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THE POET DANTE11 *AND HIS LANDI ,Half a Score of Books Dealingwith the Great Florentine*•11 *Iand Other Italian Themes■i*•4By WALTER LITTLEFIELDONE of the most Interesting literary paradoxes of the age is the prolific output of books on Italian subjects from the pens of enthusiastic foreigners and the ironical toler-* * • B I ' * *' *• ' ... / 1 9ance with jwhich such works are received by Italian critics. Conspicuous in this prolificacy is the struggle of interpreters of Dante for first place. Indeed, so pronounced are their efforts that a humoristI ‘lias declared that the commentators ofthe gTeat Florentine far exceed in number his readers. Be that as it may, the efforts of foreign scholars, historians, and p#-s to rqsurrcct the past of the Peninsula is most commendable even though the citizens of the Third . Italy resent being rescued from the clutches of the Modernism which has encompassed them.There are, too, offenders among themselves whom they delight to honor when$ Ithey can find time to turn from the conflicts of hygiene and economics, shake themselves free of the burden of political ambition, and placidly meditate on the acts of their ancestors.Nor Is the exaltation of Dante without reason. It would be hard to find a modern book dealing with Italy that does not contain his name in Its index. Take, for example, the ten volumes which are the subject of this article. Aside from those books particularly dealing with him, it Is not forgotten that Verona “ was his first refuge and asylum ” and that his/, .v, J ■ 'jlast public service was an embassy to Venice; that without his “ Commedia *' Sicilian and not Tuscan might be the language of modern Italy; while, in a volume so seemingly remote as the correspondence of the Medici of the fifteenth century, we find Lorenzo of that house taking issue with the Florentine for his strictures on Guittone d’Arezzo as the** ** I 1 - * ’H* .reputed inventor of the new style.”It Is an interesting historical fact that a century before the composition of the ** Commedia ” there exi. ted no writing in •ny Italian dialect.* More or less classi-•THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE. An Attempt to Defin* Somewhat the Charm of the Pre-Renaissance Literature of Latin EurOL«. By Ezra-Pound. E. P. Dutton Co. f2.5.I•THE _ ______________ _______tion from Italian Poetry Before 1300. Edit** ed by the late Prof.’ A. J. Butler. New York: Oxford University Press.•DANTE: JA DRAMATIC POEM. By Helotee Durant Hose. Member of the Dante Society, Cambridge. Mass. Frontispiece. Mitchell :ey.Kennerl•STORIESnington.FROM DANTE. By Susan Ctra-Frontispiece from Rossetti. Colored illustrations by Evelyn Paul. ThomasY. Crowell Co. jl.50.•A HISTORY OF VERONA, By A. M. Alien. In the States of Italy Series. Edited by Edward Armstrong and R. l^angton Douglas- Illustrated. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.•VENICE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.From the French of Philippe Mormier.Frontispiece. Richard G. Badger. JC.•VENICE AND ITS STORY. By T. Okev, Third, revised, and cheaper edition. illustrated. E. P. Dutton Co. 54.•THE DOGARESSAS OF VENICE. (The Wives of the Doges.) By Edgcumte Staley. Illustrated. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 53.50.•MEDIAEVAL ITALY. FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO HENRY VII. By Prof. Paa-quale Villari. Translated by Costanso Hu!* ton. Illustrated. Charles Scribner’s Sons. $3.75.•LIVES OF THE EARLY MEDICI AS TOLD IN TIlRiR CORRESPONDENCE. Translated and edited by Janet Ross. Illustrated. R. G. iWiger. |i. 'el Latin was the medium of written communication among officials and the educated. The people still spoke a Jargon that would doubtless have been understood in the streets of Rtme a thousand yearn before, while wandering poets tem-pered the harshness of popular speech by their improvisations in Provencal, some of which were placed on record. Therewras discernible, too, in more or less sacred ditties, a commingling of ancientLatin W’ords with popular forms. jIt is due to the patronage of Frederick II that the popular verse of the Sicilians7 '■ ;* ' *took on a literary form and bepame worthy of record. The writers in this dialect, owing to political exigencies, gradually spread through the North, inviting publicity for their own verses and inspiring emulation in other dialects. Thus we have an old hermit of Perugia, in 1258, feverishly writing a religious drama in Umbrian. But it v/as in Tuscany that these wanderers from the South obtained their best hearing and inspired the broadest and most profound emulation which was ultimately to find its most enduringand sublime expounder in Dante and itsperpetuation through Boccaccio and Pe-trarca and\heir host of disciples and imitators in all parts of Italy. . ^The steps by which the Tuscan dialect became the literary and classical language of the Italian Renaissance is described more or less definitely by Ezra Pound in •• The Spirit of Romance/4^ It Is the volume of a virtuoso rather than that of a scholar. There are charming digressions from the strict line of philological development; pleasant excursions into the dialects of France and of Spain, into churchly and academic Latin which are quite sufficient unto themselves and need no excuse. 44 The Spirit of Romance is the author’s therne—the romantic spirit of the early romance languages. The key-., note of the whole book is to be found In the following phrase: , 44 The twelfth century, or, more exactly, that century whose centre is the year 1200, has left us two perfect gifts: the Church of San Zeno at Verona,- and the 4 Canzon! * of Arnaut Daniel. A man who has absorbed such a statement should be gentry and kindly approached by students.4* The Forerunners of Dante/4® by the late Prof. A. J. Butler, one of the most eminent of English Dnteists, is a bird of a different feather. The Danteist will open this little volume with reverence, for, to use his own phrase, the author was i4 caught by death44 before he had time ta supplement his collection of 44 canzone44 by a similar work oh the pre-Dantesquc sonnet. It may be recalled that fifty years ago Dante Gabriel Rossetti published a translation into English verse of some specimens of the early Italian poets from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante. But here we have their work in the original Sicilian, Bolognese, and Tuscan, with particular reference to j those poets mentioned by Dante in his “ De Vulgari Eloquentia,44 or who obviously influenced him in the composition of the “ Commedia.44Prof. Butler’s pre-eminent knowledge of romance philology is convincingly expressed in the careful editing the texts have received, and in his comments, in which very often he takes issue with Italian scholars both as to the relative importance of a 14 canzone 44 and its date; and, what is most attractive, he lightens his academic criticism with ie impressions of a sentimentalist. As, for example, when he compares Ciullo lt;TAIca-mo’s 44 Contrasto 44 with 44 The Nutbrown Maid 44 and enthusiastically ranks the doggerel of Rinalo d’Aquino as something unmatched in the whole range of Italian verse ** for sheer pathos and simplicity/4 44 The Forerunners of Dante/4 both for the rare material brought together and for its scholarly yet unpedan-tic editing, should be highly prized by Danteists.It is rather difficult to give a just estimation of lldloise Durant Roses“Dante/* Its verse shows little imagi-
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New York Times
New York, New York, US
Sat, Dec 17, 1910
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