These form a galaxy indeed, but belong rather to learning and science than to literature. This temporary languor of pure literature may perhaps be accounted for when it is considered that one main factor of inspiration has been removed by the contentment of the national aspirations. The subjection and oppression of the country, with all their evils, at all events afforded an intense stimulus to literary genius. Every Italian heart was possessed by the emotions most conducive to impassioned composition; and patriotic sentiment, even when not expressed in words, imbued the whole of literature. The tension removed, it was perhaps inevitable that overstrained feelings should decline to a lower level, which may be suddenly elevated by the occurrence of some great national crisis, or the appearance of some genius gifted, like Mazzini and Carducci, with an especial power of influencing the young. What Italian letters seem to want above all things is men, other than poets and novelists, capable of impressing their own individuality on what they write, and such men are most readily formed either by the agitation of stirring times, or by the contagious enthusiasm caught from a great teacher.
The opinions of many eminent living men of letters on the future of their country’s literature have been collected by Signor Ugo Ojetti in his Alla scoperta dei Letterati (1895). They are not in general of a very encouraging character, but their weight is considerably impaired by their almost complete restriction to a single branch of literature, and that one whose preponderance is by no means to be desired. Almost all the authors interviewed by Signor Ojetti are novelists, and, so far as appears from his reports, would appear utterly unconscious of the existence of any class of literature but fiction, poetry, and the drama. They seem to regard literature and belles lettres as convertible terms, and take no notice of the wider and more important domains of history, biography, philosophy, moral and economic science, which may be and often have been in the most flourishing condition while belles lettres languish. It is, indeed, much to be wished that more of the literary talent of Italy were directed to solid and permanent work, and less to fiction, which must be ephemeral in proportion to the very fidelity with which it fulfils its ordinary task of depicting the manners of the day. Work like Comparetti’s Virgilio nel Medio Evo, for example, confers higher distinction on the national literature than any number of novels, unless when creations of genius of a high order.
Such genius, when exercised in fiction or in poetry, does not depend for its manifestation upon the state of the book market; the really gifted author obeys an impulse from within. “Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.” If modern Italians have it in them to produce great books, they will not be prevented by such of the obstacles stated by Signor Ojetti’s confabulators as may be fairly resolved into one, the insufficient remuneration of literary work. It is just to acknowledge, however, the existence of impediments of another kind. From the earliest period of letters Italy has suffered from the variance of the written and the spoken language. The refinements of cultivated circles at Rome were not accepted in the provinces: there was a Latin of books and a Latin of ordinary life. In process of time the former became the exclusive speech of the learned, while the language of the vulgar gave birth to a number of dialects, out of which, when a vernacular literature came to exist, the Tuscan was selected as the most appropriate for written speech. Hence there has always been something artificial in Italian literary language. Many of the most gifted authors who happened to be born out of Tuscany never attained to write it with perfect correctness; and the jealous care taken to ensure its purity tended to limit its flexibility and compass. It thus became hardly adequate to deal with the mass of neologism absolutely forced upon it by the development of modern civilisation.
“The difficulty,” says Symonds, “under which a mother-tongue, artificially and critically fashioned like Italian, suffers when it copes with ordinary affairs of modern life, is illustrated by the formation of feeble vocables, and by newspaper jargon,” of which he gives a horrible instance. The same critic wrote in 1877: “Italian has undergone no process of transformation and regeneration according to the laws of organic growth since it first started. The different districts still use different dialects, while writers in all parts of the peninsula have conformed their style, as far as possible, to early Tuscan models. It may be questioned whether united Italy, having for the first time gained the necessary conditions of national concentration, is not now at last about to enter on a new phase of growth in literature, which, after many years, will make the style of the first authors more archaic than it seems at present.” The immense difficulty experienced by so great a writer as Manzoni in reconciling vigour with purity of diction, and his complaints of the limited vocabulary at his disposal, seem to prove that these impediments are not imaginary. Since Symonds wrote, however, a view differing in some respects has been expressed by one of the few living men who may claim to be regarded as masters of Italian prose, Gabriele d’Annunzio. In the dedicatory preface to his Trionfo della Morte (1894), D’Annunzio enters into the question of the adequacy of the Italian language to express modern ideas, which he emphatically asserts. There is no respect, he declares, in which it need envy other tongues, or anything that it need wish to borrow from them. The misfortune is that its great resources are neglected by modern writers, whose ordinary vocabulary is limited to a few hundred words, many of illegitimate extraction or hopelessly disfigured by vulgar usage, and these thrown into sentences of nearly uniform length, destitute of logical connection and of the rhythmical accompaniment indispensable to a fine style. The remedy is a return to the old authors; and, justly remarking that the novelists of the best period are entirely out of harmony with modern requirements by reason of their wholly objective character and incapacity for psychological analysis, D’Annunzio seriously advises modern romancers to enrich their vocabulary and perfect their style by a course of the ancient ascetic, casuistical, and devotional writers. The Zolas of modern Italy resorting for instruction to St. Catherine of Siena would indeed afford a scene for Aristophanes; yet from a merely stylistic point of view the advice is judicious.
As regards the ancient writers, the effect would be to renovate them instead of rendering them more archaic, as anticipated by Symonds, so far at least as concerns their vocabulary. Although perhaps an inevitable tribute to Time and Evolution, it is yet no gain to the English language or literature that so much of our early writers should be obsolete; and Italy would do well to preserve as much as possible the speech of the original masters of her tongue, which can be best effected by keeping their phraseology in constant employment. It may be hoped that a standard of taste will thus be created enabling writers to deal satisfactorily with the mass of neologisms which the great development of modern civilisation renders it impossible to exclude, but which, indiscriminately admitted, threaten to swamp and debase the national speech, or possibly to sunder the common inheritance into two languages, one for the scholar, the other for the multitude. It is, indeed, a most serious problem for patriotic scholars in all nations how to preserve the continuity of the national speech amid the vicissitudes of the national life, and the tendencies which in the intellectual as in the physical sphere are always at work to wear all diversities down to one monotonous level. The consolation is that, whereas these agencies are mere unconscious forces, called into being by causes independent of the human will, the resisting influences have their origin in the will, and are capable of intelligent direction. It should be the task of the cultivators of every literature to ascertain what course this literature has instinctively shaped for itself; what are the dominant ideas which have determined the course of its development. In Italy, from the first lyrists down to Carducci, from the first prose writers down to D’Annunzio, the guiding principle would seem to have been the love of perfect form and artistic finish, liable, like all other meritorious tendencies, to abuse, when its too exclusive pursuit has cramped originality; to aberration, when writers, remembering the end, have mistaken the means; but on the whole a right and laudable aim, because in harmony with the genius of the people and the language. As it has been said that what is not clear is not French, so it might be added that what is not refined is not Italian.
Notwithstanding the production of much inferior work, this character still appertains to the literature in its best contemporary examples, the only ones with which posterity is likely to concern itself. The enormous recent development, nevertheless, of the sphere of human interests; the creation of new arts and sciences, necessitating a corresponding expansion of the resources of language; the facility of intercourse among peoples, tending to a cosmopolitanism which continually threatens to obliterate national distinctions; the formation of an immense and imperfectly trained reading class, to whose tastes the majority of authors must or at all events will condescend—these are trying circumstances for every literature, and especially for one whose special claims are polish and dignity. But if it be true that these latter qualities are not imported, or imposed by external pressure, but inherent in the constitution of the nation itself, it may well be hoped that they will adapt themselves to the circumstances of the present, without breach of continuity with the past. Up to the present time this continuity appears to us unbroken, and we have been able to conceive of the history of Italian literature as biography, not so much of individual writers as of a single fair spirit living through them all, which has moulded, animated, and laid aside all in their turn. Like other finite existences, this spirit has known infancy, adolescence, and maturity, and must one day know decay and death; but the phenomena accompanying her present development seem to us rather to indicate that, in common with other literatures, she is traversing a crisis than that she is entering upon a period of decadence. Every age of letters has its own peculiar peril: that of ours is the debasement of the standard of writing to the level of imperfectly educated readers. Against this danger Italian literature should be especially protected by its close affinity to the languages of antiquity, by uniform practice and tradition ever since Dante called Love the fountain of fair speech[23], and by a refinement so deeply imbibed that it seems to have become a part of itself.
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