Italian poetry

“ The history of Italian poetry confirms the truth, that the poet follows the real and the sublimest scope of art when he keeps in mind the character of his country and of his age. The highest Italian poetry is truly national. ”

“ In the history of Italian literature, Dante, to expand a figure already used, stands at the end of the Middle Ages like a lofty, solitary mountain peak; behind him the low, level plain fades away into darkness; before him the landscape, shone upon by the first rays of a new epoch, slopes gradually upward until with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the great writers of the Renaissance, we have a lofty and widely extended plateau. ”

“ To the liberality of their patrons these poets owed not only the leisure and freedom from the ordinary cares of life56, which allowed them to give all their thought and the unimpaired freshness of their genius to their art, but the opportunity of enjoying under the most favourable circumstances that source of happiness and inspiration which has given its most distinctive charm to their poetry—the beauty of Italian Nature. ”

“ More extraordinary works than the Vita Nuova have been composed at even an earlier age, but there is perhaps no other book in the world in which a young man appears as asserting by his first attempt so unchallenged a superiority over predecessors and contemporaries, with whom he has nevertheless much in common. The evolution of Italian poetry has up to this point proceeded gradually and systematically; all of a sudden it makes a bound, and seems as it were to have sprung across a chasm. The prose is of more equable desert than the interspersed poetry, some of which is inferior ”

“ One who has not been abroad—I might almost say, who has not lived abroad—cannot realize how much art takes hold of the imagination of a people, and enters into their very life. It is the form in which Italian genius has most often expressed itself. What poetry is in some countries, art is in Italy. England had great poets in the days of Elizabeth, but no great painters, at a time when the churches and galleries of Italy were illuminated by the genius of Raphael and Titian and Leonardo da Vinci. ”

“ In this History of Italian Literature I have endeavoured, to the best of my ability, to trace its progress and development. That it has progressed, cannot, I think, be denied. Poetry has freed itself from conventionality. Prose has given birth to works which former ages could not even have conceived. ”

“ The asceticism of the Middle Ages now gives way to intense delight in the life that now is. The artist and poet sought to represent the pomp and circumstance of life, man in his physical and intellectual power, woman in her beauty, nature in all its picturesque variety, art in its magnificence. This was the ideal followed by Ariosto; this was the ideal of the Italian Renaissance. ”

“ Every sonnet has its own unity, and is not, it might be pleaded, to be charged with tediousness or monotony, because the same structure of verse, or even the same general sentiment, may recur in an equally independent production. Even collectively taken, the minor Italian poetry of the sixteenth century may be deemed a great repertory of beautiful language, of sentiments and images, that none but minds finely tuned by nature produce, and that will ever be dear to congenial readers, presented to us with exquisite felicity and grace, and sometimes with an original and impressive vigour. ”

“ The second great age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind.{306} The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery, are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with. ”

“ This deprived Italian art of that sublimity which needs a grain of the grotesque for its perfection, a touch of the uncouth for its accomplishment. The instinct of poets and artists alike induced them to bring mystery within the sphere of definition, to limit the marvelous by reducing it to actual conditions, and to impoverish the terrible by measuring its boundaries. But since every defect has its corresponding quality, this same instinct secured for the modern age a world of immaculate loveliness in art and undimmed joyousness in poetry. ”

“ Since the fall of the republic of Florence, poetry and eloquence, which ought to have waited on the changes and advancement of civilisation, and to have harmonised with the thoughts and manners of the country, failed to do so. Italian painting left no path untried so to arrive at perfection, and sought originality by a thousand different roads; while poets were afraid of novelty. This is not strange. The creations of genius and the inventions of the imagination are derived from, and depend on, the moral culture of the intellect, and this culture was shackled. ”

“ Italian poetry was not born in Rome or Paris or Toulouse, and the development of lyrical art in the thirteenth century was not the sudden cry of a voice which, like the voice of Virgil in Hell, through long silence had grown hoarse. All Italians sing—more or less melodiously—and there was singing in Italy long before the days of Frederick II, but the words ot the songs were not written down; they come to us as fragments quoted by Dante, by Villani, by the religious chroniclers. ”

“ The great memories of Rome weigh down their faculties of invention. It would also seem as though they shrank in their poetry from the representation of what is tragic and spirit-stirring. They incline to what is cheerful, brilliant, or pathetic. The dramatic element in human life, external to the personality of the poet, which exercised so strong a fascination over our ballad-bards and playwrights, has but little attraction for the Italian. When he sings, he seeks to express his own individual emotions—his love, his joy, his jealousy, his anger, his despair. ”

“ The sixteenth century, especially the first half, is the golden age of Italian literature, comparable to that of Augustus in Rome, Louis XIV. in France, and Queen Elizabeth in England. In the narrow confines of this sketch we have only been able to treat in some detail the great writers thereof, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. Yet the number of men of genius and talent is legion—giants indeed lived in those days—not only in the field of art and scholarship but in literature. ”

“ 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 general characteristics, however, of Italian poetry became a more masculine tone, a wider reach of topics, and a selection of the most noble, an abandonment, except in the lighter lyrics, of amatory strains, and especially of such as were languishing and querulous, an anticipation, in short, as far as the circumstances of the age would permit, of that severe and elevated style which has been most affected for the last fifty years. ”

“ His Autobiography gives us a vivid picture of the Italy of the Eighteenth Century, of its torpor and frivolity. He reveals himself with a complete absence of reserve, and his Life is the only work in which he gives us vivid descriptions, all his other productions being rather colourless from the lack of descriptions.
Want of colour is, indeed, the great defect of his poetry, as well as of his prose. He had little eye for the beauties of Nature, and less for the beauties of Art. He has nothing of the sweetness of Metastasio; he has none of the exquisite details of Parini. ”

“ Persons ignorant of the usual course of literary history might expect in Italian a regular and unbroken development, literary as well as linguistic, of Latin. But, as a matter of fact, the earliest vernacular literature in Italy shows very little trace of classical influence [187] : and though that influence appears strongly in the age immediately succeeding ours, and helps to produce the greatest achievements of the language, it may be questioned whether its results were wholly beneficial. In the earliest Italian, or rather Sicilian, poetry quite different influences are perceptible. ”

“ In Italy, especially, though we can even here dispense with one component part of elevation of character,—age, we must have all the others: we must have high feeling, beauty of form, and depth of effect, or the thing will be a barbarism; the inhabitant must be an Italian, full of imagination and emotion: a villa inhabited by an Englishman, no matter how close its imitation of others, will always be preposterous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With marvellous versatility he essayed history, politics, moral and speculative philosophy, biography, philology, criticism and poetry, distinguishing himself in all without producing great or enduring work in any. His greatest distinction, perhaps, was attained as an Italian grammarian and lexicographer; but as a critic he wielded great authority, and powerfully contributed to the development of literature. He was essentially the man of his own times, and seemed to resume their various aspects in himself, a sound Catholic and an ardent liberal; a classicist and a romanticist ”

“ These old chansons de geste, however, in coming to Italy, lost much of their original significance. The spirit and ideals could scarcely be understood by the Italians, to whom feudal society was largely unknown. What they liked in the French romances was not religious or patriotic sentiments, but adventures and the wonderful deeds of the heroes. ”

“ Except in the unfinished fronts of the churches, which, however, unfortunately, are mere ugly blankness, one finds less of the poetry of ancient over-use, or in other words less romantic southern shabbiness, than in most Italian cities. At two or three points, none the less, this sinister grace exists in perfection—just such perfection as so often proves that what is literally hideous may be constructively delightful and what is intrinsically tragic play on the finest chords of appreciation. ”

“ It dies to live with thee.
Before we close this chapter we must say a word or two concerning another branch of early literature, whose influence is not great on Dante or his immediate successors, but which was destined to bloom forth later in a new kind of poetry, which has become the peculiar glory of Italy. ”

“ The first thing that strikes the attention of the student of Italian literature is its comparatively recent origin. In the north and south of France the Old French and Provençal languages had begun to develop a literature before the tenth century, which by the end of the twelfth had risen to a high degree of cultivation; indeed, by that time the Provençal had attained its highest point, and had already begun to decline. In Italy, however, we cannot trace the beginning of a literature, properly so-called, farther back than the thirteenth century. ”

“ In spite of the fact, however, that these monuments of early Italian increase from year to year, they were not numerous before the thirteenth century. The very scarcity of them shows the tenacity with which the people clung to the traditions of Rome, since not only literature, but even public and private documents were written in Latin. This literary tradition never wholly died out in Italy, even in the darkest days of her history. It is true that in the terrible disorders that accompanied the slow agony of dying Rome, a long period of darkness and ignorance occurred. ”

“ I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty. ”

“ Scarcely a single man of genius or even of talent, can be found in the period between 1580 and 1750. All literature was marked by lack of originality of thought and by a style deformed by execrable taste, a style which consisted of wretched conceits, puns, antithesis, and gorgeous and far-fetched metaphors. This form of literary diction was not confined, however, [Pg 339] to Italy, being represented in Spain by Gongora, in France by the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and in England by Lyly's Euphues. ”

“ The scholars of the time enjoyed an immense popularity. A new caste of society arose, not dependent on birth or wealth, but on learning and intelligence. Princes and cities sought for their services, for which they paid large sums. Everywhere they were received as equal to the noblest in the land. The movement reached its highest point in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the intellectual and artistic life of Italy was of almost incredible greatness. ”