Renaissance in Italy Volume IV Part 8

[116] See Sonnets vii. and viii. of the _Rime_.

[117] The same motive occurs in the _Ameto_, where the power of love to refine a rustic nature is treated both in the prose romance and in the interpolated _terza rima_ poems. See especially the song of Teogapen (_Op. Volg._ xv. 34).

[118] Boccaccio breaks the style and becomes obscenely vulgar at times. See Parte Quarta, x.x.xvi. x.x.xvii., Parte Quinta, xlv. xlvi. The innuendoes of the _Ugellino_ and the _Nicchio_ are here repeated in figures which antic.i.p.ate the novels and _capitoli_ of the _cinque cento_.

[119] Students may consult the valuable work of Vincenzo Nannucci, _Manuale della Letteratura del primo secolo della Lingua Italiana_, Firenze, Barbera, 1874. The second volume contains copious specimens of thirteenth-century prose.

[120] Nannucci, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 95.

[121] The journals of Matteo Spinelli, ascribed to an Apulian of the thirteenth century, were long accepted as the earliest vernacular attempt at history in prose. It has lately been suggested, with good show of argument, that they are fabrications of the sixteenth century.

With regard to the similar doubts affecting the Malespini Chronicles and Dino Compagni, I may refer to my discussion of this question in the first volume of this work, _Age of the Despots_, pp. 251, 262-273.

[122] Nannucci, _op. cit._ p. 137.

[123] Of Villani's Chronicle I have already spoken sufficiently in the _Age of the Despots_, chap. 5, and of the _Vita Nuova_ in this chapter (above, pp. 67-70).

[124] _Vita Nuova_, cap. 2.

[125] _Filocopo_, _Op. Volg._ vii. 4.

[126] _Fioretti di S. Francesco_ (Venezia, 1853), p. 104.

[127] See below, the chapter on the Purists.

[128] See Capponi's _Storia della Repubblica di Firenze_, lib. iii.

cap. 9, for a very energetic statement of this view.

[129] See _Rime di M. Cino da Pistoja e d'altri del Secolo xiv._ (Firenze, Barbera, 1862), p. 528. It begins:

Ora e mancata ogni poesia E vote son le case di Parnaso.

It contains the famous lines:

Come deggio sperar che surga Dante Che gia chi il sappia legger non si trova?

E Giovanni che e morto ne fe scola.

Not less interesting is Sacchetti's funeral Ode for Petrarch (_ibid._ p. 517). Both show a keen sense of the situation with respect to the decline of literature.

CHAPTER III.

THE TRANSITION.

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's _Pecorone_--Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry--Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza--Nicol 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 the _Bourgeoisie_--Discouragement of the Age--Fazio's _Dittamondo_--Rome and Alvernia--Frezzi's _Quadriregio_--Dantesque Imitation--Blending of Cla.s.sical and Medieval Motives--Matteo Palmieri's _Citta di Vita_--The Fate of _Terza Rima_--Catherine of Siena--Her Letters--S.

Bernardino's Sermons--Salutati's Letters--Alessandra degli Strozzi--Florentine Annalists--Giov. Cavalcanti--Corio's _History of Milan_--Matarazzo's _Chronicle of Perugia_--Masuccio and his _Novellino_--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--The _Deiciarchia_--_Tranquillita dell'Animo_--_Teogenio_--Alberti's Religion--Dedication of the Treatise on Painting--Minor Works in Prose on Love--_Ecatomfila_, _Amiria_, _Deifiria_, etc.--Misogynism--Novel of _Ippolito and Leonora_--Alberti's Poetry--Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the Age--Francesco Colonna--The _Hypnerotomachia 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 two preceding chapters will have made it clear that the Church, Chivalry, and the Nation contributed their 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 Provencal poetry. His _Canzoniere_ cannot 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 complex pedigree of culture is no easy task--chiefly because it manifested itself under two apparently antagonistic forms; first in the recovery of the cla.s.sics 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 a.n.a.logous 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 a.s.similates 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 and intellectual, was Florence, which gave birth to the three great poets of the fourteenth century. Though Florence developed her inst.i.tutions later than the Lombard communes, she maintained a civic independence longer than any State but Venice; and her _popolo_ may 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.serted itself in antagonism to the Church and chivalry.

The recovery of the cla.s.sics 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's _Stanze_, 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 cla.s.sicism, which was tantamount to ranascent nationality, r.e.t.a.r.ded 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's _Canzoni_, and whose life Boccaccio had portrayed in the Decameron, were now divided from the rising cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed as it were for a season underground, and lost itself in unexplored ravines. Absorbed into the ma.s.ses of the people, it continued an obscure but by no means insignificant course, whence it was destined to reappear at the right moment, when the several const.i.tuents of the nation had attained the sense of intellectual unity.

This sense of unity was the product of the cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sics 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 partic.i.p.ated by the race at large. The poetry of the people then received a form refined by cla.s.sic 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 a.s.serted 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 cla.s.sical and the modern, reunited on a broader plane.

The nation, educated by scholarship and brought to a sense of its ident.i.ty, 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 trans.m.u.ted 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 rea.s.serted themselves for a brief moment in Ta.s.so. Still even in Ta.s.so 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 pa.s.sions--the Italians, thus const.i.tuted, in their vigorous reaction against the middle ages, secularized the Papacy, absorbed the Paganism of the cla.s.sics, subst.i.tuted an aesthetic 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 unprincipled _condottieri_. Under these conditions of dismemberment, the Renaissance came to perfection, and the ideal unity of the Italians was achieved. The s.p.a.ce 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 the _Quattrocento_ in 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 among cultivated 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 n.o.ble families of Florence, he lived until the end of the century, employed in various public duties and a.s.siduous 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. The _Novelle_ are 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 in the 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 his _Novelle_--a world without tenderness, pathos, high principle, pa.s.sion, or enthusiasm--men and women delighting in coa.r.s.e 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, a _burla_ or a _beffa_, 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 the _Novelle_ as adequate in every detail to the facts of Florentine society, would be uncritical. They must chiefly be used for showing what pa.s.sed 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. The _bourgeoisie_ of Florence lives again in their animated pages. We have in them a literature written 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 the _Inferno_; the malice expressed by Il Lasca and Firenzuola, epitomized in Florentine nicknames, and condensed in Rabelaisian anecdotes which have become cla.s.sical. 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 of _Il Gra.s.so, Legnaiuolo_.

Somewhat later than Sacchetti's _Novelle_, appeared another collection of more or less veracious anecdotes, compiled by a certain Ser Giovanni.[138] He called it _Il Pecorone_, which may be interpreted "The Simpleton:"

Ed e per nome il Pecoron chiamato, Perche ci ha dentro novi barbagianni; Ed io son capo di cotal brigata, E vo belando come pecorone, Facendo libri, e non ne so boccata.

Nothing is known about Ser Giovanni, except what he tells us in the Sonnet just quoted. From it we learn that he began his _Novelle_ in 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 Forl, 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 fifty _Novelle_, 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 Frederick Barbarossa, 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 the _Novella_ disappears. 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 a _trecentisto_ prosaist, 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 his _Canzoni a Ballo_, the author of the _Pecorone_ followed 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 Guido Cavalcanti first made fashionable, these _Ballate_ give lyrical expression to a great variety of tender situations. The emotion of first love, the pains and pleasures of a growing pa.s.sion, the anguish of betrayal, regrets, quarrels, reconciliations, are successively treated. In short, Ser Giovanni versified and set to music all the princ.i.p.al motives upon which the _Novella_ of feeling turned, and formed an _ars amandi_ adapted to the use of the people. In this sense his poems seem to have been accepted, for we find MSS. of the _Ballate_ detached from the prose of _Il Pecorone_.[141] Among the most striking may be mentioned the canzonet _Tradita 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 la.s.sa_.[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:

Con quanti dolci suon e con che canti Io era visitata tutto 'l giorno!

E nella zambra venivan gli amanti, Facendo festa e standomi intorno: Ed io guardava nel bel viso adorno, Che d'allegrezza mi cresceva il core.

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 e caro.

They are written for and by the _bourgeois_ who has escaped from shops and squares and gossiping street-corners. The keynote of this poetry, which has always something of the French _ecole buissonniere_ in its fresh unalloyed enjoyment, is struck in a song describing the return of Spring[143]:

Benedetta sia la state Che ci fa s solazzare!

Maladetto sia lo verno Che a citta ci fa tornare!