VIII

PROSE LITERATURE IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

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S with the other nations, so, too, in Italy prose begins later than poetry. Of course the use of the vulgar tongue for business purposes, and for the requirements of everyday life, is in all probability much earlier, dating back even farther than the first attempts at poetry in the native dialect. For such purposes Latin must have long been inadequate; the use of that form of speech which was on everyone's lips became necessary, or, at any rate, vulgar words were mixed with the traditional Latin formulæ. The grammarian Boncompagno says (between 1215 and 1226): "Mercatores in suis epistolis verborum ornatum non requirunt, quia fere omnes et singuli per idiomata propria seu vulgaria vel per corruptum latinum ad invicem sibi scribunt et rescribunt, intimando sua negocia et cunctos rerum eventus." And another grammarian, Guido Faba of Bologna, about the year 1229, gives in his "Epistolario," together with the Latin model letters, a whole series also of Italian ones, which are therefore probably the earliest specimens of connected Italian prose we possess. They show the marked influence of the Bolognese dialect; still, it is not the dialect in its pure form, but transformed already for literary purposes, and, what is more remarkable, there appear also to be traces of the love-poetry in the Provençal manner. Genuine, not merely forged writings of the same kind, have come down to us also from a somewhat later period. The "Ricordi di una famiglia Senese" are a collection of sheets on which are written down the expenditure and revenue of the house of a certain Matasala di Spinello de' Lambertini, between the years 1231 and 1262, that is to say, a dry register of sums of money and objects that had been bought and sold, but still of importance as a specimen

of the Sienese dialect of the time. The same value attaches to the "Lettere volgari del Secolo XIII., scritte da Senesi," a small collection of private letters, commercial and partly also political in character, written by Sienese merchants from France and to that country; the first letter is dated 1253, but the most important belong to the years 1260-1269, or still later.

Writings of this nature do not in reality belong to the history of literature, and they have been mentioned solely with the view of pointing out the early existence of a certain kind of prose, which was nothing but the living speech written down in cases where it was indispensable. Its actual literary use represents a more advanced stage, for which far more care and a definite intention on the part of the writer are necessary. We must therefore regard as the earliest monument of literary prose the letters of Guittone, with which we are already acquainted, and which are in themselves so entirely independent of the poetical usage; the one addressed to the Florentines was probably, as we saw, written about the year 1260. To 1268 belongs the first translation of Albertano da Brescia, which will be discussed further on, and a second one to 1278; later are the works of Giamboni and of Ristoro of Arezzo, the "Conti di Antichi Cavalieri,” and the "Novellino." But it would serve no purpose to adhere exactly to the chronological order, which is still far too uncertain, and so we shall rather group together the monuments according to their subject-matter and literary character.

The "Novellino," or, as the book was entitled by its first editor, the "Cento Novelle Antiche," mark the beginning of a genre which was destined to attain to an extraordinary degree of fertility in Italy: it is the oldest collection of tales. The aim of the little book was stated by the author or compiler himself at the beginning: "As the noble and high-born are, in their words and deeds, as it were, a mirror for the lesser ones, and as their words are more pleasing since they come from a more delicate instrument, we recall here some flowers (ie., select examples) of words, of fair acts of courtesy and of fair replies, and of fair deeds of valour, of fair gifts and of fair loves, such as were formerly achieved by many." The collection contains a hundred tales, as appears

from the title. Some of them treat chivalrous themes, and tell of Tristan and Isolde, of King Melidaus, and of the Lady of Shalott, who died of love for Lancelot; in others we have stories of heroes and sages of antiquity, such as Alexander the Great, the sons of Priam, Thales of Miletus, Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, and Trajan-all these curiously transformed and travestied according to the popular medieval tradition. There is Narcissus (No. 46), who has become a "good and fair knight," while Pythagoras is a philosopher in Spain, who has compiled an astrological table (33). Socrates is a wise Roman, and replies to the embassy sent by the Sultan from Greece (61); Hercules traverses forests and slays lions and bears, but is not able to tame his wicked wife (70); Nero condemns his master Seneca to death, as revenge for the beating he received from him when he was his pupil (71). Then we have stories of biblical history, of Balaam, David, Solomon, and Christ himself; also some legends, such as that of Saint Paulinus, who gave himself up as prisoner for the son of the poor woman, when he could not help her in any other way, and of Peter the publican, who gave all he had to the poor, and had himself sold, so that they might have the proceeds. Other tales, again, narrate true or invented occurrences relating to historical personages of quite recent times-to Saladin, Charles of Anjou, and King Conrad IV. in his youth, to Italian magnates and princes, such as Jacopino Rangone, Paolo Traversari, and Ezzelino, and especially to the Emperor Frederick II., whose powerful figure had made a great impression on the time, and in whom the author shows an exceptionally keen interest. Then we have persons who are well known to us from Provençal literature. Thus, Messer Imberal del Balzo, i.e., En Barral of Baux, Viscount of Marseilles, the patron of the troubadours, who looks for traces of birds, receives a humorous reply from an old woman. The poet Guillem de Berguedan, who has offended all the noble ladies of Provence, saves himself from their vengeance through an ingenious idea. Of the young King of England, the son of Henry II., acts of chivalry and generosity are narrated, and of Bertran de Born, his behaviour during captivity after the death of the young King; of Richart de Barbezieu-in this case, it is true, under the

name of a certain Alamanno (64)—we are told how he lost his lady's favour, and how he won it again. There is one instance of a fable of animals, that of the mule, the fox, and the wolf, where the latter wished to read the letters on the hoofs of the former (94). For us, however, the most interesting are the tales which reflect contemporary manners, the stories concerning the author's immediate surroundings, such as that of Bito of Florence, who manages to get a farthing out of the miserly Ser Frulli without his noticing it (96); of the man who told the endless tale (89); of the peasant who came into the town in order to buy clothes, and was beaten for having no money (95); of the clever woman, whose tart was eaten by the cat, while the mouse got away (92). They are poor jokes, but they serve to show how easily the public was satisfied in those days, and we note in them a tendency towards a more vivid conception of reality. Here, too, we already find the scandalous little stories of women and priests, which subsequently became the favourite theme of the short tales. Thus, we have Piovano Porcellino, who caught the Bishop Mangiadore in the act of which the latter wanted to accuse him (54); the doctor of Toulouse, who married the niece of the Archbishop, but sent her home again after two months, owing to an unexpected event, and justified his action to the furious uncle in a witty reply (49). Further, there are the two exemplary father confessors (91 and 93), and the grieving widow, who consoles herself with the man set to watch the body of a hanged criminal, and eventually fixes the corpse of her own husband on the gallows (59)— that is, the widely-diffused story of the matron of Ephesus.

This collection of tales is, therefore, a union of all possible elements, of the most varied kind. The author probably did not invent a single one of the stories himself. They are either such as were in everyone's mouth at the time, or such as he could take from books, from the Latin collections of tales that were the common property of nations in the Middle Ages, such as the "Disciplina Clericalis" of Petrus Alfonsus, and the "Gesta Romanorum" (that is, if these are earlier than the "Novellino" itself), and from the biographies of the troubadours. Finally, the Bible and the chronicles probably supplied several contributions. Alessandro D'Ancona made a study of these sources of the book in a very valuable

treatise; for more than a third of the tales, he noted the passages in which the same or a similar theme is treated in other ancient monuments. This study was instructive, as clearly showing that the author so often merely re-told stories that were spread far and wide throughout the entire literature of Europe. Of course, D'Ancona was not able to discover the direct sources for each individual tale, and thus to obtain an idea of the way in which it had been used, owing to the poverty of the mode of exposition employed in the book, and of the lack of details that might serve as guiding links for the discovery of the more immediate origin of the stories. For these narratives of the "Novellino" are short and rapid sketches, drawn in a few rough strokes, which merely give the actual facts, without working them out in any way. Of course, the single tales vary greatly in point of detail. Although meagreness and dryness are the rule, still these qualities are not so exaggerated in the story of Bito and Frulli, in the "Novella d'Amore" (99), and in others, as, for example, in those of Pietro Tavoliere (17), of the lady of Gascony and the king of Cyprus (51), of the Emperor Frederick, who desires to put his wife's fidelity to the test (100), of the merchant and the coins (98), and others that occupy only a few lines, and the brevity of which is carried to an almost unnatural degree. This is, however, due to the anecdotic character of the stories, the interest of which is mostly concentrated on one point. They frequently end with a witty saying, a clever repartee, or an ingenious idea. At times, they also serve to point a moral or at least a general maxim—a quality which the tales may have derived from their sources; for the Latin collections of this kind, such as the "Disciplina Clericalis" and the "Gesta Romanorum,' were also moral and didactic in aim. The mode of expression corresponds to the manner of exposition: the sentences are short and clumsy, each of them standing alone by itself, after the manner of the first beginnings of prose, whose elements place themselves one beside the other, without blending into one harmonious whole, such as we find in the structure of the sentence when it has reached a more advanced stage of artistic development.

Whenever the tales allude to historical events that are known to us and to which a date can be assigned, they do