CHAPTER II. The Age of Dante. BERTRAND DE BORN, as we saw, was committed by Dante to hell. 'The beautiful Spring delights me well, When flowers and leaves are growing; And I love to see, all scatter'd around, To see, on the level plains beyond, Gay knights and steeds caparison'd'. So wrote de Born in his pride, and so wrote, or tried to write, many scores of the fighting Troubadours, whose poetic ichor flowed in Dante's veins. Yet Dante, parcelling hell into deep trenches of narrow circles of torment, placed de Born in the ninth trench of the eighth circle 'I truly saw, and still I seem to see it, A trunk without a head walk in like manner Hung from the hand in fashion of a lantern, And they were two in one, and one in two; Thou who dost breathing go the dead beholding ; And so that thou may carry news of me, Know that Bertran de Born am I, the same Who gave to the Young King the evil comfort "'1. Why, we ask, was this harsh and headless fate reserved by Dante for de Born? A complete answer is not possible. Dante's Inferno was peopled according to a mandate of his own, and no present-day court of inquiry can investigate all the considerations, personal, historical, and political, which weighed with Dante in his lifetime. But a clue may be sought in the last verse. De Born gave the De Born gave the young king' (Henry, twice crowned during the reign of his father, King Henry II of England) evil counsel, and the evil counsellors of princes were doubly damned in Dante's eyes. They practised machinations and covert ways', and injured both the princes and their peoples. So the poet, however brilliant a Troubadour, who encouraged mischief in the State and sowed seeds of political dissension, was tried, convicted, and sentenced by the last and greatest of the Troubadours. For the spirit of the age is changing', writes a close and an accurate observer. Never before have we had so many poets to satirize the stains upon the garment of humanity, which does not necessarily prove that the stains are deeper, but certainly suggests that the poets are more moral' 2. There at present we must leave this matter. The more moral 'tone of Dante's age will appear from an examination of its products, when something, too, will be said of Dante's dark historical background. 1 Dante, Inferno, XXVIII, 118-35. The translation is Longfellow's, and I use it throughout this chapter. As indicated below, Longfellow misses the effect of Dante's rhymes. The terza-rima, or linked triplets, of the original is rhymed as follows: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe, fgf, and so on. But Longfellow is spirited and fairly literal. 2 E. Dale, National Life and Character in the Mirror of Early English Literature. I. LOVE-LYRIC. 6 First, of the forms of verse, which were cultivated intensively by love-lyrists. The stanza just quoted from de Born occurs in a poem of a kind known to the Troubadours as a sirvente. Literally, a song of service', it passed into French as serventois and into Italian as serventese or sermintese. The service might be to God or man, and didactic poets used this lyric form for moral or social themes. It played a conspicuous part in popularizing the Crusades, and, later, satirists employed it with a sting directed against women. Dante tells us in Vita Nuova that he had 'put together the names of sixty of the most beautiful ladies in that city where God had placed my own lady, and these names I introduced into an epistle in the form of a sirvente'. Villon's Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis was a sirvente, as we shall see, of the fifteenth century, and Tennyson's Palace of Art may be said to have revived the kind in the nineteenth. Another form of Troubadour poetry was the retroencha (rotrouenge), or song with refrain, such as Richard Coeur-de-Lion sang from the casement of his German prison. There were, further, the alba (aubade), or morning-farewell, and the serena, or eveningfarewell; the balada, pastorela, canso, and planh (lament); the rondeau and rondel, the vireli and villanelle, and many others. The Provençal tençon, or lovers' dispute, became the jeu parti of France, and was also known as débat or estrif (strife). This kind is important to later literature, apart from the attraction of its specimens, on account of the stimulus which it gave to dramatic composition. Akin to the débat was the pastourelle, probably Northern French in origin, which treated the encounter of a knight with a shepherdess and his success or otherwise in wooing her. Since the lady commonly had a husband, the dramatic interest was ready made. De Born wrote a planh for the young king', who died in 1183, and a favourable specimen of the débat is found in The Owl and the Nightingale, an anonymous English poem, written c. 1220. The débat had two interlocutors. When Wiclif added a third person, he called the resulting poem a trialogue, by a confusion between dialogue and duologue. Some writers, too, may be enumerated. They are not major names, perhaps, but where so much has been lost or forgotten, and where our debt to the beginners is so immense, relative degrees of greatness are difficult to estimate in perspective. Thus, the Court of Thibaut IV (1201-1253), Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, was a mission-station for Troubadour poetry in its journey outwards from Provence. Its next resting-place was Sicily, and thence it crossed to the Italian mainland. The period of its passage across the straits is described as its Tuscanization (Toscanaggiamento), and the earliest Tuscan love-lyrist was Guido Guinicelli of Bologna (c. 1230-1276). Dante acknowledged Guido as ' father of me and of my betters', and attributed to him a sweet, new style' (dolce stil nuovo) in lyric songs, which would make for ever dear their very ink'. The sweetness was in places a little cloying, and its newness mainly consisted in applying Plato's theory of ideas to the conception of human love. Through one man's love for one woman, the lover was wrought upon to seek the mystic' idea' of love, whose pattern was laid up in Heaven. This not very easy quest of love sublimated and woman spiritualized was sung by Guido and his successors in a style sweet enough but far from simple: Guido's ode of the 6 Gentle Heart, in D. G. Rossetti's version, is often quoted 'The sun strikes full upon the mud all day: It remains vile, nor the sun's worth is less. That aught the name of gentleness should have, Except the heart there be a gentle man's. Heaven holds the star and the star's radiance'. This stanza enfolds, as in a cradle, the future gentleman of the Renaissance. To Guido Guinicelli succeeded Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300)— 'So has one Guido from the other taken The glory of our tongue, and he perchance Is born, who from the nest shall chase them both', wrote Dante of the two Guidos, and no one disputes to-day Dante's superiority in Tuscan song to his friends and immediate predecessors. With him and them we associate a philosophic vision of love, which, though rare in expression, persisted from age to age. Founded on love of mortal woman, it released itself more and more from a bondage to the flesh, and gradually was more and more attuned to purely intellectual perceptions. Shelley's Epipsychidion, written in 1821, and described by Addington Symonds as the most unintelligible of all his poems to those who have not assimilated the spirit of Plato's Symposium and Dante's Vita Nuova', is the chief modern link in the lyric chain which goes back to Dante and the Guidos, and, through them, to Sicily and Provence. To Dante's contributions we shall return. Here we may note an impression which Shelley did not fail to mark, that language itself is E |