to set Italy free? Why did Mazzini later point him out as one of the
great sources of inspiration for his "Young Italy"? We must remember
that literature and the drama are more closely related to Italian public
opinion than they are with us, that the appearance of a new book or play
is often a vital subject to a ministry. What the people read they felt,
and it was Alfieri who first showed them the immorality of national
servitude. One of his best critics has said that when Alfieri first
turned his glance toward the Italian stage, it presented anything but a
hopeful aspect. "The degradation of a people enslaved under a foreign
yoke, and without political life, could not fail to make itself felt
in the theater as in the more extended arena of public affairs. No high
effort of mind could be born amid such circumstances. A stage without
authors soon ceases to have actors. When actors and authors both are
wanting an audience will not easily be found. Thus it was, thus it had
been in Italy through many troubled years. The opera,--the seductive,
but enervating opera,--carried to great perfection by Metastasio, was
almost alone in possession of the popular taste.... Alfieri's first
thought was to improve the taste of his countrymen, by blending the
amusement they were accustomed to with something better.... Instead of
attempting reform by easy stages, he determined to attempt everything at
once.... It was something more than an improvement of the stage that he
attempted; it was the improvement of his countrymen; the regeneration of
his country!... Throughout nearly all his tragedies and his prose works,
the leading idea by which he was animated stood plainly out. Several
pieces he specially calls tragedies of liberty. They well deserve the
name. He never tired in his denunciations of tyranny, in his invectives
against oppression. These were themes upon which the more he spoke, the
more eloquent he became."
The dramas themselves, built in strict accordance with the three
unities of classic taste, may seem strangely stiff and unemotional
to us, but they carried an immense appeal to the Italian of the last
century. They spoke a new voice and stirred a new spirit in their
hearers. The voice once heard, the spirit once born, the new idea grew
rapidly. Within a few years after Alfieri's death eighteen editions of
his works had passed through the press. Two great theaters, one at Milan
and one at Bologna, were built by men eager to present his tragedies.
The influence of his writings was tremendous; the minds of Italians from
Piedmont to Sicily were stirred to a higher pitch than they had been for
many centuries.
Alfieri's character had many defects, at best his life was unmoral,
but having regard to the society into which he was born and the
early training he received, more was scarcely to be looked for. He
was passionate, reckless, and untutored in all self-control, yet he
harnessed himself to a work which possessed his fancy and in its service
became the devotee of study and control. Like his life his writings
lack peace and broad philosophy, but on the other hand they gain from
his peculiar nature a certain domineering force. Giuseppe Arnaud in his
criticism on the patriotic poets of Italy says, "Whoever should say that
Alfieri's tragedies, in spite of many eminent merits, were constructed
on a theory opposed to grand scenic effects and to one of the two bases
of tragedy, namely, compassion, would certainly not say what was far
from the truth. And yet, with all this, Alfieri will still remain the
dry, harsh blast which swept away the noxious miasmas with which the
Italian air was infected. He will still remain that poet who aroused
his country from its dishonorable slumber, and inspired its heart with
intolerance of servile conditions and with regard for its dignity. Up to
this time we had bleated and he roared."
Let me only add the striking words of his fellow countryman, the gifted
poet-statesman Massimo d'Azeglio. "In fact," he wrote, "one of the
merits of that proud heart was to have found Italy Metastasian and left
it Alfierian; and his first and greatest merit was, to my thinking, that
he discovered Italy, so to speak, as Columbus discovered America, and
initiated the idea of Italy as a nation. I place this merit far beyond
that of his verses and his tragedies."
Alfieri reminded Italians that they had a native voice.
[Illustration: MANZONI]
MANZONI, THE MAN OF LETTERS
The position of Manzoni in modern Italian life and literature is
doubly interesting, both because his work in poetry and the drama
marks the vital turning point in the historic battle of Classicism
with Romanticism, and because his romance "I Promessi Sposi" is the
greatest achievement in all Italian letters in the field of the novel.
Walter Scott gave the country north of Tweed a history in the "Waverley
Novels," and Alessandro Manzoni's writing a little later, at a time
when Scott's work was a great factor in European literature, gave Italy
a history in the same sense. The inestimable service that the Waverley
Novels did Scotland "I Promessi Sposi" did the disrupted states of Italy.
The spirit of the French Revolution was all-engrossing, as subversive of
the old religions, philosophies, and literatures, as it was of the old
politics. It represented the actual thoughts of the men of that era, but
it developed so rapidly and fell into such excesses that its downfall
was sudden and complete. Then the reaction set in, which, as De Sanctis
in his history of the movement says, was "as rapid and violent as the
revolution.... The white terror succeeded to the red."
The same critic goes on to show that there were at this period two
great philosophic principles, materialism and skepticism, and that
in opposition to them there rose a spirituality which was carried to
the heights of idealism. This spirituality approached the mysticism
of mediæval days. "To the right of nature," he says, "was opposed the
divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual rights
the State, to liberty authority and order. The middle ages returned in
triumph.... Christianity, hitherto the target of all offense, became the
center of every philosophical investigation, the banner of all social
and religious progress.... The criterions of art were changed. There was
a pagan art and a Christian art, where highest expression was sought in
the Gothic, in the glooms, the mysteries, the vague, the indefinite,
in a beyond which was called the ideal, in an inspiration towards the
infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore melancholy.... To Voltaire
and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De Staël, Lamartine, Victor Hugo,
Lamennais. And in 1815 appeared the Sacred Hymns of the young Manzoni."
This spirit of idealism became the incentive for the new school
of Romance in literature and the drama, in contrast to the drab
materialism of the Revolutionary age. This school of Romance is not,
however, to be considered as diametrically opposed to the Classical
School, for they had much in common, and the contrast between them
lay not so much in the spirit which animated them as in the strict
regard of Classicism for the time-hallowed unities of time, place, and
action, and the willingness of the Romantic School to sacrifice all
these for freedom of movement and effect. The new school wished to find
its poems in the experiences of men of that day, to write its dramas
about any comedy or tragedy without regard to their classic form, it
wished freedom to grow as its own spirit might dictate. In Germany and
England great Romanticists were ripening into power, Goethe and Burger,
Scott and Byron were being widely read in Italy, and the dramas of both
Schiller and Shakespeare were continually translated and reproduced
in Italian verse. The restoration of the Austrians and Bourbons after
the Napoleonic downfall made any chance to speak political truths
impossible, even in the half-veiled militant form used earlier by
Alfieri. The Romantic School therefore, confined in its modern scope,
turned backward, became retrospective, and sought its outlet in the
glories of that mediæval world which had been so nearly akin in spirit
to the modern sentiment. It turned from recent atheistic tendencies to
a mood of great devotion, from lax morality to a high degree of upright
conduct, from the regard of liberty as the greatest good to that of
responsibility to mankind as the goal. Only distantly and secondarily
political, this Romantic movement was first of all moral, and taught
Italians that in order to be good citizens they must be good men first.
As in all literary history the movement had a deep philosophic meaning,
and this sense of moral responsibility was at the base of all Manzoni's
great creative efforts.
First of all, then, the literary movement which succeeded the
Revolutionary era in Italy was idealistic as compared with the
materialism of the days of the Napoleonic occupation, and secondly,
it was Romantic in contradistinction to the Classicism of the earlier
times. Greek and Roman themes for artistic expression were abandoned
for the stories of national mediævalism, the Papacy became the center
of its poetic aspiration, and its spirit, though highly ardent, was far
more truly modern than that of Classicism had been. Our former critic,
De Sanctis, says that in this new movement religion "is no longer a
creed, it is an artistic motive.... It is not enough that there are
saints, they must be beautiful: the Christian idea returns as art....
Providence comes back to the world, the miracle reappears in story,
hope and prayer revive, the heart softens, it opens itself to gentle
influences.... Manzoni reconstructs the ideal of the Christian Paradise
and reconciles it with the modern spirit. Mythology goes, the classic
remains; the eighteenth century is denied, its ideas prevail."
Manzoni stood first for that new movement which opposed morality to
license in national development, secondly for the temper which derided
the classic limits of the three unities and held that a purely national
event was as suitable for the purpose of artistic representation as
the stories of classic history. In addition to this he first adopted
that form of the Romantic spirit which was rising so rapidly into use
in England in the novels of Walter Scott, in France in the writings
of Victor Hugo and Lamennais, and in Germany in those of Goethe and
Schiller, and gave Italy the result in his great novel of Italian life
and history. For each of these reasons Manzoni represents a force potent
in upbuilding Italian character and strengthening it at the time of its
great crisis. Though he drew suggestions from abroad, he made his work
Italian, and thoroughly Italian. "If," says De Sanctis, "the Romantic
School, by its name, its ties, its studies, its impressions, was allied
to German traditions and French fashions, it was at bottom Italian
in accent, aspiration, form, and motive.... Every one felt our hopes
palpitating under the mediæval robe; the least allusion, the remotest
meanings, were caught by the public, which was in the closest accord
with the writers. The middle ages were no longer treated with historical
and positive intention; they became the garments of our ideals, the
transparent expression of our hopes."
Alessandro Manzoni was born in Milan, March 7, 1785, at about the time
when Alfieri was accomplishing his greatest work. His father, Pietro
Manzoni, belonged to the nobility, and bore the title of Count, a title
which Alessandro, when he inherited it at an early age, refused to
adopt, and continued to refuse to use during his whole life. His mother
was the daughter of Beccaria, a man well known throughout Europe for
his studies of political economy and criminology, and whose treatise
entitled "Crimes and Punishments" was greatly admired in the Voltairean
circles of France. Alessandro's mother was a remarkably intelligent
woman, with a fineness of nature which was inherited by her son, and
which kept him unspoiled and simple through a life unusually acclaimed
and applauded.
His earliest youth was spent among the hills of Galbiate, according to
the custom of wealthy Lombard families, to send their children to the
mountains in order to give them rugged health. The boy was in care of
a woman who was successively his nurse and governess, and who taught
him to read and stirred his interest in the legends and history of the
neighboring countryside. When still a small boy he was sent to the
church college of the Frati Lomaschi, education being then entirely
in charge of ecclesiastics. He seems to have been in no wise an apt
student, the close confinement, the strict discipline, and the dry
manner of teaching subjects which were all of an eminently classical
nature combining to dull his spirits and interest. Stories are current
in Milan of Manzoni's inability to learn, almost bordering on stupidity,
but such stories are popular of men who have later shown great ability,
and deserve little credence. Suffice it that he showed no great aptitude
for learning at the school of the Frati Lomaschi, nor even later at
the Collegio dei Nobili. At the latter he did, however, meet the poet
Vincenzo Monti, a man well known throughout Italy, who had had for
patrons the Cardinals Borghese and Braschi, a poet and dramatist whose
pen was too apt to serve the political party in power, but who had
achieved wide popularity, and whose poems were praised by critics as
diverse-minded as Byron and Napoleon Bonaparte. Monti met the young
Manzoni when he was on a visit to the college, and took an interest in
him. Alessandro admired the poet, and it was perhaps this acquaintance
which first actively interested him in literature as a pursuit. The
meeting of the boy Walter Scott with Robert Burns is a parallel in
Scottish literary annals.
In 1805, when he was twenty, Alessandro's father died and the youth
left the Collegio dei Nobili, and returned for a time to his mother.
After a period of home life he was sent to the University of Pavia,
the best-known of Lombard universities. His stay here was short. His
mother, now a widow for several years, was advised to go to France for
her health, and the close bonds which united mother and son would not
allow of such a distant separation. Alessandro left the University and
went with his mother to Auteuil, which was then a fashionable watering
place where the _beau monde_ of French art and letters gathered. Here
and at Paris he met the leading thinkers of the time, Volney, Cabanis,
De Tracy, Fauriel, and Condorcet, all of whom were interested in the
young man as the grandson of Beccaria and because of his own originality
of thought. These men called themselves idealogues, and claimed to
have shaken off all the conventions of the previous centuries. As a
student Manzoni had been an extremely liberal Catholic, and was usually
considered by strict critics a follower of Voltaire. At Paris and
Auteuil, however, he met so many men of the then prevalent atheistic
mode of thought that his own interest in his family religion was
quickened and he emerged from his friendship with such men as Cabanis
and Condorcet a more pronounced churchman than he had been before. It
was characteristic of him to cling tenaciously to those precedents and
standards which had so long survived in his own country. His religion,
however, was soon to become more to him than a field for philosophic
speculation, for in 1810 he married Louise Henriette Blondel, daughter
of a banker of Geneva, who, herself a convert from Protestantism to the
Church of Rome, became most ardent in the church of her adoption. She
soon brought Alessandro to her own enthusiastic view, and from the date
of his marriage his philosophy never varied. Henriette Manzoni possessed
rare beauty, and was long remembered in Milan "for her fresh blond head,
and her blue eyes, her lovely eyes," and the young husband was ideally
happy with his bride. He had by now determined to try his skill at
composition, and set himself as models the three men whose fame was then
at its height in Italy, Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo.
His bride had brought Manzoni a country seat as well as considerable
property, and so he settled in the country and studied to perfect his
style in writing. His first works were a series of Sacred Hymns, written
directly under the influence of the renewed religious faith attendant
on his marriage. These were published in 1815, and were at once noticed
as poems alike remarkable for deep religious feeling and great beauty
of expression. Appearing as they did at a time when religion was being
bitterly assailed, churchmen looked upon the young poet as a distinct
acquisition to their forces. Manzoni was not, however, even then a
believer in the temporal power of the Pope. He said to Madame Colet, the
author of "L'Italie des Italiens," "I bow humbly to the Pope, and the
Church has no more respectful son; but why confound the interests of
earth and those of heaven? The Roman people are right in asking their
freedom--there are hours for nations, as for governments, in which they
must occupy themselves, not with what is convenient, but with what is
just. Let us lay hands boldly upon the temporal power, but let us not
touch the doctrine of the Church. The one is as distinct from the other
as the immortal soul from the frail and mortal body. To believe that
the Church is attacked in taking away its earthly possessions is a real
heresy to every true Christian."
This was the same view which Manzoni held throughout his life, and
which, stated in his quoted words, gives the position taken by the most
enlightened men of the Nationalist party in those later days when the
question of the temporal power of the Pope became vital for Italy. What
the Sacred Hymns showed was that Manzoni looked to the Church as the
center of all true aspiration and religion rather than to philosophic
theories as the safeguard of morals.
His next production carried him a step further in advance of his
contemporaries, and marked him as the leader of the Romantic School.
In 1819 he wrote his first tragedy, published the following year under
the title "Il Conte di Carmagnola." The subject-matter was the career
of Carmagnola, a celebrated condottiere of the Middle Ages, and the
dramatic form was entirely distinct from that classic construction which
had so long tyrannized over the drama. In an introduction he explains
his departure from the classic unities of time, place, and action, and
gives his reasons for believing that the dramatist should be free to
choose his own subject and to treat it in such fashion as shall seem to
him best to express his idea. The Elizabethan dramatists had long before
discarded the law of the unities in England, and had carried their plots
over such courses of time and place as they pleased, and so had Schiller
in Germany, but in Italy the law had been absolute from the time of
Tasso to that of Alfieri. Eight years after Manzoni's "Carmagnola"
appeared, Victor Hugo brought on the great dramatic war in France with
his "Cromwell," and from the date of his ultimate triumph in Paris dates
the downfall of the Classicists and the full glory of the Romanticists.
In Italy Manzoni's step was violently attacked and defended.
Conservatives opposed him, but the younger element immediately acclaimed
him as their leader. The following year, 1821, he wrote his great ode on
the death of Napoleon, which had occurred on May 5th, at St. Helena, and
the news of which had greatly affected all Europe. The ode, entitled "Il
Cinque Maggio," was remarkable for great dignity, a deep and profound
estimate of Napoleon's genius, and a tribute to his colossal fame which
even the French recognized as the fittest expression of poetic power.
The ode was at once translated into German by Goethe, and into English
by Gladstone and the Earl of Derby. It immediately placed him at the
head of the new school of continental poets.
Very soon afterwards, in 1822, Manzoni wrote his second tragedy,
"Adelchi," a drama of the war between the Lombards and Charlemagne. It
followed the lines of the Carmagnola, repeating the break from classical
precedents, and establishing the value of the Romantic School. Both
dramas were acted, but without success. The Carmagnola, when it was
given at Florence in 1828, had the open support of the court to offset
the attacks of the old school, and yet did not win even a mildly
enthusiastic hearing. The Adelchi was tried with a similar result at
Turin.
In spite of their ill reception on the stage, both of Manzoni's dramas
were immensely popular with readers, and, although based on incidents
remote in point of time, both thrilled with a patriotism that stirred
the hearts of all Italians. Mr. Howells says of the tragedies in his
"Modern Italian Poets," "The time of the Carmagnola is the fifteenth
century; that of the Adelchi the eighth century; and however strongly
marked are the characters,--and they are very strongly marked, and
differ widely from most persons of Italian classic tragedy in this
respect,--one still feels that they are subordinate to the great
contests of elements and principles for which the tragedy furnishes a
scene. In the Carmagnola the pathos is chiefly in the feeling embodied
by the magnificent chorus lamenting the slaughter of Italians by
Italians at the battle of Maclodio; in the Adelchi we are conscious of
no emotion so strong as that we experience when we hear the wail of the
Italian people, to whom the overthrow of their Longobard oppressors by
the Franks is but the signal of a new enslavement. This chorus is almost
as fine as the more famous one in the Carmagnola, both are incomparably
finer than anything else in the tragedies and are much more dramatic
than the dialogue. It is in the emotion of a spectator belonging to our
own time rather than in that of an actor of those past times that the
poet shows his dramatic strength, and whenever he speaks abstractly for
country and humanity he moves us in a way that permits no doubt of his
greatness."
Manzoni's greatest work, however, was yet to appear, for admirable as
were his poems and inspiring as were his heroic dramas it was as a
novelist that he was to reach his pinnacle of fame. It was also as a
novelist that he was to become one of the men who directly created that
national spirit which made modern Italy. Italy had had many poets, but
no great novelist since Boccaccio. Fortunately Manzoni had not been
confined to the literature of his own land, but had studied Goethe,
Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Scott, and drew his inspiration largely from
them. He owed much to the English novel, and especially to the author
of "Waverley," a man whom he much admired, and who fully returned his
admiration.
"I Promessi Sposi" appeared in 1825 and created a tremendous
impression. Scott said that it was the greatest historical novel ever
written, and Goethe said, "It satisfies us like perfectly ripe fruit."
It was the first and greatest Italian romance, and it awakened an
interest throughout Europe in Italian history. The scene is laid in
Milan under the harsh Spanish rule of the Seventeenth Century, and
the reader is carried through the story of war and famine, and the
great plague. Its merits are hard to exaggerate, the beauty of its
descriptions and the accuracy of its history, the intense interest of
its characters, a galaxy that embraces every walk of life, the truth
of its philosophy are equally remarkable. The universal feelings of
humanity pulse through its pages; as Dr. Garnett says of it, "as a
picture of human nature the book is above criticism; it is just the
fact, neither more nor less."
Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables" wrote a book which appealed to the
innate democracy of man, but Manzoni in "I Promessi Sposi" made the same
appeal without having recourse to the Frenchman's use of the grotesque
and gigantic. Through the whole of the latter novel runs the note of
a profound sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, a note which
is perhaps stronger in this book than in any romance ever written. It
is the work of a great mind, fully alive to every sensibility and
sympathy, accurate in its judgments, and to which, in the ancient words,
nothing human is foreign.
Cardinal and priest, brigand and simple hero, grande dame and the lovely
girl whose hand promised in marriage gives part title to the book, are
each perfect in their way, and bring the characteristics of a past
century vividly before the present. Goethe pointed out the too great
prominence of the historical element, but the very careful attention
paid by Manzoni to the accuracy of his setting must add to the sense of
reality which he so completely gains. The novel was rapidly translated
into all modern languages, and at once created a school of historical
novelists in Italy.