The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

Torquato Tasso, who lived during the latter half of the sixteenth century (1544-1595), and who also wrote at Ferrara, composed the world-famed epic Gerusalemme Liberata, or “Jerusalem Delivered.” It is the epic or Iliad of the first great Crusade, in which Godfrey of Boulogne, who is the hero—Goffredo indeed was the earlier name of the epic—took back the sacred city of Jerusalem from the Saracens. It would be vain to attempt here to give an idea of this splendid heroic poem, of its vigour, of the beauty of language in its episodes, of the romantic experiences of the knightly Tancred and the heroine Clorinda, of the exploits, the miracles, the magic, and the enchanted forest. That it greatly influenced Spenser—whose Bower of Acrasia, for instance, is Tasso’s garden of Armida—that it, along with the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy, helped to build up the Paradise Lost of Milton, is one of its claims upon our special notice here. To Elizabethan readers the work was made accessible through the famous translation of Fairfax (1600), and by others of less renown. To Tasso also belongs an unfinished poem on the Creation, Il Mondo Creato, with which Milton was manifestly well acquainted. Whether or not the English poet was also influenced in his Paradise Lost by another Italian production, the Adamo of Andreini, is uncertain.

Before proceeding further, we must take advantage of the mention of Tasso, and make reference to another form of composition, of which the Italians were always peculiarly fond, and which much affected the rest of Europe for nearly two centuries. We have seen how the Greek Theocritus wrote idylls of country life in Sicily, and how Virgil composed pastoral eclogues on Italian soil. After the Renaissance—even the earlier wave of that name—the writers of Italy took up these themes and began to dwell again on country scenes, and on the delights of an ideal pastoral life, as far removed as possible from the vicious and troublous realities of their cities. Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Mantuanus are steps in the history of such pastoral before Tasso. The poet of Jerusalem Delivered does not disdain this region of poetry. In his pastoral drama Aminta he places his highly cultivated and courtly shepherds, shepherdesses, and nymphs on the hills about Sorrento, and lends to their external life as much pretence at reality as he can command. But he is above all things a poet, and only secondarily a dramatist, and it is upon the lyrics that the chief effect is staked. What the great Tasso did, others must do, and at the end of the sixteenth century there are more than a dozen Italian verse-writers composing in similar strain. The chief is Guarini, with his Pastor Fido, destined to become well-known in an English shape as Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess. But Tasso, as has just been said, was not the first to revive the pastoral. It was a century since Poliziano had written a Favola di Orfeo, a dramatic eclogue blending idyll and tragedy. But greatest among such predecessors had been the Neapolitan Sannazaro, who in 1504 had published the Arcadia, a medley of romance and eclogue, partly in prose, partly in verse, which gave its shape to our own Arcadia, the polished, if long and often tiresome, work of Sir Philip Sidney. Sannazaro indeed practically invented that mythical Arcady, or rural Utopia, into which poets and prose-writers have since made so many journeys in order to find a land where there still lingers the golden age of innocence and felicity amid bowers of beauty, where hard facts and bad weather never intrude. Another writer, Battista of Mantua—commonly called “the Mantuan”—composing in Latin, had also become a famous model in the pastoral kind for all western Europe. Readers of Love’s Labour’s Lost need hardly be told that “good old Mantuan” was a Latin school-book in Shakespeare’s boyhood, and had also been imitated by Barclay, and translated by Turbervile. From him, partly direct and partly through the medium of the French Marot, came the cue for Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender and its progeny. In the Elizabethan age, pastorals and pastoral plays were numerous, and among the writers must be reckoned Lyly, Lodge, Greene, Peele, and Giles Fletcher.

The work of Italy in this century—the “Cinquecento”—was above all things work of artistic polish. The importance attached to beauty of style and elegance of words is apt to seem to us disproportionate. We are inclined to wish that the Italian writers had explored greater heights and depths of thinking and feeling, and had grappled more closely with matters of high seriousness. We find them enlarging, elaborating, and polishing tales of romance and adventure, or scenes of beauty and romantic life. We find them revelling in descriptions, and yet, all the time, ironically playing with the very unrealities of that which they describe, often plainly hinting to us not to take the matter too seriously. Above all things they are artists in style. And, therefore, it is natural to find that words are often compassed to the neglect of the matter. This was not only so in writing, it extended to their more courtly speech. It is largely from Italy, though partly from Spain, that there came over France and England that vice of affectation which developed a special shape in Euphuism. Before the appearance of Lyly’s Euphues in 1578, association with the gallants and wits of the Italian Courts had worked upon English pretenders to courtly graces. They deliberately affected forms of speech which should show both how much they knew, and how ingeniously refined they could be in novelty of phrase. Early Elizabethan literature is greatly tainted by Euphuism, with its tricks of language, alliterative, antithetical, hyperbolical, full of whimsical comparisons, overwrought descriptions, plays on words, avoiding natural forms of expression in favour of those which would show off the writer’s cultivation, his wit, and taste.

Carried to its extreme in Italy, this minute attention to elaborate expression produced an irritating artificiality in the literature of the seventeenth century. The seicentisti produced many fine words, but little important substance. Literature declined into a plaything. Marini’s affected figures of speech, far-fetched comparisons, and tricks of verbiage, as illustrated particularly in his romantic Adone, characterized a generation of writers. “Marinism” in Italian literature, like “Alexandrianism” in the Greek, is now a term of reproach in letters. We cannot, indeed, in fairness, always attribute a mania of style to some definite inventor. Nor can we always draw clear distinction between one class of frigid, and finally exasperating, artifice and another. Unfortunately each new example is a new temptation, since exaggerations and tricks are always easier to imitate than the quiet and unaccentuated perfections of the consummate masters. The strained conceits of Donne and Crashaw, and in general of the “Fantastic” and “Metaphysical” school of our early seventeenth century, are one manifestation of the same spirit which was working in Italy. But Donne follows in the track of Euphuism, with new developments from his own talents, while others of the “Fantastics” go directly to the school of Marini. Among these must be included Crashaw, who both translates and imitates the Italian poet, and Cowley, whose early poems reproduce many of the Italian conceits.

In the seventeenth century Italian literature fell into its decline, and by about 1650 its influences on English writers ceased. Milton is perhaps the last great poet whose debts to Italian models and Italian culture can be declared measurable. His own knowledge of the Italian language, his travels in Italy, and his friendships with Italians kept him in touch with the current literature of the country. The sonnet was not dead in a land which was still to produce a Filicaia, and Milton was a sonneteer both in his own language and in Italian. His Comus is an Italian pastoral masque raised for once to the scope and dignity of literature, and to two famous poems he is led to attach the Italian names L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. What his great epic owes to his reading of Dante and Tasso is readily perceived, and the student of the two literatures cannot but feel that the quiet tone of noble sweetness in his earlier work is largely due, as it is with Spenser, to the fine example of Italy. We should, perhaps, add at this point that a less considerable contemporary of Milton, the artificial Cowley, was much under the influence of the Italian lyrist Chiabrera (1552-1637), whose sumptuous, courtly, glittering, but very un-Pindaric, “Pindarics” for a time challenged the lyric supremacy of Petrarch. It is not a little strange that Wordsworth also was so far attracted by Chiabrera as to translate certain of his poetical epitaphs. Nor is it to be passed over that Pope’s heroi-comical Rape of the Lock was suggested—and in such compositions the suggestion counts for much—by the Rape of the Bucket (La Secchia Rapita) of Tassoni, who died in 1636.

It is hardly part of our subject to dwell upon Italian drama, inasmuch as it exerted but very little effect upon ours. So far as there was any, it was in the “masques,” which owe their birth to the age of Poliziano, played no inconsiderable part in the court festivities of England from the time of Henry VIII, and came to engage so much of the learning and ingenuity of Ben Jonson. Yet masques are little more than glorified tableaux in glorified “private theatricals,” accompanied by some form of libretto written ad hoc, and of almost no permanent value. Milton’s Comus is no fair specimen of the class. It is, perhaps, scarcely relevant to literature to record that we owe our Harlequin and Pantaloon to the stock characters in the Italian semi-improvisations known as commedie dell’arte.

Italians may think otherwise, but, to our foreign conception, Italy has never possessed a really fine dramatic masterpiece, tragic or comic. The drama of Italy, like drama elsewhere, had its prelude in the realistic presentations of religion, commonly known as “mysteries” and “miracles,” but in Italy styled sacre rappresentazioni. But Italy, unlike France or England, quickly developed the purely secular drama from a source distinct from the Church. The Italians lay nearer to the Roman comedy, and it was in Italy that the Latin Renaissance came earliest. The ordinary Italian ingenuity and love of art and show produced the “masque,” which was apt to be blent with pastoral, while the deliberate Latinizing of the cultured classes brought in imitations, often mere translations, of the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and of the tragedies of Seneca. In the development of its tragedy Italy became severely “classical,” in the misused sense of the term. That is to say, it became Senecan, and obeyed the three unities. The vogue began with Trissino and his Sofonisba (1515), and was carried on by Rucellai, Alamanni, and others. Comedy, which also followed in the Roman path, was in a large degree emancipated by Aretino. To none of the dramatic forms, tragedy, comedy, drammi pastorali, drammi musicali (opera, tragedia per musica), do we owe any real growths within our own literature. Late in the eighteenth century Alfieri did his best, within the Senecan conventions, to create a tragic stage, and much can be said in praise of his efforts and his talents; but he was no dramatic genius. Goldoni’s comedies do not concern us. The one dramatic gift of Italy to Europe has been opera, which arose from musical pastoral in Rinnucini’s Dafne. This, however, belongs rather to the domain of music. It is, no doubt, hard to pass by the lyric brilliancy and charm of Metastasio (who flourished about 1740), but for our subject he cannot fairly be regarded as of moment.

For prose, besides the novelle and novellini, we have in particular the much read and rightly detested Prince of Machiavelli, and the Cortegiano of Castiglione (1518), a book which speedily influenced English courtly ideals, both directly and through various manuals written in imitation. But there is little else to which conspicuous influence could be ascribed without exaggeration.

The “Novella” is regularly a short story outlined round a situation which is intended to be exciting. It is not a novel, but rather the sketch of one. In this domain Italy was exceedingly prolific. True to the national instinct for fidelity to patterns, the Italian novellieri are fond of the old device of Boccaccio, borrowed by Chaucer; they frequently pretend that their various stories are related by a company of persons accidentally brought together in a country house, or on a voyage, or the like, and placed in need of such mutual entertainment. The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, the Hecatommithi of Cinthio, and the stories of Straparola, Da Porto, Bandello, and others, enjoyed a wide vogue in France and England, and formed matter for the exploitation of every class of our Elizabethan dramatists or writers of fiction.