The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 23

[Footnote 182: Following Eustathius in Hercher, _op. cit._]

[Footnote 183: These political verses are fifteen-syllabled, with a caesura at the eighth, and in a rhythm ostensibly accentual.]

[Footnote 184: _Erotici Scriptores_, ii. 555.]

[Sidenote: Hysminias and Hysmine.]

[Sidenote: _Its style._]

But _Hysminias and Hysmine_[185] has interests of character which distinguish its author and itself, not merely from the herd of chroniclers and commentators who make up the bulk of Byzantine literature so-called, but even from such more respectable but somewhat featureless work as Anna Comnena's. It is not a good book; but it is by no means so extremely bad as the traditional judgment (not always, perhaps, based on or b.u.t.tressed by direct acquaintance with the original) is wont to give out. On one at least of the sides of this interest it is quite useless to read it except in the original, for the attraction is one of style. Neither Lyly nor any of our late nineteenth-century "stylists" has outgone, perhaps none has touched, Eustathius in euphuism. It is needless to say that while the simplicity of the best Greek style usually prefers the most direct and natural order, its suppleness lends itself to almost any gymnastic, and its lucidity prevents total confusion from arising. Eustathius has availed himself of these opportunities for "raising his mother tongue to a higher power" to the very utmost. No translation can do justice to the elaborate foppery of even the first sentence,[186] with its coquetry of arrangement, its tormented structure of phrase, its jingle of sound-repet.i.tion, its desperate rejection of simplicity in every shape and form. To describe precisely the means resorted to would take a chapter at least. They are astonis.h.i.+ngly modern--the present tense, the use of catchwords like [Greek: holos], the repet.i.tions and jingles above referred to. Excessively elaborate description of word-painting, though modern too, can hardly be said to be a novelty: it had distinguished most of the earlier Greek novelists, especially Achilles Tatius. But there is something in the descriptions of _Hysminias and Hysmine_ more mediaeval than those of Achilles, more like the _Romance of the Rose_, to which, indeed, there is a curious resemblance of atmosphere in the book. Triplets of epithet--"a man athirst, and parched, and boiling"--meet us. There is a frequent economy of conjunctions. There is the resort to personification--for instance, in the battle of Love and Shame, which serves as climax to the elaborate description of the lovers' kissing.

In short, all our old friends--the devices which every generation of seekers after style parades with such a touching conviction that they are quite new, and which every literary student knows to be as old as literature--are to be found here. The language is in its decadence: the writer has not much to say. But it is surprising how much, with all his drawbacks, he accomplishes.

[Footnote 185: Sometimes spelt _Ismenias and Ismene_. I believe it was first published in an Italian translation of the late Renaissance, and it has appeared in other languages since. But it is only worth reading in its own.]

[Footnote 186: [Greek: Polis Eurykomis kai talla men agathe, hoti kai thalatte stephanoutai kai poilmois katarreitai kai leimosi koma kai tryphais eutheneitai pantodapais, ta d' eis theous eusebes, kai hyper tas chrysas Athenas hole bomos, hole thyma, theois anathema.]]

[Sidenote: _Its story._]

Whether the book, either as an individual composition, or more probably as a member of an extinct cla.s.s, is as important in matter and in tone as it is in style is more doubtful. The style itself, as to which there is no doubt, may perhaps colour the matter too much.

All that can be safely said is that it reads with distinctly modern effect after Heliodorus and Achilles, Longus and Xenophon. The story is not much. Hysminias, a beautiful youth of the city of Eurycomis, is chosen for a religious emba.s.sy or _kerukeia_ to the neighbouring town of Aulicomis. The task of acting as host to him falls on one Sosthenes, whose daughter Hysmine strikes Hysminias with love at first sight. The progress of their pa.s.sion is facilitated by the pretty old habit of girls acting as cupbearers, and favoured by accident to no small degree, the details of the courts.h.i.+p being sometimes luscious, but adjusted to less fearless old fas.h.i.+ons than the wooings of Chloe or of Melitta. Adventures by land and sea follow; and, of course, a happy ending.

[Sidenote: _Its handling._]

But what is really important is the way in which these things are handled. It has as mere story-telling little merit: the question is whether the spirit, the conduct, the details, do not show a temper much more akin to mediaeval than to cla.s.sical treatment. I think they do. Hysminias is rather a silly, and more than rather a chicken-hearted, fellow; his conduct on board s.h.i.+p when his beloved incurs the fate of Jonah is eminently despicable: but then he was countryman _ex hypothesi_ of Mourzoufle, not of Villehardouin. The "battailous" spirit of the West is not to be expected in a Byzantine sophist. Whether something of its artistic and literary spirit is not to be detected in him is a more doubtful question. For my part, I cannot read of Hysmine without being reminded of Nicolette, as I am never reminded in other parts of the _Scriptores Erotici_.

[Sidenote: _Its "decadence."_]

Yet, experiment or remainder, imitation or original, one cannot but feel that the book, like all the literature to which it belongs, has more of the marks of death than of life in it. Its very elegances are "rose-coloured curtains for the doctors"--the masque of a moribund art. Some of them may have been borrowed by, rather than from, younger and hopefuller craftsmans.h.i.+p, but the general effect is the same. We are here face to face with those phenomena of "decadence," which, though they have often been exaggerated and wrongly interpreted, yet surely exist and reappear at intervals--the contortions of style that cannot afford to be natural, the tricks of word borrowed from literary reminiscence ([Greek: holos] itself in this way is at least as old as Lucian), the tormented effort at detail of description, at "a.n.a.lysis"

of thought and feeling, of incident and moral. The cant phrase about being "_ne trop tard dans un monde trop vieux_" has been true of many persons, while more still have affected to believe it true of themselves, since Eustathius: it is not much truer of any one than of him.

Curious as such specimens of a dying literature may be, it cannot but be refres.h.i.+ng to go westward from it to the nascent literatures of Italy and of Spain, literatures which have a future instead of merely a past, and which, independently of that somewhat illegitimate advantage, have characteristics not unable to bear comparison with those of the past, even had it existed.

[Sidenote: _Lateness of Italian._]

Between the earliest Italian and the earliest Spanish literature, however, there are striking differences to be noted. Persons ignorant of the usual course of literary history might expect in Italian a regular and unbroken development, literary as well as linguistic, of Latin. But, as a matter of fact, the earliest vernacular literature in Italy shows very little trace of cla.s.sical influence[187]: and though that influence appears strongly in the age immediately succeeding ours, and helps to produce the greatest achievements of the language, it may be questioned whether its results were wholly beneficial. In the earliest Italian, or rather Sicilian, poetry quite different influences are perceptible. One of them--the influence of the literatures of France, both Southern and Northern--is quite certain and incontestable. The intercourse between the various Romance-speaking nations surrounding the western Mediterranean was always close; and the development of Provencal literature far antic.i.p.ated, both in date and form, that of any other. Moreover, some northern influence was undoubtedly communicated by the Norman conquests of the eleventh century. But two other strains--one of which has long been a.s.serted with the utmost positiveness, while the latter has been a favourite subject of Italian patriotism since the political unification of the country--are much more dubious. Because it is tolerably certain that Italian poetry in the modern literary sense arose in Sicily, and because Sicily was beyond all doubt almost more Saracen than Frank up to the twelfth century, it was long, and has not quite ceased to be, the fas.h.i.+on to a.s.sign a great, if not the greatest, part to Arabian literature. Not merely the sonnet (which seems to have arisen in the two Sicilies), but even the entire system of rhymed lyrical verse, common in the modern languages, has been thus referred to the East by some.

[Footnote 187: I have not thought it proper, considering the system of excluding mere hypothesis which I have adopted, to give much place here to that interesting theory of modern "Romanists" which will have it that Latin cla.s.sical literature was never much more than a literary artifice, and that the modern Romance tongues and literatures connect directly, through that famous _lingua romana rustica_ and earlier forms of it, vigorous though inarticulate, in cla.s.sical times themselves, with primitive poetry--"Saturnian," "Fescennine," and what not. All this is interesting, and it cannot be said, in the face of inscriptions, of the sc.r.a.ps of popular speech in the cla.s.sics, &c., to be entirely guesswork. But a great deal of it is.]

[Sidenote: _The "Saracen" theory._]

This matter can probably never be p.r.o.nounced upon, with complete satisfaction to readers, except by a literary critic who is equally competent in Eastern and Western history and literature, a person who certainly has not shown himself as yet. What can be said with some confidence is, that the Saracen theory of Literature, like the Saracen theory of Architecture, so soon as it is carried beyond the advancing of a possible but slight and very indeterminate influence and colouring, has scarcely the slightest foundation in known facts, and is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with facts that are known, while it is intrinsically improbable to the very highest degree. As has been pointed out above, the modern prosody of Europe is quite easily and logically explicable as the result of the juxtaposition of the Latin rhythms of the Church service, and the verse systems indigenous in the different barbaric nations. That the peculiar cast and colour of early Italian poetry may owe something of that difference which it exhibits, even in comparison with Provencal, much more with French, most of all with Teutonic poetry, to contact with Arabian literature, is not merely possible but probable. Anything more must be regarded as not proven, and not even likely.

[Sidenote: _The "folk-song" theory._]

[Sidenote: _Ciullo d'Alcamo._]

Of late, however, attempts have been made to a.s.sign the greater part of the matter to no foreign influence whatever, but to native folk-songs, in which at the present time, and no doubt for a long time back, Italy is beyond all question rich above the wont of European countries. But this attempt, however interesting and patriotic, labours under the same fatal difficulties which beset similar attempts in other languages. It may be regarded as perfectly certain that we do not possess any Italian popular poem in any form which can have existed prior to the thirteenth century; and only such poems would be of any use. To argue, as is always argued in such cases, that existing examples show, by this or that characteristic, that in other forms they must have existed in the twelfth century or even earlier, is only an instance of that learned childishness which unfortunately rules so widely in literary, though it has been partly expelled from general, history. "May have been" and "must have been" are phrases of no account to a sound literary criticism, which insists upon "was." And in reference to this particular subject of Early Italian Poetry the reader may be referred to the very learned dissertation[188] of Signor Alessandro d'Ancona on the _Contrasto_ of Ciullo d'Alcamo, which has been commonly regarded as the first specimen of Italian poetry, and has been claimed for the beginning of the thirteenth century, if not the end of the twelfth. He will, if the G.o.ds have made him in the least critical, rise from the perusal with the pretty clear notion that whether Ciullo d'Alcamo was "such a person," or whether he was Cielo dal Camo; whether the _Contrasto_ was written on the bridge of the twelfth and thirteenth century, or fifty years later; whether the poet was a warrior of high degree or an obscure folk-singer; whether his dialect has been Tuscanised or is still Sicilian with French admixture,--these are things not to be found out, things of mere opinion and hypothesis, things good to write programmes and theses on, but only to be touched in the most gingerly manner by sober history.

[Footnote 188: See _Studj sulla Letteratura Italiana dei Primi Secoli_. 2d ed. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1891. Pp. 241-458.]

To the critic, then, who deals with Dante--and especially to him, inasmuch as he has the privilege of dealing with that priceless doc.u.ment, the _De Vulgari Eloquio_,[189]--may be left Ciullo, or Cielo, and his successors the Frederician set, from the Emperor himself and Piero delle Vigne downwards. More especially to him belong the poets of the late thirteenth century, Dante's own immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and in a way masters--Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Sinibaldi, and Guittone d'Arezzo (to whom the canonical form of the sonnet used at one time to be attributed, and may be again); Brunetto Latini, of fiery memory; Fra Jacopone,[190] great in Latin, eccentric in Italian, and others. It will be not merely sufficient, but in every way desirable, here to content ourselves with an account of the general characteristics of this poetry (contemporary prose, though existent, is of little importance), and to preface this by some remarks on the general influences and contributions of material with which Italian literature started.

[Footnote 189: Obtainable in many forms, separately and with Dante's works. The Latin is easy enough, but there is a good English translation by A.G. Ferrers Howell (London, 1890). Those who like facsimiles may find one of the Gren.o.ble MS., with a learned introduction, edited by MM. Maignien and Prompt (Venice, 1892).]

[Footnote 190: Authorities differ oddly on Jacopone da Todi (_v._ p.

8) in his Italian work. Professor d'Andrea's book, cited above, opens with an excellent essay on him.]

[Sidenote: _Heavy debt to France._]

There is no valid reason for doubting that these influences and materials were mainly French. As has been partly noted in a former chapter, the French _chansons de geste_ made an early and secure conquest of the Italian ear in the north, partly in translation, partly in the still more unmistakable form of macaronic Italianised French. It has indeed been pointed out that the Sicilian school was to some extent preceded by that of the Trevisan March, the most famous member of which was Sordello. It would appear, however, that this school was even more distinctly and exclusively a branch of Provencal than the Sicilian; and that the special characteristic of the latter did not appear in it. The Carlovingian poems (and to some, though a much less, extent the Arthurian) made a deep impression both on popular and on cultivated Italian taste as a matter of subject; but their form, after its first results in variation and translation, was not perpetuated; and when Italian epic made its appearance some centuries later, it inclined for the most part to burlesque, or at least to the tragi-comic, until the serious genius of Ta.s.so gave it a new, but perhaps a not wholly natural, direction.

[Sidenote: _Yet form and spirit both original._]

In that earliest, really national, and vernacular school, however, which has been the chief subject of discourse, the direction was mainly and almost wholly towards lyric; and the supremacy of the sonnet and the _canzone_ is the less surprising because their rivals were for the most part less accomplished examples of the same kind.

The _Contrasto_[191] of Ciullo itself is a poem in lyric stanzas of five lines--three of sixteen syllables, rhymed _a_, and two hendecasyllabics, rhymed _b_. The rhymes are fairly exact, though sometimes loose, _o_ and _u_, _e_ and _i_, being permitted to pair.

The poem, a simple discourse or dispute between two lovers, something in the style of some French _pastourelles_, displays however, with some of the exaggeration and stock phrase of Provencal (perhaps we might say of all) love-poetry, little or nothing of that peculiar mystical tone which we have been accustomed to a.s.sociate with early Italian verse, chiefly represented, as it is to most readers, by the _Vita Nuova_, where the spirit is slightly altered in itself, and speaks in the mouth of a poet greater in his weakest moments than the whole generation from Ciullo to Guittone in their strongest. This spirit, showing itself in the finer and more masculine form in Dante himself, in the more feminine and weaker in Petrarch, not merely gives us sublime or exquisite poetry in the fourteenth century, but in the sixteenth contributes very largely to launch, on fresh careers of achievement, the whole poetry of France and of England. But it is fair to acknowledge its presence in Dante's predecessors, and at the same time to confess that they themselves do not seem to have learned it from any one, or at least from any single master or group of masters.

The Provencal poets deify pa.s.sion, and concentrate themselves wholly upon it; but it is seldom, indeed, that we find the "metaphysical"

touch in the Provencals proper. And it is this--this blending of love and religion, of scholasticism and _minnedienst_ (to borrow a word wanted in other languages than that in which it exists)--that is attributed by the partisans of the East to Arabian influence, or at least to Arabian contact. Some stress has been laid on the testimony of Ibn Zobeir about the end of the twelfth century, and consequently not long before even the latest date a.s.signed to Ciullo, that Alcamo itself was entirely Mussulman in belief.

[Footnote 191: The text with comment, stanza by stanza, is to be found in the book cited above.]

[Sidenote: _Love-lyric in different European countries._]

On these points it is not possible to decide: the point on which to lay the finger for our present purpose is that the contribution of Italy at this time was, on the one hand, the further refinement of the Provencal attention to form, and the production of one capital instrument of European poetry--the sonnet; on the other, the conveyance, by means of this instrument and others, of a further, and in one way almost final, variation of the poetic expression of love.

It is of the first importance to note the characteristics, in different nations at nearly the same time, of this rise of lyrical love-poetry. We find it in Northern and Southern France, probably at about the same time; in Germany and Italy somewhat later, and almost certainly in a state of pupils.h.i.+p to the French. All, in different ways, display a curious and delightful metrical variety, as if the poet were trying to express the eternal novelty, combined with the eternal oneness, of pa.s.sion by variations of metrical form. In each language these variations reflect national peculiarities--in Northern French and German irregular bursts with a multiplicity of inarticulate refrain, in Provencal and Italian a statelier and more graceful but somewhat more monotonous arrangement and proportion.

And the differences of spirit are equally noticeable, though one must, as always, be careful against generalising too rashly as to their ident.i.ty with supposed national characteristics. The innumerable love-poems of the _trouveres_, pathetic sometimes, and sometimes impa.s.sioned, are yet, as a rule, cheerful, not very deep, verging not seldom on pure comedy. The so-called monotonous enthusiasm of the troubadour, his stock-images, his musical form, sublime to a certain extent the sensual side of love, but confine themselves to that side merely, as a rule, or leave it only to indulge in the purely fantastic.

Of those who borrowed from them, the Germans, as we should expect, lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity, and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it at times wears the garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a _corpus_ of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We should then see--after a fas.h.i.+on difficult if not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind--at once the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature, perhaps, would serve better as a kind of chrestomathy for ill.u.s.trating the positions on which the scheme of this series is based. And though it is overshadowed by the achievements of its own pupils; though it has a double portion of the mediaeval defect of "school"-work--of the almost tedious similarity of different men's manner--the Italian poetry, which is practically the Italian literature, of the thirteenth century would be not the least interesting part of such a _corpus_.

[Footnote 192: "Sacro erotismo," "bacca.n.a.le cristiano," are phrases of Professor d'Andrea's.]

[Sidenote: _Position of Spanish._]

The Spanish literature[193] with which we have to do is probably inferior in bulk even to that of Italy; it is certainly far less rich in named and more or less known authors, while it is a mere drop as compared with the Dead Sea of Byzantine writing. But by virtue of at least one really great composition, the famous _Poema del Cid_, it ranks higher than either of these groups in sheer literary estimation, while from the point of view of literary history it is perhaps more interesting than the Italian, and certainly far more interesting than the Greek. It does not rank with French as an instance of real literary preponderance and chieftains.h.i.+p; or with German as an example of the sudden if short blossoming of a particular period and dialect into great if not wholly original literary prominence; much less with Icelandic and Provencal, as containing a "smooth and round" expression of certain definite characteristics of literature and life once for all embodied. It has to give way not merely to Provencal, but to Italian itself as an example of early scholars.h.i.+p in literary form.

But it makes a most interesting pair to English as an instance of vigorous and genuine national literary development; while, if it is inferior to English, as showing that fatal departmental or provincial separation, that "particularism" which has in many ways been so disastrous to the Peninsula, it once more, by virtue of the _Poema_, far excels our own production of the period in positive achievement, and foretells the masterpieces of the national poetry in a way very different from any that can be said to be shown in Layamon or the _Ancren Riwle_, even in the Arthurian romances and the early lyrics.

[Footnote 193: Spanish can scarcely be said to have shared, to an extent commensurate with its interest, in the benefit of recent study of the older forms of modern languages. There is, at any rate in English, and I think elsewhere, still nothing better than Ticknor's _History of Spanish Literature_ (3 vols., London, 1849, and reprinted since), in the early part of which he had the invaluable a.s.sistance of the late Don Pascual de Gayangos. Some scattered papers may be found in _Romania_. Fortunately, almost all the known literary materials for our period are to be found in Sanchez' _Poesias Castellanas Anteriores al Siglo XV._, the Paris (1842) reprint of which by Ochoa, with a few valuable additions, I have used. The _Poema del Cid_ is, except in this old edition, rather discreditably inaccessible--Vollmoller's German edition (Halle, 1879), the only modern or critical one, being, I understand, out of print. It would be a good deed if the Clarendon Press would furnish students with this, the only rival of _Beowulf_ and the _Chanson de Roland_ in the combination of antiquity and interest.]

[Sidenote: _Catalan-Provencal._]

The earliest literature which, in the wide sense, can be called Spanish divides itself into three heads--Provencal-Catalan; Galician-Portuguese; and Castilian or Spanish proper. Not merely Catalonia itself, but Aragon, Navarre, and even Valencia, were linguistically for centuries mere outlying provinces of the _langue d'oc_. The political circ.u.mstances which attended the dying-out of the Provencal school at home, for a time even encouraged the continuance of Provencal literature in Spain: and to a certain extent Spanish and Provencal appear to have been written, if not spoken, bilingually by the same authors. But for the general purpose of this book the fact of the persistence of the "Limousin" tongue in Catalonia and (strongly dialected) in Valencia having been once noted, not much further notice need be taken of this division.

[Sidenote: _Galician-Portuguese._]

So also we may, with a brief distinctive notice, pa.s.s by the Galician dialects which found their perfected literary form later in Portuguese. No important early literature remains in Galician, and of Portuguese itself there does not seem to be anything certainly dating before the fourteenth century, or anything even probably attributed to an earlier time except a certain number of ballads, as to the real antiquity of which a sane literary criticism has always to reiterate the deepest and most irremovable doubts. The fact of the existence of this dialect, and of its development later into the language of Camoens, is of high interest: the positive doc.u.ments which at this time it offers for comment are very scanty indeed.

[Sidenote: _Castilian._]