THE REGENERATION
That only one of the distinguished writers reviewed in the last
chapter should have given free expression to the Italian craving for
liberty and national unity, may be accounted for in the simplest
possible manner. Foscolo was the only one in exile; the unexpatriated,
writing under a censorship, said not what they would, but what they
could. Apart, nevertheless, from this consideration, it is true that
the national movement was slow in acquiring energy and consistency,
inasmuch as it was not in the first instance an indigenous growth.
The conception of an Italian nation under a single political head had
not been too clearly formulated, even by Petrarch and Machiavelli,
and since the latter’s time had been in great measure the exclusive
possession of the finest minds. As an upbursting bubble may hint at
what is passing in the depths of the sea, so Gernando’s scoff in the
_Gerusalemme Liberata_ at Rinaldo as a native of _la serva Italia_
reveals the hidden workings of Tasso’s spirit, and vindicates him from
the charge of ludicrously servile adulation. Nothing more ridiculous
can be conceived than the poet’s notion that his patron Alphonso might
well lead either the armies or the fleets of Europe in a new crusade if
he was to be no more than a Duke of Ferrara; not so if the headship of
a united and regenerated Italy was to fall to him.
The next generation reposed hopes premature, indeed--yet, as the
far-off event was to show, not irrational--in the house of Savoy; but
as time wore on and material circumstances improved, these patriotic
aspirations waned, and the call for liberty which came from France in
the revolutionary era had to create the sentiment to which it appealed.
Any prospect of such a response seemed destroyed by the behaviour of
the French propaganda itself--its infamous betrayal of the Venetian
Republic, its exactions from private fortunes, pillages from public
treasuries, and wholesale robbery of Italian works of art. Yet by an
extraordinary turn of events the chief perpetrator of these iniquities,
himself an Italian, became most undesignedly on his own part the father
of Italian unity and freedom. By crowning himself King of Italy,
Napoleon Bonaparte gave her a national existence. After a few years of
his rule the inhabitants of the peninsula could not but perceive that
the visions of their seers and the aspirations of their statesmen had
in great measure come to pass.
Notwithstanding the existence of some nominally independent
principalities, for the first time since Theodoric the Italians of the
North at all events actually were Italians--not Lombards, or Tuscans,
or Piedmontese. They were indeed ruled by a despot; but to this, with
the practical instinct of their race, the Italians submitted in the
prevision that Napoleon’s empire must be dissolved by his death, and
the hope that the national unity would survive it and him. Such might
well have been the case had his authority been peacefully transmitted
to a successor; but the circumstances of his downfall inevitably
brought back the Austrians and the exiled princes, to reign no longer
over a contented or an indifferent people, but over one which had taken
the idea of national unity to its heart. The effect on literature is
illustrated by a passage in one of Byron’s letters from Italy: “They
talk Dante, write Dante, and think and dream Dante to an extent that
would be ridiculous but that he deserves it.” It was not so much the
recognition of Dante’s literary desert which occasioned this reaction
from eighteenth-century neglect, as the incarnation of the sufferings
and the genius of his country in his person.
A generation thus nurtured on Dante, and on Dante studied from such
a point of view, could not but grow up serious and patriotic. Nor
were other literary influences wanting. The fourth canto of _Childe
Harold_, and even more Madame de Staël’s _Corinne_, contrasted in the
most forcible manner the past artistic and intellectual glories with
the actual political degradation, and showed Italy how far she had
fallen, but also how high she might hope to reascend. Such influences
imbued the youthful generation with a more impassioned and enthusiastic
character than its fathers. The new aspirations embodied themselves
most distinctly in three men--Mazzini, type of physical resistance
to oppression; Giusti, of relentless opposition in the intellectual
sphere; Leopardi, of the passive protest of martyrdom. In him, as by an
emblem, the beauty and the anguish of the suffering country are shown
forth, and on this account no less than from the superiority of his
literary genius, though no active insurgent against the established
order of things, he claims the first place in his hapless but glorious
generation.
The tragical yet uneventful life of GIACOMO LEOPARDI was little else
than ardent cultivation of the spirit and constant struggle with the
infirmities of the body. Born in 1798 at Recanati, a small dull town
near Rimini, the son of a learned and high-minded, but unfortunately
bigoted and retrograde Italian nobleman, of anti-national politics and
antiquarian tastes, whose embarrassed circumstances and incapacity for
business had induced him to assign his property to a practical but
parsimonious wife, Leopardi solaced the forlornness of existence in a
spiritual desert by intense study, favoured by his father’s extensive
library, in which he immured himself to a degree propitious to neither
bodily nor mental health. So extraordinary were his powers that at
nineteen, besides many excellent _bonâ fide_ translations, he produced
imaginary versions of lost Greek authors which deceived accomplished
classical scholars. But the maladies from which he was to suffer all
his life had already made progress; he could follow no profession, and
was entirely dependent upon well-intentioned but uncongenial parents,
whose dread of the liberal and free-thinking opinions he had imbibed,
chiefly from correspondence with Pietro Giordani, induced them to
imprison him at home.
Though solaced by the affection of his brother Carlo and his sister
Paolina, Leopardi’s position was most uncomfortable, and the chief
external events of his history for many years are his temporary escapes
and his enforced returns. He sought refuge successively at Rome,
Bologna, and Florence, meeting with friends everywhere, especially at
Rome, where he won the esteem and excited the wonder of Niebuhr and
Bunsen. His craving for deeper sympathy twice involved him in love
affairs, both fruitful in humiliation and disappointment. Nothing else,
indeed, could be expected for the suit of the pallid, deformed youth,
whose blood barely circulated, whose indigestion almost deprived him
of nourishment, whose feeble limbs bent beneath the weight of a body
even so attenuated, and whose heart and lungs scarcely discharged
their office. All active life seemed concentrated in his brain, which
throve and energised at the expense of every other organ. He executed
some work for the booksellers, especially his condensed but invaluable
comment on Petrarch, and from time to time gave expression to some
slowly-maturing thought, in literary form meet for immortality, but
unvalued and unrecompensed by his contemporaries.
Neither Leopardi’s patriotic sentiments nor his speculative opinions
could be disclosed under the pressure of Austrian and Bourbon
despotism; the King of Sardinia had not yet declared himself on the
side of liberty, and there was literally no spot in Italy where an
Italian could write what he thought. Emigration to France or England
would have been forbidden by his parents, upon whom he was entirely
dependent. At length, in September 1833, he was able to establish
himself at Naples, where for a time his health and spirits seemed
marvellously improved; but from the summer of 1836 these retrograded,
and he succumbed to a sudden aggravation of the dropsy which had long
threatened him, on June 14, 1837. His unpublished philological writings
were bequeathed to a Swiss friend, Professor de Sinner, who neglected
his trust. The MSS., however, were bought from his heirs by the Italian
Government, and have been partially published. Leopardi’s other works
were faithfully edited by Antonio Ranieri, a friend whose devoted
kindness to him during his life renders it utterly incomprehensible
how he should have sought to blacken his memory after his death by
the publication of a number of painful and humiliating circumstances,
which, if they had been facts, should have been consigned to oblivion,
but which Dr. Franco Ridella has shown to be mere invention.
While he still posed as Leopardi’s Pythias, Ranieri summed up his
friend’s titles to renown as, “first a great philologer, next a great
poet, at the last a great philosopher.” Great poet he unquestionably
was; his refined classical scholarship might have earned him the
distinction of a great philologer in a sense disused since comparative
philology has taken rank among the exact sciences; if he was a great
philosopher, so Voltaire and Lucian must be esteemed. The keen
sensibility to pain which dominated his mental constitution was as
little associated with any constructive faculty or capacity for
systematic thought as was their hatred of pretence and perception of
the ludicrous; but while their endowments were brilliantly serviceable
to mankind, Leopardi’s moral pathology, if it had any potency at all,
could operate only for ill. Mischievous attempts have indeed been made
to accredit the pessimism of our times by exalting the cries wrung by
anguish from a wretched invalid into the last and ripest fruit of the
tree of knowledge. Whatever may be the case in Oriental countries,
there has seldom been a pessimist in the West without some moral or
physical malady which ought to have withheld him from assuming the
part of an instructor of mankind; but Leopardi’s pessimism is not only
morbid, but unmanly. The stress which he lays upon merely physical
evils, such as heat and cold, hunger and thirst, would have moved
the contempt of an ancient sage of any sect; and the contemporary of
so many martyrs for their country admits no spring of human action
but naked egotism. The grandeur and beauty of material nature, the
sublime creations of man’s spirit, the teeming harvest of human virtues
and affections, the tranquillising recognition of eternal order and
controlling law, the marvellous course of the world’s history, when
not ignored, are treated as the mere mockery and aggravation of the
entirely imaginary background of blackness--a shining leprosy upon
a hideous countenance. And yet the real nature of the man was quite
different; his pessimism and egotism are simply the product of bodily
suffering, of the wounded self-esteem and disappointed affections
which followed in its train, and of the absence of any outlet for his
surpassing intellectual powers.
It was a cruel injury to Italy that her greatest modern genius should
have done so little for her regeneration, and that his writings,
instead of inspiring a healthy public spirit, should rather tend to
foster the selfish indifference and the despair of good which continue
to be her principal bane. In two points of view, nevertheless, Leopardi
rendered his country essential service. His sufferings, and the moral
infirmities which they entailed, enabled him to represent in his own
person, as no soundly-constituted man could have done, the unhappy
Italy of his day. He seemed the living symbol of a country naturally
favoured beyond all others, but racked and dismembered by foreign and
domestic tyrants, the counterparts in the body politic of the maladies
which crippled Leopardi’s energies, and distorted his views of man and
nature. At the same time the transcendent excellence of his scanty
literary performances raised Italian literature to a height which,
Alfieri and Monti notwithstanding, it had not attained since Tasso, and
in the midst of an epoch of servitude and subjugation gave Italians at
least one thing of which they might justly be proud.
The bulk of Leopardi’s writings, indeed, is diminutive, and the
range of his ideas narrow; but within these limits he has approached
absolute perfection more closely, not only than any other Italian, but
than any modern writer. He is one of that small and remarkable class
of men who have arisen here and there in recent Europe to reproduce
each some peculiar aspect of the ancient Greek genius. As Shelley is a
Greek by his pantheism, Keats by his feeling for nature, Platen by the
architectonic of his verse, so is Leopardi by his impeccability. All
the best Greek productions, whether of poetic or of plastic art, have
this character of inevitableness: they can neither be better nor other
than they are. It is not the same in romantic poetry. Shakespeare no
doubt always chose the best path, but he always seems to have had the
choice among a thousand. In almost everything of Leopardi’s, whether
verse or prose, form and thought appear indissolubly interfused without
the possibility of disjunction. This is eminently the case with his
poems, perfect examples of lofty and sustained eloquence entirely
uncontaminated by rhetoric. There are few thoughts which strike by
their novelty, few elaborated similes, few phrases which stand forth
in isolation from the environing text. All seems of a piece; but the
words chosen are invariably the most apt to express the idea sought
to be conveyed, and the stream of sentiment is as pellucid as it is
impetuous. The same mastery is evinced in the descriptive passages,
which never appear to exist for their own sakes, but as depicting
the inner feeling of the poem by a visible symbol. Be the subject
small or great, from the disappearance of a vast landscape at the
setting of the moon, or the terrified peasant listening sleeplessly
to the roar of Vesuvius, down to the rain pattering at the poet’s
window, or the rattle of the carriage resuming its journey after the
storm, these descriptions impress by their perfect adequacy and their
complete fusion of speech and thought, and it can only be objected
to them that they are finer than the moralities they usher in. So
wrote the Greeks, and the recovery of an apparently lost type makes
amends for the monotony of Leopardi’s dismal message to mankind and
the extreme limitation of his range of thought. In his later days his
horizon seemed to expand; his serio-comic _Paralipomeni_, already
noticed with other examples of its class, displays an unexpected
versatility, and his last ode, _La Ginestra_, inspired by the hardy
and humble broom-plant flourishing on the brink of the lava-fields of
Vesuvius, is more original in conception and ampler in sweep than any
of its predecessors. It somewhat resembles Shelley’s _Mont Blanc_;
as Shelley’s _Triumph of Life_, with equal unconsciousness on the
author’s part, approximates to Leopardi’s first important poem, the
_Appressamento alla Morte_. They had here a common model in Petrarch.
Leopardi’s poems, though the majority are in blank verse, may
generally be defined as canzoni, either odes in the strict sense of the
term, addresses to friends, impassioned outpourings of lonely thought
akin to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” or apostrophes to inanimate
objects, such as the moon, the natural friend of the melancholy poet,
or the Vesuvian broom-plant, already mentioned. A few pieces, such as
_Il Primo Amore_, _Il Risorgimento_, are autobiographical; in these
Leopardi usually adopts _terza rima_ or the ordinary rhymed metres.
Personal as these pieces are in subject, they are not really more
subjective than the rest. Leopardi is entirely devoid of inventive
power: the wandering shepherd of Asia, mouthpiece for one of his
finest poems, is the author in everything but costume. Three of the
most celebrated odes, _To Italy_, _On the Florentine Monument to
Dante_, and _To Angelo Mai on the Recovery of Cicero De Republica_,
may be styled patriotic; but although the love of Italy is clearly and
eloquently expressed, the scorn of her actual condition, the fault of
no one then breathing, is so bitter and contumelious that the effect
is anything but Tyrtæan. These are nevertheless masterpieces of noble
diction, and little short of miraculous for the age of twenty, at which
they were produced. It is perhaps a defect that lines are frequently
left unrhymed, and that the ear is thus defrauded of an anticipated
satisfaction.
Leopardi’s blank verse is the finest in Italian literature. If it has
neither the “wood-note wild” of Shakespeare’s sweetest passages, nor
the voluminous harmony of Milton’s organ-music, nor the dainty artifice
of Tennyson, it is fully on a par with the finest metrical performances
of Shelley and Coleridge; and perhaps the English reader could hardly
obtain a better idea of it than by imagining a blending of the manner
of Coleridge’s idylls with that of Shelley’s _Alastor_. It admits of
translation into English; while an adequate rendering of the strictly
lyrical poems, so smooth and yet so muscular, like the marble statue of
an athlete, would be an achievement of very great difficulty. Perhaps
the following little piece may convey some idea of Leopardi’s manner in
blank verse. Few are the poems in which a mere triviality has been made
the occasion of a meditation so sublime:
_Dear to me ever was this lonely hill,
And this low hedge, whose potent littleness
Forbids the vast horizon to the eye.
For, as I sit and muse, my fancy frames
Interminable space beyond its bound,
And silence more than human, and secure
Unutterable and unending rest,
Where even the heart hath peace. And as I hear
The faint wind’s breath among the trees, my mind
Compares these lispings with the infinite hush
Of that invisible distance, and the dead
And unborn hours of dim eternity
With this hour and its voices. Thus my thought
Gulfing infinity doth swallow up;
And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea._
Leopardi’s prose works, his correspondence and philological essays
excepted, are, like his poetry, limited in extent and in range of
subject, but incomparable for refinement and beauty of form. He deemed
a perfect prose more beautiful and more difficult of achievement than
poetry of like rank, and related to it as the undraped figure to the
figure clothed. The most remarkable of his prose writings are the
Dialogues, which almost all turn upon the everlasting theme of the
misery of mankind, varied in the exposition with a grace and fanciful
ingenuity recalling the little apologues in Turgenev’s _Senilia_. In
one, Mercury and Atlas play at ball with the earth, become light as
tinder by internal decay and the extinction of life; in another, the
earth and the moon compare notes on the infelicity of their respective
inhabitants; in another, Momus and Prometheus descend to earth to
investigate the success of the latter’s philanthropic inventions, which
have answered Momus’s expectations better than his; in another, Tasso’s
familiar genius promises to make him happy in the only possible manner,
by a pleasing dream. Comparison is continually suggested with two
great writers, Lucian and Pascal, and Leopardi sustains it worthily.
Inferior to Lucian in racy humour, to Pascal in keenness of sarcasm,
he surpasses both in virtue of the poetical endowment which nature had
utterly denied to them. In form he comes nearest to Lucian, in spirit
to Pascal. Lucian, a healthy four-square man, robust in common-sense,
little given to introspection and untroubled by sensitiveness, is
constitutionally very unlike Leopardi; but it might be difficult to
establish a closer parallel than between the Italian and the French
recluse; both very sparing but very choice writers; exquisite scholars
in classics and mathematics respectively; both hopeless pessimists
because hopeless invalids; the keenest and most polished intellects of
their time, and yet further astray on the most momentous subjects than
many a man “whose talk is of bullocks.” Leopardi has the advantage in
so far that his scorn of man never degenerates into misanthropy, and
his negation is better than Pascal’s superstition.
Leopardi’s strictly ethical writings (_Storia del Genere Umano_;
_Parini_, or _On Glory_; _Bruto Minore_; _Filippo Ottonieri_) are
necessarily devoid of imaginative form, and hence want the peculiar
charm of his Dialogues, but are not inferior in classical finish.
They bring out a more serious defect of his thought than even his
pessimism--his ultra-hedonism in definition of happiness as a
succession of momentary pleasurable emotions, each to be enjoyed as
something complete in itself without reference to antecedents or
consequences. This theory, said to have originated with Aristippus of
Cyrene, is precisely that put forth by Walter Pater at the beginning
of his career, but afterwards virtually retracted. There is one human
condition, and but one, which it actually does suit, and that is
Leopardi’s own--the condition of the chronic invalid. To the sufferer
whose life is a continual physical agony, the brief intervals of ease
actually are the utmost bliss he is capable of conceiving, and he may
well be forgiven if he makes a succession of such thrills of pleasure
the ideal of life. From any other point of view this hedonism is the
doctrine of a voluptuary, which Leopardi assuredly was not. His mode
of thought, nevertheless, increased his infelicity by depriving him
of solace from the anticipation of posthumous fame, for which, as
no ingenuity could prove it a pleasurable sensation, his hedonistic
materialism left no place. With his low estimate of men, he could
repose little hope in their justice; nor, though perfectly aware of
the supreme literary excellence of his own writings, could he feel
the assurance of their immortality which is only possible to him who
regards the universe as incarnate Reason. His verdict upon himself and
them, widely at variance with the truth, but logical from his own point
of view, is pathetically summed up in his epitaph on the imaginary
Filippo Ottonieri, his own ideal portrait: “_Here lies Filippo
Ottonieri, born for renown and virtuous deeds; who lived without profit
and died without fame; ignorant neither of his nature nor of his
fortune._”
Many of Leopardi’s detached meditations and aphorisms evince great
subtlety and accuracy of observation, distorted by his persistent
determination to think ill of the human race as a whole, while amicably
and often affectionately disposed towards its individual members. His
philological writings are those of an accomplished scholar, but their
themes are generally of minor importance. His letters are frequently
most pathetic in their references to his wretched situation, which
alone can excuse the frequent insincerity of those addressed to his
father. On the whole, his faults and his virtues are such as to render
him the most lively representation of the Italy of his day, superior to
the Italy of a past age in so far as awakened to a consciousness of her
abject condition, but not yet nerved to struggle for her redemption.
While Leopardi, although at heart a patriot, was virtually proclaiming
patriotism a phantom, a poet of a very different cast was assailing
abuses and preparing a better day by dint of humorous indignation and
sturdy hopefulness. The Italy of the time stands between Leopardi
and GIUSEPPE GIUSTI (1809-50) like Garrick between tragedy and
comedy. Giusti’s gifts were less sublime than Leopardi’s, but not
less original. What Leopardi was to the Italian language in its most
classical form, Giusti was to the peculiar niceties of the most
idiomatic Tuscan. What Leopardi was to the most elevated description
of poetry, Giusti was to political satire. Indeed he was more, for
Leopardi merely carried recognised form to more consummate perfection,
while Giusti’s style was actually created by him. Rich as Italy had
been in most kinds of humorous and burlesque poetry, she had achieved
little in political satire for very evident reasons. Campanella
and Alfieri had verged upon it; and Casti’s _Animali Parlanti_ and
Leopardi’s _Paralipomeni_ may, from one point of view, be regarded as
political satires, though rather belonging to the mock-heroic epic.
But no political satirist had yet reached the heart of the people,
partly because few had the courage to make the attempt, partly because
metrical satire was as yet restricted to refined and artificial forms.
The gallantry with which Giusti, living under the absolute government
of Tuscany, itself wholly subservient to Austria, launched shaft
after shaft against the oppressors of his country, is paralleled by
the boldness of the literary innovation he made in discarding the
time-honoured forms of blank verse and _terza rima_, and conveying
satire in easy and familiar lyric.
Giusti has been compared to Béranger, but certainly falls short of the
Frenchman as a master of song, while he has more of the sacred fire
of poetical indignation. The Anacreontic side of Béranger’s genius
has no counterpart in him. As a master of idiomatic Tuscan he stands
alone; but his poems require a glossary, and what helps his fame with
his countrymen hinders it with foreigners. His satires are sometimes
called forth by the occurrences of the day, but are more frequently
directed at some persistent evil or misfortune of the country; and
although the expulsion of the foreigner and his vassals is the idea
most commonly in the background, not a few of the best pieces treat of
the defects of the Italian people itself, the frivolity of some classes
of society, the ignorance and superstition of others, and not least the
pretentious emptiness of much modern liberalism. The general tone of
Giusti’s compositions is easy and humorous; but under the impulse of
emotion he is capable of rising into high poetry, as in the description
of the corruption of Florentine society in his _Gingillino_, or in the
palinode to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, when (October 1847) the poet for
a moment believed that Leopold was about to pursue a liberal course.
Giusti would have found it difficult to reconcile this attitude
with the aspirations for the unity of Italy which he had expressed
in his _Stivale_ in 1836, but it soon appeared that Leopold’s
constitutionalism was of a piece with the monastic inclinations
attributed to invalid devils, and Giusti went back into opposition,
more annoyed and dispirited by the follies and vagaries of his own
party than by the iniquities of the enemy. The French Revolution
of February 1848 gave the upper hand to the Tuscan liberals, who
had superabundantly manifested their incapacity ere, in March 1849,
the fate of Tuscany was decided on the battlefield of Novara. The
heart-broken poet, already suffering from grievous illness, could
not survive until the better day, dying on 31st March 1850. _Chi
dura vince._ His profession had been that of an advocate, and, until
his last days, his life was uneventful except for an unfortunate
attachment. It certainly speaks for the lenity of the Tuscan Government
that he should not have spent much of it in prison, for his satires
from 1833 to 1847 circulated widely in manuscript, and some were
printed in Switzerland in his lifetime. They must suffer with posterity
for their general relation to temporary circumstances; but Giusti will
ever retain the honour of having been the first to apply ordinary
Italian speech to the poetical expression of new ideas and new needs,
thus enlarging the domain both of language and of literature.
The best English translations from Giusti are the brilliant renderings
by Mr. W. D. Howells, especially that of the striking poem of _St.
Ambrose_, where an Italian is represented as moved to sympathy with the
Austrian soldiers by the beauty of
_A German anthem that to heaven went
On unseen wings, up from the holy fane;
It was a prayer, and seemed like a lament,
Of such a pensive, grave, pathetic strain,
That in my soul it never shall be spent;
And how such heavenly harmony in the brain
Of those thick-skulled barbarians should dwell,
I must confess it passes me to tell._
_In that sad hymn I felt the bitter sweet
Of the songs heard in childhood, which the soul
Learns from beloved voices, to repeat
To its own anguish in the days of dole:
A thought of the dear mother, a regret,
A longing for repose and love--the whole
Anguish of distant exile seemed to run
Over my heart and leave it all undone._
_When the strain ceased, it left me pondering
Tenderer thoughts, and stronger and more clear;
These men, I mused, the self-same despot king
Who rules on Slavic and Italian fear,
Tears from their homes and arms that round them cling,
And drives them slaves thence, to keep as slaves here;
From their familiar fields afar they pass,
Like herds to winter in some strange morass._
_Poor souls! far off from all that they hold dear,
And in a land that hates them! Who shall say
That at the bottom of their hearts they bear
Love for our tyrant? I should like to lay
They’ve our hate for him in their pockets! Here,
But that I turned in haste and broke away,
I should have kissed a corporal, stiff and tall,
And like a scarecrow stuck against the wall._
Affinities with Browning may be observed in these stanzas, and Browning
meets Giusti half-way in _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_.
Another popular poet claims a high and exceptional place in Italian
letters, not so much from his poetical gift as from his vivid and
uncompromising realism. The peculiar domain of GIOACCHINO BELLI
(1791-1863) is the populace of Rome, whose humours, joys, and tragedies
he has made his own. He has indeed competitors, but, as his editor
Morandi observes, these are but as rivers to the sea in comparison with
the fabulous opulence of Belli, who has depicted the life around him in
more than two thousand sonnets, each in its way a little masterpiece.
Almost all represent some scene in the life of the people, observed
in his daily ramble, and versified upon his return home. For spirit
and truth to nature most of them are almost comparable to Theocritus’s
portrait of Praxinoe, and there is probably not another instance in the
world of the life of a great city so perfectly delineated in verse,
or of such an enormous collection of sonnets of so high an average of
merit. The drawback to their general enjoyment is their inevitable
composition in the Roman dialect, lively, coloured, and full of comic
phrases, but uncouth and corrupt. Another important division of Belli’s
work is the political sonnet, full of mordant satire on the abuses of
the Papal government under Gregory XVI., not the less veracious because
the author wished to recall it when the Catholic in him ultimately
overcame the Liberal.
The patriotic work of Giusti and of Belli was thus in a measure
local; one took charge of Tuscany, and the other of Rome. Another
distinguished man took all Italy (the impossible kingdom of the Two
Sicilies excepted) for his province, and deserves to be enumerated
among the more eminent Italian writers of the nineteenth century who
have powerfully contributed to the regeneration of their country.
PIETRO GIORDANI (1774-1848) is nevertheless not a great author, and
perhaps his highly interesting correspondence is the only portion of
his writings which will retain a permanent value. But he was almost
the mainspring of the literary movement of his time. Italian authors
resorted to him for ideas, as English authors resorted to Samuel Rogers
for breakfasts, and neither went empty away. But for him Leopardi might
have wasted his life on classical philology and verbal criticism; he
helped Manzoni and Giusti to their fame; he lived familiarly with
Niccolini, Capponi, and Colletta, and was the intimate friend of
Monti and Canova. The first forty years of his life, spent in various
official employments, had been troubled and needy, but he ultimately
inherited a fortune, and during the Thirty Years’ Peace his activity
incessantly pervaded Italian letters like an unseen sap, save when he
came forward to promote a savings-bank or an infant-school, or got
himself expelled from the territories of some petty prince. His style
is highly finished and polished, but is the chief recommendation of his
writings, the epistolary excepted.
Finally, among the more distinguished authors of the period who
systematically laboured for the deliverance and regeneration of their
country must be named two most illustrious men, both called upon to
deal with practical affairs, yet chiefly efficacious through their
writings, VINCENZO GIOBERTI and GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. Both were subjects of
the King of Sardinia--Gioberti a royal chaplain at Turin; Mazzini a man
of letters at Genoa writing essays in defence of the romantic school.
Both were incarcerated and banished--Gioberti through the animosity of
the Jesuits, Mazzini as a Carbonaro. Gioberti betook himself to France,
Mazzini to England. Gioberti soon obtained an European reputation by
his philosophical writings, but does not appear to have materially
influenced French opinion in favour of his country. Mazzini, on the
other hand, produced great effects by his mission to England, where the
“swift, yet still, Ligurian figure; merciful and fierce; true as steel,
the word and thought of him limpid as water” (Carlyle),[22] fascinated
the best men and women, and made the emancipation of Italy a cause
dear to the heart of the people. On the other hand, he misused the
liberality of his friends by promoting a number of petty revolts and
foolish expeditions which commonly ended in the destruction of all who
participated in them.
Gioberti accomplished infinitely more for the national cause by his
great book, _Il Primato d’Italia_ (1845), which dissuaded Italy from
abortive conspiracies, and preached spiritual as a preparation for
political unity. It also, by its own merits and the reputation which
the author had already gained as a thinker, compelled men of intellect
to look into her case. Unfortunately, Gioberti had not grasped the
necessity of absolute administrative concentration, and advocated
confederacy among the various Italian states; an idea irreconcilable
with that of unity, and moreover utterly impracticable on account of
the centrifugalism of the sovereigns concerned. This made it possible
for Gioberti, when at length he had himself become minister at Turin,
to propose that Piedmont should anticipate the inevitable restoration
of the sovereigns of Central Italy by Austria or France by restoring
them herself; a step which would have ruined the house of Savoy in
public opinion, and consequently have destroyed all hope of an united
Italy. Gioberti soon retired to Paris, where he died suddenly in 1852,
just as a new chapter of events was opening, in which, taught by
experience, he would probably have performed a more efficient part.
It would have been well for the political, though not the literary
reputation of Mazzini if he had died about the same time in the good
odour of the courage and capacity he had shown in the defence of Rome
against the French. Although he had a great advantage over Gioberti
in his perception of the need of national unity, he was unable to
conceive of this otherwise than under Republican forms. He was hence
almost as ready to thwart the Piedmontese as to expel the Austrian;
he opposed every practical scheme for the redemption of Italy, from
the Crimean expedition downwards; and his public career down to his
death in 1872 is a series of lamentable mistakes. He could not see
that his mission was performed when he had once breathed life into the
dry bones, and he had no appreciation of the practical genius of a man
like Cavour, fully as indispensable to the common cause as his own
ideal enthusiasm. Happily there was another and more extensive field
in which this enthusiasm was perfectly in place. Mazzini was much more
than a conspirator, more even than a patriot. As a man of letters,
he concerned himself with German, English, and Slavonic literature,
and opened up new horizons to Italian thought. Polish literature was
especially congenial to him, for at that period its inspiration came
from worlds beyond mortal ken, and Mazzini, recoiling from the prosaic
common-sense of the eighteenth century, possessed the vein of mysticism
common to contemporaries otherwise so dissimilar as Lamennais, Balzac,
George Sand, Newman, Mickiewicz. This gave a singular elevation to his
ethical thought. A severe thinker, he meditated much on human rights
and human duties, and assigned precedence to the latter. “Think less
of your rights and more of your duties” is the burden of much ethical
admonition addressed, especially during his later years, to the
working classes, and containing some of the noblest and most dignified
teaching to be found in the world. Mazzini had little sympathy with
some of the more recent developments of democracy; his life had been
one of disinterested privation for great ends, and he thought little,
perhaps too little, of merely material ameliorations. His mysticism,
his austere magnanimity, and his deeply religious feeling find their
most perfect expression in his noble epistle to the members of the
Œcumenical Council of 1869, which, along with President Lincoln’s
oration on the battlefield of Gettysburg, crowns the public eloquence
of our time; nor needs the age which has produced two such deliverances
to envy in this respect the age of Pericles.
Time has worked and is working for Mazzini; the fanaticism and unreason
of one side of his character, having produced no permanent ill effect,
fall more and more into oblivion, or are recognised as the necessary
conditions of his unique gifts. His failings were the failings of
a prophet: little as he was qualified to guide the movement he had
evoked, none but such an one as he could have brought about the
national resurrection truly described by Mr. Swinburne in the poem
where he as truly hails in Mazzini the third Italian prophet after
Dante and Michael Angelo:
_And the third prophet standing by her grave,
Stretched forth his hand and touched her, and her eyes
Opened as sudden suns in heaven might rise,
And her soul caught from his the faith to save:
Faith above creeds, faith beyond records, born
Of the pure, naked, fruitful, awful morn._
There is an ancient story of a princess carried off by a dragon and
confined on a desert island in the most remote recesses of the ocean,
who owed her deliverance to the joint exertions of three most eminent
brothers, none of whom could have accomplished anything without the
other two. One, an astrologer, discovered the place of her captivity;
the second, a mechanician, made a winged horse; upon which the third, a
soldier, proceeded to the spot and slew the dragon. In the liberation
of Italy the part of the astrologer fell to Mazzini, that of the
mechanician to Cavour, and that of the soldier to Garibaldi.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] There is a lively portrait of him in Ruffini’s _Lorenzo Benoni_,
where he is introduced as “Fantasio.”