III - THE EARLIEST ITALIAN LITERATURE

Summary

It may be well to state at the outset that by literature I do not merely mean documents actually preserved by writing or engraving, but all productions capable of being so preserved, whether originally handed down by oral tradition or not. It will be the special aim of this essay to examine the evidence of language as to the character of the earliest Italian literature; for I doubt whether this branch of the subject, important as it is if we would gain anything like accurate ideas, has received the attention which it deserves. It is true that the evidence has been over and over again collected and reviewed, yet, as it seems to me, without sufficient grasp and clearness of conception. In this, as in other cases, conventional criticism, that is, criticism based upon insufficient investigation and handed down unquestioned from scholar to scholar, has exercised its usual baneful effect of obscuring the facts, and producing a confused misrepresentation instead of a clear and natural picture.

The study of Latin etymology, the further it is pursued, seems, as has been argued in the previous essay, to point to the conclusion that the Italian branch of the Indo-Germanic family of nations was for a long time separated from the Hellenic; that its social and political institutions were, in all their main outlines, fully developed before any serious influence from Hellas made itself felt; that its religious system is, in all essentials, its own creation; and finally, that long before the great revolution introduced into its literature by the study of the Greek masterpieces, it had developed a literature of its own with marked national characteristics, which, in spite of the strenuous efforts of the Hellenizing school, were never wholly effaced.