While the Italians were fighting the Wars of Investiture and Independence, two literatures had arisen in the country which we now call France. Two languages, the langue d'oc and the langue d'oïl, gave birth to two separate species of poetry. The master-product of the latter was the Song of Roland, which, together with the after-birth of Arthurian romance, flooded Europe with narratives, embodying in a more or less epical form the ideals, enthusiasms, and social creed of Chivalry. The former, cultivated in the southern provinces that border on the Mediterranean, yielded a refined and courtly fashion of lyrical verse, which took the form of love-songs, battle-songs, and satires, and which is now known as Provençal literature. The influence of feudal culture, communicated through these two distinct but closely connected channels, was soon felt in Italy. The second phase of Italian development has been called Lombard, because it was chiefly in the north of the peninsula that the motive force derived from France was active. Yet if we regard the matter of this new literature, rather than its geographical distribution, we shall more correctly designate it by the title Franco-Italian. In the first or Latin period, the Italians used an ancient language. They now adopted not only the forms but also the speech of the people from whom they received their literary impulse. It is probable that the Lombard dialects were still too rough to be accommodated to the new French style. The cultivated classes were familiar with Latin, and had felt no need of raising the vernacular above the bare necessities of intercourse. But the superior social development of the French courts and castles must be reckoned the main reason why their language was acclimatized in Italy together with their literature. Just as the Germans before the age of Herder adopted polite culture, together with the French tongue, ready-made from France, so now the Lombard nobles, bordering by the Riviera upon Provence, borrowed poetry, together with its diction, from the valley of the Rhone. Passing along the Genoese coast, crossing the Cottian Alps, and following the valley of the Po, the languages of France and Provence diffused themselves throughout the North of Italy. With the langue d'oïl came the Chansons de Geste of the Carolingian Cycle and the romances of the Arthurian legend. With the langue d'oc came the various forms of troubadour lyric. Without displacing the local dialects, these imported languages were used and spoken purely by the nobles; while a hybrid, known as franco-italian, sprang up for the common people who listened to the tales of Roland and Rinaldo on the market-place. The district in which the whole mass of this foreign literature seems to have flourished most at first, was the Trevisan March, stretching from the Adige, along the Po, beyond the Brenta and past Venice, to the base of the Friulian Alps. The Marches of Treviso were long known as La Marca Amorosa or Gioiosa, epithets which strongly recall the Provençal phrases of Joie and Gai Saber, and which are familiar to English readers of Sir Thomas Mallory in the name of Lancelot's castle, Joyous Gard. Exactly to define the period of Trevisan culture would be difficult. It is probable that it began to flourish about the end of the twelfth, and declined in the middle of the thirteenth century. Dante alludes to it in a famous passage of the Purgatory[11]:
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In sul paese ch'Adige e Po riga, Solea valore e cortesia trovarsi Prima che Federigo avesse briga. |
There are many traces of advanced French civilization in this district, among which may be mentioned the exhibition of Miracle Plays upon the French type at Civitale in the years 1298 and 1304, and the Castello d'Amore at Treviso described by Rolandini in the year 1214. Yet, though the Trevisan Marches were the nucleus of this Gallicizing fashion, the use of French and Provençal spread widely through the North and down into the center of Italy. Numerous manuscripts in the langue d'oïl attest the popularity of the Arthurian romances throughout Lombardy, and we know that in Umbria S. Francis first composed poetry in French.[12] It was in French, again, that Brunetto Latini wrote his Tesoro. So late as the middle of the fourteenth century this habit had not died out. Dante in the Convito thought it necessary to stigmatize "those men of perverse mind in Italy who commend the vulgar tongue of foreigners and depreciate their own."
We have seen that the language and the matter of this imported literature were twofold; and we can distinguish two distinct currents, after its reception into Italy. The Provençal lyric, as was natural, attracted the attention of the nobles; and since feudalism had a stronger hold upon the valley of the Po than on any other district, Lombardy became the chief home of this poetry. Not to mention the numerous Provençal singers who sought fortune and adventure in northern Italy, about twenty-five Italians, using the langue d'oc, may be numbered between the Marchese Alberto Malaspina, who held Lunigiana about 1204, and the Maestro Ferrara, who lived at the Court of Azzo VII. of Este.[13] These were for the most part courtiers and imperial feudatories; and only two were Tuscans. The person of one of them, Sordello, is familiar to every reader of the Purgatory.
The second tide of influence passed from Northern France together with the epics of chivalry. But its operation was not so simple as that of the Provençal lyric. We can trace for instance a marked difference between the effect produced by the Chansons de Geste and that of the Arthurian tales. The latter seem to have been appropriated by the nobles, while the former found acceptance with the people. Nor was this unnatural. At the opening of the twelfth century the Carolingian Cycle had begun to lose its vogue among the polished aristocracy of France. That uncompromising history of warfare hardly suited a society which had developed the courtesy and the romance of chivalry. It represented the manners of an antecedent age of feudalism. Therefore the tales of the Round Table arose to satisfy the needs of knights and ladies, whose thoughts were turned to love, the chase, the tournament, and errantry. The Arthurian myth idealized their newer and more refined type of feudal civility. It was upon the material of this romantic Epic that the nobles of North Italy fastened with the greatest eagerness. No one has forgotten how the tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere proved, in a later day, the ruin of Francesca and her lover.[14] The people, on the other hand, took livelier interest in the songs of Roland and Charlemagne. The Chansons de Geste formed the stock in trade of those Cantatores Francigenarum, who crowded the streets and squares of Lombard cities.[15] The exchange of courtesies and refined sentiments between a Tristram and Iseult or a Lancelot and Guinevere must naturally have been less attractive to a rude populace than narratives of battle with the Infidel, and Roland's horn, and Gano's treason, and Rinaldo's quarrels with his liege. In the Arthurian Cycle names and places alike—Avalon, Camelot, Winchester, Gawain, Galahaut—were distant and ill-adapted to Italian ears.[16] The whole tissue of the romance, moreover, was imaginative. The Carolingian Cycle, on the contrary, introduced personages with a good right to be considered historical, and dwelt upon familiar names and traditional ideas. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that this Epic took a strong hold on the popular imagination, and so penetrated the Italian race as to assume a new form on Italian soil, while the Arthurian romance survived as a pastime of the upper classes, and underwent no important metamorphosis at their hands. In the course of this volume, I shall have to show how, when Italian literature emerged again from the people after nearly a century of neglect, it was the transformed tale of Charlemagne and Roland which supplied the Italian nation with its master-works of epic poetry—the Morgante and the two Orlandos.
The Lombard, or rather the Franco-Italian period is marked by the adoption of a foreign language and foreign fashions. Literature at this stage was exotic and artificial; but the legacy transmitted to the future was of vast importance. On the one side, the courtly rhymers who versified in the Provençal dialect, bequeathed to Sicily and Tuscany the chivalrous lyric of love, which was destined to take its final and fairest form from Dante and Petrarch. On the other hand, the populace who listened to the Song of Roland on the market-place, prepared the necessary conditions for a specific and eminently characteristic product of Italian genius. Without a national epic, the Italians were forced to borrow from the French. But what they borrowed, they transmuted—not merely adding new material, like the tale of Gano's treason and the fiction of Orlando's birth at Sutri, but importing their own spirit, positive, ironical and incredulous, into the substance of the legend.
In the course of Italianizing the tale of Roland, the native dialects made their first effort to assume a literary form. We possess sufficient MS. evidence to prove that the Franco-Italian language of the songs recited to the Lombard townsfolk, was composed by the adaptation of local modes of speech to French originals. The process was not one of pure translation. The dialects were not fit for such performance. It may rather be described as the attempt of the dialects to acquire capacity for studied expression. With French poems before them, the popular rhapsodes introduced dialectical phrases, substituted words, and, where this was possible, modified the style in favor of the dialect they wished to use. French still predominated. But the hybrid was of such a nature that a transition from this mixed jargon to the dialect, presented in a literary shape, was imminent.
There is sufficient ground for presuming that the Italian dialects triumphed simultaneously in all parts of the peninsula about the middle of the thirteenth century.[17] This presumption is founded partly on the quotations from dialectical poetry furnished by Dante in the De Eloquio, which prove a wide-spread literary activity; partly on fragments recovered from sources which can be referred to the second half of the century. The peculiar problems offered by the conditions of poetry at Frederick II.'s Court, though these are open to many contradictory solutions, render the presumption more than probable. It is difficult to understand the third or Sicilian period of literature without hypothesizing an antecedent stage of vulgar poetry produced in local dialects. But, owing to the scarcity of documents, no positive facts regarding the date and mode of their emergence can be adduced. We have on this point to deal with matters of delicate conjecture and minute inference; and though it might seem logical to introduce at once a discussion on the growth of the Italian language, and its relation to the dialects which were undoubtedly spoken before they were committed to writing, special reasons induce me to defer this topic for the present.
While the North of Italy was deriving the literature both of its cultivated classes and of the people from France, a new and still more important phase of evolution was preparing in the South. Both Dante and Petrarch recognize the Sicilian poets as the first to cultivate the vulgar tongue with any measure of success, and to raise it to the dignity of a literary language. In this opinion they not only uttered the tradition of their age, but were also without doubt historically correct. Whatever view may be adopted concerning the formation of the lingua illustre, or polished Italian, from the dialectical elements already employed in local kinds of poetry, there is no disputing the importance of the Sicilian epoch. We cannot fix precise dates for its duration. Yet, roughly speaking, it may be said to have begun in 1166, when troubadours of some distinction gathered round the person of the Norman king, William II., at Palermo, and to have ended in 1266, when Manfred was killed at the battle of Benevento. It culminated during the reign of the Emperor Frederick II. (1210-1250), who was himself skilled in Latin and the vulgar tongues of France and Italy, and who drew to his court men distinguished for their abilities in science and literature. Dante called Frederick, Cherico grande. The author of the Cento Novelle described him as veramente specchio del mondo in parlare et in costumi, and spoke of his capital as the resort of la gente ch'avea bontade ... sonatori, trovatori, e belli favellatori, uomini d'arti, giostratori, schermitori, d'ogni maniera gente.[18] The portrait drawn of him by Salimbene in his contemporary Chronicle, though highly unfavorable to the schismatic enemy of Holy Church, proves that his repute was great in Italy as a patron of letters and himself a poet of no mean pretensions.[19]