202 Dante Sexcentenary Lectures
was indigenous in Italy, not superimposed, and the different
Italian dialects remained fairly close to the parent lan-
guage. For a time this very closeness hampered the use of
the vernacular as a literary vehicle, for whoever could read
and write could master Latin with comparative facility.
Latin was thus, as Iate as the thirteenth century, the com-
mon language of culture in the peninsula; in the rest of
Europe this was true only among the clerks. Dante him-
self hesitated between Italian and Latin for his great poem.
Had he yielded to the scholarly prejudice, all his genius
would hardly have saved the “Comedy” from the fate of
“De Planctu Naturæ” or Petrarch’s “Africa.”
This belated emergence of Italian as a literary medium
was a blessing in disguise: it was not used for any ambitious
purpose until the thought of the age was definitely formed.
Italy was spared the disheartening effort to express great
but immature concepts with an inadequate vocabulary.
Literary Italian knew no infancy: it was born an adult.
The continuity of its Latin tradition enabled Italian to
skip another stage of development. There was a medieval
French, made up of profoundly corrupted popular Latin,
mixed with Celtic and Teutonic elements; then there was a
Renaissance French, into which classical terms were forcibly
introduced, often duplicating the medieval word, whose ori-
gin had become unrecognizable; finally there was a classical
French, which sought to evolve order out of that chaos.
Similarly we had Anglo-Saxon, then Anglo-Norman, blend-
ing into Chaucerian English; then a Latin invasion in the
sixteenth century, the whole magnificently fused at last by
the Elizabethan poets and King James’ translators. Com-
pared with these complex histories, that of Italian is sim-
plicity itself. The language was from the very first com-
posed of fairly homogeneous elements; the direct heir of