DEPARTMENTS OF LITERATURE. CHIEF REPRESENTATIVES. DATES. TYPICAL WORKS. SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Epic tales of Chivalry (Chansons de Geste) Various Trouvères (mostly unknown) Twelfth and thirteenth centuries 1. Romances of Charlemagne’s Paladins. These works and their like were practically as familiar to the “reading public” of England as of France during the pre-Chaucerian period, when French was the social, official, and literary language. Some portions were contributed by Anglo-Normans, e.g., Wace and Benoît de Sainte-More. Chaucer began by translating and imitating from the French, e.g., in his Romance of the Rose. His Canterbury Tales include a number of fabliaux, and also borrowings from the romans. Gower is still more after the same school. The Romance of the Rose and other allegories continued in vogue till the Renaissance. The Chansons de Geste exerted much influence on Italian writers of romantic heroics (Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, etc.), thence again affected England (through Spenser, etc.). The fabliaux were utilized by Boccaccio and the Italian novellieri, and thence influenced Elizabethan novel and drama.
2. Romances of ancient heroes, e.g., Roman de Troie.
3. Romances of Arthur.
Allegorical Epic (Romans) Mostly anonymous, but Roman de la Rose begun by Guillaume de Lorris and completed by Jean de Meung Twelfth and thirteenth centuries Roman de Renart (Reynard the Fox), Roman de la Rose.
Fabliaux Generally anonymous Twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Poetry:
(Other than Drama) Transition to Renaissance. VILLON 1431-1500 Personal lyrics.
MAROT 1495-1544 Epistles, elegies, eclogues. Marot and his followers, e.g., Saint-Gelais, were an influence upon Wyatt, Spenser, etc. Spenser copies Marot in eclogue.
(Till eighteenth century) Pléiade reformers. RONSARD 1524-1585 Odes, sonnets Spenser begins his poetical work by paraphrasing Du Bellay. The school of Ronsard aided the Italian school in bringing the so-called “classical” forms of verse into England.
DU BELLAY ob. 1560
Apostle of “correctness.” MALHERBE 1556-1628 The influence of the doctrine of “correctness” on English literature begins in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and extends till late in the eighteenth. See “Boileau” below.
VOITURE 1598-1648 Occasional verses, vers de société, bacchanalian verse. Models for post-Restoration writers, e.g., Dorset, Sedley.
SAINT-AMANT 1594-1660
LA FONTAINE 1621-1695 Fables and Contes Influenced Dryden, Gay, Prior in similar compositions.
Legislator in poetic style. BOILEAU 1636-1711 L’Art Poétique, satires, etc. The authority of Boileau was almost as high in England as in France. Pope, Addison, and the “correct” school generally follow him. Pope’s Essay on Criticism echoes Boileau.
Drama:
(a) Tragedy CORNEILLE 1606-1684 Cinna, Le Cid, Polyeucte, etc. Effect of French dramatic principles appears with the re-opening of theatres under Charles II. It is considered necessary to recast Shakespeare, and an effort is made after the “unities.” The “heroic plays” of Dryden’s time are due to a combination of French tragedy with French romance (e.g., Tyrannic Love, Conquest of Granada, etc.). Addison’s Cato is a full attempt at “classical” drama in imitation of the French.
RACINE 1639-1699 Phèdre, Esther Attalie, etc.
(b) Comedy MOLIÈRE 1622-1673 Le Misanthrope, Tartuffe, L’Avare, etc. French comedy was imitated, but debased, by Wycherley, Farquhar, etc. Molière was much utilized by post-Restoration dramatists, e.g., in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer (= Misanthrope), Country Wife (= L’École des Femmes + L’École des Maris), Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-all (= L’Elounis).
Prose Fiction:
(a) Allegorical (satirical) RABELAIS 1483-1553 Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Appreciably the precursor of Swift and Sterne.
(b) Heroic romances (of sentiment) LA CALPRENÈDE 1602-1663 Cléopâtre, etc. These long and ranting works were translated into English and were much read. They were imitated by Aphra Behn. Combined with French “classical” tragedy they produced the English “heroic plays,” e.g., Dryden’s Secret Love (from the Grand Cyrus) and Settle’s Ibrahim.
MLLE. DE SCUDÉRY 1607-1701 Le Grand Cyrus, etc.
(c) Picaroon romances (adventures after Spanish models) SCARRON 1610-1660
LESAGE 1668-1747 Gil Blas, Le Diable Boiteux This style was taken up in particular by Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett. Of late there has been a recrudescence of Dumas in minor English fiction.
DUMAS (the elder) 1803-1870 Three Musketeers, etc.
(d) Character novel MME. DE LA FAYETTE 1633-1693 Zaide, Princesse de Clèves Followed by Richardson (Clarissa Harlowe, etc.), who began the vogue which has continued till the present.
MARIVAUX 1688-1763 Marianne
BALZAC 1799-1850 Novels of the Comédie Humaine
Essays, moralizings, philosophy MONTAIGNE 1533-1592 Essais The first model of the “Essay” proper. Well known to Elizabethans (Bacon, Shakespeare, etc.). Translated by Florio.
PASCAL 1623-1662 Provincial Letters, Pensées All this literature was widely read and assimilated in England, but precise effects can hardly be specified. Rousseau, however, is the first to evoke the “Nature worship,” or the study of natural influence upon the feelings, which becomes so prominent in the English poetry of the early nineteenth century. The same influence from Chateaubriand is seen in Byron.
DESCARTES 1596-1650 Discours de la Méthode
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 1613-1680 Maxims
LA BRUYÈRE 1639-1696 Characters
MONTESQUIEU 1689-1755 Esprit des Lois
VOLTAIRE 1694-1778 Candide, Essai sur les Mœurs, etc.
ROUSSEAU 1712-1778 Contrat Social, Confessions, etc.
CHATEAUBRIAND 1768-1848 Génie du Christianisme
COMTE 1798-1857 Philosophie Positive.
Letter-writing MME. DE SÉVIGNÉ 1627-1696 The model for English letter-writers of the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole being the great exemplar for our own country. The mock-correspondence of the Spectator already shows the vogue.
Literary Criticism BOILEAU 1636-1711 (See “Poetry”).
STE. BEUVE 1804-1869 Portraits Littéraires, Causeries du Lundi, etc. Exponent of criticism based on wide knowledge of literature. Matthew Arnold was his avowed disciple.

V
ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

To Italy there always attaches a singular fascination. Its natural beauties, its historic associations, its ancient ruins, its mediaeval buildings, its collections of art—these things scattered thickly and in endless variety from one end of the peninsula to the other, from Sicily to Milan, from Genoa to Venice, make Italy the country of countries for the traveller of culture and sensibility, of enthusiasm for things splendid and beautiful.

This being so, it might seem a most inconsistent and regrettable fact that, while there are thousands who go, guidebook in hand, through the galleries of the Vatican or the palace of the Venetian Doges, or through that Florentine church of Santa Croce where they read the name of a Michelangelo or a Machiavelli on illustrious tombs, yet a very few have thought fit to look into Italian literature, to see if it perhaps contains things as worthy of regard as Italian edifices or Italian pictures. Few also realize that it is often impossible to understand Italian art without understanding contemporary Italian literature.

Time was when education was hardly a complete and liberal education if it did not include the knowledge of Italian and of the best thoughts of Italy. Time was when England was the pupil of Italy in letters, as it has largely continued to be in those other arts which are called “fine.” At two periods, namely, first in the days of Chaucer, and afterwards for more than a century, from the time of Wyatt and Surrey to the prime of Milton, Italian masterpieces and Italian style were chief patterns to Englishmen, and Italian thoughts and subjects were borrowed without stint.

Doubtless Italy has had her day as our teacher in letters, and we look to her no more for inspiration or guidance in poetry or prose. Nevertheless it is a mistake to seek so little direct knowledge of what is meant by the names of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Ariosto and Tasso, and of others well known to the ear. The study of writers like these in their own tongue would do much to remove the false impressions we are so apt to form of foreign peoples and their character. Literature is the “expression of the soul of a people,” and the only sure way of getting at a people’s soul is to study the expression of that soul in its literature. For instance, are the Italians a people of profound feeling, of much imagination, of high ideals of conduct? It is not travel which will readily tell us this, but a study of the emotions, imaginings, and moral conceptions which are revealed in their books.

The Italians are in but a partial degree descendants of the ancient Romans. The Romans proper never did fill much of Italy. To the south of Rome and in Sicily lay colonies of Greeks, at Naples, Reggio, Taranto, Syracuse and Palermo. To the north lay the alien and rather mysterious Etruscans in modern Tuscany. Still further north lay various Celtic Gauls along the valleys of Piedmont and Lombardy. And even in central Italy there were many tribes and many dialects, which were only brought by force under a common Roman empire and a common literary and official Latin tongue. The Romans did their best to weld all these diverse elements into a homogeneous people with a common feeling of nationality, common ideals and common customs. But at no time did one identical race or one identical dialect fill the peninsula of Italy.

With the fall of the Roman empire Italy became the prey of Goths and Lombards in the north, and later of Saracens, Normans, and Spaniards successively in the south. Modern times have seen these elements also combining as best they can into one people, with a national sentiment and a national soul.

The modern Italians are, therefore, descendants of ancient Romans and their kindred tribes, intermixed in intricate ways with Etruscans, Ligurians, and Gaulish Celts, with Goths and other Teutons, with Greeks, Spaniards, and a strain of Saracen. Nevertheless, among all these constituents, it is the Roman mental attitude which most prevails. Beyond doubt the literary ideal which possesses modern Italy is an inheritance from ancient Rome.