The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of languages that might all have proved right “Italian” had not Dante, Petrarch and 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.