Chapter VI: Other Influences Summarized 216 (7)

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.

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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.

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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.

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Before leaving this great triumvirate of the most potent and golden period of Italian letters—a triumvirate which represents three steps, from the sublimity of poetic vision, through the higher experiences of the poetic real, down to unelevated or vulgar facts of the reality of prose; from a Beatrice through a Laura to a Fiammetta, who was very much flesh and blood; we must not forget to note their several vehicles of verse. Dante wrote in the _terza rima_, or stanza of three lines, linked in an arrangement which we may represent by _a b a_, _b c b_, _c d c_, and so on consistently. This is not found before him, though after him it became appropriated to Italian philosophic and satirical poetry. Petrarch’s chief vehicle was the sonnet. Boccaccio composed his poems in the _ottava rima_, which he did not, indeed, invent, but which he fixed for ever after as the orthodox verse of Italian romance and epic, whether to be used by Ariosto and Tasso or by lesser men. The Italians are characteristically imitators of set forms, and the metres of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio have bound their followers in a degree in which Englishmen have never been bound by any metres. When English writers adopted Boccaccio’s _ottava rima_, they modified it. Chaucer dropped a line; Spenser added one. Yet both the stanza of Chaucer’s _Troilus and Cressida_ and the stanza of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_ are none the less to be reckoned as borrowings from Italy, though both, we may believe, are improvements upon the original. That Spenser’s, at least, was such is shown by the unanimity with which Thomson, Byron, Shelley and Keats accepted it for sustained works of their own.

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The first three classics of Italy thus passed away. Boccaccio died in 1375, and the Italian literature of Italy practically stood still. This was the age of the revival of learning, when the Latin and Greek classics, and at first particularly the Latin classics, were engaging the attention of every man who pretended to scholarship and taste, and when men of letters, instead of perfecting their own tongue and enriching it with works full of modern manners and modern thoughts, were engaged in a servile imitation of the ancient writers of Rome, especially Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, and Seneca. It was a time of insatiate erudition in the things of antiquity, an age of great scholars like Bruno, Poggio Bracciolini, Filelfo, and Valla, but an age when all their best was written in Latin and that without originality or the savour of reality. It was also a great time of literary patronage. The princes themselves studied more or less earnestly, and affected literary taste, scholarship and Platonism. Scholars were in the highest repute, not only as teachers and companions of princes, but as ambassadors and counsellors. Every little state had its group of learned writers. The Popes at Rome, the Visconti at Milan, the Gonzaga at Mantua, the Este at Ferrara, the Medici at Florence, collected together men of letters and bestowed lavish gifts upon them. Cosmo de’ Medici, the Florentine merchant who had gained the control of his city, turned his gardens into an academy. His trading agents collected manuscripts everywhere in Greece and the East. The first of those academies which afterwards became so numerous, and which bore such remarkable names as _Della Crusca_, _Intronati_, and the rest, began to spring up everywhere in Italy. Florence took the lead. The talk was of letters and literary taste. Much pedantry, no doubt, there was; but the universal love of letters was none the less genuine. Unfortunately it took the practical shape of a cultivation of writing in Latin, not in Italian. The _illuminati_ of the day despised the tongue of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. They gathered and absorbed the ideas of pagan antiquity, but they did not yet seek to embody them in the language which men actually spoke. They learned the secrets of literary polish, but did not apply them to composition in Italian. So was it till towards the end of the fifteenth century, or, roughly speaking, a hundred years after the death of Boccaccio. These studies were anything but regrettable in the end: the immediate fault lay in exclusive devotion to them, to the neglect of the vernacular. When the fruits of classical study began to be utilized for the purpose of literature in Italian, the results were of the best. For the enthusiasm of the New Learning itself all Europe has reason to be grateful to Italy, and no country more so than England, from which (in 1488) Linacre went to sit at the feet of Poliziano in Florence, whither also Grocyn and Latimer found their way.

At length, thanks to the efforts of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano and Pulci at Florence, and of Boiardo at Ferrara, there was a revival of Italian letters, a new breath of spontaneity passing over literary creation. There is no need to speak in detail of the sonnets and _canzoni_ of Lorenzo de’ Medici, modelled on Petrarch and addressed to a Lucrezia Donato as the counterpart of Laura, nor of the lyric grace and descriptive beauty of the learned and tasteful Poliziano. But of Pulci’s romantic epic of _Morgante Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ it is necessary to say a word, for the reason that they are the precursors of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_, of Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_, and thence indirectly of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_. It is Ariosto and Tasso who rank next to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and who consummate that sixteenth century or “Cinque Cento” literature which constitutes the silver epoch of Italian letters. Pulci’s _Morgante Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ are both “chivalrous romances,” written in the _ottava rima_, or Italian equivalent of the Spenserian stanza. They are not exactly epics, but rather stories of knightly adventures, full of description and of the marvellous, of the romance of love and arms, full of knights who slay giants, liberate ladies, and fall in love with pagan maidens. Pulci’s work, though often sufficiently earnest and stirring, is also often seasoned with that mocking humour, that irony, that refusal to take ideals seriously, which is one of the most constant of Italian characteristics. That of Boiardo is of a more serious type. These books, as has just been hinted, mark a revival of the well-known French romances, of the adventures credited to the Paladins of Charlemagne. Such stories, which have no foundation in sober history, were early borrowed by the Italians, and everyone knew of Charlemagne, of Roland and Oliver, of the disaster of Roncesvalles, of the traitor Gano and the rest. It was for Pulci and Boiardo to take these legends of romance from the people, give them a literary shape, and so lead the way for the magnificent work of Ariosto. It may be mentioned in passing that Boiardo’s Moorish hero Rodamonte, the insolent and atheistic—a name utilized by Ariosto in the form Rodomonte—has supplied a term for that species of bombastic romancing which we call “rodomontade.” That Boiardo was read by Milton is clear from allusion in _Paradise Regained_.

In the next generation the _Orlando Innamorato_ was recast by Berni into a mocking and satirical form, which was much more to the taste of the Italian mind. The language of this _rifacimento_ is marked by greater ease and polish than the original, but its chief claim to distinction lies in the peculiar humour of the writer—the “Bernesque”—of interest to students of English literature, from the fact that Berni largely determined the character of the great productions of Byron’s Italian period.

Italian literature has thus been brought back from scholars to the people, when Lodovico Ariosto begins to write at Ferrara. His works are various, including comedies and the inevitable sonnet after the manner of Petrarch; but it is the _Orlando Furioso_, the romance of “Orlando Mad,” which renders him immortal. That work is of special interest here, inasmuch as it advanced English literature by inspiring the author of the _Faerie Queene_ with the desire to “outgo” its power of perfect description, and its unending chain of marvels and adventures. The poem is a “romantic epic,” begun in 1505, and finished in eleven years. It undertakes—following Boiardo on a higher plane of art—to sing of Paladins at the court of Charlemagne, their loves, and their adventures, during the fabulous wars of that famous emperor with the Moors. The hero Orlando became mad through love of Angelica, and this madness, though it is only an episode in the poem, gives the name to the whole. The entire work is full of the spirit of prowess, of marvellous adventures of heroes in rapid succession, their triumphs over the forces of nature and the spells of magic, and of magnificent descriptions painted by the poet as vividly as Italian artists painted with the brush—perhaps, it may be, somewhat too fully, too precisely. The actions are placed in an ideal world of chivalry, of knightly courtesy and knightly omnipotence, where there are no stubborn facts and limitations to interfere with the valour of the heroes. That world Ariosto did not create; he borrowed it from the French trouvères, and from his predecessor Boiardo, whose work he simply continues while throwing it into the shade. The magic and sorcery come largely from Arabian sources; nevertheless Ariosto himself is of imagination all compact, he invents episodes with wonderful fertility, and orders them with wonderful distinctness. And the style is of the most consummate in point of grace, elegance, and sweetness. He, like other Italians, draws character but faintly; he does not soar to great poetic heights, or descend to profound poetic depths; but in all the forty thousand lines of his poem, it is asserted by Italians who should be judges of their own tongue, that there is not one which is crude, inharmonious, or feeble. According to himself

Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto,

and it is not easy to see how such things could be more perfectly sung.

Ariosto became a rage and a model. During the sixteenth century every Paladin and every Knight of the Round Table had his poet. Our own Spenser, deeply read as he was in Italian, had not only read Ariosto, but in all probability more than one imitator of Ariosto, and it is not for nothing that so many characters in the _Faerie Queene_, such as Archimago and Orgoglio, Duessa, and Fidissa, bear Italian names, names that so well fit the land of romance which the Italians had annexed for their own. In 1591 appeared the well-known translation by Sir John Harington.

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.

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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.

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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.

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What English literature owes to that of Italy, except in the case of Byron’s Bernesque period, it owes before the middle of the seventeenth century. From Dante to Tasso the obligations were great and manifold. To Italian stories, Italian sonnets and lyrics, to Italian epic, romance and pastoral, our writers from Chaucer to Milton are multifariously indebted. Most indebted of all is the great epoch which culminated in Shakespeare. Before his day the Tudor Court had much affected the language and courtesies of Italy. Italian travel was common, and Italians were relatively numerous in London. Even that sweet stateliness which characterizes so much of the Elizabethan lyric is a gift of Italy. To Italian skill and refinement of language, to Italian melodies of versification, our rough lyric beginnings owe debts more appreciable than to Italian matter. In other words, Italy taught us the art of writing, while leaving us to use it upon our own realities of thought and feeling. Before the poetical innovations of Wyatt and Surrey, English verse had stood in much need of further moulding of form and polish of language. It was an outcome of the partiality of the Court of Henry VIII for Italian art and manners that there arose the new school of poets whom Puttenham describes as “a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.” Both Wyatt and Surrey are best known as sonneteers. Sometimes they are translating from Petrarch, but they are by no means mere translators, or even servile imitators. It is well known that the sonnet, as introduced by them, differs somewhat from the Italian, and its ending in an epigrammatic couplet is a purely English novelty. “Sonnet,” indeed, was for a time used loosely for other forms than the true poem of fourteen lines; but, when it found itself, it had lost nothing in strength and beauty. Perhaps the chief impulse in establishing the sonnet in England, when a certain halt had occurred after Surrey, came from Watson’s _Passionate Century of Love_ (1581), although in these “sonnets,” Italian enough in spirit, the form is strangely made to consist of eighteen lines in three sestets.

The whole Elizabethan world of lyrists “Petrarchized.” The _Amoretti_ of Spenser made him to Gabriel Harvey “an English Petrarch,” although in truth Petrarch is but one in a list of Spenser’s models, which includes also Sannazaro, Ariosto, and Tasso. It would be easy to trace throughout the English sonneteers, from the appearance of _Tottell’s Miscellany_ in 1557, the effects of many an Italian Petrarchist whose name has not been given in the foregoing sketch. Nor was the borrowing confined to the sonnet form or the sonnet spirit. It extended also to the “sonnet series” or “sonnet sequence.” The notion of such related sonnets was introduced from Italy by Surrey in his series dedicated to “Geraldine,” and from him was taken up by Sidney (to Stella), Spenser (to Rosalind), Constable (_Diana_), Daniel (_Delia_), Drayton (_Idea_), Lodge (_Phillis_), Giles Fletcher (_Licia_), as well as by Shakespeare, who, in his more noble way, leaves the object nameless. This development should perhaps serve as a warning to those who press Shakespeare’s sonnets too rigorously for a key to his actual experiences.

Our servitude to France followed upon the decline of Italian influence. So far as we have been affected by Italy during the last century it has been due rather to the residence of English writers—Byron, Shelley, Landor, Leigh Hunt, Browning, Ruskin—in the peninsula, than to any new fountains of inspiration to be found in its productions.

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The English genius wisely rejected some portions of the literary offerings of Italy. Especially was this so in the domain of critical principle, and particularly as it concerned the drama. Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetrie_ follows the false doctrine of the dramatic unities as laid down by Castelvetro (1570), but such pseudo-classical plays as were attempted met with the fate which had previously attended Sackville’s sterile effort of _Gorboduc_. The only useful and permanent contribution from dramatic sources was the blank verse of Trissino, which Surrey first borrowed for his translation of the _Aeneid_, whence it was passed on to the stage by Sackville. Taken up by playwrights, it was moulded into a powerful instrument by Marlowe, and thence grew to all its subsequent ripe uses. For the rest, when Gascoigne translated Ariosto’s comedy _I Suppositi_ in _The Supposes_, the Italian model itself proved barren, but the lesson of style in dialogue left its usual improving result.

In borrowing the Italian _novelle_ and translating them, the English sixteenth century for a time reproduced their horrors and licentiousness, much to the disgust of many good citizens, who would scarcely have recognized themselves if described as Puritans. It became necessary even to order the burning of many of them for their wantonness. Yet on the whole the English selection, whether for mere reading (as in Painter’s _Palace of Pleasure_), or for exploitation by the stage (as in _Romeo and Juliet_), or by prose fiction (as in the work of Greene), shows sufficient indication of the superior English sense of decency. Nevertheless, it was a recommendation to story-books if it could be said (truly or otherwise) that the tales came “from Italy.” Nor did the borrowings of them cease till the Puritans closed the playhouses, for Massinger and Webster seek their situations where Shakespeare sought his, albeit their choice may be less sure.

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The Italians display literary characteristics not difficult to define. They are the heirs of the Latin tradition. But Latin literature, as has been stated earlier in this book, was not particularly original either in thought or style. It was not a highly imaginative or emotional literature; its verse tends chiefly to polish, and its prose to either declamation or epigram. It was marked by incessant strivings after verbal art, but not by any abandonments of passionate ardour, of lofty endeavours, or of profound meditations. It was a literature given to narration and satire; but not to exalted feeling. In other words, it was a literature of culture rather than of spontaneity. It was prone, therefore, to follow models, and to consider the form before the substance. In almost all these qualities Italian literature shares. Except in Dante, it hardly shows in any large measure the great poetic faculty of experiencing and vividly realizing great passions and far-reaching thoughts. Nearly all the Italians, after the vernacular had once been established, cultivate the most fastidious perfection of workmanship, while their thought and feeling are of but average depth, dealing with things positive and on the surface. Except in Dante and his age, Italian literature avoids the visionary and abstract, and deals by preference with the material and sensuous. It is not marked by potent and seminal thoughts, which are found almost only in Dante. For that reason it is Dante whom we generally satisfy ourselves with reading, if, indeed, we are not rather satisfied with talking of him and reading about him.

CONSPECTUS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE.
CHIEF REPRESENTATIVES.
DATE.
TYPICAL WORKS.
SOME INFLUENCES ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Allegorical Poetry (“Visions”)
DANTE ALIGHIERI
1265-1321
(_Divina Commedia_)
The first model of noble style and matter in modern literature.
Afforded much suggestion to Milton (_Paradise Lost_). Chaucer
shows borrowings and translations in _e.g._, _House of Fame_,
_Parliament of Fowles_, and the story of Ugolino in _Monk’s
Tale_. Specific influences are less obvious than the general
fact.
Francesco PETRARCA
1304-1374
_Trionfi_ (“Triumphs”).
Lyrical Poetry:
(_a_) Sonnets and _Canzoni_
(Dante and his circle)
1265-1321
Francesco PETRARCA
1304-1374
Sonnets and _Canzoni_
Petrarch’s sonnets became the model for all later Italians, and
thence for Englishmen. The form (modified) was introduced into
England by Wyatt and Surrey (temp. Henry VIII) and sonnets, or
sonnet sequences, were written by more than a hundred versifiers
in the Elizabethan period. Examples are Spenser (_Amoretti_),
Sidney (_Astrophel and Stella_), Watson (_Teares of Fansie_),
Daniel (_Delia_), Drayton (_Idea_) Constable (_Diana_),
Shakespeare. Milton’s sonnets (five of them in Italian) are of
the same suggestion; and so down to them Rossetti and Mrs.
Browning. The poetical collections of Elizabethans (_Tottell’s
Miscellany_, _The Paradise of Dainty Devices_, etc.) are
markedly Italian in _provenance_.
(Lorenzo de’ Medici, etc.)
1448-1492
Sonnets and _Canzoni_.
Lodovico ARIOSTO
1474-1533
Sonnets.
Torquato TASSO
1544-1595
Sonnets.
Giovanni Battista MARINI
1569-1625
(Various.)
(_b_) Other Lyrics
Gabriello Chiabrera
1551-1637
Pindaric lyrics
Influenced the taste for Pindarics which appeared in Cowley,
Dryden, etc.
Pietro METASTASIO
1698-1782
Operatic lyrics.
Heroic and Epic Verse (chiefly romantic heroics)
Giovanni BOCCACCIO
1313-1375
_La Teseide_ and _Filostrato_
Chief introducer of the octave stanza (_ottava rima_), which
became the type for Italian epic. Adopted in English with one
modification by Chaucer (_Troilus and Cressida_), and with
another by Spenser (_Faerie Queene_). Chaucer’s _Knight’s
Tale_ is from Boccaccio’s _Teseide_, and his _Troilus and
Cressida_ (like Shakespeare’s) from the _Filostrato_. Chaucer
shows many borrowings and paraphrases.
Luigi PULCI
1431-1487
_Morgante Maggiore_ (heroic romance, serious only in part).
Matteo Maria BOIARDO
1430-1494
_Orlando Innamorato_ (mockingly recast by Berni fifty years
later).
Important as leading to Ariosto’s poem. Boiardo was well known
to Milton, and had previously served as material for Elizabethan
story writers. Byron in _Don Juan_ and _Beppo_ adopted
the “Bernesque” style.
Lodovico ARIOSTO
1474-1533
_Orlando Furioso_ (1516)
Favourite reading of Spenser, to whom it suggests the metrical
form and romantic style of _Faerie Queene_. Translated by
Harington (1591) in the same metre.
Torquato TASSO
1544-1595
_Gerusalemme Liberata_ (1581)
Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_ is full of echoes and imitations
of Tasso (the bower of Acrasia is a translation of the garden of
Armida). Milton is similarly indebted, as well as to Tasso’s
_Creation_ (_Il Mondo Creato_). Translated by Fairfax (1600).
Giovanni Battista MARINI
1569-1625
_Adone_ (a romantic epic)
Chiefly memorable for encouragement of the fantastic style known
as Marinism (early seventeenth century in England). Marini was
favourite reading with Crashaw and his like.
Mock Heroic
Alessandro Tassoni
1565-1638
_La Secchia Rapita_ (“Rape of the Bucket”).
Suggested Pope’s _Rape of the Lock_.
Satirical Verse
(Ariosto)
Luigi Alamanni
1495-1556
Utilized by Wyatt.
Pietro Aretino
1492-1557
Much affected by Elizabethan pamphleteers, _e.g._, Nash (“the
English Aretino”).
Drama: Tragedy
Giovanni Giorgio TRISSIMO
1478-1550
_Sofonisba._
Important as the first example of blank verse, which was
borrowed from him by Surrey, used in the first English tragedy
(_Gorboduc_, by Sackville), and thence established by Marlowe
for English drama.
TASSO
_Il Torrismondo._
(The French and English dramatists proper began by following the
Italian example of producing so-called classical plays: but
English drama owes little to Italian, the case being rather
the reverse. So far as Italian effect was pronounced it was in
the direction of horrible detail.)
Scipione MAFFEI
1675-1755
_Merope._
Vittorio ALFIERI
1749-1803
_Saul._
Drama: Comedy
ARIOSTO
1474-1533
_I Suppositi_ and _La Cassaria_, etc.
_I Suppositi_ (_The Supposes_) translated by Gascoigne
(1566) as one of our earliest comedies.
Niccolo MACHIAVELLI
1469-1527
_Mandragola_, etc.
(Pietro Aretino)
(The general influence in England was as slight as that of
Tragedy. It should, however, be remarked that our Harlequin,
Pantaloon, Columbine, and Punch, are derived from the old
Italian _commedie dell’arte_, _i.e._, stock un-literary
comedies: also that the “Masques” (up to Ben Jonson) were a
suggestion from Italy.)
Carlo GOLDONI
1707-1792
Comedies.
Pastoral Drama (See below, “Pastoral Eclogues.”)
Angelo POLIZIANO
fl. 1480
_Orfeo._
TASSO
1544-1595
_Aminta_ (1572)
Watson’s _Amyntas_ (1584).
Battista GUARINI
1537-1612
_Pastor Fido_ (1585)
Many times translated into English, first in 1602. Fletcher’s
_Faithful Shepherdess_.
Musical Drama (Melodrama, Opera.)
Ottavio Rinuccini
fl. 1594
_Dafne_ and _Euridice_.
Apostolo Zeno
1669-1750
Pietro METASTASIO
1698-1782
Twenty-eight grand operas (_La Semiramide_, etc.).
Pastoral Eclogues
Battista Spagnoli (MANTUANUS)
fl. 1502
Latin eclogues
Used by Barclay (1513) and freely by Spenser (_Shepheard’s
Calender_), quoted by Holofernes in Shakespeare.
Giacomo SANNAZARO
1458-1530
_Arcadia_ (1504) (prose and verse).
Original of Sidney’s _Arcadia_. (These revive pastoral poetry
among both the French (Marot) and English.)
(Marini.)
Prose Fiction
Giovanni BOCCACCIO
1313-1375
_Decameron_ (100 tales).
Suggests plan of Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, and also several
of the tales themselves. In Elizabethan times some of them
appear in Painter’s _Palace of Pleasure_, whence _All’s
Well that Ends Well_ is derived. Well known at all times.
Ser Giovanni
Publ. 1558
_Pecorone_
Giraldi Cinthio
Publ. 1565
_Hecatommithi_
Matteo Bandello, etc.
Publ. 1554-1573
_Novelle_
Much read and used by Elizabethans (Greene, Peel, etc. ). The
storehouse of dramatic plots. Thus, _Romeo and Juliet_,
_Measure for Measure_, _Othello_, etc., are from the Novelle.
Other Prose
Niccolo MACHIAVELLI
1469-1527
_Il Principe_, _History_, _Discourses on Livy_
_The Prince_ widely read. Bacon was well acquainted with
Machiavelli, and takes occasional suggestion from him in the
_Essays_.

VI

OTHER LITERARY INFLUENCES SUMMARIZED

(_a_) SPANISH LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

The direct and avowed influence of Spain upon English literature has hardly been comparable to that of France or Italy; nevertheless, in its totality, it has been sufficient to demand some concise review. Meanwhile that review necessitates, if less inevitably than in the case of Italy and France, an outline survey of the history of Spanish literature down to the middle of the seventeenth century. After that date the Peninsula, apart from its own lack of progress, cannot be said to count in our literary development.

In the summary of such literary forces as existed in the Dark Ages, we have already spoken of the Moslem learning of Cordova, and of the agency of Moors, Arabs, and Jews in spreading science and philosophy. We must not forget also the influence of Arab lyrics accompanying Arab music, which not only operated in Spain, but also in Provence after the Counts of Barcelona had established their court in that region. The interpenetration of Christian and Moorish thought was, as a matter of course, continued for many generations during the Christian re-conquest, but from the eighth to the twelfth century both learning and literary art lay with the Moslem. When in the thirteenth century the dialect of Castile had become the most important, though by no means the only Spanish speech, it embodied but little contribution from the north. Such as it reveals is an imitation of the Carlovingian _chansons de geste_ of France, in the shape of romantic poems of which the hero is Ruy Diaz de Bivar, commonly called the “Cid” (a corruption of the Arabic _Seyd_, “lord”). Side by side with these went the troubadour poetry common to the Provençal of Southern France and its closely related Catalonian of Eastern Spain. In the next and following centuries there were destined to spring from the Cid poems, combined with the Celtic tales of Arthur, brought through France from Wales, those romances of chivalry—_libros de caballerias_—of which something will be said in due course.

Meanwhile some noticeable elements in the character of the rising Spanish literature were being cultivated under Oriental influence. Chief among these were the love of aphorism and the love of story. The Spanish mind has at all times been peculiarly sententious, and the proverbial philosophy of Spain extraordinarily rich. The Spanish taste has also set strongly in the direction of fiction of no very probable kind, whether embodying more or less supernatural marvel, impossible sentiment, chivalric and pastoral, or crowd of incident. These predilections already showed themselves during the nascent period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Spanish taste worked with the Oriental in respect both of proverb and story. The people of the _Arabian Nights_ naturally passed on their _répertoire_ more readily to their Spanish neighbours than elsewhere. The Arabic version of the _Fables_ (or _Tales_) _of Pilpay_ was translated under the same title of _Kalila and Dimna_, and the Arabic version of the _Seven Sages_ (or _Book of Sindabad_) into the _Stratagems of Women_. With these and other materials there went a native inventiveness, in which Spanish writers have seldom been deficient. When they proceed to issue stories in their own names, though still derived from eastern sources (as in the forty-nine tales of the _Count Lucanor_ of Don Juan Manuel early in the fourteenth century), the sententious character common to Moors and Spaniards is in strong evidence. The same people which was gathering proverbial wisdom into such collections as _Blooms of Philosophy_ and _Mouthfuls of Gold_, affected tales with a moral. _Count Lucanor_ consists of stories, told by a minister to a prince according to the Oriental machinery, which are meant to do more than amuse. They have the credit of being the first collection of novels, if we may call them such, in modern Europe. Scattered _fabliaux_ existed in France, and various tales were current in Italy, but there was as yet no _Decameron_. The extent to which portions of this early fiction filtered into England cannot very well be estimated, but in the neo-Latin countries, with their comparative nearness of language and traditions, their racial affinities and their common church, the tales enjoyed a large vogue, which brought them into the hands of the French composers of _fabliaux_, of Boccaccio’s Italian predecessors, of Boccaccio himself, and thence of Chaucer. The plot of one of Don Manuel’s stories is familiar to us through the _Taming of the Shrew_, and on the Continent some of them reappear in the dramas of Calderon, or the novels of Lesage. Nor was the circulation of the proverbs confined to Spain. In Caxton’s _Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the French, there appear aphorisms which correspond to those in the Spanish Florilegia.

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