Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/524

 502 ITALY [LITERATURE. legendary literature of France. Some attention should be paid to the Letters, of Fra Guittone d Arezzo, who wrote many poems and also some letters in prose, the subjects of which are moral and religious. Love of antiquity, of the traditions of Rome and of its language, was so strong iu Guittone that he tried to write Italian in a Latin style, and it turned out obscure, involved, and altogether barbarous. He took as his special model Seneca, and hence his prose assumed a bombastic style, which, according to his views, was very artistic, but which in fact was alien to the true spirit of art, and resulted in the extravagant and grotesque. New 2. The Spontaneous Development of Italian Literature. Tuscan j n t} ie y ear 1282, the year in which the new Florentine con- 8 ho ! stitution of the &quot; Arti Minori &quot; was completed, a period of poetry! literature began that does not belong to the age of first beginnings, but to that of development. With the school of Lapo Gianni, of Guido Cavalcanti, of Cino da Pistoia, and Dante Alighieri, lyric poetry became exclusively Tuscan, The whole novelty and poetic power of this school, which really was the beginning of Italian art, consist in what Dante expresses so happily &quot; Quando Amore spira, noto, ed a qucl modo Ch ei detta dentro, vo significando &quot; that is to say, in a power of expressing the feelings of the soul in the way in which love inspires them, in an appropriate and graceful manner, fitting form to matter, and by art fusing one with the other. The Tuscan lyric poetry, the first true Italian art, is pre-sminent in this artistic fusion, in the spontaneous and at the same time deliberate action of the mind. In Lapo Gianni the new style is not free from some admixture of the old associations of the Siculo-Proven^al school. He wavered as it were be tween two manners. The empty and involved phraseology of the Sicilians is absent, but the poet does not always rid himself of their influence. Sometimes, however, he draws freely from his own heart, and then the subtleties and obscurities disappear, and his verse becomes clear, flowing, and elegant. Guido Guido Cavalcanti was a learned man with a high con- Caval- ccption of his art. He felt the value of it, and adapted canti. jjjs } earn i n g to it. Cavalcanti was already a good deal out of sympathy with the mediaeval spirit ; he reflected deeply on his own work, and from this reflexion he derived his poetical conception. His poems may be divided into two classes, those which portray the philosopher, &quot; il soltilis- simo dialettico,&quot; as Lorenzo the Magnificent called him, and those which are more directly the product of his poetic nature imbued with mysticism and metaphysics. To the first set belongs the famous poem Sulla Natura d Amore, which in fact is a treatise on amorous metaphysics, and was annotated later in a learned way by the most renowned Platonic philosophers of the 15th century, such as Marsilius Ficinus and others. In other poems of Cavalcanti s besides this, we see a tendency to subtilize and to stifle the poetic- imagery under a dead weight of philosoph}. But there are many of his sonnets in which the truth of the images and the elegance and simplicity of the style are admirable, and make us feel that we are in quite a new period of art. This is particularly felt in Cavalcanti s Ballate, for in them ho pours himself out ingenuously and without affectation, but with an invariable and profound consciousness of his art. Far above all tho others for the reality of the sorrow and the love displayed, for the melancholy longing expressed for the distant home, for the calm and solemn yearning of his heart for the lady of his love, for a deep subjectivity which is never troubled by metaphysical sub tleties, is the ballata composed by Cavalcanti when he was banished from Florence with the party of the Bianchi in 1300, and took refuge at Sarzana, The third poet among the followers of the new school Cin&amp;lt; was Cino da Pistoia, of the family of the Siuibuldi (see Pist CINO DA PISTOIA). His love poems are so sweet, so mellow, and so musical that they are only surpassed by Dante. The pains of love are described by him with vigorous touches ; it is easy to see that they are not feigned but real, The psychology of love and of sorrow nearly reaches perfection, As the author of the Vita Nuova, Dante also belongs Dai to the same lyric school. This is a little book of poetry and prose, which tells the story of his love for Beatrice, who is pretty generally held to be the daughter of Folco Portinari. In the lyrics of the Vita Xuova (so called by its author to indicate that his first meeting with Bea trice was the beginning for him of a life entirely different from that he had hitherto led) there is a high idealization of love. It seems as if there were in it nothing earthly or human, and that the poet had his eyes constantly fixed on heaven, while singing of his lady. Everything is supersensual, aerial, heavenly, and the real Beat r be is always gradually melting more and more into the sym bolical one passing out of her human nature and into the divine. The life of Dante covered a period of fifty-six years (1265-1321). In 1289 he fought at Campaldino against the Ghibellines of Arezzo. In 1300 he was pro bably one of the ambassadors from the Guelphs to Pope Boniface VIII. He was afterwards elected a prior, and it is believed that he took part in the measure for banishing the heads of the factions of the Bianchi and Neri which began that same year in Florence. The Neri betook themselves to Boniface, accusing their adversaries of an understanding with the Ghibellines. For the purpose of meeting these accusations, Dante went to Boniface, but in the meanwhile the latter sent Charles of Valois as a peacemaker, with secret injunctions to crush the Bianchi. Charles fulfilled this part of his mission with zeal. One of the proscribed was Dante, on the charge of illicit gains and of extortion during his priorate. Henceforth the poet s life was a perpetual pilgrimage from one Italian town to another. He was also at Paris in 1 303. He hoped great things from the descent of Henry VII. of Luxembourg into Italy, and wrote to the people and princes to announce the coming of the day of redemption. He had hopes, too, of Uguccione della Faggiuola, leader of the Pisans against Florence (1315). But all his hopes proved vain, and he took refuge with Can Grande della Scala at Verona (1316), moving on later to Busone di Raffaclli at Gubbio (1318), to Vagano della Torre at Udine (1319), and to Guido Novello da Polenta at Ravenna (1320), where he died the next year. It appears that Dante began the Convito in his youth, that he continued it in his exile, and never completed it. He named the book the Convito, to signify that a banquet of wisdom was served up in it. He meant to comment on fourteen of his songs, and the commentary was to be the promised serving up of the banquet, But he only composed four out of the fourteen treatises. As has been said by one of Dante s chief admirers in modern Italy, &quot;it is a book of much learning, but the symbolism kills the poetry, and the quotations stifle the real knowledge.&quot; The Convito is very valuable as giving a notion of the mind of Dante and of his scholastic education. On the other hand, his treatise De Monarchia shows us his political conception. It was probably written in 1310, when the coming of Henry VII. revived such hopes in him. He meant to prove in it that a universal monarchy is necessary to the well-being of the world, that the Roman people had a right to claim the exercise of this office, that the authority of a monarch comes straight from God and not from his vicar, the pope. The De Monarchia is written in scholastic