An anonymous sonnetteer of the same period uses similar language[165];
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Roma vi chiama—Cesar mio novello, I' son ignuda, e l'anima pur vive; Or mi coprite col vostro mantello. |
The Ghibelline poets, whether they dreamed like Fazio of Roman Empire, or flattered the Visconti with a crown to be won by triumph over the detested Guelfs, made play with Dante's memory. Some of the most interesting lyrics of the school are elegies upon his death. To this class belong two sonnets by Pieraccio Tedaldi and Mucchio da Lucca.[166] Nor must Boccaccio's noble pair of sonnets, although he was not a political poet, be here forgotten.[167] That Dante was diligently studied can be seen, not only in the diction of this epoch, but also in numerous versified commentaries upon the Divine Comedy—in the terza rima abstracts of Boson da Gubbio, Jacopo Alighieri, Saviozzo da Siena, and Boccaccio.[168]
Tuscan politics are treated from the Guelf point of view in Sacchetti's odes upon the war with Pisa, upon the government of Florence after 1378, and against the cowardice of the Italians.[169] His conception of a burgher's duties, the ideal of Guelf bourgeoisie before Florence had become accustomed to tyrants, finds expression in a sonnet—Amar la patria.[170] We frequently meet with the word Comune on his lips:
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O vuol rè o signore o vuol comune, Chè per comune dico ciò ch'io parlo. |
A like note of municipal independence is sounded in the poems of Antonio Pucci, and in the admonitory stanzas of Matteo Frescobaldi.[171] Considerable interest attaches to these political compositions for the light they throw on party feeling at the close of the heroic age of Italian history. The fury with which those factions raged, prompts the bards of either camp to curses. I may refer to this passage from Folgore da San Gemignano, when he sees the Ghibelline Uguccione triumphant over Tuscany:[172]
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Eo non ti lodo Dio e non ti adoro, E non ti prego e non ti ringrazio, E non ti servo ch'io ne son più sazio Che l'aneme de star en purgatoro; Perchè tu ai messi i Guelfi a tal martoro Ch'i Ghibellini ne fan beffe e strazio, E se Uguccion ti comandasse il dazio, Tu 'l pagaresti senza peremptoro! |
Yet neither in the confused idealism of the Ghibellines nor in the honest independence of the Guelfs lay the true principle of national progress. Sinking gradually and inevitably beneath the sway of despots, the Italians in the fifteenth century were destined to become a nation of scholars, artists, litterati. The age of Dante, the uncompromising aristocrat, was over. The age of Boccaccio, the easy-going bourgeois, had begun. The future glories of Italy were to be won in the field of culture; and all the hortatory lyrics I have mentioned, exerted but little influence over the development of a spirit which was growing quietly within the precincts of the people. The Italian people at this epoch cared far less for the worn-out factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines than for home-comforts and tranquillity in burgher occupations. The keener intellects of the fifteenth century were already so absorbingly occupied with art and classical studies that there was no room left in them for politics of the old revolutionary type. Meanwhile the new intrigues of Cabinets and Courts were left to a class of humanistic diplomatists, created by the conditions of despotic government. Scarcely less ineffectual were the moral verses of Bambagiuoli and Cavalca, or the Petrarchistic imitations of Marchionne Torrigiani, Federigo d'Arezzo, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto di Battifolle, and Bonaccorso da Montemagno.[173] The former belonged to a phase of medieval culture which was waning. The elegant but lifeless Petrarchistic school dragged through the fifteenth century, culminating in the Canzoniere of Giusto de' Conti, a Roman, which was called La bella mano. The revival of their mannerism, with a fixed artistic motive, by Bembo and the purists of the sixteenth century, will form part of my later history of Renaissance literature.
One note is unmistakable in all the poetry of these last trecentisti. It is a note of profound discouragement, mistrust, and disappointment. We have already heard it sounded by Sacchetti in his lament for Boccaccio. Boccaccio had raised it himself in two noble sonnets—Apizio legge and Fuggit'è ogni virtù.[174] It takes the shrillness of a threnody in Tedaldi's Il mondo vile and in Manfredi di Boccaccio's Amico il mondo.[175] The poets of that age were dimly conscious that a new era had opened for their country—an era of money-getting, despotism, and domestic ease. They saw the people used to servitude and sunk in common pleasures—dead to the high aims and imaginative aspirations of the past. The turbulence of the heroic age was gone. The men of the present were all Vigliacci. And as yet both art and learning were but in their cradle. It was impossible upon the opening of the fifteenth century, in that crepuscular interval between two periods of splendor, to know what glories for Italy and for the world at large would be produced by Giotto's mighty lineage and Petrarch's progeny of scholars. We who possess in history the vision of that future can be content to wait through a transition century. The men of the moment not unnaturally expressed the querulousness of Italy, distracted by her struggles of the past and sinking into somnolence. Cosimo de' Medici, the molder of Renaissance Florence, was already born in 1389; and men of Cosimo's stamp were no heroes for poets who had felt the passions that moved Dante.