CHAPTER V.LITERATURE OF THE VULGAR TONGUE. POPULAR AND SACRED POETRY.Theperiod succeeding Petrarca and Boccaccio gave indications that the spirit of poetry was extinguished for some time to come. After Boccaccio’s death, his would-be rival, Franco Sacchetti, a man not only skilled in grave and gay compositions, but able to unite literary work with political office at home and abroad, a man capable of thoroughly appreciating the varied circumstances of life, merrily sang:The spring of poetry is now grown dry,No living form dwells on the Muses’ mount;Nor can we think that Dante could return,Since none will slake their thirst at his pure fount.Where’er we listen we but hear the toneOf horns, that blow the signal to refrain:Where’er we look we see but dead leaves strewn,And time must pass ere verdure clothes the plain.Nor were indications deceptive. For many centuries elapsed ere a poet of real significance arose. Here and there a hand touched the lyre of Petrarca, as, for instance, the Roman Giusto de’ Conti, the best among the imitators of Madonna Laura’s poet. We can hardly call poetry the greater works of the Florentine Antonio Pucci, in which he recounts the chronicle of Villani interzineand the Pisan war inottava rima, the eight-lined stanza. He was a popular poet, who was not wanting in either feeling or talent, as many of his sonnets testify. Whatever might be attempted in variousquarters passed without leaving a trace amid the efforts of the humanists, who despised the language of the people, and thought of nothing but perpetuating ancient culture, compared to which, according to the prevailing opinion, this language took the position of an inferior in birth. All its native power, and the cheerful, calm energy of the Tuscan people, were necessary to prevent its perishing in the midst of a twofold danger. Contempt might have excluded the language from any application to nobler ends, and so caused it to deteriorate. The attempts of the philologists to elevate the vulgar tongue after their fashion might have robbed it of naturalness, independence, character, and originality, and made it a clumsy compromise between old and new, without life or root in the people. The Tuscan language, which became the written speech of Italy, was in the fifteenth century threatened with both these dangers from a want of appreciation of its true spirit and life.At the commencement of this century we meet with a work which, like its author, still represents the thirteenth, but which casts some rays of light over the following period. It is the tract, ‘Del governo di cura familiare,’ by the Dominican monk Giovanni Dominici, who has been already mentioned (p. 426). The book originated at the suggestion of a noble lady, Bartolommea degli Obizzi, who, with her husband Antonio degli Alberti and four children, were involved in the fearful persecution which the family had to endure in consequence of the implication of one of the Alberti in the events of 1378. The sensible, God-fearing woman, suddenly overwhelmed with all the cares of the household and the education of her children under the most distressing circumstances, had turned to a pious preaching friar whose counsel stood in high repute in and beyond his native town. He answered with this book, which was preceded by others of the same kind. It is an introduction to Christian life, and to the duties of a Christian education, containing many small details inseparable from the opinions andmanners of the time. It is full of a manly spirit, with a clear recognition of the position and duties of parents and heads of families in the midst of changes which arose everywhere in consequence of the newly discovered antique world having already begun to penetrate, as it were, into a society hitherto hedged about by the narrow limits of mediæval culture and customs. From a special reference to the duties of a mother left in some sense in the position of a widow, the book passes to general remarks and considerations suggested by the state of a commonwealth torn by sectarian hatred.[410]The domestic ordinances for a Christian education in reference to respect for parents and authorities are followed by those which are dictated by active patriotism, zeal for the common good, and the preservation of unity. Parts of this book afford us a complete picture of the domestic condition of the time. The language is still that of the thirteenth century, but the structure of the sentences has no longer the graceful simplicity and transparent clearness which characterise more than one of the author’s brethren in orders.More than a generation after Fra Giovanni Dominici, a man standing in the midst of the new classical school took up the same subject from a wider point of view. He belonged to the family for whose use the book of his predecessor had been destined. We meet with Leon Batista Alberti in almost every field—in science, literature, and art—and only his unexampled versatility hindered him from ascending to the height which he often approached. In his dialogue, consisting of several books, ‘La Cura della Famiglia,’[411]Alberti, to whom in a certain sense all the knowledgeof the times lay open, displays, in his moral and philosophical view of life, the greatest harmony with the monk who hardly crossed the threshold of his age, and expresses himself on education and the true relation of the authors of antiquity to Christian morality in the same sense, and sometimes in the same words, as Giovanni. Dante and Petrarca had completed and purified by Christian wisdom the old philosophy as it had appeared to them; Alberti, a disciple of Greek learning, maintained the doctrine that, without Christianity, the world would remain in a valley of error, and wisdom would be impossible or vain. There was no lack of similar tendencies; out of the theological circle no book has spoken so decidedly.If we regard the style of this work, which purported to be popular, we feel the difference between it and that of the book which gave the author the impulse to its composition. Here is a learned man who endeavours to make use of a language despised by the learned, if not for strictly scientific purposes, yet for the discussion of questions which include a philosophy of life. He will, so he declares, write in a simple, naked style, though he has always Xenophon in his mind. More than the lost sovereignty of the world, he laments the loss of the rich and harmonious language of the world; but he does not understand why the Tuscan language of his day should excite so much aversion that even excellent things composed in it should displease. It was only a question of being easily understood, and knowing how to handle the language. It would be foolish to despise what was in daily use or to praise what no one understood. The ancient language had attained such authority because numerous learned men had written in it. It would be the same with that of the present day if learned men would expend real industry and pains to purify and cultivate it. Thus wrote Leon Batista Alberti about the middle of thecentury. His words indicate the direction of the effort then made to impart to the popular language dignity and euphony, not merely by an imitation of Latin phrases like Boccaccio’s, but even by a Latin formation of words. The error was not entirely avoided by this gifted man, who in the book under discussion, though striving after simplicity and comprehensiveness did not overcome the pedantry which sought safety in foreign elements only. When the accomplished scholar, Cristoforo Landino, at the commencement of his explanation of Petrarch’s poetry, before the ‘Padri Conscripti,’[412]expressed his opinion of the feasability of cultivating the Tuscan language which, like the Latin, ought to be subjected to grammar, he propounded the aphorism ‘He who would be a good Tuscan must be a Latinist.’ He then praised Leon Batista as the foremost master of the prose of later times, Leonardo Bruni as the reviver of antique poetry, and the hendecasyllabics as Sapphic and heroic verses. Knowing all this we cannot see from whence the fresh spirit was to come that could alone breathe life into the forms of language.How far they went in this direction, when dead if learned imitation triumphed over nature, genius, and the laws of a living language, which, as a modern writer expresses it, produced a greater reverence for the dead than for the living, is shown best by the Academy of Languages held in 1441, principally at the instigation of Alberti, under the patronage of Piero de’ Medici, in Sta. Maria del Fiore, to celebrate the presence of Pope Eugenius IV. The rectors of the university proclaimed a poetical competition, the theme of which was to be a eulogy on friendship. A silver laurel-wreath was appointed the prize; from this is derived the name of ‘Academia coronaria;’ the papal secretaries were the umpires. Before the Signoria, the archbishop, the Venetian ambassadors, prelates, nobles, and people, eight poets readtheir verses, most of them in triplets orterza rima, and one in stanzas orottava rima, on Sunday, October 22. The worst poets certainly would not have presented themselves; but we search in vain for poetry in these dry and bombastic productions. The amusing yet pathetic character of this competition was most manifested in the dialogues recited by a celebrated man, Leonardo Dati, the first and second part of which were in hexameters, the third in Sapphic metre, and the fourth ended in a sonnet, composed, as it was said, after antique rules. The metres corresponding with the language, neither Italian nor Latin, were modelled after Latin words and syntax; an incomprehensible and most indigestible mixture of new and old.[413]The judges awarded the prize to none of the competitors, but gave it to the Church, which, in respect to poetry, was accustomed to something different when the ‘Divine Comedy’ was expounded in her lofty halls. He who gave the impulse to the competition seems, however, not to have found this degradation of poetry so dreadful, for he arranged a second tournament on Envy, which, however, happily did not take place. This corrupted taste found sufficient defenders in the following century, and even men of genius retained the morbid taste for mingling languages and exaggerated artificial forms of words, which these times made a fashion, and which bore the same relation to the true language as periwigs to natural hair. Happily a counterpoise to such a caricature was not wanting—a counterpoise that weighed all the heavier because connected with the inward nature and life of the people, with their faith and feeling, their religious requirements and traditions, which, if much degenerated into superficiality and mere observance, not only opposed the progress of worldliness, but won before the end of the century a victory, the echoes of which were long heard. Not to speak of the low comic branch of popular poetry, the people’s language was preserved livingand fresh in letters, both those relating to business and those of a religious character, in smaller writings intended for the people, and in sacred poetry.Thus in the second half of the fourteenth century, when the schism in the Church oppressed the minds of men, when that which had been held to be unchangeable began to totter, as well as in the first half of the following, when humanism began to develop its necessary but undermining effects, there still existed a fervent and living religious sense, which held together many things that threatened to fall asunder, and explains much that would otherwise be a riddle. Caterina of Siena is the greatest and most brilliant figure in the first epoch; all the more significant because in her the purest piety is united to penetration, blended with mysticism. Her insight into the secrets of the soul and the nature of doctrine, and her clear perception of the requirements of the age, were combined with unwearied activity and frank courage. The respect due and willingly shown by her to popes and princes, detracts in nothing from the decided character and expressive language of her discourses. But St. Caterina, unequalled before or since, does not stand alone. In writings which contain the natural unadorned expression of feeling and opinion, and in letters which, unlike those of learned men, were not intended for the public and for national collections, we find the explanation of many phenomena that contrast with the facts of public life noted by history. These phenomena must surprise him who does not regard the domestic life of the people in all ranks, or who has not sounded the inner working of a religious feeling, the manifestation of which in architectural monuments in an age full of violence and predominating worldly activity, attracts our principal attention, and scarcely seems in accord with the time. Besides several ecclesiastical representatives of this school, like Giovanni Dominici and Giovanni delle Celle, who was also canonised, Chiara Gambacorti—the foundress of the Pisan convent of Dominican nuns of the StrictObservance, who died in 1420—may be mentioned. We find others certainly not less important in that class of laymen, who were as numerous as they were influential in the towns of Tuscany in the two centuries we have spoken of—men who divided their activity between public offices and private business, and who with time and power, had an open eye, and a warm heart for whatever concerned intellectual interests, especially religious tendencies and ecclesiastical matters. These fervent natures, whose numbers increased as worldliness became more threatening, finally gathered round Fra Girolamo Savonarola as round a fixed centre in their protest against the pagan tendencies which constantly gained ground, in spite of many contradictory phenomena, in the second half of the fifteenth century. And the same natures, thirty years later, at the last flash of this mystic piety and ascetic reformatory movement in the decisive battle for life or death of the commonwealth, lent their best powers to the champions of freedom, who were overthrown for a second and last time.[414]With this intellectual tendency a style of poetry was connected to which the philologists of the Renaissance period would have disdained to award a place in literature, even if they would have noticed it at all, had not their attention been in a certain measure forced to it by persons of high standing who guided the general taste in their circles. Popular sacred poetry was as old as the language of Dante’s time, and Fra Jacopone of Todi, to whom some pathetic if not grand Latin hymns of the later Middle Ages are ascribed, touched the keynote in his Canticles, which was echoed for three centuries in the lauds or hymns of praise. But Fra Jacopone himself only transmitted the tradition,which had remained alive since Francis of Assisi. The great number of fraternities, who assembled after the day’s work in churches and chapels and at the corners of streets and sang hymns; the numerous processions and pilgrimages, even if we except those which, like the processions of the White Penitents, set whole villages and towns in commotion; the frequent evening devotions, which were shared in by others than members of the confraternities; the expressions of pious feeling and religious aspiration, after the labour and toil of the day—all this contributed to the growth of a species of popular poetry which bore rich fruit, especially in the fifteenth century. The continuance of Christian feeling and the desire to manifest it among the people at a time when paganism had revived in the learned world is remarkable, and to judge of the general opinions and tendencies merely by the literary monuments of the age would lead to wrong conclusions.If, as we have said, the full development of this kind of poetry belongs to the fifteenth century, the preceding age, when trials of every kind—sanguinary civil wars, devastating marches of mercenary and robber bands, pestilence and Church schism—called men to serious reflection, presents hardly less activity in this direction. The crowds of Florentine burghers who, during the strife with Pope Gregory XI. on his return from Avignon, sought compensation for the discontinuance of Divine worship in the city while under the interdict by devotions in the open air, by prayer and psalmody before the tabernacles in the streets, were a remarkable and, in their way, elevating sight. The oldest company, orschola, of the psalm-singers, orlaudesi, which originated in a chapel near the cathedral church where the bell-tower now stands, and was named after the Holy Virgin or St. Zanobi, was instituted before the end of the twelfth century. From it proceeded the pious men who founded the order of Servi di Maria (Servites), who had their residence in Florence, near the church of the Annunziata,on the wooded heights of the Apennines, in the far-seen cloisters of Monte Senario, and who are often mentioned in connection with the history of the Florentine patriciate.[415]Other societies followed: the companies of Or San Michele, Sta. Maria Novella, Sta. Croce, Sto. Spirito, of the Carmine and Ognissanti. In short from all the large churches were formed brotherhoods which, in conjunction with similar ones for benevolent purposes, included a considerable part of the higher class of citizens, and several of which still exist. The style of poetry fostered in and by these fraternities had a long life, and sent forth aftershoots centuries later, when Vincenzo da Filicaia composed hymns for the society of St. Benedict, which, in the Jubilee year 1700, undertook a pilgrimage to Rome at the same time as the last but one of the Medicean rulers.Nor do we meet with these phenomena in Florence alone, but in the neighbouring towns of Tuscany also. In Siena—where, as in adjacent Umbria, in the midst of all civil disturbances, not seldom accompanied with bloodshed, a peculiar spiritual life penetrated with mysticism had been developed and long upheld—arose the society of Jesuates about the middle of the fourteenth century, originally a congregation of laymen which formed themselves into an order and, like the Humiliates before them, combined monastic life with the practice of arts and industry. When in 1367 Pope Urban V., for whom all the serious andbelieving inhabitants of Rome longed, arrived at Corneto on his return from Avignon to Rome, Giovanni Colombini, the founder of this congregation, marched with his followers singing lauds through Viterbo to the sea-shore. With olive branches in their hands they accompanied with hymns the procession of the Holy Father, who granted the white robe to them in Toscanella. From its origin this popular order had sacred poets,[416]by whom the tradition of Fra Jacopone was kept alive, himself a member of one of the most popular orders. When the Venetian Antonio Bembo, who belonged to the Jesuates, lay on his death-bed in Pistoja, the two brethren who tended him began at his wish to sing the hymn of the saint of Todi, ‘Thou love of God hast wounded me.’ Towards the end of the century we find the fraternity of the Bianchi in Siena singing lauds like the Florentine brotherhoods. In Lorenzo de’ Medici’s days these consisted principally of artisans who assembled on Saturdays, after nine, in a church and sang lauds in four voices before a picture of the Madonna, changing about among themselves with every hymn. It was partly a kind ofcanto fermo, and partly sung after popular melodies. If we consider that till the reform of church music, undertaken at the wish of the Council of Trent by Giovanni Pierluigi of Palestrina, Divine worship had been accompanied by vaudeville melodies, we cannot be surprised if the same tunes to which carnival songs were sung—Italian, French, and Flemish—were occasionally used with the lauds without anyone taking offence at it. Thus we find them founded on melodies as those of the ‘Leggiadra damigella,’ or ‘Una donna d’amor fino,’ ‘O Rosa mia gentile,’ ‘O crudel donna ch’hai lassato me,’ ‘Vicin, vicin, vicin, chi mol’ spazar camin,’ ‘Plus que je visle regar gracieuse,’ and similar ones. Occasionally it is remarked that the melody is the same as that of dances orstrambotti, as the popular songs were called, which might be referred to King Manfred’s days and make the nearest approach to our street-tunes.This sacred poetry is very prolific, and though the frequent recurrence of the same motive is wearying, we are astonished at the endless wealth of the variations and the delicate expression of effect, elegant in its simplicity. The form and metre of the hymns, some of which are quite short and others extending to several verses, are very different. Fra Jacopone was succeeded by the Minorite, Fra Ugo Panziera of Prato; the Dominican, Fra Domenico Cavalco of Vico Pisano, who, as an ascetic writer, has proved himself a master of prose; Bianco dall’Anciolina, one of the companions of Giovanni Colombini; and, about the beginning of the fifteenth century, by the learned Venetian Leonardo Giustiniani, brother of the patriarch Lorenzo who was venerated as a saint; contemporaneous with him were Fra Giovanni Dominici, Francesco d’Albizzo, and many others. The succeeding epoch witnessed the appearance of the two men who have given this popular poetry its greatest brilliancy and importance: they were Feo Belcari and Girolamo Benivieni.[417]The birth of Feo Belcari[418]occurred at a time when thesad divided condition of the Church—which the Pisan Council did not help by the choice of a third Pope—had excited in Florence a movement which was only terminated by the restoration of unity. He was born on February 4, 1410, and belonged to a respectable family extinct before the sixteenth century. He filled many public offices, sat in the magistracy of the priors in the summer of 1454, was secretary in the office of the Public Debt, and died on August 16, 1484. He is the best representative of the tendency, intellect, and feeling which we are now considering. Feo Belcari was no dreamer, but a man of active life, a sharer in the cheerful society, principally composed of artists, which was a characteristic element of the social condition of the time. All that we possess of him belongs to devotional literature. His book on the founders of the Jesuates, dedicated to Giovanni de’ Medici, describes times and circumstances which he knew from oral tradition, being in the most intimate connection with the orders that had acquired importance in Florence. His letters—one of which on humility, addressed to his daughter Orsola, gives a clear view of his opinions—are moral philosophical treatises, in which the familiarity with the Fathers of the Church and Christian authors of the Middle Ages would make us take them for the work of a theologian, had not the knowledge of this literature been so widely disseminated among a portion of the laity. His dramatic works are among the most important of the kind which introduced Sacred History into the circle of festivals, half ecclesiastical half secular, and claimed the equal attention of high and low. In 1449 his mystery of the ‘Sacrifice of Abraham’ was acted in the church of Cestello. But more than all, hislaudihave made him a name. The number of them is very great, for many are only variations of the same theme—that of Divine love and the powerlessness of human nature without grace. Butthe different turns and shades of meaning are remarkable, and the ease with which the metre harmonises with the hymn is astonishing, whilst there is no want of reality. In 1455, when the author was at the height of his powers and activity, a collection of this poetry had been arranged for the Compagnia de’ Battuti di San Zanobi, and the plays were kept in use till far into the following century. The style is mostly simple, as befits popular productions, but it is not entirely free from Latinisms and affectation in his prose writings.The death of Feo Belcari, the ‘Christian Poet,’ was sung by Girolamo Benivieni[419]interza rima, where we read among other things:The darkened world has now long missed the starWhich, while the shade still hung before my eyes,Shone like a guide unto my steps afar.Ne’er will the sweet and heavenly tones resound,Silent the harmonies of that sweet lyre,Now only in the angels’ bright world found.Girolamo Benivieni, as his own words suggest, was in a measure the successor of Belcari. But while the latter wrote entirely under the influence of strictly orthodox Christianity, Benivieni sought to impart to his work the spirit of Greek philosophy which ruled the age in which he had grown up. While Belcari, again, united public activity with the contemplative life in which he loved to indulge, we are not informed that Benivieni, however deeply the events in his native country might move him, had any share in them beyond that of an author and a friend of many of the actors. Born in 1453, he survived friends and foes and the Republic itself. Intellectually active up to his last years, he kept true to the recollections of his most active years, and to the convictions he had then formed. Feo Belcari had been his leader in youth; Fra Girolamo Savonarola was the guidingstar of his ripe manhood. Between the two, the representative of the contemplative man and the strenuous ascetic, stands a grave, beautiful figure, Pico of Mirandola, who had no less influence on Benivieni than the others. Only from its intimate connection with these three has Benivieni’s life—of which nothing else is known—a significance and importance, that cannot otherwise be explained. As he sang Belcari’s death, and defended the truth of Savonarola’s doctrines and predictions—more than thirty years after his death—before Pope Clement VII.,[420]so did he choose his last resting-place beside Pico,[421]whose death preceded his own by half a century. Benivieni illustrated his friend’s canzonets on Divine Love with a detailed commentary which proved how their minds accorded with one another.Benivieni attempted the most various kinds of poetry—eclogues, canticles, canzonets, sonnets—which give him a place beside the two men whom we shall soon see taking the first places in poetry, Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici; while in popular songs, theFrottole, he retained the tradition which, whatever the learned might say, still represented the popular element in literature. He translated the Psalms and the ‘Dies Iræ’ into theterza rima, remodelled a novel of Boccaccio’s into stanzas, and made poetic translations from the Greek and Latin. His poems on religious philosophical subjects show him to have been in form and meaning one of those who aspired to mediate between Christianity and Platonism, a tendency also evinced by the commentary accompanying the poems we have mentioned, and addressedto Pico’s nephew, Giovan Francesco. Benivieni’s principal historical importance, so to say, consists in the sympathy he showed for the movement commenced by Savonarola, which found its especial poetical expression through him. His lauds, which, in their mysticism tinged with sensuousness, remind us at times of Fra Jacopone’s sentimentality, were sung by the people in the streets of the city, by high and low members of the Dominican order, in places where shortly before Medicean carnival-songs had resounded, and where piles of worldly vanity were heaped up to be followed soon by other forms of terrible ruin.In the style which gives importance to Belcari’s and Benivieni’s poetry when the former still lived and the latter was in youthful manhood, a woman appeared who claims peculiar attention, because she exercised a decided influence on the personage who has given to this epoch the special stamp of his individuality. Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici was eminently gifted; we have seen her in several positions in life which display her clear understanding, caution, affection for her family, and care for their welfare, without arrogance or forgetfulness of her station. Her productions as a poet belong to the intellectual class. The six lauds[422]which remain of her poetry have this peculiarity, that they include the ecclesiastical year; and if their poetical value does not exceed others of the kind, they produce a favourable impression by avoiding the endless repetitions of similar poems. The Birth of Christ, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Life of Christ on earth, these are the themesof her hymns, some of which were sung to sacred, and some to profane airs. Beside these processional songs, Lucrezia wrote various Biblical histories interza rimaor in eight-lined stanzas:e.g., the ‘Lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist,’ the ‘History of Esther, Judith, and Tobias.’ Angelo Poliziano revised her poems, and her grandsons learned them by heart. Another poetess of the time, whose family was intimately acquainted with Lucrezia’s, Antonia Giannotti Pulci, attempted sacred dramas, in which her husband Bernardo made himself a name.Besides poetry another branch of literature deserves attention, although the humanistic school diminished its powers, and restricted its influence without entirely depriving it of importance. It will be easily understood that, in the native country of Dino Compagni and the Villani, there could be no lack of such as continued to note down what they felt and heard, and what they had themselves a personal share in. Nowhere, perhaps, were such notices, either in the form of annals or chronicles, or as narratives of personal experience with a predominance of character drawing, so frequent and so valuable as here. In the last decades of the fourteenth century several writers had followed in the steps of the Villani with far more talent than they had. Donato Velluti, Marchionne Stefani, Gino Capponi wrote a description of the popular insurrections of 1378, in the course of which the reader is in danger of losing the thread if he does not keep the separate elements apart. The following century was active in this department, but however important in many cases the material may have been, the form and language betray the lowly position to which the humanistic literature had condemned this despised sister. Buonaccorso Pitti, Jacopo Salviati, and Neri Capponi wrote histories and commentaries which are partly personal memoirs, and all the more instructive because the epoch was one which claimed so fully the active participation of capable citizens at home and abroad. We may, perhaps, blame the weakness ofthe last-mentioned writer for placing his own deeds and those of his father, relations, and friends, in the foremost rank in commentaries, which extend nearly to his death in 1456; but where men like Gino and Neri Capponi have laboured in such a conspicuous manner, the circumstantial style is willingly accepted, as the inner life of a people can only be recognised and understood by a closer view of important persons. Other chroniclers, like Domenico Buoninsegni and Goro Dati, from whom less is to be gained for political history, are the more readily pardoned for their gossiping patriotism because the subject of their preference is a deserving one, and they furnish us with a quantity of information that is important for the history of civilisation.A special place belongs to Giovanni Cavalcanti, the principal authority for the time from 1420 to 1440. The humanistic school had exercised more influence on him than on any of the historians of his day who wrote in the vulgar tongue, but in a manner which imprints the strangest character on his history. For we find here, grafted on the passionate description of a partisan who had fallen out with his own faction in the course of his work, a rhetorical wordiness and elegant would-be eloquence which clothes the strife of faction, with its loves and hatreds, in antiquated speeches and moralising sentences. The personality of the author in and for itself, as it meets us in his writings (we know nothing else of him), is characteristic; a nobleman of one of the oldest families, poor, oppressed, without any share in the administration, and with a full consciousness of the old conservative claims of the patricians, with a fierce contemptuous hatred of the lower classes, and a bitter grudge against the heads of the State, which leads him to charge Cosimo de’ Medici whom he so often praises with a diabolical design to destroy freedom. To all these annalists and historians we may add others, whose works are mostly printed, and include the times of Lorenzo or later, namely, Benedetto Dei, Bartolommeo Cerretani, Pietro Parenti, Giovanni Cambi.Similar to this branch of history, biography placed her achievements in the vulgar tongue beside those of the humanists, who, rivalling the Greeks and Romans, created much that was important and permanently valuable in a higher sense than their great historical works. Most unassuming, and, in spite of all solecisms and defects of form, most pleasing is the popular form of biography, in the hundred characteristic portraits by Vespasiano da Bisticci, to whom we owe innumerable deep views into the inner life for which we vainly seek among the learned historians.END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAPTER V.LITERATURE OF THE VULGAR TONGUE. POPULAR AND SACRED POETRY.Theperiod succeeding Petrarca and Boccaccio gave indications that the spirit of poetry was extinguished for some time to come. After Boccaccio’s death, his would-be rival, Franco Sacchetti, a man not only skilled in grave and gay compositions, but able to unite literary work with political office at home and abroad, a man capable of thoroughly appreciating the varied circumstances of life, merrily sang:The spring of poetry is now grown dry,No living form dwells on the Muses’ mount;Nor can we think that Dante could return,Since none will slake their thirst at his pure fount.Where’er we listen we but hear the toneOf horns, that blow the signal to refrain:Where’er we look we see but dead leaves strewn,And time must pass ere verdure clothes the plain.Nor were indications deceptive. For many centuries elapsed ere a poet of real significance arose. Here and there a hand touched the lyre of Petrarca, as, for instance, the Roman Giusto de’ Conti, the best among the imitators of Madonna Laura’s poet. We can hardly call poetry the greater works of the Florentine Antonio Pucci, in which he recounts the chronicle of Villani interzineand the Pisan war inottava rima, the eight-lined stanza. He was a popular poet, who was not wanting in either feeling or talent, as many of his sonnets testify. Whatever might be attempted in variousquarters passed without leaving a trace amid the efforts of the humanists, who despised the language of the people, and thought of nothing but perpetuating ancient culture, compared to which, according to the prevailing opinion, this language took the position of an inferior in birth. All its native power, and the cheerful, calm energy of the Tuscan people, were necessary to prevent its perishing in the midst of a twofold danger. Contempt might have excluded the language from any application to nobler ends, and so caused it to deteriorate. The attempts of the philologists to elevate the vulgar tongue after their fashion might have robbed it of naturalness, independence, character, and originality, and made it a clumsy compromise between old and new, without life or root in the people. The Tuscan language, which became the written speech of Italy, was in the fifteenth century threatened with both these dangers from a want of appreciation of its true spirit and life.At the commencement of this century we meet with a work which, like its author, still represents the thirteenth, but which casts some rays of light over the following period. It is the tract, ‘Del governo di cura familiare,’ by the Dominican monk Giovanni Dominici, who has been already mentioned (p. 426). The book originated at the suggestion of a noble lady, Bartolommea degli Obizzi, who, with her husband Antonio degli Alberti and four children, were involved in the fearful persecution which the family had to endure in consequence of the implication of one of the Alberti in the events of 1378. The sensible, God-fearing woman, suddenly overwhelmed with all the cares of the household and the education of her children under the most distressing circumstances, had turned to a pious preaching friar whose counsel stood in high repute in and beyond his native town. He answered with this book, which was preceded by others of the same kind. It is an introduction to Christian life, and to the duties of a Christian education, containing many small details inseparable from the opinions andmanners of the time. It is full of a manly spirit, with a clear recognition of the position and duties of parents and heads of families in the midst of changes which arose everywhere in consequence of the newly discovered antique world having already begun to penetrate, as it were, into a society hitherto hedged about by the narrow limits of mediæval culture and customs. From a special reference to the duties of a mother left in some sense in the position of a widow, the book passes to general remarks and considerations suggested by the state of a commonwealth torn by sectarian hatred.[410]The domestic ordinances for a Christian education in reference to respect for parents and authorities are followed by those which are dictated by active patriotism, zeal for the common good, and the preservation of unity. Parts of this book afford us a complete picture of the domestic condition of the time. The language is still that of the thirteenth century, but the structure of the sentences has no longer the graceful simplicity and transparent clearness which characterise more than one of the author’s brethren in orders.More than a generation after Fra Giovanni Dominici, a man standing in the midst of the new classical school took up the same subject from a wider point of view. He belonged to the family for whose use the book of his predecessor had been destined. We meet with Leon Batista Alberti in almost every field—in science, literature, and art—and only his unexampled versatility hindered him from ascending to the height which he often approached. In his dialogue, consisting of several books, ‘La Cura della Famiglia,’[411]Alberti, to whom in a certain sense all the knowledgeof the times lay open, displays, in his moral and philosophical view of life, the greatest harmony with the monk who hardly crossed the threshold of his age, and expresses himself on education and the true relation of the authors of antiquity to Christian morality in the same sense, and sometimes in the same words, as Giovanni. Dante and Petrarca had completed and purified by Christian wisdom the old philosophy as it had appeared to them; Alberti, a disciple of Greek learning, maintained the doctrine that, without Christianity, the world would remain in a valley of error, and wisdom would be impossible or vain. There was no lack of similar tendencies; out of the theological circle no book has spoken so decidedly.If we regard the style of this work, which purported to be popular, we feel the difference between it and that of the book which gave the author the impulse to its composition. Here is a learned man who endeavours to make use of a language despised by the learned, if not for strictly scientific purposes, yet for the discussion of questions which include a philosophy of life. He will, so he declares, write in a simple, naked style, though he has always Xenophon in his mind. More than the lost sovereignty of the world, he laments the loss of the rich and harmonious language of the world; but he does not understand why the Tuscan language of his day should excite so much aversion that even excellent things composed in it should displease. It was only a question of being easily understood, and knowing how to handle the language. It would be foolish to despise what was in daily use or to praise what no one understood. The ancient language had attained such authority because numerous learned men had written in it. It would be the same with that of the present day if learned men would expend real industry and pains to purify and cultivate it. Thus wrote Leon Batista Alberti about the middle of thecentury. His words indicate the direction of the effort then made to impart to the popular language dignity and euphony, not merely by an imitation of Latin phrases like Boccaccio’s, but even by a Latin formation of words. The error was not entirely avoided by this gifted man, who in the book under discussion, though striving after simplicity and comprehensiveness did not overcome the pedantry which sought safety in foreign elements only. When the accomplished scholar, Cristoforo Landino, at the commencement of his explanation of Petrarch’s poetry, before the ‘Padri Conscripti,’[412]expressed his opinion of the feasability of cultivating the Tuscan language which, like the Latin, ought to be subjected to grammar, he propounded the aphorism ‘He who would be a good Tuscan must be a Latinist.’ He then praised Leon Batista as the foremost master of the prose of later times, Leonardo Bruni as the reviver of antique poetry, and the hendecasyllabics as Sapphic and heroic verses. Knowing all this we cannot see from whence the fresh spirit was to come that could alone breathe life into the forms of language.How far they went in this direction, when dead if learned imitation triumphed over nature, genius, and the laws of a living language, which, as a modern writer expresses it, produced a greater reverence for the dead than for the living, is shown best by the Academy of Languages held in 1441, principally at the instigation of Alberti, under the patronage of Piero de’ Medici, in Sta. Maria del Fiore, to celebrate the presence of Pope Eugenius IV. The rectors of the university proclaimed a poetical competition, the theme of which was to be a eulogy on friendship. A silver laurel-wreath was appointed the prize; from this is derived the name of ‘Academia coronaria;’ the papal secretaries were the umpires. Before the Signoria, the archbishop, the Venetian ambassadors, prelates, nobles, and people, eight poets readtheir verses, most of them in triplets orterza rima, and one in stanzas orottava rima, on Sunday, October 22. The worst poets certainly would not have presented themselves; but we search in vain for poetry in these dry and bombastic productions. The amusing yet pathetic character of this competition was most manifested in the dialogues recited by a celebrated man, Leonardo Dati, the first and second part of which were in hexameters, the third in Sapphic metre, and the fourth ended in a sonnet, composed, as it was said, after antique rules. The metres corresponding with the language, neither Italian nor Latin, were modelled after Latin words and syntax; an incomprehensible and most indigestible mixture of new and old.[413]The judges awarded the prize to none of the competitors, but gave it to the Church, which, in respect to poetry, was accustomed to something different when the ‘Divine Comedy’ was expounded in her lofty halls. He who gave the impulse to the competition seems, however, not to have found this degradation of poetry so dreadful, for he arranged a second tournament on Envy, which, however, happily did not take place. This corrupted taste found sufficient defenders in the following century, and even men of genius retained the morbid taste for mingling languages and exaggerated artificial forms of words, which these times made a fashion, and which bore the same relation to the true language as periwigs to natural hair. Happily a counterpoise to such a caricature was not wanting—a counterpoise that weighed all the heavier because connected with the inward nature and life of the people, with their faith and feeling, their religious requirements and traditions, which, if much degenerated into superficiality and mere observance, not only opposed the progress of worldliness, but won before the end of the century a victory, the echoes of which were long heard. Not to speak of the low comic branch of popular poetry, the people’s language was preserved livingand fresh in letters, both those relating to business and those of a religious character, in smaller writings intended for the people, and in sacred poetry.Thus in the second half of the fourteenth century, when the schism in the Church oppressed the minds of men, when that which had been held to be unchangeable began to totter, as well as in the first half of the following, when humanism began to develop its necessary but undermining effects, there still existed a fervent and living religious sense, which held together many things that threatened to fall asunder, and explains much that would otherwise be a riddle. Caterina of Siena is the greatest and most brilliant figure in the first epoch; all the more significant because in her the purest piety is united to penetration, blended with mysticism. Her insight into the secrets of the soul and the nature of doctrine, and her clear perception of the requirements of the age, were combined with unwearied activity and frank courage. The respect due and willingly shown by her to popes and princes, detracts in nothing from the decided character and expressive language of her discourses. But St. Caterina, unequalled before or since, does not stand alone. In writings which contain the natural unadorned expression of feeling and opinion, and in letters which, unlike those of learned men, were not intended for the public and for national collections, we find the explanation of many phenomena that contrast with the facts of public life noted by history. These phenomena must surprise him who does not regard the domestic life of the people in all ranks, or who has not sounded the inner working of a religious feeling, the manifestation of which in architectural monuments in an age full of violence and predominating worldly activity, attracts our principal attention, and scarcely seems in accord with the time. Besides several ecclesiastical representatives of this school, like Giovanni Dominici and Giovanni delle Celle, who was also canonised, Chiara Gambacorti—the foundress of the Pisan convent of Dominican nuns of the StrictObservance, who died in 1420—may be mentioned. We find others certainly not less important in that class of laymen, who were as numerous as they were influential in the towns of Tuscany in the two centuries we have spoken of—men who divided their activity between public offices and private business, and who with time and power, had an open eye, and a warm heart for whatever concerned intellectual interests, especially religious tendencies and ecclesiastical matters. These fervent natures, whose numbers increased as worldliness became more threatening, finally gathered round Fra Girolamo Savonarola as round a fixed centre in their protest against the pagan tendencies which constantly gained ground, in spite of many contradictory phenomena, in the second half of the fifteenth century. And the same natures, thirty years later, at the last flash of this mystic piety and ascetic reformatory movement in the decisive battle for life or death of the commonwealth, lent their best powers to the champions of freedom, who were overthrown for a second and last time.[414]With this intellectual tendency a style of poetry was connected to which the philologists of the Renaissance period would have disdained to award a place in literature, even if they would have noticed it at all, had not their attention been in a certain measure forced to it by persons of high standing who guided the general taste in their circles. Popular sacred poetry was as old as the language of Dante’s time, and Fra Jacopone of Todi, to whom some pathetic if not grand Latin hymns of the later Middle Ages are ascribed, touched the keynote in his Canticles, which was echoed for three centuries in the lauds or hymns of praise. But Fra Jacopone himself only transmitted the tradition,which had remained alive since Francis of Assisi. The great number of fraternities, who assembled after the day’s work in churches and chapels and at the corners of streets and sang hymns; the numerous processions and pilgrimages, even if we except those which, like the processions of the White Penitents, set whole villages and towns in commotion; the frequent evening devotions, which were shared in by others than members of the confraternities; the expressions of pious feeling and religious aspiration, after the labour and toil of the day—all this contributed to the growth of a species of popular poetry which bore rich fruit, especially in the fifteenth century. The continuance of Christian feeling and the desire to manifest it among the people at a time when paganism had revived in the learned world is remarkable, and to judge of the general opinions and tendencies merely by the literary monuments of the age would lead to wrong conclusions.If, as we have said, the full development of this kind of poetry belongs to the fifteenth century, the preceding age, when trials of every kind—sanguinary civil wars, devastating marches of mercenary and robber bands, pestilence and Church schism—called men to serious reflection, presents hardly less activity in this direction. The crowds of Florentine burghers who, during the strife with Pope Gregory XI. on his return from Avignon, sought compensation for the discontinuance of Divine worship in the city while under the interdict by devotions in the open air, by prayer and psalmody before the tabernacles in the streets, were a remarkable and, in their way, elevating sight. The oldest company, orschola, of the psalm-singers, orlaudesi, which originated in a chapel near the cathedral church where the bell-tower now stands, and was named after the Holy Virgin or St. Zanobi, was instituted before the end of the twelfth century. From it proceeded the pious men who founded the order of Servi di Maria (Servites), who had their residence in Florence, near the church of the Annunziata,on the wooded heights of the Apennines, in the far-seen cloisters of Monte Senario, and who are often mentioned in connection with the history of the Florentine patriciate.[415]Other societies followed: the companies of Or San Michele, Sta. Maria Novella, Sta. Croce, Sto. Spirito, of the Carmine and Ognissanti. In short from all the large churches were formed brotherhoods which, in conjunction with similar ones for benevolent purposes, included a considerable part of the higher class of citizens, and several of which still exist. The style of poetry fostered in and by these fraternities had a long life, and sent forth aftershoots centuries later, when Vincenzo da Filicaia composed hymns for the society of St. Benedict, which, in the Jubilee year 1700, undertook a pilgrimage to Rome at the same time as the last but one of the Medicean rulers.Nor do we meet with these phenomena in Florence alone, but in the neighbouring towns of Tuscany also. In Siena—where, as in adjacent Umbria, in the midst of all civil disturbances, not seldom accompanied with bloodshed, a peculiar spiritual life penetrated with mysticism had been developed and long upheld—arose the society of Jesuates about the middle of the fourteenth century, originally a congregation of laymen which formed themselves into an order and, like the Humiliates before them, combined monastic life with the practice of arts and industry. When in 1367 Pope Urban V., for whom all the serious andbelieving inhabitants of Rome longed, arrived at Corneto on his return from Avignon to Rome, Giovanni Colombini, the founder of this congregation, marched with his followers singing lauds through Viterbo to the sea-shore. With olive branches in their hands they accompanied with hymns the procession of the Holy Father, who granted the white robe to them in Toscanella. From its origin this popular order had sacred poets,[416]by whom the tradition of Fra Jacopone was kept alive, himself a member of one of the most popular orders. When the Venetian Antonio Bembo, who belonged to the Jesuates, lay on his death-bed in Pistoja, the two brethren who tended him began at his wish to sing the hymn of the saint of Todi, ‘Thou love of God hast wounded me.’ Towards the end of the century we find the fraternity of the Bianchi in Siena singing lauds like the Florentine brotherhoods. In Lorenzo de’ Medici’s days these consisted principally of artisans who assembled on Saturdays, after nine, in a church and sang lauds in four voices before a picture of the Madonna, changing about among themselves with every hymn. It was partly a kind ofcanto fermo, and partly sung after popular melodies. If we consider that till the reform of church music, undertaken at the wish of the Council of Trent by Giovanni Pierluigi of Palestrina, Divine worship had been accompanied by vaudeville melodies, we cannot be surprised if the same tunes to which carnival songs were sung—Italian, French, and Flemish—were occasionally used with the lauds without anyone taking offence at it. Thus we find them founded on melodies as those of the ‘Leggiadra damigella,’ or ‘Una donna d’amor fino,’ ‘O Rosa mia gentile,’ ‘O crudel donna ch’hai lassato me,’ ‘Vicin, vicin, vicin, chi mol’ spazar camin,’ ‘Plus que je visle regar gracieuse,’ and similar ones. Occasionally it is remarked that the melody is the same as that of dances orstrambotti, as the popular songs were called, which might be referred to King Manfred’s days and make the nearest approach to our street-tunes.This sacred poetry is very prolific, and though the frequent recurrence of the same motive is wearying, we are astonished at the endless wealth of the variations and the delicate expression of effect, elegant in its simplicity. The form and metre of the hymns, some of which are quite short and others extending to several verses, are very different. Fra Jacopone was succeeded by the Minorite, Fra Ugo Panziera of Prato; the Dominican, Fra Domenico Cavalco of Vico Pisano, who, as an ascetic writer, has proved himself a master of prose; Bianco dall’Anciolina, one of the companions of Giovanni Colombini; and, about the beginning of the fifteenth century, by the learned Venetian Leonardo Giustiniani, brother of the patriarch Lorenzo who was venerated as a saint; contemporaneous with him were Fra Giovanni Dominici, Francesco d’Albizzo, and many others. The succeeding epoch witnessed the appearance of the two men who have given this popular poetry its greatest brilliancy and importance: they were Feo Belcari and Girolamo Benivieni.[417]The birth of Feo Belcari[418]occurred at a time when thesad divided condition of the Church—which the Pisan Council did not help by the choice of a third Pope—had excited in Florence a movement which was only terminated by the restoration of unity. He was born on February 4, 1410, and belonged to a respectable family extinct before the sixteenth century. He filled many public offices, sat in the magistracy of the priors in the summer of 1454, was secretary in the office of the Public Debt, and died on August 16, 1484. He is the best representative of the tendency, intellect, and feeling which we are now considering. Feo Belcari was no dreamer, but a man of active life, a sharer in the cheerful society, principally composed of artists, which was a characteristic element of the social condition of the time. All that we possess of him belongs to devotional literature. His book on the founders of the Jesuates, dedicated to Giovanni de’ Medici, describes times and circumstances which he knew from oral tradition, being in the most intimate connection with the orders that had acquired importance in Florence. His letters—one of which on humility, addressed to his daughter Orsola, gives a clear view of his opinions—are moral philosophical treatises, in which the familiarity with the Fathers of the Church and Christian authors of the Middle Ages would make us take them for the work of a theologian, had not the knowledge of this literature been so widely disseminated among a portion of the laity. His dramatic works are among the most important of the kind which introduced Sacred History into the circle of festivals, half ecclesiastical half secular, and claimed the equal attention of high and low. In 1449 his mystery of the ‘Sacrifice of Abraham’ was acted in the church of Cestello. But more than all, hislaudihave made him a name. The number of them is very great, for many are only variations of the same theme—that of Divine love and the powerlessness of human nature without grace. Butthe different turns and shades of meaning are remarkable, and the ease with which the metre harmonises with the hymn is astonishing, whilst there is no want of reality. In 1455, when the author was at the height of his powers and activity, a collection of this poetry had been arranged for the Compagnia de’ Battuti di San Zanobi, and the plays were kept in use till far into the following century. The style is mostly simple, as befits popular productions, but it is not entirely free from Latinisms and affectation in his prose writings.The death of Feo Belcari, the ‘Christian Poet,’ was sung by Girolamo Benivieni[419]interza rima, where we read among other things:The darkened world has now long missed the starWhich, while the shade still hung before my eyes,Shone like a guide unto my steps afar.Ne’er will the sweet and heavenly tones resound,Silent the harmonies of that sweet lyre,Now only in the angels’ bright world found.Girolamo Benivieni, as his own words suggest, was in a measure the successor of Belcari. But while the latter wrote entirely under the influence of strictly orthodox Christianity, Benivieni sought to impart to his work the spirit of Greek philosophy which ruled the age in which he had grown up. While Belcari, again, united public activity with the contemplative life in which he loved to indulge, we are not informed that Benivieni, however deeply the events in his native country might move him, had any share in them beyond that of an author and a friend of many of the actors. Born in 1453, he survived friends and foes and the Republic itself. Intellectually active up to his last years, he kept true to the recollections of his most active years, and to the convictions he had then formed. Feo Belcari had been his leader in youth; Fra Girolamo Savonarola was the guidingstar of his ripe manhood. Between the two, the representative of the contemplative man and the strenuous ascetic, stands a grave, beautiful figure, Pico of Mirandola, who had no less influence on Benivieni than the others. Only from its intimate connection with these three has Benivieni’s life—of which nothing else is known—a significance and importance, that cannot otherwise be explained. As he sang Belcari’s death, and defended the truth of Savonarola’s doctrines and predictions—more than thirty years after his death—before Pope Clement VII.,[420]so did he choose his last resting-place beside Pico,[421]whose death preceded his own by half a century. Benivieni illustrated his friend’s canzonets on Divine Love with a detailed commentary which proved how their minds accorded with one another.Benivieni attempted the most various kinds of poetry—eclogues, canticles, canzonets, sonnets—which give him a place beside the two men whom we shall soon see taking the first places in poetry, Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici; while in popular songs, theFrottole, he retained the tradition which, whatever the learned might say, still represented the popular element in literature. He translated the Psalms and the ‘Dies Iræ’ into theterza rima, remodelled a novel of Boccaccio’s into stanzas, and made poetic translations from the Greek and Latin. His poems on religious philosophical subjects show him to have been in form and meaning one of those who aspired to mediate between Christianity and Platonism, a tendency also evinced by the commentary accompanying the poems we have mentioned, and addressedto Pico’s nephew, Giovan Francesco. Benivieni’s principal historical importance, so to say, consists in the sympathy he showed for the movement commenced by Savonarola, which found its especial poetical expression through him. His lauds, which, in their mysticism tinged with sensuousness, remind us at times of Fra Jacopone’s sentimentality, were sung by the people in the streets of the city, by high and low members of the Dominican order, in places where shortly before Medicean carnival-songs had resounded, and where piles of worldly vanity were heaped up to be followed soon by other forms of terrible ruin.In the style which gives importance to Belcari’s and Benivieni’s poetry when the former still lived and the latter was in youthful manhood, a woman appeared who claims peculiar attention, because she exercised a decided influence on the personage who has given to this epoch the special stamp of his individuality. Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici was eminently gifted; we have seen her in several positions in life which display her clear understanding, caution, affection for her family, and care for their welfare, without arrogance or forgetfulness of her station. Her productions as a poet belong to the intellectual class. The six lauds[422]which remain of her poetry have this peculiarity, that they include the ecclesiastical year; and if their poetical value does not exceed others of the kind, they produce a favourable impression by avoiding the endless repetitions of similar poems. The Birth of Christ, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Life of Christ on earth, these are the themesof her hymns, some of which were sung to sacred, and some to profane airs. Beside these processional songs, Lucrezia wrote various Biblical histories interza rimaor in eight-lined stanzas:e.g., the ‘Lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist,’ the ‘History of Esther, Judith, and Tobias.’ Angelo Poliziano revised her poems, and her grandsons learned them by heart. Another poetess of the time, whose family was intimately acquainted with Lucrezia’s, Antonia Giannotti Pulci, attempted sacred dramas, in which her husband Bernardo made himself a name.Besides poetry another branch of literature deserves attention, although the humanistic school diminished its powers, and restricted its influence without entirely depriving it of importance. It will be easily understood that, in the native country of Dino Compagni and the Villani, there could be no lack of such as continued to note down what they felt and heard, and what they had themselves a personal share in. Nowhere, perhaps, were such notices, either in the form of annals or chronicles, or as narratives of personal experience with a predominance of character drawing, so frequent and so valuable as here. In the last decades of the fourteenth century several writers had followed in the steps of the Villani with far more talent than they had. Donato Velluti, Marchionne Stefani, Gino Capponi wrote a description of the popular insurrections of 1378, in the course of which the reader is in danger of losing the thread if he does not keep the separate elements apart. The following century was active in this department, but however important in many cases the material may have been, the form and language betray the lowly position to which the humanistic literature had condemned this despised sister. Buonaccorso Pitti, Jacopo Salviati, and Neri Capponi wrote histories and commentaries which are partly personal memoirs, and all the more instructive because the epoch was one which claimed so fully the active participation of capable citizens at home and abroad. We may, perhaps, blame the weakness ofthe last-mentioned writer for placing his own deeds and those of his father, relations, and friends, in the foremost rank in commentaries, which extend nearly to his death in 1456; but where men like Gino and Neri Capponi have laboured in such a conspicuous manner, the circumstantial style is willingly accepted, as the inner life of a people can only be recognised and understood by a closer view of important persons. Other chroniclers, like Domenico Buoninsegni and Goro Dati, from whom less is to be gained for political history, are the more readily pardoned for their gossiping patriotism because the subject of their preference is a deserving one, and they furnish us with a quantity of information that is important for the history of civilisation.A special place belongs to Giovanni Cavalcanti, the principal authority for the time from 1420 to 1440. The humanistic school had exercised more influence on him than on any of the historians of his day who wrote in the vulgar tongue, but in a manner which imprints the strangest character on his history. For we find here, grafted on the passionate description of a partisan who had fallen out with his own faction in the course of his work, a rhetorical wordiness and elegant would-be eloquence which clothes the strife of faction, with its loves and hatreds, in antiquated speeches and moralising sentences. The personality of the author in and for itself, as it meets us in his writings (we know nothing else of him), is characteristic; a nobleman of one of the oldest families, poor, oppressed, without any share in the administration, and with a full consciousness of the old conservative claims of the patricians, with a fierce contemptuous hatred of the lower classes, and a bitter grudge against the heads of the State, which leads him to charge Cosimo de’ Medici whom he so often praises with a diabolical design to destroy freedom. To all these annalists and historians we may add others, whose works are mostly printed, and include the times of Lorenzo or later, namely, Benedetto Dei, Bartolommeo Cerretani, Pietro Parenti, Giovanni Cambi.Similar to this branch of history, biography placed her achievements in the vulgar tongue beside those of the humanists, who, rivalling the Greeks and Romans, created much that was important and permanently valuable in a higher sense than their great historical works. Most unassuming, and, in spite of all solecisms and defects of form, most pleasing is the popular form of biography, in the hundred characteristic portraits by Vespasiano da Bisticci, to whom we owe innumerable deep views into the inner life for which we vainly seek among the learned historians.END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
LITERATURE OF THE VULGAR TONGUE. POPULAR AND SACRED POETRY.
Theperiod succeeding Petrarca and Boccaccio gave indications that the spirit of poetry was extinguished for some time to come. After Boccaccio’s death, his would-be rival, Franco Sacchetti, a man not only skilled in grave and gay compositions, but able to unite literary work with political office at home and abroad, a man capable of thoroughly appreciating the varied circumstances of life, merrily sang:
The spring of poetry is now grown dry,No living form dwells on the Muses’ mount;Nor can we think that Dante could return,Since none will slake their thirst at his pure fount.Where’er we listen we but hear the toneOf horns, that blow the signal to refrain:Where’er we look we see but dead leaves strewn,And time must pass ere verdure clothes the plain.
Nor were indications deceptive. For many centuries elapsed ere a poet of real significance arose. Here and there a hand touched the lyre of Petrarca, as, for instance, the Roman Giusto de’ Conti, the best among the imitators of Madonna Laura’s poet. We can hardly call poetry the greater works of the Florentine Antonio Pucci, in which he recounts the chronicle of Villani interzineand the Pisan war inottava rima, the eight-lined stanza. He was a popular poet, who was not wanting in either feeling or talent, as many of his sonnets testify. Whatever might be attempted in variousquarters passed without leaving a trace amid the efforts of the humanists, who despised the language of the people, and thought of nothing but perpetuating ancient culture, compared to which, according to the prevailing opinion, this language took the position of an inferior in birth. All its native power, and the cheerful, calm energy of the Tuscan people, were necessary to prevent its perishing in the midst of a twofold danger. Contempt might have excluded the language from any application to nobler ends, and so caused it to deteriorate. The attempts of the philologists to elevate the vulgar tongue after their fashion might have robbed it of naturalness, independence, character, and originality, and made it a clumsy compromise between old and new, without life or root in the people. The Tuscan language, which became the written speech of Italy, was in the fifteenth century threatened with both these dangers from a want of appreciation of its true spirit and life.
At the commencement of this century we meet with a work which, like its author, still represents the thirteenth, but which casts some rays of light over the following period. It is the tract, ‘Del governo di cura familiare,’ by the Dominican monk Giovanni Dominici, who has been already mentioned (p. 426). The book originated at the suggestion of a noble lady, Bartolommea degli Obizzi, who, with her husband Antonio degli Alberti and four children, were involved in the fearful persecution which the family had to endure in consequence of the implication of one of the Alberti in the events of 1378. The sensible, God-fearing woman, suddenly overwhelmed with all the cares of the household and the education of her children under the most distressing circumstances, had turned to a pious preaching friar whose counsel stood in high repute in and beyond his native town. He answered with this book, which was preceded by others of the same kind. It is an introduction to Christian life, and to the duties of a Christian education, containing many small details inseparable from the opinions andmanners of the time. It is full of a manly spirit, with a clear recognition of the position and duties of parents and heads of families in the midst of changes which arose everywhere in consequence of the newly discovered antique world having already begun to penetrate, as it were, into a society hitherto hedged about by the narrow limits of mediæval culture and customs. From a special reference to the duties of a mother left in some sense in the position of a widow, the book passes to general remarks and considerations suggested by the state of a commonwealth torn by sectarian hatred.[410]The domestic ordinances for a Christian education in reference to respect for parents and authorities are followed by those which are dictated by active patriotism, zeal for the common good, and the preservation of unity. Parts of this book afford us a complete picture of the domestic condition of the time. The language is still that of the thirteenth century, but the structure of the sentences has no longer the graceful simplicity and transparent clearness which characterise more than one of the author’s brethren in orders.
More than a generation after Fra Giovanni Dominici, a man standing in the midst of the new classical school took up the same subject from a wider point of view. He belonged to the family for whose use the book of his predecessor had been destined. We meet with Leon Batista Alberti in almost every field—in science, literature, and art—and only his unexampled versatility hindered him from ascending to the height which he often approached. In his dialogue, consisting of several books, ‘La Cura della Famiglia,’[411]Alberti, to whom in a certain sense all the knowledgeof the times lay open, displays, in his moral and philosophical view of life, the greatest harmony with the monk who hardly crossed the threshold of his age, and expresses himself on education and the true relation of the authors of antiquity to Christian morality in the same sense, and sometimes in the same words, as Giovanni. Dante and Petrarca had completed and purified by Christian wisdom the old philosophy as it had appeared to them; Alberti, a disciple of Greek learning, maintained the doctrine that, without Christianity, the world would remain in a valley of error, and wisdom would be impossible or vain. There was no lack of similar tendencies; out of the theological circle no book has spoken so decidedly.
If we regard the style of this work, which purported to be popular, we feel the difference between it and that of the book which gave the author the impulse to its composition. Here is a learned man who endeavours to make use of a language despised by the learned, if not for strictly scientific purposes, yet for the discussion of questions which include a philosophy of life. He will, so he declares, write in a simple, naked style, though he has always Xenophon in his mind. More than the lost sovereignty of the world, he laments the loss of the rich and harmonious language of the world; but he does not understand why the Tuscan language of his day should excite so much aversion that even excellent things composed in it should displease. It was only a question of being easily understood, and knowing how to handle the language. It would be foolish to despise what was in daily use or to praise what no one understood. The ancient language had attained such authority because numerous learned men had written in it. It would be the same with that of the present day if learned men would expend real industry and pains to purify and cultivate it. Thus wrote Leon Batista Alberti about the middle of thecentury. His words indicate the direction of the effort then made to impart to the popular language dignity and euphony, not merely by an imitation of Latin phrases like Boccaccio’s, but even by a Latin formation of words. The error was not entirely avoided by this gifted man, who in the book under discussion, though striving after simplicity and comprehensiveness did not overcome the pedantry which sought safety in foreign elements only. When the accomplished scholar, Cristoforo Landino, at the commencement of his explanation of Petrarch’s poetry, before the ‘Padri Conscripti,’[412]expressed his opinion of the feasability of cultivating the Tuscan language which, like the Latin, ought to be subjected to grammar, he propounded the aphorism ‘He who would be a good Tuscan must be a Latinist.’ He then praised Leon Batista as the foremost master of the prose of later times, Leonardo Bruni as the reviver of antique poetry, and the hendecasyllabics as Sapphic and heroic verses. Knowing all this we cannot see from whence the fresh spirit was to come that could alone breathe life into the forms of language.
How far they went in this direction, when dead if learned imitation triumphed over nature, genius, and the laws of a living language, which, as a modern writer expresses it, produced a greater reverence for the dead than for the living, is shown best by the Academy of Languages held in 1441, principally at the instigation of Alberti, under the patronage of Piero de’ Medici, in Sta. Maria del Fiore, to celebrate the presence of Pope Eugenius IV. The rectors of the university proclaimed a poetical competition, the theme of which was to be a eulogy on friendship. A silver laurel-wreath was appointed the prize; from this is derived the name of ‘Academia coronaria;’ the papal secretaries were the umpires. Before the Signoria, the archbishop, the Venetian ambassadors, prelates, nobles, and people, eight poets readtheir verses, most of them in triplets orterza rima, and one in stanzas orottava rima, on Sunday, October 22. The worst poets certainly would not have presented themselves; but we search in vain for poetry in these dry and bombastic productions. The amusing yet pathetic character of this competition was most manifested in the dialogues recited by a celebrated man, Leonardo Dati, the first and second part of which were in hexameters, the third in Sapphic metre, and the fourth ended in a sonnet, composed, as it was said, after antique rules. The metres corresponding with the language, neither Italian nor Latin, were modelled after Latin words and syntax; an incomprehensible and most indigestible mixture of new and old.[413]The judges awarded the prize to none of the competitors, but gave it to the Church, which, in respect to poetry, was accustomed to something different when the ‘Divine Comedy’ was expounded in her lofty halls. He who gave the impulse to the competition seems, however, not to have found this degradation of poetry so dreadful, for he arranged a second tournament on Envy, which, however, happily did not take place. This corrupted taste found sufficient defenders in the following century, and even men of genius retained the morbid taste for mingling languages and exaggerated artificial forms of words, which these times made a fashion, and which bore the same relation to the true language as periwigs to natural hair. Happily a counterpoise to such a caricature was not wanting—a counterpoise that weighed all the heavier because connected with the inward nature and life of the people, with their faith and feeling, their religious requirements and traditions, which, if much degenerated into superficiality and mere observance, not only opposed the progress of worldliness, but won before the end of the century a victory, the echoes of which were long heard. Not to speak of the low comic branch of popular poetry, the people’s language was preserved livingand fresh in letters, both those relating to business and those of a religious character, in smaller writings intended for the people, and in sacred poetry.
Thus in the second half of the fourteenth century, when the schism in the Church oppressed the minds of men, when that which had been held to be unchangeable began to totter, as well as in the first half of the following, when humanism began to develop its necessary but undermining effects, there still existed a fervent and living religious sense, which held together many things that threatened to fall asunder, and explains much that would otherwise be a riddle. Caterina of Siena is the greatest and most brilliant figure in the first epoch; all the more significant because in her the purest piety is united to penetration, blended with mysticism. Her insight into the secrets of the soul and the nature of doctrine, and her clear perception of the requirements of the age, were combined with unwearied activity and frank courage. The respect due and willingly shown by her to popes and princes, detracts in nothing from the decided character and expressive language of her discourses. But St. Caterina, unequalled before or since, does not stand alone. In writings which contain the natural unadorned expression of feeling and opinion, and in letters which, unlike those of learned men, were not intended for the public and for national collections, we find the explanation of many phenomena that contrast with the facts of public life noted by history. These phenomena must surprise him who does not regard the domestic life of the people in all ranks, or who has not sounded the inner working of a religious feeling, the manifestation of which in architectural monuments in an age full of violence and predominating worldly activity, attracts our principal attention, and scarcely seems in accord with the time. Besides several ecclesiastical representatives of this school, like Giovanni Dominici and Giovanni delle Celle, who was also canonised, Chiara Gambacorti—the foundress of the Pisan convent of Dominican nuns of the StrictObservance, who died in 1420—may be mentioned. We find others certainly not less important in that class of laymen, who were as numerous as they were influential in the towns of Tuscany in the two centuries we have spoken of—men who divided their activity between public offices and private business, and who with time and power, had an open eye, and a warm heart for whatever concerned intellectual interests, especially religious tendencies and ecclesiastical matters. These fervent natures, whose numbers increased as worldliness became more threatening, finally gathered round Fra Girolamo Savonarola as round a fixed centre in their protest against the pagan tendencies which constantly gained ground, in spite of many contradictory phenomena, in the second half of the fifteenth century. And the same natures, thirty years later, at the last flash of this mystic piety and ascetic reformatory movement in the decisive battle for life or death of the commonwealth, lent their best powers to the champions of freedom, who were overthrown for a second and last time.[414]
With this intellectual tendency a style of poetry was connected to which the philologists of the Renaissance period would have disdained to award a place in literature, even if they would have noticed it at all, had not their attention been in a certain measure forced to it by persons of high standing who guided the general taste in their circles. Popular sacred poetry was as old as the language of Dante’s time, and Fra Jacopone of Todi, to whom some pathetic if not grand Latin hymns of the later Middle Ages are ascribed, touched the keynote in his Canticles, which was echoed for three centuries in the lauds or hymns of praise. But Fra Jacopone himself only transmitted the tradition,which had remained alive since Francis of Assisi. The great number of fraternities, who assembled after the day’s work in churches and chapels and at the corners of streets and sang hymns; the numerous processions and pilgrimages, even if we except those which, like the processions of the White Penitents, set whole villages and towns in commotion; the frequent evening devotions, which were shared in by others than members of the confraternities; the expressions of pious feeling and religious aspiration, after the labour and toil of the day—all this contributed to the growth of a species of popular poetry which bore rich fruit, especially in the fifteenth century. The continuance of Christian feeling and the desire to manifest it among the people at a time when paganism had revived in the learned world is remarkable, and to judge of the general opinions and tendencies merely by the literary monuments of the age would lead to wrong conclusions.
If, as we have said, the full development of this kind of poetry belongs to the fifteenth century, the preceding age, when trials of every kind—sanguinary civil wars, devastating marches of mercenary and robber bands, pestilence and Church schism—called men to serious reflection, presents hardly less activity in this direction. The crowds of Florentine burghers who, during the strife with Pope Gregory XI. on his return from Avignon, sought compensation for the discontinuance of Divine worship in the city while under the interdict by devotions in the open air, by prayer and psalmody before the tabernacles in the streets, were a remarkable and, in their way, elevating sight. The oldest company, orschola, of the psalm-singers, orlaudesi, which originated in a chapel near the cathedral church where the bell-tower now stands, and was named after the Holy Virgin or St. Zanobi, was instituted before the end of the twelfth century. From it proceeded the pious men who founded the order of Servi di Maria (Servites), who had their residence in Florence, near the church of the Annunziata,on the wooded heights of the Apennines, in the far-seen cloisters of Monte Senario, and who are often mentioned in connection with the history of the Florentine patriciate.[415]Other societies followed: the companies of Or San Michele, Sta. Maria Novella, Sta. Croce, Sto. Spirito, of the Carmine and Ognissanti. In short from all the large churches were formed brotherhoods which, in conjunction with similar ones for benevolent purposes, included a considerable part of the higher class of citizens, and several of which still exist. The style of poetry fostered in and by these fraternities had a long life, and sent forth aftershoots centuries later, when Vincenzo da Filicaia composed hymns for the society of St. Benedict, which, in the Jubilee year 1700, undertook a pilgrimage to Rome at the same time as the last but one of the Medicean rulers.
Nor do we meet with these phenomena in Florence alone, but in the neighbouring towns of Tuscany also. In Siena—where, as in adjacent Umbria, in the midst of all civil disturbances, not seldom accompanied with bloodshed, a peculiar spiritual life penetrated with mysticism had been developed and long upheld—arose the society of Jesuates about the middle of the fourteenth century, originally a congregation of laymen which formed themselves into an order and, like the Humiliates before them, combined monastic life with the practice of arts and industry. When in 1367 Pope Urban V., for whom all the serious andbelieving inhabitants of Rome longed, arrived at Corneto on his return from Avignon to Rome, Giovanni Colombini, the founder of this congregation, marched with his followers singing lauds through Viterbo to the sea-shore. With olive branches in their hands they accompanied with hymns the procession of the Holy Father, who granted the white robe to them in Toscanella. From its origin this popular order had sacred poets,[416]by whom the tradition of Fra Jacopone was kept alive, himself a member of one of the most popular orders. When the Venetian Antonio Bembo, who belonged to the Jesuates, lay on his death-bed in Pistoja, the two brethren who tended him began at his wish to sing the hymn of the saint of Todi, ‘Thou love of God hast wounded me.’ Towards the end of the century we find the fraternity of the Bianchi in Siena singing lauds like the Florentine brotherhoods. In Lorenzo de’ Medici’s days these consisted principally of artisans who assembled on Saturdays, after nine, in a church and sang lauds in four voices before a picture of the Madonna, changing about among themselves with every hymn. It was partly a kind ofcanto fermo, and partly sung after popular melodies. If we consider that till the reform of church music, undertaken at the wish of the Council of Trent by Giovanni Pierluigi of Palestrina, Divine worship had been accompanied by vaudeville melodies, we cannot be surprised if the same tunes to which carnival songs were sung—Italian, French, and Flemish—were occasionally used with the lauds without anyone taking offence at it. Thus we find them founded on melodies as those of the ‘Leggiadra damigella,’ or ‘Una donna d’amor fino,’ ‘O Rosa mia gentile,’ ‘O crudel donna ch’hai lassato me,’ ‘Vicin, vicin, vicin, chi mol’ spazar camin,’ ‘Plus que je visle regar gracieuse,’ and similar ones. Occasionally it is remarked that the melody is the same as that of dances orstrambotti, as the popular songs were called, which might be referred to King Manfred’s days and make the nearest approach to our street-tunes.
This sacred poetry is very prolific, and though the frequent recurrence of the same motive is wearying, we are astonished at the endless wealth of the variations and the delicate expression of effect, elegant in its simplicity. The form and metre of the hymns, some of which are quite short and others extending to several verses, are very different. Fra Jacopone was succeeded by the Minorite, Fra Ugo Panziera of Prato; the Dominican, Fra Domenico Cavalco of Vico Pisano, who, as an ascetic writer, has proved himself a master of prose; Bianco dall’Anciolina, one of the companions of Giovanni Colombini; and, about the beginning of the fifteenth century, by the learned Venetian Leonardo Giustiniani, brother of the patriarch Lorenzo who was venerated as a saint; contemporaneous with him were Fra Giovanni Dominici, Francesco d’Albizzo, and many others. The succeeding epoch witnessed the appearance of the two men who have given this popular poetry its greatest brilliancy and importance: they were Feo Belcari and Girolamo Benivieni.[417]
The birth of Feo Belcari[418]occurred at a time when thesad divided condition of the Church—which the Pisan Council did not help by the choice of a third Pope—had excited in Florence a movement which was only terminated by the restoration of unity. He was born on February 4, 1410, and belonged to a respectable family extinct before the sixteenth century. He filled many public offices, sat in the magistracy of the priors in the summer of 1454, was secretary in the office of the Public Debt, and died on August 16, 1484. He is the best representative of the tendency, intellect, and feeling which we are now considering. Feo Belcari was no dreamer, but a man of active life, a sharer in the cheerful society, principally composed of artists, which was a characteristic element of the social condition of the time. All that we possess of him belongs to devotional literature. His book on the founders of the Jesuates, dedicated to Giovanni de’ Medici, describes times and circumstances which he knew from oral tradition, being in the most intimate connection with the orders that had acquired importance in Florence. His letters—one of which on humility, addressed to his daughter Orsola, gives a clear view of his opinions—are moral philosophical treatises, in which the familiarity with the Fathers of the Church and Christian authors of the Middle Ages would make us take them for the work of a theologian, had not the knowledge of this literature been so widely disseminated among a portion of the laity. His dramatic works are among the most important of the kind which introduced Sacred History into the circle of festivals, half ecclesiastical half secular, and claimed the equal attention of high and low. In 1449 his mystery of the ‘Sacrifice of Abraham’ was acted in the church of Cestello. But more than all, hislaudihave made him a name. The number of them is very great, for many are only variations of the same theme—that of Divine love and the powerlessness of human nature without grace. Butthe different turns and shades of meaning are remarkable, and the ease with which the metre harmonises with the hymn is astonishing, whilst there is no want of reality. In 1455, when the author was at the height of his powers and activity, a collection of this poetry had been arranged for the Compagnia de’ Battuti di San Zanobi, and the plays were kept in use till far into the following century. The style is mostly simple, as befits popular productions, but it is not entirely free from Latinisms and affectation in his prose writings.
The death of Feo Belcari, the ‘Christian Poet,’ was sung by Girolamo Benivieni[419]interza rima, where we read among other things:
The darkened world has now long missed the starWhich, while the shade still hung before my eyes,Shone like a guide unto my steps afar.Ne’er will the sweet and heavenly tones resound,Silent the harmonies of that sweet lyre,Now only in the angels’ bright world found.
Girolamo Benivieni, as his own words suggest, was in a measure the successor of Belcari. But while the latter wrote entirely under the influence of strictly orthodox Christianity, Benivieni sought to impart to his work the spirit of Greek philosophy which ruled the age in which he had grown up. While Belcari, again, united public activity with the contemplative life in which he loved to indulge, we are not informed that Benivieni, however deeply the events in his native country might move him, had any share in them beyond that of an author and a friend of many of the actors. Born in 1453, he survived friends and foes and the Republic itself. Intellectually active up to his last years, he kept true to the recollections of his most active years, and to the convictions he had then formed. Feo Belcari had been his leader in youth; Fra Girolamo Savonarola was the guidingstar of his ripe manhood. Between the two, the representative of the contemplative man and the strenuous ascetic, stands a grave, beautiful figure, Pico of Mirandola, who had no less influence on Benivieni than the others. Only from its intimate connection with these three has Benivieni’s life—of which nothing else is known—a significance and importance, that cannot otherwise be explained. As he sang Belcari’s death, and defended the truth of Savonarola’s doctrines and predictions—more than thirty years after his death—before Pope Clement VII.,[420]so did he choose his last resting-place beside Pico,[421]whose death preceded his own by half a century. Benivieni illustrated his friend’s canzonets on Divine Love with a detailed commentary which proved how their minds accorded with one another.
Benivieni attempted the most various kinds of poetry—eclogues, canticles, canzonets, sonnets—which give him a place beside the two men whom we shall soon see taking the first places in poetry, Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici; while in popular songs, theFrottole, he retained the tradition which, whatever the learned might say, still represented the popular element in literature. He translated the Psalms and the ‘Dies Iræ’ into theterza rima, remodelled a novel of Boccaccio’s into stanzas, and made poetic translations from the Greek and Latin. His poems on religious philosophical subjects show him to have been in form and meaning one of those who aspired to mediate between Christianity and Platonism, a tendency also evinced by the commentary accompanying the poems we have mentioned, and addressedto Pico’s nephew, Giovan Francesco. Benivieni’s principal historical importance, so to say, consists in the sympathy he showed for the movement commenced by Savonarola, which found its especial poetical expression through him. His lauds, which, in their mysticism tinged with sensuousness, remind us at times of Fra Jacopone’s sentimentality, were sung by the people in the streets of the city, by high and low members of the Dominican order, in places where shortly before Medicean carnival-songs had resounded, and where piles of worldly vanity were heaped up to be followed soon by other forms of terrible ruin.
In the style which gives importance to Belcari’s and Benivieni’s poetry when the former still lived and the latter was in youthful manhood, a woman appeared who claims peculiar attention, because she exercised a decided influence on the personage who has given to this epoch the special stamp of his individuality. Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici was eminently gifted; we have seen her in several positions in life which display her clear understanding, caution, affection for her family, and care for their welfare, without arrogance or forgetfulness of her station. Her productions as a poet belong to the intellectual class. The six lauds[422]which remain of her poetry have this peculiarity, that they include the ecclesiastical year; and if their poetical value does not exceed others of the kind, they produce a favourable impression by avoiding the endless repetitions of similar poems. The Birth of Christ, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Life of Christ on earth, these are the themesof her hymns, some of which were sung to sacred, and some to profane airs. Beside these processional songs, Lucrezia wrote various Biblical histories interza rimaor in eight-lined stanzas:e.g., the ‘Lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist,’ the ‘History of Esther, Judith, and Tobias.’ Angelo Poliziano revised her poems, and her grandsons learned them by heart. Another poetess of the time, whose family was intimately acquainted with Lucrezia’s, Antonia Giannotti Pulci, attempted sacred dramas, in which her husband Bernardo made himself a name.
Besides poetry another branch of literature deserves attention, although the humanistic school diminished its powers, and restricted its influence without entirely depriving it of importance. It will be easily understood that, in the native country of Dino Compagni and the Villani, there could be no lack of such as continued to note down what they felt and heard, and what they had themselves a personal share in. Nowhere, perhaps, were such notices, either in the form of annals or chronicles, or as narratives of personal experience with a predominance of character drawing, so frequent and so valuable as here. In the last decades of the fourteenth century several writers had followed in the steps of the Villani with far more talent than they had. Donato Velluti, Marchionne Stefani, Gino Capponi wrote a description of the popular insurrections of 1378, in the course of which the reader is in danger of losing the thread if he does not keep the separate elements apart. The following century was active in this department, but however important in many cases the material may have been, the form and language betray the lowly position to which the humanistic literature had condemned this despised sister. Buonaccorso Pitti, Jacopo Salviati, and Neri Capponi wrote histories and commentaries which are partly personal memoirs, and all the more instructive because the epoch was one which claimed so fully the active participation of capable citizens at home and abroad. We may, perhaps, blame the weakness ofthe last-mentioned writer for placing his own deeds and those of his father, relations, and friends, in the foremost rank in commentaries, which extend nearly to his death in 1456; but where men like Gino and Neri Capponi have laboured in such a conspicuous manner, the circumstantial style is willingly accepted, as the inner life of a people can only be recognised and understood by a closer view of important persons. Other chroniclers, like Domenico Buoninsegni and Goro Dati, from whom less is to be gained for political history, are the more readily pardoned for their gossiping patriotism because the subject of their preference is a deserving one, and they furnish us with a quantity of information that is important for the history of civilisation.
A special place belongs to Giovanni Cavalcanti, the principal authority for the time from 1420 to 1440. The humanistic school had exercised more influence on him than on any of the historians of his day who wrote in the vulgar tongue, but in a manner which imprints the strangest character on his history. For we find here, grafted on the passionate description of a partisan who had fallen out with his own faction in the course of his work, a rhetorical wordiness and elegant would-be eloquence which clothes the strife of faction, with its loves and hatreds, in antiquated speeches and moralising sentences. The personality of the author in and for itself, as it meets us in his writings (we know nothing else of him), is characteristic; a nobleman of one of the oldest families, poor, oppressed, without any share in the administration, and with a full consciousness of the old conservative claims of the patricians, with a fierce contemptuous hatred of the lower classes, and a bitter grudge against the heads of the State, which leads him to charge Cosimo de’ Medici whom he so often praises with a diabolical design to destroy freedom. To all these annalists and historians we may add others, whose works are mostly printed, and include the times of Lorenzo or later, namely, Benedetto Dei, Bartolommeo Cerretani, Pietro Parenti, Giovanni Cambi.Similar to this branch of history, biography placed her achievements in the vulgar tongue beside those of the humanists, who, rivalling the Greeks and Romans, created much that was important and permanently valuable in a higher sense than their great historical works. Most unassuming, and, in spite of all solecisms and defects of form, most pleasing is the popular form of biography, in the hundred characteristic portraits by Vespasiano da Bisticci, to whom we owe innumerable deep views into the inner life for which we vainly seek among the learned historians.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.