SISMONDI’S LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH
Vol. xxv.] [June 1815.
This is another great work from the pen of the celebrated historian of the Italian Republics: though we think it written, on the whole, with less force and spirit than that admirable history. The excellent author has visibly less enthusiasm as a critic than as a politician; and therefore he interests us less in that character, and at the same time inspires us rather with less than greater confidence in the accuracy of his opinions; for there can be no real love of liberty, or admiration of genius, where there is no enthusiasm—and no one who does not love them, will ever submit to the labour of a full and fair investigation of their history and concerns. A cold, calculating indifference in matters of taste, is generally the effect of want of feeling; as affected moderation in politics is (nine times out of ten) a cloak for want of principle. Notwithstanding the very great pleasure we have received from the work before us, we should have been still more gratified, therefore, if the author had himself appeared more delighted with his task, and consequently imparted to it a more decided and original character. In his Republics, he describes events and characters in the history of modern Italy with the genuine feelings of an enlightened reasoner, indignant at the wrongs, the vices, and the degradation of the country of his ancestors: In judging of its literature, he too often borrows French rules and German systems of criticism. His practical taste and speculative principles do not, therefore, always coincide; and, regarding this work on Literature as an appendage to his History, it is impossible not to observe, that he is glad, upon all occasions, to slide into his old and favourite subject; to pass from the professor’s chair into the rostrum; and to connect, in glowing terms, the rise or fall of letters with the political independence or debasement of the states in which they flourished or decayed.
If we were to hazard any other preliminary remark of a general character, it should be, that the author appears to have a more intimate acquaintance with, and a great predilection for, the more modern and immediately popular writers of Italy, than for those who appear to us objects of greater curiosity and admiration. Thus, he dismisses Dante, Petrarca and Boccacio, in fewer pages than he devotes to Metastasio alone—an author whose chief merit he himself defines to be, the happy adaptation of his pieces to the musical recitative of the opera, and which, therefore, in a literary point of view, must be comparatively uninteresting. Again, Ariosto makes, in his hands, a very slender appearance by the side of Tasso—an appearance by no means proportioned to the size of the men, or to the interest which is felt in them, or to the scope for criticism in their different works. The account of the two modern Italian dramatists, Alfieri and Goldoni, though given much at length, is not certainly liable to the same kind of objection, as the information with respect to them is valuable from its novelty.
The present volumes contain a general view of the literature of the South of Modern Europe,—of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Provençal. The author proposes, in another work, to examine that of the North, particularly of England and Germany. The publication now before us was (we are informed in the preface) originally composed to be delivered to a class of young persons at Geneva: and this circumstance, while it has added to its value and comprehensiveness as a book of reference, has made it less entertaining to the general reader. A body of criticism, like a body of divinity, must contain a great deal of matter less pleasant than profitable in the perusal. In our account of it, we shall direct the reader’s attention to what most forcibly arrested our own—premising merely, that among the writers to whom M. Sismondi is forward to acknowledge his obligations, are, Professor Boutterwek on modern literature in general, Millot’s history of the Troubadours, Tiraboschi and M. Guiguené on the Italian literature, Velasquez on the Spanish and Portuguese, and William Schlegel for the dramatic literature of all these nations. It is to this last author that he seems to be indebted for a great part of his theoretical reasoning and conjectural criticism on the general principles of taste and the progress of human genius.
The first volume commences with an account of the Provençal poetry, which is by no means the least interesting or curious part of this extensive and elaborate work. We shall endeavour to give some general idea of it to our readers. The language which prevailed in all the South of Europe, after the destruction of the Roman empire, was a barbarous mixture of Latin with the different languages of the Northern invaders. It was in the south of France that this language first took a consistent form, and became the vehicle of a gay and original poetry. The causes which contributed to invest it with this distinction, were, according to M. Sismondi, 1. The comparative exemption of the Francs from perpetual successive inroads of barbarous conquerors; and, 2. The collateral influence of the Moorish or Arabian literature, through the connection between the kingdoms of Spain and Provence. The description given by the author of the Arabian literature, which ‘rose like an exhalation,’ and disappeared almost as soon, is splendid in the extreme. In a hundred and fifty years, human genius is said to have produced more prodigies in that prolific region, than it has done in the history of ages in all the world besides. Arts and sciences had their birth, maturity and perfection;—almost all the great modern discoveries (as they have been considered) were anticipated, and again forgotten,—paper, printing, the mariner’s compass, glass, gunpowder, &c. In the exercise of fancy and invention, they infinitely surpassed all former or succeeding ages. As an instance of the prodigious scale on which these matters were conducted in the East, and of the colossal size to which their literature had swelled in all its branches, it is stated that the Thousand and One Stories forming the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, constitute only a six-and-thirtieth part of the original collection. We suspect that there is some exaggeration in all this; though the brilliant theories of our author have, no doubt, very considerable foundation in fact. We hope there is none for the eloquent, but melancholy, reflections he makes on the sudden disappearance of so much intellectual magnificence from the face of the earth.
‘Such,’ he says, ‘was the lustre with which literature and sciences shone forth from the ninth to the fourteenth century of our era, in the vast regions which were subjected to Mahometism. The most melancholy reflections are attached to the long enumeration of names unknown to us, and which were nevertheless illustrious,—of works buried in manuscript in some dusty repositories—which yet for a time had a powerful influence on the culture of the human mind. What remains then of so much glory? Five or six persons only can visit the treasures of Arabian manuscripts shut up in the library of the Escurial; and some few hundreds besides, scattered over all Europe, have qualified themselves, by obstinate labour, to dig in the mines of the East—but these persons can only obtain, with the utmost difficulty, some rare and obscure manuscripts, and cannot raise themselves high enough to form a judgment on the whole of a literature of which they never attain but a part. Meantime, the extended regions where Mahometism reigned, and still reigns, are dead to all the sciences. Those rich plains of Fez and Morocco, illumined five centuries ago by so many academies, so many universities, and so many libraries, are now nothing but deserts of burning sand, for which tyrants dispute with tigers. All the gay and fertile shore of Mauritania, where commerce, the arts, and agriculture had been raised to the highest prosperity, are now the nests of pirates, who spread terror on the seas, and who relax from their labour in shameful debaucheries, till the plague, which returns yearly, comes to mark out its victims, and to avenge offended humanity. Egypt is nearly swallowed in the sands, which it once fertilized—Syria and Palestine are desolated by wandering Bedouins, less formidable, however, than the Pasha who oppresses them. Bagdad, formerly the abode of luxury, of power, and of knowledge, is ruined; the once celebrated universities of Cufa and Bassora are shut,—those of Samarcande and of Balch are also destroyed. In this immense extent of country, twice or three times as large as our Europe—nothing is found but ignorance, slavery, terror and death. Few of the inhabitants can read any of the writings of their illustrious forefathers;—few could comprehend them—none could procure them. The immense literary riches of the Arabs, of which we have given some glimpses, exist no more in any of the countries which the Arabs and Mussulmen rule.—It is not there that we must now seek either the renown of their great men or their writings. What has been saved of them, is entirely in the hands of their enemies—in the convents of the monks, or in the libraries of the Kings of Europe. And yet these countries have not been conquered. It is not the foreigner who has despoiled them of their wealth, wasted their population, destroyed their laws, their morals, and their national spirit. The poison was within them—it developed itself, and has annihilated all things.
‘Who knows if, some centuries hence, this same Europe, where the reign of literature and sciences is now transported—which shines with such lustre—which judges so well of times past—which compares so well the successive influence of antient literature and morals, may not be deserted, and wild as the hills of Mauritania, the sands of Egypt, and the vallies of Anatolia? Who knows whether, in a country entirely new, perhaps in the high lands where the Oronoko and the Amazon collect their streams, perhaps in the now impenetrable enclosure of the mountains of New Holland, there may not be formed nations with other morals, other languages, other thoughts, other religions,—nations who shall again renew the human kind, who shall study like ourselves the times past, and who, seeing with surprise that we have been, and have known what they shall know—that we have believed like them in durability and glory, shall pity our impotent efforts, and shall recal the names of Newton, of Racine, of Tasso, as examples of the vain struggles of man to attain an immortality of renown which fate denies him?’
The more immediate causes which gave birth to the poetry of the Provençals, and by consequence to all our modern literature, are afterwards detailed in the following passage, which is interesting both in point of fact, and as matter of speculation.
‘In Italy, at the time of the renovation of its language, each province, each small district, had a particular dialect. This great number of different patois, was owing to two causes; the great number of barbarous tribes with whom the Romans had successively been confounded by the frequent invasions of their country, and the great number of independent sovereignties which had been kept up there. Neither of those causes operated on the Gauls in the formation of the Romanesque. Three hordes established themselves there nearly at the same time,—the Visigoths, the Burgundians, and the Franks; and after the conquest of these last, no northern barbarians could again form a fixed establishment there, except the Normans, in a single province; no mixture of Germans, much less of the Sclavonians and Scythians, came again to produce a change in language and morals. The Gauls had then been employed in consolidating themselves into one nation, with one language, for four ages: during which Italy had been successively the prey of the Lombards, the Francs, the Hungarians, the Saracens, and the Germans. The birth of the Romanesque in Gaul, came thus to precede that of the Italian language. It was divided into two principal dialects:—the Provençal Romanesque, spoken in all the provinces to the south of the Loire, which had been originally conquered by the Visigoths and the Burgundians; and the Walloon Romanesque, in the provinces to the north of the Loire, where the Franks had the ascendant. The political divisions remained conformable to this first division of nations and languages. In spite of the independence of the great feudatories, northern France always formed one political body; the inhabitants of the different provinces met in the same national assemblies, and in the same armies. Southern France, on its side, after having been the inheritance of some of the successors of Charlemagne, had been raised, in 879, to the rank of an independent kingdom, by Bozon, who was crowned at Nantes, under the title of King of Arles or of Provence; and who subjected to his domination Provence, Dauphiny, Savoy, the Lyonese, and some counties of Burgundy. The title of kingdom gave place, in 943, to that of earldom, under Bozon II., without the dismemberment of Provence, or its separation from the House of Burgundy, of which Bozon I. had been the founder. This house was extinguished in 1092, in the person of Gillibert, who left two daughters only, between whom he divided his states. One, Faydide, married Alphonso, Count of Toulouse; and the other, Douce, married Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona. The union of Provence during two hundred and thirty years, under a line of princes who played no very brilliant part beyond their own territory, and who are almost forgotten by history, but who suffered no invasion; who, by a paternal administration, augmented the riches, and extended the population of the state, and favoured commerce, to which their maritime situation invited them, sufficed to consolidate the laws, the manners, and the language of the Provençals. It was at this epoch, but in a deep obscurity, that in the kingdom of Arles, the Provençal Romanesque took completely the place of the Latin. The latter was still made use of in the public acts; but the former, which was spoken universally, began also to be made use of in literature.
‘The succession of the Count of Barcelona, Raymond Berenger, to the sovereignty of Provence, gave a new turn to the national spirit, by the mixture of the Catalonians with the Provençals. Of the three Romanesque languages, which the Christian inhabitants of Spain then spoke, the Catalonian, the Castillian, and the Gallician, or Portuguese, the first was almost absolutely like the Provençal; and though it has since been much removed from it, especially in the kingdom of Valencia, it has always been called after the name of a French province. The people of the country call it Llemosin or Limousin. The Catalans, therefore, could make themselves well understood by the Provençals; and their intercourse at the same court served to polish the one language by means of the other. The first of these nations had already been much advanced, either by their wars and their intercourse with the Moors of Spain, or by the great activity of the commerce of Barcelona. This city enjoyed the most ample privileges: the citizens felt their freedom, and made their princes respect it,—at the same time that the wealth which they had acquired rendered the taxes more productive, and permitted the court of the Counts to display a magnificence unknown to other sovereigns. Raymond Berenger, and his successor, brought into Provence at once the spirit of liberty and chivalry, the taste of elegance and the arts, and the sciences of the Arabs. From this union of noble sentiments, arose the poetry which shone at the same time in Provence, and all the south of Europe, as if an electric spark had, in the midst of the thickest darkness, kindled at once in all quarters its brilliant radiance.
‘Chivalry arose with the Provençal poetry; it was in some sort the soul of every modern literature: and this character, so different from all that antiquity had known,—that invention, so rich in poetical effects, is the first subject for observation, which modern literary history presents us. We must not, however, confound feudalism with chivalry. Feudalism is the real world at this epoch—with its advantages and disadvantages, its virtues and its vices; chivalry is this world idealized, such as it has existed only in the invention of the romancers: its essential character is a devotion to woman, and an inviolable regard to honour; but the ideas which the poets manifested then, as to what constituted the perfection of a knight or a lady, were not entirely of their invention. They existed in the people, without perhaps being followed by them; and when they had acquired more consistence in their heroic songs, they reacted in their turn upon the people, among whom they originated, and thus approximated the real feudal system to the ideal notions of chivalry.
‘Without doubt, there can be few finer things than the bold and active kind of life which characterized the feudal times; than the independent existence of each nobleman in his castle; than the persuasion which he felt, that God alone was his judge and master; than that confidence in his own power which made him brave all opposition, and offer an inviolable asylum to the weak and unfortunate,—which made him share with his friends the only possessions which they valued, arms and horses,—and rely on himself alone for his liberty, his honour, and his life. But, at the same time, the vices of the human character had acquired a development proportioned to the vigour of men’s minds. Among the nobility, whom alone the laws seemed to protect, absolute power had produced its habitual effect,—an intoxication approaching to madness, and a ferocity of which later times afford no example. The tyranny of a baron, it is true, extended only a few leagues round his chateau, or the town which belonged to him: If any one could pass this boundary, he was safe; but, within these limits, in which he kept his vassals like herds of deer in a park, he gave himself up, in the plenitude of his power, to the wildest caprices; and subjected those who displeased him to the most frightful punishments. His vassals, who trembled before him, were degraded below the human species; and, in the whole of this class, there is hardly an instance of any individual displaying, in the course of ages, a single trait of greatness or virtue. Frankness and good faith, which are essentially the virtues of chivalry, are indeed, in general, the consequence of strength and courage; but, in order to render an adherence to them general, it is indispensable that punishment or shame should be attached to their violation. But the seignoral lords were placed in their chateaus above all fear; and opinion had no force in restraining men who did not feel the relations of social life. Accordingly, the history of the middle ages furnishes a greater number of scandalous perfidies than any other period. Lastly, the passion of love had, it is true, taken a new character, which was much the same in reality and in the poetry of the time. It was not more passionate or more tender than among the Greeks and Romans, but it was more respectful; something mysterious was joined to the sentiment. Some traces of that religious respect were preserved towards women, which the Germans felt towards their prophetesses. They were considered as a sort of angelic beings, rather than as dependants, submitted to the will of their masters: It was a point of honour to serve and to defend them, as if they were the organs of the divinity on earth; and at the same time there was joined to this deference, a warmth of sentiment, a turbulence of passions and desires, which the Germans had known little of, but which is characteristic of the people of the South, and of which they borrowed the expression from the Arabians. In our ideas of chivalry, love always retains this religious purity of character; but in the actual feudal system, the disorder was extreme; and the corruption of manners has left behind it traces more scandalous than in any other period of society. Neither the sirventes nor the canzos of the troubadours, nor the fables of the trouveres, nor the romances of chivalry, can be read without blushing: the gross licentiousness of the language is equalled only by the profound corruption of the characters, and the profligacy of the moral. In the South of France, in particular, peace, riches, and the example of courts, had introduced among the nobility an extreme dissipation: they might be said to live only for gallantry. The ladies, who did not appear in the world till after they were married, prided themselves in the homage which their lovers paid to their charms: they delighted in being celebrated by their troubadour: they answered in their turn, and expressed their sentiments in the most tender and passionate verses. They even instituted Courts of Love, where questions of gallantry were gravely debated, and decided by their suffrages. In short, they had given to the whole of the South of France the movement of a carnival, which contrasts singularly with the ideas of restraint, of virtue, and of modesty, which we connect with the good old times. The more we study history, the more we shall be convinced that chivalry is an almost purely poetical invention. We never can arrive by any authentic documents at the scene where it flourished: it is always represented at a distance, both in time and place. And while contemporary historians give us a distinct, detailed, complete idea of the vices of courts and of the great, of the ferocity or licentiousness of the nobles, and the degradation of the people; one is astonished to see, after a lapse of time, the same ages animated by the poets with fictitious and splendid accounts of virtue, beauty, and loyalty. The romancers of the twelfth century placed the age of chivalry in the reign of Charlemagne; Francis I. placed it in their time: We at present believe we see it flourishing in the persons of Du Guesclin and of Bayard, at the courts of Charles V. and Francis the I. But when we come to examine any of these periods, though we find some heroic characters in all of them, we are soon forced to confess that it is necessary to remove the age of chivalry three or four centuries before any kind of reality.’ p. 91.
This, we cannot help thinking, is a little hard on the good old times: though the specimens of their poetry, which are subjoined, go far to justify this severity. They certainly indicate neither refinement of sentiment, nor elevation of fancy. They are merely war or love-songs, relating to the personal feelings or situation of the individual who composed them. The Provençal poetry, indeed, is in a great measure lyrical; at least it is certain, that it is neither epic nor dramatic. The tensons were, indeed, a sort of eclogues, or disputes in verse, in which two or three persons maintained their favourite opinions on any given subject; and they appear to have been for the most part extemporaneous effusions. The following example will give some idea of the state of manners and literature at this period.
‘Several ladies who assisted at the Courts of Love, as they were called, used to reply themselves to the verses which their beauty inspired. There is left but a small portion of their compositions, but they have almost always the advantage over the troubadours. Poetry did not then aspire either to creative power, or to sublimity of thought, or to variety of imagery. Those powerful efforts of genius, which have given birth at a later period to dramatic and epic poetry, were then unknown; and in the simple expression of feeling, an inspiration, more tender and more delicate, would give to the poetry of women a more natural expression. One of the most pleasing of these compositions is by Clara d’Anduse: it is left unfinished: but, as far as a prose translation can convey the impression, which depends so much on the harmony of the metre, it is as follows.
‘“In what cruel trouble, in what profound sadness, jealous calumniators have plunged my heart! With what malice these perfidious destroyers of all pleasure have persecuted me! They have forced you to banish yourself from me, you whom I love more than life! They have robbed me of the happiness of seeing you, and of seeing you without ceasing! Ah, I shall die of grief and rage!
‘“But let calumny arm itself against me: the love with which you inspire me braves all its shafts: they will never be able to reach my heart: nothing can increase its tenderness, or give new force to the desires with which it is inflamed. There is no one, though it were my enemy, who would not become dear to me, by speaking well of you: but my best friend would cease to be so, from the moment he dared to reproach you.
‘“No, my sweet friend, no: do not believe that I have a heart treacherous to you: do not fear that I should ever abandon you for another, though I should be solicited by all the ladies of the land. Love, who holds me in his chains, has said, that my heart should be devoted to you alone; and I swear that it shall always be so. Ah, if I was as much mistress of my hand, he who now possesses, should never have obtained it.
‘“Beloved! such is the grief which I feel at being separated from you, such my despair, that when I wish to sing, I only sigh and weep. I cannot finish this couplet. Alas! my songs cannot obtain for my heart what it desires.”’
The poets of this period were almost all of them chevaliers; and it is in their war-songs, that, according to M. Sismondi, we find most of the enthusiasm of poetry. Guillaume de St. Gregory, thus chants his love for war, and seems to be inspired by the very sight of the field of battle.
‘How I love the gay season of the approach of spring, which covers our fields with leaves and flowers! How I love the sweet warbling of the birds, which make the woods resound with their songs! But how much more delightful still it is to see the tents and pavillions pitched in the meadows! How I feel my courage swell, when I see the armed chevaliers on their horses, marching in long array!
‘I love to see the cavaliers put to flight,—the common people, who strive to carry away their most precious effects: I love to see the thick battalions of soldiers, who advance in pursuit of the fugitives; and my joy redoubles when I observe the siege laid to the strongest castles, and hear their battered walls fall with a dreadful crash!’... ‘Yes, I repeat it again, the pleasures of the table, or of love, are not to be compared, in my mind, with those of the furious fight ... when I hear the horses neighing on the green meadows, and the cry repeated on all sides, “To arms, to arms!” when the great and the vulgar load the earth with their bodies, or roll, dying, into the ditches; and when large wounds from the blows of the lance mark the victims of honour.’
This poetic rhapsody of the eleventh or twelfth century is not altogether unworthy of the spirit of the nineteenth; so we shall not stop to moralize upon it. One of the most heroic and magnanimous personages of the same period was Bertrand de Born, Vicompte Hautefort. He was a great maker of war and verses. ‘The most violent,’ says M. Sismondi, ‘the most impetuous of the French chevaliers, breathing nothing but war; exciting, inflaming the passions of his neighbours and his superiors, in order to engage them in hostilities, he troubled the provinces of Guienne by his arms and his intrigues, during all the second half of the twelfth century; and the reigns of the Kings of England, Henry II. and Richard Cœur de Lion. He first stripped his brother Constantine of his personal inheritance, and made war upon Richard who protected him. He then attached himself to Henry, the brother of Richard Cœur de Lion, and afterwards made war upon him, after having engaged him in a conspiracy against his father. For this last offence he is put by Dante into his hell. In all his enterprizes, he encouraged himself by composing sirventes, that is, songs in which he sounded the war-whoop, in the manner of some writers nearer our own times. Let the reader judge for himself.
‘“What signify to me happy or miserable days? What are weeks or years to me? At all times my only wish is, to destroy whoever dares to offend me! Let others, if they please, embellish their houses; let them idly procure the conveniences of life: but, for myself, to collect lances, helmets, swords and implements of destruction, shall be the only object of my life! I am fatigued with advice, and swear never to attend to it!”’
The historical notice of Richard Cœur de Lion gives a striking and more favourable picture of the manners of the time. Every one is acquainted with the story of his deliverance from prison by the fidelity of his servant Blondel, and of his rescue from the Saracens by the gallant device of Guillaume de Preaux, who attracted the fury of the assailants to his own person, by crying out, ‘Spare me; for I am the King of England!’ M. Sismondi gives the following as the words of the celebrated song (a little modernized) composed by Richard during the captivity to which he was treacherously subjected by Leopold of Austria, after his return from the Holy Land.
Si prisonnier ne dit point sa raison
Sans un grand trouble, et douloureux soupçon,
Pour son consort qu’il fasse une chanson
J’ai prou d’amis, mais bien pauvre est leur don;
Honte ils auront, si faute de rançon,
Je suis deux hivers pris.
Qu’ils sachent bien, mes hommes, mes barons,
Anglais, Normands, Poitevins et Gascons,
Que je n’ai point si pauvres compagnons
Que pour argent n’ouvrisse leurs prisons.
Point ne les veux taxer de trahison,
Mais suis deux hivers pris.
Pour un captif plus d’ami, de parent!
Plus que ses jours ils epargnent l’argent;
Las! que je sens me douloir ce tourment!
Et si je meurs dans mon confinement,
Qui sauvera le renom de ma gent,
Car suis deux hivers pris?
Point au chagrin ne vaudrais succomber!
Le roi françois peut mes terres brûler,
Fausser la paix qu’il jura de garder;
Pourtant mon cœur je sens se rassurer,
Si je l’en crois, mes fers vont se briser,
Mais suis deux hivers pris.
Fiers ennemis, dont le cœur est si vain,
Pour guerrayer, attendez donc la fin
De mes ennemis; me trouverez enfin,
Dites-le leur, Chail et Pensavin,
Chers troubadours, qui me plaignez en vain
Car suis deux hivers pris.
Among the most distinguished troubadours, we find the names of Arnaud de Marveil, and of Arnaud Daniel, celebrated by Petrarch and Dante, Rambaud de Vaqueiras, and Pierre Vidal, both warriors and poets, and Pierre Cardinal, the satirist of Provence. The Provençal literature does not however appear to have produced any one great genius or lasting work. Their poetry, indeed, did not aim at immortality; but appears to have been considered chiefly as an ornamental appendage of courts, as the indolent amusement of great lords and ladies. It consists, therefore, entirely of occasional and fugitive pieces. The ambition of the poet seems never to have reached higher than to express certain habitual sentiments, or record passing events in agreeable verse, so as to gratify himself or his immediate employers; and his genius never appears to have received that high and powerful impulse, which makes the unrestrained development of its own powers its ruling passion, and which looks to future ages for its reward.
The Provençal poetry belongs, in its essence as well as form, to the same class as the Eastern or Asiatic; that is, it has the same constitutional warmth and natural gaiety, but without the same degree of magnificence and force. During its most flourishing period, it made no perceptible progress; and it has left few traces of its influence behind. The civil wars of the Albigeois, the crusades which made the Italian known to all the rest of Europe, and the establishment of the court of Charles of Anjou, the new sovereign of Provence, at Naples, were fatal to the cultivation of a literature which owed its encouragement to political and local circumstances, and to the favour of the great. M. Sismondi compares the effects of the Provençal poetry to the northern lights, which illumine the darkness of the sky, and spread their colours almost from pole to pole; but suddenly vanish, and leave neither light nor heat behind them. After the literature of the troubadours had disappeared from the country which gave it birth, it lingered for a while in the kingdoms of Arragon and Catalonia, where it was cultivated with success by Don Henri of Arragon, Marquis of Villera; by Ausias, who has been called the Petrarch; and by Jean Martorell, the Boccacio of the Provençal tongue, and the well-known author of the history of Tirante the White, which is preserved by Cervantes with such marks of respect, when Don Quixote’s library is condemned to the flames.
Our author next enters at great length, and with much acuteness, into the literature of the North of France, or the Roman Wallon, which succeeded the Provençal. The great glory of the writers of this language, was the invention of the romances of chivalry. M. Sismondi divides these romances into three classes or periods, and supposes them all to be of Norman origin, in contradiction to the very general theory which traces them to the Arabs or Moors. The first class relates to the exploits of King Arthur, the son of Pendragon, and the last British king who defended England against the Anglo-Saxons. It is at the court of this king, and of his wife Geneura, that we meet with the enchanter Merlin, and the institution of the Round Table, and all the Preux chevaliers, Tristram de Leonois, Launcelot of the Lake, and many others. The romance of Launcelot of the Lake was begun by Chretien de Troyes, and continued, after his death, by Godfrey de Ligny: that of Tristram, the son of King Meliadus of Leonois, the first that was written in prose, and which is the most frequently cited by the old authors, was composed in 1190 by one of the trouveres or Northern troubadours, whose name is unknown. The second class of chivalrous romances, is that which commences with Amadis of Gaul, the hero of lovers, of which the events are more fabulous, and the origin more uncertain. There are numerous imitations of this work, Amadis of Greece, Florismarte of Hircania, Galaor, Florestan, Esplandian, which are considered as of Spanish origin, and which were in their greatest vogue at the time of the appearance of Don Quixote. The third class considered by our author, as undoubtedly of French origin, relates to the court of Charlemagne and his peers. The most antient monument of the marvellous history of Charlemagne, is the chronicle of Turpin, or Tilpin, Archbishop of Rheims. Both the name of the author and the date are, however, doubtful. It relates to the last expedition of Charlemagne into Spain, to which he had been miraculously invited by St. Jacques of Galicia, and to the wars of the Christians against the Moors. M. Sismondi is inclined to refer this composition to the period when Alphonso VI. king of Castile and Leon, achieved, in the year 1085, the conquest of New Castile and Toledo.
‘He was followed,’ it is said, ‘in this triumphant expedition, by a great number of French chevaliers, who passed the Pyrenees to combat the infidels by the side of a great king, and to see the Cid, the hero of his age. The war against the Moors in Spain was then undertaken from a spirit of religious zeal, very different from that which, twelve years later, kindled the first crusade. Its object professedly was, to carry succour to neighbours, to brothers who adored the same God, and who revenged common injuries, of which the romancer seemed to wish to recal the remembrance: whereas the end of the first crusade was to deliver the Holy Sepulchre, to recover the inheritance of our Lord, and to bring assistance to God rather than man, as one of the troubadours expressed it. This zeal for the Holy Sepulchre, this devotion pointing towards the East, appears nowhere in the Chronicle of Archbishop Turpin; which, nevertheless, is animated by a burning fanaticism, and full of all sorts of miracles. This chronicle, however fabulous, cannot itself be considered as a romance. It consists alternately of incredible feats of arms, and of miracles, of monkish superstition and monkish credulity. We find there several instances of enchantment: the formidable sword of Roland, Durandal, with every stroke opens a wound: Ferragus is all over enchanted and invulnerable: the dreadful horn of Roland, which he sounds at Roncesvalles to call for succour, is heard as far as St. Jean Pied de Port, where Charlemagne was with his army; but the traitor Ganeton prevents the monarch from giving assistance to his nephew. Roland, losing all hope, is himself desirous to break his sword, that it may not fall into the hands of the infidels, and thus hereafter bathe itself in the blood of Christians: he strikes it against tall trees, against rocks—but nothing can resist the enchanted blade, guided by an arm so powerful; the oaks are overturned, the rocks are shattered in pieces, and Durandal remains entire. Roland at last thrusts it up to the hilt in a hard rock, and twisting it with violence, breaks it between his hands. Then he again sounds his horn, not to demand succour from the Christians, but to announce to them his last hour; and he blows it with such violence, that his veins burst, and he dies covered with his own blood. All this is sufficiently poetical, and indicates a brilliant imagination; but in order to its being a romance of chivalry, it was necessary that love and women should be introduced—and there is no allusion made to one or the other.’ p. 289.
This, we think, is rather an arbitrary decision of our author, and certainly does not prove that the work is not a romance of any kind. He concludes this chapter in the following manner.
‘But all these extraordinary facts, which in the Chronicle of Turpin passed for history, were consigned soon after to the regions of romance, when the crusades were finished, and had made us acquainted with the East, at the end of the thirteenth century, and during the reign of Philip the Hardy. The king at arms of this monarch, Adenez, wrote in verse the romance of Berthe-au-grandpied; the mother of Charlemagne, that of Ogier the Dane, and Cleomadis. Huon de Villeneuve wrote the history of Renaud de Montauban. The four sons of Aymon, Huon de Bourdeaux, Doolin de Mayence, Morgante the giant, Maugis the christian magician, and several other heroes of this illustrious court, were celebrated then or afterwards by romancers, who have placed in broad day all the characters, and all the events of this period of glory, of which the divine poem of Ariosto has consecrated the mythology.—The creation of this brilliant romantic chivalry, was completed at the end of the thirteenth century; all that essentially characterizes it, is to be found in the romances of Adenez. His chevaliers no longer wandered, like those of the Round Table, through gloomy forests in a country half civilized, and which seemed always covered with storms and snow: the entire universe was expanded before their eyes, The Holy Land was the grand object of their pilgrimage: but by it they entered into communication with the fine and rich countries of the East. Their geography was as confused as all their other knowledge. Their voyages from Spain to Cathay, from Denmark to Tunis, were made, it is true, with a facility, a rapidity more astonishing than the enchantments of Maugis or Morgana: but these fanciful voyages afforded the romance writers the means of embellishing their recitals with the most brilliant colours. All the softness and the perfumes of the countries, the most favoured by nature, were at their disposal: All the pomp and magnificence of Damascus, of Bagdad, and Constantinople, might be made use of to adorn the triumph of their heroes; and an acquisition more precious still, was the imagination itself of the people of the East and South; that imagination, so brilliant, so various, which was employed to give life to the sombre mythology of the North. The fairies were no longer hideous sorceresses, the objects of the fear and hatred of the people, but the rivals or the friends of those enchanters, who disposed in the east of Solomon’s ring, and of the genii who were attached to it. To the art of prolonging life, they had joined that of augmenting its enjoyments: they were in some sort the priestesses of nature and of its pleasures. At their voice, magnificent palaces arose in the deserts; enchanted gardens, groves, perfumed with orange-trees and myrtles, appeared in the midst of burning sands, or on barren rocks in the middle of the sea. Gold, diamonds, pearls, covered their garments, or the inside of their palaces: and their love, far from being reputed sacrilegious, was often the sweetest recompense of the toils of the warrior. It was thus that Ogier the Dane, the valiant paladin of Charlemagne, was received by the fairy Morgana in her castle of Avalon. She placed on his head the fatal crown of gold, covered with precious stones, and leaves of laurel, myrtle, and roses, to which was attached the gift of immortal youth, and, at the same time, the oblivion of every other sentiment than the love of Morgana. From this moment the hero no longer remembered the court of Charlemagne; nor the glory which he had acquired in France; nor the crowns of Denmark, of England, Acre, Babylon, and Jerusalem, which he had worn in succession; nor all the battles he had fought, nor the number of giants he had vanquished. He passed two hundred years with Morgana in the intoxication of love, without being sensible of the flight of time; and when, by chance, his crown fell off into a fountain, and his memory was restored, he thought Charlemagne still living, and demanded with impatience, tidings of the brave paladins, his companions in arms. In reading this elegant fiction, we easily discover, that it was written after the Crusades had opened a communication between the people of the East and those of the West, and had enriched the French with all the treasures of the Arabian imagination!’
M. Sismondi also justly ascribes the invention of the Mysteries, the first modern efforts of the dramatic art, to the French; but the inference which he draws from it, that this was owing to the great dramatic genius of that people, must excite a smile in many of his readers. For, certainly, if there ever was a nation utterly and universally incapable of forming a conception of any other manners or characters than those which exist among themselves, it is the French. The learned author is right, however, in saying that the Mystery of the Passions, and the moralities performed by the French company of players, laid the foundation of the drama in various parts of Europe, and also suggested the first probable hint of the plan of the Divine Comedy of Dante; but it is not right to say that the merit of this last work consists at all in the design. The design is clumsy, mechanical, and monotonous; the invention is in the style.
We have hitherto followed M. Sismondi in his account of the progress of modern literature, before the Italian language had been made the vehicle of poetical composition, and before the revival of letters. The details which he gives on the last subject, and the extraordinary picture he presents of the pains and labour undergone by the scholars of that day in recovering antient manuscripts, and the remains of antient art, are highly interesting. It is from this important event, and also from the work of Dante, the first lasting monument of modern genius, that we should strictly date the origin of modern literature; and, indeed, it would not be difficult to show, that it is still the emulation of the antients, working, indeed, on very different materials, from different principles, and with very different results, that has been the great moving spring of the grandest efforts of human genius in our own times. Our author next follows the progress of the Italian language, particularly at the court of the Sicilian Monarchs, to the period of which we are speaking. He thus introduces his account of the first great name in modern literature.
‘Nevertheless, no poet had as yet powerfully affected the mind, no philosopher had penetrated the depths of thought and sentiment, when the greatest of the Italians, the father of their poetry, Dante, appeared, and showed to the world how a powerful genius is able to arrange the gross materials prepared for him, in such a manner as to rear from them an edifice, magnificent as the universe, of which it was the image. Instead of love songs, addressed to an imaginary mistress,—instead of madrigals, full of cold conceits,—of sonnets painfully harmonious,—or allegories false and forced, the only models which Dante had before his eyes in any modern tongue, he conceived in his mind an image of the whole invisible world, and unveiled it to the eyes of his astonished readers. In the country, indeed, of Dante, that is, at Florence, on the 1st of May, 1304,’ (our author says), ‘all the sufferings of hell were placed before the eyes of the people, at a horrible representation appointed for a festival day; the first idea of which was no doubt taken from the Inferno. The bed of the river Arno was to represent the gulf of hell; and all the variety of torments which the imagination of monks or of the poet had invented, streams of boiling pitch, flames, ice, serpents, were inflicted on real persons, whose cries and groans rendered the illusion complete to the spectators.
‘The subject, then, which Dante chose for his immortal poem, when he undertook to celebrate the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of the dead, hell, purgatory, and paradise, was in that age the most popular of all; at once the most profoundly religious, and the most closely allied to the love of country, of glory, and of party-feelings, inasmuch as all the illustrious dead were to appear on this extraordinary theatre; and in short, by its immensity, the most loftily sublime of any which the mind of man has ever conceived. The commentaries on Dante, left us by Boccace and others, furnish a new proof of the superiority of this great man. We are there astonished to find his professed admirers unable to appreciate his real grandeur. Dante himself, as well as his commentators, attaches his excellence to purity and correctness: yet he is neither pure nor correct; but he is a creator. His characters walk and breathe; his pictures are nature itself; his language always speaks to the imagination, as well as to the understanding; and there is scarcely a stanza in his poem, which might not be represented with the pencil.’
M. Sismondi seems to have understood the great poet of Italy little better than his other commentators; and indeed the Divine Comedy must completely baffle the common rules of French criticism, which always seeks for excellence in the external image, and never in the internal power and feeling. But Dante is nothing but power, passion, self-will. In all that relates to the imitative part of poetry, he bears no comparison with many other poets; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead-weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity like that which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul, that make amends for all other deficiencies. Dante is a striking instance of the essential excellences and defects of modern genius. The immediate objects he presents to the mind, are not much in themselves;—they generally want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they become every thing by the force of the character which he impresses on them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the barren vastnesses of illimitable space. In point of diction and style, he is the severest of all writers, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering—who relies most on his own power, and the sense of power in the reader—who leaves most to the imagination.[[2]]
Dante’s only object is to interest; and he interests only by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been excited; but he seizes on the attention, by showing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly frequently gives us the thrilling and overwhelming sensation which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive; but the interest never flags, from the intense earnestness of the author’s mind. Dante, as well as Milton, appears to have been indebted to the writers of the old Testament for the gloomy tone of his mind, for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry. But there is more deep-working passion in Dante, and more imagination in Milton. Milton, more perhaps than any other poet, elevated his subject, by combining image with image in lofty gradation. Dante’s great power is in combining internal feelings with familiar objects. Thus the gate of Hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. The beauty to be found in Dante is of the same severe character, or mixed with deep sentiment. The story of Geneura, to which we have just alluded, is of this class. So is the affecting apostrophe, addressed to Dante by one of his countrymen, whom he meets in the other world.
‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale!
Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
And another example, even still finer, if any thing could be finer, is his description of the poets and great men of antiquity, whom he represents ‘serene and smiling,’ though in the shades of death,
——‘because on earth their names
In fame’s eternal records shine for aye.’
This is the finest idea ever given of the love of fame.
Dante habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up, with this inscription, ‘I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth’:—and half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance. All this tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and the appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the reader. There are occasional striking images in Dante—but these are exceptions; and besides, they are striking only from the weight of consequences attached to them. The imagination of the poet retains and associates the objects of nature, not according to their external forms, but their inward qualities or powers; as when Satan is compared to a cormorant. It is not true, then, that Dante’s excellence consists in natural description or dramatic invention. His characters are indeed ‘instinct with life’ and sentiment; but it is with the life and sentiment of the poet. In themselves they have little or no dramatic variety, except what arises immediately from the historical facts mentioned; and they afford, in our opinion, very few subjects for picture. There is indeed one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted. Michael Angelo was naturally an admirer of Dante, and has left a sonnet to his memory.
The Purgatory and Paradise are justly characterised by our author as ‘a falling off’ from the Inferno. He however points out a number of beautiful passages in both these divisions of the poem. That in which the poet describes his ascent into heaven, completely marks the character of his mind. He employs no machinery, or supernatural agency, for this purpose; but mounts aloft ‘by the sole strength of his desires—fixing an intense regard on the orbit of the sun’! This great poet was born at Florence in 1265, of the noble family of the Alighieri—and died at Ravenna, September 14th, 1321. Like Milton, he was unfortunate in his political connexions, and, what is worse, in those of his private life. He had a few imitators after his death, but none of any eminence.
M. Sismondi professes to have a prejudice against Petrarch. In this he is not, as he supposes, singular; but we suspect that he is wrong. He seems to have reasoned on a very common, but very false hypothesis, that because there is a great deal of false wit and affectation in Petrarch’s style, he is therefore without sentiment. The sentiment certainly does not consist in the conceits;—but is it not there in spite of them? The fanciful allusions, and the quaintnesses of style lie on the surface; and it is sometimes found convenient to make these an excuse for not seeking after that which lies deeper and is of more value.[[3]] It has been well observed, by a contemporary critic, that notwithstanding the adventitious ornaments with which their style is encumbered, there is more truth and feeling in Cowley and Sir Philip Sidney, than in a host of insipid and merely natural writers. It is not improbable, that if Shakespeare had written nothing but his sonnets and smaller poems, he would, for the same reason, have been assigned to the class of cold, artificial writers, who had no genuine sense of nature or passion. Yet, taking his plays for a guide to our decision, it requires no very great sagacity or boldness to discover that his other poems contain a rich vein of thought and sentiment. We apprehend it is the same with Petrarch. The sentiments themselves are often of the most pure and natural kind, even where the expression is the most laboured and far-fetched. Nor does it follow, that this artificial and scholastic style was the result of affectation in the author. All pedantry is not affectation. Inveterate habit is not affectation. The technical jargon of professional men is not affectation in them: for it is the language with which their ideas have the strongest associations. Milton’s Classical Pedantry was perfectly involuntary: it was the style in which he was accustomed to think and feel; and it would have required an effort to have expressed himself otherwise. The scholastic style is not indeed the natural style of the passion or sentiment of love; but it is quite false to argue, that an author did not feel this passion because he expressed himself in the usual language in which this and all other passions were expressed, in the particular age and country in which he lived. On the contrary, the more true and profound the feeling itself was, the more it might be supposed to be identified with his other habits and pursuits—to tinge all his thoughts, and to put in requisition every faculty of his soul—to give additional perversity to his wit, subtlety to his understanding, and extravagance to his expressions. Like all other strong passions, it seeks to express itself in exaggerations, and its characteristic is less to be simple than emphatic. The language of love was never more finely expressed than in the play of Romeo and Juliet; and yet assuredly the force or beauty of that language does not arise from its simplicity. It is the fine rapturous enthusiasm of youthful sensibility, which tries all ways to express its emotions, and finds none of them half tender or extravagant enough. The sonnet of Petrarch lamenting the death of Laura,[[4]] which is quoted by M. Sismondi, and of which he complains as having ‘too much wit,’ would be a justification of these remarks; not to mention numberless others.
M. Sismondi wishes that the connexion between Petrarch and Laura had been more intimate, and his passion accompanied with more interesting circumstances. The whole is in better keeping as it is. The love of a man like Petrarch would have been less in character, if it had been less ideal. For the purposes of inspiration, a single interview was quite sufficient. The smile which sank into his heart the first time he ever beheld her, played round her lips ever after: the look with which her eyes first met his, never passed away. The image of his mistress still haunted his mind, and was recalled by every object in nature. Even death could not dissolve the fine illusion: for that which exists in the imagination is alone imperishable. As our feelings become more ideal, the impression of the moment indeed becomes less violent; but the effect is more general and permanent. The blow is felt only by reflection; it is the rebound that is fatal. We are not here standing up for this kind of Platonic attachment; but only endeavouring to explain the way in which the passions very commonly operate in minds accustomed to draw their strongest interests from constant contemplation.
Petrarch is at present chiefly remembered for his sonnets, and the passion which they celebrate: he was equally distinguished in his lifetime by his Latin poems, and as one of the great restorers of learning. The following account of him is in many respects interesting.
‘Petrarch, the son of a Florentine who had been exiled as well as Dante, was born at Arezzo, in the night of the 19th of July 1304, and died at Arqua, near Padua, the 18th July 1374. He had been, during the century of which his life occupied three-fourths, the centre of all the Italian literature. Passionately fond of letters, history, and poetry, and an enthusiastic admirer of antiquity, he communicated by his discourse, his writings, and his example, to all his contemporaries, that impulse towards research and the study of the Latin manuscripts, which so particularly distinguished the fourteenth century; which preserved the chef-d’œuvres of the classic writers, at the moment when, perhaps, they were about to be lost for ever; and which changed, by means of these admirable models, the whole march of the human mind. Petrarch, tormented by the passion which has contributed so much to his celebrity, wishing to fly from himself, or to vary his thoughts by the distraction of different objects, travelled during almost the whole course of his life. He explored France, Germany, all the states of Italy: he visited Spain: and, in a continual activity directed to the discovery of the monuments of antiquity, he associated himself with all the learned, and with all the poets and philosophers of his time. From one end of Europe to the other, he made them concur in this great object; he directed their pursuits; and his correspondence became the magic chain which for the first time united the whole literary republic of Europe. The age in which he lived was that of small states. No sovereign had as yet established any of those colossal empires, the authority of which makes itself dreaded by nations of different languages. On the contrary, each country was divided into a great number of sovereignties; and the monarch of a small city was without power at a distance of thirty leagues, and unknown at the distance of a hundred. But the more political power was circumscribed, the more the glory of letters was extended: and Petrarch, the friend of Azzo of Correggio, prince of Parma, of Luchin and of Galeazzi Visconti, princes of Milan, and of Francis of Carrara, prince of Padua, was better known and more respected by Europe at large than all these sovereigns. The universal glory which his great knowledge had procured him, and which he directed to the service of letters, also frequently called him into the political career. No man of learning, or poet, has ever been charged with so great a number of embassies to so many great potentates,—the emperor, the Pope, the king of France, the senate of Venice, and all the princes of Italy: and, what is remarkable, is, that Petrarch did not fulfil those missions as belonging to the state with whose interests he was charged, but as belonging to all Europe. He received his title from his glory; and when he treated between different powers, it was almost as an arbiter whose suffrage each was desirous to secure with posterity. In fine, he gave to his age that enthusiasm for the beauties of antiquity, that veneration for learning, which renovated its character, and determined that of all succeeding times. It was in some sort in the name of grateful Europe, that Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol by the senator of Rome, the 8th of April 1341; and this triumph, the most glorious which has ever been decreed to any one, was not disproportioned to the influence which this great man has exerted over the ages which succeeded him.’
Boccacio was also one of the most indefatigable and successful of the restorers of ancient learning; and is classed by M. Sismondi as one of the three inventors of modern letters,—having done for Italian prose what Dante and Petrarch had done for Italian poetry. He was born at Paris in 1313, the son of a Florentine merchant; and died at Certaldo, in Tuscany, in the house of his forefathers, 21st December 1375, at the age of sixty-two years. He wrote epic poems and theology: But his Tales are his great work.
‘The Decameron,’ says our author, ‘the work to which, in the present day, Boccacio owes his high celebrity, is a collection of a hundred novels, which he has arranged in an ingenious manner, by supposing, that in the dreadful plague in 1348, a society of men and women, who had retired into the country to avoid the contagion, had imposed on themselves an obligation, for ten days together, to recite each a novel a day. The company consisted of ten persons; and the number of novels is, of course, a hundred. The description of the delicious country round Florence, where these joyous hermits took up their abode,—that of their walks—their festivals—their repasts, has given Boccacio an opportunity to display all the riches of a style the most flexible and graceful. The novels themselves, which are varied with infinite art, both as to the subject and manner, from the most touching and tender to the most playful, and unfortunately also to the most licentious, demonstrate his talent for recounting in every style and tone. His description of the plague of Florence, which serves as the introduction, ranks as one of the finest historical portraits which any age has left us. Finally, that which constitutes the glory of Boccacio, is the perfect purity of the language, the elegance, the grace, and above all, the naïveté of the style, which is the highest merit of this class of writing, and the peculiar charm of the Italian language.’
All this is true; though it might be said of many other authors: But what ought to have been said of him is, that there is in Boccacio’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is not to be met with in any other prose writer whatever. We think M. Sismondi has missed a fine opportunity of doing the author of the Decameron that justice which has not been done him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in the early popularity of his attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccacio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own tastes. But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excitement of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In this way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and his falcon. The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author. The story of Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is more affecting in the circumstances and the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of unalterable affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are perfect masterpieces. The epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart. The invention implied in his different tales is immense: but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all authors—probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther. Several of Shakespeare’s plots are taken from Boccacio; and indeed he has furnished subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The story of Griselda is borrowed from the Decameron by Chaucer; as is the knight’s Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of the Theseid.
M. Sismondi follows the progress of Italian literature with great accuracy and judgment, from this period to that of their epic and romantic writers. Pulci and Boyardo preceded Ariosto and Tasso. It has been observed that there is a great resemblance between the style of Pulci’s Morganti Maggiore and that of Voltaire. Thus, one of the personages in his poem being questioned as to the articles of his faith, says, that ‘he believes in a fat capon and a bottle of wine.’ His hero Rolando arriving at the gate of a monastery, on which some giants showered down fragments of rocks from the neighbouring mountain every night and morning, is advised by the Abbot to make haste in, ‘for that the manna is going to fall!’ This kind of levity of allusion, was characteristic of the literature of the age. One of these giants, to wit, Morganti, is converted by Orlando; but makes a very indifferent Christian after all. This writer has a certain familiar sarcastic gaiety in common with Ariosto, but none of his enthusiasm or elevation. The Orlando Amoroso of Boyardo, who was governor of Reggio, and one of the courtiers of Duke Hercules of Ferrara, was the foundation of Ariosto’s poem.
‘This poem,’ says our author, ‘which is at present known only from the more modern edition of Berni, who revised it sixty years after, is superior to that of Pulci, in the variety and novelty of the adventures, the richness of the colouring, and in the interest it excites. The women here appear, what they ought to be in a romance, the soul of the work; Angelica here shows herself in all her charms, and with all her power over the bravest knights. All those warriors, whether Moors or Christians, whose names have become almost historical, received from Boyardo their existence, and the characters which they have preserved ever since. We are told that he took the names of several, as Gradasso, Sacripant, Agramant, Mandiscardo, from those of his vassals at his estate of Scandiano, where these families still remain: but it seems he wished for a still more sounding name for the most redoubtable of his Moorish chiefs. While on a hunting party, that of Rodomont came into his mind. On the instant he returned full gallop to his chateau, and had the bells rung and the cannon fired in sign of a fete, to the great astonishment of the peasants, to whom this new saint was quite unknown. The style of Boyardo did not correspond with the vivacity of his imagination: It is little laboured; the verse is harsh and tedious; and it was not without reason that in the following age it was judged proper to give a new form to his work.’
The account given of Ariosto and Tasso is in general correct as to the classification of their different styles, and the enumeration of their particular excellences or defects; but we should be inclined to give the preference in the contrary way. Ariosto’s excellence is (what it is here described) infinite grace and gaiety. He has fine animal spirits, an heroic disposition, sensibility mixed with vivacity, an eye for nature, great rapidity of narration and facility of style, and, above all, a genius buoyant, and with wings like the Griffin-horse of Rogero, which he turns and winds at pleasure. He never labours under his subject; never pauses; but is always setting out on fresh exploits. Indeed, his excessive desire not to overdo any thing, has led him to resort to the unnecessary expedient of constantly breaking off in the middle of his story, and going on to something else. His work is in this respect worse than Tristram Shandy; for there the progress of the narrative is interrupted by some incident, in a dramatic or humorous shape; but here the whole fault lies with the author. The Orlando Furioso is a tissue of these separate stories, crossing and jostling one another; and is therefore very inferior, in the general construction of the plot, to the Jerusalem Delivered. But the incidents in Ariosto are more lively, the characters more real, the language purer, the colouring more natural: even the sentiments show at least as much feeling, with less appearance of affectation. There is less effort, less display, a less imposing use made of the common ornaments of style and artifices of composition. Tasso was the more accomplished writer, Ariosto the greater genius. There is nothing in Tasso which is not to be found, in the same or a higher degree, in others: Ariosto’s merits were his own. The perusal of the one leaves a peculiar and very high relish behind it; there is a vapidness in the other, which palls at the time, and goes off sooner afterwards. Tasso indeed sets before us a dessert of melons, mingled with roses:—but it is not the first time of its being served up:—the flowers are rather faded, and the fruit has lost its freshness. Ariosto writes on as it happens, from the interest of his subject, or the impulse of his own mind. He is intent only on the adventure he has in hand,—the circumstances which might be supposed to attend it, the feelings which would naturally arise out of it. He attaches himself to his characters for their own sakes; and relates their achievements for the mere pleasure he has in telling them. This method is certainly liable to great disadvantages; but we on the whole prefer it to the obtrusive artifices of style shown in the Jerusalem,—where the author seems never to introduce any character but as a foil to some other,—makes one situation a contrast to the preceding, and his whole poem a continued antithesis in style, action, sentiment, and imagery. A fierce is opposed to a tender, a blasphemous to a pious character. A lover kills his mistress in disguise, and a husband and wife are represented defending their lives, by a pretty ambiguity of situation and sentiment, warding off the blows which are aimed, not at their own breasts, but at each other’s. The same love of violent effect sometimes produces grossness of character, as in Armida, who is tricked out with all the ostentatious trappings of a prostitute. Tasso has more of what is usually called poetry than Ariosto—that is, more tropes and ornaments, and a more splendid and elaborate diction. The latter is deficient in all these:—the figures and comparisons he introduces do not elevate or adorn that which they are brought to illustrate: they are, for the most part, mere parallel cases; and his direct description, simple and striking as it uniformly is, seems to us of a far higher order of merit than the ingenious allusions of his rival. We cannot, however, agree with M. Sismondi, that there is a want of sentiment in Ariosto, or that he excels only as a painter of objects, or a narrator of events. The instance which he gives from the story of Isabella, is an exception to his general power. The episodes of Herminia, and of Tancred and Clorinda, in Tasso, are exquisitely beautiful; but they do not come up, in romantic interest or real passion, to the loves of Angelica and Medoro. We might instance, to the same purpose, the character of Bradamante;—the spirited apostrophe to knighthood, ‘Oh ancient knights of true and noble heart;’—that to Orlando, Sacripant, and the other lovers of Angelica—or the triumph of Medoro—the whole progress of Orlando’s passion, and the still more impressive description of his sudden recovery from his fatal infatuation, after the restoration of his senses. Perhaps the finest thing in Tasso is the famous description of Carthage, as the warriors pass by it in the enchanted bark. ‘Giace l’alta Cartago,’ &c. This passage, however, belongs properly to the class of lofty philosophical eloquence; it owes its impressiveness to the grandeur of the general ideas, and not to the force of individual feeling, or immediate passion. The speech of Satan to his companions is said to have suggested the tone of Milton’s character of the Devil. But we see nothing in common in the fiend of the two poets. Tasso describes his as a mere deformed monster. Milton was the first poet who had the magnanimity to paint the devil without horns and a tail; to give him personal beauty and intellectual grandeur, with only moral deformity.
The life of Tasso is one of the most interesting in the world. Its last unfortunate events are related thus by our author.—
‘Tasso, admitted into the society of the great, thought himself sufficiently their equal, to fall in love with women of rank; and found himself sufficiently their inferior, to suffer from the consequences of his passion. His writings inform us, that he was attached to a lady of the name of Leonora: but it would seem that he was alternately in love with Leonora of Este, sister to the Duke Alphonso; with Leonora of San Vitale, wife of Julius of Tiena; and with Lucretia Bendidio, one of the maids of honour to the princess.... It is said, that one day being at court with the Duke and the Princess Leonora, he was so struck with the beauty of the lady, that, in a transport of love, he approached her suddenly, and embraced her in the eyes of the whole assembly. The Duke, turning coldly to his courtiers, said to them—“What a pity that so great a man should have gone mad!” and on this pretence, had him confined in the hospital of St. Anne, a receptacle for lunatics at Ferrara. His confinement disordered his imagination. His body was enfeebled by the agitation of his mind; he believed himself by turns poisoned, or tormented by witchcraft; he fancied that he saw dreadful apparitions, and passed whole nights in painful watchfulness. He addressed letters of complaint to all his friends, to all the princes of Italy, to the city of Bergamo his native place, to the emperor, to the holy office at Rome, imploring their pity and his liberty. To add to his misfortunes, his poem was published without his permission, from an imperfect copy. He remained confined in the hospital seven years; during which, the numerous writings that proceeded from his pen, could not convince Alphonso II. that he was in his senses. The princes of Italy in vain interposed for his release, which the Duke refused to grant, chiefly to mortify his rivals, the Medici. At length, he was released from his captivity at the instance of Vincent de Gonzago, Prince of Mantua, on the occasion of the marriage of the sister of this nobleman with the unrelenting Alphonso.’
It was during this melancholy interval, that he was seen by Montaigne in his confinement, who, after some striking reflections on the vicissitudes of genius, says,—‘I rather envied than pitied him, when I saw him at Ferrara in so piteous a plight, that he survived himself; misacknowledging both himself and his labours, which, unwitting to him, and even to his face, have been published both uncorrected and maimed!’—Tasso died at Rome in 1599, when he was fifty-one years old. After the Jerusalem, the most celebrated of his works, is his pastoral poem of Aminta, on which the Pastor Fido of Guarini is considered by M. Sismondi as an improvement. He published both comedies and tragedies. He composed a tragedy, called Il Torrismondo, while in prison, and dedicated it to his liberator, the Prince of Mantua. The concluding chorus of this tragedy possesses the most profound pathos; and the poet, in writing it, had evidently an eye to his own misfortunes and his glory, which he saw, or thought he saw, vanishing from him—‘Like the swift Alpine torrent, like the sudden lightning in the calm night, like the passing wind, the melting vapour, or the winged arrow, so vanishes our fame; and all our glory is but a fading flower. What then can we hope, or what expect more? After triumphs and palms, all that remains for the soul, is strife and lamentation, and regret; neither love nor friendship can avail us aught, but only tears and grief!’
We have thus gone through M. Sismondi’s account of the great Italian poets; and should now proceed to the consideration of their more modern brethren of the drama, and of the Spanish and Portuguese writers in general: But we cannot go on with this splendid catalogue of foreigners, without feeling ourselves drawn to the native glories of two of our own writers, who were certainly indebted in a great degree to the early poets of Italy, and must be considered as belonging to the same school.—We mean Chaucer and Spenser—who are now, we are afraid, as little known to the ordinary run of English readers as their tuneful contemporaries in the South. To those among our own countrymen who agree with M. Sismondi in considering the reign of Queen Anne as the golden period of English poetry, it may afford some amusement at least to accompany us for a little in these antiquarian researches.
Though Spenser was much later than Chaucer, his obligations to preceding poets were less. He has in some measure borrowed the plan of his poem from Ariosto; but he has engrafted upon it an exuberance of fancy, and an endless voluptuousness of sentiment, which are not to be found in the Italian writer.—Farther, Spenser is even more of an inventor in the subject-matter. There is a richness and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions, which almost vies with the splendour of the ancient mythology. If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance, Spenser’s poetry is all fairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough; in Spenser, we wander in another world among ideal beings. The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills, and fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to find it; and fulfils the deluding promise of our youth. He waves his wand of enchantment,—and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two worlds of reality and of fiction, seem poised on the wings of his imagination. His ideas indeed seem always more distinct than his perceptions. He is the painter of abstractions, and describes them with dazzling minuteness. In the Mask of Cupid, the god of love ‘claps on high his coloured winges twain;’ and it is said of Gluttony in the procession of the Passions,—
‘In green vine-leaves he was right fitly clad.’
At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty; as, where he compares Prince Arthur’s crest to the appearance of the almond-tree. The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind; and his delineations are guided by no principle but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence, or the still solitude of a hermit’s cell—in the extremes of sensuality or refinement. With all this, he neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem is an allegory. But he has been falsely charged with a want of passion and of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the pathos of immediate action or suffering, which is the dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance,—all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not coarse and palpable,—but it assumes the character of vastness and sublimity, seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with all the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We will only refer to the Cave of Mammon, and to the description of Celleno in the Cave of Despair. The three first books of the Faery Queen are very superior to the others. It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakespeare, in point of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus. There is only one book of this allegorical kind which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely less imagination); and that is the Pilgrim’s Progress.
It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite than Spenser and Chaucer. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment;—Chaucer in severe activity of mind. Spenser was, perhaps, the most visionary of all the poets;—Chaucer the most a man of observation and of the world. He appealed directly to the bosoms and business of men. He dealt only in realities; and, relying throughout on facts or common tradition, could always produce his vouchers in nature. His sentiment is not the voluntary indulgence of the poet’s fancy, but is founded on the habitual prejudices and passions of the very characters he introduces. His poetry, therefore, is essentially picturesque and dramatic: In this he chiefly differs from Boccacio, whose power was that of sentiment. The picturesque and the dramatic in Chaucer, are in a great measure the same thing; for he only describes external objects as connected with character,—as the symbols of internal passion. The costume and dress of the Canterbury pilgrims,—of the knight,—the ‘squire,—the gap-toothed wife of Bath, speak for themselves. Again, the description of the equipage and accoutrements of the two Kings of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight’s Tale, are as striking and grand, as the others are lively and natural. His descriptions of natural scenery are in the same style of excellence;—their beauty consists in their truth and characteristic propriety. They have a local freshness about them, which renders them almost tangible; which gives the very feeling of the air, the coldness or moisture of the ground. In other words, he describes inanimate objects from the effect which they have on the mind of the spectator, and as they have a reference to the interest of the story. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is in the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf, where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrouded in her bower, and listening in the morning of the year to the singing of the nightingale, while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour,—its retirement,—the early time of the day,—the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring bushes—the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the whole seem like the recollection of an actual scene. Whoever compares this beautiful and simple passage with Rousseau’s description of the Elisée in the New Eloise, will be able to see the difference between good writing and fine writing, or between the actual appearances of nature, and the progress of the feelings they excite in us, and a parcel of words, images and sentiments thrown together without meaning or coherence. We do not say this from any feeling of disrespect to Rousseau, for whom we have a great affection; but his imagination was not that of the poet or the painter. Severity and boldness are the characteristics of the natural style: the artificial is equally servile and ostentatious. Nature, after all, is the soul of art:—and there is a strength in the imagination which reposes immediately on nature, which nothing else can supply. It was this trust in nature, and reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer to describe the grief and patience of Griselda,—the faith of Constance,—and the heroic perseverance of the little child, who, going to school through the streets of Jewry,
‘Oh, Alma redemptoris mater, loudly sung,’
and who, after his death, still triumphed in his song. Chaucer has more of this deep, internal, sustained sentiment than any other writer, except Boccacio, to whom Chaucer owed much, though he did not owe all to him: for he writes just as well where he did not borrow from that quarter, as where he did; as in the characters of the Pilgrims,—the Wife of Bath’s Prologue,—the ‘Squire’s Tale, and in innumerable others. The poetry of Chaucer has a religious sanctity about it, connected with the manners of the age. It has all the spirit of martyrdom!
In looking back to the chef-d’œuvres of former times, we are sometimes disposed to wonder at the little progress which has been made since in poetry, and the arts of imitation in general. But this, perhaps, is a foolish wonder. Nothing is more contrary to fact, than the supposition, that in what we understand by the fine arts, as painting and poetry, relative perfection is the result of repeated success; and that, what has been once well done, constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is indeed progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: but that which is not mechanical or definite, but depends on taste, genius, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde, after a certain period, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion is indeed a common error, which has grown up, like many others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to something quite different, without thinking of the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful advances have been made in biblical criticism, in chemistry, in mechanics, in geometry, astronomy, &c., i.e. in things depending on inquiry and experiment, or on absolute demonstration, have been led hastily to conclude, that there was a general tendency in the efforts of the human intellect to improve by repetition, and, in all arts and institutions, to grow perfect and mature by time. We look back upon the theological creed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in natural philosophy, with a smile of pity: Science, and the arts connected with it, have all had their infancy, their youth and manhood, and seem to have in them no principle of limitation or decay; and, inquiring no farther, we infer, in the intoxication of our pride, and the height of our self-congratulation, that the same progress has been made, and will continue to be made, in all other things which are the work of man. The fact, however, stares us so plainly in the face, that one would think the smallest reflection must suggest the truth, and overturn our sanguine theories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the first birth of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was in other respects rude and barbarous. Those arts which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have almost always leaped at once from infancy to manhood—from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have, in general, declined ever after. This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of science and of art;—of the one, never to arrive at the summit of perfection at all; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante and Ariosto, (Milton alone was of a later period, and not the worse for it),—Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes and Boccacio—all lived near the beginning of their arts—perfected, and all but created them. These giant sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth; but they tower above their fellows; and the long line of their successors does not interpose any object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature, they are unrivalled; in grace and beauty, they have never been surpassed. In after ages and more refined periods (as they are called), great men have arisen one by one, as it were by throes and at intervals; though, in general, the best of these cultivated and artificial minds were of an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope among poets, Guido and Poussin among painters. But in the earlier stages of the arts, when the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language acquired, they rose by clusters and in constellations—never so to rise again.
The arts of poetry and painting are conversant with the world of thought within us, and of the world of sense without us—with what we know and see and feel intimately. They flow from the living shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of Nature: But the pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high—the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood, three thousand or three hundred years ago, as they are at present. The face of nature, and ‘the human face divine,’ shone as bright then, as they have ever done since. But it is their light, reflected by true genius on art, which marks out the path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses’ feet, like that which
——‘circled Una’s angel face,
And made a sunshine in the shady place.’