The Banquet | Page 7

pleasure. Hence we see in the cities of Italy, if
we will look carefully back fifty years from the present time, many
words to have become extinct, and to have been born, and to have been
altered. But if a little time transforms them thus, a longer time changes
them more. So that I say that, if those who departed from this life a
thousand years ago should come back to their cities, they would believe
those cities to be inhabited by a strange people, who speak a tongue
discordant from their own. On this subject I will speak elsewhere more
completely in a book which I intend to write, God willing, on the

"Language of the People."
Again, the Latin was not subject, but sovereign, through virtue. Each
thing has virtue in its nature, which does that to which it is ordained;
and the better it does it so much the more virtue it has: hence we call
that man virtuous who lives a life contemplative or active, doing that
for which he is best fitted; we ascribe his virtue to the horse that runs
swiftly and much, to which end he is ordained: we see virtue of a sword
that cuts through hard things well, since it has been made to do so.
Thus speech, which is ordained to express human thought, has virtue
when it does that; and most virtue is in the speech which does it most.
Hence, forasmuch as the Latin reveals many things conceived in the
mind which the vulgar tongue cannot express, even as those know who
have the use of either language, its virtue is far greater than that of the
vulgar tongue.
Again, it was not subject, but sovereign, because of its beauty. That
thing man calls beautiful whose parts are duly proportionate, because
beauty results from their harmony; hence, man appears to be beautiful
when his limbs are duly proportioned; and we call a song beautiful
when the voices in it, according to the rule of art, are in harmony with
each other. Hence, that language is most beautiful in which the words
most fitly correspond, and this they do more in the Latin than in the
present Language of the People, since the beautiful vulgar tongue
follows use, and the Latin, Art. Hence, one concedes it to be more
beautiful, more virtuous and more noble. And so one concludes, as first
proposed; that is, that the Latin Commentary would have been the
Sovereign, not the Subject, of the Songs.


CHAPTER VI.
Having shown how the present Commentary could not have been the
subject of Songs written in our native tongue, if it had been in the Latin,
it remains to show how it could not have been capable or obedient to

those Songs; and then it will be shown how, to avoid unsuitable
disorder, it was needful to speak in the native tongue.
I say that Latin would not have been a capable servant for my Lord the
Vernacular, for this reason. The servant is required chiefly to know two
things perfectly: the one is the nature of his lord, because there are
lords of such an asinine nature that they command the opposite of that
which they desire; and there are others who, without speaking, wish to
be understood and served; and there are others who will not let the
servant move to do that which is needful, unless they have ordered it.
And because these variations are in men, I do not intend in the present
work to show, for the digression would be enlarged too much, except as
I speak in general, that such men as these are beasts, as it were, to
whom reason is of little worth. Wherefore, if the servant know not the
nature of his lord, it is evident that he cannot serve him perfectly. The
other thing is, that it is requisite for the servant to know also the friends
of his lord; for otherwise he could not honour them, nor serve them,
and thus he would not serve his lord perfectly: forasmuch as the friends
are the parts of a whole, as it were, because their whole is one wish or
its opposite. Neither would the Latin Commentary have had such
knowledge of those things as the vulgar tongue itself has. That the
Latin cannot be acquainted with the Vulgar Tongue and with its friends,
is thus proved. He who knows anything in general knows not that thing
perfectly; even as he who knows from afar off one animal, knows not
that animal perfectly, because he knows not if it be a dog, a wolf, or a
he-goat. The Latin knows the Vulgar tongue in general, but not
separately; for if it should know it separately it would know all