Though these are the leading types of the Rispetto, Canzune and Villotta, each district exhibits a variety of subordinate and complex forms. The same may be said about the Stornello, Ritornello and Ciure. The names, too, are very variously applied; nor without pedantry would it be possible to maintain perfect precision in their usage.[334] It is enough to have indicated the two broad classes into which popular poetry of this kind is divided. For the future I shall refer to the one sort as Rispetti, to the other as Stornelli.
Comparative analysis makes it clear that the Rispetti and Stornelli scattered over all the provinces of Italy, constitute a common fund. That is to say, we do not meet with the Rispetti of each dialect confined to their own region; but the same original Rispetto, perhaps now lost to sight, has been adapted and transformed to suit the taste and idiom of the several provinces. To reconstitute the primitive type, to decide with certainty in each case the true source of these lyrics, is probably impossible. All we know for certain is that beneath apparent dialectical divergences the vulgar poetry of the Italians presents unmistakable signs of identity.[335] Which province was the primitive home of the Rispetti; whether Sicily, where the faculty for reproducing them is still most vivid[336]; or Tuscany, where they certainly attain their purest form and highest beauty; or whether all Italian country districts have contributed their quota to the general stock; are difficult questions, as yet by no means satisfactorily decided. Professor d'Ancona advances a theory, which is too plausible to be ignored in silence. Rispetti, he suggests, were first produced in Sicily, whence they traveled through Central Italy, receiving dialectical transmutation in Tuscany, and there also attaining to the perfection of their structure.[337] Numerous slight indications lead to the conclusion that their original linguistic type was southern. The imagery also which is common in verses sung to this day by the peasants of the Pistoja highlands, including frequent references to the sea with metaphors borrowed from orange-trees and palms, seems to indicate a Sicilian birthplace.[338] We have, moreover, the early evidence of six Napolitane copied from a Magliabecchian MS. of the fourteenth century, which exhibit the transition from southern to Tuscan idiom and structure.[339] One of these still exists in several dialects, under the title of La Rondinella importuna.[340] It is therefore certain that many Rispetti are very ancient, dating from the Suabian period, when Sicilian poetry, as we have seen, underwent the process of toscaneggiamento. However, D'Ancona's theory is too hypothetical, and it may also be said, too neat, to be accepted without reservation.
One point, at any rate, may be considered certain. Though the Rispetti are still alive upon the lips of contadini; though we may hear them echoing from farm and field through all the length and breadth of Italy; though the voluminous collections we possess have recently been gathered from viva voce recitation; yet they are perhaps as ancient as the dialects. The proof of this antiquity lies in the fact that whether we take the literary Strambotti of Poliziano for our standard, or the pasticci, incatenature and intrecciature of the sixteenth century for guides, we find the phrases and the style that are familiar to us in the rural lyrics of to-day.[341] Bronzino's Serenata and the Incatenatura of Bianchino contain, embedded in their structure, ditties which were universally known in the sixteenth century, and which are being sung still with unimportant alterations by the people. The attention of learned men was directed in the renascence of Tuscan literature to the beauty of these lyrics. Poliziano, writing to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1488, and describing his journey with Pietro through Montepulciano and Acquapendente in the month of May, says that he and his companions amused themselves with rappresaglie or adaptations of the songs they heard upon the way.[342] His road took him through what is still one of the best sources of local verse and music; and we may believe that at the close of the fifteenth century, the contadini of that district were singing nearly the same words as now. Nor, when we examine the points of similarity and difference in the Italian Rispetti and Stornelli, as they now exist, is there anything improbable in this antiquity. Nothing but great age can account for their adaptation to the tone, feeling, fancy, habits and language of so many regions. It must have taken more than a century or two to rub down their original angles, to efface the specific stamp of their birthplace, and to make them pass for home productions in Venice no less than Palermo, in Tuscan Montalcino and Ligurian Chiavari.
The retentiveness of the popular memory, before it has been spoiled by education, is quite sufficient to account for the preservation of these lyrics through several hundred years. Nor need their wide diffusion suggest difficulties. Italy in the middle ages offered readier means of intercommunication between the inhabitants of her provinces than she has done since the settlement of the country in 1530. When the liberation of the Communes gave a new impulse to intellectual and commercial activity, there began a steady and continually increasing movement from one city to another. Commercial enterprise led the burghers of Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Venice, Genoa, to establish themselves as bankers and middle-men, brokers and manufacturers, in Rome and Naples. Soldiers of adventure flocked from the south, and made the northern towns their temporary home. The sanctuaries of Gargano, Loretto and Assisi drew pilgrims from all quarters. Noblemen of Romagna acted as podestà beyond the Apennines, while Lombards opened shops in Palermo. Churchmen bred upon the Riviera wore the miter in the March; natives of the Spoletano taught in the schools of Bologna and Pavia. Men of letters, humanists and artists had no fixed dwelling-place, but wandered, like mercenary soldiers, from town to town in search of better pay. Students roamed from school to school according as the fame of great professors drew them. Party-quarrels in the commonwealths drove whole families, such as the Florentine Uberti, Alberti, Albizzi, Strozzi, into exile. Conquered cities, like Pisa, sent forth their burghers by hundreds as emigrants, too proud to bear the yoke of foes they had resisted. Nor were the Courts of princes without their influence in mingling the natives of different districts. Whether, then, we study the Novelle, or the histories of great houses, or the biographies of eminent Italians, or the records of the universities, we shall be led to the conclusion that from the year 1200 to the year 1550 there was a perpetual and lively intercourse by land and sea between the departments of Italy. This reciprocity of influence did not cease until the two despotic races, Austrian and Spaniard, threw each separate province into solitary chains. Such being the conditions of social exchange at the epoch when the language was in process of formation, there is nothing strange in finding the rural poetry of the south acclimatized in central and northern Italy. But the very facility of communication and the probable antiquity of these lyrics should make us cautious in adopting any rigid hypothesis about their origin. It is reasonable to suppose that such transferable property as love-poems might have been everywhere produced and rapidly diffused, the best from each center surviving by a natural process of selection. Lastly, whatever view may be taken of their formation and their age, we have every reason to believe that the fifteenth century was a fruitful period of production and accumulation. Toward the close of the quattrocento they attracted the curiosity of lettered poets, who began to imitate them, and in the next hundred years they were committed in large numbers to the press.[343]
In addition to the influence exercised by these popular lyrics over polite literature in the golden age of the Renaissance, extraordinary interest attaches to them as an indigenous species of verse, dating from remote antiquity and still surviving in all corners of the country. In them we analyze the Italian poetic genius at its source and under its most genuine conditions. Both from their qualities and their defects inferences may be drawn, which find application and illustration in the solemn works of laureled singers. The one theme of Rispetti and Stornelli is love; but love in all its phases and with all its retinue of associated emotions—expectation, fruition, disappointment, jealousy, despair, rejection, treachery, desertion, pleading, scorn—the joys of presence, the pangs of absence, the ecstasy of union, the agony of parting—love, natural and unaffected, turbulent or placid, chaste or troubled with desire, imperious or humble, tempestuously passionate or toned to tranquil acquiescence—love varying through all moods and tempers, yet never losing its note of spontaneity, sincerity and truth. The instincts of the people are pure, and their utterances of affection are singularly free from grossness. This at least is almost universally the case with lyrics gathered from the country. Approaching town-life, they lose their delicacy; and the products of the city are not unfrequently distinguished by the crudest obscenity.[344] The literary form of many of these masterpieces exhibits the beauty of rhythm, the refinement of outline, which we associate with melodies of the best Italian period—with chants of Pergolese, songs of Salvator Rosa. When we compare their subject-matter with that of our Northern Ballads, we notice a marked deficiency of legend, superstition or grotesque fancy. There are no witches, dragons, demon-lovers, no enchanted forests, no mythical heroes, no noble personages, few ghosts, few dreams and visions, in these songs poured forth among the olive-trees and myrtle-groves of Italy. Human nature, conscious of pleasure and of pain, finding its primitive emotion an adequate motive for verse subtly modulated through a thousand keys, is here sufficient to itself. The echoes imported from an outer world of passion and romance and action into this charmed region of the lover's heart are rare and feeble. Through all their national vicissitudes, the Italian peasants followed one sole aim in verse. The Rispetti of all times, localities and dialects form one protracted, ever-varying Duo between Thou and I, the dama and the damo, the eternal protagonists in the play of youth and love.
This absence of legendary and historical material marks a main difference between Italian and Teutonic inspiration. Among the Italic communities the practical historic sense was early developed, and sustained by the tradition of a classic past. It demanded a positive rather than imaginative treatment of contemporary fact and mythus. Among the people this requirement was satisfied by Storie, Lamenti, and prose Chronicles. Very few, indeed, are the relics of either romantic or actual history surviving in the lyrics of the rural population. Only here and there, in dim allusions to the Sicilian Vespers and the Norman Conquest, in the tale of the Baronessa di Carini, or in the Northern legend of Rosmunda, under its popular form of La Donna Lombarda, do we find a faint analogy between the Italian and Teutonic ballads.[345] Dramatic, mythical and epical elements are almost wholly wanting in the genuine lyrics of the people.
This statement requires some qualification. The four volumes of Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti recently published by Signor Pitrè, prove that the Sicilians in prose at least have a copious literature corresponding to German Märchen and Norse tales.[346] This literature, however, has not received poetic treatment in any existing southern songs that have been published, excepting in the few already noticed. At the same time, it must be mentioned that the collections of lyrics in north-western dialects—especially the Canti Monferrini, Canzoni Comasche, and Canti Leccesi—exhibit specimens of genuine ballads. It would seem that contact with French and German borderers along the Alpine rampart had introduced into Piedmont and Lombardy a form of lyric which is not essentially Italian. Had I space sufficient at disposal, I should like to quote the Donna Lombarda, Moglie Infedele, Giuseppina Parricida, Principessa Giovanna, Giuliano della Croce Bianca, Cecilia, Rè Carlino, Morando, and several others from Ferraro's collection.[347] They illustrate, what is exceedingly rare in popular Italian poetry, both the subject-matter and the manner peculiar to the Northern Ballad. Let the following verses from La Sposa per Forza suffice[348]:
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Ra soi madona a r'ha brassaja Suvra u so coffu a r'ha minèe; Uardèe qui, ra me noiretta, Le bele gioje che vi vôi dunèe. Mi n'ho csa fè dle vostre gioje; E manc ancur dla vostra cà; Cma ca voja dir bel gioje Ra me mama m' na mandirà. |
To comparative mythologists in general, and to English students in particular, the most interesting of these rare Italian Ballads is undoubtedly one known as L'Avvelenato.[349] So far as I am aware, it is unique in the Italian language; nor had its correspondences with Northern Ballad-literature been noticed until I pointed them out in 1879.[350] In his work on popular Italian poetry, Professor D'Ancona included the following song, which he had heard upon the lips of a young peasant of the Pisan district[351]: