THE REVIVAL
We have seen that the Italy of the eighteenth century had fully entered
into the general intellectual movement of the rest of Europe. Scarcely
any trace remained of the special characteristics of the Cinque
Cento except the imperishable tradition of culture and refinement
which still kept literature at a high level of style. The vagaries
of the seventeenth century had passed without leaving a trace. The
prevailing taste was that of France. The chief exception to this
polished uniformity was found in the drama. On the lyrical stage,
Italy, favoured by the musical capabilities of her language and the
superior aptitudes of her vocalists, had created something really
novel and national; and in the allied realm of instrumental music had
emulated the architectural and pictorial triumphs of the sixteenth
century. In tragedy and comedy, moreover, she had at length attained
to a semblance of a national drama; but this, being the achievement
of two exceptionally gifted men, who in comedy at all events left no
worthy successors, was comparatively apart from the national life, and
could not be expected to prove an important element in the literary
development of the future.
What Italy was at that time as regards originality, she has continued
to be until our own day. While claiming her full share in the conquests
of science, and by no means behind-hand in the study of antiquity,
she has produced little that can be regarded as an absolute creation.
Leopardi, alike in genius and art the most consummate among her men
of letters, has wrought on old lines, exalting the forms he found to
more eminent perfection. Manzoni’s innovations are chiefly introduced
from beyond the Alps. Carducci has rendered a priceless service in
repressing the language’s tendency to fluent inanity, and has widely
expanded its metrical capabilities, but has mainly worked upon hints
derived from antique or foreign literatures. If, however, Italy
has originated none of the great movements which have transformed
European literature since the middle of the eighteenth century, she
has participated in them all. As she then fully associated herself
with the enlightened and humanising tendencies of that beneficent if
prosaic age; she has since entered freely into the four great movements
which have broken up eighteenth-century formality and bought life and
liberty at the price of intellectual disorder--the naturalistic, the
sentimental, the romantic, and the revolutionary.
The naturalistic impulse to the living and accurate description of
natural beauty, and the recognition of a living spirit in Nature, is
no modern phenomenon. It is present as a vivifying influence in the
classics and in the poetry of Palestine and the East, and even more
so in Celtic literature, where more than anywhere else it appears
spontaneous and exempt from literary manipulation. Whether from a
Celtic admixture of race or from some other reason, it seems among
modern literatures the more especial property of the British. The
descriptions of Shakespeare and Milton, like those of their Greek
predecessors, may have been surpassed in the minute elaboration of
detail, not in truth or feeling. Spenser affords a still better
example, for--the multitudinous melodies of his peculiar stanza
excepted--this is the one point in which he transcends his Italian
models. In propriety of plan, in human and dramatic interest, in
terseness and polish of style, he is greatly their inferior; but the
natural descriptions of Ariosto and Tasso, beautiful as they often are,
fall far behind his in rich warmth and glowing splendour.
This national gift fell into abeyance in the later half of the
seventeenth century: there is scarcely a vestige of it in Dryden except
where he reproduces Chaucer. Thomson’s _Seasons_ mark its revival,
and were not without their effect in Europe; yet it must be owned
that its modern herald and hierophant is not a Briton, but a Swiss
justly reckoned among French authors--Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was
the mission of this extraordinary man to inaugurate not merely the
naturalistic, but the sentimental movement also, which, taken up by
Sterne and Goethe, filled Europe with imitators, and, among other
consequences, gave a great impulse to the novel at the expense of the
drama. Neither the description of nature nor the analysis of feeling is
peculiarly congenial to the Italian character, and it may be doubted
whether the latter impulse would have been very deeply felt but for the
unhappy political circumstances of the country, which engendered among
the noblest minds a prevailing disgust and despair conducive to the
diffusion of morbid sentiment and a generally mournful cast of thought.
Both the naturalistic and the sentimental tendencies inaugurated by
Rousseau found a powerful representative in Ugo Foscolo.
The next great development of taste by which Italian literature came
to be modified was one with which the Italian temperament has naturally
so little sympathy, that the influence which it exercised and continues
to exercise must be regarded as a strong proof of the susceptibility of
Italy to all great currents affecting intellectual Europe. The romantic
school is at variance with all her literary traditions and all her
canons of taste. Had it been anything but an exotic, it would have come
into being centuries before among a people rich in popular legends,
and whose history abounds with subjects adapted for ballad poetry.
Little, however, is seen or heard of it until, as the cosmopolitan
drift becomes more and more powerful, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Scott
excite the curiosity of the Italian reading public. One reason for
this backwardness may be plausibly alleged in the absence of Gothic
architecture from Italy. The earliest architectural remains were either
classical or Byzantine, which passed so easily into the Palladian and
other modern Italian styles as to render Gothic architecture in Italy
little more than an episode, and to leave no room for those impressions
of vague sublimity and solemn grandeur which Gothic architecture
produces, and which so naturally spring up in the minds of the
inhabitants of countries covered like England and Germany with ruined
castles and abbeys. Every feeling which the artist of the romantic
school would address is aroused by the mossed keeps and mouldering
fanes of mediæval antiquity. Horace Walpole may have been a dilettante
in architecture as in literature; nevertheless the romantic school in
England is inaugurated by Strawberry Hill and the _Castle of Otranto_;
and Goethe’s residence at Strasburg had much to do with _Goetz von
Berlichingen_. When, on the other hand, the Northern man is initiated
into the beauties of Italian architecture, his romantic feeling is apt
to wane, as he himself admits:
_’Tis not for centuries four for nought
Our European world of thought
Hath made familiar to its home
The classic mind of Greece and Rome;
In all new work that would look forth
To more than antiquarian worth,
Palladio’s pediments and bases,
Or something such, will find their places:
Maturer optics don’t delight
In childish dim religious light,
In evanescent vague effects
That shirk, not face, one’s intellects;
They love not fancies just betrayed,
And artful tricks of light and shade,
Put pure form nakedly displayed,
And all things absolutely made._
The feeling thus expressed by Clough, speaking through the mouth of
the Devil, is utterly contrary to the mystic awe and vague apprehension
of infinity characteristic of romantic art. It is no wonder, therefore,
that the movement engendered towards the middle of the eighteenth
century by impatience with the prosaic present and reaction towards
the neglected Middle Age, favoured by the moral atmosphere created by
Rousseau, and for England and Germany so imperious a necessity that
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Novalis and Tieck, all romanticists from
the cradle, appeared in the world within three years, should have
been little heard of in Italy until Scott and Goethe had captivated
the youthful genius of Manzoni. Yet a streak of romantic light had
preceded, though from quite a different quarter, namely, Ossian. If
the Gaelic bard’s antiquity was questionable, he was not the less
acceptable to a modern imagination; and the prodigious success in all
European nations of what would have been universally derided thirty
years sooner, showed that new tastes and new cravings had been awakened
among them. Of these Italy had her share, as attested, towards the end
of the eighteenth century, by the vogue of the translation of Ossian by
Cesarotti.
Not much need be said in this place of the last great factor in the
literary metamorphosis to which Italy, in common with the rest of
Europe, had to conform herself. The Revolution modified literature by
altering the environment of men of letters, supplying them with themes
and ideas which could not otherwise have come within their scope, and
inspiring them with vehement passions according as their circumstances
and temperaments led them to champion the new gospel or rally to the
ancient traditions. Italy was one of the last countries to feel its
effects in the literary sphere, chiefly because the movement did not,
as elsewhere, originate in the land itself, but was thrust upon it
by an invader whose rapine alienated much of the patriotic sentiment
that would otherwise have welcomed the Revolution. Monti, the first
great Italian writer whose career was powerfully affected by it, was
neither a revolutionist nor an anti-revolutionist, but a straw in a
whirlpool. When, however, the idea of Italian unity--Napoleon’s legacy
to his true native country--had had time to develop itself, and it had
become manifest that the only path to it lay through a cordial adoption
of revolutionary principles, the Revolution acquired more practical
significance for Italy than for any other country in Europe.
In a certain respect, Alfieri may be considered as the first
representative of both the sentimental and the national tendencies
in modern Italian literature. He had denounced tyranny and extolled
liberty while the Bastille had yet many years to stand; and if he
could not write like Goethe or Rousseau, he had practically lived, and
recorded in his autobiography, a life of sentimental passion. The air
of the Revolution, nevertheless, was needed to bring these germs to
maturity. Its stimulating influence is especially conspicuous in the
tone of Madame de Staël’s _Corinne_, compared with that of the letters
of Goethe and Beckford. The landscape is the same, but is beheld in
quite another light. Thus encouraged by general European sympathy, the
revolutionary and sentimental movements overpower the pliable Monti,
and find a genuine representative in the moody and malcontent Foscolo.
The romantic movement, which Italy would hardly have originated for
herself, necessarily came later, and found its leader in Manzoni.
Silvio Pellico and others acceded, and connected these currents
of feeling with the more decided revolutionary impulse of a later
generation, typified in Leopardi, Giusti, and Mazzini.
VINCENZO MONTI (1754-1828) is indeed no representative of the
Revolution, for the most celebrated of his poems is a denunciation of
it, and although he afterwards changed sides, the Republic was for
him merely a transition to the Empire. He nevertheless in a measure
personifies Italy herself amid the gusts of the revolutionary tempest,
tossed to and fro between contending influences, her sails spread to
the sky, her anchor still cleaving to earth. Born in the district of
Ferrara, and having gone through the ordeal, so often exacted from
poets, of distasteful law-study, he repaired to Rome as a literary
adventurer, and by his splendid tercets on the Beauty of Nature and
other lyrics adapted for recitation, sang himself into the good graces
of the Papal court. He took a yet higher flight in his fine, rather
lyrical than dramatic, tragedy of _Aristodemo_ (1787), as superior to
Alfieri in versification as inferior in virile energy. The subject is
one of the most pathetic, the grief of a father for having slain his
daughter. The _Galeotto Manfredi_ (1788), partly inspired by private
circumstances, is interesting as one of the first Italian examples of
romantic tragedy. One of the characters is copied from Iago.
It was not until 1793 that Monti took rank as the first epic poet of
his time by his _Bassvilliana_, a poem on the murder of the French
diplomatist Bassville, who had perished in a tumult provoked by his
own imprudence. Never since the tentmaker of Tarsus was caught up
into the third heaven was an obscure person elevated so mightily as
this insignificant Bassville, of whose remorseful spirit Monti’s
ardent imagination makes a new Dante, guided by an angel to behold
the atrocities of the French Revolution as a penance preliminary to
its entrance into Paradise. In the whole compass of literature there
is perhaps no other instance of so close and successful a copy as
Monti’s of Dante, combined with so much impetuous vigour, and other
qualities not usually associated with imitation. It revealed Monti as
the most impressionable of poets in his equal subjugation by Dantesque
influences and by the passions of the hour. Such a man must needs move
with the times. Ere long the Papal courtier was the friend and guest
of the French generals, inditing thundering odes against superstition
and fanaticism; soon he held office under the Cisalpine Republic, and
when the Austrians prevailed he fled to Paris. He came back as the
courtier and flatterer of Napoleon; and yet this versatility seems less
the effect of self-interest than of ductility of character, and his
countrymen laughingly talked of the three periods of the _abate_, the
_citizen_, and the _cavalier_ Monti. This sensitiveness was serviceable
to his lyric genius, for he thrilled with the emotion he wished to
express, and in expressing it approved himself a perfect master of
language and metre.
In the interval between Monti’s withdrawal from Rome and the brilliant
position which under the Imperial auspices he acquired at Milan, he
had produced his _Prometheus_, one of the finest examples of Italian
blank verse, but a curious mixture of things ancient and modern;
his _Musologia_, charming octaves on the Muses; _Caius Gracchus_, a
tragedy betraying imitation of Shakespeare’s _Coriolanus_, celebrated
for the force of the fifth act; _Mascheroniana_, a palinode for the
_Bassvilliana_, notwithstanding the art with which the poet manages
to assert his consistency. Disfigured as it is by adulation of
Napoleon and senseless abuse of England[21], this is perhaps Monti’s
finest poem. It is the offspring of a genuine poetic _œstrum_, which
whirls the stuff of a party pamphlet into sublimity, like a rag in a
hurricane. It was never finished. Incomplete too is the _Bard of the
Black Forest_, a poem on Napoleon’s exploits, unequal to the subject,
but remarkable for its concise rapidity of expression. Monti was now
Napoleon’s official laureate for the Italian department, and it is
sufficiently amusing to find him expressing his apprehensions lest
he should be so far carried away by his patriotism as to offend the
reigning powers, and breathing a superfluous prayer for prudence in his
vocation. There was little danger; patriotism, though a genuine, was a
weaker emotion with him than respect for dignities, as he sufficiently
evinced by his obedience to the Austrian mandate to celebrate the
expulsion of the French, although he never abased himself so far as to
assail Napoleon. He lost his office of historiographer, and retiring
into private life, devoted himself mainly to critical and philological
work. He had a short time previously published a translation of the
_Iliad_, commenced in 1790, highly admired by his countrymen, and
certainly a remarkable performance when it is considered that he
scarcely knew a word of Greek; whence Foscolo wittily called him
_gran traduttor dei traduttor d’Omero_. So much more important to
the translator is flexibility of mind than exactness of scholarship.
Monti’s later days, now embittered by controversies and pecuniary
embarrassments, mitigated by the generosity of friends, now brightened
by successful work on his unfinished _Feronia_, a youthful production
in which he had celebrated the draining of the Pontine marshes, or by
the production of some fine lyric, passed on the whole tranquilly until
his death in 1828 from the effects of a paralytic stroke.
The eloquent but unspeculative Monti had nothing to teach but his
almost inimitable art of verbal expression, and hence has founded
no school. His reputation has declined, chiefly from the ephemeral
character of the themes on which his genius was expended, and of which
none but himself could have made so much. He can hardly be called
a great poet, if for no other reason than that his impressionable
imagination wanted tenacity; he tired of his own works, and left the
majority of them incomplete. He is nevertheless a brilliant phenomenon,
the more interesting from the decidedly national stamp of his genius.
He has Southern demonstrativeness and volubility, and kindles like a
meteor by his own flight; when thoroughly fired, whether in epic or
lyric, he is almost an improvisatore. Improvisation in an English poet
would seem a _tour de force_ at best, but it appears natural to the
quick intelligence and musical speech of Italy.
Monti is thus a representative of his nation, and is no less true
to the general spirit of his epoch: classic in aspiration, modern
in sentiment, related to the Greeks much as Canova was related to
Phidias. He was no interpreter of his age, but a faithful mirror of its
successive phases, and endowed with the rare gift of sublimity to a
degree scarcely equalled by any contemporary except Goethe, Byron, and
Shelley. The descriptions in the _Mascheroncide_ of Napoleon’s descent
upon Italy, and of the inundation of the Po, if not perfect models of
taste, are almost Lucretian in their stormy and tumultuous grandeur.
The frequent poverty, or at least shallowness of his thought is veiled
by splendid diction; and in tact and felicity of encomium he recalls
Dryden, whom he so strongly resembles in the character of many of his
compositions, the versatility of his conduct, and the circumstances
of his life. A further analogy may be found in the eminence of both
as critics, Monti’s disquisitions on Dante and the Cruscan vocabulary
constituting as important a portion of his work as Dryden’s prefaces of
his. His dialogues, chiefly between deceased authors and grammarians
recalled from the shades to discuss philological questions, are
charming for their elegance and grace.
UGO FOSCOLO (1778-1827), the second eminent poet of the revolutionary
period, successively Monti’s champion and his adversary, is in most
respects a violent contrast to him. It would have been well had
he been merely his complement. Monti’s pliant character greatly
needed an infusion of vigour and independence; but Foscolo, though a
self-restrained artist in his poems, in his life required the curb as
much as Monti required the spur. Worse, his tempestuous vehemence and
crabbed indocility were no tokens of real strength; he was at bottom
weak and whimsical, the slave of passion, physical and intellectual.
His countrymen, nevertheless, have forgotten his faults and follies
for the sake of his untarnished patriotism, most unjustly suspected in
his own day; he is the first very distinguished modern Italian whose
consistency in this particular is a source of national joy and pride.
Alfieri’s resentment against the French, though sufficiently excusable,
blinded him to the real tendency of his times; other well-meaning men
were either too intimately associated with the temporary makeshift of
the despotic Empire, or too amenable to clerical pressure. Foscolo was
untainted by either influence, and might be deemed not only absolved
but canonised by his countrymen when Garibaldi made a pilgrimage to
his tomb at Chiswick, and when, in 1871, his remains were transferred
to the cemetery at Florence, the inspiration of the most famous of his
poems.
Alike in personal character and the quality of his productions,
Foscolo may be compared with Landor, but with the capital distinction
that Landor was a man of the past, and Foscolo, for all his Greek
erudition and classical enthusiasm, a man of his own time. His romance,
_Jacopo Ortis_ (1798), perhaps the most celebrated of his productions,
is a reminiscence of _Werther_ and a forerunner of _René_, but adds to
the merely personal sorrows of these tragic autobiographies the nobler
motive of despair at the ruin and enslavement of the hero’s country.
Foscolo, though born at Zante, was prouder of his Venetian descent than
of his Greek nativity, and the ignominious end of so glorious a history
as the Republic’s not unnaturally or ignobly drove him to despair. At
the same time he was usually under the spell of some woman; one of
his genuine letters, indeed, written at a much later date, surpasses
his romance in the eloquence of unhappy passion. Both motives combine
to drive Ortis to suicide. Apart from its impressive style, the book
is weak and unwholesome, but it powerfully depicts an unquestionable
tendency of the age, and as such has a right to live, apart from its
influence on Leopardi, George Sand, and other more recent writers of
genius. Foscolo’s melancholy, fretful and egotistic as it is, is not
pessimism; it is not grounded in the nature of things, but is always
remediable by a change in external circumstances.
Unlike the exuberant Monti, Foscolo wrote little poetry, but his
scanty production is of choice quality. His most celebrated poem is
the _Sepolcri_ (1807), which in style and subject bears a remarkable
resemblance to the finest poem America has yet given to the world,
Bryant’s _Thanatopsis_. The American poet has conceived his work in
a larger and grander spirit, and consequently surpasses Foscolo in
the sublimity of his thought, though the latter’s poem is longer and
adorned with episodes, and in merit of execution there may be little to
choose. Bryant dwells on the majesty of death; Foscolo on the reverence
due to the tomb, and the immortality of the memories of the great--a
fine theme undoubtedly, and deserving of the monumental eloquence
with which he has adorned it, but small if measured against Bryant’s.
Foscolo’s other most considerable poetical composition, his _Hymns to
the Graces_, celebrated as the beneficent spirits of Greece, Italy,
and an ideal world, was long but an aggregation of fragments, and was
recovered as a whole only in 1856. The fastidious author could never
satisfy himself, and the result is a production more remarkable for
high polish than warmth of poetic feeling. It is just such a poem as
Landor might have written. Foscolo’s tragedies, _Ajax_ and _Ricciarda_,
are fine compositions in the spirit of Alfieri: the former,
notwithstanding its classical theme, has a relation to contemporary
circumstances, Moreau being depicted as Ajax, and Bonaparte as
Agamemnon. The few minor poems of Foscolo are admirable, full of
weighty lines that imprint themselves on the memory. As a critic he
accomplished more than it will be easy to accomplish after him, coming
just at the moment when Europe, weary of the superficial æsthetics of
the eighteenth century, was anxiously looking for a guide to the spirit
of the past. It is as much by this happy fortune as by their intrinsic
merit that his essays mark an era in the literary history of Dante,
Petrarch, Tasso, and Boccaccio.
Foscolo’s agitated life has afforded matter for many biographers,
but the essential facts lie in narrow compass. Born in Zante of mixed
Venetian and Greek parentage, he early sought Venice, and learned
the secret of literary style from Cesarotti, the translator of
Ossian. The shameful extinction of the Venetian Republic by France
and Austria combined with his own ill-regulated passions to make him
write _Jacopo Ortis_ and talk of imitating his suicidal hero. A spell
of military service, partly at the siege of Genoa, partly in the army
destined for the invasion of England, went far to cure him, and he
spent several years as a man of letters at Milan, translating Homer,
composing his tragedies, and too much engaged in unedifying literary
quarrels for his own dignity or the credit of letters. He showed an
honourable independence in rejecting the bribes offered to induce him
to adulate Napoleon, and, equally spurning the proffered subvention
of the Austrian Government, became an exile at the overthrow of the
Empire. He ultimately took refuge in England, exchanged, he might have
boasted, for Byron. Here he was warmly received in aristocratic as well
as literary circles, and might have performed a distinguished part.
But his extravagance and his irregular habits wore out his friends’
patience, though Mr. Smiles says: “Ugo Foscolo lived to the end of
his life surrounded by all that was luxurious and beautiful.” If so,
Hudson Gurney, who raised his tomb, must have given him bread as well
as a stone. He was also affectionately tended by his natural daughter,
whose mother was an Englishwoman. He died in September 1827. Some of
his best critical work belongs to this last period, and a valuable
correspondence from English friends is understood to be awaiting
publication. His own letters are admirable, full of life and movement.
Little as IPPOLITO PINDEMONTE (1754-1825) resembled Foscolo either
as an author or as a man, their names are frequently associated on
account of Pindemonte’s reply to Foscolo’s _Sepolcri_, a fine poem
breathing the spirit of resignation and tranquillity, for which his
gloomy predecessor had left him abundant scope. Pindemonte’s best
production, however, is his _Antonio Foscarini_, a true tale of unhappy
love, recited with great pathos in elegant octaves. He is a kind of
Italian Cowper, a gentle and amiable valetudinarian. Like Cowper, he
sang country life, and touched the events and the manners of his times
in a strain of soft elegiac melancholy; like Cowper, too, he translated
Homer. He holds no such important position in Italian as Cowper
does in English literature, but represents the large class of his
fellow-citizens who, carrying the spirit of the eighteenth century into
the nineteenth, were rather ornamental than useful to their country.
Monti and Foscolo, with all their genius, could not escape the
influence of their times. In the French and Italian literature of the
Imperial period, and still more in its art, a certain pseudo-classical
affectation is visible. Sublimity and grace are attained indeed, but
there is something mannered about the one, and something fastidious
about the other. The reigning taste required to be brought nearer
to Nature, and the writer who could effect this was sure to mark an
epoch in the literature of his country. The mission was discharged by
ALESSANDRO MANZONI (1785-1873), a man who announces a new departure in
many ways, and whose historical significance, even more than his fine
genius, places him above the still more gifted Leopardi at the head of
the Italian literature of the first half of the nineteenth century.
From one point of view he signalises the invasion of the romantic
spirit. Goethe, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott are more to him than the old
Italian masters. From another, he founds the Neo-Catholic school, and
personifies the revival of the religious spirit in its most gentle and
edifying form. Monti and Foscolo had been sceptics; Manzoni is devout,
while at the same time there is nothing grotesque in his mediævalism,
and he keeps the spheres of religion and politics so apart as to be
able to hail the downfall of the temporal power. Yet, again, he is
a reformer of the language, and the first to form a style equally
acceptable to his cultured and to his unlettered countrymen.
The hero of these various achievements was singularly unlike the usual
type of great renovators and innovators. Such epoch-making personages
rarely want for self-assertion. Manzoni was a gentle, undemonstrative
man, though observant of others and not ignorant of his own worth, and
capable of sarcasm on occasion; a valetudinarian, whose dread of crowds
frequently confined him to his house, who made no display, mounted no
rostrum, and ceased to write at forty. Hence, though _I Promessi Sposi_
is probably more widely known than any Italian book after the _Divina
Commedia_, the author has failed to personally impress the European
imagination, and appears a mere shadow in comparison with Victor Hugo
or even Lamartine, neither of whom, notwithstanding their infinitely
greater productiveness, so profoundly influenced the literature of
their country. Born at Milan, Manzoni was an Austrian subject, and,
though a true patriot, shunned to offend the ruling powers. He led
the life of a respectable Italian gentleman of moderate fortune, at
one time greatly impaired by his father’s extravagance, and basked
for nearly half a century in the tranquil enjoyment of European fame,
which, after the success of _I Promessi Sposi_, he imperilled by no
further venture. “Formerly,” he said in excuse, “the Muse came after
me, now I should have to go after her.” The events of 1848 failed to
draw him from his retirement; when the unity of Italy was accomplished
he accepted public honours, but declined public duties; none criticised
his inaction, for all felt that he had done his best by Italy. His
death at the age of eighty-eight evoked such a unanimity of sentiment
as has perhaps accompanied that of no great author of modern times
except Sir Walter Scott. Goethe had hostile detractors. Settembrini and
the few others who presumed to criticise Manzoni urged their scruples
in a spirit of becoming reverence.
Manzoni’s claim to this universal veneration was three-fold. In
the first place, he was really a great writer; in the second, he
was the standard-bearer of Italian literature, the one contemporary
author of his nation who could be named along with Goethe and Byron;
thirdly and chiefly, he represented the most important intellectual
movement of the post-Napoleonic age, the romantic and mediæval
reaction--a necessity, for justice demanded it. The Middle Age was
indeed no model for the nineteenth century, as the romanticists and
reactionaries thought, but it did possess elements indispensable for
the enrichment of the national life; and although the Italian mind
was probably less in harmony with these than the mind of any other
people, no Italian could forget that the greatest of his countrymen
was also the greatest and most representative writer of the Middle
Ages. It had been one of Monti’s chief merits to have emulated and
revived the style of Dante, to the disgust of Pope Pius VI., who asked
him why on earth he could not write like Metastasio. After the form
came the spirit of the _Divine Comedy_, commended to the nation by
the misfortunes and deceptions which succeeded the fall of Napoleon,
when the exile of Florence appeared more than ever a symbol of his
country. The worshippers of Dante were indeed divided, some seeing in
him the Ghibelline, the enemy of the temporal power no less than of the
foreigner; others, the apostle of mediæval Catholicism. Both views were
right and both wrong, and the choice between them was merely a matter
of temperament, but the latter was the more likely to be propagated by
the air of the time.
The gentle and modest Manzoni obeyed the more potent influence. In
1812 he began to produce his hymns, mostly on the festivals of the
Church, which perhaps suggested Keble’s _Christian Year_. They were
published in 1815, but the finest, that for Whitsunday, is a later
addition. They attracted little attention until the appearance of
his famous ode on the death of Napoleon, _Il Cinque Maggio_, which,
appearing at the right “psychological moment,” at a time when every
man felt almost as an intimate of the great conqueror who had made so
large a portion of his own existence, took Italy and Europe by storm.
The note of personal compassion which pervades it was then in place,
but now that Napoleon’s exploits and disasters are ancient history, and
he is chiefly regarded as a great world-shaker and incarnate elemental
force, we feel the need of a deeper insight and a wider sweep. Even
Manzoni’s fire and eloquence, vivid as they are, scarcely rival
Lamartine’s on the same subject. A patriotic poem of equal power, the
ode on the march of the Piedmontese volunteers to succour the Lombards
in 1821, imaginary as fact, but veracious as prophecy, has suffered
less, or indeed nothing, from the lapse of time, expressing the deepest
feelings of every Italian heart now as then. Though composed in 1821,
it was not so much as written down until 1848, from apprehension of the
Austrian police. No less fine are the lyrics in Manzoni’s tragedies,
the _Carmagnola_ (1820) and the _Adelchi_ (1822).
These dramas themselves mark an epoch in Italian literary history,
not so much from their absolute merit, as from being the first
attempt to adapt Shakespearian methods to the Italian drama. Alfieri
and Monti had adhered to the classical school; Manzoni struck into
a new path, and by so doing revealed a new world to his countrymen,
little as it followed that the old world need be entirely forsaken.
The _Carmagnola_ depicts the condottieri of the fifteenth century,
the _Adelchi_ the Lombards of the eighth. The latter is the more
dramatic, and the two principal characters, Adelchi and Ermengarda,
are depicted with extreme beauty and power. The pieces, however, are
rather dramatic poems than plays, and rise highest where there is most
scope for poetry. Martin the Deacon’s description of his journey in the
_Adelchi_, for instance, so finely translated by Mr. W. D. Howells, is
magnificent, but on a scale disproportioned to the play. The fire and
spirit of the two martial lyrics in the _Carmagnola_ and the _Adelchi_
respectively are marvellous; “their wonderful plunging metre,” it
has been said, “suggests a charge of horses.” That in the _Adelchi_
should alone vindicate Manzoni against the accusation of unpatriotic
lukewarmness. It paints the lot of the Italian people of the eighth
century, transferred by the fortune of war from a Lombard master to a
Frank, who unite to oppress them, and nothing can be more evident than
the contemporary application to Italian, Austrian, and Frenchman. The
following slightly abridged version is by Miss Ellen Clerke:
_From moss-covered ruin of edifice nameless,
From forests, from furnaces idle and flameless,
From furrows bedewed with the sweat of the slave,
A people dispersed doth arouse and awaken,
With senses all straining and pulses all shaken,
At a sound of strange clamour that swells like a wave._
_In visages pallid, and eyes dim and shrouded,
As blinks the pale sun through a welkin beclouded,
The might of their fathers a moment is seen;
In eye and in countenance doubtfully blending,
The shame of the present seems dumbly contending
With pride in the thought of a past that hath been._
_Now they gather in hope to disperse panic-stricken,
And in tortuous ways their pace slacken or quicken,
As, ’twixt longing and fear, they advance or stand still,
Gazing once and again where, despairing and scattered,
The host of their tyrants flies broken and shattered
From the wrath of the swords that are drinking their fill._
_As wolves that the hunter hath cowed and subjected,
Their hair on their hides in dire horror erected,
So these to their covert distractedly fly;
And hope springs anew in the breast of the peasant;
O’ertaking the future in joy of the present,
He deems his chain broken, and broken for aye._
_Nay, hearken! Yon heroes in victory warring,
From refuge and rescue the routed debarring,
By path steep and rugged have come from afar,
Forsaking the halls of their festive carousing,
From downy repose on soft couches arousing,
In haste to obey the shrill summons of war._
_They have left in their castles their wives broken-hearted,
Who, striving to part, still refused to be parted,
With pleadings and warnings that died on the tongue.
The war-dinted helmet the brow hath surmounted,
And soon the dark chargers are saddled and mounted,
And hollow the bridge to their gallop hath rung._
_From land unto land they have speeded and fleeted,
With lips that the lay of the soldier repeated,
But hearts that have harboured their home and its bowers.
They have watched, they have starved, by grim discipline driven,
And hauberk and helm have been battered and riven,
And arrows around them have whistled in showers._
_And deem ye, poor fools! that the meed and the guerdon
That lured from afar were to lighten your burden,
Your wrongs to abolish, your fate to reverse?
Go! back to the wrecks of your palaces stately,
To the forges whose glow ye extinguished so lately,
To the field ye have tilled in the sweat of your curse!_
_The victor and vanquished, in amity knitted,
Have doubled the yoke to your shoulders refitted;
One tyrant had quelled you, and now ye have twain.
They cast forth the lot for the serf and the cattle,
They throne on the sods that yet bleed from their battle,
And the soil and the hind are their servants again._
If Manzoni was surpassed as a dramatist and equalled as a lyrist by
others among his countrymen, he has hitherto found no competitor as
a novelist. _I Promessi Sposi_ (1825) was the first great Italian
romance, and it remains the greatest. It would be difficult to
transcend its capital merits, the beauty and truth of description,
the interest of its leading characters, and its perfect fidelity
to life, if not in every respect to the place and period where and
when the scene is laid--Milan under the dreary Spanish rule of the
seventeenth century--yet to the universal feelings and instincts of
humanity. As a picture of human nature the book is above criticism;
it is just the fact, neither more nor less. “It satisfies us,” said
Goethe, “like perfectly ripe fruit.” It has, notwithstanding, a weak
side, which Goethe did not fail to point out--the prominence of the
historical element, and the dryness with which the writer exhibits his
authorities, instead of dissolving them in the flow of his narrative.
“The German translator,” said Goethe, “must get rid of a great part of
the war and the famine, and two-thirds of the plague.” Other objections
to Manzoni’s romance refer to its real or supposed tendencies, which
leave its artistic merits unaffected. It may be granted that panegyrics
upon Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, however just, were hardly seasonable
when the Pope was the fast ally of the Austrian; and Manzoni did still
worse by his country when (1819) he wrote a treatise on Catholic
Morals, unexceptionable when there should be no more question of the
Temporal Power. But he then cherished generous illusions which he
was ultimately obliged to renounce; though never parting with one of
the leading and most remarkable features of _I Promessi Sposi_, its
sympathy with the poor and lowly. It is a remarkable proof of the
difficulties of style which beset the Italian author, that Manzoni
found it necessary to give his romance a thorough revision to bring its
diction nearer to the Tuscan standard. His other prose works comprise,
the _Column of Infamy_, an historical appendix to _I Promessi Sposi_,
_Letters on Romanticism_, an able polemic on behalf of the romantic
school, and _Letters on the Unities of Time and Place_, demonstrating
that the unity of action is the only unity which need be regarded by
the dramatist.
The success of _I Promessi Sposi_ could not but create a school of
historical novelists in Italy, whose works probably effected more for
the propagation of Italian literature beyond the Alps than those of
any writer except Manzoni himself. The _Marco Visconti_ of Tommaso
Grossi, the _Ettorre Fieramosca_ of Massimo d’Azeglio, the _Margherita
Pusterla_ of Cesare Cantù, are romances of great merit, but, as the
author of one of them exclaims, “How far we are behind Manzoni!”
Little as any anti-national motive can be attributed to the _Adelchi_,
it is true that Manzoni’s patriotism was chiefly evinced in his lyrics,
and that he was not prominent as a patriotic dramatist. This part was
reserved for GIOVANNI BATTISTA NICCOLINI (1782-1861). In times of
trial and distress the measure of service is apt to be the measure of
applause, and popular gratitude may for a time have exalted Niccolini’s
tragedies to a higher level than that due to their strictly literary
desert. They are nevertheless fine productions, and the most patriotic
are usually the best. _Arnaldo di Brescia_, too bold an apotheosis
of the fiery monk who defied the Papacy in the twelfth century to be
printed in Italy for many years after its appearance in France, is
the most poetical, but is neither intended nor adapted for the stage.
Notwithstanding its historical subject, this mighty tragedy, as Mr. W.
D. Howells, the translator of some of its finest passages, not unjustly
terms it, is an idealistic work. The other dramas, taken from history,
and representing such crises in Italian story as the destruction of
Florentine liberty and the Sicilian Vespers, are more compliant with
ordinary dramatic rules; but the most celebrated and successful on the
stage is _Antonio Foscarini_, founded on the same incident in Venetian
history that had afforded the subject of Pindemonte’s poem. Before he
became imbued with the spirit of the romantic school, Niccolini had
acquired great distinction as a classical dramatist, especially by his
_Polissena_ and his _Medea_. His first performance, _Nabucco_ (1816),
idealised the fall of Napoleon in a Babylonian tragedy. Among his plays
is a free translation of Shelley’s _Cenci_, in general excellent,
but remarkable for the entire disfigurement of the opening speech,
no doubt for prudential reasons. At first poor, afterwards in easy
circumstances, Niccolini spent an uneventful life in the service of
the Academy of Florence; his mode of living was sequestered, and his
character stainless.
With all his good-will, Niccolini could deal no such blows at foreign
or domestic oppressors as that which a brother dramatist of greatly
inferior power delivered by the mere record of his sufferings. _Le Mie
Prigioni_ made SILVIO PELLICO (1789-1854) as typical a figure as the
Iron Mask or the Prisoner of Chillon, and won Italy a moral victory
in her darkest day (1832). It is needless to give any particular
account of so famous a book. The candid and innocent author was born
to move mankind by a single story, and to relapse into obscurity after
delivering his message. His dramas and lyrics do not exceed mediocrity,
with the exception of _Francesca da Rimini_ (1818), a tragedy full of
tender feeling, admired by Byron, to whom the version of some scenes in
the _Quarterly Review_ has been attributed. They were, however, in fact
rendered by Milman.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] _Impatient to put out the only light Of Liberty that yet remains
on Earth!_
--WORDSWORTH.