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In relation to what I have said elsewhere [→Z 343–44], to the effect that the Italian language has never shed the capacity to use its ancient wealth, but the French language just the reverse, see Andrés, Storia d’ogni letteratura, Venice, Vitto, tome 3, pp. 95, end–99, beginning, that is, Part 1, ch. 13 and tome 4, p. 17, that is Part 2, Introduction. (8 May 1821.)
Some Greek writers in the last period of the Greek Empire were actually superior in elegance to many from earlier but corrupt periods, just as Latin writers in sixteenth-century Italy very often surpass the ancient Latin writers coming after Cicero and Virgil. “After the age of Augustus there has never been a period in which the language of the Romans was so generally written in so pure and refined a manner” (as in the 16th century). Andrés, loc. cit. above, p. 96. (8 May 1821.)
[1024] Even though the Celtic language was so beautiful and well suited to literature and, as a consequence, was formed and established and fixed (expressions used by Buommattei for a similar purpose),1 as may be seen nowadays in the records that remain, and as I have said p. 994, end, even though it was so ancient and deeply rooted, etc., nonetheless whereas the Greeks, even when they were Roman subjects and living in Rome or Italy, always wrote in Greek and never in Latin, no Gallic writer in the same circumstances ever wrote, so far as we know, in the Celtic language, but always in Latin. (9 May 1821.)
From Demosthenes onward Greece had no other writer who in regard to language and style resembled, or rather equaled the best of the ancients, with the exception of Arrian (and this without the slightest affectation, or trace of imitation, or trace of antiquated language or style, unlike our modern imitators of the fourteenth and the sixteenth century). Neither Polybius, nor Dionysius of Halicarnassus (though the latter more than the others, and he may be placed second to Arrian), nor Plutarch, nor even Lucian, who was so very Attic in style and so very elegant (with an elegance, however, that was quite different from the native elegance of the ancients, and from perfect, and characteristic Greek language and style) can be compared to him under this head. (9 May 1821.)
For p. 1021. So that the present corruption of the Italian language both spoken and written adds a new and most formidable obstacle to its universality. For foreigners, it may be said, do not know any Italian literature or written language that is not old, because our modern books [1025] do not cross the Alps, nor do they deserve to, and because we do not, in fact, have a modern literature (still less modern sciences), nor even an established, fully formed, recognized, and characteristic modern language. On the other hand, they do not know, nor can they know any other spoken Italian than the one spoken today, which is so different from the old language, both spoken and written, and so different from good, true, proper Italian speech. More or less the same may be said of Spanish. (9 May 1821.)
The actual knowledge that the Greeks of any period had of Latin Church Fathers and theologians, etc., the only Latin writers whom they might know, was not comparable (except perhaps in the most barbarous Middle Ages) to that which the Latins had of Greek Church Fathers and ecclesiastical authors, especially in the early centuries of Christendom, and in the final years of the Greek empire (Andrés, loc. cit. by me p. 1023, tome 3, p. 55), when they displayed it chiefly at the Council of Florence1 (ibid.). (9 May 1821.)
Although man always desires an infinite pleasure, he desires one that is material and perceptible, no matter how much that infinity or lack of definition leads us to believe that something spiritual is involved. The spiritual element that we conceive confusedly in our desires or in our [1026] vaguest, most indefinite, vast, sublime sensations is nothing, you might say, but the infinity or indefiniteness of the material. So that our desires and sensations, even the most spiritual ones, never extend outside of matter, more or less definitely conceived, and the most spiritual and pure and imaginary and indeterminate happiness that we can sample or desire is never, nor can it ever be anything but material, because each and every faculty of our mind comes to an absolute stop on the final boundary of matter and is wholly confined within the bounds of matter. (9 May 1821.)
If princes were to revive illusion, and give their peoples life and spirit and a real sense of themselves, and bring the constitutive and founding errors and imaginings of nations and societies back to life with some degree of substance and reality, if they were to restore our homeland to us, if triumphs, public contests, games, patriotic festivals, honors given for merit and services rendered to the homeland were to come back into use, it is certain that all the nations would come alive, or rather come alive again, and would become great and strong and formidable. But the southern nations especially, and among these Italy and Greece in particular (provided they returned to being nations), would become invincible once more. And then [1027] we would once again know the true and innate preeminence of the southern nature over the northern, a preeminence that our nations always had as long as they did not want for strong, great, and general illusions, and motives and sustenance for these. A preeminence that for a long time now, but especially today, seems conversely, to nature’s shame I would say, to belong (not only in war, but in every kind of action, energy, and life) to the inhabitants of the ice and the mists, to regions that are unfavored, indeed almost hated by nature:
Quod latus mundi nebulae malusque
Juppiter urget.1
[a part of the world oppressed by fog and sullen Jupiter]
It is noteworthy that, just as the ancients resemble the southern character and the moderns the northern, so too ancient civilization, etc., was chiefly southern while modern is chiefly northern. It is well known that civilization has long been advancing from south to north (since Indian times), gradually leaving the lands of the south behind. The capitals of the ancient world were Babylon, Memphis, Athens, Rome, those of the modern world are Paris, London, Petersburg! What climates!2 The natural consequence of southern peoples losing the action and use of the mainspring of their life, that is, imagination, the mainspring which when it is capable of action (and it cannot be so without the right circumstances) overcomes the force of all other mechanisms capable of making the northern peoples, and any people, act. Indeed, truth to tell, the northern peoples, especially the most warlike and terrible, are not made to act by any mainspring, by any force intrinsic and internal to their own mechanism, but simply by someone else’s impulse, by the mere influence of those whom they obey, even if they are ordered to eat straw. (10 May 1821.)
[1028] The thing that is most lastingly and truly pleasurable is the variety of things, for no other reason than that nothing is lastingly and truly pleasurable. (10 May 1821.)
On the first Italian grammars see Andrés, Storia della letteratura, Venice, Vitto, tome 9, p. 316, end, that is, Part 2, bk. 4, ch. 2. (10 May 1821.)
On the dream of founding a universal language, see Andrés, loc. cit. above, p. 320 and Soave’s Locke, tome 2, pp. 62–76, third Venice ed., 1794.1 (10 May 1821.)
The Bible and Homer are the two great sources for writers, says Alfieri in his Life.2 Likewise Dante in Italian, etc.3 If only because, being the oldest books, they are the closest to nature, the sole source of beauty, greatness, life, variety. Once reason is introduced into the world everything little by little, and the more it progresses, becomes ugly, petty, dead, monotonous. (11 May 1821.)
If the universality of a language depended on the spread of those to whom it is natural, no language today would have this attribute more than English, since English colonies occupy a greater part of the world and are more numerous than those of every other European nation, and the English nation is the most widely traveled in the world. (11 May 1821.)
[1029] The Latin language overcame the ancient Spanish, Celtic, etc., languages simply through the introduction into Spain, Gaul, etc., of Roman government, laws, customs. But to overcome Greek, not even transferring Rome itself, and virtually Italy itself, was enough.1 (11 May 1821.)
For p. 991. With the sole exception of Phaedrus, whether he was Thracian, as is common
ly believed (the language of literature in Thrace was Greek, as is evident from the Thracians Linus and Orpheus, and the later Dionysius, a famous grammarian surnamed the Thracian), or Macedonian, as Desbillons maintains (“Disputatio I de vita Phaedri,” prefaced to Phaedri Fabulis, Mannheim 1786, pp. vff.).2 His Latin style, though many do not find it excellent or entirely perfect, is nonetheless certainly better than mediocre. (11 May 1821.)
For p. 245. The French language remains and will long remain universal, on account of its structure and character. What is certain, however, is that the introduction of this language into common use, and the material principle behind its universality, arises both from the paramount political influence of France in the recent past and from its moral influence as the most civilized nation in the world, and as a consequence of its fashions, etc., or we might say from the fashion of being French, [1030] from the sway and dictatorship of fashion that France has held and still holds, etc. And crucially again it arises from the spread of its literature and the superiority and influence it has acquired over other literatures, if for no other reason than its being exclusively and peculiarly modern, and because modern literature itself was born in France (as a result of civil, moral, political, etc., circumstances) before it came into being in any other nation, and has been cultivated there more than anywhere else, and in a more modern way, or in the modern style, than in any other country. But the continuation of this universality, even when the causes mentioned above come to an end (as they have done in part), will be due to its own character, whereas whatever universality was formerly acquired by the Spanish, Italian, etc., languages ended when the extrinsic causes producing it had ended, since those languages have no intrinsic propensity for universality. With these observations rectify what I said pp. 240–45. And where literature and moral influence, etc. etc., is concerned, it is certain that these were the extrinsic causes for the universality of the Greek language, which, however, also had its intrinsic causes. These were completely lacking in Latin, which was therefore never truly universal, [1031] nor did it endure, as Greek still endures, notwithstanding the fact that it abounded in extrinsic reasons for universality. (11 May 1821.) See p. 1039, end.
That the Italian language especially, and to a lesser degree also Spanish and French, as I will explain below, derive from ancient Vulgar Latin, may be demonstrated not only by means of obscure facts and recondite erudition, but by simple reasoning based on facts that are widely known and certain, and on the nature of things. The Italian language derives from ancient Latin, and this is a palpable fact. The Italian language is a vernacular. But no vernacular derives from a written language and one that is proper to writing, except insofar as this written language shares in the actual and commonly spoken language. The written Latin language differed markedly from the spoken, and this is evident both from the nature of written Latin, which could never be common, and from the express testimony of Cicero. If, then, the Italian language derives from Latin, and Italian is not merely written or put to literary uses, but is common and spoken, it cannot derive from written Latin, only from Vulgar Latin.
It is reasonable to infer from the fact of there being a vulgar Latin that was very different from written Latin that the Italian derived from Latin cannot come from the written language; it must come from the language as commonly spoken.
[1032] This argument applies to all the languages derived from Latin, and to all those derived from any other ancient language where the written form differs markedly from the spoken. But it applies particularly to Italian, which is the vernacular of that same country to which Latin was natural.
What language would have been spoken in Italy in the late Empire? Was it perhaps written Latin? Who can believe the absurd notion that barbarous centuries spoke better than civilized ones? Was it perhaps the languages of the northern peoples, their conquerors? (1) It is known and consistent with testimonies and empirical observations that rather than introducing their own language among the conquered, these peoples learned and adopted the latter’s language. See Andrés, tome 2, p. 330.1
(2) Everyone knows how few northern words remain in Italian, and also in French and Spanish, and how the body, substance, bulk, essential foundation, and capital of these languages, and especially Italian, derives from Latin, and is Latin.
So it is, then, that Italy in the late Empire certainly spoke Latin. Corrupt Latin, but Latin nonetheless. What kind of Latin, then? Not the written form: the vernacular, therefore, that is to say the language they spoke before, the common language they spoke before. For their language, the common language they spoke before, was not written [1033] Latin, nor could it be, but Vulgar Latin. Even this vernacular will have been spoken corruptly, but the substance, the bulk, etc., of the language then spoken, must have been that of the vernacular in question, given that today the bulk of Italian is derived from Latin, and is Latin.
It is commonly assumed, so it seems, that the common use of Latin was completely or almost completely interrupted in Italy, with only its civil, religious, and literary use remaining; and that from this use, and from written Latin, etc., there was then again reborn the use of a vulgar Latin language, or one derived from Latin, that is to say, the use of Italian. And thus the latter was taken to derive from written Latin, whether through Provençal, which arose before Italian, or by some other means.
These are completely ridiculous fables and (apart from the fact of their being wholly unfounded) contrary to the nature of things.
Wherever Latin has not been in use except as a civil, religious, written, literary, etc., language, the national vernaculars have remained, and instead of a language that was the daughter of Latin deriving and being born from written Latin, etc., in such places, the vernacular has, on the contrary, banished Latin from writing as well, and from literary and civil use. In Germany, [1034] England, Poland, where in the early middle ages Latin was used (and in Poland later as well) but never as a spoken language, only as a civil, religious, literary one, no language arose from Latin; the ancient, national languages remain, the vernacular languages remain; or rather, the languages derived from these natural and vernacular languages remain, and Latin has disappeared from civil and literary use. I say the same of Greece, where Latin was introduced solely as a language of government, etc., see pp. 982–83. The same, too, of Italian, Spanish, French, all of which likewise banished their mother language1 from civil, political, and literary use. And this may indeed be seen in the case of the French language introduced as civil, etc., in England through the Norman Conquest (see p. 1011, end), of Arabic introduced earlier in the same fashion in part of Spain (Andrés, 2, 263–73) and then likewise banished from literature and every sphere. See also the Annali di scienze e lettere, no. 13, pp. 29–32.2 And the nature of things requires that it is not the language of writers which changes that of the people and is brought in among the people, but rather the language of the people which conquers that of writers, who also write for the people and for the many. The written does not drive out the spoken, but the spoken sooner or later overcomes the written and makes it more or less uniform with itself. See p. 1062.
If Gothic or any other language whether northern or no had truly become established in Italy as a spoken vernacular, with Latin still remaining as written, etc., today we would speak that or those languages, and not a language derived from Latin.
But since the opposite occurred, it is evident that Italy’s language was uninterruptedly Latin; and if it was such, uninterruptedly up until the present day, it was therefore without interruption that more or less altered Vulgar Latin which was spoken in times past, and not, indeed, the [1035] written form; therefore, we speak today a language derived from that vernacular, and one whose capital belongs to and is indeed the same as that of ancient Vulgar Latin.
The same goes for Spanish and French. If these languages are vernacular, and derive from Latin, and therefore from spoken Latin and not from written, therefore from Vulgar Latin, this means that the Latin language was es
tablished in Spain and France as a spoken language, and not only as a civil, governmental, literary language (and so it is in fact, very few Celtic words remain in the French language, and no trace of the ancient language of Spain in Spanish: Andrés, 2, 252). And it means that Vulgar Latin, more or less altered by foreign admixture, was maintained in Spain and France (as in Wallachia) from the time of its original introduction up until the birth of the Spanish and the French languages, and by means of these up until the present day. On the ancient origin of the present Spanish language, and on how its oldest surviving records, like those of Provençal, French, etc., are closely modeled on Latin, see an example drawn from that language by Andrés, 2, 286, end.1
To conclude. If the Italian language, which is a vernacular, derives from Latin, it cannot then [1036] derive from written Latin, which is so different from spoken, but comes directly from ancient Vulgar Latin, and is the same fundamentally and in essence. And because of location (setting aside for the moment proofs of fact and erudition) it is more so than Spanish and French. This argument is valid, however, for any language derived either from Latin or from any other ancient language: and each and every modern language derived from any ancient language is derived from the spoken form of that language, not the written form. For if the German language, as Tercier says, is etc., see p. 1012, beginning, this occurs because, since the ancient Teutonic language in its written form was a language that was uncultured, or not sufficiently formed and defined to be written down, in effect a written language without a literature, it differed very little or not at all from the common spoken language. But we would see as great and perhaps greater uniformity between Italian and ancient Vulgar Latin if we had more information about the latter. And if I speak of greater uniformity, there is good cause to do so, considering the great difference there really is between present-day German and Teutonic (Andrés, 2, 249–54), and the very great resemblance that I have sought at many points to establish between Italian [1037] and ancient Vulgar Latin. So that the Italian language, rather than being the most modern of all the living European languages, as they claim (Andrés, 2, 249–54), will be recognized as either the most ancient, or as among the most ancient, with its origin and use (never subsequently interrupted, though altered) lost in the obscurity of the origins of very ancient and earliest Latin. By contrast with Spanish and French, because in these nations the use of Vulgar Latin certainly came about many, many centuries later than in Italy. (12 May 1821.)