Wahr 9-26-1922 HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK TORONTO AND MELBOURNE 7-1668 INTRODUCTION I HE earliest Italian poetry which has come down to us was written in Sicily during the brief but extremely important epoch of culture which was inaugurated by the Emperor Frederick II, himself a poet and an enthusiastic patron of all fine art. This poetry, as might be expected, is in some degree tainted with the formal graces of the Court; it lacks the personal note, and its conventions are an inheritance from the Provençal troubadours. Dante tells us in the Vita Nuova that the first poet who wrote in lingua volgare—in the spoken language that existed all through the early Middle Ages side by side with the sadly degraded Latin of the priests-employed that lowly medium in order to be understood by the lady whom he addressed; but the Sicilian school of poets probably made use of the volgare for a less interesting reason— it had become the fashion, or, possibly, the custom of writing it was encouraged by the Emperor because his ambition to unite the various Italian cities against the Pope made him realize the importance of cultivating a language which, except for a few local variations, was common to them all. In spite of a certain conventionality, however, there is a freshness and delicacy in the little garland of Sicilian courtpoetry which is intrinsic, owing nothing to the art of 407762 Provence; the note of irony in the Tenzone of Ciullo d'Alcamo is new and real, and the other poets of the group occasionally achieve effects which are never found in completely derivative literature. To call them the Sicilian group does not imply that they were all Sicilians; there were many Tuscans, and probably many Lombards, at the Court of Frederick II, and thus the new art would be disseminated throughout Italy. 6 Provençal influence not only found its way into the country through Sicily; the gai saber was cultivated in Genoa, in the Trevisan March, and especially at the Court of Bonifazio di Monferrato, the friend of Raimbaut di Vaqueiras. Many Italians, Sordello amongst them, wrote in Provençal. The poetry of the langue d'oc was essentially courtly', but the epics of chivalry which were written in the langue d'oil and were brought into Italy by wandering minstrels (who eventually became a public nuisance, in the manner of certain modern alien artists) had a more popular quality; the pig-headed paladins and bloodthirsty archbishops who ravened in those interminable laisses would no doubt seem singularly lifelike to a humble audience in that most troubled time. Besides the epic of chivalry, didactic poems in the manner of the 'Romance of the Rose' were popular; various versions of the Arthurian legends were recited both in the piazza and the Court, MS. copies of which (amongst them the famous book which Paolo and Francesca read together in the garden at Rimini) existed in the palace of every great noble. These poems in the langue d'oïl very soon lost their distinctively French quality, and borrowed many dialectic peculiarities of the provinces where they became popular. SOTTOL The book which Paolo and Francesca read was probably written in a jargon compounded of the langue d'oil and the volgare of the Adriatic seaboard. Not only French and Provençal, but the parent language itself, which remained alive in the Church and the Schools, influenced the earliest Italian writers. There was a school of Latinizing' poets at Pisa in the thirteenth century, and the work of Guittone of Arezzo and the scholastic bards of the University of Bologna derived much of its antique gravity, and lost all the spontaneous vigour that is the life of lyric poetry, from its attempt to adapt classical form. But all these are purely external, one may almost add pedantic influences. Italian poetry was not born in Rome or Paris or Toulouse, and the development of lyrical art in the thirteenth century was not the sudden cry of a voice which, like the voice of Virgil in Hell, through long silence had grown hoarse. All Italians sing-more or less melodiously-and there was singing in Italy long before the days of Frederick II, but the words of the songs were not written down; they come to us as fragments quoted by Dante, by Villani, by the religious chroniclers. The singers of this popular poetry are not chained in the vicious circle of courtly mannerisms; the whole of life-family, municipal, national-is their province; they are satiric, amorous, obscene, patriotic, burlesque and elegiac; most important of all, they are completely spontaneous. It is in them, and not in the haughty masters of the gai saber, that we find the germ of the Italian lyric, and poems so completely different as the Lament for the Crusades of Rinaldo d'Aquino and the Crucifixion of Jacopone da Todi are direct continuations of |