Portion of Bronze Architrave of South Door, Baptistery, Florence
The merit of amatory poetry consists, almost entirely, in its expression. Its warmth and tenderness of sentiment is injured by any exertion of mere ingenuity and fancy, in the pursuit of which the poet, or the lover, seems to lose sight of his proper object. Little more is required from him than to represent with sensibility and with truth the feelings which are common to all who love. The harmony of language is the best means of expressing that of the heart. But this principle seems almost entirely to have escaped the notice of the first Sicilian and Italian writers. The example of the Arabs and of the Provençals induced them to prefer ostentation to simplicity, and to exercise a false and affected taste in the choice of their poetical ornaments. In the best specimens of this school, we should find little to reward the labour of translating them; and we feel less inclined to draw the inferior pieces from their deserved obscurity. It is, therefore, principally with a view to the history of the language, and of the versification, that we turn over the pages of Ciullo d’Alcamo the Sicilian, those of Frederick II, and of his chancellor, Pietro delle Vigne, of Oddo delle Colonne, of Mazzeo di Ricco, and of other poets of the same class.
The language employed by the Sicilians in their poetical attempts was not the popular dialect, as it then existed among the natives of the island and as we still find it preserved in some Sicilian songs, scarcely intelligible to the Italians themselves. From the imperial court and that of the kings of Sicily, it had already received a more elegant form; and those laws of grammar which were originally founded upon custom had now obtained the ascendency over it, and prescribed their own rules. The lingua cortigiana, the language of the court, was already distinguished as the purest of the Italian dialects. In Tuscany it came into general use; and previous to the end of the thirteenth century it received great stability from several writers of that country, in verse as well as in prose, who carried it very nearly to that degree of perfection which it has ever since maintained. For elegance and purity of style, Ricordano Malaspina, who wrote the History of Florence in 1280, may be pronounced, at the present day, to be in no degree inferior to the best writers now extant.
THE MASTER POET, AND HIS THEME
No poet, however, had yet arisen, gifted with absolute power over the empire of the soul; no philosopher had yet pierced into the depths of feeling and of thought, when Dante, the greatest name of Italy, and the father of her poetry, appeared, and demonstrated the mightiness of his genius by availing himself of the rude and imperfect materials within his reach, to construct an edifice resembling, in magnificence, that universe whose image it reflects. Instead of amatory effusions addressed to an imaginary beauty, instead of madrigals full of sprightly insipidity, sonnets laboured into harmony, and strained or discordant allegories, the only models, in any modern language, which presented themselves to the notice of Dante, that great genius conceived, in his vast imagination, the mysteries of the invisible creation, and unveiled them to the eyes of the astonished world.
In the century immediately preceding, the energy of some bold and enthusiastic minds had been directed to religious objects. A new spiritual force, surpassing in activity and fanaticism all monastic institutions before established, was organised by St. Francis and St. Dominic, whose furious harangues and bloody persecutions revived that zeal which, for several centuries past, had appeared to slumber. In the cells of the monks, nevertheless, the first symptoms of reviving literature were seen. Their studies had now assumed a scholastic character. To the imagination of the zealot, the different conditions of a future state were continually present; and the spiritual objects which he saw with the eyes of faith were invested with all the reality of material forms, by the force with which they were presented to his view in detailed descriptions and in dissertations displaying a scientific acquaintance with the exact limit of every torment, and the graduated rewards of glorification.
A very singular instance of the manner in which these ideas were impressed upon the people is afforded by the native city of Dante, in which the celebration of a festival was graced by a public representation of the infernal tortures; and it is not unlikely that the first circulation of the work of that poet gave occasion to this frightful exhibition. The bed of the Arno was converted into the gulf of perdition, where all the horrors coined by the prolific fancy of the monks were concentrated. Nothing was wanting to make the illusion complete; and the spectators shuddered at the shrieks and groans of real persons, apparently exposed to the alternate extremes of fire and frost, to waves of boiling pitch, and to serpents. This scene occurred at Florence on the 1st of May, 1304.
It appears, then, that when Dante adopted, as the subject of his immortal poem, the secrets of the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of the dead, he could not possibly have selected a more popular theme. It had the advantage of combining the most profound feelings of religion with those vivid recollections of patriotic glory and party contentions which were necessarily suggested by the reappearance of the illustrious dead on this novel theatre.