VI RELIGIOUS AND MORAL POETRY IN NORTHERN ITALY ITAL which literature mostly begins. This may be due to the disposition of the people, but perhaps, in a still greater degree, to its history and to the mode of feeling that was fostered by this history. Medieval Italy lacked a strong national feeling, the feeling of a national unity; it lacked great and powerful native princes, and general struggles against terrible foes, such as we find in France and in Spain. Moreover, the period during which the popular legends and the epic traditions were formed among other nations, was no heroic epoch for Italy. The dominion was in the hands of foreigners, and the great military deeds were in this country achieved by Lombards (before these had come to form part of the nation), by Franks, and by German Emperors; the Normans as victors and as conquerors of the Saracens, were Frenchmen and not yet Italians, and the traces they left in epic poetry are found in French literature. Nowhere do we see any Italian glory, any national pride, any national hero. Yet the Italians also had their heroic period. This was occupied with the struggles of the cities for their liberty, which are so full of poetical elements, of patriotism, energy, wild delight in warfare and barbarism, and with the bold naval battles of the Pisans, Genoese and Venetians. But in these enterprises the strength of the nation was not concentrated on one object, and the struggles were carried on on behalf of individual municipalities, and not for the sake of the fatherland in the wider sense. And this period of power and warlike spirit falls in a luminous and historic period, in which learned studies are recommenced, in which men's minds revert to antiquity, in which chronicles are written and no more legends are formed. Just because there was a lack of native themes for narrative poetry, foreign ones had been so readily adopted. But these foreign themes, dealing with the legend of chivalry, were not based on the deeper foundations of the nation's manners and general aims: they served only to divert and to entertain. It is not here, in the street singers' rhymes concerning Charles and Roland and Oliver, that we shall have to seek the expression of the deep and serious interests of the time and people; this we shall find elsewhere, in the various versions of the theme which, being common to all Christian nations, could not fail to be equally popular with them all. Religious poetry occupied itself with the loftiest theme that can interest humanity, with the great question which, in a believing age, formed the incessant care of men's minds, the centre of moral and intellectual activity-the question of eternal salvation, of the soul's redemption, and of a future existence, compared with which the present earthly life appeared insignificant and contemptible. This subject, which was so deeply rooted in man's innermost soul, contained germs of poetry destined, at the touch of genius, to show their fertility, but first presenting themselves to us in the clumsy compositions of popular poets. Northern Italy possesses a considerable number of religious poems belonging to the thirteenth century. The oldest of the monuments of this class composed in those parts are a rhymed Decalogue, which paraphrases the ten commandments somewhat clumsily, adding examples from Holy Writ, by way of strengthening the precepts, and a Salve Regina, both in the dialect of Bergamo. The MS. containing them is said to be of the year 1253. The notaries of Bologna at times wrote down in their documents pious poems instead of the love songs. A record of 1279 contains a Pater Noster, in which one or more Latin words of the prayer are always supplemented by Italian words, in such a way as to form a pair of verses. Another document, dated 1294, gives us a sonnet on the Virgin, and in a MS. of Ferrara, of Bolognese origin, are preserved a lauda and a song of praise in verses of seven syllables with irregular rhymes, both of them again on the subject of the Virgin Mary. Then we have works of considerable length by Uguccione da Lodi, Barsegapè, Fra Bonvesin da Riva, and Fra Giacomino, of Verona. These are priests, who expound to the people, in a manner that they can understand and in their own dialect, the sacred traditions and the truths of faith. In spite of the fact that the authors belong to different parts, all four of them, as well as many other writers of Northern Italy of that and later periods, write almost the same language, which, of the present dialects, approaches most closely to the Venetian, though it also contains elements of the Milanese as it is now spoken. It was therefore formerly assumed that a literary language had begun to develop here, to which the Venetian had served as a model, like the Tuscan in Central Italy. But Ascoli has proved that the present form of the dialects cannot be taken as a standard of their former state, and that the formations which are now regarded as being characteristic only of one or the other of the Northern dialects, were in the beginning more widely diffused and existed as doublets, so that the writers could choose between them. The forms that occur in these poems were, accordingly, really oral, only that in addition to them there were others which remained in the dialect, while the former died out. It is true that this constitutes the beginning of a literary idiom, the formation of which may always be said to commence the moment the dialect is set down in writing; the selection of certain forms, and the preference given to these over others, is the method by which a literary language is formed. But the standard, according to which the selection was made, was, as Ascoli remarked, not so much the Venetian as the Provençal, which exercised so wide an influence everywhere, and the French; those elements of the dialect were preferred which came nearest to these idioms, that were already adapted to literary use. The influence of the Latin is also very natural in the writings of the priests, and is unmistakable at any rate in the orthography; and so we have in this selection of forms, and in this mode of adaptation to a foreign and learned ideal, a process that is not unlike the one that was assumed by us to explain the formation of a literary language in Southern Italy. The poem of Uguccione da Lodi is a long-winded sermon, very faulty in composition and full of repetitions; it exhorts mankind to abandon earthly vanities, by dint of bearing in mind inevitable death and the terrible punishment of hell. In one passage the sermon changes into a prayer, for the author himself is a penitent sinner, who, till his old age, allowed himself to be dazzled by false worldly splendours, and who formerly, when he girt on his sword, believed himself to be more valiant than Roland, and now prays God to have mercy on his soul. Pietro di Barsegapè, who names himself thus several times, belonged to an ancient and noble family of Milan, whose name was in Latin documents written a Basilica Petri, and was contracted in the vulgar tongue to Bascape. He narrates in a long poem which is contained in a MS. of 1274, "how God created the world, and how man was formed of earth; how God descended from heaven to earth, pure, regal Virgin; and how he endured the passion, for our great salvation; and how he shall come on the day of wrath, when the great perdition shall take place": Como Deo à fato lo mondo, E como de terra fò l' omo formo ; It is, therefore, the entire great Christian epic of the Fall, the Redemption, and the Last Judgment. The account of the original sin is made the occasion for the introduction of long moral reflections on human corruption and on the struggle of the soul, which would wish always to live in a state of penance and severe discipline, with the refractory body, by which it is seduced to sensual pleasures. Then follows the denunciation of the world and of its empty joys, from which we must turn away, if we would be saved; the seven mortal sins are called the seven women with whom man has wanton intercourse, and on whose account he must needs descend to hell. The entire narrative is exceedingly simple, without ornament of any kind; it mostly follows the Biblical tradition, with certain concessions to the ideas of the time and of the hearers, as where Judas is called the seneschal and cellarer of the Lord, or where the Holy Virgin, after giving birth to the Saviour, goes to church and hears the mass sung. But the order and clearness of this simple narrative are remarkable, and it must have left a considerable impression on the less cultivated among the listeners. It is a short reproduction for the people of all that they were to believe, and the author's own unshaken faith imparts a certain warmth to his recital. And so, although this is not yet poetry, properly speaking, still the germs are there from which poetry was destined to develop. It is necessary to seek the origin of a thing, when the thing itself is not yet in existence. The verses of Fra Giacomino of Verona are no less rough and clumsy than those of Barsegapè; the author was a Franciscan monk of little culture. But these very facts bring us into closer touch with the people and with the thoughts that occupied them at that time. The two poems, which are closely connected, and which Giacomino himself claimed as his property by introducing his name at the end of the second, have a special interest by reason of their subjectmatter: they treat "De Jerusalem celesti" and "De Babilonia civitate infernali," that is of Paradise and Hell. The religious poetry is didactic, its narrative aims at teaching and improving mankind. These poets stand in contrast to their contemporaries the jongleurs, the frivolous and worldly minstrels who recite the tales of chivalry. In the same way as these, they address themselves to the people, and are as it were spiritual minstrels, but their purpose is not merely to satisfy the curiosity of the masses, but to lay the foundations of a permanent gain. Their words are intended to appeal to the soul, to move it and to lead it towards the path of salvation. "This," says Barsegapè, "is no such fable, as you listen to in the winter, comfortably seated by the fire; but if you understand the discourse well, it will give you much to think over. If you are not harder than stones, you will have great fear through it." And Fra Giacomino: "But that you may not be calmed in your hearts, know that this is no fable or story of jongleurs; Giacomino of Verona, of the order of the Minorites, has compiled it from text, glossaries and sermons." But this purpose of moral correction cannot be attained with more complete success than by bringing before the imagination the condition of a future existence, that of the righteous in Paradise, with the purpose |