Nove fiate già , appresso al mio nascimento, era tornato lo cielo della luce quasi ad un medesimo punto, quanto alla sua propria girazione, quando alli miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa Donna della mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice, i quali non sapeano che si chiamare. Ella era già in questa vita stata tanto che nel suo tempo lo cielo stellato era mosso verso la parte d'oriente delle dodici parti l'una d'un grado: sì che quasi dal principio del suo anno nono apparve a me, ed io la vidi quasi alla fine del mio nono anno.
Nove fiate già , appresso al mio nascimento, era tornato lo cielo della luce quasi ad un medesimo punto, quanto alla sua propria girazione, quando alli miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa Donna della mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice, i quali non sapeano che si chiamare. Ella era già in questa vita stata tanto che nel suo tempo lo cielo stellato era mosso verso la parte d'oriente delle dodici parti l'una d'un grado: sì che quasi dal principio del suo anno nono apparve a me, ed io la vidi quasi alla fine del mio nono anno.
Boccaccio, relating his first glimpse of Fiammetta on April 17, 1341, spins the following cocoon of verbiage:[125]
Avvenne che un giorno, la cui prima ora Saturno avea signoreggiata, essendo già Febo co' suoi cavalli al sedecimo grado del celestiale Montone pervenuto, e nel quale il glorioso partimento del figliuiolo di Giove dagli spogliati regni di Plutone si celebrava, io, della presente opera componitore, mi trovai in un grazioso e beltempio in Partenope, nominato da colui che per deificarsi sostenne che fosse fatto di lui sacrificio sopra la grata, e quivi con canto pieno di dolce melodia ascoltava l'uficio che in tale giorno si canta, celebrato da' sacerdoti successori di colui che prima la corda cinse umilmente esaltando la povertade quella seguendo.
Avvenne che un giorno, la cui prima ora Saturno avea signoreggiata, essendo già Febo co' suoi cavalli al sedecimo grado del celestiale Montone pervenuto, e nel quale il glorioso partimento del figliuiolo di Giove dagli spogliati regni di Plutone si celebrava, io, della presente opera componitore, mi trovai in un grazioso e beltempio in Partenope, nominato da colui che per deificarsi sostenne che fosse fatto di lui sacrificio sopra la grata, e quivi con canto pieno di dolce melodia ascoltava l'uficio che in tale giorno si canta, celebrato da' sacerdoti successori di colui che prima la corda cinse umilmente esaltando la povertade quella seguendo.
Dante's style is analytic and direct. The sentences follow each other naturally; and though the language is stiff, from scrupulous precision, and in one place intentionally obscure, it is free from affectation. Boccaccio aims at a synthetic presentation of all he means to say; and he calls nothing by its right name, if he can devise a periphrasis. The breathless period pants its labored clauses out, and dwindles to a lame conclusion. TheFilocopowas, however, an immature production. In order to do its author justice, and at the same time to compare his style with a graceful piece of fourteenth-century composition, I will select a passage from theFioretti di S. Francesco, and place it beside one taken from the first novel of the Decameron. This is the episode of S. Anthony preaching to the fishes[126]:
E detto ch'egli ebbe così, subitamente venne alla riva a lui tanta moltitudine di pesci, grandi, piccoli e mezzani, che mai in quel mare nè in quel fiume non ne fu veduta sì grande moltitudine: e tutti teneano i capi fuori dell'acqua, e tutti stavano attenti verso la faccia di santo Antonio, e tutti in grandissima pace e mansuetudine e ordine: imperocchè dinanzi e più presso alla riva stavano i pesciolini minori, e dopo loro stavano i pesci mezzani, poi di dietro, dov'era l'acqua più profonda, stavano i pesci maggiori. Essendo dunque in cotale ordine e disposizione allogati i pesci, santo Antonio cominciò a predicare solennemente, e disse così: Fratelli miei pesci, molto siete tenuti, secondo la vostra possibilitade, di ringraziare il nostro Creatore, che v'ha dato così nobile elemento per vostra abitazione; sicchè, come vi piace, avete l'acque dolci e salse; e havvi dati moltirifugii a schifare le tempeste; havvi ancora dato elemento chiaro e transparente, e cibo, per lo quale voi possiate vivere, etc., etc.... A queste e simiglianti parole e ammaestramenti di santo Antonio, cominciarono li pesci ad aprire la bocca, inchinaronli i capi, e con questi ed altri segnali di riverenza, secondo li modi a loro possibili, laudarono Iddio.
E detto ch'egli ebbe così, subitamente venne alla riva a lui tanta moltitudine di pesci, grandi, piccoli e mezzani, che mai in quel mare nè in quel fiume non ne fu veduta sì grande moltitudine: e tutti teneano i capi fuori dell'acqua, e tutti stavano attenti verso la faccia di santo Antonio, e tutti in grandissima pace e mansuetudine e ordine: imperocchè dinanzi e più presso alla riva stavano i pesciolini minori, e dopo loro stavano i pesci mezzani, poi di dietro, dov'era l'acqua più profonda, stavano i pesci maggiori. Essendo dunque in cotale ordine e disposizione allogati i pesci, santo Antonio cominciò a predicare solennemente, e disse così: Fratelli miei pesci, molto siete tenuti, secondo la vostra possibilitade, di ringraziare il nostro Creatore, che v'ha dato così nobile elemento per vostra abitazione; sicchè, come vi piace, avete l'acque dolci e salse; e havvi dati moltirifugii a schifare le tempeste; havvi ancora dato elemento chiaro e transparente, e cibo, per lo quale voi possiate vivere, etc., etc.... A queste e simiglianti parole e ammaestramenti di santo Antonio, cominciarono li pesci ad aprire la bocca, inchinaronli i capi, e con questi ed altri segnali di riverenza, secondo li modi a loro possibili, laudarono Iddio.
This is a portion of the character of Ser Ciapelletto:
Era questo Ciapelletto di questa vita. Egli essendo notajo, avea grandissima vergogna quando uno de' suoi strumenti (come che pochi ne facesse) fosse altro che falso trovato; de' quali tanti avrebbe fatti, di quanti fosse stato richesto, e quelli più volentieri in dono, che alcun altro grandemente salariato. Testimonianze false con sommo diletto diceva richesto e non richesto; e dandosi a' que' tempi in Francia a' saramenti grandissima fede, non curandosi fargli falsi, tante quistioni malvagiamente vincea, a quante a giurare di dire il vero sopra la sua fede era chiamato. Aveva oltre modo piacere, e forte vi studiava, in commettere tra amici e parenti e qualunque altra persona mali et inimicizie e scandali; de' quali quanto maggiori mali vedeva seguire, tanto più d'allegrezza prendea. Invitato ad uno omicidio o a qualunque altra rea cosa, senza negarlo mai, volenterosamente v'andava; e più volte a fedire et ad uccidere uomini colle proprie mani si trovò volentieri.
Era questo Ciapelletto di questa vita. Egli essendo notajo, avea grandissima vergogna quando uno de' suoi strumenti (come che pochi ne facesse) fosse altro che falso trovato; de' quali tanti avrebbe fatti, di quanti fosse stato richesto, e quelli più volentieri in dono, che alcun altro grandemente salariato. Testimonianze false con sommo diletto diceva richesto e non richesto; e dandosi a' que' tempi in Francia a' saramenti grandissima fede, non curandosi fargli falsi, tante quistioni malvagiamente vincea, a quante a giurare di dire il vero sopra la sua fede era chiamato. Aveva oltre modo piacere, e forte vi studiava, in commettere tra amici e parenti e qualunque altra persona mali et inimicizie e scandali; de' quali quanto maggiori mali vedeva seguire, tanto più d'allegrezza prendea. Invitato ad uno omicidio o a qualunque altra rea cosa, senza negarlo mai, volenterosamente v'andava; e più volte a fedire et ad uccidere uomini colle proprie mani si trovò volentieri.
These examples will suffice to show how Boccaccio distinguished himself from thetrecentistiin general. When his style attained perfection in the Decameron, it had lost the pedantry of his first manner, and combined the brevity of the best contemporary writers with rhetorical smoothness and intricacy. The artful structure of the period, and the cadences of what afterwards came to be known as "numerous prose," were carried to perfection. Still, though he was the earliest writer of a scientific style, Boccaccio failed to exercise a paramount influence over the language until the age of the Academies.[127]The writers of thefifteenth century, partly no doubt because these were chiefly men of the people, appear to have developed their manner out of the material of thetrecentoin general, modified by contemporary usage. This is manifest in theReali di Francia, a work of considerable stylistic power, which cannot probably be dated earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century. The novelist Masuccio modeled his diction, so far as he was able, on the type of the Decameron, and Alberti owed much to the study of such works as theFiammetta. Yet, speaking broadly, neither the excellences nor the defects of Boccaccio found devoted imitators until the epoch when the nation at large turned their attention to the formation of a common Italian style. It was then, in the days of Bembo and Sperone, that Boccaccio took rank with Petrarch as an infallible authority on points of language. The homage rendered at that period to the Decameron decided the destinies of Italian prose, and has since been deplored by critics who believe Boccaccio to have established a false standard of taste.[128]This is a question which must be left to the Italians to decide. One thing, however, is clear; that a nation schooled by humanistic studies of a Latin type, divided by their dialects, and removed by the advance of culture beyond the influences of the purertrecentisti, found in the rhetorical diction of the Decameron a common model better suited to their taste and capacity than the simple style of the Villani could have furnished.
Boccaccio died in 1375, seventeen months after the death at Arquà of his master, Petrarch. The painter Andrea Orcagna died about the same period. With these three great artists the genius of medieval Florence sank to sleep. A temporary torpor fell upon the people, who during the next half century produced nothing of marked originality in literature and art. The Middle Age had passed away. The Renaissance was still in preparation. When Boccaccio breathed his last, men felt that the elder sources of inspiration had failed, and that no more could be expected from the spirit of the previous centuries. Heaven and hell, the sanctuaries of the soul, the garden of this earth, had been traversed. The tentative essays and scattered preludings, the dreams and visions, the preparatory efforts of all previous modern literatures, had been completed, harmonized and presented to the world in the master-works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. What remained but to make a new start? This step forward or aside was now to be taken in the Classical Revival. Well might Sacchetti exclaim in thatcanzone[129]which is at once Boccaccio's funeraldirge and also the farewell of Florence to the fourteenth century:
The Church, Chivalry, the Nation—The National Element in Italian Literature—Florence—Italy between 1373 and 1490—Renascent Nationality—Absorption in Scholarship—Vernacular Literature follows an obscure Course—Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular Currents—Renascence of Italian—The Italian Temperament—Importance of the Quattrocento—Sacchetti's Novels—Ser Giovanni'sPecorone—Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry—Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza—Nicolò Soldanieri—Alesso Donati—His Realistic Poems—Followers of Dante and Petrarch—Political Poetry of the Guelfs and Ghibellines—Fazio degli Uberti—Saviozzo da Siena—Elegies on Dante—Sacchetti's Guelf Poems—Advent of theBourgeoisie—Discouragement of the Age—Fazio'sDittamondo—Rome and Alvernia—Frezzi'sQuadriregio—Dantesque Imitation—Blending of Classical and Medieval Motives—Matteo Palmieri'sCittà di Vita—The Fate ofTerza Rima—Catherine of Siena—Her Letters—S. Bernardino's Sermons—Salutati's Letters—Alessandra degli Strozzi—Florentine Annalists—Giov. Cavalcanti—Corio'sHistory of Milan—Matarazzo'sChronicle of Perugia—Masuccio and hisNovellino—His Style and Genius—Alberti—Born in Exile—His Feeling for Italian—Enthusiasm for the Roman Past—The Treatise on the Family—Its Plan—Digression on the Problem of its Authorship—Pandolfini or Alberti—TheDeiciarchia—Tranquillità dell'Animo—Teogenio—Alberti's Religion—Dedication of the Treatise on Painting—Minor Works in Prose on Love—Ecatomfila,Amiria,Deifiria, etc.—Misogynism—Novel ofIppolito and Leonora—Alberti's Poetry—Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the Age—Francesco Colonna—TheHypnerotomachia Poliphili—Its Style—Its Importance as a Work of the Transition—A Romance of Art, Love, Humanism—The Allegory—Polia—Antiquity—Relation of this Book to Boccaccio and Valla—It Foreshadows the Renaissance.
The Church, Chivalry, the Nation—The National Element in Italian Literature—Florence—Italy between 1373 and 1490—Renascent Nationality—Absorption in Scholarship—Vernacular Literature follows an obscure Course—Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular Currents—Renascence of Italian—The Italian Temperament—Importance of the Quattrocento—Sacchetti's Novels—Ser Giovanni'sPecorone—Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry—Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza—Nicolò Soldanieri—Alesso Donati—His Realistic Poems—Followers of Dante and Petrarch—Political Poetry of the Guelfs and Ghibellines—Fazio degli Uberti—Saviozzo da Siena—Elegies on Dante—Sacchetti's Guelf Poems—Advent of theBourgeoisie—Discouragement of the Age—Fazio'sDittamondo—Rome and Alvernia—Frezzi'sQuadriregio—Dantesque Imitation—Blending of Classical and Medieval Motives—Matteo Palmieri'sCittà di Vita—The Fate ofTerza Rima—Catherine of Siena—Her Letters—S. Bernardino's Sermons—Salutati's Letters—Alessandra degli Strozzi—Florentine Annalists—Giov. Cavalcanti—Corio'sHistory of Milan—Matarazzo'sChronicle of Perugia—Masuccio and hisNovellino—His Style and Genius—Alberti—Born in Exile—His Feeling for Italian—Enthusiasm for the Roman Past—The Treatise on the Family—Its Plan—Digression on the Problem of its Authorship—Pandolfini or Alberti—TheDeiciarchia—Tranquillità dell'Animo—Teogenio—Alberti's Religion—Dedication of the Treatise on Painting—Minor Works in Prose on Love—Ecatomfila,Amiria,Deifiria, etc.—Misogynism—Novel ofIppolito and Leonora—Alberti's Poetry—Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the Age—Francesco Colonna—TheHypnerotomachia Poliphili—Its Style—Its Importance as a Work of the Transition—A Romance of Art, Love, Humanism—The Allegory—Polia—Antiquity—Relation of this Book to Boccaccio and Valla—It Foreshadows the Renaissance.
Thetwo preceding chapters will have made it clear that the Church, Chivalry, and the Nation contributedtheir several quotas to the growth of Italian literature.[130]The ecclesiastical or religious element, so triumphantly expressed in the Divine Comedy, was not peculiar to the Italians. They held it in common with the whole of Christendom; and though the fabric of the Roman Church took form in Italy, though the race gave S. Francis, S. Thomas, and S. Bonaventura to the militia of the medieval faith, still the Italians as a nation were not specifically religious. Piety, which is quite a different thing from ecclesiastical organization, was never the truest and sincerest accent of their genius. Had it been so, the history of Latin Christianity would have followed another course, and the schism of the sixteenth century might have been avoided.
The chivalrous element they shared, at a considerable disadvantage, with the rest of feudal Europe. Chivalry was not indigenous to Italian soil, nor did it ever flourish there. The literature which it produced in France, became Italian only when the Guidi and Dante gave it philosophical significance. Petrarch, who represents this motive, as Dante represents the ecclesiastical, generalized Provençal poetry. HisCanzonierecannot be styled a masterpiece of chivalrous art. Its spirit is modern and human in a wider and more comprehensive sense.
To characterize the national strain in this complexpedigree of culture is no easy task—chiefly because it manifested itself under two apparently antagonistic forms; first in the recovery of the classics by the scholars of the fifteenth century; secondly in the portraiture of Italian character and temperament by writers of romance and fiction. The divergence of these two main currents of literary energy upon the close of the middle ages, and their junction in the prime of the Renaissance, are the topics of my present volume.
We have seen how tenaciously the Italians clung to memories of ancient Rome, and how their history deprived them of that epical material which started modern literature among the northern races. While the vulgar language was being formed from the dialects into which rustic Latin had divided, a new nationality grew into shape by an analogous process out of the remnants of the old Italic population, fused with recent immigrants. Absorbing Greek blood in the south and Teutonic in the north, this composite race maintained the ascendancy of the Romanized people, in obedience to laws whereby the prevalent and indigenous strain outlives and assimilates ingredients from without. Owing to a variety of causes, among which must be reckoned geographical isolation and imperfect Lombard occupation, the purest Italic stock survived upon the Tuscan plains and highlands, between the Tyrrhene Sea and the Apennines, and where the Arno and the Tiber start together from the mountains of Arezzo. This region was the cradle of the new Italian language, the stronghold of the new Italian nation. Its center, political, commercial andintellectual, was Florence, which gave birth to the three great poets of the fourteenth century. Though Florence developed her institutions later than the Lombard communes, she maintained a civic independence longer than any State but Venice; and herpopolomay be regarded as the type of the popular Italian element. Here the genius of Italy became conscious of itself, and here the people found a spokesman in Boccaccio. Abandoning ecclesiastical and feudal traditions, Boccaccio concentrated his force upon the delineation of his fellow-countrymen as he had learned to know them. The Italians of the new age start into distinctness in his work, with the specific qualities they were destined to maintain and to mature during the next two centuries. Thus Boccaccio fully represents one factor of what I have called the national element. At the same time, he occupies a hardly less important place in relation to the other or the humanistic factor. Like his master Petrarch, he pronounced with ardor and decision for that scholarship which restored the link between the present and the past of the Italian race. Independently of their achievements in modern literature, we have to regard the humanistic efforts of these two great writers as a sign that the national element had asserted itself in antagonism to the Church and chivalry.
The recovery of the classics was, in truth, the decisive fact in Italian evolution. Having attained full consciousness in the Florence of Dante's age, the people set forth in search of their spiritual patrimony. They found it in the libraries. They became possessed of it through the labors of the scholars. Italian literature during the first three quarters of the fifteenth century merged, so far as polite society was concerned, in Humanism, the history of which has already been presented to the reader in the second volume of this work.[131]For a hundred years, from the publication of the Decameron in 1373 to the publication of Poliziano'sStanze, the genius of Italy was engaged in an exploratory pilgrimage, the ultimate end of which was the restoration of the national inheritance in ancient Rome. This process of renascent classicism, which was tantamount to ranascent nationality, retarded the growth of the vulgar literature. Yet it was imperatively demanded not only by the needs of Europe at large, but more particularly and urgently by the Italians themselves, who, unlike the other modern races, had no starting-point but ancient Rome. The immediate result of the humanistic movement was the separation of the national element into two sections, learned and popular, Latin and Italian. The common people, who had repeated Dante'sCanzoni, and whose life Boccaccio had portrayed in the Decameron, were now divided from the rising class of scholars and professors. Cultivated persons of all ranks despised Italian, and spent their time in studies beyond the reach of the laity. Like some mountain rivers after emerging from the highlands of their origin, the vernacular literature passed as it were for a season underground, and lost itself in unexplored ravines. Absorbed into the masses of the people, it continued an obscure but by no means insignificantcourse, whence it was destined to reappear at the right moment, when the several constituents of the nation had attained the sense of intellectual unity. This sense of unity was the product of the classical revival; for the activity of the wandering professors and the fanatical enthusiasm for the ancients were needed to create a common consciousness, a common standard of taste and intelligence in the peninsula. It must in this connection be remembered that the vernacular literature of the fourteenth century, though it afterwards became the glory of Italy as a whole, was originally Florentine. The medium prepared by the scholars was demanded in order that the Tuscan classics should be accepted by the nation as their own. Toward the close of the fifteenth century, a fusion between the humanistic and the vulgar literatures was made; and this is the renascence of Italian—no longer Tuscan, but participated by the race at large. The poetry of the people then received a form refined by classic learning; and the two sections of what I have called the national element, joined to produce the genuine Italian culture of the golden age.
It is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to insist upon this point, which forms the main motive of my present theme. After the death of Boccaccio the history of Italian literature is the history of that national element which distinguished itself from the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous, and at last in the Decameron asserted its superiority over both. But the stream of intellectual energy bifurcates. During the fifteenth century, the Latin instincts of the new Italic people found vigorous expansion in the humanistic movement, while the vernacular literature carried on a fitful and obscure, but potent, growth among the proletariate. At the end of that century, both currents, the learned and the popular, the classical and the modern, reunited on a broader plane. The nation, educated by scholarship and brought to a sense of its identity, resumed the vulgar tongue; and what had hitherto been Tuscan, now became Italian. In this renascence neither the religious nor the feudal principle regained firm hold upon the race. Their influence is still discernible, however, in the lyrics of the Petrarchisti and the epics of Orlando; for nothing which has once been absorbed into a people's thought is wholly lost. How they were transmuted by the action of the genuine Italic genius, triumphant now upon all quarters of the field, will appear in the sequel of these volumes; while it remains for another work to show in what way, under the influences of the Counter-Reformation, both the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous elements reasserted themselves for a brief moment in Tasso. Still even in Tasso we recognize the Italian courtier rather than the knight or the ascetic. For the rest, it is clear that the spirit of Boccaccio—that is, the spirit of the Florentine people—refined by humanistic discipline and glorified by the reawakening of Italy to a sense of intellectual unity, determined the character of literature during its most brilliant period.[132]
Many peculiarities of the Renaissance in Italy, and of the Renaissance in general, as communicated through Italians to Europe, can be explained by this emergence of the national Italic temperament. Political and positive; keenly sensitive to natural beauty, and gifted with a quick artistic faculty; neither persistently religious nor profoundly speculative; inclined to skepticism, but accepting the existing order with sarcastic acquiescence; ironical and humorous rather than satirical; sensuous in feeling, realistic in art, rhetorical in literature; abhorring mysticism and ill-fashioned for romantic exaltation; worldly, with a broad and genial toleration; refined in taste and social conduct, but violent in the indulgence of personal proclivities; born old in contrast with the youth of the Teutonic races; educated by long experience to expect a morrow differing in no essentials from to-day or yesterday; demanding, therefore, from the moment all that it can yield of satisfaction to the passions—the Italians, thus constituted, in their vigorous reaction against the middle ages, secularized the Papacy, absorbed the Paganism of the classics, substituted an æsthetic for an ethical ideal, democratized society, and opened new horizons for pioneering energy in all the fields of knowledge. The growth of their intelligence was precocious and fore-doomed to a sudden check; nor was it to be expected that their solutions of the deepest problems should satisfy races of a different fiber and a posterity educated on the scientific methods of investigation. Unexpected factors were added to the general calculation by the German Reformation and the political struggles which preceded the French Revolution. Yet the influence of this Italian temperament, in forming and preparing the necessary intellectual medium in modern Europe, can hardly be exaggerated.
When the Italian genius manifested itself in art, in letters and in scholarship, national unity was already an impossibility.[133]The race had been broken up into republics and tyrannies. Their political forces were centrifugal rather than centripetal. The first half of the fifteenth century was the period when their division into five great powers, held together by the frail bond of diplomacy, had been accomplished, and when Italy was further distracted by the ambition of unprincipledcondottieri. Under these conditions of dismemberment, the Renaissance came to perfection, and the ideal unity of the Italians was achieved. The space of forty years' tranquillity and equilibrium, which preceded Charles VIII.'s invasion, marked an epoch of recombination and consolidation, when the two currents of national energy, learned and popular, met to form the culture of the golden age. After being Tuscan and neo-Latin, the literature which expressed the nation now became Italian. Such is the importance of theQuattrocentoin Italian history—long denied, late recognized, but now at length acknowledged as necessary and decisive for both Italy and Europe.
In the present chapter I propose to follow the transition from the middle ages effected by writers who, though they used the mother tongue, take rank amongcultivated authors. The two succeeding chapters will be devoted to the more obscure branches of vernacular literature which flourished among the people.
Franco Sacchetti, who uttered the funeral dirge of the fourteenth century, was also the last considerable writer of that age.[134]Born about the year 1335, of one of the old noble families of Florence, he lived until the end of the century, employed in various public duties and assiduous in his pursuit of letters.[135]He was a friend of Boccaccio, and felt the highest admiration not only for his novels but also for his learning, though he tells us in the preface to his own three hundred tales that he was himself a man of slender erudition—uomo discolo e grosso.[136]From this preface we also learn that enthusiasm for the Decameron prompted him to write a set of novels on his own account.[137]Though Sacchetti loved and worshiped Boccaccio, he did not imitate his style. TheNovelleare composed in the purest vernacular, without literary artifice or rhetorical ornament. They boast no framework of fiction, like that which lends the setting of romance to the Decameron; nor do they pretend to be more than short anecdotes with here and there a word of moralizing from the author. Yet the student of Italian, eager to know what speech was current inthe streets of Florence during the last half of that century, will value Sacchetti's idiomatic language even more highly than Boccaccio's artful periods. He tells us what the people thought and felt, in phrases borrowed from their common talk. The majority of the novels treat of Florentine life, while some of them bring illustrious Florentines—Dante and Giotto and Guido Cavalcanti—on the scene. Sacchetti's preface vouches for the truth of his stories; but, whether they be strictly accurate or not, we need not doubt their fidelity to contemporary customs, domestic manners, and daily conversation. Sacchetti inspires a certain confidence, a certain feeling of friendliness. And yet what a world is revealed in hisNovelle—a world without tenderness, pathos, high principle, passion, or enthusiasm—men and women delighting in coarse humor, in practical jokes of inconceivable vulgarity, in language of undisguised grossness, in cruelty, fraud, violence, incontinence! The point is almost always some clever trick, aburlaor abeffa, or a piece of subtly-planned retaliation. Knaves and fools are the chief actors in this comic theater; and among the former we find many friars, among the latter many husbands. To accept theNovelleas adequate in every detail to the facts of Florentine society, would be uncritical. They must chiefly be used for showing what passed for fun among the burghers, and what seemed fit and decent topics for discussion. Studied from that point of view, and also for the abundant light they throw on customs and fashions, Sacchetti's tales are highly valuable. Thebourgeoisieof Florence lives again in their animated pages. We have in them a literaturewritten to amuse, if not precisely to represent, a civic society closely packed within a narrow area, witty and pleasure-loving, acutely sensitive to the ridiculous, with strongly-denned tastes and a decided preference for pungent flavors. One distinctive Florentine quality emerges with great clearness. That is a malicious and jibing humor—the malice Dante took with him to theInferno; the malice expressed by Il Lasca and Firenzuola, epitomized in Florentine nicknames, and condensed in Rabelaisian anecdotes which have become classical. It reaches its climax in the cruel but laughter-moving jest played by Brunelleschi on the unfortunate cabinet-maker, which has been transmitted to us in the novel ofIl Grasso, Legnaiuolo.
Somewhat later than Sacchetti'sNovelle, appeared another collection of more or less veracious anecdotes, compiled by a certain Ser Giovanni.[138]He called itIl Pecorone, which may be interpreted "The Simpleton:"
Nothing is known about Ser Giovanni, except what he tells us in the Sonnet just quoted. From it we learn that he began hisNovellein the year 1378—the year of the Ciompi Revolution at Florence. As a framework for his stories, he devised a frigid romance which may be briefly told. Sister Saturnina, the prioress of a convent at Forlì, was so wise and beautiful that her fame reached Florence, where a handsome and learned youth, named Auretto, fell in love with her by hearsay. He took orders, journeyed across the Apennines, and contrived to be appointed chaplain to Saturnina's nuns. In due course of time she discreetly returned his affection, and, managing their affairs with prudence and decorum, they met for private converse and mutual solace in a parlor of the convent. Here they whiled away the hours by telling stories—entertaining, instructive, or romantic. The collection is divided into twenty-five days; and since each lover tells a tale, there are fiftyNovelle, interspersed with songs after the fashion of Boccaccio. In the style, no less than in the method of the book, Ser Giovanni shows himself a closer follower of the Decameron than Sacchetti. His novels have a wide range of incidents, embracing tragic and pathetic motives no less than what is humorous. They are treated rhetorically, and, instead of being simple anecdotes, aim at the varied movement of a drama. The language, too, is literary, and less idiomatic than Sacchetti's. Antiquarians will find in some of these discourses an interest separate from what is common to works of fiction. They represent how history was communicated to the people of that day. Saturnina, for example, relates the myth of Troy and the foundation of Fiesole, which, as Dante tells us, the Tuscan mothers of Cacciaguida's age sang to their children. The lives of the Countess Matilda and FrederickBarbarossa, the antiquity and wealth of the Tuscan cities, the tragedy of Corso Donati, Giano della Bella's exile, the Angevine Conquest of Sicily, the origin of Guelfs and Ghibellines in Italy, Attila's apocryphal siege of Florence, supply materials for narratives in which the true type of theNovelladisappears. Yet Ser Giovanni mingles more amusing stories with these lectures;[139]and the historical dissertations are managed with such grace, with so golden a simplicity of style, that they are readable. Of a truth it is comic to think of the enamored monk and nun meeting in the solitude of their parlor to exchange opinions upon Italian history. Though he had the good qualities of atrecentistoprosaist, Ser Giovanni was in this respect but a poor artist.
Both Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni were poets of no mean ability. As in his prose, so also in hisCanzoni a Ballo, the author of thePecoronefollowed Boccaccio, without, however, attaining to that glow and sensuous abandonment which renders the lyrics no less enchanting than the narratives of the Decameron. His style is smooth and fluent, suggesting literary culture rather than spontaneous inspiration.[140]Yet it is always lucid. Through the transparent language we see straight into the hearts of lovers as the novelist of Florence understood them. Written for the most part in the seven-lined stanza with recurring couplet, which GuidoCavalcanti first made fashionable, theseBallategive lyrical expression to a great variety of tender situations. The emotion of first love, the pains and pleasures of a growing passion, the anguish of betrayal, regrets, quarrels, reconciliations, are successively treated. In short, Ser Giovanni versified and set to music all the principal motives upon which theNovellaof feeling turned, and formed anars amandiadapted to the use of the people. In this sense his poems seem to have been accepted, for we find MSS. of theBallatedetached from the prose ofIl Pecorone.[141]Among the most striking may be mentioned the canzonetTradita sono, which retrospectively describes the joy of a girl in her first love; another on the fashions of Florentine ladies,Quante leggiadre; and the lamentation of a woman whose lover has abandoned her, and who sees no prospect but the cloister—Oi me lassa.[142]
Ser Giovanni's lyrics are echoes of the city, where maidens danced their rounds upon the piazza in May evenings, and young men courted the beauty of the hour with songs and visits to her chamber:
Franco Sacchetti carries us to somewhat different scenes. The best of his madrigals and canzonets describe the pleasures of country life. They are not genuinely rustic; nor do they, in Theocritean fashion, attempt to render the beauty of the country from the peasant's point of view. On the contrary, they owe their fascination to the contrast between the simplicity of the villa and the unrest of the town, where:
Mai vi si dice e di ben far vi è caro.
They are written for and by thebourgeoiswho has escaped from shops and squares and gossiping street-corners. The keynote of this poetry, which has always something of the Frenchécole buissonnièrein its fresh unalloyed enjoyment, is struck in a song describing the return of Spring[143]:
The poet summons his company of careless folk, on pleasure bent:
He takes them forth into the fields among the farms and olive-gardens, bidding them leave prudence and grave thoughts within the lofty walls of Florence town:
This note of gayety and pure enjoyment is sustained throughout his lyrics. In oneBallatahe describes a country girl, caught by thorns, and unable to avoid her admirer's glance.[144]Another gives a pretty picture of a maiden with a wreath of olive-leaves and silver.[145]A third is a little idyll of two girls talking to their lambs, and followed by an envious old woman.[146]A fourth is a biting satire on old women—Di diavol vecchia femmina ha natura.[147]A fifth is that incomparably graceful canzonet,O vaghe montanine pasturelle, the popularity of which is proved by the fact that it was orally transmitted for many generations, and attributed in after days to both Lorenzo de' Medici and Angelo Poliziano.[148]Indeed, it may be said in passing that Poliziano owed much to Sacchetti. This can be seen by comparing Sacchetti'sBallataon the Gentle Heart, and his pastoral of the Thorn-tree with the later poet's lyrics.[149]
The unexpressed contrast between the cautious town-life of the burgher poet and his license in the villa, to which I have already called attention, determines the character of many minor lyrics by Sachetti.[150]We comprehend the spirit of these curious poems, at once popular and fashionable, when wecompare them with medieval FrenchPastourelles, or with similar compositions by wandering Latin students. In theCarmina Buranamay be found several little poems, describing the fugitive loves of truant scholars with rustic girls, which prove that, long before Sacchetti's age, the town had sought spring-solace in the country.[151]Men are too apt to fancy that what they consider the refinements of passion and fashion (the finer edge, for example, put upon desire by altering its object from the known and trivial to the untried and exceptional, from venal beauties in the city to shepherd maidens on the village-green) are inventions of their own times. Yet it was precisely a refinement of this sort which gave peculiar flavor to Sacchetti's songs in the fourteenth century, and which made them sought after. They had great vogue in Italy, enjoying the privilege of popularity among the working classes, and helping to diffuse that sort of pastoral part-song which we still know as Madrigal.[152]Sacchetti was himself a good musician; many of his songs were set to music by himself, and others by his friends. This gives a pleasant old-world homeliness to the Latin titles inscribed beneath the rubrics—Franciscus de Organis sonum dedit;Intonatum per Francum Sacchetti;Francus sonum dedit; and so forth.
The Ballads and Madrigals of Niccolò Soldanieri should be mentioned in connection with Sacchetti;though they do not detach themselves in any marked way from the style of love poetry practiced at the close of the fourteenth century.[153]The case is different with Alesso Donati's lyrics. In them we are struck by a new gust of coarse and powerful realism, which has no parallel among the elder poets except in the savage sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri. Vividly natural situations are here detached from daily life and delineated with intensity of passion, vehement sincerity. Sacchetti's gentleness and genial humor have disappeared. In their place we find a dramatic energy and a truth of language that are almost terrible. Each of the little scenes, which I propose to quote in illustration of these remarks, might be compared to etchings bitten with aquafortis into copper. Here, for example, is a nun, who has resolved to throw aside her veil and follow her lover in a page's dress[154]:
Here is a dialogue at dawn between a woman and her paramour. The presence of the husband sleeping in the chamber is suggested with a brutal vigor[155]:
Scarcely less forcible is the girl's vow against her mother, who keeps her shut at home[156]:
To translate these madrigals would be both difficult and undesirable. It is enough to have printed the original texts. They prove that aristocratic versifiers at this period were adopting the style of the people, and adding the pungency of brief poetic treatment to episodes suggested bynovelle.[157]
While dealing with the Novelle and the semi-popular literature of this transition period, I have hitherto neglected those numerous minor poets who continued the traditions of the earliertrecento.[158]There are two main reasons for this preference. In the first place, thenovellewas destined to play a most important part in the history of the Renaissance, imposing its own laws of composition upon species so remote as the religious drama and romantic epic.In the second place, the dance-songs, canzonets and madrigals of Sacchetti's epoch lived upon the lips of the common folk, who during the fifteenth century carried Italian literature onward through a subterranean channel.[159]When vernacular poetry reappeared into the light of erudition and the Courts, the influences of that popular style, which drew its origin from Boccaccio and Sacchetti rather than from Dante or the Trovatori, determined the manner of Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano. Meanwhile the learned poems of the latesttrecentistiwere forgotten with the lumber of the middle ages. For the special purpose, therefore, of this volume, which only regards the earlier stages of Italian literature in so far as they preceded and conditioned the Renaissance, it was necessary to give the post of honor to Boccaccio's followers. Some mention should, however, here be made of those contemporaries and imitators of Petrarch, in whom the traditions of the fourteenth century expired. It is not needful to pass in review the many versifiers who treated the old themes of chivalrous love with meritorious conventional facility. The true life of the Italians was not here; and the phase of literature which the Sicilian School inaugurated, survived already as an anachronism. The case is different with such poetry as dealt immediately with contemporary politics. In the declamatory compositions of this age, we hear the echoes of the Guelf and Ghibelline wars. The force of that great struggle was already spent; but the partisans of either faction, passion enough survived to furnish genuine inspiration. Fazio degli Uberti'sserminteseon the cities of Italy, for example, was written in the bitter spirit of an exiled Ghibelline.[160]His ode to Charles IV. is a torrent of vehement medieval abuse, poured forth against an Emperor who had shown himself unworthy of his place in Italy[161]:
After detailing the woes which have befallen her in consequence of her abandonment by the imperial master, Italy addresses herself to God:
The Italian Ghibellines had, indeed, good reason to complain that German gluttons, Cæsars in naught but name, who only thought of making money by their sale of fiefs and honors, had changed the eagle of the Empire into an obscene night-flying bird of prey. The same spirit is breathed in Fazio's ode on Rome.[162]He portrays the former mistress of the world as a lady clad in weeds of mourning, "ancient, august and honorable, but poor and needy as her habit showed, prudent in speech and of great puissance." She bidsthe poet rouse his fellow-countrymen from their sleep of sloth and drunkenness, to reassert the majesty of the empire owed to Italy and Rome:
This is the last echo of theDe Monarchiâ. The great imperial idea, so destructive to Italian confederation, so dazzling to patriots of Dante's fiber, expires amid the wailings of minstrels who cry for the impossible, and haunt the Courts of petty Lombard princes.
In another set ofCanzoniwe listen to Guelf and Ghibelline recriminations, rising from the burghs of Tuscany. The hero of these poems is Gian Galeazzo Visconti, rightly recognized by the Guelfs of Florence as a venomous and selfish tyrant, foolishly belauded by the Ghibellines of Siena as the vindicator of imperial principles. The Emperors have abandoned Italy; the Popes are at Avignon. The factions which their quarrels generated, agitate their people still, but on a narrower basis. Sacchetti slings invectives against themaladetta serpe, aspro tiranno con amaro fele, who shall be throttled by the Church and Florence, leagued to crush the Lombard despots.[163]Saviozzo da Siena addresses the same Visconti asnovella monarchia, giusto signore, clemente padre, insigne, virtuoso. By his means thedolce vedovella, Rome or Italy, shall at last find peace.[164]This Duke of Milan, it will be remembered, had already ordered the crownof Italy from his Court-jeweler, and was advancing on his road of conquest, barred only by Florence, when the Plague cut short his career in 1402. The poet of Siena exhorts him to take courage for his task, in lines that are not deficient in a certain fire of inspiration:
In another strophe he refers to the Italian crown:
An anonymous sonnetteer of the same period uses similar language[165];
The Ghibelline poets, whether they dreamed like Fazio of Roman Empire, or flattered the Visconti with a crown to be won by triumph over the detested Guelfs, made play with Dante's memory. Some of the most interesting lyrics of the school are elegies upon his death. To this class belong two sonnets by Pieraccio Tedaldi and Mucchio da Lucca.[166]Nor must Boccaccio's noble pair of sonnets, although he was not a political poet, be here forgotten.[167]That Dante wasdiligently studied can be seen, not only in the diction of this epoch, but also in numerous versified commentaries upon the Divine Comedy—in theterza rimaabstracts of Boson da Gubbio, Jacopo Alighieri, Saviozzo da Siena, and Boccaccio.[168]
Tuscan politics are treated from the Guelf point of view in Sacchetti's odes upon the war with Pisa, upon the government of Florence after 1378, and against the cowardice of the Italians.[169]His conception of a burgher's duties, the ideal of Guelfbourgeoisiebefore Florence had become accustomed to tyrants, finds expression in a sonnet—Amar la patria.[170]We frequently meet with the wordComuneon his lips:
A like note of municipal independence is sounded in the poems of Antonio Pucci, and in the admonitory stanzas of Matteo Frescobaldi.[171]Considerable interest attaches to these political compositions for the light they throw on party feeling at the close of the heroic age of Italian history. The fury with which those factions raged, prompts the bards of either camp to curses. I may refer to this passage from Folgore da San Gemignano, when he sees the Ghibelline Uguccione triumphant over Tuscany:[172]
Yet neither in the confused idealism of the Ghibellines nor in the honest independence of the Guelfs lay the true principle of national progress. Sinking gradually and inevitably beneath the sway of despots, the Italians in the fifteenth century were destined to become a nation of scholars, artists,litterati. The age of Dante, the uncompromising aristocrat, was over. The age of Boccaccio, the easy-goingbourgeois, had begun. The future glories of Italy were to be won in the field of culture; and all the hortatory lyrics I have mentioned, exerted but little influence over the development of a spirit which was growing quietly within the precincts of the people. The Italian people at this epoch cared far less for the worn-out factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines than for home-comforts and tranquillity in burgher occupations. The keener intellects of the fifteenth century were already so absorbingly occupied with art and classical studies that there was no room left in them for politics of the old revolutionary type. Meanwhile the new intrigues of Cabinets and Courts were left to a class of humanistic diplomatists, created by the conditions of despotic government. Scarcely less ineffectual were the moral verses of Bambagiuoli and Cavalca, or the Petrarchistic imitations of Marchionne Torrigiani, Federigod'Arezzo, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto di Battifolle, and Bonaccorso da Montemagno.[173]The former belonged to a phase of medieval culture which was waning. The elegant but lifeless Petrarchistic school dragged through the fifteenth century, culminating in theCanzoniereof Giusto de' Conti, a Roman, which was calledLa bella mano. The revival of their mannerism, with a fixed artistic motive, by Bembo and the purists of the sixteenth century, will form part of my later history of Renaissance literature.
One note is unmistakable in all the poetry of these lasttrecentisti. It is a note of profound discouragement, mistrust, and disappointment. We have already heard it sounded by Sacchetti in his lament for Boccaccio. Boccaccio had raised it himself in two noble sonnets—Apizio leggeandFuggit'è ogni virtù.[174]It takes the shrillness of a threnody in Tedaldi'sIl mondo vileand in Manfredi di Boccaccio'sAmico il mondo.[175]The poets of that age were dimly conscious that a new era had opened for their country—an era of money-getting, despotism, and domestic ease. They saw the people used to servitude and sunk in common pleasures—dead to the high aims and imaginative aspirations of the past. The turbulence of the heroic age was gone. The men of the present were allVigliacci. And as yet both art and learning were but in their cradle. It was impossible upon the opening of the fifteenth century, in that crepuscular interval between two periods of splendor, to know what glories for Italy and for the world at large wouldbe produced by Giotto's mighty lineage and Petrarch's progeny of scholars. We who possess in history the vision of that future can be content to wait through a transition century. The men of the moment not unnaturally expressed the querulousness of Italy, distracted by her struggles of the past and sinking into somnolence. Cosimo de' Medici, the molder of Renaissance Florence, was already born in 1389; and men of Cosimo's stamp were no heroes for poets who had felt the passions that moved Dante.
The Divine Comedy found fewer imitators than theCanzoniere; for who could bend the bow of Ulysses? Yet some poets of the transition were hardy enough to attempt the Dantesque meter, and to pretend in a prosaic age that they had shared the vision of the prophets. Among these should be mentioned Fazio degli Uberti, a scion of Farinata's noble house, who lived and traveled much in exile.[176]Taking Solinus, the antique geographer, for his guide, Fazio produced a topographical poem called theDicta MundiorDittamondo.[177]
From the prosaic matter of this poem, which resembles a very primitive Mappamondo, illustrated with interludes of history and excursions into mythological zoölogy, based upon the text of Pliny, and not unworthy of Mandeville, two episodes emerge andarrest attention. One is the description of Rome—a somber lady in torn raiment, who tells the history of her eventful past, describes her triumphs and her empire, and points to the ruins on her seven crowned hills to show how beautiful she was in youth[178]:
Fazio addresses the mighty shadow with respectful sympathy. Rome answers in language which is noble through its simple dignity:
The second passage of importance, more noticeable for a sense of space and largeness than for its poetical expression, is a description of the prospect seen from Alvernia, that high station of the "topless Apennines," where S. Francis took the Stigmata, and where Dantesought a home in the destruction of his earthly hopes[179]:
The whole of Tuscany and Umbria, their cities, plains, rivers and mountain summits, are unrolled; and the friar concludes with a sentence which well embodies the feeling we have in gazing over an illimitable landscape:
Such value as theDittamondomay still retain for students, it owes partly to the author's enthusiasm for ancient Rome, and partly to the sympathy with nature he had acquired during his wandering as an exile over the sacred soil of Italy.
Another poem of Dantesque derivation was theQuadriregioof Federigo Frezzi, Bishop of Foligno.[180]It is an allegorical account of human life; and the four regions, which give their name to the book, are the realms of Love, Satan, Vice and Virtue.[181]To cast the moralizations of the middle ages in a form imitated from Dante, after Dante had already condensed the ethics and politics, the theology and science of his century in the Divine Comedy, was little less than a hopeless task. Nor need a word be spent upon theQuadriregio, except by way of illustrating the peculiar conditions of the poetic art, here upon the border-land between the middle age and the Renaissance. Federigo Frezzi was intent on depicting the victories of virtue over vice, and on explaining the advantage offered to the Christian by grace. Yet he chose a mythological framework for his doctrine. Cupid, Venus and Minerva are confused with Satan, Enoch and Elijah. Instead of Eden there is the golden age. Nymphs of Diana, Juno, and the like, are used as emblems. Pallas discourses about Christ, and expounds the Christian system of redemption. The earthly Paradise contains Helicon, with all the antique poets. Jupiter is contrasted with Satan. It is the same blending of antique with Christian motives which we note in the Divine Comedy; but the tact of the great artist is absent, and the fusion becomes grotesque. After reading through the poem we lay it down with the same feeling as that produced in us by studying some pulpit of the Pisan School, where a Gothic Devil, all horns and hoofs and grinning jaws, squats cheek by jowl with a Madonna copied from aRoman tomb. The following description of Cupid recalls the manner of the Sienesefrescanti[182]:
Here is the picture of the Golden Age, transcribed from Latin poetry, much as it was destined to control the future of Italian fancy[183]:
A little while beyond this foretaste of thecinque cento, we find Charon copied, without addition, but with a fatal loss of poetry, from theInferno[184]:
Last upon the list of Dantesque imitators stands Matteo Palmieri, a learned Florentine, who composed hisCittà di Vitain the middle of the fifteenth century. This poem won for its author from Marsilio Ficino the title ofPoeta Theologicus.[185]Its chief interest at the present time is that the theology expressed in it brought suspicion of heresy on Palmieri. He held Origen's opinion that the souls of men were rebel angels. How a doctrine of this kind could be rendered in painting is not clear. Yet Giorgio Vasari tells us that a picture executed for Matteo Palmieri by Sandro Botticelli, which represented the Assumption of the Virgin into the celestial hierarchy—Powers, Princedoms, Thrones and Dominations ranged around her in concentric circles—fell under the charge of heterodoxy. The altar in S. Pietro Maggiore where it was placed had to be interdicted, and the pictureveiled from sight.[186]The story forms a curious link between this last scion of medieval literature and the painting of the Renaissance. After Palmieri the meter of the Divine Comedy was chiefly used for satire and burlesque. Lorenzo de' Medici adapted its grave rhythms to parody inI Beoni. Berni used it for the Capitoli of thePescheand thePeste. At Florence it became the recognized meter for obscene and frivolous compositions, which delighted the Academicians of the sixteenth century. The people, meanwhile, continued to employ it inLamenti, historical compositions, and personal Capitoli.[187]Thus Cellini wrote his poem calledI Carceriinterza rima, and Giovanni Santi used it for his precious but unpoetical Chronicle of Italian affairs. Both Benivieni and Michelangelo Buonarroti composed elegies in this meter; and numerous didactic eclogues of the pastoral poets might be cited in which it served for analogue to Latin elegiacs. In theSacre Rappresentazioniit sometimes interruptedottava rima, on the occasion of a set discourse or sermon.[188]Both Ariosto and Alamanni employed it in their satires. From these brief notices it will be seen thatterza rimaduring the Renaissance period was reserved for dissertational, didactic and satiric themes, the Capitoli of the burlesque poets being parodies of grave scholastic lucubrations. But no one now attempted an heroic poem in this verse.[189]