Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/79

1885.] of compulsory education, and universal military service, that Italian – i.e., Tuscan – is being learned and spoken throughout the peninsula. Until then each province, almost each town, had its own dialect, which in some cases so nearly assumed the proportions of a language that the speaker of Zanese – that is to say, Genoese, with its Arab and Spanish affinities – would not understand the speaker of, say, Sardinian, the nearest survival to ancient Latin yet spoken on the globe. To this day it is only in Tuscany that Italian is the common speech. For the benefit of the stranger or visitor from other parts of Italy, the inmates of a city will speak Italian; but it often comes with difficulty from their lips, and when left alone they relapse into their familiar native dialect. The final disappearance of this peculiarity is of course a mere question of time, probably of but one generation. Still the novelist has had to reckon with this factor, and has been hampered by it. If not born a Tuscan, he often himself commanded the Italian language with difficulty; and hence has arisen a certain stiffness and angularity of style peculiarly fatal when it appears in fictitious literature, whose mechanism, so to speak, should above all run smoothly and imperceptibly. A leading Italian author told a friend of ours that to this day he never ventures to write a page without turning to his 'Fanfani' (the Italian Stormonth) to see if he may use a word or not. Now Fanfani, no doubt, is somewhat: of a purist, and the very newest contemporary writers of Italy refer to him but little, to judge from the Gallicisms and neologisms they permit themselves. On the other hand, it would be well if they remembered that here, as elsewhere, there is a middle path; and that if the diction sanctioned by the Crusca, with its academic niceties, wanted flexibility, and made the language one which it was hard for a novelist to handle and mould to his requirements, the laxity and liberties they permit themselves with the ancient and classic tongue of the peninsula are yet more to be deprecated, and will, unless a proper check is imposed, end in effacing some of its finest characteristics. It was Manzoni, himself a Lombard, who, among moderns, first used the Tuscan language in which to clothe his romance; and to this circumstance, as much as to its excellence, the sensation it created, the fame it preserves, is due. Its publication marks an epoch. The spoken language was here first employed in written form; it was demonstrated, and interestingly, attractively demonstrated, that printed language need not necessarily walk upon stilts, a form of progression peculiarly ill adapted to fiction that deals with men and women as they live and move in daily life, not men and women powdered, painted, and "made up" for masquerading.

It was, no doubt, the pressing reality of political events that recalled the Italian writers from the arena of past ages to the events of our own day; and for some time they were more anxious to arouse high-souled and patriotic sentiments than to write for the sake of pure literature. As the political horizon lightened, the novelists found themselves uncertain whither to turn for example, and whence to choose their themes. Some looked to France for models, others to England, some to both; and among those who did the latter was Salvatore Farina, at this day unhesitatingly pronounced the head