EARLY ITALIAN PROSE
Already, for half a century, Italian poetry had been cultivated with ardour and with success, and in Dante’s time there was scarcely a well-educated Florentine who could not at need rhyme a sonnet or write a short song in the vulgar tongue. It was not so easy to write in prose; for if the poet had a language and rules of style, there had not yet been a learned time for the prose writer; he had no fixed rules, the form in short which allows a writer to express his thought in the logical order necessary to convey all its shades of meaning, to show up its striking points, artistically to subordinate the less important or purely expletive parts. The poet, on the contrary, at his first attempt met with metrical forms, long adopted and practised in Provençal, a parent idiom, whose rules could, without any difficulty, be applied to Italian. He found moreover that the Provençal poetry, whose prosody he borrowed, had taken with slight differences the same subjects which he wished to sing in Italian; so that he found a poetical storehouse, if the expression may be allowed, of comparisons, epithets, connecting links, phrases, and permissible inversions.
It was not so with prose. The Italian language, which could without difficulty adopt the Provençal metrical system, found no prose developed which it could take as a model. Latin was the only perfect type which it could imitate; but the complete absence of any declension, the relatively limited number of conjunctions, the impossibility of freeing itself completely from analytical order, which it experienced in common with all modern languages, did not allow it to be modelled on Cicero, as poetry was modelled on Bertrand de Born or Sordello. To reach this point of perfection two or three more centuries were needed, during which deep thinkers and great artists moulded this refractory material.
It is true that the Latin historians, who were perfectly known, might have been taken as examples to be copied and even imitated; for these writers had treated the same kinds of subject which were again about to be attempted. However, there was one difference: ancient history, after all, was far distant, and the resemblance between the subjects was more apparent than real; or at least, if this resemblance really existed, men were too interested in the events to be able to judge them and compare them with others as coldly as we are accustomed to do. To sing the praises of his lady’s eyes, to express sentiments of fidelity or sadness, to paint chivalrous tournaments, it suffices to have read or to have listened to the Provençal troubadours, and the same words, with very few changes, can almost be transported from one language into the other. Imagine, on the other hand, a poor chronicler of the Middle Ages imitating Sallust or Titus Livius: could the vernacular furnish him with a single word to render those of his model—and the prose writer, accustomed to think in Latin, could he find in Italian a single expression equivalent to his thought? Whence could he have drawn that common fund of ideas and formulas which is so necessary to write a real history, however matter of fact, however little philosophic it might be? Even in order to relate facts, putting aside all thought of interest, one must have ideas.
But the difficulty was far greater when abstract subjects were treated. There is even some confusion in the beautiful prose of Dante’s Convito, and even in the scholastic digressions of The Divine Comedy, although at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Italian language was already far more developed than one hundred years before; and, to go no further, some idea of the extreme difficulty of such an enterprise may be found by calling to mind the obstacles which had to be overcome by the first French and German philosophers who had the courage and self-denial to expose in their mother-tongues (which were then nearly formed) ideas reasoned in Latin; for a certain effort is needed to follow the French and German writings of Descartes and Wolff, while their Latin works present no difficulty. Therefore, besides the general and constant causes for the priority of poetry to prose, there was in Italy a special cause which contributed to develop poetry first in the vulgar tongue; this cause was the existence of Provençal poetry, already flourishing and cultivated.
A fact common alike to the literary history of Italy and to that of all other nations is that the first attempts in prose were generally historical writings. In fact, among all primitive people we see that the first use they made of free speech was to decompose the epic poems, to give the importance of historical tradition to stories of popular imagination. Thus we see the Ionian chroniclers, up to Herodotus, add the history of contemporary events to the deeds of heroes of fable, just as the first Florentine chroniclers, till Villani, trace back the origin of their native town and its early history to Roman names whose traditions were doubtless retained in the popular poems prior to the Provençal school which reigned in Italy towards the middle of the fourteenth century, and relate, without metre or rhythm, what the Florentine woman of the time of Frederick Barbarossa sang, seated at her spindle:
“Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
De’ Trojani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.”
—Dante.
However this may be, it was only about this time that the use of the vernacular spread little by little; that public treaties and commercial correspondence began to be written in this language, and the public already preferred to read in the Italian language stories and other works written originally in Latin or sometimes in Provençal. But these writings can scarcely be considered literary works; they cannot, therefore, be taken as the starting-point of a history of Italian prose.
Just as the first Italian poems had been written in Sicilian dialect, soon replaced by the Tuscan dialect, so the first somewhat important and truly literary work in Italian prose was written in Sicilian dialect, while nearly all the prose writers of the following period were Tuscans; and this fact is sufficiently explained by the general history of Italy in the thirteenth century.
While Florence and all the centre of the peninsula were in a state of civil war, or painfully working to attain an independent municipal life, Naples, the home of the Hohenstaufens and the capital of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was enjoying profound peace, royal luxury, great freedom of thought, and all the refinements of life, in the midst of institutions which may be considered perfect for their time. Queen Constanza had already granted special protection to the Provençal poets, and her son, Frederick II, only placed above the troubadours of the south of France the learned philosophers of Baghdad and Cordova, as if the great man only believed himself understood or appreciated by those whose glance was not troubled by religious, political, or local passions. The influence of this brilliant court, which united taste for science with frivolity, where serious discussions on law and philosophy alternated with the gay Provençal wisdom, and where displays of chivalry and love songs diverted the greatest statesmen of the Middle Ages after the fatigues or annoyances of politics, this preponderant influence made the Sicilian nation for a time the chief actor in the history of Italy, and their language the dominant organ of the rising literature; and it is not surprising that the first great work in Italian prose was written in the dialect made popular by the beautiful songs of the emperor Frederick II and his famous chancellor Pietro delle Vigne, King Enzio, and the brave Manfred, his half-brother.
Matteo Spinelli, the contemporary of these poets of noble birth, has left a chronicle under the very characteristic title “journal,” which enables us to judge at once what Italian prose was at that period. If we quote this work of Spinelli’s first, it is not because we are unaware of the numerous and often vague attempts which preceded him; but all previous writings may be considered as uncertain groping. The language of these works is not even completely Italian yet, and the true modern idiom has been considered to rise in all its individuality in the poems of Ciullo d’Alcamo and in the Journals of Spinelli. Moreover, the work of the Sicilian chronicler (although, as its name seems to indicate, it was a diary scarcely intended for publication) offers by its very extent more ample matter for literary and philological study than certain inscriptions, deeds, laws, decrees, and other documents of similar nature.
San Martino, Naples
We do not mean to say that the Journals have nothing Latin about them, or that they are written in pure Italian or Sicilian. Latin words, even phrases, which recall the customs of a dead language, are frequently found in the midst of a speech in all other respects purely Italian; but these souvenirs are always isolated, and do not alter the general character of the tongue, which is essentially Sicilian. But what distinguishes the style of this delightful teller of stories is not only the sweetness characteristic of the dialect he employed, but also a certain carelessness, a certain freedom in the construction of his sentences. In the first prose writer of a language one certainly does not expect Ciceronian periods; it appears perfectly natural that all his sentences should be co-ordinate, instead of being subordinate to one another, and that he should simply join his propositions by copulative conjunctions, instead of arranging them in incidental phrases; but with Spinelli, we simply find conversational language, and nothing more; that is to say, his style is wanting in clearness. He writes as he would have spoken to an attentive audience, with all the assistance to be derived from gesture, intonation, and expressive glance. This conversational style, applied to written works of great length, is often unintelligible unless interpreted by a clever reader, who recites it as an actor recites his rôle in a comedy. In the end it becomes wearisome by the very fact that the necessary explanation, which recitation would give, is wanting. But, on the other hand, there is an animation which the finest art could not produce—each word, each expression creates a picture. One might be listening to a loquacious barber, on the lookout for the gossip of the day, serving up hot the talk of the town.
This is Spinelli’s specialty; he must not be looked on as a historian, not even a political chronicler, but as a teller of stories, often amusing, nearly always animated. The events of contemporary history are only mentioned incidentally in the midst of town and country gossip. But apart from the style and light shade of irony which form one of the charms of Boccaccio, Spinelli’s stories are not less wanting in interest than the stories of the Decameron. This is the great merit of the Journals; their historic value is almost worthless, and, on account of serious errors (chiefly those of chronology), they become dangerous guides for the reader who takes them seriously and refers to them for information on the period and country in which Spinelli lived. There is a great difference to be seen when one passes from this expansive and unpretentious gossip to professional men of letters, to the somewhat pedantic orators of Florence, from the neglected Sicilian dialect to the already majestic and developed language of Tuscany.
The study of rhetoric was first cultivated in Florence, and we see, by Dante’s education, the importance attached to this branch of knowledge. However, the earliest rhetoricians, such as Buoncompagni and Guidotto of Bologna, seldom employed the vernacular. The honour of fixing, so to say, the Tuscan dialect, of raising the Italian patois to the rank which Latin had occupied exclusively till then, belongs to Brunetto Latini, of whom Villani tells us that he was “the first to polish the Florentines,” and to whom Dante, his pupil, raised a monument more durable than any other claim to immortality which the poor orator possessed: “You taught me how man can make himself immortal, and it is right that while I live my tongue should declare the gratitude which I feel.”[g]