FOOTNOTES:
[8] When preceded by the Christian name, “Boccaccio” ought, in strictness, to lose the final vowel, but this would seem pedantic in English.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
A just remark of Coventry Patmore’s on the contrast between Dante and Shakespeare in their relation to their respective literatures might be extended to the Italian literature of the fourteenth century in general: it has lofty peaks, but little elevated table-land. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio tower above their contemporaries, who, viewed from such eminences, are almost indiscernible. It might have been expected, nevertheless, that the example of surpassing excellence, which could complain of no want of popularity or recognition, would have powerfully stimulated contemporaries and successors, and that, as Homer gave birth to the Cyclic poets, and Alcæus followed in the wake of Alcman, the great Italians would have appeared as the immediate progenitors of epicists, lyrists, and novelists of kindred if inferior power. On the contrary, the century from the death of Boccaccio to the appearance of Lorenzo de’ Medici as a poet is the most barren in Italian literary history. It produces no vernacular writer of genius, and but few of eminent talent. It is indeed no reproach to it to have brought forth no second Dante, or to have failed, like all other ages, to reproduce the inimitable perfection of Petrarch. But it might have been anticipated that the new ways opened out by Boccaccio alike in metrical epic and in prose narrative would have been followed up, and that history and allied branches of literature would have assumed a classic form.
Little of the kind occurred, and classical study itself ceased to produce a vivifying effect upon letters. This may have been partly owing to excessive admiration for the ancient writers, degenerating into pedantic imitation; partly from the great demand for Latin translations from the Greek, and Latin official correspondence, encouraging Latin composition at the expense of the vernacular; but cannot be wholly explained by any cause peculiar to Italy, for the same phenomenon manifested itself over Europe. Chaucer, who had carried the poetry of England so high, had no successors; and it would be difficult to point to a work of genius anywhere, except theImitatio Christi, which might have been produced in any Christian age, and theAmadis of Gaul, the parent of the romances of chivalry, composed in Portugal or Spain about the beginning of the fifteenth century. How far this is to be ascribed to the Black Death, which, in sweeping away so much of the existing generation, blighted so much of the hope of the future; how far to calamities like the Great Schism and the Jacquerie; how far to causes unfathomable by the human intellect, will always be a question.
Certain it is that, while material civilisation continued to develop, and Leonardo Bruni, thinking only of the cultivation of Greek, is able to say, “Letters at this time grew mightily in Italy,” creative genius received a check; and the standard of public virtue in most countries fell lower than it had ever been, or has been again. We can only note the few who in Italy, otherwise than as classical scholars, did anything to vindicate their age from the imputation of intellectual barrenness. Two didactic poems with epic affinities, produced, one shortly before, the other shortly after the death of Boccaccio, attest more than pages of panegyric the power with which Dante controlled the imaginations of his countrymen. FAZIO DEGLI UBERTI, a Florentine of whose life little is known, except that he spent most of it in exile, and died about 1367, seems to have thought that if Dante had appropriated heaven, hell, and purgatory, the earth at least remained for himself. He undertook to describe, in a number of cantos in terza rima, his perlustration of it under the escort of a singular guide, the Latin topographer Solinus. What Solinus is to Virgil, Uberti is to Dante; yet, though an uninspired, he is not a contemptible writer. His geographical epic theDittamondo (Discourse of the World) may be unduly prejudiced in the eyes of English readers from Rossetti’s rendering of a canto in blank verse. It would indeed have been a waste of time to have striven to reproduce the original metre, yet Uberti’s tercets glide with an ease and fluency of which the blank verse gives no notion. The poem is not altogether destitute of poetical spirit; one conception, that of the forlorn Genius of Rome herself guiding the poet to her ruins, is truly fine, but force was wanting to work it out. Otherwise it is chiefly interesting as a repertory of the geographical knowledge and fancies of the age. The canto on England has been translated by Rossetti, and is entertaining from its naïveté. Uberti must have been an accomplished man, for he intersperses French and Provençal verses with his Italian. He is more truly a poet in his lyrical than in his epic performances, if, at least, the sonnets and canzoni which pass under his name are really his. One, translated by Rossetti, has so much poetical merit as to have been frequently ascribed to Dante:
I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair
Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net;
Using at times a string of pearls for bait,
And sometimes with a single rose therein.
I look into her eyes, which unaware,
Though mine own eyes to her heart penetrate;
Their splendour, that is excellently great,
To the sun’s radiance seeming near akin,
Vet from herself a sweeter light to win.
So that I, gazing on that lovely one,
Discourse in this wise with my secret thought:
“Woe’s me! why am I not,
Even as my wish, alone with her alone,—
That hair of hers, so heavily uplaid,
To shed down braid by braid,
And make myself two mirrors of her eyes
Within whose light all other glory dies?”
Another writer of mark, nearer than Fazio to Dante both in style and subject, is FREDERICO FREZZI, citizen and bishop of Foligno, who died at the Council of Constance in 1416. HisQuatriregio, a moral poem describing the author’s progress through the realms of Love, Pluto, the Vices and Virtue, so close an imitation of Dante as to border upon servility, is, notwithstanding, not a mean performance. Frezzi has considerable rhetorical, if not much poetical power, and many passages are really impressive. The diction also is good; but the book’s chief repute at this day is among artists, on account of the remarkable designs adorning the edition of 1506, which present an affinity to Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante, and have been attributed, although on insufficient authority, to Luca Signorelli. The poem was republished at Foligno in 1725, with a learned commentary, of which it was in great need. MATTEO PALMIERI’S poem,Città di Vita, probably much in Frezzi’s style, arouses interest from its having been suppressed as heretical, but its poetical merit has never yet sufficed to allure a publisher. “The object,” says Symonds, who read it in MS., “is to show how free-will is innate in men.” It is founded upon an actual vision, according lo the assertion of the author.