Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be taught hard things
in their dialect, although they can live, whether easy lives or hard, and
evidently can die, therein.  The hands and feet that have served the
villager and the citizen at homely tasks have all the lowliness of his
patois, to his mind; and when he must perforce yield up their employment,
we may believe that it is a simple thing to die in so simple and so
narrow a language, one so comfortable, neighbourly, tolerant, and
compassionate; so confidential; so incapable, ignorant, unappalling,
inapt to wing any wearied thought upon difficult flight or to spur it
upon hard travelling.
Not without words is mental pain, or even physical pain, to be undergone;
but the words that have done no more than order the things of the narrow
street are not words to put a fine edge or a piercing point to any human
pang.  It may even well be that to die in dialect is easier than to die
in the eloquence of Manfred, though that declaimed language, too, is
doubtless a defence, if one of a different manner.
These writers in Venetian--they are named because in no other Italian
dialect has work so popular as Goldoni's been done, nor so excellent as
Signor Fogazzaro's--have left the unlettered local language in which they
loved to deal, to its proper limitations.  They have not given weighty
things into its charge, nor made it heavily responsible.  They have added
nothing to it; nay, by writing it they might even be said to have made it
duller, had it not been for the reader and the actor.  Insomuch as the
intense expressiveness of a dialect--of a small vocabulary in the mouth
of a dramatic people--lies in the various accent wherewith a southern
citizen knows how to enrich his talk, it remains for the actor to restore
its life to the written phrase.  In dialect the author is forbidden to
search for the word, for there is none lurking for his choice; but of
tones, allusions, and of references and inferences of the voice, the
speaker of dialect is a master.  No range of phrases can be his, but he
has the more or the less confidential inflection, until at times the
close communication of the narrow street becomes a very conspiracy.
Let it be borne in mind that dialect properly so called is something all
unlike, for instance, the mere jargon of London streets.  The difference
may be measured by the fact that Italian dialects have a highly organized
and orderly grammar.  The Londoner cannot keep the small and loose order
of the grammar of good English; the Genoese conjugates his patois verbs,
with subjunctives and all things of that handsome kind, lacked by the
English of Universities.
The middle class--the piccolo mondo--hat shares Italian dialect with
the poor are more strictly local in their manners than either the opulent
or the indigent of the same city.  They have moreover the busy
intelligence (which is the intellect of patois) at its keenest.  Their