III.
One prominent feature of this transitional epoch was the reappearance of popular forms of art and literature in Italy. The Italian provinces had retained their local characteristics with undiminished vitality through centuries of civic conflict and the dominance of humanistic culture. Now that this culture was decaying, each district and each city contributed some novelty of its own local vintage. Things which had been overgrown and screened by scholarship put forth their native vigour. A rich jungle of dialectical poetry sprouted from long-hidden roots. Men of birth and breeding began to pique themselves upon the use of their provincial language. A polite public, tired perhaps of too much polish, yielded to the charm of realism. The habits of the peasantry and artisans were transmitted to writing by educated pens. Scenic representations of a simple character, which had formed the delight of villagers from time immemorial, claimed the attention of learned coteries. Farces and morris-dances became fashionable. The buffoons and mimes and masquers, against whom the Church had fulminated in the Middle Ages, and whom the scholars of the Revival looked down upon with condescending indulgence, now lifted up their heads. Suddenly, by an imperceptible process of development, which it is impossible to trace in all its stages, Italy found herself in possession of what looked like a novel type of comedy. This improvised comedy, or Commedia dell' Arte, as we must henceforth call it, was not really new.[20] On the contrary, the elements out of which it sprang were among the oldest, most vital, most national possessions of the race. Yet it was due to the peculiar conditions of the last years of the Renaissance, to the reaction against exhausted forms of artificial literature, and to the fresh interest in dialects, that this hitherto neglected plaything of the proletariate assumed a rare and bizarre shape of beauty. The Italians, still capable of exquisite artistic creation, had just now lost their liking for the Commedia Erudita. Public theatres were beginning to be built. These naturally introduced a more popular tone into the drama. Spectacles were adapted to the taste of a mixed audience. Improvised comedy succeeded to the heritage of written comedy. This younger daughter of Thalia invested the motley characters and masks of her invention with the cast-off mantle of her elder sister. She entered the sphere of the fine arts by continuing the tradition of Italian comedy upon an altered system, and with novel elements of humour.
To talk of younger and elder with reference to these two types of comedy involves some confusion of ideas. Nothing is more significant of Italy than the antiquity and complexity of all the forms of art which flourished there. The Commedia Erudita, as we have seen, was derived from Latin, and through Latin from Athenian sources. The Commedia dell' Arte had an even longer pedigree than this. In a powerfully mimetic race like the Italians, the rudiments out of which it was constructed were, as we shall see, indigenous. Before Rome rose upon the Tiber, the comedy of masks and improvisation had, in some shape or other, amused the people. The fall of the Empire, the formation of the Christian polity, the centuries of the Middle Ages, the culture of the Renaissance, did not extirpate it. Though we know but little of its history during that long period, there is every reason to believe that the elements which gave it individuality survived all changes. To this topic I shall have to return. For the present, it is enough to point out that the blending of the vulgar improvised comedy of vintage festivals and market-places with what remained of polite written comedy after the middle of the sixteenth century, determined the Commedia dell' Arte, considered as a specific and strongly marked type of dramatic art. In this sense, and in this sense only, it may be denominated the younger sister of the Commedia Erudita.