and taste, and when men of letters, instead of perfecting their own tongue and enriching it with works full of modern manners and modern thoughts, were engaged in a servile imitation of the ancient writers of Rome, especially Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, and Seneca. It was a time of insatiate erudition in the things of antiquity, an age of great scholars like Bruno, Poggio Bracciolini, Filelfo, and Valla, but an age when all their best was written in Latin and that without originality or the savour of reality. It was also a great time of literary patronage. The princes themselves studied more or less earnestly, and affected literary taste, scholarship and Platonism. Scholars were in the highest repute, not only as teachers and companions of princes, but as ambassadors and counsellors. Every little state had its group of learned writers. The Popes at Rome, the Visconti at Milan, the Gonzaga at Mantua, the Este at Ferrara, the Medici at Florence, collected together men of letters and bestowed lavish gifts upon them. Cosmo de’ Medici, the Florentine merchant who had gained the control of his city, turned his gardens into an academy. His trading agents collected manuscripts everywhere in Greece and the East. The first of those academies which afterwards became so numerous, and which bore such remarkable names as _Della Crusca_, _Intronati_, and the rest, began to spring up everywhere in Italy. Florence took the lead. The talk was of letters and literary taste. Much pedantry, no doubt, there was; but the universal love of letters was none the less genuine. Unfortunately it took the practical shape of a cultivation of writing in Latin, not in Italian. The _illuminati_ of the day despised the tongue of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. They gathered and absorbed the ideas of pagan antiquity, but they did not yet seek to embody them in the language which men actually spoke. They learned the secrets of literary polish, but did not apply them to composition in Italian. So was it till towards the end of the fifteenth century, or, roughly speaking, a hundred years after the death of Boccaccio. These studies were anything but regrettable in the end: the immediate fault lay in exclusive devotion to them, to the neglect of the vernacular. When the fruits of classical study began to be utilized for the purpose of literature in Italian, the results were of the best. For the enthusiasm of the New Learning itself all Europe has reason to be grateful to Italy, and no country more so than England, from which (in 1488) Linacre went to sit at the feet of Poliziano in Florence, whither also Grocyn and Latimer found their way.

At length, thanks to the efforts of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano and Pulci at Florence, and of Boiardo at Ferrara, there was a revival of Italian letters, a new breath of spontaneity passing over literary creation. There is no need to speak in detail of the sonnets and _canzoni_ of Lorenzo de’ Medici, modelled on Petrarch and addressed to a Lucrezia Donato as the counterpart of Laura, nor of the lyric grace and descriptive beauty of the learned and tasteful Poliziano. But of Pulci’s romantic epic of _Morgante Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ it is necessary to say a word, for the reason that they are the precursors of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_, of Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_, and thence indirectly of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_. It is Ariosto and Tasso who rank next to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and who consummate that sixteenth century or “Cinque Cento” literature which constitutes the silver epoch of Italian letters. Pulci’s _Morgante Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ are both “chivalrous romances,” written in the _ottava rima_, or Italian equivalent of the Spenserian stanza. They are not exactly epics, but rather stories of knightly adventures, full of description and of the marvellous, of the romance of love and arms, full of knights who slay giants, liberate ladies, and fall in love with pagan maidens. Pulci’s work, though often sufficiently earnest and stirring, is also often seasoned with that mocking humour, that irony, that refusal to take ideals seriously, which is one of the most constant of Italian characteristics. That of Boiardo is of a more serious type. These books, as has just been hinted, mark a revival of the well-known French romances, of the adventures credited to the Paladins of Charlemagne. Such stories, which have no foundation in sober history, were early borrowed by the Italians, and everyone knew of Charlemagne, of Roland and Oliver, of the disaster of Roncesvalles, of the traitor Gano and the rest. It was for Pulci and Boiardo to take these legends of romance from the people, give them a literary shape, and so lead the way for the magnificent work of Ariosto. It may be mentioned in passing that Boiardo’s Moorish hero Rodamonte, the insolent and atheistic—a name utilized by Ariosto in the form Rodomonte—has supplied a term for that species of bombastic romancing which we call “rodomontade.” That Boiardo was read by Milton is clear from allusion in _Paradise Regained_.

In the next generation the _Orlando Innamorato_ was recast by Berni into a mocking and satirical form, which was much more to the taste of the Italian mind. The language of this _rifacimento_ is marked by greater ease and polish than the original, but its chief claim to distinction lies in the peculiar humour of the writer—the “Bernesque”—of interest to students of English literature, from the fact that Berni largely determined the character of the great productions of Byron’s Italian period.

Italian literature has thus been brought back from scholars to the people, when Lodovico Ariosto begins to write at Ferrara. His works are various, including comedies and the inevitable sonnet after the manner of Petrarch; but it is the _Orlando Furioso_, the romance of “Orlando Mad,” which renders him immortal. That work is of special interest here, inasmuch as it advanced English literature by inspiring the author of the _Faerie Queene_ with the desire to “outgo” its power of perfect description, and its unending chain of marvels and adventures. The poem is a “romantic epic,” begun in 1505, and finished in eleven years. It undertakes—following Boiardo on a higher plane of art—to sing of Paladins at the court of Charlemagne, their loves, and their adventures, during the fabulous wars of that famous emperor with the Moors. The hero Orlando became mad through love of Angelica, and this madness, though it is only an episode in the poem, gives the name to the whole. The entire work is full of the spirit of prowess, of marvellous adventures of heroes in rapid succession, their triumphs over the forces of nature and the spells of magic, and of magnificent descriptions painted by the poet as vividly as Italian artists painted with the brush—perhaps, it may be, somewhat too fully, too precisely. The actions are placed in an ideal world of chivalry, of knightly courtesy and knightly omnipotence, where there are no stubborn facts and limitations to interfere with the valour of the heroes. That world Ariosto did not create; he borrowed it from the French trouvères, and from his predecessor Boiardo, whose work he simply continues while throwing it into the shade. The magic and sorcery come largely from Arabian sources; nevertheless Ariosto himself is of imagination all compact, he invents episodes with wonderful fertility, and orders them with wonderful distinctness. And the style is of the most consummate in point of grace, elegance, and sweetness. He, like other Italians, draws character but faintly; he does not soar to great poetic heights, or descend to profound poetic depths; but in all the forty thousand lines of his poem, it is asserted by Italians who should be judges of their own tongue, that there is not one which is crude, inharmonious, or feeble. According to himself

Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto,

and it is not easy to see how such things could be more perfectly sung.

Ariosto became a rage and a model. During the sixteenth century every Paladin and every Knight of the Round Table had his poet. Our own Spenser, deeply read as he was in Italian, had not only read Ariosto, but in all probability more than one imitator of Ariosto, and it is not for nothing that so many characters in the _Faerie Queene_, such as Archimago and Orgoglio, Duessa, and Fidissa, bear Italian names, names that so well fit the land of romance which the Italians had annexed for their own. In 1591 appeared the well-known translation by Sir John Harington.

Torquato Tasso, who lived during the latter half of the sixteenth century (1544-1595), and who also wrote at Ferrara, composed the world-famed epic _Gerusalemme Liberata_, or “Jerusalem Delivered.” It is the epic or Iliad of the first great Crusade, in which Godfrey of Boulogne, who is the hero—_Goffredo_ indeed was the earlier name of the epic—took back the sacred city of Jerusalem from the Saracens. It would be vain to attempt here to give an idea of this splendid heroic poem, of its vigour, of the beauty of language in its episodes, of the romantic experiences of the knightly Tancred and the heroine Clorinda, of the exploits, the miracles, the magic, and the enchanted forest. That it greatly influenced Spenser—whose Bower of Acrasia, for instance, is Tasso’s garden of Armida—that it, along with the _Iliad_, the _Aeneid_, and the _Divine Comedy_, helped to build up the _Paradise Lost_ of Milton, is one of its claims upon our special notice here. To Elizabethan readers the work was made accessible through the famous translation of Fairfax (1600), and by others of less renown. To Tasso also belongs an unfinished poem on the Creation, _Il Mondo Creato_, with which Milton was manifestly well acquainted. Whether or not the English poet was also influenced in his _Paradise Lost_ by another Italian production, the _Adamo_ of Andreini, is uncertain.

Before proceeding further, we must take advantage of the mention of Tasso, and make reference to another form of composition, of which the Italians were always peculiarly fond, and which much affected the rest of Europe for nearly two centuries. We have seen how the Greek Theocritus wrote idylls of country life in Sicily, and how Virgil composed pastoral eclogues on Italian soil. After the Renaissance—even the earlier wave of that name—the writers of Italy took up these themes and began to dwell again on country scenes, and on the delights of an ideal pastoral life, as far removed as possible from the vicious and troublous realities of their cities. Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Mantuanus are steps in the history of such pastoral before Tasso. The poet of _Jerusalem Delivered_ does not disdain this region of poetry. In his pastoral drama _Aminta_ he places his highly cultivated and courtly shepherds, shepherdesses, and nymphs on the hills about Sorrento, and lends to their external life as much pretence at reality as he can command. But he is above all things a poet, and only secondarily a dramatist, and it is upon the lyrics that the chief effect is staked. What the great Tasso did, others must do, and at the end of the sixteenth century there are more than a dozen Italian verse-writers composing in similar strain. The chief is Guarini, with his _Pastor Fido_, destined to become well-known in an English shape as Fletcher’s _Faithful Shepherdess_. But Tasso, as has just been said, was not the first to revive the pastoral. It was a century since Poliziano had written a _Favola di Orfeo_, a dramatic eclogue blending idyll and tragedy. But greatest among such predecessors had been the Neapolitan Sannazaro, who in 1504 had published the _Arcadia_, a medley of romance and eclogue, partly in prose, partly in verse, which gave its shape to our own _Arcadia_, the polished, if long and often tiresome, work of Sir Philip Sidney. Sannazaro indeed practically invented that mythical Arcady, or rural Utopia, into which poets and prose-writers have since made so many journeys in order to find a land where there still lingers the golden age of innocence and felicity amid bowers of beauty, where hard facts and bad weather never intrude. Another writer, Battista of Mantua—commonly called “the Mantuan”—composing in Latin, had also become a famous model in the pastoral kind for all western Europe. Readers of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ need hardly be told that “good old Mantuan” was a Latin school-book in Shakespeare’s boyhood, and had also been imitated by Barclay, and translated by Turbervile. From him, partly direct and partly through the medium of the French Marot, came the cue for Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ and its progeny. In the Elizabethan age, pastorals and pastoral plays were numerous, and among the writers must be reckoned Lyly, Lodge, Greene, Peele, and Giles Fletcher.

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The work of Italy in this century—the “Cinquecento”—was above all things work of artistic polish. The importance attached to beauty of style and elegance of words is apt to seem to us disproportionate. We are inclined to wish that the Italian writers had explored greater heights and depths of thinking and feeling, and had grappled more closely with matters of high seriousness. We find them enlarging, elaborating, and polishing tales of romance and adventure, or scenes of beauty and romantic life. We find them revelling in descriptions, and yet, all the time, ironically playing with the very unrealities of that which they describe, often plainly hinting to us not to take the matter too seriously. Above all things they are artists in style. And, therefore, it is natural to find that words are often compassed to the neglect of the matter. This was not only so in writing, it extended to their more courtly speech. It is largely from Italy, though partly from Spain, that there came over France and England that vice of affectation which developed a special shape in Euphuism. Before the appearance of Lyly’s _Euphues_ in 1578, association with the gallants and wits of the Italian Courts had worked upon English pretenders to courtly graces. They deliberately affected forms of speech which should show both how much they knew, and how ingeniously refined they could be in novelty of phrase. Early Elizabethan literature is greatly tainted by Euphuism, with its tricks of language, alliterative, antithetical, hyperbolical, full of whimsical comparisons, overwrought descriptions, plays on words, avoiding natural forms of expression in favour of those which would show off the writer’s cultivation, his wit, and taste.