FOOTNOTES:
[10] The best collection of popular Italian belletristic literature is theCanti e Racconti del Popolo Italiano, in eight volumes, edited by E. Comparetti and A. D’Ancona.
CHAPTER X
CHIVALRIC POETRY
The history of the Italian chivalric epic is one of the most interesting departments of the story of literature, both on its own account, and because it reveals as in a mirror the growth of the more important epic of the tale of Troy. It arose out of a real event of the deepest importance to Europe, but this it so disfigured by romance and imagination as to be hardly recognisable. Charles Martel, the deliverer of France from the Saracens, is confounded with another and still more illustrious Charles, whose relations with the Saracen monarchs were usually amicable; and, by what seems to be a universal law, this hero comes to occupy but a corner of the temple nominally dedicated to him, and his renown is transferred to creatures of pure imagination. As Agamemnon, who at all events personifies the most powerful state of primitive Greece, yields as a poetic hero to such historically subordinate, if not absolutely fictitious personages as Achilles and Ulysses; as the terrible Attila, the portent of his time, shrinks in the Nibelungen Lied into the insignificant figure of Etzel; so, in the romancer’s eye, the real glories of Charlemagne dwindle to nothing before the petty skirmish of Roncesvalles.
In all these instances, and equally so in the cycle of Arthur, a germ of historical reality lies latent in the human consciousness for centuries, and then suddenly becomes prolific of a wealth of imaginative detail. There can be no reasonable doubt that the writers of the Homeric epics, whether few or many, stood in the same relation to their sources as Malory and Boiardo to theirs, inheritors of a tradition in which they reposed genuine belief, but which at the same time they thought themselves at liberty to embellish and diversify as they deemed best. We should probably find the resemblance between the development of Trojan and of Arthurian legend to be very close, had we the same acquaintance with the intellectual history of ancient Greece as we possess with that of the mediæval period. Both were the result of a great poetical revival, when the awakening spirit grasped eagerly at the nutriment nearest to hand; and the Celtic romancers of the twelfth century were inspired by true Celtic yearnings for an irrevocable past, finding much of their material in the national historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth.
With the Italian romantic epic the case was somewhat different: it was largely influenced by a single book, and one composed with a direct polemical purpose. The fear and hatred entertained in the tenth and eleventh centuries for the Saracen invaders and the Danes, and other heathens frequently confounded with them, found expression at last in a remarkable book, the Latin Chronicles attributed to Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims in the eighth century, but really a fabrication of the eleventh, in which Charlemagne and his paladins were idealised as the vanquishers of the pagans. From the prominent position given to Charlemagne’s imaginary Spanish expeditions, the author is thought to have been a Spaniard, and he owed much to that “Iliad of the Middle Ages,” theSong of Roland, also a production of the eleventh century. The panic passed away, but left behind it a rich deposit of romantic fiction, deriving a beauty unknown to former ages from the high estimate of woman which Christianity and Teutonic feeling had jointly contributed to the collective human consciousness. Utilised in many French narrative poems, this chivalric element first appeared in Italian in the elaborate prose-romance,I Reali di Francia. From this the step to metrical epic was easy, but the awkwardness of the Italian poets’ first attempts seems to indicate that it was not taken until the poetic art had reached its period of deepest depression in the early part of the fifteenth century, when the rude and tedious epics Buovo di Antona (Bevis of Hampton),La Spagna,Febus, andQueen Ancronja were probably composed.
Another epic of the same period, without a name, recently discovered, is to a considerable extent the groundwork of theMorgante Maggiore[11] of LUIGI PULCI (1432-87), a humorous poem with a serious purpose, or, at least, unconsciously expressing some of the most serious phenomena of the age. Its mixture of sincere religious feeling and genuine humanity with the most irreverent buffoonery has made it the stumbling-block of critics and literary historians, whose interpretation of its tendencies and estimate of its author’s character are usually determined by their own prepossessions. While it is impossible to deny that Morgante’s companion, the epicurean gourmand Margutte,[12] is the author’s special creation, and the object of his chief predilection among his characters, other portions of the poem are couched in so lofty a strain, that he has been supposed to have had assistance from no less a philosopher than Ficino and no less a poet than Politian. Sarcastic sallies at the expense of the popular theology alternate with set passages of fervent orthodoxy. To us theMorgante appears a symbol of the intellectual anarchy then prevalent among the most intelligent Italians, among whom the religious sentiment survived, while its external vesture had become mere mythology; who had neither, like Benivieni, fallen under the influence of Savonarola, nor were disqualified by lack of classical culture from participating in the humanistic revival. Pulci’s opinions are probably expressed by Astaroth, a devil introduced to aid the paladins and talk divinity, and whose discourse contains a marvellous foreshadowing of the discovery of America.
There can, nevertheless, be no question that the frivolous and mocking element in theMorgante is the source of its celebrity and literary importance. It is the first really great modern example of burlesque poetry, and there are few literatures without traces of its influence. In our own, it was the father of Frere’sWhistlecraft, which was the father ofBeppo and theVision of Judgment, the first stanza of which latter poem inverts an idea of Pulci’s; and Byron accompanied these masterpieces by a translation of Pulci’s first canto, upon which he himself set a special value. It has been contended that Shakespeare was acquainted with Pulci, and certainly Panizzi’s portrait of the vindictive traitor Gano in theMorgante might almost serve for one of Iago, while Orlando’s unsuspecting magnanimity resembles Othello’s. Panizzi justly praises the truth and dignity of the characters of Orlando and Rinaldo, and says of the general economy of the poem: “Pulci was the first who wrote a long and complicated poem which, diversified as it is by many incidents, has a principal subject and a principal character, on which all other parts and personages depend, without which the poem could not subsist, and which by itself alone forms an uninterrupted narrative. This hero and this subject are Gano and his treachery, which brings on the defeat of Roncesvalles.”
These are great merits. The principal defects are summed up by a genial admirer, Leigh Hunt (Stories from the Italian Poets, vol. i.), as the want of fine imagery and natural description, and frequent triviality and prolixity. The vulgarity objected to by the Italian critics must exist, but is not equally offensive to a foreigner. The poem is fully analysed by Panizzi in the first volume of his edition of Boiardo, and its general character may be very well caught from Byron’s translation of the first canto. Pulci’s higher strain is ably conveyed in the following portion of a translation of an episode by Lady Dacre: