Part 16
Carried to its extreme in Italy, this minute attention to elaborate expression produced an irritating artificiality in the literature of the seventeenth century. The _seicentisti_ produced many fine words, but little important substance. Literature declined into a plaything. Marini’s affected figures of speech, far-fetched comparisons, and tricks of verbiage, as illustrated particularly in his romantic _Adone_, characterized a generation of writers. “Marinism” in Italian literature, like “Alexandrianism” in the Greek, is now a term of reproach in letters. We cannot, indeed, in fairness, always attribute a mania of style to some definite inventor. Nor can we always draw clear distinction between one class of frigid, and finally exasperating, artifice and another. Unfortunately each new example is a new temptation, since exaggerations and tricks are always easier to imitate than the quiet and unaccentuated perfections of the consummate masters. The strained conceits of Donne and Crashaw, and in general of the “Fantastic” and “Metaphysical” school of our early seventeenth century, are one manifestation of the same spirit which was working in Italy. But Donne follows in the track of Euphuism, with new developments from his own talents, while others of the “Fantastics” go directly to the school of Marini. Among these must be included Crashaw, who both translates and imitates the Italian poet, and Cowley, whose early poems reproduce many of the Italian conceits.
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In the seventeenth century Italian literature fell into its decline, and by about 1650 its influences on English writers ceased. Milton is perhaps the last great poet whose debts to Italian models and Italian culture can be declared measurable. His own knowledge of the Italian language, his travels in Italy, and his friendships with Italians kept him in touch with the current literature of the country. The sonnet was not dead in a land which was still to produce a Filicaia, and Milton was a sonneteer both in his own language and in Italian. His _Comus_ is an Italian pastoral masque raised for once to the scope and dignity of literature, and to two famous poems he is led to attach the Italian names _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. What his great epic owes to his reading of Dante and Tasso is readily perceived, and the student of the two literatures cannot but feel that the quiet tone of noble sweetness in his earlier work is largely due, as it is with Spenser, to the fine example of Italy. We should, perhaps, add at this point that a less considerable contemporary of Milton, the artificial Cowley, was much under the influence of the Italian lyrist Chiabrera (1552-1637), whose sumptuous, courtly, glittering, but very un-Pindaric, “Pindarics” for a time challenged the lyric supremacy of Petrarch. It is not a little strange that Wordsworth also was so far attracted by Chiabrera as to translate certain of his poetical epitaphs. Nor is it to be passed over that Pope’s heroi-comical _Rape of the Lock_ was suggested—and in such compositions the suggestion counts for much—by the _Rape of the Bucket_ (_La Secchia Rapita_) of Tassoni, who died in 1636.
It is hardly part of our subject to dwell upon Italian drama, inasmuch as it exerted but very little effect upon ours. So far as there was any, it was in the “masques,” which owe their birth to the age of Poliziano, played no inconsiderable part in the court festivities of England from the time of Henry VIII, and came to engage so much of the learning and ingenuity of Ben Jonson. Yet masques are little more than glorified tableaux in glorified “private theatricals,” accompanied by some form of libretto written _ad hoc_, and of almost no permanent value. Milton’s _Comus_ is no fair specimen of the class. It is, perhaps, scarcely relevant to literature to record that we owe our Harlequin and Pantaloon to the stock characters in the Italian semi-improvisations known as _commedie dell’arte_.
Italians may think otherwise, but, to our foreign conception, Italy has never possessed a really fine dramatic masterpiece, tragic or comic. The drama of Italy, like drama elsewhere, had its prelude in the realistic presentations of religion, commonly known as “mysteries” and “miracles,” but in Italy styled _sacre rappresentazioni_. But Italy, unlike France or England, quickly developed the purely secular drama from a source distinct from the Church. The Italians lay nearer to the Roman comedy, and it was in Italy that the Latin Renaissance came earliest. The ordinary Italian ingenuity and love of art and show produced the “masque,” which was apt to be blent with pastoral, while the deliberate Latinizing of the cultured classes brought in imitations, often mere translations, of the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and of the tragedies of Seneca. In the development of its tragedy Italy became severely “classical,” in the misused sense of the term. That is to say, it became Senecan, and obeyed the three unities. The vogue began with Trissino and his _Sofonisba_ (1515), and was carried on by Rucellai, Alamanni, and others. Comedy, which also followed in the Roman path, was in a large degree emancipated by Aretino. To none of the dramatic forms, tragedy, comedy, _drammi pastorali_, _drammi musicali_ (_opera_, _tragedia per musica_), do we owe any real growths within our own literature. Late in the eighteenth century Alfieri did his best, within the Senecan conventions, to create a tragic stage, and much can be said in praise of his efforts and his talents; but he was no dramatic genius. Goldoni’s comedies do not concern us. The one dramatic gift of Italy to Europe has been opera, which arose from musical pastoral in Rinnucini’s _Dafne_. This, however, belongs rather to the domain of music. It is, no doubt, hard to pass by the lyric brilliancy and charm of Metastasio (who flourished about 1740), but for our subject he cannot fairly be regarded as of moment.
For prose, besides the _novelle_ and _novellini_, we have in particular the much read and rightly detested _Prince_ of Machiavelli, and the _Cortegiano_ of Castiglione (1518), a book which speedily influenced English courtly ideals, both directly and through various manuals written in imitation. But there is little else to which conspicuous influence could be ascribed without exaggeration.
The “Novella” is regularly a short story outlined round a situation which is intended to be exciting. It is not a novel, but rather the sketch of one. In this domain Italy was exceedingly prolific. True to the national instinct for fidelity to patterns, the Italian _novellieri_ are fond of the old device of Boccaccio, borrowed by Chaucer; they frequently pretend that their various stories are related by a company of persons accidentally brought together in a country house, or on a voyage, or the like, and placed in need of such mutual entertainment. The _Pecorone_ of Ser Giovanni, the _Hecatommithi_ of Cinthio, and the stories of Straparola, Da Porto, Bandello, and others, enjoyed a wide vogue in France and England, and formed matter for the exploitation of every class of our Elizabethan dramatists or writers of fiction.
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What English literature owes to that of Italy, except in the case of Byron’s Bernesque period, it owes before the middle of the seventeenth century. From Dante to Tasso the obligations were great and manifold. To Italian stories, Italian sonnets and lyrics, to Italian epic, romance and pastoral, our writers from Chaucer to Milton are multifariously indebted. Most indebted of all is the great epoch which culminated in Shakespeare. Before his day the Tudor Court had much affected the language and courtesies of Italy. Italian travel was common, and Italians were relatively numerous in London. Even that sweet stateliness which characterizes so much of the Elizabethan lyric is a gift of Italy. To Italian skill and refinement of language, to Italian melodies of versification, our rough lyric beginnings owe debts more appreciable than to Italian matter. In other words, Italy taught us the art of writing, while leaving us to use it upon our own realities of thought and feeling. Before the poetical innovations of Wyatt and Surrey, English verse had stood in much need of further moulding of form and polish of language. It was an outcome of the partiality of the Court of Henry VIII for Italian art and manners that there arose the new school of poets whom Puttenham describes as “a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.” Both Wyatt and Surrey are best known as sonneteers. Sometimes they are translating from Petrarch, but they are by no means mere translators, or even servile imitators. It is well known that the sonnet, as introduced by them, differs somewhat from the Italian, and its ending in an epigrammatic couplet is a purely English novelty. “Sonnet,” indeed, was for a time used loosely for other forms than the true poem of fourteen lines; but, when it found itself, it had lost nothing in strength and beauty. Perhaps the chief impulse in establishing the sonnet in England, when a certain halt had occurred after Surrey, came from Watson’s _Passionate Century of Love_ (1581), although in these “sonnets,” Italian enough in spirit, the form is strangely made to consist of eighteen lines in three sestets.
The whole Elizabethan world of lyrists “Petrarchized.” The _Amoretti_ of Spenser made him to Gabriel Harvey “an English Petrarch,” although in truth Petrarch is but one in a list of Spenser’s models, which includes also Sannazaro, Ariosto, and Tasso. It would be easy to trace throughout the English sonneteers, from the appearance of _Tottell’s Miscellany_ in 1557, the effects of many an Italian Petrarchist whose name has not been given in the foregoing sketch. Nor was the borrowing confined to the sonnet form or the sonnet spirit. It extended also to the “sonnet series” or “sonnet sequence.” The notion of such related sonnets was introduced from Italy by Surrey in his series dedicated to “Geraldine,” and from him was taken up by Sidney (to Stella), Spenser (to Rosalind), Constable (_Diana_), Daniel (_Delia_), Drayton (_Idea_), Lodge (_Phillis_), Giles Fletcher (_Licia_), as well as by Shakespeare, who, in his more noble way, leaves the object nameless. This development should perhaps serve as a warning to those who press Shakespeare’s sonnets too rigorously for a key to his actual experiences.
Our servitude to France followed upon the decline of Italian influence. So far as we have been affected by Italy during the last century it has been due rather to the residence of English writers—Byron, Shelley, Landor, Leigh Hunt, Browning, Ruskin—in the peninsula, than to any new fountains of inspiration to be found in its productions.
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The English genius wisely rejected some portions of the literary offerings of Italy. Especially was this so in the domain of critical principle, and particularly as it concerned the drama. Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetrie_ follows the false doctrine of the dramatic unities as laid down by Castelvetro (1570), but such pseudo-classical plays as were attempted met with the fate which had previously attended Sackville’s sterile effort of _Gorboduc_. The only useful and permanent contribution from dramatic sources was the blank verse of Trissino, which Surrey first borrowed for his translation of the _Aeneid_, whence it was passed on to the stage by Sackville. Taken up by playwrights, it was moulded into a powerful instrument by Marlowe, and thence grew to all its subsequent ripe uses. For the rest, when Gascoigne translated Ariosto’s comedy _I Suppositi_ in _The Supposes_, the Italian model itself proved barren, but the lesson of style in dialogue left its usual improving result.
In borrowing the Italian _novelle_ and translating them, the English sixteenth century for a time reproduced their horrors and licentiousness, much to the disgust of many good citizens, who would scarcely have recognized themselves if described as Puritans. It became necessary even to order the burning of many of them for their wantonness. Yet on the whole the English selection, whether for mere reading (as in Painter’s _Palace of Pleasure_), or for exploitation by the stage (as in _Romeo and Juliet_), or by prose fiction (as in the work of Greene), shows sufficient indication of the superior English sense of decency. Nevertheless, it was a recommendation to story-books if it could be said (truly or otherwise) that the tales came “from Italy.” Nor did the borrowings of them cease till the Puritans closed the playhouses, for Massinger and Webster seek their situations where Shakespeare sought his, albeit their choice may be less sure.
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The Italians display literary characteristics not difficult to define. They are the heirs of the Latin tradition. But Latin literature, as has been stated earlier in this book, was not particularly original either in thought or style. It was not a highly imaginative or emotional literature; its verse tends chiefly to polish, and its prose to either declamation or epigram. It was marked by incessant strivings after verbal art, but not by any abandonments of passionate ardour, of lofty endeavours, or of profound meditations. It was a literature given to narration and satire; but not to exalted feeling. In other words, it was a literature of culture rather than of spontaneity. It was prone, therefore, to follow models, and to consider the form before the substance. In almost all these qualities Italian literature shares. Except in Dante, it hardly shows in any large measure the great poetic faculty of experiencing and vividly realizing great passions and far-reaching thoughts. Nearly all the Italians, after the vernacular had once been established, cultivate the most fastidious perfection of workmanship, while their thought and feeling are of but average depth, dealing with things positive and on the surface. Except in Dante and his age, Italian literature avoids the visionary and abstract, and deals by preference with the material and sensuous. It is not marked by potent and seminal thoughts, which are found almost only in Dante. For that reason it is Dante whom we generally satisfy ourselves with reading, if, indeed, we are not rather satisfied with talking of him and reading about him.
CONSPECTUS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE
DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE. CHIEF REPRESENTATIVES. DATE. TYPICAL WORKS. SOME INFLUENCES ON ENGLISH LITERATURE. Allegorical Poetry (“Visions”) DANTE ALIGHIERI 1265-1321 (_Divina Commedia_) The first model of noble style and matter in modern literature. Afforded much suggestion to Milton (_Paradise Lost_). Chaucer shows borrowings and translations in _e.g._, _House of Fame_, _Parliament of Fowles_, and the story of Ugolino in _Monk’s Tale_. Specific influences are less obvious than the general fact. Francesco PETRARCA 1304-1374 _Trionfi_ (“Triumphs”). Lyrical Poetry: (_a_) Sonnets and _Canzoni_ (Dante and his circle) 1265-1321 Francesco PETRARCA 1304-1374 Sonnets and _Canzoni_ Petrarch’s sonnets became the model for all later Italians, and thence for Englishmen. The form (modified) was introduced into England by Wyatt and Surrey (temp. Henry VIII) and sonnets, or sonnet sequences, were written by more than a hundred versifiers in the Elizabethan period. Examples are Spenser (_Amoretti_), Sidney (_Astrophel and Stella_), Watson (_Teares of Fansie_), Daniel (_Delia_), Drayton (_Idea_) Constable (_Diana_), Shakespeare. Milton’s sonnets (five of them in Italian) are of the same suggestion; and so down to them Rossetti and Mrs. Browning. The poetical collections of Elizabethans (_Tottell’s Miscellany_, _The Paradise of Dainty Devices_, etc.) are markedly Italian in _provenance_. (Lorenzo de’ Medici, etc.) 1448-1492 Sonnets and _Canzoni_. Lodovico ARIOSTO 1474-1533 Sonnets. Torquato TASSO 1544-1595 Sonnets. Giovanni Battista MARINI 1569-1625 (Various.) (_b_) Other Lyrics Gabriello Chiabrera 1551-1637 Pindaric lyrics Influenced the taste for Pindarics which appeared in Cowley, Dryden, etc. Pietro METASTASIO 1698-1782 Operatic lyrics. Heroic and Epic Verse (chiefly romantic heroics) Giovanni BOCCACCIO 1313-1375 _La Teseide_ and _Filostrato_ Chief introducer of the octave stanza (_ottava rima_), which became the type for Italian epic. Adopted in English with one modification by Chaucer (_Troilus and Cressida_), and with another by Spenser (_Faerie Queene_). Chaucer’s _Knight’s Tale_ is from Boccaccio’s _Teseide_, and his _Troilus and Cressida_ (like Shakespeare’s) from the _Filostrato_. Chaucer shows many borrowings and paraphrases. Luigi PULCI 1431-1487 _Morgante Maggiore_ (heroic romance, serious only in part). Matteo Maria BOIARDO 1430-1494 _Orlando Innamorato_ (mockingly recast by Berni fifty years later). Important as leading to Ariosto’s poem. Boiardo was well known to Milton, and had previously served as material for Elizabethan story writers. Byron in _Don Juan_ and _Beppo_ adopted the “Bernesque” style. Lodovico ARIOSTO 1474-1533 _Orlando Furioso_ (1516) Favourite reading of Spenser, to whom it suggests the metrical form and romantic style of _Faerie Queene_. Translated by Harington (1591) in the same metre. Torquato TASSO 1544-1595 _Gerusalemme Liberata_ (1581) Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_ is full of echoes and imitations of Tasso (the bower of Acrasia is a translation of the garden of Armida). Milton is similarly indebted, as well as to Tasso’s _Creation_ (_Il Mondo Creato_). Translated by Fairfax (1600). Giovanni Battista MARINI 1569-1625 _Adone_ (a romantic epic) Chiefly memorable for encouragement of the fantastic style known as Marinism (early seventeenth century in England). Marini was favourite reading with Crashaw and his like. Mock Heroic Alessandro Tassoni 1565-1638 _La Secchia Rapita_ (“Rape of the Bucket”). Suggested Pope’s _Rape of the Lock_. Satirical Verse (Ariosto) Luigi Alamanni 1495-1556 Utilized by Wyatt. Pietro Aretino 1492-1557 Much affected by Elizabethan pamphleteers, _e.g._, Nash (“the English Aretino”). Drama: Tragedy Giovanni Giorgio TRISSIMO 1478-1550 _Sofonisba._ Important as the first example of blank verse, which was borrowed from him by Surrey, used in the first English tragedy (_Gorboduc_, by Sackville), and thence established by Marlowe for English drama. TASSO _Il Torrismondo._ (The French and English dramatists proper began by following the Italian example of producing so-called classical plays: but English drama owes little to Italian, the case being rather the reverse. So far as Italian effect was pronounced it was in the direction of horrible detail.) Scipione MAFFEI 1675-1755 _Merope._ Vittorio ALFIERI 1749-1803 _Saul._ Drama: Comedy ARIOSTO 1474-1533 _I Suppositi_ and _La Cassaria_, etc. _I Suppositi_ (_The Supposes_) translated by Gascoigne (1566) as one of our earliest comedies. Niccolo MACHIAVELLI 1469-1527 _Mandragola_, etc. (Pietro Aretino) (The general influence in England was as slight as that of Tragedy. It should, however, be remarked that our Harlequin, Pantaloon, Columbine, and Punch, are derived from the old Italian _commedie dell’arte_, _i.e._, stock un-literary comedies: also that the “Masques” (up to Ben Jonson) were a suggestion from Italy.) Carlo GOLDONI 1707-1792 Comedies. Pastoral Drama (See below, “Pastoral Eclogues.”) Angelo POLIZIANO fl. 1480 _Orfeo._ TASSO 1544-1595 _Aminta_ (1572) Watson’s _Amyntas_ (1584). Battista GUARINI 1537-1612 _Pastor Fido_ (1585) Many times translated into English, first in 1602. Fletcher’s _Faithful Shepherdess_. Musical Drama (Melodrama, Opera.) Ottavio Rinuccini fl. 1594 _Dafne_ and _Euridice_. Apostolo Zeno 1669-1750 Pietro METASTASIO 1698-1782 Twenty-eight grand operas (_La Semiramide_, etc.). Pastoral Eclogues Battista Spagnoli (MANTUANUS) fl. 1502 Latin eclogues Used by Barclay (1513) and freely by Spenser (_Shepheard’s Calender_), quoted by Holofernes in Shakespeare. Giacomo SANNAZARO 1458-1530 _Arcadia_ (1504) (prose and verse). Original of Sidney’s _Arcadia_. (These revive pastoral poetry among both the French (Marot) and English.) (Marini.) Prose Fiction Giovanni BOCCACCIO 1313-1375 _Decameron_ (100 tales). Suggests plan of Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, and also several of the tales themselves. In Elizabethan times some of them appear in Painter’s _Palace of Pleasure_, whence _All’s Well that Ends Well_ is derived. Well known at all times. Ser Giovanni Publ. 1558 _Pecorone_ Giraldi Cinthio Publ. 1565 _Hecatommithi_ Matteo Bandello, etc. Publ. 1554-1573 _Novelle_ Much read and used by Elizabethans (Greene, Peel, etc. ). The storehouse of dramatic plots. Thus, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Measure for Measure_, _Othello_, etc., are from the Novelle. Other Prose Niccolo MACHIAVELLI 1469-1527 _Il Principe_, _History_, _Discourses on Livy_ _The Prince_ widely read. Bacon was well acquainted with Machiavelli, and takes occasional suggestion from him in the _Essays_.
VI
OTHER LITERARY INFLUENCES SUMMARIZED
(_a_) SPANISH LITERATURE AND ENGLISH
The direct and avowed influence of Spain upon English literature has hardly been comparable to that of France or Italy; nevertheless, in its totality, it has been sufficient to demand some concise review. Meanwhile that review necessitates, if less inevitably than in the case of Italy and France, an outline survey of the history of Spanish literature down to the middle of the seventeenth century. After that date the Peninsula, apart from its own lack of progress, cannot be said to count in our literary development.
In the summary of such literary forces as existed in the Dark Ages, we have already spoken of the Moslem learning of Cordova, and of the agency of Moors, Arabs, and Jews in spreading science and philosophy. We must not forget also the influence of Arab lyrics accompanying Arab music, which not only operated in Spain, but also in Provence after the Counts of Barcelona had established their court in that region. The interpenetration of Christian and Moorish thought was, as a matter of course, continued for many generations during the Christian re-conquest, but from the eighth to the twelfth century both learning and literary art lay with the Moslem. When in the thirteenth century the dialect of Castile had become the most important, though by no means the only Spanish speech, it embodied but little contribution from the north. Such as it reveals is an imitation of the Carlovingian _chansons de geste_ of France, in the shape of romantic poems of which the hero is Ruy Diaz de Bivar, commonly called the “Cid” (a corruption of the Arabic _Seyd_, “lord”). Side by side with these went the troubadour poetry common to the Provençal of Southern France and its closely related Catalonian of Eastern Spain. In the next and following centuries there were destined to spring from the Cid poems, combined with the Celtic tales of Arthur, brought through France from Wales, those romances of chivalry—_libros de caballerias_—of which something will be said in due course.