Nevertheless, all that looks like affectation to our age, need not then have been actually so. The giving of Greek and Latin names to children, for example, is better and more respectable than the present practice of taking them, especially the female names, from novels. When the enthusiasm for the ancient world was greater than for the saints, it was simple and natural enough that noble families called their sons Agamemnon, Tydeus, and Achilles,[580] and that a painter named his son Apelles and his daughter Minerva.[581] Nor will it appear unreasonable that, instead of a family name, which people were often glad to get rid of, a well-sounding ancient name was chosen. A local name, shared by all residents in the place, and not yet transformed into a family name, was willingly given up, especially when its religious associations made it inconvenient; Filippo da San Gemignano called himself Callimachus. The man, misunderstood and insulted by his family, who made his fortune as a scholar in foreign cities, could afford, even if he were a Sanseverino, to change his name to Julius Pomponius Laetus. Even the simple translation of a name into Latin or Greek, as was almost uniformly the custom in Germany, may be excused to a generation which spoke and wrote Latin, and which needed names that could be not only declined, but used with facility in verse and prose. What was blameworthy and ridiculous was, the change of half a name, baptismal or family, to give it a classical sound and a new sense. Thus Giovanni was turned into Jovianus or Janus, Pietro to Petreius or Pierius, Antonio to Aonius, Sannazzaro to Syncerus, Luca Grasso to Lucius Crassus. Ariosto, who speaks with such derision of all this,[582] lived to see children called after his own heroes and heroines.[583]
Nor must we judge too severely the Latinisation of many usages of social life, such as the titles of officials, of ceremonies, and the like, in the writers of the period. As long as people were satisfied with a simple, fluent Latin style, as was the case with most writers from Petrarch to Æneas Sylvius, this practice was not so frequent and striking; it became inevitable when a faultless, Ciceronian Latin was demanded. Modern names and things no longer harmonised with the style, unless they were first artificially changed. Pedants found a pleasure in addressing municipal counsellors as ‘Patres Conscripti,’ nuns as ‘Virgines Vestales,’ and entitling every saint ‘Divus’ or ‘Deus;’ but men of better taste, such as Paolo Giovio, only did so when and because they could not help it. But as Giovio does it naturally, and lays no special stress upon it, we are not offended if, in his melodious language, the cardinals appear as ‘Senatores,’ their dean as ‘Princeps Senatus,’ excommunication as ‘Dirae,’[584] and the carnival as ‘Lupercalia.’ This example of this author alone is enough to warn us against drawing a hasty inference from these peculiarities of style as to the writer’s whole mode of thinking.
The history of Latin composition cannot here be traced in detail. For fully two centuries the humanists acted as if Latin were, and must remain, the only language worthy to be written. Poggio[585] deplores that Dante wrote his great poem in Italian; and Dante, as is well known, actually made the attempt in Latin, and wrote the beginning of the ‘Inferno’ first in hexameters. The whole future of Italian poetry hung on his not continuing in the same style,[586] but even Petrarch relied more on his Latin poetry than on the Sonnets and ‘Canzoni,’ and Ariosto himself was desired by some to write his poem in Latin. A stronger coercion never existed in literature;[587] but poetry shook it off for the most part, and it may be said, without the risk of too great optimism, that it was well for Italian poetry to have had both means of expressing itself. In both something great and characteristic was achieved, and in each we can see the reason why Latin or Italian was chosen. Perhaps the same may be said of prose. The position and influence of Italian culture throughout the world depended on the fact that certain subjects were treated in Latin[588]—‘urbi et orbi’—while Italian prose was written best of all by those to whom it cost an inward struggle not to write in Latin.
From the fourteenth century Cicero was recognised universally as the purest model of prose. This was by no means due solely to a dispassionate opinion in favour of his choice of language, of the structure of his sentences, and of his style of composition, but rather to the fact that the Italian spirit responded fully and instinctively to the amiability of the letter-writer, to the brilliancy of the orator, and to the lucid exposition of the philosophical thinker. Even Petrarch recognised clearly the weakness of Cicero as a man and a statesman,[589] though he respected him too much to rejoice over them. After Petrarch’s time, the epistolary style was formed entirely on the pattern of Cicero; and the rest, with the exception of the narrative style, followed the same influence. Yet the true Ciceronianism, which rejected every phrase which could not be justified out of the great authority, did not appear till the end of the fifteenth century, when the grammatical writings of Lorenzo Valla had begun to tell on all Italy, and when the opinions of the Roman historians of literature had been sifted and compared.[590] Then every shade of difference in the style of the ancients was studied with closer and closer attention, till the consoling conclusion was at last reached, that in Cicero alone was the perfect model to be found, or, if all forms of literature were to be embraced, in ‘that immortal and almost heavenly age of Cicero.’[591] Men like Pietro Bembo and Pierio Valeriano now turned all their energies to this one object. Even those who had long resisted the tendency, and had formed for themselves an archaic style from the earlier authors,[592] yielded at last, and joined in the worship of Cicero. Longolius, at Bembo’s advice, determined to read nothing but Cicero for five years long, and finally took an oath to use no word which did not occur in this author. It was this temper which broke out at last in the great war among the scholars, in which Erasmus and the elder Scaliger led the battle.
For all the admirers of Cicero were by no means so one-sided as to consider him the only source of language. In the fifteenth century, Politian and Ermolao Barbaro made a conscious and deliberate effort to form a style of their own,[593] naturally on the basis of their ‘overflowing’ learning, though they failed to inspire their pupils with a similar desire for independence; and our informant of this fact, Paolo Giovio, pursued the same end. He first attempted, not always successfully, but often with remarkable power and elegance, and at no small cost of effort, to reproduce in Latin a number of modern, particularly of æsthetic, ideas. His Latin characteristics of the great painters and sculptors of his time contain a mixture of the most intelligent and of the most blundering interpretation.[594] Even Leo X., who placed his glory in the fact, ‘ut lingua latina nostra pontificatu dicatur factu auctior,’[595] was inclined to a liberal and not too exclusive Latinity, which, indeed, was in harmony with his pleasure-loving nature. He was satisfied when the Latin which he had to read and hear was lively, elegant, and idiomatic. Then, too, Cicero offered no model for Latin conversation, so that here other gods had to be worshipped beside him. The want was supplied by representations of the comedies of Plautus and Terence, frequent both in and out of Rome, which for the actors were an incomparable exercise in Latin as the language of daily life. The impulse to the study of the old Latin comedies and to modern imitations of them was given by the discovery of plays by Plautus in the ‘Cod. Ursinianus,’ which was brought to Rome in 1428 or 1429. A few years later, in the pontificate of Paul II., the learned Cardinal of Teano[596] (probably Niccolò Forteguerra of Pistoja) became famous for his critical labours in this branch of scholarship. He set to work upon the most defective plays of Plautus, which were destitute even of the list of the characters, and went carefully through the whole remains of this author, chiefly with an eye to the language. Possibly it was he who gave the first impulse for the public representations of these plays. Afterwards Pomponius Laetus took up the same subject, and acted as manager when Plautus was put on the stage in the houses of great churchmen.[597] That these representations became less common after 1520, is mentioned by Giovio, as we have seen ([p. 242]), among the causes of the decline of eloquence.
We may mention, in conclusion, the analogy between Ciceronianism in literature and the revival of Vitruvius by the architects in the sphere of art.[598] And here, too, the law holds good which prevails elsewhere in the history of the Renaissance, that each artistic movement is preceded by a corresponding movement in the general culture of the age. In this case, the interval is not more than about twenty years, if we reckon from Cardinal Hadrian of Corneto (1505?) to the first avowed Vitruvians.
CHAPTER X.
MODERN LATIN POETRY.
THE chief pride of the humanists is, however, their modern Latin poetry. It lies within the limits of our task to treat of it, at least in so far as it serves to characterise the humanistic movement.
How favourable public opinion was to that form of poetry, and how nearly it supplanted all others, has been already shown ([p. 252]). We may be very sure that the most gifted and highly developed nation then existing in the world did not renounce the use of a language such as the Italian out of mere folly and without knowing what they were doing. It must have been a weighty reason which led them to do so.
This cause was the devotion to antiquity. Like all ardent and genuine devotion it necessarily prompted men to imitation. At other times and among other nations we find many isolated attempts of the same kind. But only in Italy were the two chief conditions present which were needful for the continuance and development of neo-Latin poetry: a general interest in the subject among the instructed classes, and a partial reawakening of the old Italian genius among the poets themselves—the wondrous echo of a far-off strain. The best of what is produced under these conditions is not imitation, but free production. If we decline to tolerate any borrowed forms in art, if we either set no value on antiquity at all, or attribute to it some magical and unapproachable virtue, or if we will pardon no slips in poets who were forced, for instance, to guess or to discover a multitude of syllabic quantities, then we had better let this class of literature alone. Its best works were not created in order to defy criticism, but to give pleasure to the poet and to thousands of his contemporaries.[599]