Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/16

INTRODUCTION Sacra Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo is written in the fluent octave stanzas—rispetti continuati—which were sung throughout Italy to the music of lute and viol. In the Nencia di Barberino, that most delightful of Quattrocento idylls, the ardours of the rustic lover are revealed to us in his own language, yet seen through the eyes, half ironical, half sympathetic, of the highly cultured citizen of Florence, giving us the first really artistic example of that sense of the burlesque which was afterwards to become so important a factor in Italian poetry. Politian, too, the famous humanist and alter ego of Lorenzo, wrote rispetti continuati and spicciolati of great beauty, and his tragedy of Orfeo is a sequence of octave stanzas interspersed with brief songs. Lorenzo and Politian are sophisticated poets, perhaps, and their spirit, when they are themselves and not disciples of Petrarch, is the spirit of Boccaccio—of slightly ironical but quite good-natured realism; but though we may search their poetry in vain for high passion and great emotion, at its best it has a spontaneous gaiety, a keen delight in the comeliness of life and the earth, and, with Politian especially, an unerring tact in expression; it is the faithful mirror of the bel viver that was so soon to cease.

Whilst Lorenzo and Politian adapted to their own ends all that was best in the popular art of their time, Pulci was content to elaborate the popular Florentine conception of chivalry—a somewhat squalid conception, but one which was natural to a people whose troubles always began at home, and who had little sympathy to spare for crusaders and love-sick paladins. There is no idealism in the Morgante Maggiore; it is obviously written by a bourgeois for bourgeois; its innumerable characters are for the most 16