Only for the people! Altro! did not Sperone and all the critics at his heels pronounce Ariosto only fit for the vulgar multitude? and was not Dante himself called the laureate of the cobblers and the bakers?
And does not Sacchetti record that the great man took the trouble to quarrel with an ass-driver and a blacksmith because they recited his verses badly?
If he had not written "only for the people," we might never have got beyond the purisms of Virgilio, and the Ciceronian imitations of Bembo.
Dante now-a-days may have become the poet of the scholars and the sages, but in his own times he seemed to the sciolists a most terribly low fellow for using his mother tongue; and he was most essentially the poet of the vulgar—of the vulgare eloquio, of the vulgare illustre; and pray what does the "Commedia" mean if not a canto villereccio, a song for the rustics? Will you tell me that?
Only for the people! Ah, that is the error. Only! how like a woman that is! Any trash will do for the people; that is the modern notion; vile roulades in music, tawdry crudities in painting, cheap balderdash in print—all that will do for the people. So they say now-a-days.
Was the bell tower yonder set in a ducal garden or in a public place? Was Cimabue's masterpiece veiled in a palace or borne aloft through the throngs of the streets?
A man, be he bramble or vine, likes to grow in the open air in his own fashion; but a woman, be she flower or weed, always thinks she would be better under glass. When she gets the glass she breaks it—generally; but till she gets it she pines.
When they grew up in Italy, all that joyous band,—Arlecchino in Bergamo, Stenterello in Florence, Pulcinello in Naples, Pantaleone in Venice, Dulcamara in Bologna, Beltramo in Milan, Brighella in Brescia—masked their mirthful visages and ran together and jumped on that travelling stage before the world, what a force they were for the world, those impudent mimes!