Italian literature

“ Up to the present time this continuity appears to us unbroken, and we have been able to conceive, of the history of Italian literature as biography, not so much of individual writers as of a single fair spirit living through them all, which has moulded, animated, and laid aside all in their turn. Like other finite existences, this spirit has known infancy, adolescence, and maturity, and must one day know decay and death ”

“ THE FIRST DECLINE OF ITALIAN LITERATURE.—The passionate study of the ancients, of which Petrarch and Boccaccio had given an example, suspended the progress of Italian literature in the latter part of the fourteenth century, and through almost all the fifteenth. The attention of the literary men of this time was wholly engrossed by the study of the dead languages, and of manners, customs, and religious systems equally extinct. They present to our observation boundless erudition, a just spirit of criticism, and nice sensibility to the beauties and defects of the great authors of antiquity ”

“ Italian literature had sprung up from nothingness and made enormous progress during three-quarters of a century without having produced a poet of the first or even of the second rank. There was no want of singers ”

“ Defining Italian literature, therefore, so as to comprise whatsoever is written in any dialect of that "soft bastard Latin" which bears the Italian name, and to exclude all compositions in a language which a Roman would have called Latin, we find none among great literatures whose beginnings are more humble and obscure, or, which at first seems surprising, more recent. ”

“ From this period Italian literature, though still interesting in itself, becomes comparatively unimportant in its relation to general civilisation; it drops from the first place into the third, and every year widens the interval between the retrogressive and the progressive peoples. ”

“ The men of greatest genius and most prominent association with the national movement have been treated of in previous chapters, but the host of distinguished if less illustrious authors who must be briefly reviewed in this, was not less animated with patriotic feeling, and this pervading spirit imparts to the Italian literature of the period unity and dignity, and entitles it to a higher place in the general history of literature than could have been procured for it by the mere ability of its representatives. ”

“ Italian literature has been continuous, abundantly productive in every century, of unequal merit perhaps, but always affording enough of mark to give it standing, and presenting one name at least the peer of the greatest, and it is of this continuous succession of writings that the present history furnishes a view. ”

“ On the other hand, the devotion of the Italian writers to elegance and symmetry of composition has rendered their literature a model for cultured writers in all languages, has deeply influenced contemporary literatures in their rudimentary stages, and has preserved many a writer from oblivion whose original power was not conspicuous, whose themes have long since become antiquated, but who still challenges the attention of posterity by charm of style. ”

“ And when we look to creative literature, we find in this Third Italy, together with a profusion of those fungoid growths of which the modern age has in the West been everywhere prolific, a group of poets, of powerful temperament and dazzling gifts, to whom no predecessor, in Italy or elsewhere, offers more than a distant resemblance. One of these, after pouring forth poems, dramas, novels, in prodigal abundance for thirty years, became the most vociferous, and possibly the most potent, of the forces that drove Italy into the war, and was until lately the idol of the whole Italian race. ”

“ HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD PERIOD.—At the close of the seventeenth century, a new dawn arose in the history of Italian letters, and the general corruption which had extended to every branch of literature and paralyzed the Italian mind began to be arrested by the appearance of writers of better taste; the affectations of the Marinists and of the so-called Arcadian poets were banished from literature; science was elevated and its dominion extended, the melodrama, comedy, and tragedy recreated, and a new spirit infused into every branch of composition. ”

“ We cannot stay to dwell upon the effect of the Humanists and all they stood for, good and evil, in Italian Art and Letters. We pass on, now, from Petrarch and the influence the movement had on Italian literature, to its effect on Italian Art. ”

“ Not much need be said in this place of the last great factor in the literary metamorphosis to which Italy, in common with the rest of Europe, had to conform herself. The Revolution modified literature by altering the environment of men of letters, supplying them with themes and ideas which could not otherwise have come within their scope, and inspiring them with vehement passions according as their circumstances and temperaments led them to champion the new gospel or rally to the ancient traditions. ”

“ The next great development of taste by which Italian literature came to be modified was one with which the Italian temperament has naturally so little sympathy that, the influence which it exercised and continues to exercise must be regarded as a strong proof of the susceptibility of Italy to all great currents affecting intellectual Europe. ”

“ Contemporaneously with this development of moral and economical science, another active movement went on which created far more agitation among Italian literati, and which, if it scarcely enriched the national literature with a single work of merit, at all events kept up the tradition of poetry. ”

“ We are inclined to wish that the Italian writers had explored greater heights and depths of thinking and feeling, and had grappled more closely with matters of high seriousness. We find them enlarging, elaborating, and polishing tales of romance and adventure, or scenes of beauty and romantic life. We find them revelling in descriptions, and yet, all the time, ironically playing with the very unrealities of that which they describe, often plainly hinting to us not to take the matter too seriously. ”

“ Though Latin prose-literature had yet to be enriched by some of its greatest and most original works, yet neither the glory of the Empire, the charm of the Italian life, nor the vivifying ideas and creations of Greek genius were ever again able to revive the genuine poetical inspiration which ancient Italy once, and once only, enjoyed in abundant measure. ”

“ Fortunately for Italy, the Arcadia was a very popular book; fortunately, too, the Latin constructions with which it is replete were not so easily imitated as its general refinement of phrase. By the time of Leo X. inelegance had almost disappeared from Italian literature, and Italy might boast herself the only country in Europe that possessed a perfect literary language; wanting, indeed, the golden simplicity of the thirteenth century, but still the prose of cultivated men, and adequate for every form of literary composition. ”

“ Among the foremost Italian scholars were many exemplars of worthy life and noble character, men whose enthusiasm for letters was joined to moral qualities which compel respect and admiration. And no transient phase of fashionable paganism could mar the distinctive merits of the Italian Renaissance, or affect its permanent results. Italian humanism restored good standards of style in prose and verse, thereby benefiting not classical studies alone, but modern literature as well ”

“ As representatives of this struggle, of this antagonism, we may consider Luigi Marsilio and Coluccio Salutati, both learned men who spoke and wrote Latin, who aspired to be humanists, but who meanwhile also loved Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and felt and celebrated in their writings the beauty of Italian literature.
3. The Renaissance.—A great intellectual movement, which had been gathering for a long time, made itself felt in Italy in the 15th century. A number of men arose, all learned, laborious, indefatigable, and all intent on one great work. ”

“ They seem to regard literature and belles lettres as convertible terms, and take no notice of the wider and more important domains of history, biography, philosophy, moral and economic science, which may be and often have been in the most flourishing condition while belles lettres languish. It is, indeed, much to be wished that more of the literary talent of Italy were directed to solid and permanent work, and less to fiction, which must be ephemeral in proportion to the very fidelity with which it fulfils its ordinary task of depicting the manners of the day. ”

“ The number of books which may be usefully consulted on various points of Italian literature is very considerable. Only the most important can be named here, and those for the most part such as are written in English or Italian, and fall strictly under the heads of literary history or bibliography, or standard editions with indispensable commentaries. ”

“ Boccaccio died in 1375, and the Italian literature of Italy practically stood still. This was the age of the [198] revival of learning, when the Latin and Greek classics, and at first particularly the Latin classics, were engaging the attention of every man who pretended to scholarship and taste, and when men of letters, instead of perfecting their own tongue and enriching it with works full of modern manners and modern thoughts, were engaged in a servile imitation of the ancient writers of Rome, especially Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, and Seneca. ”

“ The beauty of the Italian landscape and the softness of the Italian climate seem naturally fitted to dispose the poetic soul to the dreams of rural life, and the language seems, by its graceful simplicity, peculiarly adapted to express the feelings of a class of people whom we picture to ourselves as ingenuous and infantine in their natures. ”

“ Hence is it that the fifteenth century, so signalised by the diffusion of knowledge, and the advance of the fine arts, has bequeathed to us fewer eminent writers than those which immediately preceded and followed it, and that during its course Italian literature was unquestionably retrograde. ”

“ When poetry first assumed a form in the Peninsula, Europe was still, if not in a barbarous state, at least in the very infancy of civilisation; and Italy alone, among European nations, taught arts, science, and letters. The character of the youth of modern European civilisation, with all its defects and all its charms, is indelibly impressed on the literature of that age. The poetry of the first great Italian poets sprang from the complicated feelings which a new æra awoke in them. When you read their best productions, you feel that they are animated by the energy proper to the young ”

“ The world with masters is so covered o'er.
There is no room for pupils any more."
—Rossetti. But the great poet was about to arise who may almost be said to have created two literatures—his country's and that specially devoted to himself—and whose own works are such, that if every other production of Italian literature were to perish, it would, on their account alone, continue to deserve a place among the great literatures of the world. ”

“ In characterising the original authors, apart from critics and commentators, whom Italy produced during the first half of the fifteenth century, we have omitted the men who really exerted the most important influence upon literature. These form a group by themselves—not one of Italian authors, for they rarely wrote in the vernacular ”

“ It should be the task of the cultivators of every literature to ascertain what course this literature has instinctively shaped for itself; what are the dominant ideas which have determined the course of its development. In Italy, from the first lyrists down to Carducci, from the first prose writers down to D'Annunzio, the guiding principle would seem to have been the love of perfect form and artistic finish, liable, like all other meritorious tendencies, to abuse, when its too exclusive pursuit has cramped originality; to aberration, when writers, remembering the end, have mistaken the means ”

“ What I finally perceived was that his poem came through him from the heart of Italian life, such as it was in his time, and that whatever it teaches, his poem expresses that life, in all its splendor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, its love and its hate.
Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of it, but at the end of the ends the "Divine Comedy" will stand for the patriotism of medieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound and lofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned. ”

“ The influence of the novel in the modern sense grows, and will continue to grow; but there is still abundant room for the short and simple story, the consistent development of a single incident or situation, compensating in art for what it lacks in variety, yet, now that human life has become so much richer and more complex than of old, at a further remove from mere anecdote than seemed necessary for its Italian prototype. ”

“ The author holds that the Italian is realistic rather than romantic and his modern literature is characterized by fidelity to life and the intellectualization of its themes rather than by emotionalism. Even romanticism contained the germs of the modern movement and an increasingly intelligent public demands more and more discussion and solution of vital questions and urgent problems. ”