I LYRICAL POETRY BEFORE DANTE 1 Ir was in southern France that the intellectual life of Europe first awoke. In that land of fertile soil and fair skies a new sense of the joy of living began to stir in men's hearts after the cheerless night of the Dark Ages. They saw that the world was good to dwell in and that existence had its zest. Especially did they become aware of the shapeliness of the human form, and discarding the loose sacks which monkish prejudice had designed to conceal it, they modeled their apparel to reveal its grace. With the throwing off of the ascetic ideals, woman was elevated from the degrading position she had held, and by a natural reaction became the object of chivalrous devotion. The awakening of nobler love, and the growing pleasure in life and its beauty, produced inevitably a fresh outburst of song. The ballad singers gave place to the troubadours. Many of these were men of talent, culture, and high birth, who easily compelled their flexible and rhythmic language to express in melodious strains their knightly passions. Their songs may seem to us vapid after the chill of so many centuries, and they are undoubtedly lacking in that vividness that so often reveals genius in the ruder ages. 1 For much of the material used in this short account I am indebted to Gaspary's Italian Literature to the Death of Dante, trans. by H. Oelsner, a book of great value. (D.) Their forms of expression, moreover, are unnatural and cumbrously artificial, but the power of their exaggerated sentiments, wedded to the harmony of their musical verse, gave them great influence among a people not trained to refined criticism. Yet their intrinsic merit is not great, and they owe their interest to the contrast with the sterility that preceded them, and to the deep impression they made on the singers who came after them. In Italy the period of literary activity was much later in its coming than in France. This seems strange when we consider the intense activity of her political life, the strife of her factions, the hot debates of her ambitious republics with the emperors. One would naturally think that such seething, tumultuous life would find appropriate literary expression. The chief reason seems to lie in the slow development of the Italian tongue. Italy was the home of the Latin race, and here longer than elsewhere the stately language of the Roman refused to be moulded into a vernacular. There cannot be a living literature without a living language. Not after Charlemagne was a grammatical Latin spoken in Italy, and not until the beginning of the thirteenth century do we find any Italian literary production. During the four intervening centuries the sweet Italian tongue was forming. A document of the year 960 contains a sentence in the vulgar speech. We have also a Sardinian document, and a formula of confession from central Italy, which are almost entirely in the speech of the common people. These, with some Italian inscriptions and other Sardinian documents belonging to the twelfth century, are all we have to mark the transition period. Northern Italy, being contiguous to southern France, soon felt the thrill of the latter's poetic impulse. But the poets of Lombardy, not being original enough to sing in their native tongue, although that speech was capable of expressing musically any thought of theirs, servilely imitated the troubadours of Provence, both in subject-matter, form, and language. To the Sicilian school of poets is usually given the honor of first using the vernacular in song. But why ignore St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun,—a lyrical outburst of a soul of the finest fibre and noblest compass? It possessed that to which the poets in the brilliant circle surrounding Frederick II. were strangers,—genuine spontaneity. Even after the lapse of seven centuries we can still feel the swing of its cadences and catch the glow of its spiritual fervor. Yet this canticle of St. Francis, which his followers sang as God's minstrels from village to village, while it undoubtedly exerted wide influence, is not in the line of the historical development of Italian lyrical poetry. This passes through Sicily rather than through Umbria. In the hands of the troubadours of the court of Frederick the national language became pliant and flexible, fitted for the hand of the master when he comes. But while entrusting their lyrics to the national tongue, and rendering valuable service by giving to lyrical poetry a basis of metrical form, the Sicilians still worked to the models coming from Provence. As the chivalrous ideals of southern France were hardly at home in a court where the emperor kept a harem, guarded by eunuchs, the verse growing out of such conditions was conventional and artificial, lacking all vital inspira tion. |