The intellectual life of the Yugoslavs would, but for Dubrovnik, have
died out altogether. And even at Dubrovnik, of which the Southern Slav
thinks always with pride and gratitude, there was a movement to turn
away from the Slav world. This was certainly one of the periods, which
reappear not seldom in the story of Dubrovnik, when it seemed that
miracles of wisdom would be wanted for the steering of the ship of
State. Venice and the Turkish Empire were as two tremendous waves that
rose on either side. By a very clever show of yielding, the little
Republic had for a time disarmed the Turks, and, later on, when the
Venetians declared that all the commercial treaties existing between
the Dalmatian towns and Turkey were void, it was necessary for
Dubrovnik also to accommodate herself to this enactment and to
restrict her trade to Spain and the African coast. It would under
these circumstances be most imprudent, so urged some of the citizens
of Dubrovnik, if they were officiously to advertise their relationship
to the hapless Slavs, who were enslaved to the Republic's mighty
neighbours. And in 1472 the Senate had directed that within its walls
no speeches should henceforth be made in Slav. But as the Senate
consisted of forty-five nobles, and these were obliged to be over
forty years of age, one may say that they did not represent what was
most virile in the State; at all events, this isolated tribute to
expediency may for a time have been observed in that assemblage, in
the world of letters it was disregarded. And this is the more
wonderful when we remember that Dubrovnik had from Italy a language
that was already formed, she had Italian models and printers and even
their literary taste. But [vS]i[vs]ko Men[vc]etic and D[vz]ore
Dr[vz]i['c]--both of them nobles, by the way--started at once to write
verses in Slav; not very sublime verses, as they were principally
love-songs of the school that imitated Petrarch, but it is pleasing to
recall that they were written in spite of the thunders of Elias
Crijevi['c], a contemporary renegade. Under the name of Elias di Cerva
this gentleman travelled to Rome, where he made himself a disciple of
Pomponius Laetus and once more modified his good Slav name into AElius
Lampridius Cerva, and received at the Quirinal Academy the crown of
Latin poetry. Having thus qualified himself to be a schoolmaster, he
went back to Dubrovnik and settled down to that profession. He was
likewise very active as a publicist on the "barbaric" Slav language,
which, as he was never tired of screaming, was a menace both to Latin
and Italian. One is apt to call those persons reasonable, among other
things, whose opinions coincide with one's own; but is there anybody
willing to assert that because the Slav culture of that epoch was,
like many another culture, inferior to the Italian; because the
Italian towns were in the rays of artistic glory, whereas the Slav
world was not; because on that account the Slavs were wise enough to
profit from the Italian masters; is there anyone who, because some of
the Slavs were and are unwise enough to be more Italian than the
Italians, will assert that the Slav has no right to develop a national
art, a national State?
It is superfluous to make a catalogue of those Ragusan writers who
were more or less successful in purging their Slav language of
Italianisms. Luckily they had at their doors the language of
Herzegovina, which is unanimously considered by philologists to be the
purest of the Serbo-Croat dialects. The most considerable of these
writers was Gunduli['c], although he never could forget that his
productions must be pious, and, beyond all other aims, present a
moral. It was in Poland that he saw the liberator of the Southern
Slavs, and what he sings in Osman, his chief work, is the overthrow of
Sultan Osman II. by Vladislav, heir to the Polish throne. As this poem
of the seventeenth century, this flowering of the Slav spirit, might
be looked upon as assailing "the integrity of the Turkish Empire," it
was only allowed to circulate in MS. until 1830. According to Dr.
Murko,[26] Professor of Slav Language and Literature at the
University of Leipzig, this work surpasses Tasso's _Jerusalem
Delivered_; but it is commonly thought that there is more literary
merit in Gunduli['c]'s _Dubravka_, a lovely, patriotic pastoral. The
worthy Franciscan Ka[vc]i['c],[27] who followed him with a
work--_Familiar Conversations on the Slovene Nation_--would perhaps be
regarded by us as more remarkable for his originality; but this
patriotic production, in verse and in prose, didactic, chronological,
allegorical and epic, has made him immortal. Beginning with Teuta, the
first king of the Slovene nation, who flourished, says the author,
about the year 3732 B.C., he proceeds imperturbably and sometimes in
moving numbers to relate the lives and virtues of all the other
Slovene kings, be they Bosnian, Croat, Serbian, Bulgarian; it may well
be that the secret of his vogue is, in the words of the critic
Lucianovi['c], that "he was less a minstrel of the past than of the
future." On the fruitful island of Hvar (Lesina) there arose an
exquisite lyric poet, Luci['c], whose romantic drama _Robinja_ (The
Female Slave) is said to have great importance in the history of the
modern theatre; but the most famous of Hvar's poets was Hektorovi['c]
(1487-1572). "This nobleman with his democratic ideas," says the
Russian savant Petrovski in speaking of his _Ribanje_ (Fishing), "is
the intimate friend of his fisher-folk, the singers of national songs,
and with his remarkable realism he was three centuries before his
time." When we finally note that at Zadar in the sixteenth century
there was written _Planine_ (The Mountains), in which Zorani['c] gave
us the most patriotic work of mediaeval Yugoslav literature, we may say
at least that the Dalmatian Yugoslavs did not abandon hope.
By the way, these remarks on the Slav literature of Dalmatia may be
thought otiose, for the national aspirations would not have been less
fervent if they had been expressed in Italian. One is reminded by the
well-known Italian writer, Giuseppe Prezzolini,[28] that until last
century the ruling classes of Piedmont spoke French; Alfieri and
Cavour had to "learn Italian," but who would on this account pretend
that Piedmont is a French province? There is really nothing strange
in the fact that the Pan-Slavist newspaper _L'Avenire_, published at
Dubrovnik from August 1848 until March 1849 by Dr. Casna[vc]i['c], was
written in Italian, or that those Irish who desire to be free from
their hated oppressor have not completely given up the use of his
language.