Visitai stamattina Messer Zaccheria Barbero; e mostrandoli io l'affezione vostra ec., mi rispose sempre lagrimando, et ut visum est, de cuore; risolvendosi in questo, in te uno spem esse. Ostendit so nosse quantum tibi debeat; sicchè fate quello ragionaste, ut favens ad majora. Quello Legato che torna da Roma, et qui tecum locutus est Florentiæ, non è punto a loro proposito, ut ajunt.
Poliziano, however, showed by his letters to the ladies of the Medicean family, and by some sermons composed for a religious brotherhood of which he was a member, that he had no difficulty in writing Tuscan prose of the best quality.[283] It seems to have been a contemptuous fashion among men of learning, when they used the mother tongue for correspondence, to load it with Latin—just as a German of the age of Frederick proved his superiority by French phrases. The acme of this affectation was reached in the Hypnerotomachia, where the vice of Latinism sought perpetuation through the printing press. Meanwhile, the genius of the Florentine people was saving Italian literature from the extreme consequences to which caricatures of this kind, inspired by humanistic pedantry and sciolism, exposed it.
A characteristic incident of the year 1441 brings before us a set of men who, though obscure and devoted to the service of the common folk, exercised no slight influence over the destinies of the Italian language. After the reinstatement of the Medici, and while Alberti was resident in Florence, it occurred to him to propose the prize of a silver crown for the best poem upon Friendship, in the vulgar tongue. Piero de' Medici approving of this scheme, it was arranged that the contest for the prize should take place in S. Maria del Fiore, the competitors reciting their own compositions. The secretaries of Pope Eugenius IV. consented to be umpires. Eight poets entered the lists—Michele di Noferi del Gigante, Francesco d'Altobianco degli Alberti, and six others not less unknown to fame. We still possess their compositions in octave stanzas, terza rima, sapphics, hexameters and lyric strophes.[284] The poems were so bad that even the judges of that period refused to award the crown; nor could the most indulgent student of forgotten literature arraign this verdict for severity. Yet the men who engaged in Alberti's Certamen Coronarium, as it was called, fairly represented a class of literary workers, who occupied a middle place between the learned and the laity, and on whom devolved the task of writing for the people.
Since that unique moment in the history of Tuscan civilization when the lyrics of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti were heard upon the lips of blacksmiths, the artisans of Florence had not wholly lost their thirst for culture. Style and erudition retired into the schools of the humanists and the studies of the nobles. But this curiosity of the volgo, as Boccaccio contemptuously called them, was satisfied by the production of a vernacular literature, which brought the ruder elements of knowledge within their reach. Mention has already been made of Latini's Tesoro and Tesoretto, Uberti's Dittamondo and similar encyclopædic works of medieval learning. To these may now be added Leonardo Dati's cosmographical history in octave stanzas, the Schiavo da Bari's aphorisms on morality, and Pucci's terza rima version of Villani's Chronicle. Genealogical poems on popes, emperors and kings; episodes from national Italian history; novels, romances and tales of chivalry; pious biographies; the rudiments of education, from the Dottrinale of Jacopo Alighieri down to Feo Belcari's A B C, helped to complete the handicraftsman's library. Further to describe this plebeian literature is hardly necessary. The authors advanced no pretensions to artistic elegance or stateliness of style. They sought to render knowledge accessible to unlettered readers, or to please an open-air audience with stirring and romantic narratives. Their language broke only at rare intervals into poetry and rhetoric, when the subject-matter forced a note of unaffected feeling from the improvisatore. Yet it has always the merit of purity, and, in point of idiom, is superior to the Latinistic periods of Alberti. By means of the neglected labors of these nameless writers, the style of the fourteenth century, so winning in its infantine grace, was gradually transformed and rendered capable of stronger literary utterance. Those who have studied a single prose-work of this period—I Reali di Francia, for instance, or Belcari's Vita del Beato Colombino, or the Governo della Famiglia ascribed to Pandolfini—will be convinced that a real progress toward grammatical cohesion and massiveness of structure was made during those years of the fifteenth century which are usually counted barren of achievement by literary historians. Italian prose had entered on the period of adolescence, leading to the manhood of Machiavelli.
The popular poetry of the quattrocento is still more interesting than its prose. No period of Italian history was probably more fruitful of songs poured forth from the very heart of the people, on the fields and in the city. The music of these lyrics still lingers about the Tuscan highlands and the shores of Sicily, where much that now passes for original composition is but the echo of most ancient melody stored in the retentive memory of peasants. To investigate the several species of this poetry, together with kindred works of prose fiction, under the several classes of (i) epics and romances, (ii) histories in verse and satires, (iii) love-poems, (iv) religious lyrics, and (v) dramas, will be my object in the present and the following chapters. This survey of popular literature forms a necessary introduction to the renascence which was simultaneously effected for Italian at Florence, Ferrara and Naples during the last years of the century. The material prepared by the people was then resumed and artistically elaborated by learned authors.
It has been well said that Italian poetry exhibits a continual reciprocity of exchange between the cultivated classes and the proletariate. In this respect the literature of the Italians corresponds to their fine art. Taken together with painting, sculpture, and music, it offers a more complete embodiment of the national spirit than can be shown by any other modern race. Dante's Francesca and Count Ugolino, Ariosto's golden cantos, and the romantic episodes of the Gerusalemme are known by heart throughout the length and breadth of the Peninsula. The people have appropriated these masterpieces of finished art. On the other hand, the literary poets have been ever careful to borrow subjects, forms, and motives from the populace. The close rapport which thus connects the tastes and instincts of the proletariate with the culture of the aristocracy, is rooted in peculiar conditions of Italian society. Traditions of a very ancient civilization, derived without apparent rupture from the Roman age, have penetrated and refined the whole nation. From the highest to the lowest, the Italians are born with sensibility to beauty. This people and its poets live in sympathy so vital that, though their mutual good understanding may have been suspended for short intervals, it has never been broken. The vibrations of intercourse between the peasant and the learned writer are incessant; and if we notice some intermittency of influence on one side or the other, it is only because at one epoch the destinies of the national genius were committed to the people, at another to the cultivated classes. In the fifteenth century, one of these temporary ruptures occurred. The Revival of Learning had to be effected by an isolation of the scholars. Meanwhile, the people carried on the work of literary transmutation, which was to connect Boccaccio with Pulci and Poliziano. Their instinct rejected all elements alien to the national temperament. Out of the many models bequeathed by the fourteenth century, only those which suited the sensuous realism of the Florentines survived. The traditions of Ciullo d'Alcamo and Jacopone da Todi, of Rustico di Filippo and Lapo Gianni, of Folgore da S. Gemignano and Cene dalla Chitarra, of Cecco Angiolieri and Guido Cavalcanti, of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, of Ser Giovanni and Alesso Donati, triumphed over the scholasticism of those learned poets—"half Provençal and half Latin, half chivalrous, and half bourgeois, half monastic and half sensual, half aristocratic and half plebeian"[285]—who had unsuccessfully experimentalized in the dawn of Tuscan culture. The artificial chivalry, lifeless mysticism, barren metaphysics, and hypocritical piety of the rhyming doctors were eliminated. Common sense expressed itself in a reaction against their conventional philosophy. Giotto's blunt critique of Franciscan poverty, Orcagna's burlesque definition of Love, not as a blind boy with wings and arrows, but thus:
|
L'amore è un trastullo; Non è composto di legno nè d'osso; E a molta gente fa rompere il dosso: |
struck the keynote of the new literature.[286] It is true that much was sacrificed. Both Dante and Petrarch seemed to be forgotten. Yet this was inevitable. Dante represented a bygone age of faith and reason. Petrarch's humanity was too exquisitely veiled. The Florentine people required expression more simple and direct, movement more brusque, emotion of a coarser fiber. Meanwhile the Divine Comedy and the Canzoniere were the inalienable possessions of the nation. They had already taken rank as classics.
The Italians had no national Epic, if we except the Æneid. We have seen how the romances of Charlemagne and Arthur were imported with the languages of France and Provence into Northern Italy, and how they passed into the national literature of Lombardy and Tuscany.[287] Both cycles were eminently popular. The Tavola Ritonda ranks among the earliest monuments of Tuscan prose.[288] The Cento Novelle contain frequent references to Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram. Folgore da S. Gemignano compares the members of his Joyous Company to King Ban's children. In the Laberinto d'Amore Boccaccio speaks of Arthurian tales as the favorite studies of idle women, and Sacchetti bids his blacksmith turn from Dante to legends of the Round Table. Yet there is no doubt that from a very early period the Carolingian cycle gained the preference of the Italian people.[289] It is also noticeable that, not the main legend of Roland, but the episode of Rinaldo, and other offshoots from the history of the Frankish peers, furnished plebeian poets with their favorite material.[290] MSS. written in Venetian and Franco-Italian dialects before the middle of the fourteenth century attest to the popularity of these subordinate romances, and reveal an independent handling of the borrowed subject. In form they do not diverge widely from French originals. Yet there is one prominent characteristic which distinguishes the Italian rifacimenti. A Christian hero falls in love with a pagan heroine on pagan soil. His pursuit of her, their difficulties and adventures, and the evangelization of her people by the knightly lover, furnish a series of incidents which recur with singular persistence.[291] When the romances in question had been translated into Tuscan, a destiny of special splendor was reserved for two of them, in no way distinguished by any apparent merit above the rest. These were the tales of Buovo d'Antona, of which we possess an early version in octave stanzas, and of Fioravante, which exists in still older prose. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Buovo and the Fioravante, together with other material drawn from the Carolingian epic, were combined into the great prose work called I Reali di Francia.[292] Since its first appearance to the present day, this romance has never ceased to be the most widely popular of all books written in Italian. "There is nothing," says Signor Rajna, "so assiduously read from the Alps to the furthest headlands of Sicily. Wherever a reader exists, there is it certain to be found in honor."[293] Not the earliest but the latest product of a long elaboration of romantic matter by the people, it seems to have assimilated the very essence of the popular imagination. When we inquire into its authorship, we find good reason to ascribe it to Andrea dei Mangalotti of Barberino in the Val d'Elsa, one of the best and most indefatigable workmen for the literary market of the proletariate.[294] It was he who compiled the Aspromonte, the Aiolfo, the seven books of Storie Nerbonesi, the Ugone d'Avernia, and the Guerino il Meschino, reducing these tales from elder poems and prose sources into Tuscan of sterling lucidity and vigor, and attempting, it would seem, to embrace the whole Carolingian cycle in a series of episodical romances.[295] Guerino il Meschino rivaled for a while the Reali in popularity; but for some unknown reason, which would have to be sought in the instinctive partialities of the people, it was gradually superseded by the latter. The Reali alone has descended in its original form through the press to this century.[296]
Andrea da Barberino, if we are right in ascribing the Reali to his pen, conferred a benefit on the Italians parallel to that which the English owed to Sir Thomas Mallory in his "Mort d'Arthur." He not only collected and condensed the scattered tales of numerous unknown predecessors, but he also bequeathed to the nation a monument of unaffected prose at a moment when the language was still ingenuous and plastic. It would be not uninteresting to compare the fate of the Reali with that of our own "Mort d'Arthur." The latter was the more artistic performance of the two. It achieved a truer epical unity, and was composed in a richer, more romantic style. The former remained episodical and incomplete; and its language, though solid and efficient, lacked the charm of Mallory's all golden prose. Yet the Reali is still a household classic. It is found in every contadino's cottage, and supplies the peasantry with subjects for their Maggi. The "Mort d'Arthur," on the contrary, has become the plaything of medievalizing folk in modern England. Read for its unique beauty by students, it is still unknown to the people, and, in the opinion of the dull majority, it is reckoned inferior to Tennyson's smooth imitations.