only Provencal and
Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was neglected, when the revival of
Greek and Latin letters made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare
mediaeval prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern tongue,
so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some grotesque painted saint,
when compared with the splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and
twining in graceful or solemn involutions, as of a Pyrrhic or a maidens'
dance. And it was during this period, from Petrarch to Politian, that,
as philologists have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable
chivalric romance, and the poetry of Provencal and Sicilian school, cast
off by the upper classes, was gradually picked up by the lower and
especially by the rural classes. Vagabond ballad-singers and
story-tellers--creatures who wander from house to house, mending broken
pottery, collecting rags or selling small pedlar's wares--were the old
clothesmen who carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery. The
people of the town, constantly in presence of the upper classes, and
therefore sooner or later aware of what was or was not in fashion, did
not care long for the sentimental daintiness of mediaeval poetry;
besides, satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town as are dogs
in gutters and cats on roofs; and the townsfolk soon set their own
buffoonish or satirical ideas to whatever remained of the music of
mediaeval poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the sonnet had
become for the Florentine artizans a mere scurrilous epigram. It was
different in the country. The peasant, at least the Tuscan peasant, is
eminently idealistic and romantic in his literary tastes; it may be that
he has not the intellectual life required for any utterances or forms of
his own, and that he consequently accepts poetry as a ready-made
ornament, something pretty and exotic, which is valued in proportion to
its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason whatever it may, certain it is
that nothing can be too artificial or high-flown to please the Italian
peasantry: its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights,
winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its songs are almost
without exception about love, constancy, moon, stars, flowers. Such
things have not been degraded by familiarity and parody as in the town;
they retain for the country folk the vague charm (like that of music,
automatic and independent of thorough comprehension) of belongi