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Guido Guinicelli, who died in 1276, when Dante was eleven years old, and, a little later, Guido Cavalcanti, and some few others, trusting more than had been done before to their own inspiration, show themselves as the forerunners of a better day.
From her eyes dart spirits who strike awe into the heart; from her lips come words which make men sigh; on her passage the poet casts down his eyes; notions, all these, with which we are familiar from the "Vita Nuova;" but which belong to Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, nay, even to Guinicelli, quite as much as to Dante.
Of more importance are the poems of Guido Guinicelli, of which the philosophical one entitled "Of the Gentle Heart" was a nine days' wonder, but which, even in Rossetti's elegant version, seems cold and formal.
On the other hand, it is plain at every line that he was a frantic ascetic, taking a savage pleasure in vilifying all mundane things, and passionately disdainful of study, of philosophical and theological subtleties. No poet, therefore, of the troubadour sort, or of the idealising learned refinement of Guinicelli or Cavalcanti. Nor was his life one of apostolic sweetness.
But with the Renaissance that movement half of mediæval democratic progress, and half of antique revivalism, and to which in reality belongs not merely Petrarch, but Dante, and every one of the Tuscan poets, Guinicelli, Lapo Gianni, Cavalcanti, who broke with the feudal poetry of Provence and Sicily with the Renaissance, or rather with its long-drawn-out end, comes the close, for the moment, of the really creative activity of the Latin peoples in the domain of poetry.
[Footnote 24: The "new Guido" is his friend Guido Cavalcante (now dead); the "first" is Guido Guinicelli, for whose writings Dante had an esteem; and the poet, who is to "chase them from the nest," caccer
"She passes along the street so beautiful and gracious," says Guinicelli, "that she humbles pride in all whom she greets, and makes him of our faith if he does not yet believe. And no base man can come into her presence. And I will tell you another virtue of her: no man can think ought of evil as long as he looks upon her."
One was his predecessor in poetry, Guido Guinicelli, from whom he could not take his eyes for love and reverence, till the sufferer, who told him there was a greater than himself in the crowd, vanished away through the fire as a fish does in water. The greater one was Arnauld Daniel, the Provençal poet, who, after begging the prayers of the traveller, disappeared in like manner.
Ruskin has nearly frightened the lovers of Art; I said that the Summa was to the painters there as good vantage ground as any novel of Sacchetti's. I now say that Luigi Pulci and his kindred so treated the love-lore which was solemn mystery to Guinicelli and Lapo and Fazio, or the young Dante shuddering before his lord of terrible aspect.
The other important poem is the Ensenhamen, a didactic work of instruction upon the manner and conduct proper to a courtier and a lover. Here, and also in some of his lyric poems, Sordello represents the transition to a new idea of love which was more fully developed by the school of Guido Guinicelli and found its highest expression in Dante's lyrics and Vita Nuova.
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