ROMAN BIAS OF THE ITALIANS. Litterulis, legemque suam persuadeat illis, Ut doceant aliquem nisi clericus accipiatur. 5 While the Italians thus continued the rhetorical and legal studies of the ancients, they did not forget that they were representatives and descendants of the Romans. The Republic and the Empire were for them the two most glorious epochs of their own history ; and any attempt which they made to revive either literature or art, was imitative of the past. They were not in the position to take a new departure. No popular epic, like the Niebelungen of the Teuton, the Arthurian legend of the Celt, the Song of Roland of the Frank, or the Spanish Cid, could have sprung up on Italian soil. The material was wanting to a race that knew its own antiquity. Even when an Italian undertook a digest of the Tale of Troy or of the Life of Alexander, he converted the metrical romances of the middle ages into prose, obeying an instinct which led him to regard the classical past as part of his own history.1 In like manner, the recollection of a previous municipal organisation in the communes, together with the growing ideal of a Roman Empire, which should restore Italy to her place of sovereignty among the nations, proved serious obstacles to the unification of the people. We 1 See Adolfo Bartoli, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. i. pp. 142-158, and p. 167, on Guido delle Colonne and Qualichino da Spoleto. have already seen that this reversion of the popular imagination to Rome may be reckoned among the reasons why the victory of Legnano and the Peace of Constance were comparatively fruitless.1 Politically, socially, and intellectually, the Italians persisted in a dream of their Latin destiny, long after the feasibility of realising that vision had been destroyed, and when the modern era had already formed itself upon a new type in the federation of the younger races. Of hardly less importance, as negative influences, were the failure of feudalism to take firm hold upon Italian soil, and the defect of its ideal, chivalry. The literature of trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers grew up and flourished in the castles of the North; nor was it until the Italians, under the sway of the Hohenstauffen princes, possessed something analogous to a Provençal Court, that the right conditions for the development of literary art in the vernacular were attained. From this point of view Dante's phrase of lingua aulica, to express the dialect of culture, is both scientific and significant. It will further appear in the course of this chapter that the earliest dawn of Italian literature can be traced to those minor Courts of Piedmont and the Trevisan Marches, where the people borrowed the forms of feudal society more sympathetically than elsewhere in Italy. It must moreover be remembered that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries the force of the Italian people was concentrated upon two great political struggles, the contest of the Church with the Empire, and the War of Lombard Independence. In the 1 See above, vol i. Age of the Despots, 2nd ed. chap. 2 TARDY GROWTH OF ITALIAN LANGUAGE. 7 prosecution of these quarrels, the Italians lost sight of letters, art, theology. They became a race of statesmen and jurists. Their greatest divines and metaphysicians wandered northward into France and England. Their most famous university, that of Bologna, acquired a world-wide reputation as a school of jurisprudence. Legal studies and political activity occupied the attention of their ablest men. It would be difficult to overrate the magnitude of the work done during those two centuries. In the course of them, the Italians gave final form to the organism of the Papacy, which must be regarded as a product of their constructive genius. They developed republican governments of differing types in each of their great cities, and made, for the first tine since the foundation of the Empire, the name of People sovereign. They resuscitated Roman law, and reorganised the commerce of the Mediterranean. Remaining loyal to the Empire as an idea, they shook off the yoke of the German Cæsars; and while the Papacy was their own handiwork, they, alone of European nations, viewed it politically rather than religiously, and so weakened it as to prepare the way for the Babylonian captivity at Avignon. Thus, through the people's familiarity with Latin ; through the survival of Roman grammar schools and the memory of Roman local institutions; through a paramount and all-pervading enthusiasm for the Roman past; through the lack of new legendary and epical material; through the failure of feudalism, and through the political ferment attending on the Wars of Investiture and Independence, the Italians were slow to produce a modern language and a literature of modern type. They came late into the field; and when they took their place at last, their language presented a striking parallel to their political condition. As they failed to acquire a solid nationality, but remained split up into petty States, united by a PanItalic sentiment; so they failed to form a common speech. The written Italian of the future was used in its integrity by no one province; each district clinging to its dialect with obstinate pride.1 Yet, though the race was tardy in literary development, and though the tongue of Ariosto has never become so thoroughly Italian as that of Shakspere is English or that of Molière is French; still, on their first appearance, the Italian masters proved themselves at once capable of work maturer and more monumental than any which had been produced in modern Europe. Their education during two centuries of strife was not without effect. The conditions of burghership in their free communes, the stirring of their political energies, the liberty of their popolo, and the keen sense of reality developed by their legal studies, prepared men like Dante and Guido Cavalcanti for solving the problems of art in a resolute, mature and manly spirit, fully conscious of the aim before them, and self-possessed in the assurance of adult faculties. In the first, or, as it may be termed, the Latin The Italians did not even begin to reflect upon their lingua volgare until the special characters and temperaments of their chief States had been fixed and formed. In other words, their social and political development far anticipated their literary evolution. There remained no centre from which the vulgar tongue could radiate, absorbing local dialects. Each State was itself a centre, perpetuating dialect. MEDIEVAL ITALIAN SCHOLARSHIP. 9 period of medieval culture, there was not much to distinguish the Italians from the rest of Europe. Those Lombard schools, of which mention has already been made, did indeed maintain the traditions of decadent classical education more alive than among the peoples of the North. Better Latin, and particularly more fluent Latin verse, was written during the dark ages in Italy than elsewhere.1 Still it does not appear that the whole credit of medieval Latin hymnology and of its curious counterpart, the songs of the wandering students, should be attributed to the Italians. While we can refer the Dies Ira, Lauda Sion, Pange Lingua, and Stabat Mater with tolerable certainty to Italian poets; while there is abundant internal evidence to prove that some of the best Carmina Burana were composed in Italy and under Italian influences; yet Paris, the focus of theological and ecclesiastical learning, as Bologna was the centre of legal studies, must be regarded as the headquarters of that literary movement which gave the rhyming hexameters of Bernard of Morlas and the lyrics of the Goliardi to Europe.2 It seems clear that we cannot ascribe to the Italians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries any superiority in the use of Latin over the schools of France. Their previous vantage-ground had been lost in the political distractions of their country. At the same time, they were the first jurists 1 See Du Méril, Poésies Populaires Latines antérieures au douzième Siècle, Paris, 1843. 2 Regarding the authorship of Latin hymns see the notes in Mone's Hymni Latini Medii Evi, Friburgi Brisgoviæ, 1853, 3 vols. For the French origin of Carmina Burana see Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder des Mittelalters, von Oscar Hubatsch, Görlitz, 1870. |