The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

The modern Italian speech is the child of Latin, in the sense in which French and Spanish are the children of Latin; or rather, like French and Spanish, it is a new shape which Latin has gradually put on after hundreds of years of use and misuse. Perhaps a word must be said in order to explain the chasm between Latin literature and the Italian literature of Dante. At no time, even in the zenith of Roman prosperity, did all parts of Italy speak the same Latin, even if they spoke Latin at all. Local peculiarities of grammar and pronunciation were numerous and marked. Moreover, in the most golden days of Latin speech, that Latin which we know and learn was the language of a literary and cultured class; the Latin of the people was different and more free. As generations went by, and the Roman empire grew, the difference between the literary and the popular speech became wider and wider still, until the one was scarcely recognizable in the other. And when Italy in the Dark Ages was ravaged, unsettled, and dismembered; when little state sprang up here and little state there; when the literary and cultured class almost disappeared, the upshot was that the speech of the people prevailed, just as Saxon-English prevailed over Norman-French. In each district its own dialect became the law, so that people at Naples, at Rome, at Florence, at Bologna, at Venice, and at Milan, were speaking in distinct manners of their own, while recognized Italian language there was none. Dialects exist in all these places, and in many more, even to-day; nevertheless there is an orthodox Italian language, the “Tuscan speech with the Roman utterance,” in which cultivated people endeavour to speak, and which is the only language recognized for serious literature. Many still imagine that it was Dante who made that language. On the contrary, no great literature can exist till the language is shaped. English had to be formed before Chaucer could come. An Italian tongue was necessary before Dante could build his masterpiece.

It appears at first a remarkable thing that the first literature which can pretend to any extensive influence in Italy was called “Sicilian.” Moreover the ideal language of Dante was one which he called the “courtly language”—the lingua aulica cortigiana—whereas no court existed in his Tuscan Republics. The two facts have their relation. Until late in the twelfth century Italy, having no recognized language, had produced nothing. Meanwhile the southern half of France had been for several generations ringing with the musical voices of the Provençal troubadours. Yet Italy, except for some troubadour influence in the north, was silent. But about the year 1220, Frederick II, of the “two Sicilies,” had gathered about himself, in his rich and luxurious court at Palermo, scholars and men of refinement from all parts of Italy and Provence. At his seat, where cultured Saracens were numerous, and their artistic tastes in strong evidence, Provençal troubadours were to be found rhyming their dainty and harmonious songs of love and chivalry. “Sicilians” and others, gathered from the rest of Italy, took the key from these, and in Sicily sprang up for the first time in Italy a definite form of poetry composed in a popular speech instead of Latin. It is a love-poetry, which, in kind, is copied from Provence, aiming solely at a fine air of style and harmony of verse, and caring nothing for variety of subject or for originality of thought. There are the same trite comparisons, the same threadbare reflections, self-communings, and self-pityings. But the language employed was the Italian of the court, an eclectic diction, polished and regulated, and known as the lingua cortigiana or lingua aulica—the “court language.” To the Italians assembled in Frederick’s dominions this diction became the model for literary speech. Any who composed in it were “courtly makers” in “Sicilian.”

After the decline of Frederick’s power in the south, it was Florence, Pisa, Lucca and the Tuscan communes that possessed the chief vitality and influence in Italy, and it was these that chiefly carried on the literary tradition. But the Tuscan dialect, like the East Midland English, was the most central. Its peculiarities were therefore the least pronounced among the dialects of the peninsula. The Tuscans readily formed from their own dialect a “courtly language” similar to that of the Sicilian poetry, and it was to Florence and its neighbourhood that Italians came to look for the choicest literature, as they looked for the most vigorous commerce. The custom of turning literary compositions from the local dialects into Tuscan as the fashionable language—the process called Toscaneggiamento—had begun before Dante wrote. And when Dante had written in Tuscan that monumental and immortal work, the Divine Comedy, it was inevitable that Tuscan should remain for all time the one and only language of ambitious Italian composition.

The first promptings to any Italian literature thus came from the graceful and musical, but often sickly and always artificial, poems of the troubadours, whether clustered about Frederick or brought by visitors to the northern courts of Milan, Ferrara, or Verona. The contribution of Italy itself had so far been the sonnet form, invented in Sicily and destined to play the most important part among all Italian lyrics. The ideal erected had been one of polish, not of thought, and unhappily for the most part this suited the Italian genius only too well. But fortunately for the literature of the peninsula, there came very early the man to whom life was real and earnest, and to whom writing meant the expression of things intensely serious and vital.

Dante Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, and died in exile at Ravenna in 1321. The first great writer of Italian is its very greatest—a name to be written with those of Homer and Shakespeare. It would require a volume to speak adequately and with illustration of the profound impression of nobility of character which he leaves upon his readers, of the vast reach of his imagination, of the startling vividness of the visions which he creates, of his master-power to make simple words tell just what he sees. To read the story of his life and times is a romance in itself. To place oneself in that Florence of six centuries ago, where Guelfs are conflicting with Ghibellines and “Whites” with “Blacks,” where the burghers are at one moment filling the streets with songs and gay processions and pageants, and at another moment with the shouts of fighting and scenes of murder; to see among these same burghers the firm-set face of the future poet Dante, as he goes out to battle at Campaldino; to see him sitting as a magistrate of the city, and then again driven into exile and wandering, with a price upon his head, to Verona or Ravenna—it is tempting to dwell upon such visions, but the temptation is one which we must resist.

Dante is a figure in the literature of the world, not of Italy alone. Like Shakespeare, he began with the lyric work dominant in his age. Like Shakespeare, he therein revealed a power beyond his contemporaries or predecessors. His sonnets and Canzoni are indeed limited by the prevailing conventions of that style, but from him they gain a pure nobility of feeling and an intrinsic weight which no Provençal had displayed, and to which the best Italians had but striven. But to the world at large he is the author of the Divine Comedy. His readers, not he himself, called it the “Divine,” both because it deals with things heavenly and mystical beyond all ordinary vision, and also because it transcends all other works which bore the name of “Comedy”—divine in its subject, divine in its execution. Dante himself called it Commedia. He knew nothing of the correct distinctions of true drama, for none existed in his day. To him commedia meant a medley, with a happy ending, something written in the vulgar tongue, not aspiring to be an epic, like that of the great master Virgil, but written in the middle style. The poem, as a fact, is no more a comedy than Paradise Lost is a comedy. Yet the title is his own and is indefeasible.

The Divine Comedy is a work which stands alone in literature, without a distinct prototype and without a worthy follower. The fact that Homer had made Odysseus descend to the shades, and that Virgil had done the same with Aeneas, accounts for the shape or machinery, but for no more. It is a work involving the most stupendous materials—no less than an epitome of contemporary thought, belief, mysticism, aspiration, passion, history—and handled with stupendous unconsciousness of mastery.

On the face of it, it is a narrative of a journey taken by the poet through Hell, through Purgatory, and into Paradise. In Easter week of the year 1300, Dante is led by Virgil (who to the Middle Ages had strangely enough become the incarnation of this world’s wisdom) down through the concentric circles of Hell—a funnel-shaped abyss within the centre of the earth—and descends step after step to greater and greater horrors. There he sees the gluttons wallowing in fetid mud, and the leaders of heresies burning in half-opened tombs; he sees the sinners of avarice and of prodigality suffer together with mutual revilings; he sees the steady rain of burning flakes of fire; he is amazingly fertile in other agonies for unrepentant or unshriven sinners. Then, from the Inferno, under the self-same guidance, he mounts to the light and ascends the mountain of Purgatorio, which rises like a cone, plane after plane, in seven tiers for the seven deadly sins. Here the souls that are being purified are suffering penances, which grow less and less awful as we approach the summit. On the summit itself is the Terrestrial Paradise. Further than that Virgil, the pagan poet, may not go; but Beatrice, Dante’s lost love and his emblem of Christian faith, comes down to meet him, and together they rise in spiral rings of flight, upward and upward through glory after glory, till they reach the true Paradise, and stand in the presence of the Beatific Vision.

There is something awe-inspiring in the very contemplation of a subject so vast: yet Dante combines and handles all these mysteries with such a vivid realistic power that the last suggestion to rise in the reader’s mind is any suspicion of grotesque, still less of futile, extravagance. His pictures are intensely vivid. His creations live. It would be no wonder if the good people of Verona really pointed him out in awe, and said, “Yonder is the man who has been in Hell!” A pictorial artist could scarcely exhaust Dante in subjects for paintings. And, with it all, his mere language is as simple and direct as was ever used by a poet’s pen. It is so far Homeric. Almost the mere noun and verb suffice to say what he has to say, and yet, somehow, that same noun and verb combine into a sweet and majestic harmony which fit the sublime subject as the “organ-voice” of Milton fitted his. We must, of course, make all concession to the ignorance of his day and the unattractive subtleties of the philosophy. These may often affect our interest, but they take nothing from the poet’s genius.

Such was the narrative on the face of it. But the narrative is only the cloak for an allegory. Dante, unlike most other Italian writers, was a profoundly pious, and not merely a pietistic man. Moreover, his mind was stored with all the theology, science, and philosophy of the time, and he meant his work to have another and a deeper interpretation. In the Inferno and Purgatorio he represents the moral passage of man through life, learning to see its vices and their punishments, descending through them, and thence again mounting through self-mortification and cleansing fires upward to moral purity and wisdom. Virgil is the embodiment of moral philosophy; and so far moral philosophy can guide us. But Beatrice is the personification of Divine philosophy, the heavenly wisdom of theology, and it is this which is required to bring man to the full beauty and beatitude of perfect holiness. That, on the one hand, so many should read the narrative as narrative, and be awed and fascinated by it, while they miss, or are unconcerned with, the allegory beneath; and that, on the other, the allegorical interpretation should not obtrude itself, and yet should be so clear and so symmetrical when discovered, is a superlative token of the poet’s extraordinary genius.