Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/5

INTRODUCTION The book which Paolo and Francesca read was probably written in a jargon compounded of the langue d'oïl 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 ot 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 5