It is remarkable of those writers who had already distinguished themselves by their Latin works, that when they began to compose in their native language, those classical effusions on which they had confidently rested their future celebrity sank into oblivion; and the writers themselves ceased to be subjects either of critical inquiry or of popular curiosity, except in that language in which they had opened a vein of original thought, in a manner and diction the creation of their own feelings. Here their natural power and their freed faculties placed them at a secure interval from their imitators. Modern writers in Latin were doomed to find too many academical equals; but those who were inimitable in their vernacular idiom could dread no rival, and discovered how the productions of the heart, rather than those of the lexicon, were echoed to their authors in the voice of their contemporaries.
The people indeed were removed far out of the influence of literature. The people could neither become intelligent with the knowledge, nor sympathise with the emotions, concealed in an idiom which had long ceased to be spoken, and which exacted all the labour and the leisure of the cloistered student.
This state of affairs had not occurred among the Greeks, and hardly among the Romans, who had only composed their immortal works in their maternal tongue. Their arts, their sciences, and their literature were to be acquired by the single language which they used. It was the infelicity of their successors in dominion, to weary out the tenderness of youth in the repulsive labours of acquiring the languages of the two great nations whose empire had for ever closed, but whose finer genius had triumphed over their conquerors.
With the ancients, instruction did not commence until their seventh year; and till they had reached that period Nature was not disturbed in her mysterious workings: the virgin intellect was not doomed to suffer the violence of our first barren studies—that torture of learning a language which has ceased to be spoken by the medium of another equally unknown. Perhaps it was owing to this favourable circumstance that, among the inferior classes of society in the two ancient nations, their numerous slaves displayed such an aptitude for literature, eminent as skilful scribes, and even as original writers.
One of the earliest prose writers in our language when style was beginning to be cultivated, has aptly described, by a domestic but ingenious image, the effect of our youth gathering the burdens of grammatical faggots in the Sylva of antiquity. It is Sir Thomas Elyot who speaks, in “The Boke of the Governor,” printed in 1531: “By that time the learner cometh to the most sweet and pleasant rendering of old authors, the sparks of fervent desire are extinct with the burthen of grammar, like as a little fire is even quenched with a great heap of small sticks, so that it can never come to the principal logs, where it should burn in a great pleasant fire.”
It was Italy, the Mother and the Nurse of Literature (as the filial zeal of her sons has hailed her), which first opened to the nations of Europe the possibility of each creating a vernacular literature, reflecting the image not of the Greeks and of the Romans, but of themselves.
Three memorable men, of the finest and most contrasted genius, appeared in one country and at one period. With that contempt for the language of the people in which the learned participated, busied as they were at the restoration of letters by their new studies and their progressive discoveries, Petrarch contemned his own Italian “Rime,” and was even insensible to the inspiration of a mightier genius than his own—that genius who, with a parental affection, had adopted the orphan idiom of his father-land; an orphan idiom, which had not yet found even a name; for it was then uncertain what was the true language of Italy. Dante had at first proposed to write in Latin; but with all his adoration of his master Virgil, he rejected the verse of Virgil, and anticipated the wants of future ages. A peculiar difficulty, however, occurred to the first former of the vernacular literature of Italy. In the state of this unsettled language—composed of fragments of the latinity of a former populace, with the corruptions and novelties introduced by its new masters—deformed by a great variety of dialects—submitted, in the mouths of the people, to their caprices, and unstamped by the hand of a master—it seemed hopeless to fix on any idiom which, by its inherent nobleness, should claim the distinguished honour of being deemed Italian. Dante denied this envied grace to any of the rival principalities of his country. The poet, however, mysteriously asserted that the true Italian “volgare” might be discovered in every Italian city; but being common to all, it could not be appropriated by any single one. Dante dignified the “volgare illustre” which he had conceived in his mind, by magnificent titles;—it was “illustrious,” it was “cardinal,” it was “aulic,” it was “courtly,” it was the language of the most learned who had composed in the vulgar idiom, whether in Sicily, in Tuscany, in Puglia, even in Lombardy, or in the marshes of Ancona! This fanciful description of the Italian language appeared enigmatical to the methodical investigations of the cold and cautious Tiraboschi. That grave critic submitted the interior feeling of the poet to the test of facts and dates. With more erudition than taste, he marked the mechanical gradations—the stages of every language, from rudeness to refinement. The mere historical investigator could conceive no other style than what his chronology had furnished. But the spirit of Dante had penetrated beyond the palpable substances of the explorer of facts, and the arranger of dates. Dante, in his musings, had thrown a mystical veil over the Italian language; but the poet presciently contemplated, amid the distraction of so many dialects, that an Italian style would arise which at some distant day would be deemed classical. Dante wrote, and Dante was the classic of his country.
The third great master of the vernacular literature of Italy was Boccaccio, who threw out the fertility of his genius in the volgare of nature herself. This Shakspeare of a hundred tales transformed himself into all the conditions of society; he touched all the passions of human beings, and penetrated into the thoughts of men ere he delineated their manners. Even two learned Greeks acknowledged that the tale-teller of Certaldo, in his variegated pages, had displayed such force and diversity in his genius, that no Greek writer could be compared with his “volgare eloquenza.”
The Italian literature thus burst into birth and into maturity; while it is remarkable of the other languages of Europe, that after their first efforts they fell into decrepitude. Our Saxon rudeness seems to have required more hewing and polishing to be modelled into elegance, and more volubility to flow into harmony, than even the genius of its earliest writers could afford. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the contemporaries of Gower, of Chaucer, and of “the Ploughman;” they delight their nation after the lapse of many centuries; while the critics of the reign of Elizabeth complained that Piers Ploughman, Chaucer, and Gower then required glossaries; and so, at a later period, did Ronsard, Baif, and Marot in France. In prose we had no single author till the close of the sixteenth century who had yet constructed a style; and in France Rabelais and Montaigne had contracted the rust and the rudeness of antiquity, as it seemed to the refinement of the following generation.
It cannot be thought that the genius of the Italians always excelled that of other countries, but the material which those artists handled yielded more kindly to their touch. The shell they struck gave a more melodious sound than the rough and scrannel pipe cut