What Bembo calls Tuscan was at once a fact and an ideal. It is the current name not only for the diction of Tuscany, but for the literary diction increasingly practiced by all writers in Italian. Castiglione feels himself bound to defend certain Lombard words. Ariosto anxiously revises to conform. Tasso has a dispute with the Accademia della Crusca. The most distinct dialect was in Naples. To conform to Tuscan was for Neopolitans most nearly like acquiring another language. But even there, and much more readily in other parts of Italy, Tuscan was accepted and increasingly practiced as literary Italian. Used by scholars who also wrote Latin, Italian naturally learned from Cicero and Vergil more logical and rhythmical sentence habits, more adroit shaping of verse. Thus the best result of humanism, perhaps, was the one least sought by the humanists, the refinement of the vernacular.
Lodovico Dolce’s Observations on the Vernacular (Venice, 1550) is an Italian grammar addressed to educated readers and using the classical headings. A section (157-186) on punctuation shows both the new emphasis demanded by printing and a shift of control from rhythm toward logic. Nearly fifty pages are devoted to Italian verse forms. Though there are many examples from Boccaccio and a few from other authors, the great exemplar throughout is Petrarch. Petrarch, then, was a model for Italian poetry, Boccaccio for prose. As humanist Latin had its thesaurus, so the cult of native models should have wherewith to guide both study and imitation. Francesco Alunno’s Observations on Petrarch (1539) is a concordance plus a text of the sonnets and canzoni. His concordance of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1543) has the significant title The Riches of the Vernacular. Finally The Frame of the World (Della fabrica del mondo, 1546-1548) is entitled further “ten books containing the words of Dante, Petrarch, Bembo, and other good authors, by means of which writers may express with ease and eloquence all man’s conceptions of any created thing whatsoever.” The ten divisions are God, heaven, the world, the elements, the soul, the body, man, quality, quantity, and hell. On this grandiose scale the thesaurus carried out for mature writers in the vernacular the idea of contemporary schoolbooks for Latin themes. It was indeed a copia.
(b) French
Italian theory of the vernacular being typical generally, and being moreover quickly known in France, the progress of French thought need not be detailed. Jean Lemaire allegorized La Concorde des deux langages (about 1512) to urge Frenchmen and Italians together from lower to higher poetry. No less than Italy France saw its literary future in the vernacular. But France had not so compelling a literary past. Its fourteenth century had no such mighty succession as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Its medieval greatness was more remote; its medieval survivals, generally languid. So the more ardent of coming French poets were ready to repudiate not only medieval Latin for classical Latin, but also medieval French verse for a new, classical French poetry. The promotion of this is the movement called the Pléiade; and its manifesto is Joachim du Bellay’s Deffense et illustration de la langue française (1549).
The main idea is so to enrich French diction as to establish an equality with Greek and Latin. This is the meaning of illustration in the title. More than a century later Dryden used the same Latin root for the same idea when he said that medieval English poetry lacked lustre. Greek or Latin, Du Bellay urges, has no such linguistic superiority as to compel our using it as our own literary medium. Cultivation of the classics as languages leads to pedantry. Philosophy is not a language study. Those who so pursue it seem more anxious to show learning than to have it. For a literary career, indeed, one must know Latin and preferably Greek also, but not as an end and not as a medium of expression. Latin and Greek, then, have their value in the writer’s education, not in his writing; but Du Bellay does not draw this inference explicitly, and seems not to see the further inference that the real enriching is not of one’s language, but of oneself. For he proposes that French be improved by classical grafts, and further by imitation of classical style. Let us enhance French literature, he urges, by making French language more classical.
Thus to reduce the treatise to its lowest terms is quite unjust to its suggestiveness. But its intrinsic value at best is less than its historical. Ignoring a French medieval achievement already forgotten or misunderstood, it turns humanist imitation toward giving French poetry classical lustre.
Such manipulation was unchecked by any considerable knowledge of the actual development of language. Even the learned Benedictine, Périon, derived French from Greek (Ioachimi Perionii Benedictini ... dialogorum de linguae gallicae origine, eiusque cum graeca cognatione, libri quatuor, Paris, 1555; dedication dated 1554).
Périon is cautious in his conclusions, as in his title. He has unusual grasp of phonetic cognates: b, f, p, v (p. 54); t, d, th (p. 107 verso); c, ch, g, k (p. 125). He admits, of course, the large influence of Latin. But he seems to think that Gallic derived directly from Greek, and added its abundant Latin later. What he cites in his parallels is not Celtic, but French. Though the historical introduction is negligible, the linguistic proof, even where it is in error, shows both awareness of language processes and some scientific knowledge.
French is like Greek, he finds, in the habit of articles (p. 107), in accent (p. 111), in nouns ending -on and te, in having an aorist (p. 134), in using the infinitive as a verbal noun (p. 135). Thus though his theory and many of his particular derivations are unsound, his method of observing language habits is ahead of his time. Citing Budé, Baif, and a few Latin authors, he seems in the main to have worked independently from his own observations.
That so much knowledge of detail should reach so little grasp of the whole shows the prevailing ignorance of linguistic science.