Character of the controversy. 53. This controversy points out some degree of change in public opinion, and the first stage of that struggle against the aristocracy of erudition, which lasted more or less for nearly two centuries, till, like other struggles of still more importance, it ended in the victory of the many. In the days of Poggio and Politian, the native Italian no more claimed an equality, than the plebeians of Rome demanded the consulship in the first years of the republic. These are the revolutions of human opinion, bearing some analogy and parallelism to those of civil society, which it is the business of an historian of literature to indicate.
Life of Bembo. 54. The life of Bembo was spent, after the loss of his great patron Leo X., in literary elegance at Padua. Here he formed an extensive library and collection of medals: and here he enjoyed the society of the learned, whom that university supplied, or who visited him from other parts of Italy and Europe. Far below Sadolet in the solid virtues of his character, and not probably his superior in learning, he has certainly left a greater name, and contributed more to the literary progress of his native country. He died at an advanced age in 1547; having a few years before obtained a cardinal’s hat on the recommendation of Sadolet.[820]
[820] Tiraboschi, ix. 296. Corniani, iv. 99. Sadolet. Epist. lib. xii. p. 555.
Character of Italian and Spanish style. 55. The style of some other Italian and Spanish writers, Castiglione, Sperone, Machiavel, Guevara, Oliva, has been already adverted to when the subject of their writings was before us; and it would be tedious to dwell upon them again in this point of view. The Italians have been accustomed to associate almost every kind of excellence with the word cinquecento. They extol the elegant style and fine taste of those writers. But Andrès has remarked with no injustice, that if we find purity, correctness, and elegance of expression in the chief prose writers of this century, we cannot but also acknowledge an empty prolixity of periods, a harsh involution of words and clauses, a jejune and wearisome circuity of sentences, with a striking deficiency of thought. “Let us admit the graces of mere language in the famous authors of this period; but we must own them to be far from models of eloquence, so tedious and languid as they are.”[821] The Spanish writers of the same century, he says afterwards, nourished as well as the Italian with the milk of antiquity, transfused the spirit and vigour of these ancients into their own compositions, not with the servile imitation of the others, nor seeking to arrange their phrases and round their periods, the source of languor and emptiness, so that the best Spanish prose is more flowing and harmonious than the contemporary Italian.[822]
[821] Andrès, vii. 68.
[822] Id. 72.
English writers. 56. The French do not claim, I believe, to have produced at the middle of the sixteenth century any prose writer of a polished or vigorous style, Calvin excepted, the dedication of whose Institutes to Francis I. is a model of purity and elegance for the age.[823] |More.| Sir Thomas More’s Life of Edward V., written about 1509, appears to me the first example of good English language; pure and perspicuous, well-chosen, without vulgarisms or pedantry.[824] His polemical tracts are inferior, but not ill-written. We have seen that Sir Thomas Elyot had some vigour of style. |Ascham.| Ascham, whose Toxophilus, or dialogue on archery, came out in 1544, does not excel him. But his works have been reprinted in modern times, and are consequently better known than those of Elyot. The early English writers are seldom select enough in their phrases to bear such a critical judgment as the academicians of Italy were wont to exercise.
[823] Neufchâteau, Essai sur les Meilleurs Ouvrages dans la langue Française, p. 135.
[824] This has been reprinted entire in Holingshed’s Chronicle; and the reader may find a long extract in the preface to Todd’s edition of Johnson’s Dictionary. I should name the account of Jane Shore as a model of elegant narration.
Italian criticism. 57. Next to the models of style, we may place those writings which, are designed to form them. In all sorts of criticism, whether it confines itself to the idioms of a single language, or rises to something like a general principle of taste, the Italian writers had a decided priority in order of time as well as of merit. We have already mentioned the earliest work, that of Fortunio, on Italian grammar. Liburnio, at Venice, in 1521, followed with his Volgari Eleganzie. But this was speedily eclipsed by a work of Bembo, published in 1525, with the rather singular title, Le Prose. These observations of the native language, commenced more than twenty years before, are written in dialogue, supposed to originate in the great controversy of that age, whether it were worthy of a man of letters to employ his mother-tongue instead of Latin. |Bembo.| Bembo well defended the national cause; and by judicious criticism on the language itself, and the best writers in it, put an end to the most specious argument under which the advocates of Latin sheltered themselves,—that the Italian, being a mere congeries of independent dialects, varying not only in pronunciation and orthography, but in their words and idioms, and having been written with unbounded irregularity and constant adoption of vulgar phrases, could afford no certain test of grammatical purity or graceful ornament. It was thought necessary by Bembo to meet this objection by the choice of a single dialect; and though a Venetian, he had no hesitation to recognise the superiority of that spoken in Florence. The Tuscan writers of that century proudly make use of his testimony in aid of their pretensions to dictate the laws of Italian idiom. Varchi says, “The Italians cannot be sufficiently thankful to Bembo, for having not only purified their language from the rust of past ages, but given it such regularity and clearness, that it has become what we now see.” This early work, however, as might be expected, has not wholly escaped the censure of a school of subtle and fastidious critics, in whom Italy became fertile.[825]