Brunetto Latini

“ It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that I am writing these notes.
If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence, instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by the next boat to Italy.
Biagi, that courteous scholar and humanist, writes me from the Laurentian at Florence that he has discovered some new material concerning Brunetto Latini—the teacher of Dante. Among the few ambitions that I dally with there has always been the one to write a life of Brunetto, who taught Dante how a man may become immortal. ”

“ The most popular and honoured names in Florence,
have yet the damning brand: no reader of the Inferno can have forgotten the shock of that terrible reply to the poet's questionings about their fate:
Ei son tra le anime più nere. [61]
If he is partial, it is no vulgar partiality: friendship-71- and old affection do not venture to exempt from its fatal doom the sin of his famous master, Brunetto Latini; [62] nobleness and great deeds, a kindred character and common wrongs, are not enough to redeem Farinata; and he who could tell her story bowed to the eternal law, and dared not save Francesca. ”

“ In addition to all this, there seems no doubt that there were Consuls of Florence during the same period, and therefore the theory of there being Imperial Podestà in the city itself naturally falls to the ground. In fact, the Consuls' names are recorded in documents of 1184. It is true that, for the three following years, the pseudo Brunetto Latini is the only authority by whom they are mentioned; but it is difficult to suppose that he invented them all, or that he could have been mistaken three consecutive times. ”

“ The use of the magnetic needle for the guidance of vessels, however, did not become popular in Europe until as late as the fourteenth century. [87] The slowness with which its use grew into favor with European seamen is ascribable to the prevailing superstition which hung [62] like a darkening cloud over the minds of the people. The strange conservatism of the age is well described in a letter written, as it seems, in the year 1258, by Brunetto Latini, a learned Italian, Dante’s tutor, to Guido Cavalcanti of Florence. ”

“ As a boy of thirteen he would doubtless have looked on at the scene in front of Santa Maria Novella; and during the next four peaceful years we may suppose that he would have begun to sit at the feet of the old statesman, diplomatist, and scholar Brunetto Latini, picking [62] up from his lips the lore “how man becomes immortal.” ”

“ Book iii., on politics, begins with a treatise on rhetoric, chiefly from Cicero De inventione, with many extracts from other writers and Brunetto’s remarks. The last part, the most original and interesting of all, treats of the government of the Italian republics of the time. Like many of his contemporaries, Brunetto revised his work, so that there are two editions, the second made after his return from exile. MSS. are singularly numerous, and exist in all the dialects then used in France. ”

“ LATINI, BRUNETTO (c. 1210–c. 1294) , Italian philosopher and scholar, was born in Florence, and belonged to the Guelph party. After the disaster of Montaperti he took refuge for some years (1261–1268) in France, but in 1269 returned to Tuscany and for some twenty years held successive high offices. Giovanni Villani says that “he was a great philosopher and a consummate master of rhetoric, not only in knowing how to speak well, but how to write well.... ”

“ Neither Brunetto, the most learned man of his age in Florence, and, as we should say, a man of “society” as well, nor a prince who, had he lived, would have been one of the most important personages in Europe, was likely to have distinguished with his friendship a young man of twenty-nine, not of the highest birth, unless he had already made himself notable for intellectual eminence. ”

“ Again, the perfection of strength is clearness united to brevity; but to this combination Latin is utterly unequal. From the vagueness and uncertainty of meaning which characterises its separate words, to be perspicuous it must be full. What Livy, and much more Tacitus, have gained in energy, they have lost in lucidity and elegance; the correspondence of Brutus with Cicero is forcible, indeed, but harsh and abrupt. Latin, in short, is not a philosophical language, not a language in which a deep thinker is likely to express himself with purity or neatness. ”

“ Turn’d himself back, then look’d at me and spake:
“He listens to good purpose who takes note.”
I not the less still on my way proceed,
Discoursing with Brunetto, and inquire
Who are most known and chief among his tribe.
“To know of some is well;” thus he replied,
“But of the rest silence may best beseem.
Time would not serve us for report so long.
In brief I tell thee, that all these were clerks,
Men of great learning and no less renown,
By one same sin polluted in the world. ”

“ To speak of Latin dying in giving birth to her offspring is again pure mythology, and it would be easy to prove that Latin was a living language long after Italian had learnt to run alone. Only let us clearly see what we mean by Latin. The classical Latin is one out of many dialects spoken by the Aryan inhabitants of Italy. It was the dialect of Latium, in Latium the dialect of Rome, at Rome the dialect of the patricians. It was fixed by Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Nævius, Cato, and Lucretius, polished by the Scipios, Hortensius, and Cicero. ”

“ The Latin language, so noble in itself, and dignified, assumes additional majesty in the periods of the Roman Consul, and adds an inexpressible beauty and loftiness to the natural sublimity of his sentiments. No writings, in fact, are so full of moral and intellectual grandeur as those of Cicero, none are more calculated to elevate and purify our nature—to inculcate the tu vero enitere, in the path of knowledge and virtue, and to excite not merely a fond desire, or idle longing, but strenuous efforts after immortality. ”

“ As for popular Latin, it has never ceased to exist. It is the language of France, Spain, Italy, Roumania, and all the Romance countries to-day. Its history has been unbroken from the founding of Rome to the present time. Various scholars have tried to determine the date before which we shall call the popular speech vulgar Latin, and after which it may better be styled French or Spanish or Italian, as the case may be. Some would fix the dividing line in the early part of the eighth century A.D., when phonetic changes common to all parts of the Roman world would cease to occur. ”

“ If to know the main features of the classic pronunciation of Latin were impossible, then our obvious course would be to refuse the attempt; to regard the language as in reality dead, and to make no pretence of reading it. This is in fact what the English scholars generally do. But if we may know substantially the sounds of the tongue in which Cicero spoke and Horace sung, shall we give up the delights of the melody and the rhythm and content ourselves with the thought form? Poetry especially does not exist apart from sound ”

“ In 1392 Vergerio addressed to a prince of Padua the first treatise which methodically maintains the claims of Latin as an essential part of a liberal education. Eight years later, he was learning Greek from Chrysoloras. Among the most distinguished pupils of the latter was Leonardo Bruni, who, about 1405, wrote “the earliest humanistic tract on education expressly addressed to a lady.” He here urges that the foundation of all true learning is a “sound and thorough knowledge of Latin,” and draws up a course of reading, in which history is represented by Livy, Sallust, Curtius, and Caesar ”

“ How far would the influence of a man like Blondus of Forli have reached if he had written his great monuments of learning in the dialect of the Romagna? They would have assuredly sunk into neglect, if only through the contempt of the Florentines, while written in Latin they exercised the profoundest influence on the whole European world of learning. And even the Florentines in the fifteenth century wrote Latin, not only because their minds were imbued with humanism, but in order to be more widely read. ”

“ Yet the Latin language is still the necessary foundation of one half of human knowledge, and the forms created by Roman genius underlie the whole of our civilisation. So long as mankind look before and after, the name of Rome will be the greatest of those upon which their backward gaze can be turned. ”

“ Latin, however, had not the plastic property of the Greek, the faculty of transforming itself into every variety of form and shape conceived by the fancy and imagination; it partook of the spirit of Roman nationality, of the conscious dignity of the Roman citizen, of the indomitable will that led that people to the conquest of the world. In its construction, instead of conforming to the thought, it bends the thought to its own genius. It is a fit language for expressing the thoughts of an active and practical, but not of an imaginative and speculative people. ”

“ In the pronunciation of Latin the observance of quantity and of pitch are the two most difficult points of attainment; and they are the crucial test of good reading.
The observance of quantity is no less important in prose than in verse. A little reflection will convince the dullest mind that the Romans did not pronounce a word one way in prose and another in verse; that we have not in poetry and prose two languages. Cicero and Quintilian both enjoin a due admixture of long and short syllables in prose as well as verse ”

“ As Cicero sought to augment the authority of his own Latin, so did Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio for Italian. Greek (vi) we may dismiss, since it is not a medium for us; we study it not to use it, but the better to explore Latin. Provençal (vii-xi) , though once an important language of literature and very influential in our early poetry, has been superseded by Italian.
But if we are to use the vernacular for literature, which vernacular? (xii) Italian is not uniform. Shall we adopt the language of the Papal Court? No; it has not writers enough to constitute literary authority. ”

“ It is most probable that this was encouraged by the leaders of education, in order more thoroughly to break with Rome. The effect was, that after learning Greek and Latin for twenty years, a lad could hardly speak a sentence, because he had never been taught to converse in the absurdly called Dead Languages, and if he did speak, not a soul but an Englishman could understand him. The English pronunciation of Latin vowels, happens to be the very worst in the world, because we have an O and an A which belongs peculiarly to English, and which destroys all the charms of those grand-sounding vowels. ”

“ Latin was the common language of scholars and remained so even down to the days of Shakespeare. Even yet it is more nearly than any other tongue the universal language of the learned. The life of to-day is much nearer the life of ancient Rome than the lapse of centuries would lead one to suppose. You and I are Romans still in many ways, and if Cæsar and Cicero should appear among us, we should not find them, except for dress and language, much unlike men of to-day. ”

“ The clever boys are, as a rule, well provided for; but, even for them, the methods of this book have been found to be the shortest road to accuracy and style in translation. Moreover by this means they have gained a firsthand acquaintance with Latin literature and the sources of Roman history.
It is impossible here to enter into ‘the question of the close and striking correspondence between the history, the literature, and the language of Rome. It was not until the history of Rome threw its mantle over her poetry that the dignity of the poet was recognised and acknowledged. ”

“ He was a scholar, able to interpret the classical Greek poets and prose-writers; and he was eloquent. The enthusiasm created at Florence must have been remarkable. For the first time, Italians were placed in sympathy with the ancient Greek mind at its best. Ardent students, young and old, including several who afterwards became eminent, crowded the lecture-room. One of these was Lionardo Bruni, well-known in later life for his Latin History of Florence, as also for translations from Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Plutarch. ”

“ I have been inclining to the belief that Terence, Virgil, and Horace have done damage to the Latin language, or at least to our taste; just as Pope was the ruin of English poetry so long as he was allowed to dictate the style and cadences. In Plautus, Lucretius, and Catullus the language has a flexibility and the metres a freedom which (as I think) academicians and schoolmasters have not duly appreciated, and which ought to impart to us (when we do do anything so absurd as to write foreign verses) a freedom at which we have not generally aimed. ”

“ For exercising the intellectual faculties, and for awakening and developing a sense of the fundamental properties of a good style—namely, correctness, precision, and brevity of expression—there is no doubt that Latin with its limpid clearness, its rigorous precision, and its absolute definiteness of meaning, is a better object of study than Greek with its multitudinous forms and particles, the import of which is matter rather of skilled conjecture and artistic feeling than of logical analysis. ”