Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IX.djvu/476

 458 ITALY (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) ture; they are rather dilettantisms than seri- ous efforts. Italian, though practically wordy, is not necessarily periphrastic and diffuse. Da- vanzati boasts that his translation of Tacitus is more concise than the original. Nor is it by any means so deficient in the power of self- development as is generally supposed. Giuliitni has shown that the unlettered Tuscan peasants are very happy in the enrichment of their speech ; the use of the privative is extending, and it is often employed with new and stri- king effect ; and new words are not merely in- troduced from abroad, but freshly formed from Latin or provincial roots. The involution of periods is by no means an inherent defect in the language. Villari, in his life of Savonarola, employs a style of remarkable clearness, logi- cal exactness, and directness, which, if not Tus- can, is, at least according to general principles of criticism, something better than Tuscan; and the Spagna of De Amicis is a specimen of light, lively, fluent, and correct composition, of which the literature of our day cannot boast many examples. One of the points which first strike a foreigner who seeks to become ac- quainted, through the native medium, with the new life which pulsates in united Italy, and es- pecially with the physical character of the coun- try and the material interests of the people, is the poverty of the language of common speech in descriptive terms and epithets. As he ad- vances in a knowledge of Italian general liter- ature, he will find the written dialect almost equally inadequate to express sensations, im- ages, and thoughts which every hour brings to the lips of an American. For the absence of a descriptive and picturesque nomenclature in conversational language, and in poetry and other imaginative compositions, there are several rea- sons. First, the culture of Italy is to a great extent fashioned after classic models, and of course its tongue partakes of the poverty of the Latin in the material vocabulary ; in the next place, the Italian literature known to foreigners belongs chiefly to a period anterior to the de- velopment of the sense of landscape heauty and the love of nature in modern life; and finally, in England and America, and in a less degree in northern continental Europe, the diffusion and importance of physical science, of foreign commerce, and of agricultural and mechanical art, have made the vocabularies of all industries a part of the common speech of all classes, and have consequently entered far more largely into the diction of social life, of poetry, and of all belles-lettres literature, than they have done in Italy. The helps to the study of the Italian language are very in- sufficient. Pesavento has lately published a valuable comparative view of the structure of Latin and Italian, under the title Metodo com- parative ; but few good practical Italian gram- mars, and only one or two tolerable bilingual dictionaries of Italian and other modern lan- guages, exist ; and many hand dictionaries with Italian explanations are very deficient in ful- ness and incorrect in definition, in the depart- ment of which we have just spoken. These de- fects are beginning to be felt by the Italian peo- ple. Carena's Prontuario and Palma's Voeabo- lario dell 1 agricoltura supply many a term not found in general handbooks; and a series of technical dictionaries now in preparation un- der the patronage of the government, of which Canevazzi's excellent Voedbolario dell' agri- coltura is the first, will soon bring Italian lexicography, at least in the material depart- ment, to a level with that of the other Euro- pean tongues. LITERATURE. The example of the emperor Otho I. and Pope Gregory V., before mentioned, while it attested the uni- versal prevalence in the peninsula of the Italian or lingua commie, contributed also not a little to its being further used and cultivated by all classes in church and state. Thenceforward it became the language of the palace and the pulpit, of deliberative assemblies and law courts, and of all commercial and legal trans- actions. The Provencal troubadours, who were to be found everywhere in the 12th cen- tury from Sicily to the Alps, were superseded by sweeter and better singers in the native tongue of Italy ; and the romantic exploits of chivalry and the annals of the courts of love were written in the popular idiom. Thus the growth and polish of the Italian language were the work of religion and patriotism. Frederick II. made it the language of his court at Paler- mo (1212), of the schools he founded in that and other cities, and of the university of Naples (1224), which owed to him its existence. He, his sons Enzio and Manfred, and his secretary Pietro delle Vigne, wrote verses in it. A son- net of Pietro's is the earliest known specimen of the kind, hut several written by the Sicilian Giacopo da Lentino (about 1250) manifest a much greater perfection. Frederick's literary tastes excited emulation in the cities of central and northern Italy. Guido Guinicelli, who died in 1276 and is called by Dante " the father of me and of my betters," advanced this poetic form to still higher perfection, as is evidenced by his canzone styled " The Gentle Heart " in Dante Rossetti's " Early Italian Poets " (now entitled "Dante and his Circle"). Contem- porary with or immediately succeeding him were Guido Ghislieri, Fabricio, and Onesto ; Guittone d'Arezzo, in Tuscany (died 1294), whose forty letters to a friend furnish the earliest specimens of the epistolary style in Italian ; other Tuscans, among them Bonagiunta da Lucca, Gallo Pisano, and Brunette Floren- tine ; the Neapolitan chronicler Matteo Spinelli, who wrote the earliest Italian prose work of importance, a history of events from 1247 to 1268; and the Florentine historian Ricordano Malespini (died 1281), the genuineness of whose works has been questioned by recent critics. Brnnetto Latini (died in 1294), the teacher of Dante, author of the cyolopredic work II Tesoro and the collection of didactic rhymes called the Tesoretto, also belongs to this time ;