But the greatest glory of Ragusa lies neither in her wealth nor her princely hospitality, but rather in the civilizing influence which she exercised over the most barbarous European member of our Aryan family. It is the literature of Ragusa that lives still in the minds of men in days when her commerce has deserted her, and her own nobility has been extinguished with her liberty.
We have seen Ragusa by her very birth partly Roman and partly Sclave. Bit by bit the ‘city of the rock’ becomes fused with the forest-town outside. In her vast and varied intercourse with the Sclavonic interior Roman Ragusa becomes Serbian Dubrovnik. From the beginning of the fourteenth century the Serbian language, so vigorously proscribed by earlier laws, may be considered the mother-tongue of Ragusa. In 1472 the Sclavonic language became so dominant that even the Senate had to pass a law enforcing Italian as the language of their deliberations. Thus Ragusa became a Sclavonic city at the very moment when her extended connection with the rest of Europe, and especially with Italy, brought her into the full current of the Western Renascence. She had become Sclavonic, but she never lost the Italian side to her character. Her wealthy citizens, though they spoke the Serbian dialect of Dubrovnik in their family circles, sent their children to the Florentine schools, and, just as educated Irishmen and Welshmen often speak the best English, so, to this acquired knowledge of Italian, is largely due that purity of accent which has preserved the Italian of Ragusa from the Venetian and Dalmatian barbarisms of the other cities of this coast, and which makes it still the lingua Toscana in bocca Ragusea.
Ragusa was thus fitted by her very composition to be the interpreter between the Italian and Sclavonic minds, and to give birth to that literature which has won for her the title of ‘the Sclavonic Athens.’ The magistrates of the Republic, true to the same wise policy which had founded her schools, invited hither the most learned men of Italy, and towards the end of the fifteenth century many were enticed to Ragusa as professors, chancellors, and secretaries. Nascimbeno di Nascimbeni, the celebrated philologist, was invited here as rector of the school, and Demetrius Chalcochondylas deserted Florence herself to accept the chair of Greek at Ragusa. For Ragusan culture was something more than a mere reflection of the Italian Renascence, and the exiled scholars of Byzantium flocked hither as to a city which had held literary communion with their own, centuries before the days of its captivity, and whose inhabitants were in some sort their fellow-citizens. As early as the year 1170 the Ragusans had been admitted citizens of Constantinople by Manuel Comnenus, and the Imperial Chamber had undertaken to defray the expense of educating a certain number of Ragusan youths in Greek learning. By the beginning of the fourteenth century Ragusa herself had become a school of Greek for the Serbian mainland. Sclavonic Kings and Czars sent hither the young barons of their realms to be instructed in learning and manners; and the Serbian Czar, Stephen Dūshan, presented the city with a precious collection of codices, Greek and Latin, discovered in the Illyrian interior.[349] Thus the citizens of Ragusa were in every way well fitted to play a leading part in the revival of letters in Western Europe; it is said that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was not one of her families but could boast its man of letters; her scholars toiled eagerly at the new learning, and emended the texts of Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, and other classical authors. It is extremely significant of the position held by Ragusa in the world of letters at the end of the fifteenth century, that Aldus Manutius sent his son Paolo here for his classical schooling.
But this erudition was but the prelude to an outburst of original genius such as has been paralleled by few cities of the globe. Perhaps, indeed, no other people had brought before them so vividly every stirring aspect of the most romantic age that the world has seen. The Ragusans had sat at the feet of Byzantine masters in days when learning was their insolent monopoly; they had already been familiarised in the schools of Florence with the masterpieces of Italian genius; they had caught from Virgil and Ovid an inspiration of antiquity; and the dramas of Sophocles had been translated by a fellow-citizen into their Serbian mother-tongue. To these creations of exotic fancy they added, what they had never lost, a heritage of Serbian poetry, enshrining a mythology that had felt in some mysterious way the spell of Arabian genii—a mythology still so real that, to the last days of the Commonwealth, effigies of fantastic Serbian deities, and amongst them the ‘flowery-kirtled’ Vila, were borne in procession at Ragusan carnivals.[350] The merchant-citizens of the Republic had already enlarged their sympathies with the acquaintance of every European people. They had now seen the boundaries of the Old World broken through, and sailed forth to explore the New. They had rounded the Cape in the wake of the Portuguese; their argosies had touched at the port of Goa, and trafficked in the Persian Gulf. They had sailed with the Spaniards to Peru and Mexico; they had marvelled with the followers of Cortes at the temple-pyramids of the Aztecs, and plucked roses in the gardens of Yucay. Nearer home, their imagination had been kindled by the overthrow of an empire which Julius had founded. They were surveying from their very walls the tragedy of nations, and their streets were thronged with discrowned sovereigns. The most beautiful creations of the Hellenic muse had sprung Aphroditè-like from the spray of the self-same sea that sparkled in the havens of Ragusa.
Living in this poetic world, one can hardly wonder that Ragusa caught the inspiration of her surroundings; that she ‘awoke to ecstasy the living lyre,’ in the tones of her mother-tongue; that, surveying the catastrophe of the Serbian race, she created a Serbian drama. From the commencement of the last quarter of the fifteenth century onwards, Ragusa produces a long succession of poets and dramatists,[351] who are great and valuable almost in proportion as they are unknown to the West. For their pre-eminent value lies in their having composed in a Sclavonic tongue. Amongst the most celebrated works of Ragusan poets may be mentioned the ‘Dervishiade’ of Stephen Gozze, a comic epos; the ‘Jegyupka’ or gipsy-woman, a satiric poem by Andreas Giubronović; and the lyrics of Dominico Zlatarić, also known as a painter, and as translator of Tasso and of some plays of Sophocles. Nor was Ragusa wanting in poetesses to rival her poets; the epigrams of Floria Zuzzeri, who wrote in Italian as well as Sclavonic, are still of renown. But the most celebrated names in the long annals of Ragusan literature are those of Junius Palmotta and Giovanni Gondola.[352] It is a high merit of Palmotta’s dramas that the subjects are taken from the history of Southern-Sclaves.[353] The master-work of Gondola is the ‘Osmanide,’ an epic poem recording the prowess of Sultan Osman against the Poles. This is a strange witness to the Turkish sympathies of the Republic, and the noblest monument of Ragusan genius. The poems of Gondola are still, among all South-Sclavonic peoples, ‘familiar in their mouths as household words;’ and though Ragusa has lost her wealth and liberty, her most golden memories live still in the bard—
Whose tuneful lyre,
Resounding sweet from Save to Drave,
Forbids Illyrian nations to expire,
Vibrates immortal airs, to kindle patriot fire.[354]