But now Herr Settembrini sprang into the breach. His opponent, he cried, was rash to expose his preference for the intense barbarism of certain epochs, and to pour scorn upon a love of literary form⁠—without which no human nature was possible or thinkable, never had been and never would be! Fundamental nobility? Only misanthropy could so characterize the absence of letters, a rude and tongue-tied materialism. Rather you could only rightly so characterize a certain lordly luxuriance, the generosità which displayed itself in ascribing to form a human value independent of its content⁠—the cult of speech as an art for art’s sake, the inheritance bequeathed by the Graeco-Roman culture, which the humanists, the uomini letterati , had restored, restored at least to the Romance nations, and which was the source of every later significant idealism, even political. “Yes, my dear sir! That which you would disparage as a divorce between literature and life is nothing but a higher unity in the diadem of the beautiful; I am under no apprehension as to the side on which high-hearted youth will choose to fight, in a struggle where the opposing camps are literature and barbarism.”