In Tratt. III, as elsewhere, the playfulness is for the most part so spread out that it is difficult to quote. There is, however, a touch of real satire in such passages as that in which Dante twits the lawyers, physicians, and members of religious orders with their disqualification for the reputation of a true philosopher.[148]
“We are not to call him a real philosopher who is a friend of wisdom for profit’s sake, as are lawyers, physicians, and almost all the members of the religious orders, who do not study in order to know, but in order to get money or office; and if any one would give them that which it is their purpose to acquire, they would linger over their study no longer.”
Trattato IV is more obviously fruitful. Here again he girds at the lawyers and doctors, suggesting that they might at least give unprofessional advice gratis, and, in another place, ventures timidly to assert that it may be possible “to be religious though married.”[149] Again, in Ch. xvi., if nobile simply meant notus, then the Obelisk of St. Peter would be the noblest stone on earth, and Asdente the cobbler (of whom Salimbene gives us so lively a sketch) would be noblest among the citizens of Parma.[150]
Some arguments are so senseless, he says a little earlier, that they deserve to be answered not with a word, but with a knife. “Risponder si vorrebbe non colle parole ma col coltello a tanta bestialità.”[151]
Lastly, he has in this treatise the audacity to depict to us the sublimest sage, “il maestro di color che sanno,” as indulging in a burst of hypothetical laughter at the idea of a double origin of the human race. “Senza dubbio, forte riderebbe Aristotile”; and, he adds, “those who would divide mankind into two separate species like horses and asses are (with apologies to Aristotle) themselves the asses.”[152]
In the De Vulgari Eloquentia, as we have already hinted, the “idioma incomptum et ineptum” of various localities, alike on the right and on the left of the Apennines, gives play for pleasantry of which does Dante not fail to take advantage. It is with evident relish that he puts on record typical uncouth phrases of each dialect: the Roman Mezzure quinto dici, the Chignamente, frate, sc-tate of the Marches of Ancona, the Milanese Mes d’ ochiover, the Çes fastú which men of Aquileja and Istria “crudeliter accentuando, eructuant.” The feminine softness of the Romagna, and especially of Forlì, with its corada mea;[153] the more than masculine roughness of the men of Verona, Vicenza, Brescia—all those who say “Magara”; the nof and vif of Treviso.
In Chapter xi. he has his knife into mediaeval Rome, the proud and corrupt. “Sicut ergo Romani se cunctis preponendos extimant, in hac eradicatione sive discerptione non immerito eos aliis preponamus, protestantes eosdem in nulla vulgaris eloquentie ratione fore tangendos.” The primacy which the Romans claim in all things may certainly be theirs in this. In our eliminating process they shall be first to be rejected from the candidature to furnish a classical vernacular for all Italy!
Their dialect (he goes on), like their morals, is the most degraded in the whole peninsula, and has spread its corrupting influence into neighbouring districts. It is indeed not worthy to be called a vulgare (vernacular), but rather a depraved misuse of speech (tristiloquium), and is “italorum vulgarium omnium ... turpissimum.”[154]
At the end of Chapter xiii. he tilts at the Genoese Z—an ugly sound in itself, but one which, if lost or mislaid by defect of memory, would leave the poor people of Genoa without a means of transmitting their thoughts! The loss of this one letter would leave them dumb, or impose on them the necessity of inventing an entirely new mode of speech. “Si per oblivionem Ianuenses ammitterent z litteram, vel mutire totaliter eos vel novam reperare oporteret loquelam: est enim z maxima pars eorum locutionis: que quidem littera non sine multa rigiditate profertur.”[155]
On a different plane is Dante’s lamentation in Ch. xii. over the decay of literary culture in Sicily since the glorious days of Frederic and Manfred, which gave the title “Sicilianum” to the work of Dante’s predecessors in the vernacular: a passage (to me at least) somewhat obscure, in which Frederic II of Sicily, Charles II of Naples, Azzo Marquis of Este, and John Marquis of Montferrat are accused of blood-thirstiness, treachery and avarice: “Venite carnifices; venite attriplices; venite avaritiae sectatores....”[156]