NATIONAL STYLE 195 



that Italian, in spite of its fine quality and classic finish, does 

 not take a very high rank as an organ of style. 



This is due to accidents of growth, which find no exact 

 parallel in the history of any other nation. Long before 

 French attained to fixity, and while English was lisping in the 

 cradle, Italian produced a monumental poem, the 'Divine 

 Comedy.' Then followed Petrarch and Boccaccio, giving 

 exquisite form, in verse and prose, to the vernacular of medi- 

 aeval Tuscany. The Kevival of Learning directed attention 

 to antique masterpieces, and interrupted the natural develop- 

 ment of the mother tongue. When poets like Poliziano and 

 Ariosto, prose idyllists like Sannazzaro, men of letters like 

 Bembo, historians like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, resumed 

 Italian for the serious work of literature, the spirit of the age 

 already turned to criticism. Dialects flourished in every 

 province, and humanism supplied the common culture of the 

 nation. It was thought necessary to imitate the Tuscan 

 classics Petrarch for verse and Boccaccio for prose in 

 order to obtain one type of style for the scattered members of 

 the Italian family. Thus, writers who aimed at correctness 

 began already to look backward at a time when the intel- 

 lectual conditions of Europe demanded a free forward move- 

 ment. After the close of the sixteenth century Italian 

 literature was either scholarly, jejune, stiff, and empty of 

 ideas, because it followed models which were out of harmony 

 with the advance of modern thought ; or it was capricious, 

 fantastic, and barocco, because it tried to innovate within the 

 same narrow sphere of style. 



Only men of the highest natural endowments could move 

 freely and express contemporary thought and feeling in diction 

 which had been so artificially and critically elaborated. At 

 the beginning of this century Leopardi handled his mother 

 tongue in verse and prose with greater mastery than any 

 other writer of that age. It may therefore be well to select 

 passages from his works which illustrate this classic style in 

 its perfection. 



Piu volte io mi maraviglio meco medesimo come, ponghiamo caso, 

 Virgilio, esempio supremo di perfezione agli scrittori, sia venuto e man- 



o2 



