Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/423

 12 s. vii. OCT. so, 1920.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

347

own ardour. That flame burns everything to the new and. penetrates every real utter- ance of the spirit. Hence, the novelty desired by Montani is a noble thing and not that artificial ornamentation practised by the writers of the Seicento, stigmatized by Croce as " concettismoed ingegnosita. "

The same methods of thought are applied to language itself. Montani builds a theory of language of peculiar interest as it touches on the Vichian theory of poetry as being .most effective in the early times. Speech was fully developed at the very beginning owing to God infusing speech into man and the first man knew intimately the essence of things. Language is the recorder of peculiar modes of thought, of feeling, of action in a nation, and if we are able to under- stand the origin and development of Ian guage, we shall be able to understand the origin and development of the people who use that language. Language had greatest power originally since it was gifted by the divine spirit and the closer we come to that original language, the finer becomes our insight into the essence of things. Speech was at its noblest in the beginning and has weakened since. From this theory to that advanced by Vico and Herder on the origin wid nature of poetry is only a short step. The explanation of Herder's theory as given l)y Alfredo Galletti in 'II romanticismo Italia ' (Nuova Antologia 1 Luglio 1916) could Well be applied to Montani. "If all the peoples who live in contact with nature, show that they understand animals, and if the latter have always obeyed man, it is ibecause it was so desired by the harmonic provenance, the accord of souls and needs, that common ' sensorium ' which joined primitively the human being to all the life of nature in virtue and by grace of the divine mission entrusted to man, which divagation and corruption of thought has Afterwards destroyed."
 * germanico e la storiografia letteraria in

It is strange to meet such a writer at the beginning of the Settecento when the didactic, philosophic criticism of the Re- naissance, the ornamentation and conceits of the Seicento are merging into rationalism which purifies technique but destroys all spontaneity, all intuitive impulse in favour of a balanced, closely reasoned ideal. At one bound Montani attains to a spiritual ideal in literature which only a century of patient literary evaluation laboriously pro- duced in the criticism of the Romantic period, in the work of Berchet, Leopardi,

Foscolo and Manzoni. Foffano's observa- tion : " We must discern in Montani the merit of having continued Tassoni Beni, Boccalini and preceded Baretti, Becelli, and Cesarotti " errs on the side of caution : Montani, by power of intuition, enters into the Romantic period, into the modern also, and not even Becelli has anything to show less traditional than the observations con- tained in the hasty notes of the earlier critic. Even his own contemporaries recognized the merit of the Emilian critic and Orsi became a close friend.

Montani accused Orsi of being too super- ficial in bis examination and having strayed too much from his subject without erecting a sound defence. He aimed at a scientific refutation on a profoundly spiritual basis. This scientific refutation was provided by Ludovico Antonio Muratori in his * Perf etta Poesia,' the most considerable and un- doubtedly the most important work of an aesthetic nature in the early Settecento. Muratori opened out the whole question to an international significance and showed that it was impossible to isolate any one period in literary history and describe its defects as belonging wholly to that period and that nation. For example, the idea, that in Italy alone reigned conceits, equivo- cations, artifice in description and fantastic refinements in thought, had no historical justification. "This deluge was universal in Europe ; neither were the French, the Spaniards, the Germans exempt from it, those countries being submerged at the same time in the flood of conceits." Boileau traced their origin to Italy, but Muratori instanced Lope de Vega, who, long before Marino, lived in France and wrote some of his most important compositions under French influence. They could be found in Marot, Du Bellay, Du Barlas, Desportes, Ronsard, and more especially in the

Pharsalia ' of Brebeuf ; Le Moine, Rotrou, Quinault were not guiltless. Muratori thus envisaged a literary history which would link up international movements and give them a united significance. Such an inter- national history became the ambition of a later writer Quadrio, who, in his ' Storia e Ragione d'ogni Poesia,' sketched the first history of poetry in Italy.

With Muratori, however, the academic re-action against the French criticism ended and gave place to a sounder appreciation of the French reform in drama which inspired
 * he movement towards a national drama in

Italy, influenced directly the work of