A history of Italian literature

by Richard Garnett

More extraordinary works than theVita Nuova have been composed at even an earlier age, but there is perhaps no other book in the world in which a young man appears as asserting by his first attempt so unchallenged a superiority over predecessors and contemporaries, with whom he has nevertheless much in common. The evolution of Italian poetry has up to this point proceeded gradually and systematically; all of a sudden it makes a bound, and seems as it were to have sprung across a chasm. The prose is of more equable desert than the interspersed poetry, some of which is inferior; while, on the other hand, the best poetry far transcends the prose. The finest among the sonnets and canzoni, if sometimes rivalled, have not hitherto been surpassed in Italian literature, while the most famous of the former still stands at the head of its own class:

So goodly and so seemly doth appear
My Lady, when she doth a greeting bring,
That tongue is stayed, silent and quivering,
And eye adventures not to look on her.
She thence departeth, of her laud aware,
Meek in humility’s apparelling;
And men esteem her as a heavenly thing
Sent down to earth a marvel to declare.
Whoso regardeth, so delightedly
Beholds, his eyes into his heart instil
Sweet only to be known by tasting it;
And from her face invisibly doth flit
A gentle spirit Love doth wholly fill,
That to the soul is ever saying, Sigh.

The length of Italian canzoni renders it extremely difficult to do them justice in a work of necessarily contracted limits. Two stanzas, however, of Dante’s canzone on the death of his lady are, as it were, a little poem complete in themselves, and may be cited in Rossetti’s matchless version:

I was a-thinking how life fails with us
Suddenly after such a little while;
When Love sobbed in my heart, which is his home.
Whereby my spirit waxed so dolorous
That in myself I said, with sick recoil:
'Yea, to my Lady too this Death must come.’
And therewithal such a bewilderment
Possessed me, that I shut mine eyes for peace;
And in my brain did cease
Order of thought, and every healthful thing.
Afterwards, wandering
Amid a swarm of doubts that came and went,
Some certain women’s faces hurried by,
And shrieked to me, 'Thou too shalt die, shalt die!'

Then saw I many broken, hinted sights
In the uncertain state I stepped into.
Meseemed to be I know not in what place,
Where ladies through the streets, like mournful lights,
Ran with loose hair, and eyes that frightened you
By their own terror, and a pale amaze:
The while, little by little, as I thought,
The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
And each wept at the other;
And birds dropped in mid flight out of the sky,
And earth shook suddenly,
And I was 'ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
Who asked of me, 'Hast thou not heard it said?
Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead’.

Although the Vita Nuova is essentially true history, the same cannot be said of a later work preferred to it by the author himself, albeit posterity has reversed his judgment. This is theConvito, orBanquet, in which Beatrice appears as an allegory of divine philosophy. The process of this mutation is not difficult to discover. Not long after her death, Dante, as he tells us at the end of theVita Nuova, had resolved, under the influence of a wondrous vision, “di dire di lei quello che mai non fu detto d’alcuna.” The mortal maiden thus necessarily becomes a type of supernatural glory and perfection, as we see her in theDivina Commedia, and the metamorphosis inevitably extends to the lyrics in which Dante celebrates her. She is no longer Beatrice de’ Portinari, but Philosophy, and unfortunately in too many instances Dante’s poetry has become philosophy also. The nobility of the form still assures it pre-eminence over all contemporary verse but the author’s own; but the substance is often mere reasoning in rhyme. Two canzoni, however, are of distinguished beauty, “Voi ch’ intendendo il terzo ciel movete” (translated by Shelley), and “Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute,” which Coleridge says, in 1819, he is at length beginning to understand after reading it over twelve times annually for the last fourteen years. “Such a fascination had it in spite of its obscurity!”

The former of these pieces is shown by internal evidence to have been written as early as 1295, and the latter was composed after Dante’s banishment, to which period most of the other canzoni and the prose commentary probably belong. This commentary constitutes the substance of the work. It was intended to have expounded fourteen canzoni, but treats only of three, apart from a general introduction. More remarkable, perhaps, than the philosophical subtleties of which it consists, is Dante’s appeal to a new public. He writes no longer for literary circles, but for the world of persons of worth wherever found, especially persons of rank. Hence the treatise is necessarily composed in Italian, which has the good effect of drawing from Dante a spirited vindication of his native tongue. It was probably completed up to the point where the author left it by 1308 or 1309. The exceedingly corrupt text has been revised by the last editor, Dr. Moore, upon the authority of two manuscripts in England.

The literary merits of the Italian language are more fully expounded in another work of Dante’s, which, however, he composed in Latin, that his arguments might reach those who would not have condescended to read the vernacular. TheDe Vulgari Eloquio, originally entitledDe Eloquentia Vulgari, orOf the Vulgar Tongue, is shown by historical allusions to have been composed by 1304. Like theConvito it is unfinished, only two books of the four of which it was to have consisted having been written. Dante’s conception of the capabilities of his native tongue does him honour, even though he restricts the number of subjects adapted to it, and would deny its use to all but gifted writers. It is a still higher honour to have recommended it more effectually by his example than by his reasonings, which, as was inevitable in his age, frequently rest upon entirely fanciful and visionary data. His account, nevertheless, of the Italian dialects as they existed in his day, and his precepts on the metrical structure of Italian poetry, which he seems not to have then contemplated as capable of existing apart from music, retain a substantial value for all time.

The hopes founded upon the appearance of the Emperor in Italy in 1311 probably induced Dante to publish a work written some years previously, his treatiseDe Monarchia, embodying the best mediæval conception of the spheres of temporal and spiritual government upon earth. So powerfully had the universality of Roman sway impressed men’s minds, that the Roman people were believed to have obtained the empire of the earth by the donation of Heaven, and the Emperor of Germany was regarded as their lawful representative. This belief, so strange to us, was, nevertheless, salutary in its time, by repressing the champions of universal despotism who made the Pope the fountain of secular as well as spiritual authority. By numerous arguments satisfactory to himself, but which would now be considered entirely irrelevant, Dante proves that universal monarchy is a portion of the Providential scheme, that the Romans possessed by divine appointment jurisdiction over the entire earth. The inheritance of this prerogative by the Emperor of Germany is taken for granted, and it is next demonstrated that the Emperor does not derive his authority from the Church, any more than the Church hers from the Emperor. Yet Cæsar is to be reverent to Peter, as the first-born son to his father. There is no trace of religious heterodoxy in the treatise, though nothing can be more uncompromising than its limitation of the Papal authority to its legitimate sphere.

The amount of fugitive poetry ascribed to Dante is inconsiderable. Bruni, in his biography, remarks that there are two classes of poets—those who sing by inspiration and those who compose by art—and that Dante belongs to the second. It cannot be admitted that Dante was devoid of inspiration, but it is certainly true that he was one of those who possess a special power of regulating this divine gift. A Shelley or a Coleridge must write when the impulse seizes him; but a Milton, with the conception ofParadise Lost in his mind, can defer putting pen to paper for seventeen years, and, with consummate lyric power, is but unfrequently visited by the lyric impulse. Dante, so marvellously similar to Milton in many respects, also, if we may trust his account of the genesis of the pieces in theVita Nuova, but seldom found himself under an irresistible impulse to lyrical composition. Something suggests to him that a sonnet or a canzone would be expedient or decorous; he plots it out, and fills up the outline with unerring fidelity to his first conception. The gigantic plan of the Divine Comedy is similarly carried out without interruption or misgiving; and but for the death of Beatrice, it is by no means certain that it would have existed, any more than that Milton would have writtenComus if the noble children had never been lost in the wood.