The name is absent

Dante and the Renaissance 203

Rome, it did not have to be recast at the time of the Revival
of Learning. Italian is living Latin; it did not have to be
born anew, it needed no Renaissance. Dante is not modern,
any more than the Italy of to-day is archaic; but between
the two there is no gulf.

There may be a third reason for this enviable stability
of the Italian language: it is its semi-artificial character.
It will perhaps seem paradoxical to speak, of the most
musical of modern tongues as a sort of Esperanto; yet that
thesis has been ably maintained—by whom? Why, by Dante
himself. Until half a century ago there was, strictly speak-
ing, no such thing as Italian, just as there was no such thing
as Italy; there were Italian dialects and petty Italian states.
The political unity, involving linguistic unity, that France
achieved, roughly speaking, several centuries ago, had to
wait in Italy until the days of the Risorgimento and popular
education. Out of these many dialects of equal status, Tus-
can, thanks to its intrinsic purity and beauty, thanks to the
activity and prestige of Florence, thanks to the genius of
the great Triumvirate, came to be adopted when it was de-
sired to reach beyond the limits of a city-state. But the
“lingua aulica,” the court language, that Dante strove to
establish, is not spoken in its purity anywhere, not even in
Florence, as Cardinal Bembo pointed out. It is a lingua
franca, an auxiliary language, divorced from the daily
speech of the mart and the home. Now a semi-artificial lan-
guage is less liable to change than a popular dialect; its rules
are fixed by precedent and convention, among gentlemen and
scholars, not solely by the practice of the careless and
ignorant crowd. It was only in the seventeenth century that
French was taken resolutely in hand, “standardized,” in
other words, that it was made partly artificial. Italian had
reached the same point three hundred years earlier. Italian

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