Then messer Federico said:
“Indeed they would. And you Tuscan gentlemen ought to keep up your mother tongue, and not suffer it to decay, as you do,—so that now one may say that there is less knowledge of it in Florence than in many other parts of Italy.”
Then messer Bernardo said:
“These words that are no longer used in Florence have survived among the country folk, and are rejected by the gentle as corrupt and spoiled with age.”
32.—Then my lady Duchess said:
“Let us not wander from our main purpose, but have Count Ludovico teach the Courtier how to speak and write well, whether it be in the Tuscan or any other dialect.”
“My Lady,” replied the Count, “I have already told what I know about it; and I hold that the same rules which serve to teach the one, serve also to teach the other. But since you require it of me, I will make such response as I may to messer Federico, who has a different opinion from mine; and perhaps I shall have need to discuss the matter somewhat more diffusely than is right. However, it shall be all I can tell.
“And first I say that in my judgment this language of ours, which we call vulgar, is still tender and new, although it be already long in use. For since Italy was not only vexed and ravaged but long inhabited by the barbarians, the Latin language was corrupted and spoiled by contact with those nations, and from that corruption other languages were born: and like rivers that from the crest of the Apennines separate and flow down into the two seas, so also these languages divided, and some of them tinged with Latinity reached by diverse paths, one this country and one that; and one of them remained in Italy tinged with barbarism. Thus our language was long unformed and various, from having had no one to bestow care upon it or write in it or try to give it splendour or grace: but afterwards it was somewhat more cultivated in Tuscany than in the other parts of Italy. And so its flower seems to have remained there even from those early times, because that nation more than the others preserved a sweet accent and a proper grammatical order, and have had three noble writers[[82]] who expressed their thoughts ingeniously and in those words and terms that the custom of their times permitted: wherein I think Petrarch succeeded more happily than the others in amourous subjects.
“Afterwards from time to time, not only in Tuscany but in all Italy, among noble men and those well versed in courts and arms and letters, there arose some desire to speak and write more elegantly than had been done in that rude and uncultivated age, when the blaze of the calamities inflicted by the barbarians was not yet quenched. Many words were laid aside, as well in the city of Florence itself and in all Tuscany as in the rest of Italy, and instead of them others were taken up; and herein there thus occurred that change which takes place in all human affairs and has always happened in the case of the other languages also. For if those earliest writings in ancient Latin had survived until now, we should see that Evander and Turnus[[83]] and the other Latins of that age spoke differently from the last Roman kings and the first consuls. See how the verses that the Salian priests chaunted were hardly understood by posterity;[[84]] but being established in that form by the first founders, out of religious reverence they were not changed. Likewise the orators and poets continued one after another to lay aside many words used by their predecessors: thus Antonius, Crassus, Hortensius and Cicero avoided many of Cato’s words, and Virgil avoided many of Ennius’s;[[85]] and the others did the same. For although they had reverence for antiquity, yet they did not esteem it so highly as to consent to be bound by it in the way you would have us bound by it now. Nay they criticised it where they saw fit, as did Horace, who says that his forefathers lauded Plautus foolishly, and thinks he has a right to gather in new words.[[86]] And in sundry places Cicero reprehends many of his predecessors, and slightingly affirms that Sergius Galba’s orations had an antique flavour,[[87]] and says that Ennius himself disprized his predecessors in certain things: so that if we would imitate the ancients, in doing so we shall not imitate them. And Virgil, who (you say) imitated Homer, did not imitate him in language.
33.—“Therefore I for my part should always avoid using these antique words, save however in certain places, and seldom even there; and it seems to me that whoever uses them otherwise makes a mistake, not less than he who, in order to imitate the ancients, should wish to feed on acorns when wheat had been discovered in plenty. And since you say that by their mere splendour of antiquity, antique words so adorn every subject, however mean it be, that they can make it worthy of much praise,—I say that I do not set such store, not only by these antique words but even by good ones, as to think that they ought in reason to be prized without the pith of beautiful thoughts; for to divide thought from words is to divide soul from body, which can be done in neither case without destruction.