Renaissance in Italy Volume IV Part 15

[266] _Ibid._ pp. 355-359, 367-372.

[267] For example the lines beginning "Sospetto e cure." _Ibid._ p.

368.

[268] _Op. Volg._ i. lxv. He was not alone in this experiment.

Barbarous Italian Sapphics and Hexameters are to be found in the _Accademia Coronaria_ on Friendship, of which more in the next chapter.

[269] _De Re aedificatoria_, Florence, 1485. This preface is a letter addressed to Lorenzo de' Medici.

[270] "Quicquid ingenio esset hominum c.u.m quadam effectum elegantia, id prope divinum dicebat," says the anonymous biographer. This sentence is the motto of humanism as elaborated by the artistic sense.

Its discord with the religion of the middle ages is apparent.

[271] _Op. Volg._ i. 8.

[272] This we learn from the last words of the first edition, "Tarvisii c.u.m decorissimis Poliae amore lorulis distineretur misellus Poliphilus MCCCCLVII." The author's name is given in the initial letters to the thirty-eight chapters of the book.

[273] For this and other points about the _Hypnerotomachia_ see Ilg's treatise _Ueber der Kunsthistorischen Werth der Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_, Wien, Braunmuller, 1872.

[274] It ought, however, to be said that, being the first paragraph of the whole book, its style is not so free and simple as in more level pa.s.sages. Though I do not pretend to understand the meaning clearly, I subjoin a translation.--"Phoebus advancing at that moment, when the forehead of Matuta Leucothea whitened, already free from Ocean's waves, had not yet shown his whirling wheels suspense. But bent with his swift chargers, Pyrous first and Eous just disclosed to view, on painting the pale chariot of his daughter with vermeil roses, in most vehement flight pursuing her, made no delay. And sparkling over the azure and unquiet wavelets, his light-showering tresses flowed in curls. Upon whose advent at that point descending to her rest stayed Cynthia without horns, urging the two steeds of her carriage with the Mule, the one white and the other dark, drawing toward the furthest horizon which divides the hemispheres where she had come, and, routed by the piercing star who lures the day, was yielding. At that time when the Riphaean mountains were undisturbed, nor with so cold a gust the rigid and frost-creating east-wind with the side-blast blowing made the tender branches quake, and tossed the mobile stems and spiked reeds and yielding gra.s.ses, and vexed the pliant tendrils, and shook the flexible willows, and bent the frail fir-branches 'neath the horns of Taurus in their wantonness. As in the winter time that wind was wont to breathe. Likewise the boastful Orion was at the point of staying to pursue with tears the beauteous Taurine shoulder of the seven sisters."

[275] When the book was translated into French and republished at Paris in the sixteenth century, the blocks were imitated, and at a later epoch it became fashionable to refer them to Raphael. The mistake was gross. Its only justification is the style adopted by the French imitators in their rehandling of the ill.u.s.trations to Poliphil's soul pleading before Venus. These cuts seem to have felt the influence of the Farnesina frescoes.

[276] Here is the description of Poliphil's reception by the damsels: "Respose una lepidula placidamente dicendo. Da mi la mano. Hora si tu sospite & il bene venuto. Nui al presento siamo cinque sociale comite come il vedi. Et io me chiamo Aphea. Et questa che porta li buxuli & gli bianchissimi liuteamini, e nominata Offressia. Et questaltra che dil splendente speculo (delitie nostre) e gerula, Ora.s.sia e il suo nome. Costei che tene la sonora lyra, e dicta Achoe. Questa ultima, che questo vaso di pretiosissimo liquore baiula, ha nome Geussia."

[277] A portion of the pa.s.sage describing this dalliance may be extracted as a further specimen of the author's style: "c.u.m lascivi vulti, et gli pecti procaci, ochii blandienti et nella rosea fronte micanti e ludibondi. Forme prae-excellente, Habiti incentivi, Moventie puellare, Risguardi mordenti, Exornato mundissimo. Niuna parte simulata, ma tutto dalla natura perfecto, c.u.m exquisita politione, Niente difforme ma tutto harmonia concinnissima, Capi flavi c.u.m le trece biondissime e crini insolari tante erano bellissime complicate, c.u.m cordicelle, o vero nextruli di seta e di fili doro intorte, quanto che in tutto la operatione humana excedevano, circa la testa c.u.m egregio componimento invilupate e c.u.m achi crinali detente, e la fronte di cincinni capreoli silvata, c.u.m lascivula inconstantia praependenti." There is an obvious study of Boccaccesque phrase, with a no less obvious desire to improve upon its exquisiteness of detail, masking an incapacity to write connectedly.

[278] The reiteration of sensuous phrases is significant. These inscriptions, [Greek: panton tokadi, pan dei poiein kata ten autou phusin, gonos kai euphuia], together with the Triumphs of Priapus and Cupid, accord with the supremacy of Venus Physizoe.

CHAPTER IV.

POPULAR SECULAR POETRY.

Separation between Cultivated Persons and the People--Italian despised by the Learned--Contempt for Vernacular Literature--The _Certamen Coronarium_--Literature of Instruction for the Proletariate--Growth of Italian Prose--Abundance of Popular Poetry--The People in the Quattrocento take the Lead--Qualities of Italian Genius--Arthurian and Carolingian Romances--_I Reali di Francia_--Andrea of Barberino and his Works--Numerous Romances in Prose and Verse--Positive Spirit--Versified Tales from Boccaccio--Popular Legends--Ginevra degli Almieri--Novel of _Il Gra.s.so_--Histories in Verse--_Lamenti_--The Poets of the People--_Cantatori in Banca_--Antonio Pucci--His _Sermintesi_--Political Songs--Satires--Burchiello--His Life and Writings--Dance-Songs--Derived from Cultivated Literature, or produced by the People--Poliziano--Love-Songs--_Rispetti_ and _Stornelli_--The Special Meaning of _Strambotti_--Diffusion of this Poetry over Italy--Its Permanence--Question of its Original Home--Intercommunication and Exchange of Dialects--_Incatenature_ and _Rappresaglie_--Traveling in Medieval Italy--The Subject-Matter of this Poetry--Deficiency in Ballad Elements--Canti Monferrini--The Ballad of _L'Avvelenato_ and Lord Ronald.

During the fifteenth century there was an almost complete separation between the cultivated cla.s.ses and the people. Humanists, intent upon the exploration of the cla.s.sics, deemed it below their dignity to use the vulgar tongue. They thought and wrote in Latin, and had no time to bestow upon the education of the common folk. A polite public was formed, who in the Courts of princes and the palaces of n.o.blemen amused themselves with the ephemeral literature of pamphlets, essays, and epistles in the Latin tongue. For these well-educated readers Poggio and Pontano wrote their Latin novels. The same learned audience applauded the gladiators of the moment, Valla and Filelfo, when they descended into the arena and plied each other with pseudo-Ciceronian invectives. To quit this refined circle, and address the vulgar crowd, was thought unworthy of a man of erudition. Even Alberti, as we have seen, felt bound to apologize for sending his _Teogenio_ in Italian to Lionello d'Este. Only here and there a humanist of the first rank is found who, like Bruni, devoted a portion of his industry to the Italian lives of Dante and Petrarch, or like Filelfo, lectured on the Divine Comedy, or again like Landino, composed a Dantesque commentary in the mother tongue. Moreover, Dante and Petrarch pa.s.sed for almost cla.s.sical; and in nearly all such instances of condescension, pecuniary interest swayed the scholar from his wonted orbit. It was want of skill in Latin rather than love for his own idiom which induced Vespasiano to pen his lives of great men in Italian. Not spontaneous inspiration, but the whim of a ducal patron forced Filelfo to use _terza rima_ for his worthless poem on S. John, and to write a commentary upon Petrarch in the vernacular.[279] One of this man's letters reveals the humanist's contempt for the people's language, and his rooted belief in the immortality of Latin. It is worth translating.[280] "I will answer you," he says, "not in the vulgar language, as you ask, but in Latin and our own true speech; for I have ever had an abhorrence for the talk of grooms and servants, equal to my detestation of their life and manners.

You, however, call that dialect vernacular which, when I use the Tuscan tongue, I sometimes write. All Italians agree in praise of Tuscan. Yet I only employ it for such matters as I do not choose to transmit to posterity. Moreover, even that Tuscan idiom is hardly current throughout Italy, while Latin is far and wide diffused throughout the habitable world." From this interesting epistle we gather that even professional scholars in the middle of the fifteenth century recognized Tuscan as a quasi-literary language, superior in polish to the other Italian dialects, but not to be compared for dignity and durability with Latin.

It also proves that the language of Boccaccio was for them almost a foreign speech.

This att.i.tude of learned writers produced a curious obtuseness of critical insight. Niccol Niccoli, though he was a Florentine, called Dante "a poet for bakers and cobblers." Pico della Mirandola preferred Lorenzo de' Medici's verses to Petrarch. Landino complained, not, indeed, without good reason in that century, that the vulgar language could boast of no great authors. Filippo Villani, in the proem to his biographies, apologized for his father Matteo, who exerted humble faculties and scanty culture to his best ability. Lorenzo de' Medici defended himself for paying attention to an idiom which men of good judgment blamed for "lowness, incapacity and unworthiness to deal with high themes or grave material." Benedetto Varchi, who lived to be an excellent though somewhat c.u.mbrous writer of Italian prose, gives this account of his early training[281]: "I remember that when I was a lad, the first and strictest rule of a father to his sons, and of a master to his pupils, was that they should on no account and for no object read anything in the vulgar speech (_non legesseno cose volgari, per dirlo barbaramente come loro_); and Master Guasparre Mariscotti da Marradi, who was my teacher in grammar, a man of hard and rough but pure and excellent manners, having once heard, I know not how, that Schiatta di Bernardo Bagnesi and I were wont to read Petrarch on the sly, gave as a sound rating for it, and nearly expelled us from his school." Some of Varchi's own stylistic pedantries may be attributed to this Latinizing education.

Even when they wrote their mother tongue, it followed that the men of humanistic culture had a false conception of style. Alberti could not abstain from Latinistic rhetoric. Cristoforo Landino went the length of a.s.serting that "he who would fain be a good Tuscan writer, must first be a Latin scholar." The Italian of familiar correspondence was mingled in almost equal quant.i.ties with Latin phrases. Thus Poliziano, writing from Venice to Lorenzo de' Medici, employs the following strange maccaronic jargon[282]:

Visitai stamattina Messer Zaccheria Barbero; e mostrandoli io l'affezione vostra ec., mi rispose sempre lagrimando, et ut visum est, de cuore; risolvendosi in questo, in te uno spem esse. Ostendit so nosse quantum tibi debeat; sicche fate quello ragionaste, ut favens ad majora. Quello Legato che torna da Roma, et qui tec.u.m locutus est Florentiae, non e punto a loro proposito, ut ajunt.

Poliziano, however, showed by his letters to the ladies of the Medicean family, and by some sermons composed for a religious brotherhood of which he was a member, that he had no difficulty in writing Tuscan prose of the best quality.[283] It seems to have been a contemptuous fashion among men of learning, when they used the mother tongue for correspondence, to load it with Latin--just as a German of the age of Frederick proved his superiority by French phrases. The acme of this affectation was reached in the _Hypnerotomachia_, where the vice of Latinism sought perpetuation through the printing press. Meanwhile, the genius of the Florentine people was saving Italian literature from the extreme consequences to which caricatures of this kind, inspired by humanistic pedantry and sciolism, exposed it.

A characteristic incident of the year 1441 brings before us a set of men who, though obscure and devoted to the service of the common folk, exercised no slight influence over the destinies of the Italian language. After the reinstatement of the Medici, and while Alberti was resident in Florence, it occurred to him to propose the prize of a silver crown for the best poem upon Friendship, in the vulgar tongue.

Piero de' Medici approving of this scheme, it was arranged that the contest for the prize should take place in S. Maria del Fiore, the compet.i.tors reciting their own compositions. The secretaries of Pope Eugenius IV. consented to be umpires. Eight poets entered the lists--Michele di Noferi del Gigante, Francesco d'Altobianco degli Alberti, and six others not less unknown to fame. We still possess their compositions in octave stanzas, _terza rima_, sapphics, hexameters and lyric strophes.[284] The poems were so bad that even the judges of that period refused to award the crown; nor could the most indulgent student of forgotten literature arraign this verdict for severity. Yet the men who engaged in Alberti's _Certamen Coronarium_, as it was called, fairly represented a cla.s.s of literary workers, who occupied a middle place between the learned and the laity, and on whom devolved the task of writing for the people.

Since that unique moment in the history of Tuscan civilization when the lyrics of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti were heard upon the lips of blacksmiths, the artisans of Florence had not wholly lost their thirst for culture. Style and erudition retired into the schools of the humanists and the studies of the n.o.bles. But this curiosity of the _volgo_, as Boccaccio contemptuously called them, was satisfied by the production of a vernacular literature, which brought the ruder elements of knowledge within their reach. Mention has already been made of Latini's _Tesoro_ and _Tesoretto_, Uberti's _Dittamondo_ and similar encyclopaedic works of medieval learning. To these may now be added Leonardo Dati's cosmographical history in octave stanzas, the Schiavo da Bari's aphorisms on morality, and Pucci's _terza rima_ version of Villani's Chronicle. Genealogical poems on popes, emperors and kings; episodes from national Italian history; novels, romances and tales of chivalry; pious biographies; the rudiments of education, from the _Dottrinale_ of Jacopo Alighieri down to Feo Belcari's _A B C_, helped to complete the handicraftsman's library. Further to describe this plebeian literature is hardly necessary. The authors advanced no pretensions to artistic elegance or stateliness of style. They sought to render knowledge accessible to unlettered readers, or to please an open-air audience with stirring and romantic narratives. Their language broke only at rare intervals into poetry and rhetoric, when the subject-matter forced a note of unaffected feeling from the improvisatore. Yet it has always the merit of purity, and, in point of idiom, is superior to the Latinistic periods of Alberti. By means of the neglected labors of these nameless writers, the style of the fourteenth century, so winning in its infantine grace, was gradually transformed and rendered capable of stronger literary utterance. Those who have studied a single prose-work of this period--_I Reali di Francia_, for instance, or Belcari's _Vita del Beato Colombino_, or the _Governo della Famiglia_ ascribed to Pandolfini--will be convinced that a real progress toward grammatical cohesion and ma.s.siveness of structure was made during those years of the fifteenth century which are usually counted barren of achievement by literary historians. Italian prose had entered on the period of adolescence, leading to the manhood of Machiavelli.

The popular poetry of the _quattrocento_ is still more interesting than its prose. No period of Italian history was probably more fruitful of songs poured forth from the very heart of the people, on the fields and in the city. The music of these lyrics still lingers about the Tuscan highlands and the sh.o.r.es of Sicily, where much that now pa.s.ses for original composition is but the echo of most ancient melody stored in the retentive memory of peasants. To investigate the several species of this poetry, together with kindred works of prose fiction, under the several cla.s.ses of (i) epics and romances, (ii) histories in verse and satires, (iii) love-poems, (iv) religious lyrics, and (v) dramas, will be my object in the present and the following chapters. This survey of popular literature forms a necessary introduction to the renascence which was simultaneously effected for Italian at Florence, Ferrara and Naples during the last years of the century. The material prepared by the people was then resumed and artistically elaborated by learned authors.

It has been well said that Italian poetry exhibits a continual reciprocity of exchange between the cultivated cla.s.ses and the proletariate. In this respect the literature of the Italians corresponds to their fine art. Taken together with painting, sculpture, and music, it offers a more complete embodiment of the national spirit than can be shown by any other modern race. Dante's Francesca and Count Ugolino, Ariosto's golden cantos, and the romantic episodes of the _Gerusalemme_ are known by heart throughout the length and breadth of the Peninsula.

The people have appropriated these masterpieces of finished art. On the other hand, the literary poets have been ever careful to borrow subjects, forms, and motives from the populace. The close _rapport_ which thus connects the tastes and instincts of the proletariate with the culture of the aristocracy, is rooted in peculiar conditions of Italian society. Traditions of a very ancient civilization, derived without apparent rupture from the Roman age, have penetrated and refined the whole nation. From the highest to the lowest, the Italians are born with sensibility to beauty. This people and its poets live in sympathy so vital that, though their mutual good understanding may have been suspended for short intervals, it has never been broken. The vibrations of intercourse between the peasant and the learned writer are incessant; and if we notice some intermittency of influence on one side or the other, it is only because at one epoch the destinies of the national genius were committed to the people, at another to the cultivated cla.s.ses. In the fifteenth century, one of these temporary ruptures occurred. The Revival of Learning had to be effected by an isolation of the scholars. Meanwhile, the people carried on the work of literary trans.m.u.tation, which was to connect Boccaccio with Pulci and Poliziano.

Their instinct rejected all elements alien to the national temperament.

Out of the many models bequeathed by the fourteenth century, only those which suited the sensuous realism of the Florentines survived. The traditions of Ciullo d'Alcamo and Jacopone da Todi, of Rustico di Filippo and Lapo Gianni, of Folgore da S. Gemignano and Cene dalla Chitarra, of Cecco Angiolieri and Guido Cavalcanti, of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, of Ser Giovanni and Alesso Donati, triumphed over the scholasticism of those learned poets--"half Provencal and half Latin, half chivalrous, and half _bourgeois_, half monastic and half sensual, half aristocratic and half plebeian"[285]--who had unsuccessfully experimentalized in the dawn of Tuscan culture. The artificial chivalry, lifeless mysticism, barren metaphysics, and hypocritical piety of the rhyming doctors were eliminated. Common sense expressed itself in a reaction against their conventional philosophy. Giotto's blunt critique of Franciscan poverty, Orcagna's burlesque definition of Love, not as a blind boy with wings and arrows, but thus:

L'amore e un trastullo; Non e composto di legno ne d'osso; E a molta gente fa rompere il dosso:

struck the keynote of the new literature.[286] It is true that much was sacrificed. Both Dante and Petrarch seemed to be forgotten. Yet this was inevitable. Dante represented a bygone age of faith and reason.

Petrarch's humanity was too exquisitely veiled. The Florentine people required expression more simple and direct, movement more brusque, emotion of a coa.r.s.er fiber. Meanwhile the Divine Comedy and the _Canzoniere_ were the inalienable possessions of the nation. They had already taken rank as cla.s.sics.

The Italians had no national Epic, if we except the _aeneid_. We have seen how the romances of Charlemagne and Arthur were imported with the languages of France and Provence into Northern Italy, and how they pa.s.sed into the national literature of Lombardy and Tuscany.[287] Both cycles were eminently popular. The _Tavola Ritonda_ ranks among the earliest monuments of Tuscan prose.[288] The _Cento Novelle_ contain frequent references to Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram. Folgore da S.

Gemignano compares the members of his Joyous Company to King Ban's children. In the _Laberinto d'Amore_ Boccaccio speaks of Arthurian tales as the favorite studies of idle women, and Sacchetti bids his blacksmith turn from Dante to legends of the Round Table. Yet there is no doubt that from a very early period the Carolingian cycle gained the preference of the Italian people.[289] It is also noticeable that, not the main legend of Roland, but the episode of Rinaldo, and other offshoots from the history of the Frankish peers, furnished plebeian poets with their favorite material.[290] MSS. written in Venetian and Franco-Italian dialects before the middle of the fourteenth century attest to the popularity of these subordinate romances, and reveal an independent handling of the borrowed subject. In form they do not diverge widely from French originals. Yet there is one prominent characteristic which distinguishes the Italian _rifacimenti_. A Christian hero falls in love with a pagan heroine on pagan soil. His pursuit of her, their difficulties and adventures, and the evangelization of her people by the knightly lover, furnish a series of incidents which recur with singular persistence.[291] When the romances in question had been translated into Tuscan, a destiny of special splendor was reserved for two of them, in no way distinguished by any apparent merit above the rest. These were the tales of Buovo d'Antona, of which we possess an early version in octave stanzas, and of Fioravante, which exists in still older prose. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the _Buovo_ and the _Fioravante_, together with other material drawn from the Carolingian epic, were combined into the great prose work called _I Reali di Francia_.[292] Since its first appearance to the present day, this romance has never ceased to be the most widely popular of all books written in Italian. "There is nothing,"

says Signor Rajna, "so a.s.siduously read from the Alps to the furthest headlands of Sicily. Wherever a reader exists, there is it certain to be found in honor."[293] Not the earliest but the latest product of a long elaboration of romantic matter by the people, it seems to have a.s.similated the very essence of the popular imagination. When we inquire into its authorship, we find good reason to ascribe it to Andrea dei Mangalotti of Barberino in the Val d'Elsa, one of the best and most indefatigable workmen for the literary market of the proletariate.[294]

It was he who compiled the _Aspromonte_, the _Aiolfo_, the seven books of _Storie Nerbonesi_, the _Ugone d'Avernia_, and the _Guerino il Meschino_, reducing these tales from elder poems and prose sources into Tuscan of sterling lucidity and vigor, and attempting, it would seem, to embrace the whole Carolingian cycle in a series of episodical romances.[295] _Guerino il Meschino_ rivaled for a while the _Reali_ in popularity; but for some unknown reason, which would have to be sought in the instinctive partialities of the people, it was gradually superseded by the latter. The _Reali_ alone has descended in its original form through the press to this century.[296]

Andrea da Barberino, if we are right in ascribing the _Reali_ to his pen, conferred a benefit on the Italians parallel to that which the English owed to Sir Thomas Mallory in his "Mort d'Arthur." He not only collected and condensed the scattered tales of numerous unknown predecessors, but he also bequeathed to the nation a monument of unaffected prose at a moment when the language was still ingenuous and plastic. It would be not uninteresting to compare the fate of the _Reali_ with that of our own "Mort d'Arthur." The latter was the more artistic performance of the two. It achieved a truer epical unity, and was composed in a richer, more romantic style. The former remained episodical and incomplete; and its language, though solid and efficient, lacked the charm of Mallory's all golden prose. Yet the _Reali_ is still a household cla.s.sic. It is found in every _contadino's_ cottage, and supplies the peasantry with subjects for their _Maggi_. The "Mort d'Arthur," on the contrary, has become the plaything of medievalizing folk in modern England. Read for its unique beauty by students, it is still unknown to the people, and, in the opinion of the dull majority, it is reckoned inferior to Tennyson's smooth imitations.

When we come to consider the romantic poems of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, we shall be able to estimate the service rendered by men like Andrea da Barberino to polite Italian literature. The popularity of the cycle to which the _Reali_ belonged, decided the choice of the Carolingian epic by the poets of Florence and Ferrara. Nor were the above-mentioned romances by any means the only works of their kind produced for a plebeian audience in the _quattrocento_. It is enough to mention _La Regina Ancroja_, _La Spagna_, _Trebisonda con la Vita e Morte di Rinaldo_. Both in prose and verse an abundant literature of the kind was manufactured. Without being positively burlesqued, the heroes of chivalrous story were travestied to suit the taste of artisans and burghers. The element of the marvelous was surcharged; comic and pathetic episodes were multiplied; beneath the armor of the Paladins Italian characters were subst.i.tuted with spontaneous malice for the obsolete ideals of feudalism. It only needed a touch of conscious irony to convert the material thus elaborated by the people into the airy fabric of Ariosto's art. At the same time the form which the epic of romance was destined to a.s.sume, had been determined. The streets and squares of town and village rang with the chants of improvisatori, turning the prose periods of Andrea da Barberino and his predecessors into wordy octave stanzas, rehandling ancient _Chansons de Geste_, and adapting the mannerism of chivalrous minstrelsy to the requirements of a subtle-witted Tuscan crowd. The old-fashioned invocations of G.o.d, Madonna, or some saint were preserved at the beginning of each canto, while the audience received their _conge_ from the author at its close.

When the poems thus produced were committed to writing, the plebeian author feigned at least the inspiration of a bard.

While the traditions of medieval song were thus preserved, the prose-romances followed, as closely as possible, the style of a chronicle, and aimed at the verisimilitude of authentic history. The _Reali_, for example, opens with this sentence: "Fuvvi in Roma un santo pastore della Chiesa, che aveva nome papa Silvestro." The _Fioravante_, recently edited by Signor Rajna, begins: "Nel tempo che Gostantino imperadore regiea & mantenea corte in Roma grandissima." This parade of historic seriousness, observed by the subsequent romantic poets, contributed in no small measure to the irony at which they aimed. But with the story-tellers of the _quattrocento_ it was no mere affectation.

Like their predecessors of the fourteenth century, they treated legend from the standpoint of experience. It was due in no small measure to this circ.u.mstance that the Italian prose-romances are devoid of charm.

Nowhere do we find in them that magic touch of poetry which makes the forests, seas and castles of the "Mort d'Arthur" enchanted ground.

Notwithstanding all their extravagances, they remain positive in spirit, presenting the material of fancy in the sober garb of fact. The Italian genius lacked a something of imaginative potency possessed in overflowing measure by the Northern nations. It required the stimulus of satire, the infusion of idyllic sentiment, the consciousness of art, to raise the romantic epic to the height it reached in Ariosto. Then, and not till then, when the matter of the legend had become the sport of the aesthetic sense, were the inexhaustible riches of Italian fancy, dealing delicately and humorously with a subject which could no longer be apprehended seriously, revealed to the world in a masterpiece of beauty.

But that work of consummate art was what it was, by reason of the master's wise employment of a style transmitted to him through generations of plebeian predecessors.

The same positive and workmanly method is discernible in the versified _novelle_ of this period.[297] The popular poets were wont to recast tales from the Decameron and other sources in octave stanzas. Of such compositions we have excellent specimens in Girolamo Benivieni's version of the novel of Tancredi, and in an anonymous rhymed paraphrase of Patient Grizzel.[298] The latter is especially interesting when we compare it with the series of panels attributed to Pinturicchio in the National Gallery, where a painter of the same period has exercised his fancy in ill.u.s.trating the legend which the poet versified. Detached episodes of semi-mythical Florentine history were similarly treated.

Allusion has already been made to the love-tale of Ippolito and Leonora, attributed on doubtful grounds to Alberti.[299] But by far the most beautiful is the story of Ginevra degli Almieri, told in octave stanzas by Agostino Velletti.[300] This poem has rare value as a genuine product of the plebeian muse. The heroine Ginevra's father was a pork-butcher, says the minstrel, and lived in the Marcato Vecchio, where he carried on the best business of the sort in Florence. It is also important for students of comparative literature, because it clearly ill.u.s.trates the difference between Italian and Northern treatment of an all but contemporary incident. The events narrated are supposed to have really happened in the year 1396. On the Scotch Border they would have furnished materials for a ballad similar to Gil Morrice or Clerk Saunders. In Florence they take the form of a _novella_, and the _novella_ is expanded in octave stanzas.[301] Ginevra had two lovers, Antonio de' Rondinelli and Francesco degli Agolanti. Antonio loved her the more tenderly; but her parents gave her in marriage to Francesco.

Soon after the ceremony, she sickened and fell into a trance; and since Florence was then threatened with the plague, the girl was buried over-hastily in this deep slumber. Her weeping parents laid her in a cippus or _avello_ between the two doors of S. Reparata, where the workmen, unable to finish their job before sunset, left the lid of her sepulcher unsoldered. In the middle of the night Ginevra woke, and discovered to her horror that she had been sent to the grave alive.

Happily the moon was shining, and a ray of light fell through a c.h.i.n.k upon her bier. She arose, wrapped her shroud around her, and struggled from her marble chest into the silent cathedral square. Giotto's bell tower rose above her, silvery and beautiful, and slender in the moonlight. Like a ghost, sheeted in her grave-clothes, Ginevra ran through the streets, and knocked first at Francesco's door. He was seated awake by the fireside, sorrowing for his young bride's loss:

Andonne alla finestra e aprilla un poco: Chi e la? Chi batte? Io son la tua Ginevra; Non m'odi tu? Col suo parlar persevera.

Her husband doubts not that it is a spirit calling to him, bids her rest till ma.s.ses shall be said for her repose, and shuts the window. Then she turns to her mother's house. The mother, too, is sitting sorrowful by the hearth, when she is startled by Ginevra's cry:

E spaventata e piena di paura Disse: va in pace, anima benedetta, Bella figliuola mia, onesta e pura; E riserr la finestra con fretta.

Rejected by husband and mother, Ginevra next tries her uncle, and calls on him for succor in G.o.d's name:

Fugli risposto; anima benedetta, Va che Dio ti conservi in santa pace.

The poor wretch now feels that there is nothing left for her but to lie down on the pavement and die of cold. But while she is preparing herself for this fate, she bethinks her of Antonio. To his house she hurries, cries for aid, and falls exhausted on the doorstep. Then comes the finest touch in the poem. Antonio knows Ginevra's voice; and loving her so tenderly, he hurries with delight to greet her risen from the grave.