It had no originality or freshness, but was a slavish imitation of Provençal models, the conventions of which were transported bodily, without any change, except to be poorer. Love was the only theme, and the type always remains the same. The lover is humble, a feudal vassal of his lady who stands far above him, all beauty and virtue, but a cold and lifeless abstraction. She usually treats her lover with disdain or indifference, while he pours forth the protestations of his love, extols her beauty, and laments her hardness of heart. All these things, repeated countless times, in almost the same language, became monotonous in the Provençal poets, and naturally much more so in their Italian imitators.
This Sicilian school of poetry did not last long; it perished with the downfall of the Hohenstaufens. It found a continuation, however, in middle Italy, especially in the province of Tuscany, which, from this time on, becomes the center of the literary and artistic life of Italy. The poetry of the court of Frederick had not been written in the Sicilian dialect, but in a sort of court language not very dissimilar to the Tuscan. It is probable that among the poets of the Sicilian school some were Tuscans, and that after the death of Frederick they returned home, bringing with them the poetical doctrines which they had learned.
However this may be, we find a direct continuation of the movement in Tuscany. We see the same slavish imitation of the troubadours, the same ideas, and the same poetical language and tricks of style. In addition to the influence of the Sicilian school, there was a direct imitation of the Provençal poets; thus Guittone d'Arezzo, the leader of the early Tuscan school, wrote and spoke Provençal, and Dante, in his Purgatory, introduces the Troubadour Arnaut Daniel, speaking in his native tongue.
One phase of Provençal poetry—the political—strangely enough considering the stormy times, had not been imitated by the poets at the court of Frederick II. From the first, however, the Tuscans included politics in their poetry, and one of the strongest of Guittone's poems is a song on the battle of Montaperti (1260).
Guittone d'Arezzo is the direct literary ancestor of Dante, and the first original Italian poet. Hence he deserves a word or two even in this brief sketch. He was born in 1230 near Arezzo in Tuscany, hence his name; after a youth spent in the pursuit of pleasure, he was converted, and looking on all things earthly as mere vanities, he left his wife and family and joined the recently founded military-religious order of the Knights of Saint Mary. He died at Florence in 1294. In early life he had been gay and dissipated; his last years he spent in the exercises of religious asceticism. These two parts of his life correspond to two phases of his poetry. In the first he was a follower of the Sicilian school and wrote love poetry; in the second he discarded this "foolishness" and wrote political, moral, and theological discussions in verse. His poetry has little esthetic value, but is important as forming a transition between the early Sicilian school and the group of poets whose greatest member was Dante. His writings against earthly love and his praise of heavenly love mark an important change in the development of Italian poetry and open the path which leads up to Beatrice and the Divine Comedy.
The next important step in this progress is marked by Guido Guinicelli, a learned lawyer and judge of Bologna (situated in the province of Romagna and separated from Tuscany by the Apennines), a city which at that time was the seat of a flourishing university and the center of a keen intellectual life.
Guinicelli was born in 1220, was prominent in political as well as in literary circles, was banished in 1274, and died in 1276. He was a follower of Guittone, and like him his first poetry was in the manner of the Sicilian school. He changed later and began a new school, the dolce stile nuova, as Dante calls it. The change shows itself especially in the new conception of love, and of its origin, growth, and effects. The troubadours and their Sicilian imitators declared that love came from seeing, that it entered through the eyes of the beholder, and thence descended to the heart. Guinicelli says, on the contrary, that love does not come from without, but dwells, "as a bird in its nest," in the heart and is an attribute thereof. This is not true, however, of all men, but only of those who are virtuous and good. Only the gentle heart can love, and a noble character is not the effect of love, but its cause. These sentiments are expressed in the following lines, translated by Rossetti:
"Within the gentle heart Love shelters him,
As birds within the green shade of the grove.
Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme,
Love was not, or the gentle heart ere Love.
For with the sun, at once,
So sprang the light immediately, nor was
Its birth before the sun's.
And Love hath its effect in gentleness
Of very self; even as
Within the middle fire the heat's excess."
Whereas the love of the troubadours was romantic and chivalrous, the love of Guinicelli was intellectual and philosophical. With him earthly affections become purified and spiritualized. The old repertory of conventional expressions is gradually discarded, and new forms take their place, soon to become conventional in their turn. Love and the poet's Lady remain abstract, but have now a different signification. The Lady is still treated as a perfect being, but she becomes now a symbol of something higher. Love for her leads to virtue and to God; poetry now receives an allegorical character, and its real end becomes the inculcation of philosophical truth under the veil of earthly love. The importance of Guinicelli for us is his influence on Dante, for the new school was not continued in Bologna, but found its chief followers in Florence. We are thus led naturally up to the works of the great Florentine poet whom we shall study in the next two chapters.
In the meantime, however, we must cast a brief glance at certain other early phases of Italian literature, which later developed into important branches of poetry and prose.