Dante habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up, with this inscription, ‘I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth’:—and half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance. All this tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and the appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the reader. There are occasional striking images in Dante—but these are exceptions; and besides, they are striking only from the weight of consequences attached to them. The imagination of the poet retains and associates the objects of nature, not according to their external forms, but their inward qualities or powers; as when Satan is compared to a cormorant. It is not true, then, that Dante’s excellence consists in natural description or dramatic invention. His characters are indeed ‘instinct with life’ and sentiment; but it is with the life and sentiment of the poet. In themselves they have little or no dramatic variety, except what arises immediately from the historical facts mentioned; and they afford, in our opinion, very few subjects for picture. There is indeed one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted. Michael Angelo was naturally an admirer of Dante, and has left a sonnet to his memory.
The Purgatory and Paradise are justly characterised by our author as ‘a falling off’ from the Inferno. He however points out a number of beautiful passages in both these divisions of the poem. That in which the poet describes his ascent into heaven, completely marks the character of his mind. He employs no machinery, or supernatural agency, for this purpose; but mounts aloft ‘by the sole strength of his desires—fixing an intense regard on the orbit of the sun’! This great poet was born at Florence in 1265, of the noble family of the Alighieri—and died at Ravenna, September 14th, 1321. Like Milton, he was unfortunate in his political connexions, and, what is worse, in those of his private life. He had a few imitators after his death, but none of any eminence.
M. Sismondi professes to have a prejudice against Petrarch. In this he is not, as he supposes, singular; but we suspect that he is wrong. He seems to have reasoned on a very common, but very false hypothesis, that because there is a great deal of false wit and affectation in Petrarch’s style, he is therefore without sentiment. The sentiment certainly does not consist in the conceits;—but is it not there in spite of them? The fanciful allusions, and the quaintnesses of style lie on the surface; and it is sometimes found convenient to make these an excuse for not seeking after that which lies deeper and is of more value.[[3]] It has been well observed, by a contemporary critic, that notwithstanding the adventitious ornaments with which their style is encumbered, there is more truth and feeling in Cowley and Sir Philip Sidney, than in a host of insipid and merely natural writers. It is not improbable, that if Shakespeare had written nothing but his sonnets and smaller poems, he would, for the same reason, have been assigned to the class of cold, artificial writers, who had no genuine sense of nature or passion. Yet, taking his plays for a guide to our decision, it requires no very great sagacity or boldness to discover that his other poems contain a rich vein of thought and sentiment. We apprehend it is the same with Petrarch. The sentiments themselves are often of the most pure and natural kind, even where the expression is the most laboured and far-fetched. Nor does it follow, that this artificial and scholastic style was the result of affectation in the author. All pedantry is not affectation. Inveterate habit is not affectation. The technical jargon of professional men is not affectation in them: for it is the language with which their ideas have the strongest associations. Milton’s Classical Pedantry was perfectly involuntary: it was the style in which he was accustomed to think and feel; and it would have required an effort to have expressed himself otherwise. The scholastic style is not indeed the natural style of the passion or sentiment of love; but it is quite false to argue, that an author did not feel this passion because he expressed himself in the usual language in which this and all other passions were expressed, in the particular age and country in which he lived. On the contrary, the more true and profound the feeling itself was, the more it might be supposed to be identified with his other habits and pursuits—to tinge all his thoughts, and to put in requisition every faculty of his soul—to give additional perversity to his wit, subtlety to his understanding, and extravagance to his expressions. Like all other strong passions, it seeks to express itself in exaggerations, and its characteristic is less to be simple than emphatic. The language of love was never more finely expressed than in the play of Romeo and Juliet; and yet assuredly the force or beauty of that language does not arise from its simplicity. It is the fine rapturous enthusiasm of youthful sensibility, which tries all ways to express its emotions, and finds none of them half tender or extravagant enough. The sonnet of Petrarch lamenting the death of Laura,[[4]] which is quoted by M. Sismondi, and of which he complains as having ‘too much wit,’ would be a justification of these remarks; not to mention numberless others.
M. Sismondi wishes that the connexion between Petrarch and Laura had been more intimate, and his passion accompanied with more interesting circumstances. The whole is in better keeping as it is. The love of a man like Petrarch would have been less in character, if it had been less ideal. For the purposes of inspiration, a single interview was quite sufficient. The smile which sank into his heart the first time he ever beheld her, played round her lips ever after: the look with which her eyes first met his, never passed away. The image of his mistress still haunted his mind, and was recalled by every object in nature. Even death could not dissolve the fine illusion: for that which exists in the imagination is alone imperishable. As our feelings become more ideal, the impression of the moment indeed becomes less violent; but the effect is more general and permanent. The blow is felt only by reflection; it is the rebound that is fatal. We are not here standing up for this kind of Platonic attachment; but only endeavouring to explain the way in which the passions very commonly operate in minds accustomed to draw their strongest interests from constant contemplation.
Petrarch is at present chiefly remembered for his sonnets, and the passion which they celebrate: he was equally distinguished in his lifetime by his Latin poems, and as one of the great restorers of learning. The following account of him is in many respects interesting.
‘Petrarch, the son of a Florentine who had been exiled as well as Dante, was born at Arezzo, in the night of the 19th of July 1304, and died at Arqua, near Padua, the 18th July 1374. He had been, during the century of which his life occupied three-fourths, the centre of all the Italian literature. Passionately fond of letters, history, and poetry, and an enthusiastic admirer of antiquity, he communicated by his discourse, his writings, and his example, to all his contemporaries, that impulse towards research and the study of the Latin manuscripts, which so particularly distinguished the fourteenth century; which preserved the chef-d’œuvres of the classic writers, at the moment when, perhaps, they were about to be lost for ever; and which changed, by means of these admirable models, the whole march of the human mind. Petrarch, tormented by the passion which has contributed so much to his celebrity, wishing to fly from himself, or to vary his thoughts by the distraction of different objects, travelled during almost the whole course of his life. He explored France, Germany, all the states of Italy: he visited Spain: and, in a continual activity directed to the discovery of the monuments of antiquity, he associated himself with all the learned, and with all the poets and philosophers of his time. From one end of Europe to the other, he made them concur in this great object; he directed their pursuits; and his correspondence became the magic chain which for the first time united the whole literary republic of Europe. The age in which he lived was that of small states. No sovereign had as yet established any of those colossal empires, the authority of which makes itself dreaded by nations of different languages. On the contrary, each country was divided into a great number of sovereignties; and the monarch of a small city was without power at a distance of thirty leagues, and unknown at the distance of a hundred. But the more political power was circumscribed, the more the glory of letters was extended: and Petrarch, the friend of Azzo of Correggio, prince of Parma, of Luchin and of Galeazzi Visconti, princes of Milan, and of Francis of Carrara, prince of Padua, was better known and more respected by Europe at large than all these sovereigns. The universal glory which his great knowledge had procured him, and which he directed to the service of letters, also frequently called him into the political career. No man of learning, or poet, has ever been charged with so great a number of embassies to so many great potentates,—the emperor, the Pope, the king of France, the senate of Venice, and all the princes of Italy: and, what is remarkable, is, that Petrarch did not fulfil those missions as belonging to the state with whose interests he was charged, but as belonging to all Europe. He received his title from his glory; and when he treated between different powers, it was almost as an arbiter whose suffrage each was desirous to secure with posterity. In fine, he gave to his age that enthusiasm for the beauties of antiquity, that veneration for learning, which renovated its character, and determined that of all succeeding times. It was in some sort in the name of grateful Europe, that Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol by the senator of Rome, the 8th of April 1341; and this triumph, the most glorious which has ever been decreed to any one, was not disproportioned to the influence which this great man has exerted over the ages which succeeded him.’
Boccacio was also one of the most indefatigable and successful of the restorers of ancient learning; and is classed by M. Sismondi as one of the three inventors of modern letters,—having done for Italian prose what Dante and Petrarch had done for Italian poetry. He was born at Paris in 1313, the son of a Florentine merchant; and died at Certaldo, in Tuscany, in the house of his forefathers, 21st December 1375, at the age of sixty-two years. He wrote epic poems and theology: But his Tales are his great work.
‘The Decameron,’ says our author, ‘the work to which, in the present day, Boccacio owes his high celebrity, is a collection of a hundred novels, which he has arranged in an ingenious manner, by supposing, that in the dreadful plague in 1348, a society of men and women, who had retired into the country to avoid the contagion, had imposed on themselves an obligation, for ten days together, to recite each a novel a day. The company consisted of ten persons; and the number of novels is, of course, a hundred. The description of the delicious country round Florence, where these joyous hermits took up their abode,—that of their walks—their festivals—their repasts, has given Boccacio an opportunity to display all the riches of a style the most flexible and graceful. The novels themselves, which are varied with infinite art, both as to the subject and manner, from the most touching and tender to the most playful, and unfortunately also to the most licentious, demonstrate his talent for recounting in every style and tone. His description of the plague of Florence, which serves as the introduction, ranks as one of the finest historical portraits which any age has left us. Finally, that which constitutes the glory of Boccacio, is the perfect purity of the language, the elegance, the grace, and above all, the naïveté of the style, which is the highest merit of this class of writing, and the peculiar charm of the Italian language.’
All this is true; though it might be said of many other authors: But what ought to have been said of him is, that there is in Boccacio’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is not to be met with in any other prose writer whatever. We think M. Sismondi has missed a fine opportunity of doing the author of the Decameron that justice which has not been done him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in the early popularity of his attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccacio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own tastes. But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excitement of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In this way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and his falcon. The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author. The story of Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is more affecting in the circumstances and the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of unalterable affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are perfect masterpieces. The epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart. The invention implied in his different tales is immense: but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all authors—probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther. Several of Shakespeare’s plots are taken from Boccacio; and indeed he has furnished subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The story of Griselda is borrowed from the Decameron by Chaucer; as is the knight’s Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of the Theseid.
M. Sismondi follows the progress of Italian literature with great accuracy and judgment, from this period to that of their epic and romantic writers. Pulci and Boyardo preceded Ariosto and Tasso. It has been observed that there is a great resemblance between the style of Pulci’s Morganti Maggiore and that of Voltaire. Thus, one of the personages in his poem being questioned as to the articles of his faith, says, that ‘he believes in a fat capon and a bottle of wine.’ His hero Rolando arriving at the gate of a monastery, on which some giants showered down fragments of rocks from the neighbouring mountain every night and morning, is advised by the Abbot to make haste in, ‘for that the manna is going to fall!’ This kind of levity of allusion, was characteristic of the literature of the age. One of these giants, to wit, Morganti, is converted by Orlando; but makes a very indifferent Christian after all. This writer has a certain familiar sarcastic gaiety in common with Ariosto, but none of his enthusiasm or elevation. The Orlando Amoroso of Boyardo, who was governor of Reggio, and one of the courtiers of Duke Hercules of Ferrara, was the foundation of Ariosto’s poem.