Rabelais. 49. But the most celebrated, and certainly the most brilliant performance in the path of fiction, that belongs to this age, is that of Rabelais. Few books are less likely to obtain the praise of a rigorous critic; but few have more the stamp of originality, or show a more redundant fertility, always of language, and sometimes of imagination. He bears a slight resemblance to Lucian, and a considerable one to Aristophanes. His reading is large, but always rendered subservient to ridicule; he is never serious in a single page, and seems to have had little other aim, in his first two volumes, than to pour out the exuberance of his animal gaiety. In the latter part of Pantagruel’s history, that is, the fourth and fifth books, one published in 1552, the other, after the author’s death, in 1561, a dislike to the church of Rome, which had been slightly perceived in the first volumes, is not at all disguised; but the vein of merriment becomes gradually less fertile, and weariness anticipates the close of a work which had long amused while it disgusted us. Allusions to particular characters are frequent, and, in general, transparent enough with the aid of a little information about contemporaneous history, in several parts of Rabelais; but much of what has been taken for political and religious satire cannot, as far as I perceive, be satisfactorily traced beyond the capricious imagination of the author. Those who have found Montluc, the famous bishop of Valence, in Panurge, or Antony of Bourbon, father of Henry IV., in Pantagruel, keep no measures with chronology. Panurge is so admirably conceived, that we may fairly reckon him original; but the germ of the character is in the gracioso, or clown, of the extemporaneous stage; the roguish, selfish, cowardly, cunning attendant, who became Panurge in the plastic hands of Rabelais, and Sancho in those of Cervantes. The French critics have not in general done justice to Rabelais, whose manner was not that of the age of Louis XIV. The Tale of a Tub appears to me by far the closest imitation of it, and to be conceived altogether in a kindred spirit; but in general those who have had reading enough to rival the copiousness of Rabelais have wanted his invention and humour, or the riotousness of his animal spirits.
Sect. IV.
Struggle between Latin and Italian Languages—Italian and Spanish polite Writers—Criticism in Italy—In France and England.
Contest of Latin and Italian languages. 50. Among the polished writers of Italy, we meet on every side the name of Bembo; great in Italian as well as in Latin literature, in prose as in verse. It is now the fourth time that it occurs to us; and in no instance has he merited more of his country. Since the fourteenth century, to repeat what has been said before, so absorbing had become the love of ancient learning, that the natural language, beautiful and copious as it really was, and polished as it had been under the hands of Boccaccio, seemed to a very false-judging pedantry scarce worthy of the higher kinds of composition. Those too who with enthusiastic diligence had acquired the power of writing Latin well, did not brook so much as the equality of their native language. In an oration delivered at Bologna in 1529 before the emperor and pope, by Romolo Amaseo, one of the good writers of the sixteenth century, he not only pronounced a panegyric upon the Latin tongue, but contended that the Italian should be reserved for shops and markets, and the conversation of the vulgar;[816] nor was this doctrine, probably in rather a less degree, uncommon during that age. A dialogue of Sperone relates to this debated question, whether the Latin or Italian language should be preferred; one of the interlocutors (probably Lazaro Buonamici, an eminent scholar) disdaining the latter as a mere corruption. It is a very ingenious performance, well conducted on both sides, and may be read with pleasure. The Italians of that age are as clever in criticism as they are wearisome on the commonplaces of ethics. It purports to have been written the year after the oration of Romolo Amaseo, to which it alludes.
[816] Tiraboschi, x. 389.
Influence of Bembo in this. 51. It is an evidence of the more liberal spirit that generally accompanies the greatest abilities, that Bembo, much superior to Amaseo in fame as a Latin writer, should have been among the first to retrieve the honour of his native language by infusing into it that elegance and selection of phrase which his taste had taught him in Latin, and for which the Italian is scarcely less adapted. In the dialogue of Sperone quoted above, it is said that “it was the general opinion no one would write Italian who could write Latin; a prejudice in some measure lightened by the poem of Politian on the tournament of Julian de’ Medici, but not taken away till Bembo, a Venetian gentleman, as learned in the ancient languages as Politian, showed that he did not disdain his maternal tongue.”[817]
[817] P. 430. (edit. 1596).
Apology for Latinists. 52. It is common in the present age to show as indiscriminating a disdain of those who wrote in Latin as they seem to have felt towards their own literature. But the taste and imagination of Bembo are not given to every one; and we must remember, in justice to such men as Amaseo, who, though they imitate well, are yet but imitators in style, that there was really scarce a book in Italian prose written with any elegance, except the Decamerone of Boccaccio; the manner of which, as Tiraboschi justly observes, however suitable to those sportive fictions, was not very well adapted to serious eloquence.[818] Nor has the Italian language, we may add, in its very best models, attained so much energy and condensation as will satisfy the ear or the understanding of a good Latin scholar; and there can be neither pedantry nor absurdity in saying, that it is an inferior organ of human thought. The most valid objection to the employment of Latin in public discourses or in moral treatises, is its exclusion of those whose advantage we are supposed to seek, and whose sympathy we ought to excite. But this objection, though not much less powerful in reality than at present, struck men less sensibly in that age, when long use of the ancient language, in which even the sermons of the clergy were frequently delivered, had taken away the sense of its impropriety.[819]
[818] x. 402.
[819] Sadolet himself had rather discouraged Bembo from writing Italian, as appears from one of his epistles, thanking his friend for the present of a book, perhaps Le Prose. Sed tu fortasse conjicis ex eo, illa mihi non placere, quod te avocare solebam ab illis literis. Faciebam ego id quidem, sed consilio, ut videbar, bono. Cum enim in Latinis major multo inesset dignitas, tuque in ea facultate princeps mihi longe viderere, non tam abstrahebam te illinc, quam huc vocabam. Nec studium reprehendebam in illis tuum, sed te majora quædam spectare debere arbitrabar. Epist. lib. ii. p. 55.