The "Saracen" theory.
This matter can probably never be pronounced upon, with complete satisfaction to readers, except by a literary critic who is equally competent in Eastern and Western history and literature, a person who certainly has not shown himself as yet. What can be said with some confidence is, that the Saracen theory of Literature, like the Saracen theory of Architecture, so soon as it is carried beyond the advancing of a possible but slight and very indeterminate influence and colouring, has scarcely the slightest foundation in known facts, and is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with facts that are known, while it is intrinsically improbable to the very highest degree. As has been pointed out above, the modern prosody of Europe is quite easily and logically explicable as the result of the juxtaposition of the Latin rhythms of the Church service, and the verse systems indigenous in the different barbaric nations. That the peculiar cast and colour of early Italian poetry may owe something of that difference which it exhibits, even in comparison with Provençal, much more with French, most of all with Teutonic poetry, to contact with Arabian literature, is not merely possible but probable. Anything more must be regarded as not proven, and not even likely.
The "folk-song" theory.
Of late, however, attempts have been made to assign the greater part of the matter to no foreign influence whatever, but to native folk-songs, in which at the present time, and no doubt for a long time back, Italy is beyond all question rich above the wont of European countries. But this attempt, however interesting and patriotic, labours under the same fatal difficulties which beset similar attempts in other languages. It may be regarded as perfectly certain that we do not possess any Italian popular poem in any form which can have existed prior to the thirteenth century; and only such poems would be of any use. To argue, as is always argued in such cases, that existing examples show, by this or that characteristic, that in other forms they must have existed in the twelfth century or even earlier, is only an instance of that learned childishness which unfortunately rules so widely in literary, though it has been partly expelled from general, history. "May have been" and "must have been" are phrases of no account to a sound literary criticism, which insists upon "was." Ciullo d'Alcamo.And in reference to this particular subject of Early Italian Poetry the reader may be referred to the very learned dissertation[188] of Signor Alessandro d'Ancona on the Contrasto of Ciullo d'Alcamo, which has been commonly regarded as the first specimen of Italian poetry, and has been claimed for the beginning of the thirteenth century, if not the end of the twelfth. He will, if the gods have made him in the least critical, rise from the perusal with the pretty clear notion that whether Ciullo d'Alcamo was "such a person," or whether he was Cielo dal Camo; whether the Contrasto was written on the bridge of the twelfth and thirteenth century, or fifty years later; whether the poet was a warrior of high degree or an obscure folk-singer; whether his dialect has been Tuscanised or is still Sicilian with French admixture,—these are things not to be found out, things of mere opinion and hypothesis, things good to write programmes and theses on, but only to be touched in the most gingerly manner by sober history.
To the critic, then, who deals with Dante—and especially to him, inasmuch as he has the privilege of dealing with that priceless document, the De Vulgari Eloquio,[189]—may be left Ciullo, or Cielo, and his successors the Frederician set, from the Emperor himself and Piero delle Vigne downwards. More especially to him belong the poets of the late thirteenth century, Dante's own immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and in a way masters—Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Sinibaldi, and Guittone d'Arezzo (to whom the canonical form of the sonnet used at one time to be attributed, and may be again); Brunetto Latini, of fiery memory; Fra Jacopone,[190] great in Latin, eccentric in Italian, and others. It will be not merely sufficient, but in every way desirable, here to content ourselves with an account of the general characteristics of this poetry (contemporary prose, though existent, is of little importance), and to preface this by some remarks on the general influences and contributions of material with which Italian literature started.
Heavy debt to France.
There is no valid reason for doubting that these influences and materials were mainly French. As has been partly noted in a [former chapter], the French chansons de geste made an early and secure conquest of the Italian ear in the north, partly in translation, partly in the still more unmistakable form of macaronic Italianised French. It has indeed been pointed out that the Sicilian school was to some extent preceded by that of the Trevisan March, the most famous member of which was Sordello. It would appear, however, that this school was even more distinctly and exclusively a branch of Provençal than the Sicilian; and that the special characteristic of the latter did not appear in it. The Carlovingian poems (and to some, though a much less, extent the Arthurian) made a deep impression both on popular and on cultivated Italian taste as a matter of subject; but their form, after its first results in variation and translation, was not perpetuated; and when Italian epic made its appearance some centuries later, it inclined for the most part to burlesque, or at least to the tragi-comic, until the serious genius of Tasso gave it a new, but perhaps a not wholly natural, direction.
Yet form and spirit both original.
In that earliest, really national, and vernacular school, however, which has been the chief subject of discourse, the direction was mainly and almost wholly towards lyric; and the supremacy of the sonnet and the canzone is the less surprising because their rivals were for the most part less accomplished examples of the same kind. The Contrasto[191] of Ciullo itself is a poem in lyric stanzas of five lines—three of sixteen syllables, rhymed a, and two hendecasyllabics, rhymed b. The rhymes are fairly exact, though sometimes loose, o and u, e and i, being permitted to pair. The poem, a simple discourse or dispute between two lovers, something in the style of some French pastourelles, displays however, with some of the exaggeration and stock phrase of Provençal (perhaps we might say of all) love-poetry, little or nothing of that peculiar mystical tone which we have been accustomed to associate with early Italian verse, chiefly represented, as it is to most readers, by the Vita Nuova, where the spirit is slightly altered in itself, and speaks in the mouth of a poet greater in his weakest moments than the whole generation from Ciullo to Guittone in their strongest. This spirit, showing itself in the finer and more masculine form in Dante himself, in the more feminine and weaker in Petrarch, not merely gives us sublime or exquisite poetry in the fourteenth century, but in the sixteenth contributes very largely to launch, on fresh careers of achievement, the whole poetry of France and of England. But it is fair to acknowledge its presence in Dante's predecessors, and at the same time to confess that they themselves do not seem to have learned it from any one, or at least from any single master or group of masters. The Provençal poets deify passion, and concentrate themselves wholly upon it; but it is seldom, indeed, that we find the "metaphysical" touch in the Provençals proper. And it is this—this blending of love and religion, of scholasticism and minnedienst (to borrow a word wanted in other languages than that in which it exists)—that is attributed by the partisans of the East to Arabian influence, or at least to Arabian contact. Some stress has been laid on the testimony of Ibn Zobeir about the end of the twelfth century, and consequently not long before even the latest date assigned to Ciullo, that Alcamo itself was entirely Mussulman in belief.
Love-lyric in different European countries.