It was inevitable that the light thus kindled at the Sicilian Court should spread to other parts of Italy, those especially where the vernacular tongue had already obtained the greatest degree of refinement, and had developed most aptitude for the purposes of literature.
Dante, examining the dialects of Italy about the beginning of the fourteenth century, affirms, indeed, that none of them can be identified as the ideal or pattern language, which is the common property of educated Italians everywhere. But he evidently regards Tuscany and Bologna as greatly in advance of other parts of Italy; and speaks of the impediments offered by the local speech of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio to the acquisition of pure Italian, in consequence of which, he says, these cities have produced no poets. Evidently, therefore, some districts of Italy were more congenial than others to the Court poetry transplanted from Sicily; and we find it flourishing exactly where, on Dante’s principles, this might have been expected, that is, in Tuscany and the Romagna. About the same time, Antonio da Tempo, a Paduan, writing on vernacular poetry, admits that “Lingua Tusca magis apta est ad literam sive literaturam quam aliæ linguæ, et ideo magis est communis et intelligibilis.” Almost the same words are employed by an anonymous contemporary translator of the excerpts from the gospels read as lessons for the day, with the addition that the Tuscan speech is also the most agreeable. It is no wonder, therefore, that many of the so-called Sicilian poets should have been Tuscans, or that Tuscans at home should have been the first and chief cultivators of Italian poetry, so soon as this began to be written elsewhere than in Sicily, where the destruction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty put an end to it shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century. The transfer of literary composition from a Court circle to a republican community was of high importance as a substitution of freer influences for those by which it had hitherto been moulded, and we speedily see the new literature ceasing to be a mere amusement, and becoming in some measure an organ of thought and opinion. Political poems, satires, didactic pieces, moral exhortations in verse become frequent. The literary worth of these, indeed, is not in general comparable to that of the amorous strains which had formerly monopolised the field of poetry, but they show that literature was beginning to lay hold of the national life, and bear within them the germs of better things.
The most remarkable representative of the new tendency, who had previously been a leading representative of the old, the most influential and the most conspicuous figure, indeed, among Dante’s forerunners, though far from the best poet, was GUITTONE DI AREZZO, born probably about 1235. In his youth Guittone had been a love poet, after the manner of the troubadours, and obtained sufficient distinction in the sonnet—to which, indeed, he seems to have first given what was to prove its durable form—to be afterwards regarded as the precursor of Petrarch; but towards middle age, under the influence of religious emotion, he renounced the world, including his wife and family, and entered the military, not monastic, order of the Cavalieri di Santa Maria, known, from the free-and-easy deportment of some of the brethren, as the Jolly Friars, Frati Gaudenti. Guittone, however, seems to have been perfectly serious in the step he took. He condemned his former course of life, renounced poetical pursuits, and dispensed prescriptions against secular lore and poetry in all their branches. He continued, nevertheless, to write in verse, and employed the Provençal metrical forms as of old; but the themes of his muse are now morality, religion, and, occasionally, politics. His sentiments entitle him to respect, but his verse is dreary: Rossetti has been able to find only one piece of his to repay translation, and this, even in Rossetti’s hands, does not repay it. He was, nevertheless, much admired in his own day, and many contemporary poets were much influenced by him, especially by his Latinisms; for Guittone was acquainted with such of the classical writers as were then accessible, and imitated their constructions with servility and without judgment. He has a claim to priority as one of the first writers of Italian prose, on the strength of his epistles. They are otherwise only remarkable for the Latinised affectation of their style.[2]
A much more important writer, in a purely literary point of view, and the first Italian who can be esteemed a poet of high merit, is GUIDO GUINICELLI of Bologna (1220-1276), of whom little is known, except that, like most men of light and leading in those unquiet times, he was banished from his native city. His rank in Italian poetry is prominent, he gave it a more serious and philosophical character than the troubadours had been capable of imparting, and his amorous sentiment is more spirited and impressive. The masterpiece among Dante’s sonnets—Tanto gentil e tanto onesta pare—is undoubtedly adumbrated in one of Guinicelli’s. Dante calls him “the Sage,” and the canzone of theGentle Heart, to which the great Florentine is alluding, justifies his admiration. The following is the first of six beautiful stanzas:
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 his effect in gentleness
Of very self; even as
Within the middle fire the heat’s excess.
—ROSSETTI.
Much might be said of many other precursors of Dante, but space admonishes us to restrict ourselves to two—Guido delle Colonne, a Sicilian, chiefly known for his Latin romance on the Fall of Troy, but also a vernacular lyrist of considerable merit; and Rustico di Filippo (1200-1274), eulogised by Brunetto Latini as a man of great worth, but whose place among poets is mainly that of a satirist. Very biting are his lines on a certain Messer Ugolino, a member by anticipation of what Carlyle called “the Heaven and Hell Amalgamation Society,” “who has good thoughts, no doubt, if they would stay,” and
Would love his party with a dear accord
If only he could once quite care for it.
One other writer among Dante’s predecessors may be mentioned, not for his claims as a poet, but as a man so illustrious that he honoured poetry even by attempting what he was unqualified to perform. He is no less a man than St. Francis of Assisi, whoseSong of the Creatures is pronounced by Renan “the most perfect expression given by the modern world of its feeling for religion.”
Some way past the middle of the century (1265) the greatest poet of Italy was born, and ere his eyes were closed Italian literature, in virtue of his works alone, had taken place among the great literatures of the world. The distance between Dante and his immediate contemporaries is much wider than usual in the case of similar groups of intellectual and gifted men, even if, leaving Dante’s great poem and his prose works out of sight, we consider him simply as a lyrist. Yet they do constitute a group around him, and evince a general development both in thought and command of language, testifying to the upheaval which made a Dante possible. Many might be noticed did space permit, but it will be necessary to restrict ourselves to two typical instances, with an additional section on the cultivators of humorous and satirical poetry, whose writings perhaps afford surer testimony than those of more ambitious bards that poetry had actually entered into the life of the people. The two men who, but for the existence of Dante, would have stood forth as the poetical representatives of their age, are Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia. By the time of their appearance, about 1290, Italian literature had become for the time entirely concentrated in Tuscany, and the phenomena which had attended the similar isolation of Greek literary talent in Attica were destined to reproduce themselves.