The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

There had been nothing really like this poem before, and there has been nothing since. We cannot explain away the original genius of Dante. Before him Italian literature had nothing but the amatory effusions of the Provençal-Sicilian type, insipid songs, laboured and affected sonnets, and some crude visions and allegories. From these the Divine Comedy utterly departs. All that it can be said to owe to the writer’s times and his nation is the vivid realistic way in which spiritual conceptions are apprehended. The tendency which had been awakened by St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic had become general in Dante’s day, a tendency to make material and visible, in symbols, in painting, and in acting, all the mysterious things hoped and feared in religion—a tendency to picture the details, the scenes, and the personages in Heaven and Hell—a tendency in which we do not share, and which sometimes shocks the weaker brethren when they read the Divine Comedy.

There is one other topic to be considered, which must keenly interest both readers of Dante in particular, and students of literature, including English, in general. Before his great masterpiece, Dante had written a work in which stately prose alternates with grave and stately sonnets. This was the Vita Nuova (or New Life), a work full of a profoundly touching, if quaint, nobility of manner, and one which places Dante more humanly, so to speak, among the writers of his time. His sonnets, we have said, are a prelude to greater work. They are the outcome of his era. The attitude towards love comes from Provence, and the sonnet from Sicily, while a certain allegorical metaphysics had been imparted by the Italian Guido Guinicelli, who had combined with the troubadour spirit the philosophic learning—such as it was—of Bologna. Dante had contemporaries, Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, who composed sonnets in a vein closely resembling that of the greater master. And in all of them the treatment is of one and the same thing—love.

In a previous chapter we have spoken of the conventional theory of that affection as established in Provence, and have anticipated its connection with the immortalized Beatrice of Dante and the Laura of Petrarch. Woman, it will be remembered, had been sublimated into something half divine, an object of a distant devotion, shrouded in a semi-religious haze. Following the Provençal fashion, every Tuscan poet—putting, it is true, into his work a finer and graver spirit than that of his Provençal models—felt bound to devote himself, or to profess to devote himself, to some such ennobling object of affection. To that real or imaginary being he addressed his sonnets, from her he sought inspiration, by the ideal of her he guided his life. We shall find this phenomenon in its completest form in Petrarch, from whom it passed to our English sonneteers. Sometimes the sentiment was absolutely real, as real as the Rosalind of Spenser’s Amoretti. We cannot but believe that in the first instance it was so with Dante, when he wrote of Beatrice in his Vita Nuova, possibly even when he commemorated her in the Divine Comedy. We cannot but believe that he loved a real Beatrice de’ Portinari, whom he first saw at nine years of age, with a pure and elevated sentiment, and that he encouraged the sentiment as the means of uplifting and stimulating his genius and his soul. And we must believe that he is in earnest when, after her death, he makes her not only the type of all that is best in womanhood, but converts her into an abstract emblem of celestial wisdom. There is the very sound of truth in the words wherein he tells us of their first meeting. Rossetti translates them thus: “At that moment, I say most truly, that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of my heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith, and in trembling it said these words: ‘Behold God is stronger than I, and he shall reign over me.’” And after her death he writes: “It was given unto me to behold a very wonderful vision; wherein I saw things which determined me that I would say nothing further of this most blessed one, until such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labour all I can, as she well knoweth. Wherefore, if it be His pleasure through whom is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her that which hath not before been written of any woman. After the which, may it seem good unto Him who is the master of grace, that my spirit should go hence to behold the glory of its lady; to wit, of that blessed Beatrice, who now gazeth continually on His countenance, who is blessed for all ages.”

Of Dante it has seemed necessary to speak at this length because he is so incalculable a proportion of Italian literature. While other writers of Italy can be placed in general categories, Dante’s Commedia must remain for ever by itself. So far as he betrays himself Italian, it is that, like all Italians, he is a vivid realist of pictures, cultivates a literary style of finished art, and possesses by nature a strong vein of irony.

Francesco Petrarca is accorded a rank second only to Dante among Italian poets. Perhaps in our primary object, which considers the influence of Italian literature upon ourselves, he is of more palpable consequence than Dante himself. For though Dante did indeed set modern Europe a great example, a model of sublimity in literature; though he did indeed supply English writers with many a thought and phrase; though Chaucer made borrowings and translations from him—as, for instance, in the story of Ugolino; and though he influenced the early part of Milton’s Paradise Lost in a degree which we cannot exactly estimate, nevertheless his influence is comparatively indirect. But Petrarch is the writer to whom our English “courtly makers” and sonneteers directly and admittedly owe the conception of their literary form and tone, from Wyatt and Surrey and Sidney down to Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is to the existence of Petrarch’s sonnets that Shakespeare’s owe theirs. Vast is the influence of a man to whose example is due at least the form, and often more than the hint of the matter, of the sonnets of our poets, great and small, for five hundred years. Nor was his influence confined to the sonnets. Chaucer borrowed love-songs from Petrarch, and Spenser learned his art of writing in translating a Petrarchan canzone. The effect of Petrarch was moreover cumulative, inasmuch as the French sonneteers, like Saint-Gelais, Ronsard, and Du Bellay, who borrowed from him, were themselves in turn imitated by Spenser and other English writers.

Petrarch, who was born in 1304, and lived for seventy years, was both a poet and a scholar. He cared, in fact, more for his Latin writing in an epic like Africa, and for his collections of Latin MSS. than for those Italian poems which have made him famous to all Europe. We may render him hearty thanks for the immense help he gave towards bringing about the Renaissance; but we are here concerned with him only as the poet who expresses the Italian mind and expands the literature of England. Petrarch is the poet of love. He is the heir of the Provençal lyrics of chivalrous idealizing devotion. But his Laura is set upon a more human plane than Beatrice. The Laura de Noves, whom Petrarch first saw in the church at Avignon in the year 1327, and to whom he addressed some three hundred sonnets, was his inspiration, as Beatrice was Dante’s. “I owe to Laura all that I am,” he asserts. “She made to bud forth with the noblest sentiments all the seeds of virtue which nature had sowed in my heart.” Here we meet explicitly the accepted Italian attitude, as we met it in Dante, and as it was afterwards adopted—though with a change due to time and race and circumstances—by our English Surrey, and even by Shakespeare. Beatrice was a woman seen through all the grave piety and theology of Dante’s serious soul; Laura was a woman seen through a Platonic atmosphere which the humanist Petrarch was adopting from the Greek revival. Yet Laura, though an inspiration, is only a real woman; she does not become refined away, like Beatrice, into a mere personification of some abstract motive force. Petrarch’s sonnets are poems to Laura, so many polished gems, so many keleidoscopic aspects of a true and pure passion, of the fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise. He is an artist in words and in verbal music. He uses no artificial ornamentation, and he scarcely ever falls below himself. If taste, delicacy, and refinement, combined with ingenious fancy and with a purity of thought which spurns all vulgarity, can make a poet, Petrarch is a great poet. And it is no wonder if sonneteers of all nations have made him their model. Nor is it much wonder that, after the exhaustive manner in which he treats of the phases of his passion, its vicissitudes, and its inward and outward experiences, there was little room for novelty on the part of any but a more than ordinary genius.

After Dante there is one thing we shall never find in Italian poetry, and we do not find it in Petrarch. We shall find taste, melody, beauty of expression, descriptive power, but we shall not find deep passion, uncontrollable rapture, soarings of sublime inspiration. Yet, for what Petrarch’s sonnets are, they are perfect. His Canzoniere contains works of graceful thought or of tender feeling, of brilliant and polished expression, such works as a more fertile Tennyson might have written in that age; but they have no claims to be more. The impression, however, must not be left that Petrarch’s poetry was all in sonnets. To this Sicilian form he joined a series of larger and freer Canzoni after Provençal example, and also Trionfi, or allegorical visions, dealing more after the fashion of Dante with love, death, chastity, and other abstracts.

From the Divine Comedy, through Petrarch, we come down to the Human Comedy of Boccaccio. Giovanni Boccaccio, the younger and more worldly-minded contemporary of Petrarch, the son of a Florentine merchant and a Paris grisette, educated at Naples and domiciled in his maturer years at Florence, is best known as the author of the first great prose work of Italy, the Decameron. In the year 1348 a terrible plague befell the city of Florence. Boccaccio, after opening with a powerful description of this pestilence, represents seven young ladies and three cavaliers as retiring to a delightful villa outside the walls in order to escape the contagion and their responsibilities, and to pass the time in idleness and amusement. Each of the ten persons relates ten stories, and thus we obtain a hundred short tales (or “novels,” as they then called them), tales pathetic, sportive, or licentious. We are not greatly concerned with these stories; they are not original, but are taken from current recital, from Oriental sources, from French fabliaux, and from scattered productions or collections of insignificant Italian writers, such as are found in the crude shapes of the Cento Novelle. The notion of a series of stories strung into some sort of connection with each other is as old as the Book of Sinbad or the Seven Sages. Boccaccio’s chief merit is that he wrought such stories into artistic tales full of the varied life of his time, and gave them literary shape in language pure, elegant, and sonorous, if, perhaps, often too diffuse. It is he who sets the example for his immediate follower Sacchetti and for those novels of Bandello or Cinthio which were current in English in the Elizabethan age, and which so often supplied our dramatists, including Shakespeare, with plots. It particularly interests us that the plan of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where each pilgrim is to tell the same number of stories, is directly or indirectly borrowed from Boccaccio, as indeed are some of the tales themselves, besides hints hard to specify. Gower’s Confessio Amantis is under the same kinds of obligation.

In this work Boccaccio shows the usual Italian love, and also power, of depicting in words whatever the eye sees, a love and power which recall the Italian fondness for realistic painting. There is in the Italian genius at all times this same quality. In Ariosto or in Tasso, as in Boccaccio, there appears this affection for word-painting, always skilful and complete, but often carried to excess and satiety.

Meanwhile, for students of English literature, there is other work of Boccaccio’s which possesses no small importance. His two heroic poems, La Teseide and Filostrato, were the source of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and his Troilus and Cressida, as well as of all the compositions for which these have served as models. La Teseide is the story of Palamon and Arcite and their rivalry for the hand of Emilia; and Chaucer, Fletcher, and Dryden are among the English writers who have handled this theme. Filostrato is the story of Troilus and Cressida, and to compare Chaucer with Boccaccio is to see how different is the characteristic Italian light-hearted and rather cynically objective contemplation of the struggle of innocence and vice, from the English tendency to the dramatic and subjective realization of the pathos of love and suffering. For other copying of Boccaccio it may be enough to refer to Lydgate’s Falls of Princes and to the Mirror for Magistrates (1559) based on the De Casibus Illustrium Virorum of the Italian.