



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Leonard Johnson and the
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Studies in the Poetry
of Italy


II. ITALIAN



BY

OSCAR KUHNS

_Wesleyan University_



[Illustration]



=Chautauqua Press=

CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK

MCMXIII



COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY

OSCAR KUHNS

Third Edition, 1913



=The Chautauqua Print Shop=

Chautauqua, New York




PREFACE


In writing this book the author has endeavored to give a connected story
of the development of Italian literature from its origin down to the
present. In so doing, however, he has laid chief stress on those writers
whose fame is world-wide, and thus, owing to lack of space, has been
obliged to treat in the briefest manner those writers who, although
famous in Italy itself, are not generally known to the world at large.
It is hoped that the reader may be led to study more in detail
this literature, which although ranking with the greatest of the
world-literatures, has been to a large degree neglected in England and
America. The translations from Dante's New Life and of the story from
Boccaccio have been made by the author, inasmuch as during the writing
of this book he could not obtain access to the standard translations.

It is to be noted also, that owing to unavoidable delay in the
transmission of the manuscript, the author has not been able to read the
proof.

FLORENCE, Italy.




CONTENTS

BOOK II. ITALIAN


  CHAPTER                                                 PAGE

  I. THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE                     173

  II. DANTE: LIFE AND MINOR WORKS                          193

  III. THE DIVINE COMEDY                                   214

  IV. PETRARCH                                             263

  V. BOCCACCIO                                             283

  VI. THE RENAISSANCE AND ARIOSTO                          297

  VII. TASSO                                               316

  VIII. THE PERIOD OF DECADENCE AND THE REVIVAL            337



STUDIES IN THE POETRY OF ITALY




CHAPTER I

THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE


The first thing that strikes the attention of the student of Italian
literature is its comparatively recent origin. In the north and south of
France the Old French and Provencal languages had begun to develop a
literature before the tenth century, which by the end of the twelfth had
risen to a high degree of cultivation; indeed, by that time the
Provencal had attained its highest point, and had already begun to
decline. In Italy, however, we cannot trace the beginning of a
literature, properly so-called, farther back than the thirteenth
century.

Among the various causes which may be assigned for this phenomenon, the
most important undoubtedly is the fact that the Italians have always
looked upon themselves as of one race with the ancient Romans, and the
heirs of all the glorious traditions attached to the names of the
heroes, poets, and artists of the Eternal City. In similar manner they
regarded Latin as their true mother-tongue, of which the vernacular was
a mere corruption. Hence it came to pass that all the literature which
we find in Italy before the thirteenth century, and a large proportion
of that written in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries,
was in Latin and not in Italian, which seemed to the writers of those
days unworthy of forming the medium of poetry and learning.

This feeling of kinship was a natural one for those who lived in the
same cities in which the Romans had lived, surrounded by the imposing
ruins of the ancient world, speaking a language, which although
essentially a modern one, with all its characteristics, was still nearer
to Latin than French, Provencal, or Spanish. For these men the
irruptions of the northern barbarians, the Go