In fact, they would
not have kept it in use down to our own century had they not been
penetrated with a sense of its singular worth. These masters could have
given us the same thoughts in other and wholly different forms. But
when once they had made the sonnet the normal type of lyrical poetry,
many other writers of great, if not the highest, gifts, who otherwise
would have lost themselves in a sea of diffusiveness, were forced to
concentrate their feelings. The sonnet became for Italian literature a
condenser of thoughts and emotions such as was possessed by the poetry
of no other modern people.
Thus the world of Italian sentiment comes before us in a series of
pictures, clear, concise, and most effective in their brevity. Had
other nations possessed a form of expression of the same kind, we
should perhaps have known more of their inward life; we might have had
a number of pictures of inward and outward situations--reflexions of
the national character and temper--and should not be dependent for such
knowledge on the so-called lyrical poets of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, who can hardly ever be read with any serious
enjoyment. In Italy we can trace an undoubted progress from the time
when the sonnet came into existence. In the second half of the
thirteenth century the 'Trovatori della transizione,' as they have been
recently named, mark the passage from the Troubadours to the poets--
that is, to those who wrote under the influence of antiquity.
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