THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century was a period of recovery for Italy. The ancient
lustre of literature, indeed, was but feebly rekindled; and fine art,
with the exception of music, which rose to unexampled heights, sank
lower and lower. But an invigorating breath pervaded the nation; men
wrote and thought in comparative freedom; and if pedantry and frivolity
still reigned in many quarters, the sway of outrageous bad taste had
departed. Political and spiritual tyranny were still enthroned, and
religion and politics could only be handled with great caution; yet
reform was more hardy and oppression less assured than of yore. Italy
rose slowly from her abasement, like a trodden flower resuming its
erect attitude, bruised but not crushed, feeble but not inanimate,
obeying a natural impulse by which she could not fail to right herself
in time.
The chief cause of Italian regeneration, so far as peculiar to the
country, and unconnected with that general movement towards liberty and
toleration which, originating in England, was gradually transforming
Europe, was the disappearance of the Spanish dominion, which had for
two centuries inflicted every political and spiritual evil upon Italy
without conferring a single benefit in return. A Spanish dynasty did,
indeed, in 1734 re-establish itself in the Two Sicilies, but no longer
a dynasty of viceroys; it regarded itself as Italian, and was served
by Italian administrators. Lombardy slumbered under the comparatively
benign sway of Austria. There was as yet little patriotic resentment
against foreign domination as such; Austria was inert and unaggressive,
and Italy’s princes and people felt conscious of a great deliverance.
It was no time for violent intellectual exercise, but for quiet and
gradual revival. The convalescing country could not be expected to
vie with the intellectual development of England and France, but her
progress was in the same direction. Within the Alps, as beyond them,
the age, save in music, was unimaginative. It created little, but
brought much to light. Its most potent intellects, the Kants, Lessings,
Diderots, Butlers, Humes, were turned towards criticism or moral
science. So it was in Italy, where the current of the most powerful
thought ran strongly in the direction of history and jurisprudence,
state reform and public economy. Vico, Giannone, Beccaria, Filangieri,
Genovesi, Galiani are its representatives. Closely allied to these,
but devoid of their originality, are the investigators of the past and
the critical lawgivers of their own day, the Muratoris, Crescimbenis,
Maffeis, Mazzuchellis, and Tiraboschis. Nor must the academical
movement be left out of sight, which, if impotent to create good
literature, at all events kept its traditions alive. Lastly, the
development of music reacted on the lyrical drama, which kindled the
other branches of the dramatic art into activity, and for a time made
the Italian drama, tragic, comic, and operatic, the most interesting in
Europe.
Among the philosophical writers who conferred so much distinction upon
Italy in the eighteenth century, the first, both in order of time and
of importance, was GIOVANNI BATTISTA VICO, a Neapolitan (1668-1744).
Vico’s life was uneventful. He devoted his youth to the study of
metaphysics and Roman law, spent some happy years in a tutorship in the
country, and, returning to Naples, passed the remainder of his life in
a conflict with poverty, deriving most of his income from adulating the
great in complimentary verses. A small professorship of rhetoric eked
out this precarious means of subsistence, and when the Spanish dynasty
supplanted the Austrian in 1734, Charles III. conferred a pension upon
him, but the aged philosopher was already sinking into a condition
of imbecility. It seems surprising that he should have been able to
publish so many important and far from remunerative books.
Vico’s fame rests less upon any particular achievement than upon the
general impression which he produces as a man greatly in advance of his
age. His superiority in almost every branch of investigation except
physical science, of which he knew little, arises from his unflinching
application of a principle which he was almost the first of moderns
to recognise, that man is to be viewed collectively. All individuals,
all societies, all sciences, are thus concatenated and regarded as
diverse aspects of a single all-comprehending unity. As a metaphysician
and a jurist, Vico’s claims to attention are very high, but do not
properly fall within our scope. They are fully set forth by Professor
Flint in his volume on Vico in Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics.
We can only treat of Vico where he comes into contact with history
and literary criticism, as he does very remarkably in his criticisms
upon Roman history and upon Homer. His investigations into Roman
jurisprudence showed him the untruth of the traditions of the Twelve
Tables, and starting from this point, he anticipated almost everything
subsequently brought forward by Niebuhr, although from his deficiency
in exact philological knowledge his arguments were less conclusive.
His scepticism respecting Homer was also the result of speculation;
before the ballads of the mediæval period had been compared with the
Homeric poems, he pronounced on the internal evidence of the latter,
that they must be the work, not of a man, but of a nation. In both
departments he may have gone too far, but his views are the divinations
of an extraordinary genius. They are intimately connected with his
speculations on history, which anticipate the general drift of modern
thought by tending to put nations into the place of individuals, and
to represent history as the product of an inevitable sequence of
development. These views greatly influenced Herder and Turgot, and,
through them, Europe. Vico’s doctrine of the three stages through which
human society passes was used, if it was not plagiarised, by Comte and
Schelling.
Another great Neapolitan writer of the age, though working on a much
smaller scale than Vico, attracted more notice from contemporaries,
inasmuch as Vico seemed to deal merely with abstract things, while
PIETRO GIANNONE came into rough contact with vested interests.
Giannone, born at Ischitella, in Apulia, May 1676, went to the
Neapolitan bar, and made the legal and ecclesiastical history of
the kingdom his especial study. In his Civil History of the Kingdom
of Naples (1723), the work of twenty years, he demonstrated the
illegitimacy of the Papal claims to jurisdiction over Naples, with a
learning and research which, now that these claims are no longer heard
of, maintain his works in request as one of the highest authorities
upon mediæval law. The more ordinary qualities of a historian are not
manifested in the same measure, but Giannone’s place is something
quite apart. The book was received with gratitude and delight by the
educated part of the public; but the monks, secretly prompted by the
court of Rome, raised an outcry against Giannone as an unbeliever in
St. Januarius, and he was compelled to fly the country. He found refuge
successively in Vienna, Venice, and Geneva; but having been tempted
into Savoy for the purpose of attending the Roman Catholic service, was
seized and most iniquitously imprisoned by the King of Sardinia, the
King Charles of Browning’s drama, until his death in 1748, though he
maintained all the time an amicable correspondence with the King and
his minister D’Ormea. Notwithstanding the wrongs which he suffered from
the house of Savoy, he foresaw and foretold its greatness and service
to the nation. He imitated Machiavelli by exhorting the Italians to
military discipline, and his principal work is epoch-making as a
precursor of the great movement which tended to subject the Church
to the civil power in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He
also composed the _Triregno_, a review of the temporal power of the
Church in general, which was so effectually sequestrated as to have
remained unpublished until 1895. It is not quite complete. Giannone’s
autobiography, which comes down to a late period of his captivity, was
published for the first time in 1891.
Giannone is rather a jurist than an historian, and the writers whose
affinity to him is closest are not historians like Denina, but the
legists and economists, Beccaria, Filangieri, Genovesi, Galiani. Three
of these distinguished men were Neapolitans, a circumstance significant
alike of the lively genius of the people, and of the liberality of
the government under Charles the Third and his enlightened minister
Tanucci. The spirit of the Renaissance seemed to have returned in
some measure; but the drift was not now to the classical art and
the literature that had effected the spiritual emancipation of the
former age, but to new theories of human rights and duties, and to
the removal of restrictions from civic action and social intercourse.
There probably never was a time since the age of Marcus Aurelius
when philosophers attained nearer to royalty than in the age of
Frederick and Catherine, and, were not vaster issues at stake than
the improvement of human institutions, the same kind of regret might
be felt at the French Revolution which some have expressed for the
Reformation as a premature movement, destructive of safe and moderate
reform.
In truth, however, the human spirit at both epochs needed
regeneration; to have perpetuated the eighteenth-century type,
admirable as this is in many respects, would have denoted consent to
dwell in decencies for ever. CESARE BECCARIA (1738-94) and GAETANO
FILANGIERI (175-287) were nevertheless great reformers, who, the former
in his _Dei Delitti delle Pene_ (1763), the latter in his _Scienza
della Legislazione_ (1783), contributed greatly to overthrow mediæval
notions of justice, and to infuse a humane spirit into legislation,
not merely by the abolition of revolting and atrocious penalties,
but by proposing the reformation of the criminal as a chief object
of the lawgiver. This was the especial mission of Beccaria, who
also introduced a very important principle by his clear separation
of the legislative and the judicial functions. Filangieri combats
in particular the excessive interference of governments, while he
foreshadows the logic and simplicity of a universal code in the future,
realised in some measure by the Code Napoleon. ANTONIO GENOVESI
(1712-69), the first to show the necessity of Italian unity, besides
making important contributions to ethics and metaphysics, expounded
freedom of trade and the laws that govern prices, in his _Lezioni di
Commercio, o sia d’Economia Civile_. Free trade in corn had also a
powerful champion in the witty Abate FERDINANDO GALIANI (1728-87),
whose most important works, however, were written in French. Galiani
adorned the circles of the encyclopædist philosophers at Paris, whose
views on many points he soundly refuted, and who avenged themselves by
comparing the explosive little Neapolitan to a pantomime incarnate. His
discourse upon trade in corn was speedily translated into Italian, and
gave him rank as an Italian classic; the best known of his vernacular
writings is probably his humorous account of the alarm created by an
eruption of Vesuvius.
After this group of economists--to whom the historian PIETRO VERRI may
be added--should be recorded another of literary historians, eminently
useful though not brilliant writers, and consummate men of letters. Of
GIOVANNI MARIO CRESCIMBENI, the historian of Italian poetry, we shall
have to speak in mentioning the Arcadian Academy, which he so largely
contributed to found and maintain. He may be justly termed a pedant,
but neither his book nor himself can be spared from Italian literary
history. A much greater name is LODOVICO ANTONIO MURATORI (1672-1745),
but his imperishable monument was raised not as author but as editor.
The publication of twenty-seven folio volumes of mediæval Italian
historians displays a man singly equal to many learned societies. No
one has stamped his name more deeply on the historical literature of
his country than he has done by this publication, by his _Antiquitates
Italicæ Medii Ævi_, and by his _Annali_ from the Christian era to
1749. One of his original writings has an abiding place in literature,
the _Della perfetta Poesia_, which indicates the high-water mark of
good taste at the time of its publication. The affected style of the
preceding century was then entirely out of fashion. On the negative
side Muratori’s taste is almost faultless, and he often manifests great
discrimination in the appreciation of exquisite beauties. Unfortunately
he is all for the delicate and graceful, and has little feeling for the
really great, of which the Italy of the eighteenth century saw hardly
so much as the counterfeit until, late in the secular period, Cesarotti
produced his version of Ossian. Muratori venerates Dante rather than
admires him; like Confucius, he respects the gods, but keeps them at a
distance.
The learning and industry of Muratori were almost rivalled by
Count SCIPIONE MAFFEI (1675-1755), the sovereign of contemporary
Italian, almost of European archæologists, author of the famous
tragedy of _Merope_ and of the equally famed _Verona Illustrata_;
and by Count Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli (1707-65), who should have
been the biographer-general of Italian men of letters, but who began
his work on too large a scale for completion. GIROLAMO TIRABOSCHI
(1731-94), librarian of the Duke of Modena, is the standard Italian
literary historian. His great work has immortalised his name; it will
nevertheless disappoint those who resort to it in the expectation
of encountering a history on the modern plan. It is not, strictly
speaking, so much a history of literature as a history of learning.
The fortunes of schools and universities, the rise and decay of
particular branches of study, are narrated very fully, while there is
little literary criticism, and the lives of great men are recounted
with astonishing brevity, except when some personal or intellectual
circumstance regarding them has become the theme of erudite
controversy, when the incident overshadows the life. One of the most
potent literary influences of the age was the _Giornale de’ Letterati_,
founded early in the century by Apostolo Zeno, which long served as a
rallying-point for Italian literary men.
The number of historical works published in Italy during the
eighteenth century was considerable, but they are chiefly monographs on
local history, and, unless Verri’s history of Lombardy be an exception,
none gained the author the character of a philosophical historian save
CARLO DENINA’S _Rivoluzioni d’Italia_ (1768-72), a work so superior
to the writer’s other performances that it has been doubted whether
he really wrote it. A valuable history of another description was
produced by the ex-Jesuit LUIGI LANZI (1732-1811), also celebrated
as an Etruscan scholar, in his _Storia Pittorica dell’ Italia_, long
ago superseded by more accurate research, but excellent for the
time. Art criticism was promoted by FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI (1712-1764),
chamberlain and friend of Frederick the Great, Carlyle’s “young
Venetian gentleman of elegance in dusky skin and very while linen,” a
most voluminous writer, “who,” says the unmusical Carlyle, “took up
the opera in earnest manner as capable of being a school of virtue
and the moral sublime,” but whose chief title to fame is rather his
popular exposition of the physics of Newton, a modest but meritorious
service. Two miscellaneous writers deserve considerable attention. One
is GIUSEPPE BARETTI (1719-86), “a wonderful, wild, coarse, tender,
angry creature,” says Vernon Lee; endeared to Englishmen as the friend
of Johnson and of Reynolds, and the imitator of the _Spectator_ in his
_Frusta Litteraria_, although an Ishmael whose hand was against every
contemporary, and who carried personality to lengths which Addison
would have highly disapproved. The most entertaining of his writings
are his lively letters from Spain and Portugal. The other is GASPARE
GOZZI (1715-86), brother of the famous dramatist, who also imitated
the _Spectator_ in a periodical, wrote excellent stories in prose and
verse, and rendered a durable service to literature by his defence of
Dante against the aspersions of Bettinelli, preluding the Dantesque
revival of the next century.
Contemporaneously with this development of moral and economical
science, another active movement went on which created far more
agitation among Italian literati, and which, if it scarcely enriched
the national literature with a single work of merit, at all events kept
up the tradition of poetry. This was the universal itch for rhyming
which seized upon the nation about the beginning of the eighteenth
century, and dates from the foundation of the Arcadian Academy in
1692. This epoch-making event is related with unsurpassable verve in
the brilliant pages of Vernon Lee, who rekindles for us the chief
lights of the institution and the time: the frigid and sardonic, but
really illustrious jurist Gravina, instructor of Montesquieu and of the
Academy; the uncouth pedant but excellent administrator Crescimbeni,
whose history of Italian poetry is a more valuable book than Vernon Lee
allows; the fluent versifiers, not without gleams of a genuine poetical
vein, Rolli and Frugoni; the marvellous improvisatore Perfetti, a
sounding brass, but no tinkling cymbal, who actually received in the
Capitol the crown awarded to Petrarch and designed for Tasso.
The seriousness with which these Alfesibeo Carios and Opico Erimanteos
took themselves, their crooks and their wigs, is astonishing. But they
got accepted at their own valuation, and none disputed their claims
as the sovereign arbiters of elegant literature until, about 1760,
Giuseppe Baretti arose to demonstrate that, as shepherds, they must be
the representatives of the ancient Scythians. Settembrini in our own
day rather opines that they were created by the Jesuits, just as the
Cobbett of the _Rejected Addresses_ denounces “the gewgaw fetters of
rhyme, invented by the monks in the Middle Ages to enslave the people.”
Every city in Italy had its offshoot of the Arcadia; every member did
something to approve his literary taste, were it but one of the hundred
and fifty elegies, in all manner of languages, on the decease of Signor
Balestrieri’s cat (1741). The result was a deluge of insipid verse,
preferable at any rate to the extravagance of the preceding century.
Two Arcadians alone evinced real poetical talent, the two Zappis
of Imola. FELICE ZAPPI wrought on a small scale, but with exquisite
perfection. His sonnets, madrigals, and lyrical trifles generally are
among the very choicest examples of Italian minor poetry for elegance,
_esprit_, and melody. It is true that he exposed himself to the
merciless ridicule of Baretti by dreaming that he stood upon his hind
legs and barked madrigals in the character of his lady’s lap-dog, but
this lapse ought not to count against his genuine merits. His wife,
Faustina, formerly Maratti, is more ambitious but less consummate.
Her writings are nevertheless always estimable, and one sonnet is
remarkable for an energy and vehemence sped straight from the heart:
_Lady, on whom my Lord was wont to gaze
Complacent so, that oft unto mine ear
Of thy abundant tress and aspect clear
And silvery speech he yet resounds the praise;
Tell me, when thou to him discourse didst raise,
Seemed he, immersed in musing, not to hear?
Or, as to me may chance, did look austere,
And moody frown his countenance deface?
Time was, I know, when passionate and weak
Thy fair eyes found him, and I know that, till--
But ah! what blushes mantle on thy cheek!
Thy glance declines to earth, thy eyelids thrill!
Answer, I pray thee--no! hush! never speak
If thou wouldst tell me that he loves thee still!_
All the minor Italian versifiers were speedily eclipsed by the genius
of Metastasio, whose place, however, is with dramatic poets. But for
him, the eighteenth century wore away without producing a poet of
great mark, until, in 1763, Italy was startled by the appearance of
the _Mattina_, the first part of the _Giorno_ of GIUSEPPE PARINI.
Parini is particularly interesting as the first eminent Italian poet
who shows decided traces of English influence. The plan of his poem is
taken from Thomson, the spirit is the spirit of Pope; the net result is
much such a poem as Cowper might have written had he been an Italian.
Just as Thomson in his _Seasons_ depicts the entire course of Nature
from four points of view, so Parini in his _Giorno_ delineates the
useless life of a frivolous young Italian of quality by exhibiting the
occupations of his morning, afternoon, evening, and night. The spirit
is that of Pope’s satires, but Parini, composing in blank verse, has
been led into a style more nearly resembling that of Young, although
he has little of the sententious abruptness of the _Night Thoughts_ or
of their fatiguing glitter: the four poems are perfect wholes, gliding
from theme to theme by the most ingenious and delicate transitions, and
replete with charming episodes; the diction is exquisite, and the blank
verse the best that Italy had then seen. The work is invaluable as a
picture of manners, and a masterpiece of delicate polished satire; the
_jeunesse dorée_ of Milan is or ought to be made thoroughly ashamed of
the vapidity of its existence, but every phrase is urbane, and all the
ridicule dainty and ironical. The subject is hardly susceptible of high
poetry, but Parini has adorned it as only a poet could. The composition
of the remaining three parts occupied him for many years, and the
last two are not quite complete. His minor pieces reveal the same
remarkable power as the _Giorno_ of elevating trifling circumstances
into the region of poetry. One sonnet especially is worthy of the Greek
Anthology in finish and charm of invention:
_Benignant Sleep, that on soft pinion sped
Dost wing through darkling night thy noiseless way,
And fleeting multitudes of dreams display
To weariness reposed on quiet bed:
Go where my Phillis doth her gentle head
And blooming cheek on peaceful pillow lay,
And while the body sleeps, the soul affray
With dismal shape from thy enchantment bred.
So like unto mine own that form be made,
Pallor so dim disfiguring its face,
That she may waken by compassion swayed.
If this thou wilt accomplish of thy grace,
A double wreath of poppies I will braid,
And silently upon thine altar place._
Parini, “a poor sickly priest,” led an uneventful life in Milan
until the overthrow of Austrian rule by the French invasion, when he
came forward prominently in public affairs, and earned credit by his
good sense and moderation. He died in 1799, aged seventy. He was a
high-minded man of austere morality.
Another poet of the eighteenth century deserves no less fame than
Parini, but has remained comparatively unknown from having written
in dialect. It is his compensation to be as decidedly at the head
of the Sicilian lyrists as Petrarch is at the head of the Tuscan;
nor is Sicilian in any degree a rude or barbarous idiom. Schools of
Sicilian poetry existed in the thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, but all previous celebrities were eclipsed
by the brilliant achievements of GIOVANNI MELI (1740-1815). Meli can
hardly be paralleled either with Burns or with our English Theocritus,
William Barnes, for he possesses neither Burns’s tragic pathos and
withering satire, nor Barnes’s power of realistic description. But he
rivals Burns in simplicity and melody, and is capable of much loftier
lyric flights than Barnes; and if his satire does not brand or scathe,
it smiles and sparkles with genial humour. The lightness, ease, and
grace of his songs cannot be exceeded; his pastorals are worthy of a
countryman of Theocritus; and his mock-heroics, _Don Quixote_, and the
_Origin of the World_, though evincing less of poetical inspiration,
are effluences of genuine humour. His employment of the Sicilian
dialect was highly favourable to his genius by exempting him from all
obligation to write with academical constraint. It is most interesting
to find Wordsworth’s plea for a return to nature anticipated by a
Sicilian of the generally stiff and affected eighteenth century.
One of the most marked features of his poetry is its lively and
dramatic character, arising from the close observation of national
types, apparently just as they were observed by the ancient writers
of Sicilian mimes, Sophron and Epicharmus. “As in antiquity,” says
Paul Heyse, “so at this day, idyll, song, and mime are the species
of poetical composition allotted as the Sicilian heritage.” Meli
represented the national genius to perfection. His life was uneventful.
He is represented as an amiable, sensible, unassuming man, as much
of a Bacchus as consistent with sobriety, and as much of an Anacreon
as comported with an utter ignorance of Greek, an _abate_ of the old
school, attached, but not in a perverse or bigoted manner, to the
ancient social order, which, by the aid of British ships and troops,
maintained itself better in Sicily than elsewhere in Italy.
The licentious poems of the Abate GIOVANNI BATTISTA CASTI (1721-1803)
deserve attention from their influence on Byron’s _Don Juan_, and
also from the veiled political character of many of them. Casti, an
accomplished traveller and acquainted with many distinguished men,
belongs, like Talleyrand, both to the old time and to the new. Attached
by habit and taste to the polished and frivolous society of the
ancient régime, his sympathies were nevertheless liberal. He satirised
Catherine the Second, and when exiled from Vienna on that account, had
the spirit to resign his Austrian pension. The _Animali Parlanti_ a
satire upon the rule of the stronger in political life, and thus an
interesting revival of the old conception of Reynard the Fox, is his
best work.
It is remarkable that the age of Richardson and Fielding in England,
and Marivaux and Prevost d’Exiles in France, should have produced no
novelist of reputation in Italy. The imitation of even such world-famed
books as the _Nouvelle Héloise_ and _Werther_ was reserved for a later
generation. One romancer acquired some celebrity--Count ALESSANDRO
VERRI (1741-1816), who hit upon, or borrowed from Wieland, the idea of
resorting for his themes to antiquity. His _Notti Romane_, _Saffo_, and
_Erostrato_ are all works of merit, and the first-named was probably
not without influence upon Landor.
On the whole, the history of the Italy of the eighteenth century is
in most departments, intellectual and political, that of a patient
recovering from a formidable malady by slow but certain stages. Much
is lost, never to return. The relation of Italy to the rest of Europe
is no longer that of Athens to Sparta or Bœotia, as in the sixteenth
century; but neither, as in the seventeenth, is she estranged from
the general current of European thought. Her intellectual position
may be read in the very portraits of her eminent men, who in general
display the placid eighteenth-century type, and might as well have been
Frenchmen or Englishmen as Italians. They were writers of signal merit
and utility, but, Vico excepted, not men of creative genius, and the
national mind might easily have degenerated into mediocrity but for
the tremendous convulsions of the end of the century. In one province,
however, she stood apart and supreme during nearly the whole of the
age--the drama, with or without musical accompaniment, which must form
the subject of our next chapter.