Of Italian.
The effect of Italian literature in Italy was, it has been said, not at the time great; the contrast between the study of Shakespeare at this time in England and the study of Dante in Italy has, I have no doubt, defrayed the expense of many a literary-historical comparison.[[338]] But Italian—though it had lost something of the prerogative importance which it had once, and justly, and for a long time held—retained a great, and, as regards the products of its best time, a wholly salutary, influence over the rest of Europe. That rather treacherous turning of French critics on their Italian masters, which Hurd so acutely noticed, had, like other things evil, its soul of goodness in it. Ariosto, and Tasso, and Petrarch, though not Dante, had entered so thoroughly into the corpus of European literature that they could not be driven out by any scoffs of Boileau or scorns of Voltaire. And when people began to examine them for themselves there was, with the different set of tide and wind which we have seen throughout this book, a very good chance, almost a certainty, of a healthy voyage back. There was all the more chance of this that the strong Renaissance admixture in the authors of the Orlando and the Gerusalemme, the at least not strongly mediæval character of Petrarch, made them more suitable for eighteenth-century consumption than the pure milk of the mediæval word. The argument which Hurd himself put about Spenser and Milton—“These were no barbarians; these were men of real learning, of polished and statesman-like society; and they liked romance”—was applicable with even greater force to the Captain of the Garfagnana and the friend of Leo X., to the familiar (if also victim) of princes and princesses at Ferrara, and the Laureate elect of Rome.
Especially Dante.
There can indeed be no doubt that throughout the eighteenth century it was from these two poets that men drew most of their ideas of Romance itself. Dryden, on the eve of that century, betrays the fact in his own case by his designation of our own Guenevere under her Italian name of Ginevra. Scott, at its close and far beyond it, wide as was his knowledge of the true and real mediæval romance itself, is still haunted by the Italians. While as for Petrarch (to put out of question the fact that he is of all time, if not of the highest of all time), he means the sonnet; and the sonnet is anti-classical from centre to circumference. Even if Dante was somewhat neglected, the fact of Gray’s attraction to Nicholls at their first meeting, because he found that the young man read that Florentine, is evidence for exception as well as for rule. At any rate, a man who studied Italian, whether he were Englishman or Frenchman, German or from Mesopotamy, might always, and must certainly not seldom, be brought into contact with the Commedia. And when that contact is established in a fitting soul, “A drear and dying sound, Affrights the Flamens” of Neo-classicism “at their service quaint.” You read no more in Boileau that day, nor any day thereafter by preference and as a disciple.
Of Spanish.
So also in Spain the home study of the home literature—though as above noted its results were not by any means nugatory—was far inferior to the effect of the study of that literature abroad. The general and half-blind impulse towards collection and reproduction, however, was especially important,—hardly even in England, putting the works of the very greatest out of the question, did anything appear more precious than the Poesias Anteriores: and Spain had, in three different divisions and directions, inestimable and inexhaustible treasures for the foreign student, especially for the foreign student who felt the gall and the cramp of the classical strait-waistcoat and wished to cast it off. The first of these in order of time was the ballad matter provided by the Cancioneros. The second was the Spanish drama, and the reflections which it had drawn from native poets and critics. The third was the work of Cervantes and the picaresque novel.
The first of these were valuable not only as all the ballads of Europe were valuable, not merely because of the diametrical opposition of their tone and spirit to that of the “classical” poetry, but because of their remarkable differentia as ballads themselves. In the first place, they[[339]] are the only Southern ballads available,—for Italy, though not infertile in folk-song, does not appear to have had any ballads proper, and those of Modern Greece are of very doubtful earliness, and were not known till long afterwards. In the second place, the part-Oriental part-African admixture, which makes cosas de España so interesting and so powerful, appears in them to the full. And, lastly, there is a certain largeur about them—a national quality, whether excited by conflict with Charlemagne or by conflict with the Moors, which is lacking in all other ballads known at least to the present writer. Even the split between North and South Britain is a case of mere family misunderstanding, compared with the secular stand of the great Peninsula, at bay against Christian invaders from the North and Paynim foes in the household. And it is not unnoteworthy that, with the exception of Chevy Chase, not one of the very best of ballads in English is inspired by the quarrel of Englishman and Scot.
The influence of the Spanish drama and of the more or less conscious fight waged in Spain itself over its principles had also, especially in Germany, great play, and should have had greater. It reached a climax no doubt in the somewhat capricious and ill-informed, the certainly intemperate, will-worship of the Schlegels, which we have not yet discussed: but as we have seen, Lessing was aware of it, and there is no doubt that it had great effect on at least the “Sturmers-and-Drangers.” It ought, we say, probably to have had much more influence than it actually exercised; but with the decay of Spanish political power the study of the Spanish language had been steadily going out in Europe, never, as yet, to revive. The valuable and interesting Spanish critical discussions on the subject were almost unknown; and the theatre itself was never thoroughly studied, till the investigations of Schack, a German, and Ticknor, an American, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet it is not necessary to spend many words on showing the immense germinal and alterative power which this study had, and in particular the value which it possessed as seconding the influence of the English drama, with just sufficient difference to make the seconding a real reinforcement, and not a mere repetition of attack by the same troops. The obsession of the sealed pattern, the illusion of the undeviating rule, might in a Frenchman (for strongest instance) survive the reading, or at least the hearing, of the “barbarian” Shakespeare: but it must have been seriously shaken by such writers of a “polished” nation as Tirso, and Lope, and Calderon, not to speak of minors like Alarcon and Rojas.