EARLY ITALIAN PROSE
Already, for half a century, Italian poetry had been cultivated with ardour and with success, and in Dante’s time there was scarcely a well-educated Florentine who could not at need rhyme a sonnet or write a short song in the vulgar tongue. It was not so easy to write in prose; for if the poet had a language and rules of style, there had not yet been a learned time for the prose writer; he had no fixed rules, the form in short which allows a writer to express his thought in the logical order necessary to convey all its shades of meaning, to show up its striking points, artistically to subordinate the less important or purely expletive parts. The poet, on the contrary, at his first attempt met with metrical forms, long adopted and practised in Provençal, a parent idiom, whose rules could, without any difficulty, be applied to Italian. He found moreover that the Provençal poetry, whose prosody he borrowed, had taken with slight differences the same subjects which he wished to sing in Italian; so that he found a poetical storehouse, if the expression may be allowed, of comparisons, epithets, connecting links, phrases, and permissible inversions.
It was not so with prose. The Italian language, which could without difficulty adopt the Provençal metrical system, found no prose developed which it could take as a model. Latin was the only perfect type which it could imitate; but the complete absence of any declension, the relatively limited number of conjunctions, the impossibility of freeing itself completely from analytical order, which it experienced in common with all modern languages, did not allow it to be modelled on Cicero, as poetry was modelled on Bertrand de Born or Sordello. To reach this point of perfection two or three more centuries were needed, during which deep thinkers and great artists moulded this refractory material.
It is true that the Latin historians, who were perfectly known, might have been taken as examples to be copied and even imitated; for these writers had treated the same kinds of subject which were again about to be attempted. However, there was one difference: ancient history, after all, was far distant, and the resemblance between the subjects was more apparent than real; or at least, if this resemblance really existed, men were too interested in the events to be able to judge them and compare them with others as coldly as we are accustomed to do. To sing the praises of his lady’s eyes, to express sentiments of fidelity or sadness, to paint chivalrous tournaments, it suffices to have read or to have listened to the Provençal troubadours, and the same words, with very few changes, can almost be transported from one language into the other. Imagine, on the other hand, a poor chronicler of the Middle Ages imitating Sallust or Titus Livius: could the vernacular furnish him with a single word to render those of his model—and the prose writer, accustomed to think in Latin, could he find in Italian a single expression equivalent to his thought? Whence could he have drawn that common fund of ideas and formulas which is so necessary to write a real history, however matter of fact, however little philosophic it might be? Even in order to relate facts, putting aside all thought of interest, one must have ideas.
But the difficulty was far greater when abstract subjects were treated. There is even some confusion in the beautiful prose of Dante’s Convito, and even in the scholastic digressions of The Divine Comedy, although at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Italian language was already far more developed than one hundred years before; and, to go no further, some idea of the extreme difficulty of such an enterprise may be found by calling to mind the obstacles which had to be overcome by the first French and German philosophers who had the courage and self-denial to expose in their mother-tongues (which were then nearly formed) ideas reasoned in Latin; for a certain effort is needed to follow the French and German writings of Descartes and Wolff, while their Latin works present no difficulty. Therefore, besides the general and constant causes for the priority of poetry to prose, there was in Italy a special cause which contributed to develop poetry first in the vulgar tongue; this cause was the existence of Provençal poetry, already flourishing and cultivated.
A fact common alike to the literary history of Italy and to that of all other nations is that the first attempts in prose were generally historical writings. In fact, among all primitive people we see that the first use they made of free speech was to decompose the epic poems, to give the importance of historical tradition to stories of popular imagination. Thus we see the Ionian chroniclers, up to Herodotus, add the history of contemporary events to the deeds of heroes of fable, just as the first Florentine chroniclers, till Villani, trace back the origin of their native town and its early history to Roman names whose traditions were doubtless retained in the popular poems prior to the Provençal school which reigned in Italy towards the middle of the fourteenth century, and relate, without metre or rhythm, what the Florentine woman of the time of Frederick Barbarossa sang, seated at her spindle:
“Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
De’ Trojani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.”
—Dante.
However this may be, it was only about this time that the use of the vernacular spread little by little; that public treaties and commercial correspondence began to be written in this language, and the public already preferred to read in the Italian language stories and other works written originally in Latin or sometimes in Provençal. But these writings can scarcely be considered literary works; they cannot, therefore, be taken as the starting-point of a history of Italian prose.