John Addington Symonds — Renaissance in Italy — APPENDIX I. Note on Italian Heroic Verse.

APPENDIX I. Note on Italian Heroic Verse.

(See above, p. 24.)

The Italian hendecasyllable is an accentual iambic line of five feet with one unaccented syllable over and included in the rhyme. Thus the first line of the Inferno may be divided:—

Nel mez|zo del | cammin | di nos|tra vita.

When the verse is so constructed, it is said to be piano, the rhyme being what in English we call double. When the rhyme is single, the verse is tronco, and the rhythm corresponds to that of our heroic, as in the following instance (Par. xxv. 102):

Il ver|no avreb|be un me|se d'un | sol dì.

When the rhyme is treble, the verse is sdrucciolo, of which form this is a specimen (Par. xxvi. 78):

Che ri|fulge|va più | di mil|le milia.

It is clear that the quality of the verse is not affected by the number of syllables in the rhyme; and the line is called hendecasyllabic because versi piani are immeasurably more frequent and more agreeable to the ear than either versi tronchi or sdruccioli.

If we inquire into the origin of the meter, the first remark we have to make is that lines of similar construction were used by poets of Provence. Dante, for example, quotes (De Vulg. Eloq. ii. 2) from Bertram:

Non puesc mudar q'un chantar non esparja.

This fact will seem to many minds conclusive on the point in question. But, following the investigations of recent scholars, we find this form of verse pretty generally referred to the watch-song of the Modenese soldiers. Thus Professor Adolfo Bartoli, after quoting two lines of that song,

O tu qui servas armis ista moenia,
Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila,

adds: "quì apparisce per la prima volta il nostro verso endecasillabo, regolarmente accentato." If this, which is the view accepted by Italian critics, be right, he ought to have added that each line of the Modenese watch-song is a sdrucciolo verse. Otherwise, the rhythm bears the appearance of a six-foot accentual iambic, an appearance which is confirmed by the recurrence of a single rhyme or assonance in a throughout the poem. Still the strong accent on the antepenultimate syllable of every verse is sufficient to justify us in regarding the meter as endecasillabo sdrucciolo.

Going further back than the Modenese watch-song (date about 924), the next question is whether any of the classic meters supplied its precedent. By reading either Horatian Sapphics or Catullian hendecasyllables without attention to quantity, we may succeed in marking the beat of the endecasillabo piano.[629] Thus:

Cui do|no lep|idum | novum | libellum?

and:

When these lines are translated into literal Italian, the metamorphosis is complete. Thus:

Cui don|o il lep|ido | nuovo | libretto?

and:

Even Alcaics, unceremoniously handled by a shifting of the accent, which is violent disregard of quantity, yield like results. Thus:

Atqui | scie | bat quæ | sibi | barbarus.

Or in Italian:

Eppur | conob|be ciò | ch'il man|igoldo.

The accentual Sapphics of the middle ages throw some curious light upon these transmutations of meter. In a lament for Aquileia (tenth century) we find these lines:

Bella sublimis inclyta divitiis,
Olim fuisti celsa ædificiis.

Here, instead of the Latin Sapphic, we get a loose sdrucciolo rhythm. The meter of the Serventese seems built upon this medieval Sapphic model. Here is an example[630]:

O Jeso Cristo, padre onipotente,
Aprestame lo core con la mente
Che rasonare possa certamente
Un servientese.

When the humanistic Italians tried to write Italian Sapphics, they produced a meter not very dissimilar. Thus in the Certamen Coronarium [631]:

Eccomi, i' son qui Dea degli amici,
Quella qual tutti li omini solete
Mordere, e falso fuggitiva dirli
Or la volete.

What seems tolerably certain is that the modern Italian hendecasyllable was suggested by one of the Latin eleven-syllabled meters, but that, in the decay of quantitative prosody, an iambic rhythm asserted itself. It has no exact correspondence in any classic meter; but it was early developed out of the accentual Latin measures which replaced quantitative meter in the middle ages. Signor Rubieri points out that there may be traces of it in the verses of Etruscan inscriptions.[632] Nor is it impossible that the rhythm was indigenous, persisting through a long period of Græco-Roman culture, to reappear when the rustic language threw out a modern idiom.