Chapter VI: The Vanguard of the Renaissance (1)

[Sidenote: [_ca._ 1250-1400 A.D.]]

We have seen much in recent chapters of the trials and disasters of Florence. We now have the more agreeable task of recording her triumphs. The record of petty quarrels and more pretentious warrings, through which Florence has thus far been called to our attention, might well have blinded our eyes to the observation of a remarkable culture development which went on coincidentally with these political jarrings. In point of fact, there was a most extraordinary intellectual development taking place in Italy in the later centuries of the so-called dark ages, and the focus and centre of that development was Florence; in proof of which that city now gave to the world within a single century a school of writers, led by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who virtually stamped the Italian language for the first time as a literary medium, and whose works marked the highest development of Italian creative genius. And contemporaneous with these writers were the artists Cimabue and Giotto, who gave an altogether similar impulse to art. All these men were Florentines, and so greatly did their influence preponderate over that of any other Italians of the epoch that Symonds[b] is fully justified in saying: “It may be affirmed without exaggeration that, prior to the close of the fifteenth century, what we called Italian genius was in truth the genius of Florence.”

This seemingly sudden efflorescence of genius had its origin, as has been intimated, in a gradual development, which now for the first time produced tangible results. If, on the one hand, it may be urged that these great men were spontaneously creative, it must not be forgotten that their genius was nurtured in a bed of classicism. Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio were all classical scholars, the last named being a student of Greek as well as of Latin. All of them harked back to the great Roman writers as their models of style, and founded their culture on a study of ancient literature. But each of them in turn broke away spontaneously from these ancient models when he came to his really creative efforts, and each put forth in the vernacular the works that were destined to give him perpetuity of fame. In their own day, to be sure, their Latin works were regarded as having great importance. Boccaccio never dreamed of placing his Italian writings on a par with his learned treatises on mythology, geography, and biography; and we are assured that for two centuries his name was famous all over Europe on account of these scientific works, while the _Decameron_ was hardly known north of the Alps. “Petrarch himself,” says Burckhardt,[c] “trusted and hoped that his Latin writings would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tells us, he would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in blotting them out from the memory of man.” Yet these would-be forgotten poems became a standard of taste for all the world, and have kept their position in the estimate of critics of each succeeding generation.

This sudden outburst of creative genius of a high order in Italy, while the rest of the western world was bound by uncreative traditions, has been variously explained. Burckhardt finds the explanation in circumstances that led, in Italy earlier than elsewhere, to the emancipation of the individual.[a]

In the Middle Ages, he says, both sides of human consciousness--that which was turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation--only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognised himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of Italy.

In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free personality which in northern Europe either did not occur at all, or could not display itself in the same manner. The band of audacious wrong-doers in the sixteenth century described to us by Liutprand, some of the contemporaries of Gregory VII, and a few of the opponents of the first Hohenstaufen show us characters of this kind. But at the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and dress. Dante’s great poem would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race. For Italy the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth, was the most national herald of his time. This fact appears in the most decisive and unmistakable form. The Italians of the fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and seeming unlike his neighbours. By the year 1390 there was no longer any prevailing fashion of dress for men at Florence, each preferring to clothe himself in his own way.

Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools--the secretary, minister, poet, and companion. These people were forced to know all the inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and influence.

But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free from the same impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of the Byzantine Empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character through the servitude they lived under. But this was not the case with regard to individuality; for political impotence does not hinder the different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in the fullest vigour and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did not cease to be considerable, and a church which, unlike that of the Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the state--all these conditions undoubtedly favoured the growth of individual thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the cessation of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics, and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a _dilettante_, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene, too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.

In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the governing party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders, especially in Florentine history,[13] acquired so marked a personal character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob van Artevelde.

The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into a position like that of the subjects of the despotic states, with the difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (died 1446), whose work on domestic economy is the first complete programme of developed private life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the dangers and thanklessness of public life is in its way a true monument of the age.

Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. “In all our more populous cities,” says Giovanni Pontano, “we see a crowd of people who have left their homes of their own free will; but a man takes his virtues with him wherever he goes.” And, in fact, they were by no means only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.

The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, “My country is the whole world.” And when his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: “Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars, everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people? Even my bread will not fail me.” The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. “Only he who has learned everything,” says Ghiberti, “is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.” In the same strain an exiled humanist writes: “Wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home.”[c]

EUROPEAN CULTURE IN GENERAL

The oppression which weighed upon the rest of Europe contributed to the maintenance of barbarism, less by rendering difficult and sometimes dangerous the acquisition of knowledge, than by taking away all attraction from the exercise of the mind. Thought was a pain to those capable of judging the state of the human species; of studying the past, of comparing it with the present; and of thus foreseeing the future. Danger and suffering appeared on all sides. The men who, in France, Germany, England, and Spain, felt themselves endued with the power of generalising their ideas, either smothered them, not to aggravate the pain of thought, or directed them solely to speculations the farthest from real life--towards that scholastic philosophy which so vigorously exercised the understanding, without bringing it to any conclusion.

In Italy, on the contrary, liberty secured the full enjoyment of intellectual existence. Everyone endeavoured to develop the powers which he felt within him, because each was conscious that the more his mind opened the greater was his enjoyment; everyone directed his powers to a useful and practical purpose, because each felt himself placed in a state of society in which he might attain some influence, either for his own benefit or that of his fellow creatures. The first want which towns had experienced was that of their defence. Accordingly, military architecture had taken precedence in the arts. From its exercise the transition was easy to that of religious architecture, at a time when religion was indispensable to every heart--to civil architecture, then encouraged by a government in which everything was for all. The study and pursuit of the beautiful in this first of the fine arts had paved the way to all the others. From the pleasures of the imagination through the eye, men ascended to those derived from the soul; and hence the birth of poetry.[d]

The language of Provence had attained its highest degree of cultivation; Spain and Portugal had already produced more than one poet; and the _langue d’Oil_, in the north of France, was receiving considerable attention, while the Italian was not yet enumerated amongst the languages of Europe, and the richness and harmony of its idiom, gradually and obscurely formed amongst the populace, were not as yet appreciated. But in the thirteenth century Dante arose to immortalise this hitherto neglected tongue, and, aided by his single genius, it soon advanced with a rapidity which left all competition at a distance.

The Lombardian duchy of Benevento, comprising the greater part of the modern kingdom of Naples, had preserved, under independent princes, and surrounded by the Greeks and the Saracens, a degree of civilisation which, in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, was unexampled throughout the rest of Italy. Many of the fine arts, and some branches of science, were cultivated there with success. The schools of Salerno communicated to the West the medical skill of the Arabs, and the commerce of Amalfi introduced into those fertile provinces not only wealth but knowledge. From the eighth to the tenth century, various historical works, written, it is true, in Latin, but distinguished for their fidelity, their spirit, and their fire, proceeded from the pen of several men of talent, natives of that district, some of whom clothed their compositions in hexameter verses, which, compared with others of the same period, display superior facility and fancy.

The influx of foreigners consequent upon the invasion of the Norman adventurers, who founded a sovereignty in Apulia, was not sufficiently great to effect a change in the language; and, under their government, the Italian or Sicilian tongue first assumed a settled form. The court of Palermo, early in the twelfth century, abounded in riches, and consequently indulged in luxurious habits; and there the first accents of the Sicilian muse were heard. There, too, at the same period, the Arabs acquired a degree of influence and credit which they have never possessed in any other Christian court. The palace of William I, like those of the monarchs of the East, was guarded by Mohammedan eunuchs. From them he selected his favourites, his friends, and sometimes even his ministers. To attach themselves to the arts and to the various avocations which contribute to the pleasures of life, was the peculiar province of the Saracens, by whom half of the island is still occupied. When Frederick II, at the end of the twelfth century, succeeded to the throne of the Norman monarchs, he transported numerous colonies of Saracens into Apulia and the principality, but he did not banish them from either his service or his court. Of them his army was composed; and the governors of his provinces, whom he denominated justiciaries, were chosen almost exclusively from their number. Thus was it the destiny of the Arabians, in the east as well as in the west of Europe, to communicate to the Latin nations their arts, their science, and their poetry.

From the history of Sicily, we may deduce the effects produced by Arabian influence on the Italian, or as it was then considered, the Sicilian poetry, with no less certainty than that with which we trace its connection, in the county of Barcelona and in the kingdom of Castile, with the first efforts of the Provençal and Spanish poets. William I, an effeminate and voluptuous prince, forgot, in his palace of Palermo, amidst his Moorish eunuchs, in the song and the feast, those commotions which agitated his realms. The regency of the kingdom devolved, at his decease, upon his widow, who entrusted the government to Gayto Petro, the chief of the eunuchs, connected with the Saracens of Africa. All the commerce of Palermo was monopolised by the infidels. They were the professors of every art, and the inventors of every variety of luxury. The nation accommodated itself to their customs; and in their public festivals it was usual for Christian and Moorish women to sing in concert to the music of their slaves. We may safely conclude that on these occasions each party adopted their mother-tongue; and that the Italian females who, in the words of Hugo Falcandus,[m] responded, in melancholy cadence to the tambours of their Moorish attendants, would, in all probability, adapt Sicilian words to African airs and measures.

THE UNIVERSITIES AND NASCENT SCHOLARSHIP

The universities and schools which were already founded obtained more fame and became more active. The clash of arms, which had not prevented their flourishing, did not prevent new ones being formed. That same spirit of rivalry which armed one against the other, princes and nations, led them to vie one with the other in seeking, by every means, greater renown and greater glory for their little states. At one time professors were seen quietly continuing their lectures while fighting was going on under the walls of the town, or even in the streets and squares; at another time, the rostrum was overthrown, the professors were driven away, the scholars put to flight; but they soon returned, either under the same government or under the new one which had taken its place, and studies continued their course.

The University of Bologna suffered continual vicissitudes. At one time excommunicated by Clement V, the greater number of the scholars passed to the University of Padua, Bologna’s rival; at another time, in consequence of quarrels which broke out between the professors and the magistrates, or between the scholars and the citizens, whole classes deserted and settled in the neighbouring towns. But all these wrongs were righted. John XXII withdrew Clement’s interdict, and confirmed and increased the privileges of the university; the magistrates and citizens granted the amends demanded by professors and pupils; and this school, which was already famous, became more brilliant and more famous. A short time later, Milan, Pisa, Pavia, Piacenza, Siena, but especially Florence, rivalled with Padua, Bologna, and the University of Naples founded by Frederick II, which had so vastly increased under Robert of Naples. Boniface VIII had founded the University of Rome, his successors confirmed and even extended its privileges; but their bulls could not repair the harm done to the new university by their absence; it could not do aught but decline so long as their residence at Avignon left the unfortunate town of Rome almost deserted, and, as a climax, always a prey to sedition and torn by internal factions.

It must be remembered that in these universities and schools nothing was taught except, as in the preceding century, what were commonly called the seven arts. Literature, properly so called, was almost entirely ignored. The ancient authors, who, later on, formed the base of literary study, were scarcely beginning to be discovered. Libraries of schools and monasteries, even those which several princes had worked to form, mostly contained some of the works of the fathers, books on theology, law, medicine, astrology, and scholastic philosophy; and even these were few in number. It was in the course of the century then beginning that a praiseworthy eagerness for the discovery of ancient manuscripts arose in Italy, and, following Italy’s example, spread throughout Europe. The most deserted and dusty corners of private houses and convents were searched for the works of these authors, of whom till then nothing remained but the name, and of those who had left many works of which only the smallest part was known. This revolution was principally due to Petrarch, and it is one of his strongest claims to glory.

One single example will prove the vastness of his work and how little advanced even the learned of that time were. A professor of the University of Bologna, writing to him on the subject of ancient authors, especially of poets, and wishing to include among the latter Plato[14] and Cicero, was ignorant of the name of Nævius, and even Plautius, and thought that Ennius and Statius were contemporaries. The ignorance of the copyists must be added to the imperfection of knowledge and the scarcity of books. In transcribing the best books they frequently disfigured them in such a manner that their authors themselves would have had trouble to recognise them. All this must be remembered to tone down the accounts found in histories of literature of the fine libraries given to certain universities, or founded in certain towns, formed by a certain prince and thrown open by his orders to the learned and to the public. When compared with our large libraries, they are insignificant book-cupboards--an absolute famine compared with appalling superabundance.

The science which obtained most assistance from them, and which was the most abundantly provided with books, was scholastic theology; it was therefore pursued more eagerly than ever. It was no longer the century of men like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura; but their example was quite recent, and their admirers and disciples entertained the hope of equalling them and even surpassing them in glory. Hence among theologians arose that eagerness, that general fervour to interpret the same books that their predecessors had interpreted, to explain the explanations themselves, to commentate the commentaries; to deepen the shadows while attempting to cast light upon them, and to obscure by explanation what was at first clear. These are not only the ideas, but the very words of the wise Tiraboschi; he added the very natural wish that none would disturb the repose of these indefatigable commentators in the profound oblivion and dust of the libraries where they lie buried. However, he does not include among them about a dozen doctors, whose fame it appears was very great in that century. We will only mention one of them--an Augustine monk named Denis, a native of St. Sépulcre--because he was the friend and spiritual adviser of Petrarch; this much may be said of him, all the rest may be relegated to the same place of refuge whose inviolability Tiraboschi reclaims for the mob of theologians of the century. There should be no rank in dust and oblivion. All authors of books which are unreadable or which teach nothing should sleep there alike.

LATIN AND THE VERNACULAR

A complete separation had now taken place between the ordinary language of the country and the Latin tongue. Of the latter, the women were ignorant. The general adoption of the language to which their delicacy gave new graces, and in which alone they were accessible to the gallantry of their admirers, was a necessary result. It was now submitted to rules, and enlivened by that sensibility of expression, of which a dead and pedantic language ceases to be susceptible. For a century and a half, in fact, it would seem that the Sicilians confined themselves to the composition of love-songs alone. These primitive specimens of Italian poetry have been studiously preserved, and they have been analysed by M. Ginguené, with equal talent and learning. To his work, such of our readers as may wish to obtain a more particular knowledge of these relics will have satisfaction in referring; nor can they apply to a better source of information for more complete and profound details on the subject of Italian poetry than can possibly find a place in a condensed history of the general literature of the south.

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.

At the close of the century, in the year 1300, and in the week of Easter, Dante supposes himself to be wandering in the deserts near Jerusalem, and to be favoured with the means of access to the realm of shadows. He is there met by Virgil, the object of his incessant study and admiration, who takes upon himself the office of guide, and who, by his own admirable description of the heathen hell, seems to have acquired a kind of right to reveal the mysteries of these forbidden regions. The two bards arrive at a gate, on which are inscribed these terrific words:[e]

“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me, among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”[o]

The theme of the poem is too familiar to need further exposition here. It may be interesting to note, however, that the sequence of regions through which the poet journeys in witnessing the rewards of paradise is suggested by the ideas of cosmology that were prevalent in Dante’s time. The poem thus has interest from a scientific as well as from an artistic standpoint--an interest that is enhanced by the reflection that the time was almost at hand when a new system of cosmology would supplant the Ptolemaic one here suggested, and in so doing usher in a new scientific era, somewhat as the poem itself ushered in a new era of literature.[a]

The power of the human mind was never more forcibly demonstrated, in its most exquisite masterpieces, than in the poem of Dante. Without a prototype in any existing language, equally novel in its various parts and in the combination of the whole, it stands alone as the first monument of modern genius, the first great work which appeared in the reviving literature of Europe. In its composition, it is strictly conformable to the essential and invariable principles of the poetical art. It possesses unity of design and of execution; and bears the visible impress of a mighty genius, capable of embracing, at once, the parts and the whole of its scheme; of employing, with facility, the most stupendous materials, and of observing all the required niceties of proportion, without experiencing any difficulty from the constraint. In all other respects, the poem of Dante is not within the jurisdiction of established rules. It cannot with propriety be referred to any particular class of composition, and its author is only to be judged by those laws which he thought fit to impose upon himself. His modesty induced him to give his work the title of a comedy, in order to place it in a rank inferior to the epic, to which he conceived that Virgil had exclusive claims. Dante had not the slightest acquaintance with the dramatic art, of which he had, in all probability, never met with a single specimen; and from this ignorance proceeded that use of the word which now appears to us to be so extraordinary. In his native country, the title which he gave to his work was always preserved, and it is still known as _The Divine Comedy_. A name so totally different from every other seems to be happily bestowed upon a production which stands without a rival.

_Dante the Man_

The glory which Dante acquired, which commenced during his lifetime, and which raised him, in a little time, above the greatest names of Italy, contributed but little to his happiness. He was born in Florence in 1265, of the noble and distinguished family of the Alighieri, which was attached, in politics, to the party of the Guelfs.

Whilst yet very young, he formed a strong attachment to Beatrice, the daughter of Folco de’ Portinari, whom he lost at the age of twenty-five years. Throughout his future life, he preserved a faithful recollection of the passion which, during fifteen years, had essentially contributed to the happy development of his feelings, and which was thus associated with all his noblest sentiments and his most elevated thoughts. It was probably about ten years after the death of Beatrice when Dante commenced his great work, which occupied him during the remainder of his life, and in which he assigned the most conspicuous station to the woman he had so tenderly loved. In this object of his adoration, he found a common point of union for images both human and divine; and the Beatrice of his paradise appears to us sometimes in the character of the most beloved of her sex, and sometimes as an abstract emblem of celestial wisdom. Far from considering the passion of love in the same light as the ancients, the father of modern poetry recognises it as a pure, elevated, and sacred sentiment, calculated to ennoble and to sanctify the soul; and he has never been surpassed, by any who have succeeded him, in his entire and affecting devotion to the object of his attachment. Dante was, however, induced by considerations of family convenience to enter into a new engagement. In 1291, a year after the death of Beatrice, he married Gemma de’ Donati, whose obstinate and violent disposition embittered his domestic life. It is remarkable that, in the whole course of his work, into which he introduces the whole universe, he makes no personal allusion to his wife; and he was actuated, no doubt, by motives of delicacy towards her and her family, when he passed over, in similar silence, Corso Donati, the leader of the faction of his enemies, and his own most formidable adversary.

In the battle of Campaldino, in 1289, Dante bore arms for his country against the Aretini, and also against the Pisans in the campaign of 1290--the year subsequent to that in which the catastrophe of Count Ugolino occurred. He subsequently assumed the magisterial functions, at the period so fatal to the happiness of his country, when the civil wars between the Bianchi and the Neri broke out. He was accused of a criminal partiality to the interest of the former faction, during the time when he was a member of the supreme council; and when Charles de Valois, the father of Philip VI, proceeded to Florence, to appease the dissensions of the two parties, Dante was sentenced, in the year 1302, to the payment of an oppressive fine and to exile. By the subsequent sentence of a revolutionary tribunal, he was condemned, during his absence, to be burned alive, with all his partisans.

From that period, Dante was compelled to seek an asylum at such of the Italian courts as were attached to the Ghibelline interest, and were not unwilling to extend their protection to their ancient enemies. To that party, which he had opposed in the outset of his career, his perpetual exile and his misfortune compelled him, ultimately, to become a convert. He resided, for a considerable time, with the marquis Malaspina, in the Lunigiana, with the count Busone da Gubbio, and with the two brothers Della Scala, lords of Verona. But, in every quarter, the haughty obstinacy of his character, which became more inflexible in proportion to the difficulties with which he was surrounded, and the bitterness of his wit, which frequently broke out in caustic sarcasms, raised up against him new enemies. His attempts to re-enter Florence with his party, by force of arms, were successively foiled; his petitions to the people were rejected; and his last hope, in the emperor Henry VII, vanished on the death of that monarch. His decease took place at Ravenna, on the 14th of September, 1321, whilst he was enjoying the hospitable protection of Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of that city, who had always treated him rather as a friend than as a dependant, and who, a short time before, had bestowed upon him an honourable mark of his confidence by charging him with an embassy to the republic of Venice.

On the death of her great poet, all Italy appeared to go into mourning. On every side copies of his work were multiplied, and enriched with numerous commentaries. In the year 1350, Giovanni Visconti, archbishop and prince of Milan, engaged a number of learned men in the laborious task of illustrating and explaining the obscure passages of the _Divina Commedia_. Six distinguished scholars, two theologians, two men of science, and two Florentine antiquaries united their talents in this undertaking. Two professorships were instituted for the purpose of expounding the works of Dante. One of these, founded at Florence, in the year 1373, was filled by the celebrated Boccaccio. The duties of the other, at Bologna, were no less worthily discharged by Benvenuto d’Imola, a scholar of eminence. It is questionable whether any other man ever exercised so undisputed an authority and so direct an influence over the age immediately succeeding his own.

An additional proof of the superiority of this great genius may be drawn from the commentaries upon his works. We are there surprised to see his most enthusiastic admirers incapable of appreciating his real grandeur. Dante himself, in his Latin treatise entitled _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, appears to be quite unconscious of the extent of his services to the literature of his country. Like his commentators, he principally values himself upon the purity and correctness of his style. Yet he is neither pure nor correct; but, what is far superior to either, he had the powers of creative invention. For the sake of the rhyme, we find him employing a great number of barbarous words, which do not occur a second time in his verses. But, when he is himself affected, and wishes to communicate his emotions, the Italian language of the thirteenth century, in his powerful hands, displays a richness of expression, a purity, and an elegance which he was the first to elicit, and by which it has ever since been distinguished. The personages whom he introduces are moving and breathing beings; his pictures are nature itself; his language speaks at once to the imagination and to the judgment; and it would be difficult to point out a passage in his poem which would not form a subject for the pencil. The admiration of his commentators has also been abundantly bestowed upon the profound learning of Dante, who, it must be allowed, appears to have been master of all the knowledge and accomplishments of the age in which he lived. Of these various attainments, his poem is the faithful depository, from which we may infer, with great precision, the progress which science had at that time made, and the advances which were yet necessary to afford full satisfaction to the mind.[e]

The importance ascribed by Dante’s contemporaries to his writings other than the famous poem is well illustrated in the comment of the historian Giovanni Villani who, commenting on the death and burial of Dante, says: “This was a great and learned person in almost every science, although a layman; he was a consummate poet and philosopher and rhetorician; as perfect in prose and verse as he was in public speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever appeared in our language up to his time or since. He wrote in his youth the book of _The Early Life of Love_, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral and amorous canzonets very excellent, and amongst other things three noble epistles; one he sent to the Florentine government complaining of his undeserved exile; another to the emperor Henry when he was at the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian cardinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian pope--all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent sentences and authorities, which were much commended by the wise and learned. And he wrote the _Commedia_ where, in polished verse and with great and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological, philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and treated in a hundred chapters, or cantos, of the existence of hell, purgatory, and paradise, so loftily as may be said of it that whoever is of subtile intellect may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more than he ought to have done; but it may be that his exile made him do so. He also wrote the _Monarchia_, where he treats of the office of popes and emperors. And he began a comment on fourteen of the above-named moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in consequence of his death is found imperfect except on three, which to judge from what is seen would have proved a lofty, beautiful, subtile, and most important work, because it is equally ornamented with noble opinions and fine philosophical and astrological reasoning. Besides these he composed a little book which he entitled _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, of which he promised to make four books (but only two are to be found, perhaps in consequence of his early death), where in powerful and elegant Latin and good reasoning he rejects all the vulgar tongues of Italy.

“This Dante,” continues Villani, “from his knowledge, was somewhat presumptuous, harsh, and disdainful, like an ungracious philosopher; he scarcely deigned to converse with laymen; but for his other virtues, science, and worth as a citizen, it seems but reasonable to give him perpetual remembrance in this our chronicle; nevertheless his noble works left to us in writing bear true testimony of him and honourable fame to our city.”[f]

LESSER CONTEMPORARIES OF DANTE

To the same period with Dante belongs Francesco Barberini, the disciple, like Dante, of Brunetto Latini, and author of a treatise in verse on moral philosophy, which, in conformity with the affected spirit of the times, he entitled _I Documenti d’Amore_. Cecco d’Ascoli was also the contemporary of Dante, and his personal enemy. His poem in five books, called _L’Acerba_, or rather, according to M. Ginguené, _L’Acerva_, “the heap,” is a collection of all the sciences of his age, including astronomy, philosophy, and religion. It is much less remarkable for its intrinsic merit than for the lamentable catastrophe of its author, who was burned alive in Florence as a sorcerer, in 1327, at the age of seventy years, after having long held the professorship of judicial astrology in the University of Bologna.

Cino da Pistoia, of the house of the Sinibaldi, was the friend of Dante, and was equally distinguished by the brilliancy of his talents in two different departments: as a lawyer, by his commentary on the first nine books of the code, and, as a poet, by his verses addressed to the beautiful Selvaggia de’ Vergiolesi, of whom he was deprived by death, about the year 1307. As a lawyer, he was the preceptor of the celebrated Bartolo, who, if he has surpassed his master, yet owed much to his lessons. As a poet, he was the model which Petrarch loved to imitate; and, in this view, he perhaps did his imitator as much injury by his refinement and affectation as he benefited him by the example of his pure and harmonious style. Fazio de’ Uberti, grandson of the great Farinata, who, in consequence of the hatred which the Florentines entertained for his ancestor, lived and died in exile, raised himself to equal celebrity at this period by his sonnets and other verses. At a much later time of life, he composed a poem of the descriptive kind, entitled _Dettamondo_, in which he proposed to imitate Dante, and to display the real world, as that poet had portrayed the world of spirits. But it need hardly be said that the distance between the original and the imitation is great indeed.

In some respects all these poets, and many others whose names are yet more obscure, have common points of resemblance. We find, in all, the same subtlety of idea, the same incoherent images, and the same perplexed sentiments. The spirit of the times was perverted by an affected refinement; and it is a subject of just surprise that, in the very outset of a nation, simplicity and natural feeling should have been superseded by conceit and bombast. It is, however, to be considered that this nation did not form her own taste, but adopted that of a foreign country, before she was qualified, by her own improved knowledge, to make a proper choice. The verses of the troubadours of Provence were circulated from one end of Italy to the other. They were diligently perused and committed to memory by every poet who aspired to public notice, some of whom exercised themselves in compositions in the same language; and although the Italians, if we except the Sicilians, had never any direct intercourse with the Arabians, yet they derived much information from them by this circuitous route. The almost unintelligible subtleties with which they treated of love passed for refinement of sentiment; while the perpetual rivalry which was maintained between the heart and the head, between reason and passion, was looked upon as an ingenious application of philosophy to a literary subject. The causeless griefs, the languors, the dying complaints of a lover became a constituent portion of the consecrated language in which he addressed his mistress, and from which he could not without impropriety depart. Conventional feelings in poetry thus usurped the place of those native and simple sentiments which are the offspring of the heart.

PETRARCH

But, instead of dwelling upon these defects in the less celebrated poets, we shall attempt to exhibit the general spirit of the fourteenth century, as displayed in the works of the greatest man whom Italy, in that age, produced, whose reputation has been most widely spread, and whose influence has been most extensively felt, not only in Italy but in France, in Spain, and in Portugal. The reader will easily imagine that it is Petrarch, the lover of Laura, to whom we here allude.

Petrarch was the son of a Florentine, who, like Dante, had been exiled from his native city. He was born at Arezzo, on the night of the 19th of July, 1304, and he died at Arqua, near Padua, on the 18th of July, 1374. During the century of which his life occupied the greater portion, he was the centre of Italian literature. Passionately attached to letters, and more especially to history and to poetry, and an enthusiastic admirer of antiquity, he imparted to his contemporaries by his discourses, his writings, and his example that taste for the recovery and study of Latin manuscripts which so eminently distinguished the fourteenth century; which preserved the masterpieces of the classical authors, at the very moment when they were about to be lost forever; and gave a new impulse, by the imitation of those admirable models, to the progress of the human intellect.

Petrarch, tortured by the passion which has contributed so greatly to his celebrity, endeavoured, by travelling during a considerable portion of his life, to escape from himself and to change the current of his thoughts. He traversed France, Germany, and every part of Italy; he visited Spain; and, with incessant activity, directed his attention to the examination of the remains of antiquity. He became intimate with all the scholars, poets, and philosophers from one end of Europe to the other, whom he inspired with his own spirit. While he imparted to them the object of his own labours, he directed their studies; and his correspondence became a sort of magical bond, which, for the first time, united the whole literary republic of Europe. At the age in which he lived, that continent was divided into petty states, and sovereigns had not yet attempted to establish any of those colossal empires, so dreaded by other nations. On the contrary, each country was divided into smaller sovereignties. The authority of many a prince did not extend above thirty leagues from the little town over which he ruled; while at the distance of a hundred, his name was unknown. In proportion, however, as political importance was confined, literary glory was extended; and Petrarch, the friend of Azzo di Correggio, prince of Parma, of Lucchino and of Galeazzo Visconti, princes of Milan, and of Francesco di Carrara, prince of Padua, was better known and more respected, throughout Europe, than any of those petty sovereigns. This universal reputation, to which his high acquirements entitled him, and of which he frequently made use in forwarding the interests of literature, he occasionally turned to account for political purposes. No man of letters, no poet was doubtless ever charged with so many embassies to great potentates--to the emperor, the pope, the king of France, the senate of Venice, and all the princes of Italy. It is very remarkable that Petrarch did not fulfil these duties merely as a subject of the state which had committed its interests to his hands, but that he acted for the benefit of all Europe. He was intrusted with such missions on account of his reputation; and when he treated with the different princes, it was, as it were, in the character of an arbitrator, whose suffrage everyone was eager to obtain, that he might stand high in the opinion of posterity.

The prodigious labours of Petrarch to promote the study of ancient literature are, after all, his noblest title to glory. Such was the view in which they were regarded by the age in which he lived, and such also was his own opinion. His celebrity, notwithstanding, at the present day depends much more on his Italian lyrical poems than on his voluminous Latin compositions. These lyrical pieces, which were imitated from the Provençals, from Cino da Pistoia, and from the other poets who flourished at the commencement of that century, have served, in their turn, as models to all the distinguished poets of the south.

The Latin compositions upon which Petrarch rested his fame, and which are twelve or fifteen times as voluminous as his Italian writings, are now only read by the learned. The long poem entitled _Africa_, which he composed on the victories of the elder Scipio, and which was considered, in his own age, as a masterpiece worthy of rivalling the _Æneid_, is very fatiguing to the ear. The style is inflated, and the subject so devoid of interest and so exceedingly dull as absolutely to prevent the perusal of the work. His numerous epistles in verse, instead of giving interest to the historical events to which they allude, acquire it from that circumstance. The imitation of the ancients, and the fidelity of the copy, which in Petrarch’s eyes constituted their chief merit, deprive these productions of every appearance of truth. The invectives against the barbarians who had subjugated Italy are so cold, so bombastic, and so utterly destitute of all colouring suited to the time and place, that we might believe them to have been written by some rhetorician who had never seen Italy; and we might confound them with those which a poetic fury dictated to Petrarch himself, against the Gauls who besieged the capital.