Chapter IV: Part 4

[52] That most capital and characteristic book, the Autobiography of the tragedian Alfieri, contains a reference to the _Galateo_, which, longish as it is, I am tempted to extract. ‘My worthy Paciaudi was wont to advise me not to neglect, amid my laborious readings, works in prose, which he learnedly termed the nurse of poetry. As regards this, I remember that one day he brought me the _Galateo_ of Della Casa; recommending me to ponder it well with respect to the turn of speech, which assuredly is pure Tuscan, and the reverse of all Frenchifying. I, who in boyhood had (as we all have) read it loosely, understood it little, and relished it not at all, felt almost offended at this schoolboyish and pedantic advice. Full of venom against the said _Galateo_, I opened it. And, at the sight of that first _Conciossiacosachè_, to which is trailed-on that long sentence so pompous and so wanting in pith, such an impulse of rage seized me that, hurling the book out of window, I cried like a maniac: “Surely a hard and disgusting necessity, that, in order to write tragedies at the age of twenty-seven, I must swallow down again this childish chatter, and relax my brain with such pedantries!” He smiled at my uneducated poetic _furor_; and prophesied that I would yet read the _Galateo_, and that more than once. And so it turned out; but several years afterwards, when I had thoroughly hardened my neck and shoulders to bear the grammatical yoke. And I read not only the _Galateo_, but almost all our prose writers of the fourteenth century, and annotated them too: with what profit I cannot say. But true it is that, were any one to give them a good reading as regards their turn of phrase, and to manage availing himself with judgment and skill of their array, rejecting the cast clothes of their ideas, he might perhaps afterwards, in his writings as well philosophic as poetic or historic, or of any other class, give a richness, brevity, propriety, and force of colour, to his style, which I have not as yet seen fully gracing any Italian writer.’ A word or two may be spared to the formidable-looking vocable _Conciossiacosachè_ which so excited Alfieri’s bile. It might be translated literally as ‘Herewith-be-something-that;’ and corresponds in practice to the English ‘Forasmuch as’—or more briefly ‘since,’ or ‘as.’ The Italian word _poichè_ serves all the same uses, save that of longwindedness. But _Conciossiacosachè_ itself is not lengthy enough for some Italian lips: and I believe that even the phrase into which it has sometimes been prolonged—‘Con ciò sia cosa fosse massimamente che’—has been used for other than burlesquing purposes.

[53] The comparison whereby our Archbishop illustrates the condition of the napkins must perfume our page only in its native Italian—‘Che le pezze degli agiamenti sono più nette.’

[54] This is affirmed by Xenophon of the Persians: he says in the _Cyropædia_ that, both of old and in his own time, they did without either spitting or blowing the nose—a proof of temperance, and of energetic exercise which carried off the moisture of the body.

[55] _Stecco._ ‘Toothpick’ is the only appropriate technical sense for stecco given in the dictionaries; and I suppose it is correct here, although Della Casa’s very next sentence, denouncing the carrying of this implement round the neck, designates it by the word _stuzzicadenti_, and it seems odd that the two terms should be thus juxta-posed or opposed. If _stecco_ does not in this passage really mean ‘toothpick,’ I should infer that it indicates some skewer-like object, used possibly as a fork—i.e. to secure the viands on the plate, while they are severed with a spoon, and by that conveyed to the mouth (see pp. 21 and 34 as to the use of spoon instead of fork in Bonvicino’s time). This would in fact be a sort of chop-stick. Such an inference is quite compatible with the _general_ sense of the word _stecco_—any stake or splint of wood.

[56] Cecchina is a double diminutive of Francesca; corresponding to ‘Fannikin’ or ‘Fan.’

[57] The English reader may fancy that this passage conflicts with that which immediately precedes: but such is not the case. In the earlier passage, the use of _You_ was recommended as more civil than _Thou_: in the later passage, the use of _Vossignoria_ (or other the like impersonal term, where appropriate) as more respectful than _You_.

[58] This is, I think, still a national trait among Italians, and a most creditable one: the endless grades and sub-grades, shades and demi-shades, of good society, as maintained in England (with an instinct comparable to the marvellous power of a bat to wing its dark way amid any number of impediments, and to be impeded by none of them), are unintelligible to ordinary Italians—or, where intelligible, detestable. Long may they remain so!

[59] _Nobili._ I presume this is to be understood literally; the household in which noblemen could be thus employed being of course one of exalted position.