The Troubadour Tradition
in Italy and England

BEFORE sinking into the abyss of oblivion, the art of the troubadours had laid its imprint on all lyrical literatures of Europe. The Provençal Muse was silenced in Provence, but a remarkable resurrection of her influence took place, more brilliant to all appearances and more widespread in its effects than that which her first coming had exerted. Italy was the heir of the troubadour heritage, and became, as it were, the executrix of that legacy. To the Italians we owe the survival of most—one might say all—of the texts of the troubadour lyrics which we possess, and but for their preservation in Italy, little more of that literature might have reached us than a vague legend and a few names.

In France, troubadour poetry was not merely allowed to fall into oblivion; it was willfully put aside and buried in complete neglect. That attitude resulted in the first instance from the long-extended repercussions of the passions which had brought about the destruction of Provençal civilization. To that cause, however, another soon became added as a consequence of the scarcely less violent fanaticism with which the dogmas of pseudo-classicism came to be held in France. All artistic production which failed to conform to the alleged canons of classical antiquity was regarded as not only worthless, but offensive and pernicious.

The suppression of medieval art was contemplated as a legitimate aim of good taste. The defacement of medieval churches in the eighteenth century, for instance, was not mainly the work of revolutionary mobs, but of zealots of “classicism,” eager to do away with what they labelled “Gothic,” that is to say, barbaric. On the threshold of the Renaissance, Joachim du Bellay wrote: “Do not speak to me of all that old rubble of French poetry from the Jeux Floreaux of Toulouse and the Puy of Rouen, such as rondels, ballads, chants royaux, songs and the like groceries which corrupt our linguistic palate and serve no end but to debase our taste and show up our ignorance.” Even the philosophic calm of Montaigne was picked to testy petulance by all Romance literature, guilty of not framing itself on “classical,” that is, Latin models. Not only does he fret for scorn of the romances of chivalry and “suchlike trash of writings,” and cannot contain himself when Ariosto is mentioned by the side of the divine Virgil, but his contempt breaks out against the “newfangled” Spaniolised and Petrarchistical poets,” and he will not hear them named in the same breath with Catullus.

The fervor of good taste did not flame in Italy with such ferocity. The vital debt of Italian poetry to the Provençal was there freely owned from the first. “It is universally recognized and is beyond doubt,” wrote Cardinal Bembo, “that the Tuscan language is mainly indebted for its poetry to the poets of Provence, who are our masters. . . . Our tongue itself, which was still uncouth and poor in resources at the time, was refined and enriched by what it borrowed from that foreign store.”¹ Italian poets of the thirteenth century composed exclusively in Provençal. Rambertino Buvalelli, of Bologna, who was Podestà of Milan in 1208, and of Genoa in 1220, distinguished himself for his Provençal verse. Lanfranc Cigala wrote a sirvente about 1245 to the marquis of Monferrato. Bonifazio Calvo wrote a lament on the defeat of the Genoese at Chioggia, and was answered from Venice by Bartolommeo Zorzi. Pietro della Caravana exhorted his Milanese countrymen in Provençal to resist the imperial assailant.

The Romance speech of Italy, north of the Apennines, differed but slightly from the language of the troubadours, and was much closer to it than to Tuscan Italian. To this day a Milanese is able to converse quite intelligibly with an inhabitant of Marseilles, each using his own idiom. Not a few Provençal troubadours made prolonged sojourns in Northern Italy. The court of Count Alberto Malaspina, in Lunigiana, was a noted meeting-place of the Provençal poets. Rambaud de Vaqueiras appears to have spent the greater part of his life in Italy; Peire Vidal, Gaucelm Faidit, Uc de Saint Cyr, Peire Ramon, Aimeric de Perguilhan were frequent visitors to that country. On the other hand, almost all the Italian troubadours, Lanfranc Cigala, Nicoletto, Ferrari, Ugo di Grimaldo, and the most famous and influential among them, Sordello of Mantua, passed extended periods in Provence, and like the Provençal poets, visited the courts of Spain. In the thirteenth century, they almost completely supplanted the Provençal in importance.

The vogue enjoyed in Italy by Provençal lyrics extended to all classes of the population, language placing no bar on its diffusion. It surpassed in popularity the romances of chivalry, which were not accessible in Italian translations until the end of the thirteenth century. It was doubtless in Provençal, and in the prose of Arnaud Daniel, that Francesca de Rimini and Paolo Malatesta read to such fatal purpose “of Launcelot and how love constrained him.”²

Dante, in the Convito, stigmatizes those “froward” Italians who extol the vernacular speech of a foreign country and despise their own,”³ holding cheap the Italian tongue and praising the Provençal. Yet he himself was for long in doubt as to which to use. In the circles interested in poetry which Dante frequented, one of the burning questions of the day was that de vulgari eloquio. Was the vernacular fit for literary use? And if so, should the local dialect be employed or would it be better to adopt some idiom capable of becoming, like Latin, a universal literary language? Dante’s tutor, Brunetto Latini, had chosen to write in French. But the majority of poets deemed it most natural to use the one vernacular idiom which had already passed its tests and been illustrated by a mature literary form, to wit, the language of the troubadours.

The first poems composed in the Italian tongue originated in Sicily, at the court of the Emperor Frederick II. That picturesque and learned court, which was more Saracen than Christian, was by far the most cultivated in Europe. It was passionately addicted to the study of the Arabian sciences and philosophy. Michael Scotus brought to it books by the learned men of Cordova, and the treatises of Aristotle and of Averroes. Leonard of Pisa introduced it to algebra and Arabian mathematics. The court of the great emperor, “who was so deserving of honour,” che fú d’onor si degno⁴—placed as it was, like Provence, under the ban of the Church—offered the most obvious refuge to the exiled poets who fled before the terror of the French Inquisition. Some of their Italian friends took to translating and imitating in their own vernacular the Provençal lyrics. An animating spirit of that movement was the lawyer, Jacopo da Lentino, who had been ambassador to the court of Aragon, as was likewise the imperial falconer, Arrigo Testa. Following his initiative, the chancellor Pier delle Vigne, Percival Doria, Guido and Odo delle Colonne, and the emperor Frederick himself, together with his son, Prince Enzo, distinguished themselves in the imitation of Provençal poetry. Those were the first lispings of the Italian Muse.

The new vernacular poetry was known as “Sicilian,” although it was composed in the purest Tuscan, the primacy of which idiom was recognized long before Dante, owing to its closer approach to literary Latinity. Nor was the “Sicilian” manner by any means confined to the court of Palermo. It soon spread to every part of the peninsula, and the term became applied to all Italians versing in the Provençal style. Among these were counted the Sienese poet Folcachieri, Urbicciani of Lucca, the Florentine Dante da Majano, and Chiaro Davanzati. To the youthful Dante Alighieri, no other Italian poetry was known but the “Sicilian.” The first verses we have of him are a series of five sonnets in a tenson, or exchange of verses, with his namesake of Majano, strangely clumsy, almost infantile toddlings of the Dantesque Muse which betray no token of the future mettle of her pace. Italian did not at first wholly displace Provençal. Many who dabbled in the Sicilian poetry continued at the same time to compose in Provençal. Dante da Majano wrote in both languages.⁵ Guittone d’Arezzo says of one of his friends that his Provençal poems are better than those he composed in Italian.⁶

While the “Sicilian” school followed very closely the conventions, conceits and prescribed themes of troubadour poetry, it shows no trace of the doctrines newly introduced into Provence. It is clearly not among the troubadours who had sought refuge in the magnificently heretical court of Frederick II that disciples of Montanhagol are to be looked for. The most distinguished of those exiles was that same Guilhem Figuiera whose vehement denunciations of the tyrants and persecutors had drawn upon him the particular animosity of the clergy. One of the questions put to the inquisitors during the interrogation of a suspect was whether he had read the poems of Figuiera.⁷ We find here, then, no word of the “new conception of love” which was being illustrated by the poets who, paying with their orthodoxy the price of immunity, had continued in Provence. There is no reference to the spiritualization of passion or the merits of chastity. On the contrary, critics deplore the sensuality of the Sicilian school.

But a while later, another group of poets composing in the Tuscan tongue made its appearance in Northern Italy, and more particularly at Bologna, the natural gateway between the Romance-speaking North and the more Latin Tuscany. Unlike the Sicilian school, which sprang out of immediate intercourse with the Provençal refugee poets, and which represented unchanged the troubadour tradition, northern Italian versing derived its inspiration from the Italian troubadours, all friends and disciples of Montanhagol and the conforming exponents of ecclesiastical taste.

The manner of the Bolognese school found immediate favor in Tuscany and displaced the Sicilian fashion. The derivation of Tuscan poetry, under that influence, is manifest from the start in the treatment of the erotic theme. Chiaro Davanzati, who had been counted as a distinguished follower of the Sicilians, took to translating Sordello, and composed didactic pieces that might be paraphrases of the edifying Brevaries of Love of Matfré Ermengaud. “Love in its true nature and interpretation,” declares this predecessor of Dante, “is not a sin. It is unworthy of a poet to covet a woman who is not his wife. All carnal desire is a temptation of the devil. Woe to him who succumbs to it.”⁸

The most reputed among the Tuscan poets of the time, Fra Guittone d’Arezzo, who even foreshadowed the Bolognese school and exerted his influence upon its leader, Guido Guinicelli, appears to refer his inspiration to an even more exalted source: his canticles recall the dissertations of the Church fathers on the excellence of chastity. He thus sings the praises of that virtue:

Chastity, thou light and beauty of the world! Ah, how I love and commend the woman who keeps her heart and body chaste! To exist in the flesh without feeling the desires of the flesh is to be more virtuous than the angels, for the latter possess chastity without the flesh, but he who possesses at once both flesh and virtue surpasses the angels of heaven. Ah! true virtue, genuine love, thou alone art the virtue of virtues . . .

He recalls that love caused the damnation of humanity, which was on that account expelled from Paradise, “and therefore was Christ slain.” He expounds the abject state of lovers who forget God and make a divinity of the woman they love.

Guido Guinicelli (1240-1276) hails Guittone as his master and testifies his admiration in a sonnet. The small group of Florentine poets who gathered around the Bolognese leader was destined to achieve particular importance, for to this group belonged Dante Alighieri. Adopting an expression of Montanhagol, they termed themselves the poets of the dolce stil nuovo—“the sweet new style.” Dante calls Guinicelli “the supreme Guido”—maximus Guido¹⁰—and names him as the father of Italian poetry:

The enunciation of Patristic doctrines notwithstanding, love continued to be the exclusive theme of lyrical poetry. Dante assumes that any other theme is inconsistent with lyrical composition,¹² holding as Gaucelm Faidit had long since laid down “that a song must treat of love, and to introduce any other theme is bad versing.”¹³ Indeed the Italian poets of the thirteenth century and the early Renaissance often speak as though love and poetry were equivalent terms. When, for instance, Dante and Petrarch call Arnaud Daniel the “master of love,” they do not intend to exalt him as a lover, but as a poet. The harmonizing of that association with the Patristic views enounced by Guittone d’Arezzo, however, came to assume, with the poets of the stil nuovo, a subtler form than the crude device of assimilating the lady of songs with the Madonna. Guinicelli meets the difficulty in much the same manner, by declaring that he mistook his lady for an angel of God:

He assures us of the purity of the love which his lady “who is pure, bears to me, who am also pure”:

There is little need for those assurances, for the object of his affections is so disembodied that it is often open to doubt whether the poet is referring to a woman, the Holy Virgin, or the Moon:

The lady who awakened his affections “is crowned in heaven; she is his hope of Paradise. To think upon her is to enter into a state of sanctity.” She is, he tells us elsewhere, like the star that measures time and sheds its lustre through the heaven of love:

It was Guido Cavalcanti who founded the group of Guinicelli’s Tuscan disciples. Dante calls him his “first friend,” and places him in the forefront of “the most famous troubadours of that time”—famosi trovatore in quello tempo (Vita Nuova).

An imitation of the Roman de la rose,¹⁸ commonly though dubiously attributed to Cavalcanti, repeats the principles of Patristic sexual ethics by which the Provençal conformists protested their orthodoxy. These run directly counter to those set forth by the scholastics of love in the palmy days of troubadour lyricism. “The lover must above all observe the precepts of religion”; “One must not love the lady of another man,” it is therein declared; and in a notice prefixed to the exposition of those sentiments, the reader is requested to blame upon an inadvertence any expression which might appear prejudicial to modesty.¹⁹

But with the Tuscan poets of the stil nuovo, that monkish insistence upon the principles of Patristic morality is superfluous. Those principles are implicit in their amatory poetry. They are, moreover, incorporated in conceptions of far wider range and bearing. The old troubadour conceit about love penetrating through the eyes, for instance, occupies a paramount place in the ideological gist of their poetry; but it becomes invested with implications which soar into the rarefied atmosphere of transcendental metaphysics. Guido Cavalcanti, though many of his canzoni are colored with pleasant images, versifies those conceptions in terms whose meaning it is sometimes difficult to penetrate, under the mellifluous purl of linguistic flow.

This example, paraphrased into prose, would run something like this:

Love originates in the vision of the Lady, whose image, turning into a pure idea by the operation of the active intellect, becomes lodged in both the subjective and active intelligence, where is neither pain nor pleasure, but only the eternal light and contemplation of an image free from all substantial elements.

The treatment of amatory themes, in fact, underwent a remarkable transformation with the poets of the stil nuovo. One may indeed truly speak of a new conception of love, and an extraordinary one. Love became above all an object of metaphysical interest. The Provençals had debated “questions of love” in a mock-scholastic manner; but those questions bore on the rules and proprieties of erotic “courtesy.” The Italians incorporated in their poetry the subject-matter as well as the manner of scholastic disputations. The poetical treatment of the amatory theme assumes with them the form of “reasoning about love”—ragionar d’amore. The nature of love constitutes the gist of their concern. Was it a “substance” or an “accident”? In the exchange of sonnets which took the place of the Provençal tensons, even the Sicilians, such as Pier delle Vigne and Jacopo Mostacci, were drawn into an expression of their views on that scholastic quiddity.²¹

The effects of that approach upon the form of early Tuscan poetry were not to its advantage. Abstraction is bad in prose; in poetry it is intolerable. However artificial and affected may have been the matter of Provençal song, it was concrete. Brevity and directness were imposed upon it by the measures of melody. You cannot wind through the polished cadences of Ciceronian periods in a song; you cannot sing a metaphysical argument. But lyrical poetry and musical melody had, in the thirteenth century, all but parted company; only on occasion was poetry set to music. Canzoni and sonnets (little songs) were such in name only. The change opened the way to vices which were in time to betray the rich promise and possibilities of Italian poetry. The seeds of corruption were already present in the poetry of the stil nuovo. Lacking the curb of music, it ran into an elegance which surpassed in many respects that of Provençal lyric art, but which was of different order and drift, and one that was beset with many pitfalls.

It was, as is the invariable rule, the form in which its matter was draped that won for the new poetry an easy prevalence over the balder Sicilian manner, and grounded Dante’s high estimate of Guinicelli and Cavalcanti. These imparted to Italian poetry a smooth-flowing and pliant polish which the lilting measures of Provençal poetry had not. They disclosed to what advantage might be put a closer access to the Latin treasuries than was available to the Provençals. To the poet’s quest for freedom of richer expression, new far-reaching paths appeared to open. Dante regarded the ethical doctrinal contents of the new style with considerable indifference. But the metaphysical turn which the Tuscan Muse assumed appealed to some of the most absorbing preoccupations of his mind.

The stil nuovo was a learned poetry. Cavalcanti passed for one of the most erudite men of his day. His father, consigned by Dante among the Epicureans in his Inferno,²² had been so deeply addicted to the study of books of philosophy that he was reputed an atheist. Guido Cavalcanti has left no methodical exposition of his philosophical ideas, but his young friend, Dante Alighieri, had in mind the composition of a series of treatises covering the entire field of human knowledge. The plan was evidently abandoned for another, but not before it had been partially put into execution.

Dante was so strongly drawn toward science that he at one time spoke of renouncing poetry in order to devote himself entirely to philosophy. Like most of the great minds of the Middle Ages, he was consumed by the Faustian fever, the frantic desire to master every branch of learning and to penetrate every mystery. Such being his disposition, it was inevitable that he should become deeply absorbed in the study of the Arabian works. If he does not express himself in the same terms as his contemporary, Roger Bacon, who asserted that all thought and science in his day could base themselves only upon familiarity with the Arabian authors,²³ the whole of Dante’s works illustrates that opinion. His chief tutor in his youth, Brunetto Latini, a man of encyclopaedic mind, five years before the birth of his illustrious pupil, had spent several years in Spain as ambassador of the Guelfs at the court of Alfonso the Sage. He had met there the Arab and Israelite scholars who were employed, at the instigation of the philosopher-king, in the translation of the Arabian authors.²⁴

Dante conceived an enthusiasm for the astronomy and cosmology of the Muslim scholars. He quotes, on the subject of the measurement of the orbit of Mercury, “the proofs given by Al-Farghani, who declares it to correspond with the twenty-eighth part of the diameter of the earth.”²⁵ And he records the movements of the planets as laid down by the same author, “who, in the Book of the Aggregation of the Stars, gives an account of the best observations made on this subject by astronomers.”²⁶ He corrects Aristotle’s estimate of the number of the spheres and quotes in full the arguments advanced by Ibn Roschd;²⁷ he adopts the theory of Ibn Haithan, who originated the idea of “crystalline” spheres; and he cites the conception of epicycles on the lines initiated by Al-Bitroji of Seville, who refuted the Ptolemaic system three centuries before Copernicus.²⁸

The interest of Alighieri in astronomy was indeed wholly astrological; he cites with equal deference the most eminent astronomers and also charlatans of a somewhat dubious reputation. “Abú-Ma’shar,” he says, “is of the opinion that the conflagration of meteors, which is brought about through the influence of the planet Mars, forebodes the death of a ruling prince and the revolution of kingdoms.”²⁹ The importance attached by Dante to the investigation of the grouping of the heavenly bodies derived from his desire to trace the path of the influences they emit, which are responsible, he believed, for the dispositions of human character and the course of human life. “The rays which emanate from each of the spheres,” he says “are the means by which the qualities of each sphere are transmitted to the sublunary world.”³⁰ And, “while the rays of the supreme light of the universe penetrate human intelligences, they are thrown back and reflected by other terrestrial creatures. In order to elucidate this conception of ‘light’ and its ‘emanation’ I give here the various conclusions laid down by Ibn Sina on the subject.”³¹

This conception of “light” occupies, in fact, an important place in the theories of the Sufi writers of Spain, who in consequence are called Ischrakiyyin or “Illuminists.” The notion is no less conspicuous in the thought of Dante and the poets of the stil nuovo. “Every effect,” says Dante in the course of his exposition of those ideas, “participates in the nature of its cause, as is affirmed by Al-Farabi, who declares that every creature is bound by reason of its origin to include some parcel of the divine nature, even as the sun and the other stars participate in the light deriving from the Divine Cause,” the light divine being, in the view of Ibn Sina, the analogue of love.³² This statement, in the same terms as those used by the philosopher of Baghdad, was to serve as the conclusion to the Divine Comedy.”

Dante, as the above examples suffice to show, is far from being the pure Aristotelian and orthodox Thomist he was long supposed to be. He is much nearer in his conceptions to so-called “Platonic” and Sufi modes of thought, as indeed he himself makes clear: “The source of this induction (of light or Love) is unanimously stated by all philosophers, including Plato, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali and also Denys the Areopagite, however differently they may express themselves, to be ultimately located in the celestial spheres.”³³ Consequently, one is not surprised to learn that the great Florentine holds, like the Sufi poets, that “Love is a part of philosophy.”³⁴

Following the example of his models, he composed his treatise, “On Love,” which he called “The Banquet”—Il Convito or L’Amoroso convivio—in the form of a philosophical exposition dealing with both love and poetry. He presents this work, which he regarded at the time as his magnum opus, as a commentary on the canzoni with which his arguments are sprinkled. Both in its form and manner, in fact, the Convito is written on the model of the works of Ibn Dawūd, Ibn Hazm and Al-Ghazali. Dante’s style in these dissertations is far from foreshadowing the verbal splendors of the Commedia. The prose of the Convito, it must be admitted, is an example of what Voltaire would have called le style ennuyeux—the tedious style. “The substance of the entertainment which I have to offer the reader, that is, the poems,” he says in his preamble, “might produce an impression of obscurity were they not accompanied by the more substantial nourishment I have provided, and some might only perceive the material beauty of the verses without apprehending their true worth. But my exposition will furnish the light that reveals the colours entering into the composition of the poems.”³⁵ And he insists at length and repeatedly on the double meaning of his love-poetry, its literal and its allegorical sense.

Like his predecessors, he explains Plato’s doctrine of “ideas” or prototypes of “universal forms.”³⁶ Profane love is but a semblance of divine love, the Prime Mover, the First Cause, of all existence. The well-beloved, the Donna, the domina—and he names Beatrice—“is no other than divine wisdom and philosophy.”³⁷ Love is born through the medium of sight, in other words, through intelligent perception, which is assimilated, in virtue of such apprehension, to First Love. And just as the latter illuminates and animates the world, so does the sight of Beatrice spread the emanations of her light throughout the lover’s soul. Just as Love, the creative source of all things, is by nature immortal, so also Love for Beatrice cannot be other than eternal.³⁸ “Philosophy, that is, the love of wisdom,” he says, “is in reality the loving use of knowledge.”³⁹

The supreme poet of the Italian trecento pursues those conceptions of the Sufi mystics of the eleventh century considerably farther than they did. Since the time when Arabian mystical thought had set its mark on the songs of Andalusia and Provence, it had, in fact, undergone notable changes. The last days of Hispano-Moorish culture had seen the emergence of a great thinker, Ibn Roschd (Averroes), who, with measured philosophic balance, had attempted to combine the rationalism of Aristotle with the idealism of Plato, and whose works were to exercise an incalculable influence on the whole thought of Christian Europe. But, side by side with this final manifestation of Arabian philosophy, speculative tendencies were rife that were marked by the excesses of degeneration. Mysticism overflowed the mold of age-long formulae and poured forth a flood of visionary notions.

At the time when Brunetto Latini visited the Arabian academy at Toledo, the world of Islam had been thrown into a ferment by the doctrines of a mystic, Ibn Ali Ibn Arabi of Murcia, who had died twenty years earlier and had been raised to the rank of saint and prophet. Ibn Arabi had begun his career as a Sufi poet. Ibn Roschd himself, struck by the merit of his philosophical writings, had sought him out and consulted him. But Ibn Arabi had shortly after thrown all philosophical sobriety to the winds, and the expression of his mystical exaltation assumed the form of visions and allegories. He was a prolific writer. His chief work, Al-Futuhat, “Light” (or “Emanation”), dealing with the “Knowledge of God,” explains the effect produced on “intelligences” by the radiations or emanations of the supreme sphere. Taking up an ancient traditional theme, developed by Muhammed Ibn ‘Abd Allah Ibn Masarra of Cordova,⁴⁰ Ibn Arabi describes the evolutions of “intelligence” under the similitude of the journey of a philosopher. Taking Jerusalem, the center of the earth, as his point of departure, he visited, under the direction of various guides, the circles of hell and Limbo and ascended to the height of the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, eventually reaching the throne of the Primum mobile.⁴¹

A similar allegory appears to have inspired Dante when he speaks, in the Convito, of the progressive purification of Love and “of the evolution of life, which rises by degrees from Evil to Good, from Good to Better and from Better to the Supreme Good.”⁴² It was therefore important to determine with precision the conditions most favorable to the operation and perception of the celestial emanations, sources of all moral progress. This irradiation was thought of in the Middle Ages as an almost physical process. The old formula of the troubadours as to the penetration of love through the eyes was no longer a mere literary conceit, but a “scientific” theory taken quite seriously, and the process was held to be similar in its action to that by which radiations were transmitted to human souls by the spheres. Dante calculates that “if a stone fell from the pole of our celestial hemisphere, it would strike the head of a man placed at a distance of two thousand seven hundred miles west of Rome.”⁴³ But he later changed his mind and accepted the Islamic tradition followed by Al-Arabi, according to which “Paradise is situated within the seventh sphere above Jerusalem, so that if a stone fell from Paradise it would drop exactly on the Rock (of the Temple).”⁴⁴

The “lights” or emanations which affect intelligent minds do not proceed from the spheres themselves, but from the “intelligences” which direct them. “The celestial spheres are in fact set in motion,” says Dante, “by intelligences having no corporeal substance, that is to say, by angels.”⁴⁵ Those intelligences form three hierarchies, each of which comprises three orders of powers, corresponding to the nine spheres: the first hierarchy includes the angels, the archangels and the thrones; the second the commanding lordships, the virtues and the powers; the third the heavenly princes, the Cherubim and the Seraphim.⁴⁶

It was the age when attention was being drawn to the doctrines of the Kabbala. These had been introduced into Spain by Abraham Abúlafa (1210-1291), and long before that date they had been brought to notice by the Jew, Salomon Ibn Gebirol of Malaga (1021-1070), first known for his imitations of Arabian poets⁴⁷ and inspired, like Ibn Arabi, by the works of Ibn Massara. The celestial hierarchies of Dante, the order of which had been collated by the talmudists and the pseudo-Denys, correspond to those of the Kabbala: the Ofani, Arelim, Hashmalim, Malakim, Elohim, Bene-elohim, Ishim, Cherubim and Seraphim. The assimilation of man, the microcosm, to the macrocosm, and man as a paradigm, Adam Kadmon, animated by the emanations (acila) of the intelligences, or sephiroth, are the conceptions that form the kernel of Kabbalistic mysticism as it was disseminated in Italy during the thirteenth century by Menahem ben Benjamin of Recanati. A little later the Italian humanists of the so-called classical Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola, Poggio Bracciolini and Filelfo, were to fall under the spell of those mystic visions. These had already begun to exercise their influence on the poets of the stil nuovo, and that influence is clearly to be traced in the modified interpretations imposed on the traditional formulae of the troubadours.

The Italians believed that the ideas which so strangely infused themselves into their love-poetry derived from Plato. Hence the expression “Platonic love” which has passed into our languages. But, having had no opportunity of reading Plato, they in reality drew their conceptions from Alexandrian, Sufi and Jewish sources. What they took for Platonism—much to the amusement of the Greek, Gernistus, who had to explain to the members of the Florentine Platonic Academy that there existed differences between Plato and Aristotle—was in reality far more closely allied to the Neoplatonism of Proclus, Philo and the pseudo-Denys, and not markedly discriminated from the mysteries of the Kabbala.

Meanwhile, the old conventions of Provençal poetry, which bore the mark of their origin from the same sources at an earlier period, were respected by the Tuscan poets. Even the traditional distinction between “noble” or “courteous” love and the coarse feelings of the plebeian and middle classes, incongruous as it was in a society essentially middle class and republican, is given an important position in the works of Guinicelli, Cavalcanti and Dante:*

Guinicelli: Al cor gentil sempre Amor s’apprende.

Cavalcanti: . . . del suo cor gentil.

Dante: Amor che a cor gentil ratto s’apprende.

The whole of the best known canzone of Guinicelli has reference to this theme. It is developed by Guido Cavalcanti:

Dante endeavors, not without embarrassment, to explain this fundamental conception of Provençal courtly poetry in terms agreeable to the ideas which inspired the “new style.”⁴⁹ “Ibn Sīna and Al-Ghazāli considered,” he says, “that each soul is of its own nature either noble or base.”⁵⁰

Continuing the traditions represented by Sordello and the other Italian troubadours, the poets of the stil nuovo devoted themselves to composing variations on invariable burthens and formulae. “Love,” after becoming merged with the motor “intelligences” of the third sphere, that of Venus, and with the Prime Mover, retained little of its former connotation of a state of mind or personal sentiment. The symbol of passion is, strictly speaking, no more than an element in their art, an essential element, no doubt, lending itself as no other to the varied modulation of delicate sentiments, but subordinate, from the artistic standpoint, to the contrivance of curiously chiselled poetical gems.

Even as the painters of the Italian Renaissance were to exercise their technique and their talents on prescribed subjects, on madonnas or groups of saints, without necessarily being influenced by theology or piety, so the poets who continued the troubadour tradition showed themselves much more careful of the form than of the literal content of their art. In the commentaries which Dante attaches to his poems in the Vita nuova, as well as in his essay on the Vernacular Tongue, he applies himself to the discussion of technique, meter and vocabulary. And if those professional dissertations are blended with considerations on the subject of “Love,” the latter are, no less than his reflections on prosody and style, essentially literary arguments.

Had Dante been known to us only by his early lyrical poetry, he would in all probability have been scarcely distinguished above the other poets, Cavalcanti, Dino Frescobaldi, Cino da Pistoia, Gianni Alfani, and the few others of Guinicelli’s disciples. Sensitive as he was to the influences of his environment, he identified with their style, its merits and its faults. It tokens highly for the power and strength of his personality that he was eventually able, on his own independent impulse, to work himself free of that somewhat nerveless elegance. While retaining the contributions of the stil nuovo to wider means of expression, while using in even greater measure its faculties of suggestion and allusiveness, he forged for himself a different and more sinewy language.

In the third canzone of the Convivio he declares his purpose in explicit terms: “It behoves me,” he says, “to abandon the elegant love-rimes which my thoughts were wont to seek. . . . I shall lay aside the sweet style I used in treating of love, and shall speak of the true worth that enobles man in rimes both subtle and rugged”:

And in the series of canzoni known as petrose, the composition of which is placed by general consent in the last years of the thirteenth century, that is, when the Commedia was brooding in Dante’s mind, he again declares in plain words: nel mio parlar voglio esser, aspro, “my speech shall, I intend, be rugged” (ciii).

Rugged! That is the very antithesis of stil nuovo elegance. The Italian commentators are startled, perplexed, and not seldom grieved at the sudden change. It amounts to little less than an apostasy and a revolt. Signor Ortiz deplores that Dante “has relapsed into the Provençal style.” And in fact Dante went back for the sinewy and concrete vigor which was lacking in the elegant Latinity of contemporary Italian poetry, and which was demanded by the rising passion of his mood, to the head-fount, to the troubadours, and in particular to Arnaud Daniel, whom he declares to be his master and the “better craftsman”—il miglior fabbro.⁵² That frequently cited expression is often somewhat misleadingly quoted. Dante places it in the mouth of Guido Guinicelli, and it reads in that context, not “Arnaud Daniel is the best artificer,” but “Arnaud Daniel is a better artificer than I am.” For all the admiration he bestowed upon “the father of Italian poetry” and of the stil nuovo, Dante sets Arnaud Daniel above him.

For Dante, Provençal poetry was represented by the poets of the golden age; the very names of the poetasters subsequent to the crusade and the Inquisition were probably unknown to him. That poetry had, on the other hand, come to Dante and the other poets of the stil nuovo by way of the Italian troubadours, all of whom were friends and disciples of the collaborators of the Church. A curious paradox thus came about. While the technique inherited from the troubadours was that of the best phases of their art, the ideas understood to lie behind that art were those of its complete decadence. Like his successors and the majority of educated persons to the present day, Dante was deceived, in all innocence, by the pious fraud practiced by Montanhagol in regard to the old troubadours’ conception of “love.”

It is no accident that Sordello plays the conspicuous part assigned to him by Dante in the Purgatorio; throughout three cantos of the poem, from the sixth to the ninth, he acts as Dante’s guide. Even as Virgil was Dante’s instructor in Latin poetry, so another Mantuan poet, Sordello, directed his studies of the “modern classics” of his age, to wit, the troubadours. Sordello, who was something of a charlatan, does not owe his reputation to any conspicuous excellence in his poetry, but rather to the authoritarian manner with which he imposed his views, and thus won for himself in Italy the position of recognized authority on Provençal poetry. It was, therefore, inevitable that the Italians should accept Montanhagol’s theories and his habit of representing his predecessors as having conformed with them.

Sordello spent most of his life at the Court of Raimon VII of Toulouse. Dante, accordingly, in the sixth canto of the Paradiso, sides with Raimon Bérenger and Romieu de Villeneuve against the people of Provence, who were stirred to revolt by the measures which were to lead to the annexation of their country to the kingdom of France. Like most of the Provençal troubadours, Sordello was long a resident at the Spanish Courts, those of Alfonso IX of Leon, Sancho VII of Navarre and Ferdinand III of Castile. He only returned to Italy, at an advanced age, in the retinue of Charles of Anjou.⁵³ Dante was too young to have met him, but he knew Sordello’s famous mistress, Cunizza. However, it was scarcely necessary to have any personal acquaintance with Sordello in order to fall under the influence of his literary and moral theories. They were current coin in the circles of fourteenth century Italian men of letters.

As we have seen, Sordello excelled all the other troubadours in the extravagant affectations of spiritual sublimation which were introduced into Provence on the establishment of the Inquisition. It was in this counterfeit form that the courtly poetry of the troubadours was interpreted to the Italians of the north of the peninsula.

Although Dante was not in a position to perceive their historical causes, he was well aware of the deeper differences between the conception of the stil nuovo and those of the troubadours, or the more faithful imitations of the “Sicilian” school. In the Purgatorio, he contrives to meet Bonagiunta, an old “Sicilian” poet of Lucca. Dante takes occasion to touch on the widened conception of love of the new Tuscan poetry. “Brother,” replies Bonagiunta, “I now perceive what tether held us, the lawyer (Iacopo da Lentino), Guittone and myself, on the hither side of your stil nuovo. I know how your quills followed the dictates of your ideal. With us such soaring flight certainly never took place.”

Still less than the love-poetry of the troubadours, even those of the decadence, did the lyrical manner of the stil nuovo correspond to the conduct of the authors. We have seen to what point that inconsequence between theory and practice could be carried by a poet like Sordello, who was at the same time the extravagant apostle of spiritualized love in his poetry, and in his private life a notorious and cynical rake. The ecstasy of metaphysical and extra-terrestrial love bears no more relation to reality in the works of Guido Cavalcanti than in those of Sordello. When Cavalcanti chose to exercise his skill in the composition of a particular variety of Provençal lyric, the pastourelle, he thus had no difficulties in laying aside theories which would be out of place and in that sense adopting a different style.

I met a shepherdess in a grove and she seemed to me more beautiful than a star. . . . And I said to myself: This is certainly a good opportunity to enjoy myself with this little shepherdess . . . she led me to a cool thicket in which I saw flowers of all colors: and such joy and pleasure I had of her that I deemed I had a vision of the god of love.

It is a far cry from their vein to the refined key in which most of the poems of Guido Cavalcanti are modulated. To take the latter for descriptions of personal experiences and feelings would be as unreasonable as to suppose that the pastourelle, copied almost word for word from a Provençal model, narrates an actual adventure. Both styles are in equal measure literary conventions.

The chief series of erotic poems by Guido Cavalcanti is addressed to a lady whose name is given as “Mandetta,” seen at Toulouse in the Church of the Daurade during Mass. Petrarch, it will be recalled, also betakes himself to Provence for his sight, during divine service, of a lady who was to serve as the pretext for his effusions during nearly half a century. The Provençal lady of whom a glimpse is caught at Mass becomes almost a formula. May we see, in the circumstance that the ideal lady is found in Provence, a delicate expression of the obligation the Italian poets acknowledged towards their Provençal masters? However that may be, the little that is known concerning Cavalcanti’s private life is enough to show that there is no connection between the metaphysics of love in his poems and the principles which governed his behavior. The latter disclose no sign of sublimation.

Nor does the love experience of Dante Alighieri. Like the majority of poets, by temperament he was highly sensual. “Side by side with so much talent and learning,” writes Boccaccio, “his temperament displayed much lewdness of disposition. And this was the case not only during his youth but even after he had reached a mature age.”⁵⁶ Even if the testimony (which was never disputed and which was in accord with tradition down to the time of Filalfo and Missirimi) were in need of corroboration, this is amply forthcoming from the poet’s own mouth—dalla pro pria gota⁵⁷—much to the distress of modern Italian commentators, who twist and squirm to defend Dante’s virtue. With great vitality goes, as a rule, a many-sided diversity of moods and tempers. “I am changeable in every guise”—transmutabile son per tutte guise—Dante himself says.⁵⁸

It would be a great mistake to think of Dante as always wearing the stern mask of the thinker in which we are accustomed to see him pictured. He had in a high degree the sense of humor, so often lacking in writers straining to the highest themes, as in Milton, for instance. Dante knew full well how to unbend to boisterous and even riotous moods. “With the saints in church, in the taverns with the gluttons”—nella chiesa co’santi, ed in taverna co’ ghiottoni.⁵⁹ It is a very different Dante from the one we commonly picture, a laughing Dante, that we meet in the humoristic tenson, in a taste that puts one in mind of Boccaccio, with Forese Donati,⁶⁰ who, in Purgatory, recalls the gay life they led together, and what they were then.⁶¹ Another of Dante’s associates was the drunken and whoring Sienese poet, Cecco Angiolieri, who, having apparently had a quarrel with his companion, retorts with jocular invectives, telling him in effect: “I know you too well, Dante; you are not a whit better than I am.”⁶²

Sensuality is the besetting sin which Dante is called upon to confess before he can be admitted to the precincts of Paradise. “My steps have followed after the world’s false pleasures”—col falso lor piacer volser miei passi.⁶³ And Beatrice, in her stern indictment, charges that he has been too weak to resist the songs of the sirens.⁶⁴ He has fallen so low, she says, that only the sight of the punishments of hell could bring him to better his disposition.⁶⁵ And it thus happens that his sins of sensuality and her intervention to save him are the immediate occasion of his other-world journey.

Throughout Dante’s life passes a succession of women. His catalogue almost matches Leporello’s. In the very midst of the Vita nuova—the classic, as it were, of idealized lyric love—Dante dwells upon other amours. He refers to them under the traditional troubadour convention of the “screen lady,” serving to preserve the secret of his real love, although it is hard to see how the device applies in this instance. But he admits that the pretense went so far as to create considerable scandal, and that he addressed “trifles in verse” to those ladies—for there are at least two “screen-ladies,” who have been identified as the Fioretta and the Violetta of some of his most charming canzoni.⁶⁶ Beatrice refers to a third, the pargoletta, to whom a series of three of his sonnets is addressed.⁶⁷

No sooner is Beatrice dead than he consoles himself with a gentile donna, giovane e bella molto; the confession is also incorporated in his homage to Beatrice and ideal love.⁶⁸ And while he is engaged in the composition of the serene harmonies of the Purgatorio, his mind is burdened with a new intrigue: Bonagiunta “foretells” the pleasure Dante will have of a certain Gentucca, said to be the wife of Bonacorso, a rich merchant of Lucca.⁶⁹ Famed above others by reason of the superb canzoni petrose, inspired by a passion which is anything but ethereal, is the lady Petra, identified with Madonna Pietra de’ Scrovigni, of Padua.⁷⁰ Dante’s loves—the list of hints could be extended—range over a considerable variety. For a time he appears to have been much under the influence of a wild and willful little mountain peasant, “la Montanina,”⁷¹ and Boccaccio speaks of an Alpine lass, whether the same or another, “with an enlarged throat”—alpigina gozzuta.

The identification of those various ladies is purely conjectural. Not only is Dante so scrupulous in the observance of the rule of troubadour courtly love that he never refers to any except by a senhal, but he takes pleasure in enveloping their personality in a cloud of riddles and conundrums which has successfully baffled commentators, each of whom, almost, has some different interpretation to offer on the subject, and as to which is which. So far it is clear only that they were numerous. It is even open to doubt whether Beatrice was Beatrice Portinari. Dante first introduces the name in the Vita nuova, with the cryptic sentence: “The glorious Lady of my thoughts, who was by many called Beatrice, as they did not know her real name.” It would indeed be somewhat odd if Dante, so punctiliously scrupulous in the observance of the rule of using only a senhal, should have broken it only in the case of Beatrice. He says nothing of her marriage nor furnishes any particular as to her identity.

When the character of Italian amatory poetry in the fourteenth century is borne in mind, composed as it is, like troubadour poetry, almost wholly of literary conventions, the discussions as to the reality of Dante’s love for Beatrice, which fill the pages of critics, lose much of their interest. Dante’s poetic passion could not in any particular have unfolded, from the exquisite filigree of the Vita nuova to the apotheosis of the Paradiso, otherwise than it did. Whatever might be the deviations and tribulations of his life, his marriage, his numerous love affairs and his periods of wild dissipation, love, or rather Love with a capital, the central theme of his work, could be no other than a consuming passion filling the whole of his existence and occupying all his thoughts. The fact that this love dates from Dante’s tenderest infancy is in the best traditions; Bernard de Ventadorn had also known his lady almost from the cradle, Aucassin and Nicolette grew up together. Dante links this circumstance, by the aid of an exhaustive study of the Arabian calendar, with certain considerations connected with the number nine, which symbolizes mystical perfection.

In the works of all the poets writing in the tradition of the stil nuovo, right down to Petrarch’s day, the occasions of their first beholding their ladies are described in minute detail, while scarcely another incident of their love affairs is circumstantially reported. This treatment is connected with the theory that “Love” penetrates the heart by way of the eyes, and therefore it is only the first encounter of Dante and Beatrice, of Guido Cavalcanti and Mandetta, of Petrarch and Laura, which counts and is worth detailed rehearsal. For the same reason we know nothing of these ladies except their personal appearance and the color of the dress they wore at the time. Whether they were intelligent or stupid, sweet-tempered or irritable, are irrelevant circumstances in the metaphysical theory of love.

The maneuver by means of which Dante pretends to conceal his love and mislead slander by paying court to other young women, who play the part of “screen-ladies,” is among the most honorable traditions of courtly love. Again, she is like Laura, under the obligation of dying, in order that she may be elevated to the highest sphere of the empyrean and become one with Divine Wisdom or the Queen of Heaven.

There is no need to be cynical in judging the poet’s perfect love. That a momentary meeting should suffice to inspire a tender passion which will last a lifetime without any encouragement, and should outlive its object; that this attachment should not be based on any personal relationship, even the most irreproachable; that it should date from the lover’s tenderest years; that it should inspire and sustain a literary activity prolonged into old age—all these things are possible. Human nature is capable of anything when favored by circumstances. But that more than fifty poets should exhibit the same psychological peculiarities of amorous passion at the same period transcends the bounds of plausibility. We may be prepared to believe in the existence of one white blackbird: it is another thing to ask one to believe in a whole flock of them.

Biographical details concerning a certain Monna Bice, daughter of Messer Folco Portinari, encountered by Dante on the 1st May 1274 at one o’clock in the afternoon, married to a certain Messer Simone de Bardi and dying on the 8th June 1290; or concerning a certain Lady de Noves, wife of Sir Hugues de Sade, to whom she bore about a dozen children, or about one a year, seen by Messer Petrarch on the 6th April 1327, Good Friday, in the Church of Sainte-Claire, situated in the city of Avignon, in the county of Venaissin⁷²—all such particulars and a thousand more can add nothing to the likelihood of the story. When one proposes to dedicate a sonnet or a whole sequence of sonnets to a lady who must fulfill certain conditions prescribed by the rules of art, there is no need to be a great poet or a great lover to find, by delving into one’s memories, some incident or other which more or less conforms to the conditions required. The lady herself may do her best to fall in with the demands of the poetic passion, but she nevertheless plays quite a minor part in the affair. She is not the occasion of the lyrical work nor does she inspire it; on the contrary, it is the creation of the poet which assigns her a part which she is under the obligation of assuming.

Dante concludes his breviary of love, La Vita nuova, with the statement that he hopes to build a literary monument to his lady, the like of which never was dedicated to any woman.⁷³ By taking over the language fashioned by the lyric art of the troubadours and the poets of the stil nuovo in view of conventional themes and stylized emotions, and applying it to the expression of real passions, of bitter suffering, fierce hatred, deep tenderness, profound sadness, and great hopes, by combining the skilled technique of Provençal and Tuscan art with the whole thought and science of his day, Dante created the poetic masterpiece of the new Europe, first in point of time, and never surpassed or equalled since. This monument, which towers at the crossroads of the centuries, and from the pinnacle of whose greatness the eye is carried past the petty futilities and imbecilities of the times toward eternal horizons, is nevertheless constructed from the materials of the stylized art upon which rest, in time, its majestic tiers.

The art of the courtly jongleur, whose affectations raise a smile, forged the speech of Dante. Nor was it their manner and conventions alone which the troubadours of Provence bequeathed to him; they passed on to the supreme poet both the rich harmonies and the prodigious concision which give his language its miraculous quality. Dante avows his fondness for the trobar clus—le parole oscuro, which makes sensible the mystery that eludes expression. We find again in him the boldness characteristic of Arnaud Daniel or Peire Vidal, which promotes a common word, transmuted in the magic crucible of style, to the highest uses of language and inspired imagination. Dante is truly an Italian troubadour. The Divine Comedy, which, in conformity with the consecrated formulae, raises the ideal lady to the highest spheres, sets the crown upon the amatory conceits of the Vita nuova and the canzoni. The artificial love which the troubadours sang, the subtilized love of the stil nuovo, breaks the envelope of its chrysalis and spreads its wings. It becomes the Love which moves the sun and the other stars—l’amor che muove il sol e l’altre stelle.

It is often said that Dante created the Italian language. Would he had. He was, however, too close in time to the outbreak in Italy of a cult that was to have a profound effect upon all European literatures. Already foreshadowed in the trends of the stil nuovo, against which Dante had raised his cry of revolt, the Renaissance instituted the doctrinal domination of classicism, that is of Latinity. Latin was the measure of all things. Dante, after excelling in the smooth Latin elegance which the stil nuovo induced upon Provençal lyricism, had deliberately curbed the somewhat insipid graces of that mellifluous polish. He had brought back from Arnaud Daniel a more ancient “rugged” directness. To the pundits of the new cult, that rebellion was heresy; Dante was insufficiently Latin, he was “Gothic.” Even though the classic zeal did not, in Italy, attain to the vehemence it displayed in France, its effects were very similar. The Italian Renaissance sought to repudiate Dante. He was, as one of the Florentine humanists put it, “banished from the conclaves of the learned, and abandoned to the entertainment of wool-carders and bakers.” For centuries, Italy sought to forget her greatest poet. As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, the Jesuit writer S. Bettinelli charged Dante with being devoid of good taste, obscure, ponderous, and that of all the Commedia, scarcely a thousand lines are worth preserving.⁷⁴

But by a curious irony, the so-called Renaissance—for the real one, which brought barbaric Europe to life, and made the efflorescence of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries possible, took place in the twelfth under the influence of Islamic civilization—this so-called Renaissance continued to follow even more closely in some respects than did Dante the tradition inaugurated by the troubadours of Provence. Its founder in Italy was Petrarch. He, the most pampered of poets, crowned with laurel at the Capitol, honored by the European courts and chosen as the ambassador of kings and emperors, was universally recognized as the most eminent representative of the new era.

The work by which the father of the humanist Renaissance has always been best known, however, was even more faithfully modelled, in its subject-matter, inspiration and form, on the troubadour tradition than was Dante’s. “Petrarch was the final blossom and perfection of the troubadours,” says S. T. Coleridge.⁷⁵ The favored poet helped himself so freely at that source that Tassoni, Bembo and others have charged him with plagiarism.⁷⁶ Petrarch nowise repels the imputation. To follow the model of amatory lyricism was, in his eyes, no more transgression calling for apology than Virgil’s paraphrasing of Homer. In the third canto of his “Triumphs,” Petrarch enumerates his literary ancestors. After paying homage to his Italian predecessors, he proceeds:

In their wake came a company of foreigners, writers in the vernacular. Their leader is Arnaud Daniel, the great master of love, whose elegant and polished style honours the country that gave him birth. Beside him walk the two Peires (Peire Rogier and Peire Vidal), who felt so keenly the strokes of love, the lesser Arnaud (Arnaud de Mareuil) and all those whom love could not subdue but after a long contest. I mean the two Ranbauds (Ranbaud d’Orange and Ranbaud de Vaqueiras), both of whom sang of Beatrice of Montferrat. Also the aged Peire d’Auvergne, Giraud (de Bornelh) and Folquet whose name is the pride of Marseilles, and who deprived Genoa of that honour when he exchanged his lyre and songs for a kinder and more devout vocation; Jaufré Rudel, who took sail to meet death; Aimery (de Peguilain), Bernard (de Ventadorn), Hugues (de Saint-Cyr) and many more, whose voice served them as lance and sword, helm and shield.⁷⁷

Thus by one of the paradoxes which pervade history, the acknowledged representative of the “classical” cult, which came to wield the tyranny of a dictatorial literary absolutism, was at the same time the model and immediate source of the directly opposite trend, which classicism fiercely combated. What is true of Petrarch holds with equal force of the whole influence exercised by Italy during the formative centuries that followed. Italy was regarded as the natural heir of classical antiquity, but she was at the same time the repository of the Provençal tradition. Many who turned to Italy for closer touch with the “antique,” received instead the “courtly” and romantic inspiration that hales from Provence. Englishmen who undertook the Italian journey to breathe in its native fields the perfume of the “antique,” returned loaded with the fruits of troubadour tradition. The Italian influence gave rise, on the one hand, to Racine and French classicism, and on the other to the Elizabethan efflorescence and Shakespeare.

Petrarch’s prestige gave birth, throughout Europe, to a lyrical activity fashioned on the model which he had set. His version of the troubadour love-song remains probably the best in any language. He is restrained and dignified, and exempt from the added coloratura in which his imitators indulged. But that perfection is not the perfection of the troubadours. As with all humanists and classicists after him, he was debarred by the psychosis of Latinity from piercing to the very qualities that charmed him. He could conceive of no other manner of painting the lily than to overlay it with a coat of Ciceronian and Virgilian varnish.

Latin is the noblest, with one exception, of known languages. Western civilization cannot be pictured without the perfusion in its blood and substance of the speech and thought which first differentiated it from the barbarian world. But the fact remains that attempts to impose more Latinity on speech and expression that have grown independently of the Latin model have been uniformly disastrous. For one thing the insensate incongruity of applying the syntax of a highly inflected language to idioms which have entirely shed desinential inflections imparts an uncouthness even to the most musical of languages. Boccaccio’s prose, the admired model that trails its influence even in modern literary Italian, with its gerunds, participles absolute and transpositions, in its gawkiness occasionally approaches German at its worst.

Petrarch, sincerely and enthusiastically admiring his models, no more understood them than Pope, sincerely and enthusiastically admiring Homer, understood him, when he attired him in the garb of his rhyming couplets, and made him express himself in smart antitheses like a coffee-house wit. It is owing to that tonedeafness, begot of the blind cult of Latinity, that Petrarch was incapable of understanding Dante. Dante was, to Petrarch’s thinking, insufficiently Latin. His art was not the smooth-flowing elegance of his declared guide Virgil, but of a quality immeasurably superior. And it is owing to the same incapacity that the far-spread and momentous renewal of the troubadour tradition, translated into the “perfected” form in which Petrarch garbed it, begot the failures of taste which blurred, in England, the luster of Elizabethan brilliancy.

Before long, that misconception killed poetry in Italy itself. The swarms of disciples and imitators of Petrarch further “improved” on his improvements of the troubadour genre and manner, and turned out a Petrarchese poetry larded with conceits and trinketed with gauds and ornaments like an old whore. And when the classicizing Puritan, Milton, went to Italy for inspiration, he found there nothing but “flattery and fustian.”

In sixteenth-century France the center of the cult of Petrarchist poetry was at Lyons, in the circle of Louise Labé and Maurice Scève. Clement Marot, on his release from the Conciergerie and the Châtelet, where he had been confined for “eating bacon in Lent,” joined the Court at Lyons, and there made the acquaintance of the followers of Petrarch and composed the first sonnet in French. The new type of composition was soon rendered illustrious by Ronsard. This interesting technical development articulated the whole theory of love as it had arisen out of the orthodox passion of such as Montanhagol, Guiraut Riquier, Sordello, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti and Dante. Antoine Heroet gave a lengthy exposition of its principles in his Parfaite Amye, and Maurice Scève repeated, in his Delie, the spiritualized passion of Dante and Petrarch. Joachim du Bellay, in spite of the passages of invective in his Deffense and his poem Against the Petrarchans, was, like all the rest of the Pleiad poets, a Petrarchan. He celebrated, in fifty sonnets, his immortal and etherealized love for Olive, as Ronsard did his for Cassandre. The brief flowering of the Italianate blossoms in France, however, was smothered almost at its birth by the “Pleïade” itself and the classical movement.

Strange though it may appear at first blush, the Provençal tradition was much more continuous and lasting in England than in France. Before the French pseudo-classical reaction had crossed the channel, England had produced its palmary literary glory in the Elizabethan age, and the classical reaction could not assume the destructive violence that it had in France. Before it had reached these Islands, England had Elizabethan literature, derived directly from Italy without its having passed through France. The manner, style, metrical models, and the very themes and conceits of the troubadour tradition, which had moulded Italian lyrical poetry, became transported, bodily one might say, into England. There it was the more readily endenizened owing to the poetical art having, from the first, grown there as an offshoot of the Provençal stock.

The English poets, Raleigh, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, while probably unaware of those Provençal origins, were fully conscious of their Italian ties and of that migration. Foremost in bringing about the latter was a poet whom Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch regards as “one of the glories” of English poetry and “one of the heroes of our literature,” Sir Thomas Wyat. He had made a sojourn in Italy, and it was he, chiefly, who brought “the flame of lyrical poetry to England, the flame of the Petrarchists, caught from the Troubadours.”⁷⁸

It is of interest to note that Wyat, “who led our poets to Italy” and introduced the sonnet and much else that became characteristic of a new phase of English poetry, showed a particular fondness for an archaic stanzaic form, which had passed out of usage among the Italian poets themselves. That form is no other than the Hispano-Mauresque murabba’, the technological seed of the whole lyrical evolution. Thus he sings:

Or again:

and:

That popular form of Provençal poetry, as we have seen, became established in English lyrical poetry during the latter part of the thirteenth century. It retained its dominant position down to the verge of the Elizabethan age, within hailing distance, one might say, of Shakespeare. The lyrical effusions on which King Henry VIII plumed himself bear very much the same cast and manner as those of the Count de Poitiers:

Wyat is the more emblematic of the great transition which he was paramountly instrumental in bringing about, in that he uses the ancient murabba’ form side by side with its Italian derivative, which he introduced into England—the sonnet.

Shakespeare* went to school with the Italianate sonneteers. It has been deplored that he was an Elizabethan. But his faculty, no less than his failings, is a product of his age, and had he written in another, the Augustan, say, or the Romantic, we should not have known the quality that enthralls us. The Tudor English, excited by the rout of the Armada, had had revealed to them potentialities and a plasticity in words which they had not before suspected. And Shakespeare found his powers in revelry. There is nothing intrinsically reprehensible, so far as I can perceive, in giving rein to a glamorous mastery of diction. A burst of verbal coruscation is often amusing; it sometimes strikes us with breathtaking excitement, as:

and that is the mark to which great poets aim. What conflicts with that aim is habitual indulgence of that verbal profligacy.

In a sober, judicious, but appreciative appraisal of Shakespeare, Walpole says: “He cannot be simple.” That is a grievous disability. Besides producing artificiality, uniform verbal glamour cannot but be at times forced, as is only too apparent when Shakespeare’s inspiration—as not so seldom happens—sags to the level of contemporary turgidity. Yet but for that vice, the conquest of language wherein consists Shakespearean magic would not have been achieved.

Shakespeare towers like a mountain peak above the surrounding foothills, but is of one substance and structure with them. That cast and texture was imported, wittingly and avowedly, from Italy; and the Italians had it, wittingly and avowedly, from an older poetic fabric. The blossom of Elizabethan splendor was a new burgeoning from the Provençal stock. In his Biographia literaria, Coleridge, who knew nothing of Provençal poetry, characterizes the Elizabethans—not very acutely, it is true—in words that might apply with equal, indeed greater aptness to the troubadours:

The imagery is always general sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels, cruel as fair . . . are the materials which are common to all, and which each shaped according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to add or particularize. . . . (They) derive their chief attraction from the manner of treating them; from impassioned flow or picturesque arrangement. . . . They placed the essence of poetry in the art. The excellence at which they aimed consisted in the exquisite polish of diction combined with perfect simplicity. This their prime object they attained by avoidance of every word and phrase which none but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of the whole . . . and lastly with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical movement. . . . Superior excellence in the manner of treating the same subject was the trial and test of the artist’s merit.

The wealth of Shakespeare’s poetic resources enables him to substitute gold for pinchbeck, and diamonds for glass in the confection of his jewels. But their mode and manner conform to the time’s tastes and fashions. Form and resonance take precedence over matter, and the profundity of the latter, often, like the trobar clus, more apparent than real (his philosophy does not extend much farther than that of the man in the street), is above all one more instrument in the production of the magic of his art. His thought, his invention, nay, his very insight into character and his dramatic sense, are subservient to the primary aim of verbal music and verbal splendor. These are not mere vehicles for the expression of their contents, but the very essence of his, as of all poetry.

Product though he was of his age, Shakespeare bears the token of true artistic intelligence, in that he grew, learned, mellowed. In his more youthful production, tipsy with the wealth at his disposal, he riots in its prodigal spending. He thumps his target with the scattering discharges of a blunderbuss of words and images. As, to cite at haphazard:

That is bombast. It is wholly bad. Nothing is added to the main image by the volley of irrelevant epithets and subsidiary images—“babbling,” “remorseful,” “loud-howling wolves,” “jades,” “tragic melancholy.” On the contrary, the main image is wholly obliterated under the dump of irrelevancies. The old jongleur, Cercamon, is immeasurably nearer to true poetry when he says simply:

The intended image is there, clear, picturesque, and vivid, as it is not in Shakespeare.

But at the turn of the century and of his life’s maturity, Shakespeare, ripened and sobered, returns unto himself. Abandoning comedy and the pomp of patriotic chronicle-plays, where he had found free scope for his verbal abundance to play revel without overmuch concern for the emotional quality of poetry, he entered the period of the great tragedies. His advice to the players in Hamlet, not to tear passion to tatters, sounds very much like self-rebuke, and a recantation of his too fond attachment to Elizabethan exuberance. Othello says: “She was false as water,” and the words are telling! But in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare had said:

The Shakespeare of the great tragic period, of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, has banked and stilled the torrent of his eloquence and thereby lifted it to a higher level. He has for the most part, though not entirely, discarded his blunderbuss, and hits the mark with a single level shot. He has accordingly grown to an artistic stature which he had not previously attained. And in that strange, almost inexplicable, farewell to art, The Tempest, in which he breaks and buries his staff, and abjures his rough magic, Shakespeare takes his place in the highest seats of poetry.

And in the measure that he hardens to the spell of the Petrarchizing version of troubadour tradition, Shakespeare discloses an affinity to a purer form of that same tradition. He draws very close to Dante:

That is poetry of the high order. The incisive edge of the brief exhortation of Ulysses to his aged companions, however, has an emotional and a dramatic poignancy which Hamlet’s philosophical soliloquy has not:

That is also great poetry. How its quality stands by the side of Dante’s each must pronounce for himself.

The evolution whose main outlines have been sketched above constitutes a chapter of literary history. But literature is the blood of the mental life of humankind, which is transmitted from generation to generation. The conventions and idealizations of the poets, however removed they may appear from the real life of the time and from that of their authors, have had a profound effect on European civilization. The “courtesy” of twelfth-century Provence reappears in seventeenth and eighteenth century “gallantry”; it comes up again in the novel of the nineteenth century. Whatever the distance may be between literature and life, the written word sets a deep impress on the mind and the emotions of the human heart. Romantic feeling would never have existed had it not been sustained by novels and poetry. National psychology and social tradition are in a large measure the products of literature.

The emotions that spring from sex constitute a biological fact. They are independent, as regards their source, of all the conventions and principles laid down by the human spirit. The forms that these impulses assume, however, are sensitive in the highest degree to the influences expressed by literature. Literature and religion have often changed the aspect and character of such forms. The East and the West, the North and the South, display differences which appear to affect the very nature of the human heart and which have been set down to race, blood, or climate, but which are in a far greater degree the result of social traditions, conventions and habits of mind, transmitted by environment and diffused and perpetuated by the words of writers and poets.

Europe, at the dawn of its revival after the centuries of darkness which followed the collapse of the ancient world, underwent one of the most remarkable of such transformations. It would be necessary, in order to measure the extent of the change, to recall what were the ideas and feelings in Greek and Roman antiquity on the subject of women and love, what their character was in the barbaric world and finally how these topics are regarded by uncivilized and primitive people. Such a survey, which we have undertaken elsewhere and of which the present work only represents a fragment, would enable a just estimate to be reached of the ground covered by this “immensely far-ranging revolution” and this “new conception of love” for which the troubadours of Provence have long been praised.

The part they had in that revolution was, in reality, very indirect. It was not through the dialectical subtleties of courtly love nor through the so-called neo-platonism of the Italian poets and the Petrarchists that the change of feeling in question was brought about. It was imposed on European literature, on fiction and on poetry, by a power of quite another order of vehemence, persistence and authority: the power of the Church.

The Fathers of the Church regarded sexual love as the essence of sin and woman as “the gate of hell.”⁸⁷ They accounted chastity more important than the doctrines of the Christian faith.⁸⁸ “The lightest stain upon our chastity,” declared Tertullian, “is harder for us to bear than death.”⁸⁹ “The kingdom of heaven,” he said again, “is the home of eunuchs.”⁹⁰ Origen castrated himself.⁹¹ Saint Ambrose believed that the extinction of the human race was preferable to its propagation through sin.⁹² “Married persons,” he wrote elsewhere, “should blush for the state in which they live.”⁹³ “Every woman,” said Clement of Alexandria, “should be overwhelmed with shame at the thought that she is a woman.”⁹⁴

Extravagant and morbid as they may appear to us, those doctrines lie at the foundation of the attitudes, accounted moderate and reasonable, which are held by the average European and American in this respect. It is a subject which, as the philosopher Ibn Hazm of Cordova once said, “is often treated frivolously in jest, but may become a very serious and solemn matter.” It is to the pressure which the doctrines of the Church Fathers exerted for centuries on European thought and literature, that the feelings and ethical canons of civilized nations owe the traits of character by which they are distinguished. They have effected a compromise between the brutal impulses of the savage and the ascetic frenzy of the imperious passion which disturbs the human mind; they have clothed love in a web woven of the light and graceful arabesque of poetry.

But has this expedient solved the problem? It would be rash to say so. The blind impulses of the great biological forces have not developed in view of conditions which are peculiar to the human race, the conditions, namely, of social life. Between those two factors, biological and social, irreducible contradictions exist which it is beyond the power of any compromise to reconcile. Yet, artificial as may be the idealizations which the lyrical and romantic spirit tried to impose upon passion, it cannot be contended that they are more so than any other adjustment of the dilemma which has hitherto been attempted by humanity. And they have at least made a leading contribution to the creation of the sublime fiction which the human spirit has cast, like a veil, over life, over its hideousness and misery, and which we call art. The troubadours called it joy and youth.

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* Cf.: “love, that is in the gentle heart begone” -Spenser.

* An alternate version of this section on Shakespeare is given in the Appendix.