198 NOTES ON STYLE 



There is another circumstance which must not be neglected 

 in the general survey of the growth of Italian style. The 

 nation was not only divided by dialects and united mainly by 

 a common tendency toward humanistic culture. It was also 

 for several centuries deprived of free political life, a central 

 capital, and a press adequate to the intellectual requirements 

 of an expansive people. Neither by public speaking, nor 

 by the conversation of enlightened coteries, nor yet by 

 journalism, had the Italian language proper opportunities 

 for unfolding its capacities and marching front to front with 

 modern thought. Almost suddenly, within our lifetime, 

 these disabilities were removed ; and no sooner could Italy 

 proclaim herself in fact a nation, than the classic style, of 

 which Leopardi was so great a nineteenth century master, 

 began to be displaced by revolutionary modes of expression 

 which cause pain to the purists, and which no sane critic of 

 language can regard as final. The difficulty under which a 

 mother tongue, artificially and critically fashioned like Italian, 

 suffers when it copes with ordinary affairs of modern life, is 

 illustrated by the fabrication of feeble vocables like panificio, 

 birrificio, cottonificio, and by newspaper jargon, of which the 

 following sentence from a police-court report is only a fair 

 specimen : 



Tosto avvenuto 1' attentato la cameriera si e resa latitante e finora 

 non si pote mettersi sulle tracce. L' ufficiale ieri stava molto male, 

 tanto che vociferavasi fosse resa necessaria 1' amputazione della mano. 



With reference to the jingle of inharmonious and weakly 

 phrases which are now invading the minor literature of Italy, 

 I remember the late Duke of Sermoneta inveighing in my 

 presence against the diction of the Chambers, its barbarous 

 neologisms, its total want of taste, its violation of the genius 

 of the language. 'Why cannot they use the golden speech 

 of the fourteenth century ? ' he asked. ' Everything can be 

 expressed in Italian of that epoch.' Alas, I thought to 

 myself, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur. Style which 

 sufficed the writer of the c Fioretti di San Francesco ' will 

 not grapple with the exigencies of an age of scientific 



