When style and language had once become the property of a living society, all the efforts of purists and archaists failed to secure their end.Tuscany itself was rich in writers and the first order, who ignored and ridiculed these endeavors.Ridicule in abundance awaited the foreign scholar who explained to the Tuscans how little they understood their language.The life and influence of a writer like Machiavelli was enough to sweep away all these cobwebs.His vigorous thoughts, his clear and simple mode of expression wore a form which had any merit but that of the 'Trecentisti.' And on the other hand there were too many North Italians, Romans, and Neapolitans, who were thankful if the demand for purity of style in literature and conversation was not pressed too far.They repudiated, indeed, the forms and idioms of their dialect; and Bandello, with what a foreigner might suspect to be false modesty, is never tired of declaring: 'I have no style; I do not write like a Florentine, but like a barbarian; I am not ambitious of giving new graces to my language; I am a Lombard, and from the Ligurian border into the bargain.' But the claims of the purists were most successfully met by the express renunciation of the higher qualities of style, and the adoption of a vigorous, popular language in their stead.Few could hope to rival Pietro Bembo who, though born in Venice, nevertheless wrote the purest Tuscan, which to him was a foreign language, or the Neapolitan Sannazaro, who did the same.But the essential point was that language, whether spoken or written, was held to be an object of respect.As long as this feeling was prevalent, the fanaticism of the purists--their linguistic congresses and the rest of it--did little harm.Their bad influence was not felt till much later, when the original power of Italian literature relaxed and yielded to other and far worse influences.At last it became possible for the Accademia della Crusca to treat Italian like a dead language.But this association proved so helpless that it could not even hinder the invasion of Gallicism in the eighteenth century.
This language--loved, tended, and trained to every use--now served as the basis of social intercourse.In northern countries, the nobles and the princes passed their leisure either in solitude, or in hunting, fighting, drinking, and the like; the burghers in games and bodily exercises, with a mixture of literary or festive amusements.In Italy there existed a neutral ground, where people of every origin, if they had the needful talent and culture, spent their time in conversation change of jest and earnest.As eating small part of such entertainments, it not difficult to keep at a distance those who sought society for these objects.If we are to take the writers of dialogues literally, the loftiest problems of human existence were not excluded from the conversation of thinking men, and the production of noble thoughts was not, as was commonly the case in the North, the work of solitude, but of society.But we must here limit ourselves to the less serious side of social intercourse--to the side which existed only for the sake of amusement.
Social Etiquette This society, at all events at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a matter of art; and had, and rested on, tacit or avowed rules of good sense and propriety, which are the exact reverse of all mere etiquette.In less polished circles, where society took the form of a permanent corporation, we meet with a system of formal rules and a prescribed mode of entrance, as was the case with those wild sets of Florentine artists of whom Vasari tells us that they were capable of giving representations of the best comedies of the day.In the easier intercourse of society it was not unusual to select some distinguished lady as president, whose word was law for the evening.
Everybody knows the introduction to Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' and looks on the presidency of Pampinea as a graceful fiction.That it was so in this particular case is a matter of course; but the fiction was nevertheless based on a practice which often occurred in reality.
