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Short Histories of
the Literatures of
the World : IV.
Edited by Edmund Gosse
Short Histories of the
Literatures of the World
Edited by EDMUND GOSSE
Large Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. each Volume
ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE
Hy Prof. Gilbert Murray, M.A,
FRENCH LITERATURE
By Prof. Edwaru Dowden, D.C.L., LL.D.
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
By the Editor
ITALIAN LITERATURE
By Richard Garnett, C.B., LL.D.
SPANISH LITERATURE
By J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly [Shortly
JAPANESE LITERATURE
By William George Aston, C.M.G.
[Slwrlly
MODERN SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURE
By George Brandes
SANSKRIT LITERATURE
By Prof. A. A. Macoonell.
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE
By Dr. ZoltAn Beothy
AMERICAN LITERATURE
By Professor Mosr.s CoiT Tyler
GERMAN LITERATURE
By Dr. C. H. Herford
LATIN LITERATURE
By Dr. A. W. Verrall
Other volumes luill follow
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
\All rights reserved]
A History of
ITALIAN LITERATURE
RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D.
Xonbon
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MDCCCXCVIII
Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson &^ Co.
At the Ballantyne Press
PREFACE
" I THINK," says Jowett, writing to John Addington
Symonds (August 4, 1890), "that you are happy in
having unlocked so much of Itahan hterature, certainly
the greatest in the world after Greek, Latin, English.
To have interpreted one such literature and made it
accessible to English-speaking people seems to me a
sufficient result of a life."
It seems, however, peculiarly appropriate that a history
of Italian literature should follow and should precede
other and parallel histories. Symonds himself had long
before pointed out that no man, at least in a single
work of moderate compass, can fully deserve the credit
of having unlocked Itahan literature. The study of
Italian letters, he had reminded us, cannot be profitably
pursued by itself. The literature of Italy requires to be
constantly considered in connection with other litera-
tures, both those from which it is itself derived, and
those which it has deeply influenced. It is more inti-
mately affiliated to antiquity than any other European
literature, and may indeed be regarded as a continuation
or revival of the Latin. Its advent was long and un-
accountably delayed — it is the youngest of all the chief
European literatures ; but when at length it did appear,
its form, already classical, dispensed it from an infancy
b
VI
PREFACE
of rudeness and barbarism. It may be compared to
Hermes, the youngest but most precocious of the Gods ;
not, like Pallas, born adult, but equal to any achievement
from the cradle :
" The babe was born at the first peep of day ;
He bcga}i playing on the lyre at noon;
And the same evening did he steal away
Apollds herds."
Entering at once upon a heritage of classical tradition,
Italians began to teach foreign nations long before they
found anything to learn from them ; and this influence
is so large a part of the glory of Italy that her literature
cannot be fully unlocked to the foreigner unless he is
shown, not only what she has herself effected in letters,
but how greatly she has modified the intellectual develop-
ment of other countries. She owes nothing to Chaucer,
Spenser, or Milton ; but Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton
are infinitely indebted to her. The position she so long
retained as the instructor and exemplar of civilised
nations invests her literature with an importance more
considerable than that attaching to the merits of her
individual authors, illustrious as these are. Yet it is
impossible to elucidate this momentous department of
the subject in a manual of four hundred pages. All that
can be done is to indicate by continual reference and
allusion that the need exists, and must be satisfied else-
where. The influence upon Italy herself of foreign
writers, and of movements common to Europe in general,
has required and received fuller treatment.
Other circumstances, and these not attributable to the
restricted scale of his undertaking, conspire to afflict the
historian of Italian literature with a feeling of insufficiency.
PREFACE vii
From causes which will appear in the course of this
history, many of the most gifted Italians wrote in Latin.
From Petrarch down to Nicius Erythraeus a succession
of books which would have adorned the vernacular
literature if they had belonged to it, appeared in the
common idiom of scholars. Petrarch's Canzoniere, as
respects mere dimension, is as nothing to the mass of
his Latin works. Politian writes just enough Italian to
prove that he might have revived Boccaccio or antici-
pated Ariosto. Pontano, one of the brightest intellects
of Italy, writes entirely in Latin. To exclude the Latin
books of such men entirely from consideration is im-
possible ; but they cannot be adequately treated in a
professed history of vernacular literature ; and much
else of deep significance must be passed over without a
hint of its existence.
Another circumstance places the ItaHan mind at a
disadvantage when contemplated solely through a literary
medium. Literature in Italy is a less exhaustive mani-
festation than elsewhere of the intellect of the nation.
The intellectual glory of England, France, and Germany
depends mainly upon their authors and men of science ;
their illustrious artists, the succession of great German
composers since Handel excepted, are for the most part
isolated phenomena. In the ages of Italian development,
whether of the imitative arts or of music, artists far out-
number authors, and the best energies of the country
are employed in artistic production. Of this super-
abundant vitality mere literary history affords no trace.
Michael Angelo, one of the greatest men the world has
seen, can here claim no more than a paragraph on the
strength of a handful of sonnets. It is indeed remark-
able that out of the nine Italians most brilliantly con-
viii PREFACE
spicuous in the very first rank of genius and achievement
— Aquinas, Dante, Columbus, Leonardo, Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Titian, Galileo, Napoleon — only one should
have been a man of letters. The reader, therefore, who
may deem the field of Italian literature infertile in com-
parison with the opulence of England or France, must
remember that it expresses a smaller proportion of the
country's benefaction to humanity. Yet Jowett is per-
fectly justified in claiming for the Italian a front place
among tlie literatures of the world, but only on con-
dition that its great representatives shall be weighed
rather than counted.
The comparative — though only comparative — paucity
of authors in Italy is so far favourable to the historian
working on a small scale, that it allows a more expansive
treatment of the greatest men, and at the same time the
inclusion of minor writers not always of high distinc-
tion, but indispensable to the continuity of the narrative.
This is essential in a book which does not profess to be
a string of biographies, but a biography of Italian Litera-
ture herself regarded as a single entity revealed through
a succession of personages, the less gifted among whom
may be true embodiments of her spirit for the time
being. Many remarkable manifestations of the national
intellect are, nevertheless, necessarily excluded. Writers
in dialect are omitted, unless when acknowledged classics
like Meli or Belli. Academies and universities are but
slightly mentioned. Theologians, jurists, and men of
science have been passed over, except in so far as
they may also have been men of letters. There is,
in fact, no figure among them like Luther, who,
though not inspired by the love of letters as such, so
embodied the national spirit and exerted so mighty
PREFACE ix
an influence upon the language, that he could no
more than Goethe be omitted from a history of German
literature.
Some want of proportion may be charged against the
comparatively restricted space here allotted to Dante.
It is indeed true that if genius prescribed the scale of
treatment, at least a third of the book ought to have
been devoted to him ; but this very fact refutes the
censure it seems to support, since, the limits assigned
admitting of no extension, all other authors must have
suffered for the sake of one. In a history, moreover,
rather dealing with Italian literature as a whole than
with writers as individuals, the test is not so much
greatness as influence upon letters, and in this respect
Dante is less significant than Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Preceding the Renaissance, he could not profoundly
affect its leading representatives, or the succeeding gene-
rations whose taste was moulded by it ; and although at
all times admired and venerated, it was only at the
appearance of the romantic school and the Revolution
that he became a potent literary force. Another reason
for a more compendious treatment of Dante is that
while in the cases of other Italian writers it is difficult to
remedy defects by reference to any special monograph,
English literature possesses several excellent handbooks
to the Divine Comedy, resort to which would be ex-
pedient in any case.
The books to which the writer has been chiefly in-
debted are enumerated in a special bibliography. He is
obliged to Mr. W. M. Rossetti and to Messrs. Ellis and
Elvey for permission to use the exquisite translations
from the Dante and his Circle of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, cited in the early chapters of the book. The
X PREFACE
graceful versions from Boiardo and other poets contri-
buted by Miss Ellen Gierke have not, with one exception,
been previously printed. Where no acknowledgment
of indebtedness is made, translations are by the author
of the volume.
RICHARD GARNETT.
December 1897.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BEGINNINGS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE ... I
II. THE EARLY ITALIAN LYRIC 12
III. DANTE'S LIFE AND MINOR WRITINGS 24
IV. THE DIVINE COMEDY . 40
V. PETRARCH AS MAN OF LETTERS 53
VI. PETRARCH AND LAURA 66
VII. BOCCACCIO 82
Vlir. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 97
IX. THE POETICAL RENAISSANCE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY IIO
X. CHIVALRIC POETRY I26
XI. ARIOSTO AND HIS IMITATORS I40
XII. MACHIAVELLI AND GUICCIARDINI I56
XIII. OTHER PROSE- WRITERS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY . 1 70
XIV. THE PETRARCHISTS 185
XV, HUMOROUS POETRY — THE MOCK-HEROIC .... 20I
XVI, THE NOVEL 212
XVII. THE DRAMA 223
XVIII. TASSO 237
XIX, THE PROSE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . 256
xii CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XX. THE POETRY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . . 272
XXI. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 288
X.XII. THE COMEDY OF MASKS — THE OPERA — DRAMA OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 305
XXIII, THE REVIVAL 327
XXIV. THE REGENERATION . 352
XXV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY — MIDDLE PERIOD . . . 375
XXVI. CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE .... 394
BIBLIOGRAnilCAL NOTE 419
INDEX 425
A HISTORY OF
ITALIAN LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE
Great literatures, like great rivers, seldom derive their
origin from a single fountain, but rather ooze from the
soil in a multitude of almost imperceptible springs. The
literature of Greece may appear an exception, but we
know that the broad stream of Homeric song in which
we first behold it must have been fed by a number of
rills which it has absorbed into itself, and whose original
sources lie beyond the range of scrutiny. In no litera-
ture is this general maxim better exemplified than the
Italian, if, at least, as the economy of this little history
demands, we restrict this appellation to its modern
period. It might be plausibly contended that the Latin
and Italian literatures, like the Roman and Byzantine
empires, are, in truth, a single entity, but the convenience
of the student precludes a view in support of which
much might be adduced by the critic and philologist.
Defining Italian literature, therefore, so as to comprise
whatsoever is written in any dialect of that " soft bastard
A
2 ITALIAN LITERATURE
Latin " which bears the Italian name, and to exclude all
compositions in a language which a Roman would have
called Latin, we lind none among great literatures whose
beginnings are more humble and obscure, or, which at
first seems surprising, more recent. The perfection of
form which the literature of Italy had attained while all
others, save the Provengal, were yet devoid of symmetry
and polish, the comparative intelligibility of the diction
of " Dante and his circle " at the present day, while the
contemporary writers in other tongues require copious
glossaries, lead to the tacit and involuntary assumption
of a long antecedent period of development and refine-
ment which did not in fact exist. In truth, the earliest
literary compositions definable as Italian are scarcely
older than the thirteenth century.
There is, perhaps, no other such example in history
of the obliteration of literary taste and method as that
which in Italy befell one of the most gifted peoples of
the world for nearly six hundred years. After Boethius
(about 530 A.D.) the little that is left of literature becomes
entirely utilitarian, and is, with rare exceptions, restricted
to theology, jurisprudence, and monkish chronicles.
There is still much evidence that the Latin classical
writers had not passed out of the knowledge of men ;
but — except when like Virgil they became heroes of
popular legend — little that they exercised any appreci-
able influence upon men's ideas and imaginations.
One unfortunate precursor of the Renaissance, indeed,
Vilgardus of Ravenna (about A.D. 1000), was led by
his admiration for the classics to disparage Christianity,
and suffered death in consequence. As a rule, how-
ever, the Latin poets merely served as a magazine
of commonplace quotations and an arsenal of metri-
LATIN LITERATURE IN ITALY 3
cal rules, which some of the least degenerate writers
of the period apply with considerable skill. The
explanation of this paralysis of Latin literature in
Italy, while Greek was still an efficient organ of
thought in the Eastern Empire, is no doubt to be found
in the fact that it had never been a robust national
growth. The property of the learned and cultivated, it
had taken no deep hold upon the mass of the people ;
and when culture and learning perished amid the vicissi-
tudes of barbarian conquest, it was only preserved, apart
from the services of the Church, by the absolute neces-
sity of maintaining some vestiges of law, physic, and
divinity, and the impossibility of conveying instruction
in the debased dialects into which the old Latin lan-
guage was resolving itself.
It might have been expected, nevertheless, that these
dialects would have become the vehicles of popular
legend and poetry, and that, as anciently in Greece,
a literature would at length have been evolved from
the tales of the story-tellers and the songs of the
minstrels. The very existence of vernacular minstrels
and story-tellers is but matter of inference, the little
which we possess in any sense referable to this depart-
ment being in Latin. The instances laboriously accumu-
lated by Rubieri to prove the existence of popular
poetry throughout the Dark Ages seem to be all in
this language ; and centuries pass without any indica-
tion that the ancestors of Dante thought it possible to
write in any other, and scarcely any that they cared
for written composition at all, except as a medium for
instruction in such knowledge as the age possessed, and
the transaction of the ordinary business of life. The
symptoms of vitality became more evident after the
4 ITALIAN LITERATURE
Christian world had turned the corner of its first mil-
lennium. The eleventh century was in Italy an age of
eminent theologians ; it also beheld the musical reforms
of Guido of Arezzo ; and towards its conclusion poets
of some note arose to chant in Latin hexameters the
triumphs of Genoa and Pisa over the Saracens. Still,
although, as has been well remarked, the enthusiasm for
the Crusades excited by itinerant preachers goes far to
prove that public addresses were delivered in the popular
dialects, there is not a trace of any written Italian lang-
uage, or a hint of any such vernacular literature as existed,
if it hardly flourished, among the Germans, the French,
and the Anglo-Saxons. When at length in the twelfth
century Poetry unmistakably presents herself in the
songs of the wandering students {Goliardi), her attire is
still Latin. But it was much that any class of society
should now be making its own songs, and the transi-
tion to a vernacular lyric was not long or difficult,
although, instead of taking birth among the people, it
was fostered into life by the patronage of Courts.
The first of the Latin nations to acquire a cultivated
vernacular literature was the Provencal. Many reasons,
singly insufficient, but cumulatively of great force, may
be adduced for this unquestionable priority. The lan-
guage, which may be roughly but accurately described
as a connecting link between French and Italian, as its
Catalan and Valencian congeners form one between
French and Spanish, is better adapted for poetical com-
position than French ; while, the Latin influence being
less oppressively overwhelming than in the land of the
Romans, it escaped the ban of provinciality which so
long prohibited serious literary composition in the ver-
nacular speech of Italy. Before the demon of religious
PROVENgAL LITERATURE 5
persecution was unchained by the Popes, the country
enjoyed remarkable prosperity and tranquilHty ; the
harsher features of the feudal system were mitigated by
industry and commerce, while the aristocratical organi-
sation of society ensured literature that patronage with-
out which it could hardly have flourished in the absence
of a reading class.
The early poets of Provence were almost without
exception the favourites of princes and noblemen,
whose exploits they celebrated, whose enemies they
satirised, whose own political course they sometimes
inspired, and for whose gratification they vied with each
other in improvised poetical contests [tenzofis). Their
strains, though occasionally lighted up by some bright
thought which Petrarch subsequently did not disdain to
appropriate, appear to us in general artificial and con-
strained. This is partly owing to the exaggeration of a
virtue, that attention to "strictest laws of rhyme and
rule," in which, as an English poet truly declares, the
bard finds " not bonds, but wings." But the cultivation
of form is carried too far when it becomes the end
instead of the means, and the Provencal poets allowed
themselves to be seduced by their language's unequalled
facilities for rhyming into an idolatry of the elaborate,
which offered great impediments to the simple ex-
pression of feeling. Some of their strophes contain no
fewer than twenty-eight verses, the same set of rhymes
being carried through the whole stanza, and very fre-
quently through the entire poem. Out of four hun-
dred pieces in a single manuscript collection Ginguene
found only two in the simple quatrain. It was for-
tunate for the Italians that their language, fluent and
supple as it is, is incapable of such feats, and that, while
6 ITALIAN LITERATURE
adopting their lyrical measures from the Provengals, they
could not, had they wished, cramp themselves by the
reproduction of the latter's tours dc force.
It is in the last quarter of the twelfth century that we
find Provencal troubadours established at the Courts of
the North Italian princes, writing exactly such poems as
they would have written at home, and apparently just
as well understood and equally popular, a proof that
neither in Provence nor in Italy had the culture of
belles lettres progressed beyond the highest circles. One
or two of them occasionally mingled an Italian strophe
with their Provencal substance, and at a somewhat later
date Bonvesin da Riva and others wrote in a curiously
mixed dialect of French and Italian. There is, however,
no proper Italian hterature until, about 1220, we sud-
denly find a school of vernacular poetry flourishing at
Palermo under the patronage of Frederick II., Emperor
of Germany, an Italian on his mother's side, and by his
tastes and sympathies more of an Italian than of a
German prince. The character of its productions is
in general wholly Provencal, but the language is Italian
of the Tuscan type, and it is a highly interesting question
whether this was the case from the first, or whether
the pieces as we possess them are adaptations from the
Sicilian dialect, which appears from contemporary prose
monuments to have existed at the time nearly in its
present form. We cannot attempt to decide the con-
troversy, which does not affect the position of the pieces
as the earliest undoubted examples of vernacular Italian
literature. Their poetical merit cannot in general be
rated very highly, and they contain hardly anything
which might not have been written in Provence as well
as in Sicily. Frederick himself was one of the principal
SICILIAN COURT POETS 7
writers, and his canzone on his Lady in Bondage might
appear to the English reader to possess considerable
merit, but for the suspicion that the great poet who
translated it infused more poetical inspiration than he
found. It would gain considerably in significance if
Rossetti could be proved right in conjecturing that the
immured lady is a symbol of Frederick's empire in
captivity to the Pope :
" ' Each tnorn I hear his voice bid them
That watch me, to be faithful spies
Lest I go forth and see the skies;
Each night to each he saith the satne; —
And in tny soul and in mine eyes
There is a burning heat like fame?
Thus grieves she now; but she shall wear
This love of mine ivhereof I spoke
About her body for a cloak.
And for a garland in her hair,
Even yet; because I nieati to prove,
Not to speak only, this iny love."
—Rossetti.
Of the few really Sicilian poets whose verses remain,
the most remarkable is Cielo dal Carno, more commonly
known from the misreading of an ill -written text as
Ciullo d^Alcarno. The mention of Saladin has till re-
cently caused his Dialogue between Lover and Lady to
be ascribed to the close of the twelfth century, but more
unequivocal indications prove that it cannot have been
written before 1231. It is a piece of rare merit in its
way, exempt from the insipid gallantry of the typical
troubadour or minnesinger, and full of humour at once
robust and sly at the expense of slippery suitors and
complacent damsels. Nothing can be more delightfully
8 ITALIAN LITERATURE
naive, for instance, than the knight's unsolicited con-
fession that he has stolen his Bible :
" Thcn^ on Chrisfs book, borne with me still
To read fro7n and to pray
{I took it, fairest, ifi a church,
The priest being gotie away)."
— ROSSETTI.
Some of the nearly contemporary Tuscan poets may
have belonged to Frederick's circle, but it will be con-
venient to treat of them in the next chapter among
the precursors of Dante. Of the undoubted Sicilian
poets the most remarkable is Jacopo, the notary of
Lentino, depreciated by Dante on account of the rus-
ticity of his style, a defect which disappears when he
is rendered into another language. Rossetti, speaking
from Lentino's mask, frequently thrills with strokes of
true magic, as when he names
" the song,
Sweet, sweet and long, the song the sirens know."
In some of Lentino's sonnets also the germs and
groundwork of Dante's lyrical poetry are manifestly to
be discovered.
Something should be said here of the lyrical forms
used by the Italian poets of the best ages. The prin-
cipal are the canzone, the sonnet, and the ballata. The
canzone admits of several varieties of structure, but
usually commences with three unrhymed lines of eleven
syllables each, followed by three similar lines rhyming to
their predecessors, a seventh of a discretionary number
of syllables rhyming to the third and sixth, and five or
six lines on a different rhyming system, short or long at
the poet's discretion, yet generally having the last rhyme
ITALIAN METRICAL FORMS 9
of the preceding system once repeated. The following
stanza from Guido Cavalcanti may serve as an example :
" But when I looked on death made visible,
From my hearts sojourn b7-ought before mine eyes.
And holding in her^ hand my grievous sin,
I seemed to see my countenance, that fell.
Shake like a shadow : my heart uttered cries,
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