d disdained by the feudal castles; but
poetry was essentially the aristocratic, the feudal art, cultivated by
knights and cultivated for kings and barons. It was probably an unspoken
sense of this fact which caused the early Tuscan poets to misgive their
own powers and to turn wistfully and shyly towards the poets of Provence
and of Sicily. There, beyond the seas, under the last lords of Toulouse
and the brilliant mongrel Hohenstauffen princes, were courts, knights,
and ladies; there was the tradition of this courtly art of poetry; and
there only could the sons of Florentine or Sienese merchants,
clodhoppers in gallantry and song, hope to learn the correct style of
thing. Hence the history of the Italian lyric before Dante is the
history of a series of transformations which connect a style of poetry
absolutely feudal and feudally immoral, with the hitherto unheard-of
platonic love subtleties of the "Vita Nuova." And it is curious, in
looking over the collections of early Italian lyrists, to note the
alteration in tone as Sicily and the feudal courts are left further and
further behind. Ciullo d' Alcamo, flourishing about 1190, is the only
Italian-writing poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and
better trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers; and he is also the only
one who resembles them very closely. His famous _tenso_, beginning "Rosa
fresca aulentissima" (a tolerably faithful translation heads the
beautiful collection of the late Mr. D.G. Rossetti), is indeed more
explicitly gross and immoral than the majority of Provencal and German
love-songs: loose as are many of the _albas, serenas, wachtlieder_, and
even many of the less special forms of German and Provencal poetry, I am
acquainted with none of them which comes up to this singular dialogue,
in which a man, refusing to marry a woman, little by little wins her
over to his wishes and makes her brazenly invite him to her dishonour.
Between Ciullo d' Alcamo and his successors there is some gap of time,
and a corresponding want of gradation. Yet the Sicilian poets of the
courts of Hohenstauffen and Anjou, recognizable by their name or the
name of their town, Inghilfredi, Manfredi, Ranieri and Ruggierone da
Palermo, Tommaso and Matteo da Messina, Guglielmotto d' Otranto, Rinaldo
d'Aquino, Peir delle Vigne, either maintain altogether unchanged the
tone of the troubadours, or only gradually, as in the remarkable case of
the Notary of Lentino, approximate to th