realism, it is difficult to understand what Scott and Hugo, Goethe and
Manzoni did for the men of the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century.
They made people feel as they had not felt before the wide scope of
existence and the importance of the individual. Literature had been a
matter of form and convention, of classic model, of purely aristocratic
vision. The new movement was part of that same impulse which was
demanding constitutions of kings and bringing the middle classes into
political prominence. It was an awakening of public spirit which had
slept soundly through several centuries. Voltaire and Rousseau,
Alfieri and Foscolo had sounded the first notes of a new intellectual
renaissance, and now Hugo and Manzoni went further and stepped boldly
out from all classic restraints.
Although "I Promessi Sposi" is more widely known and more highly
regarded than any Italian book, except the Divine Comedy of Dante,
Manzoni's personality impressed itself but little upon his age. He
had not the fighting nature of Victor Hugo, nor the mental unrest of
Byron, two of his great contemporaries. He preferred the retirement of
his farm to the excitements of Milan, and although he was always an
ardent advocate of Italian unity and freedom he took but small part in
the great events that soon delivered Lombardy from Austria. After the
appearance of "I Promessi Sposi" he wrote little more. "Formerly," he
said, "the muse came after me, now I should have to go after her." His
quiet life laid him open to the charge of an indifferent patriotism, but
those who knew him best understood that such an accusation was bitterly
untrue.
When the Austrian government returned to Milan the members of the
Lombard nobility were required to write their names in an official
register or forfeit their titles. Manzoni preferred to lose his claim
as a patrician, and later refused a decoration, saying that he had
made a vow never to wear any order of knighthood. He afterwards offered
the same excuse to Victor Emmanuel when the latter wished to decorate
him. He was elected a Senator in 1860, when the first National Assembly
met, and went to Turin to take his seat, but soon after retired to the
privacy of his own home on Lake Maggiore. Here he entertained many great
guests, among them Cavour and D'Azeglio, to whom he was warmly attached.
His life flowed on an even current, the existence of a philosophic
spirit interested as an observer rather than as an actor.
Henriette Manzoni died in 1833, and in 1837 he married Teresa Borri,
widow of Count Stampa. He saw his children grow up about him and go to
take their places in the world. Gradually he saw the cause of national
freedom win its way, and the King to whom he was so devoted unite the
scattered states under one crown. He saw the fall of the temporal power
of the Pope, and with it the consummation of his hopes. In 1873, at
the age of eighty-eight, he died, universally mourned and revered. A
Milanese journal said: "After the confessor left the room Manzoni called
his friends and said to them, 'When I am dead, do what I did every day;
pray for Italy--pray for the king and his family--so good to me!' His
country was the last thought of this great man dying, as in his whole
long life it had been his most vivid and constant affection."
It was nearly fifty years since his last important work had appeared,
but during that long half century of inactivity Manzoni's fame had
grown steadily. His romance had passed through one hundred and eighteen
editions in Italian alone. Milan decreed him a state funeral, and
representatives of all European countries appeared at the old Lombard
capital with addresses from their sovereigns. It has been said that
Manzoni's death evoked a greater unanimity of sentiment than has been
called forth by that of any other great author of modern times, except
possibly by that of Sir Walter Scott. Even those who had criticised
Manzoni had always spoken their opinions in a spirit of reverence.
He was regarded as the great guiding figure in the course of the new
national literature.
A singularly uneventful life for one of the great builders of a nation,
uneventful even for that of a scholar or poet. Moreover the roll of
his works is small numerically, comprising his Sacred Hymns, the two
dramas, the Ode on Napoleon, the single novel, and in addition only a
few essays, the "Innominata" or Column of Infamy, an historical note to
"I Promessi Sposi," an essay on the Romantic School, called "Letters
on Romanticism," and one entitled "Letters on the Unity of Time and
Place," the purpose of which was to show that the unity of action is the
only unity of importance to the dramatist. The bulk of his work was not
great, but each expression of it was masterful in its way, the Hymns
true poetry as well as deep religious sentiment, the Ode considered
the finest ode in all Italian poetry, the dramas pulsing with life and
feeling, the novel unsurpassed. These were the literary values of his
work, but these in themselves would not account for Manzoni's influence
on his times. He was a moral and political force, showing the men of his
day that nations can only hope for liberty and peace when the citizens
respect the law and virtue. A generation that had lived through the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic era needed some one to lead them
back to moral sanity, and this was the greatest of Manzoni's works.
Like Gioberti, like D'Azeglio, like Victor Emmanuel, Manzoni was a
staunch Catholic as well as a true Italian. A close friend, Signor
Bonghi, said of him: "He had two faiths, one in the future of
Catholicism, another in the future of Italy, and the one, whatever was
said, whatever happened, never disturbed the other. In anxious moments,
when the harmony between the two was least visible, he expected it the
most, and never allowed his faith in one or the other to be shaken. Rome
he wished to be the abode of the King; Rome he wished also to be the
abode of the Pope. Obedient to the Divine Authority of the Pontificate,
no one passed a more correct judgment upon its civil character, or
defended with more firmness, when speaking upon the subject, the right
of the State."
That he was the poet of resignation, as Monnier declared, is disproved
by his dramas and his novel. The martial lyrics of the plays burn with a
spirit only too evidently fired by the contemporary subjection of Italy
to Austria and France. Take for example the first and last verses of one
of the lyrics in the Adelchi, as rendered into English by Miss Ellen
Clarke:
"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 clamor 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.
* * * * *
And deem ye, poor fools! that the need 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."
Could Manzoni have meant such words to speak other than of the Austrians
and Bourbons who were grinding Italians into servitude? Could his
marvelous meter, which has been said in its "plunging" to suggest a
charge of horses, have been meant other than to drive his countrymen
to self assertion? Manzoni was patriot as well as artist, and read
his times with no unskilful eye. When Victor Emmanuel visited Milan
in 1859 he said that he should like to meet the poet, and, when told
that the latter was ill, declared that he would go to him. Manzoni,
however, would not hear of this, and as soon as he was able called
upon the King. The sovereign's marks of regard and respect overwhelmed
the poet. Later he said of the meeting, "I see in the character of the
King the intervention of Providence. He is exactly the sovereign that
circumstances require to accomplish the resurrection of Italy. He has
rectitude, courage, incorruptible honesty, and disinterestedness; he
seeks not glory or fortune for himself, but for his country. He is
so simple, never caring to appear great, that he does not meet the
admiration of those who seek to find in princes and heroes theatrical
actions and grandiloquent words. He is natural because he is true, and
this makes his enemies say that he is wanting in regal majesty. To found
Italian unity he has risked his throne, and his life."
Manzoni's prophecies came true and he himself had no small part in
accomplishing that great end towards which so many men of diverse forces
worked. As well as king and statesman, warrior and prophet, the man of
letters taught his people how to find their independence.
[Illustration: GIOBERTI]
GIOBERTI, THE PHILOSOPHER
Gioberti's signal gift to his countrymen was his great book, "II Primato
d'Italia," a statement of the causes of Italy's early primacy among
European nations, and a philosophic theory for her regeneration. Like
Savonarola he flayed the vices of his time and preached redemption
through Christian living, but, unlike the great Fra, he undertook to
teach that the Church was no less fitted to be the seat of statecraft
than of religion. It was this that gained him the ear of Rome as well as
that of Piedmont, and made it seem for a moment as though he had found
the solution of Italy's troubles.
The effect of the "Primato" was felt from Turin to Naples. "The book,"
said Minghetti, the statesman of a later decade, "seemed to some an
extravagance, to others a revelation. The truth is, that while many of
its ideas were peculiar to the author, and partook of his character,
his studies, and his profession, the substance of it responded to a
sentiment still undefined, but which had been slowly developing in the
minds of Italians. The idea of nationality had, in the previous years,
spread far and wide through many channels, open and secret, and the
desire of a great and free country had taken possession of the majority
of the younger men; but the methods hitherto employed had proved so
inefficient that weariness and disgust had followed. Experience had
proved that conspiracies, secret societies, and partial insurrections
were of no utility--that they made the governments more severe, retarded
civil progress, arrested the increase of public prosperity, plunged many
families into misery, and did not even win the approbation of civilized
nations.
"The rumors of wars and of European insurrections which were circulated
every spring time, the mystic declamations of Mazzini in the name of
God and the people, ... all these things showed that the time had come
to try another method, more serious, more practical, and surer....
Gioberti, a Piedmontese exile for the sake of liberty, had taken part
in the earliest phases of the "Giovine Italia" or had been in relation
with its chiefs, but had wearied of that pompous and impotent society.
His intellect had anticipated that change which had been imperceptibly
operating and now began to appear widely ... but obscurely in the
consciousness of many men. This opportuneness and coincidence of
the ideas of the author with the spirit of the day gave his book
a special importance.... The purpose of the book was to prove that
Italy, although it had lost all political value for the outside world,
contained all the conditions of moral and political revival, and that
to effect this change there was no need of revolutions, invasions, or
imitations of the foreigner, since political revival is limited to three
heads--unity, independence, and liberty--the first two of which might be
obtained by a confederation of the various states under the presidency
of the Pope, and the last by means of internal reforms in each state,
effected by their respective Princes without danger or diminution of
their real power."
Vincenzo Gioberti was born in Turin April 5, 1801, and was the only
child of parents of very moderate means. At an early age it was decided
that he should prepare for the priesthood, and his education was
entrusted to the fathers of the Oratory in Turin. His nature was more
conformable to the teaching of churchmen than was that of Alfieri or
Manzoni, and whereas both the latter had chafed under the discipline
and mental training of the Church schools the young Gioberti became a
thoughtful student. He differed from Mazzini, a contemporary studying
at Genoa, in that although he early learned that the condition of his
country was wretched, his mind could only conceive of improvement by
orderly and temperate steps. He was a brilliant scholar, and during the
years of his training for the priesthood he delved deep into the history
of philosophy, and studied closely the writings of the fathers and
doctors of the Roman Church. In 1825 he was ordained a priest.
The young priest, a man of a serious and reflective mind, turned his
attention to the affairs of his country, and gradually entered upon a
careful study of the literature of the day, and the political theories
that were then agitating men's minds. He took part in scholastic
discussions of religious and political subjects, and in time widened his
acquaintance in Turin so that he came in contact with the leaders of
thought in the Sardinian capital. As he met men and spoke his thoughts
more freely it came to be seen that he was occupied above everything
else with the problem of freeing Italy from the foreign overlords, and
this gradually marked him as a free-thinking priest. At first, however,
he did not incur the enmity of the clerical party, for, although his
conception of Italian freedom consisted in emancipation not alone from
the arms of foreign masters, but from all modes of thought which were
alien to the nation's genius, and detrimental to its national authority,
this authority was always associated in his mind with the idea of Papal
supremacy, but a supremacy intellectual rather than political.
The reign of Charles Albert of Piedmont was a continual battle between
the conservative party and the enlightened liberals. The leaders of the
conservatives were clerics, in large measure Jesuits, who kept in close
touch with the Court of Vienna, realizing to the full that their aims
and those of Austria were to all intents identical, the maintenance of
the _status quo_ in Italy. The young priest Gioberti was not long in
incurring the hostility of the Jesuits, because, although he sought
the ultimate supremacy of the Papal See, he desired it as a moral
rather than as a physical supremacy, and he most ardently hoped for the
expulsion of the Austrians from Lombardy and the absolute independence
of Piedmont from Viennese influence. His was, however, too brilliant a
mind to be denied, and, despite the efforts of the Court party, Charles
Albert, who was always cognizant of the abilities of other men, soon
after his accession to the throne in 1831 nominated the young priest to
be one of the royal chaplains.
As chaplain of the court Gioberti quickly assumed prominence. His nature
was open and frank, he made friends easily, he wrote on ecclesiastical
and political subjects, and his patriotism was known to be unbounded.
He soon had gathered a party about him, and his influence over the
King grew rapidly. Charles Albert's own views on Italian policy were at
that time almost identical with Gioberti's, he would have been glad to
acknowledge a confederation of Italian states under the presidency of
the Pope, provided the foreign princelings could be disposed of without
bloodshed. This, however, the clerical party did not approve of, any
change being to their view revolutionary, and the realization that the
chaplain was gaining the private ear of the King finally compelled them
to mark him for exile.
Aware of this disaffection in the Church party at Turin, Gioberti in
1833 asked permission of Charles Albert to resign his chaplaincy, but,
before his request was granted he was suddenly arrested one day while
walking with a friend in the public gardens of the city, and placed
in prison. The influence of the clerical party was so all-powerful in
the Piedmont of that day that no attempt to secure Gioberti's release
was effective, and no popular demonstration at such an outrage could
take place. He was given no trial, and his case was the subject of
no apparent judicial process. After four months' imprisonment he was
informed that his banishment had been decreed, and he was at once
conducted to the frontier in charge of a carabineer. At the same time
his name was stricken off the roll of the theological doctors of the
College of Turin.
Driven into exile because of his political opinions, even as Mazzini
was exiled as a suspect rather than because of any proof against him,
Gioberti reached Paris in October, 1833. Like so many other great
Italians of that day he was destined to spend many years away from
his beloved country. Without friends, family, or money, his career
apparently ruined, his hopes shattered, Gioberti was to sound the depths
of a courageous man's despair. Mazzini took himself to London to eke
out a meager living as a teacher of Italian, and with the same thought
Gioberti went to Brussels. Here he undertook to teach philosophy, and
finally obtained employment in assisting his friend Gaggia in the
management of a small college. All his leisure time he devoted to
studying and writing on philosophy, rising early, and working the better
part of the night, and producing work after work of great value in
philosophic inquiry, all of which bore especially upon the needs of his
own countrymen.
His stay in Brussels, which lasted from 1834 to 1845, saw the production
of his greatest books, all deeply earnest, and each one causing in
turn the greatest interest and emotion in Italy. The volume of his
work was most remarkable, treatises appearing at short intervals,
each one of which would have sufficed to represent a lifetime's study.
His first work was the result of a friendship formed in Brussels with
a young fellow-exile, Paolo Pallia, who on one occasion expressed
to Gioberti certain doubts as to the reality of revelations and a
future life. Gioberti at once commenced work upon his "La Teorica del
Sovran-naturale," which was finished and published in 1838. This was
followed in 1839 and 1840 by his three volumes called "Introduzione
allo Studio della Filosofia." In all these writings he stands apart
from his contemporary European philosophers. Method of speculation
is with him subjective and psychological. He adopts much from Plato.
Throughout all his writings religion is synonomous with civilization,
and he repeatedly states that religion is the true and only expression
of the _idea_ in this life, and is one with the real civilization of
history. Civilization is the means to perfection, of which religion is
the essence.
These strictly philosophic works were followed by the essays "Del Bello"
and "Del Buono," and after a short interval by a magnificent exposure
of the Jesuit Order, "Il Gesuita Moderno," and his "Del Primato Morale e
Civile degli Italiani," and "Prolegomeni."
It was the "Primato" which gave the exiled Gioberti his place as a
great factor in the struggle for Italian independence. His ideas seem
strangely archaic now, but they were compelling in 1846. He himself
says: "I intend to show ... that Italy alone has the qualities required
to become the chief of nations, and that although to-day she has almost
completely lost that chiefship, it is in her power to recover it, and
I will state the most important conditions of that renovation.... As
infant civilization was born between two rivers, so renewed and adult
civilization arose between two seas; the former in fertile Mesopotamia,
whence it easily spread over Asia, Africa and the west; the latter
in Italy, which divides the Tyrrhene and Adriatic seas, thus forming
the central promontory of Europe and placed in a position to dominate
the rest of the hemisphere.... In the Church there is neither Greek
nor Barbarian, and all nations form a cosmopolitan society, as all
the tribes of Israel a single nation. But as, in the Jewish nation,
genealogy determined the tenure of the hierarchy, and the sons of Levi
received the custody of the Law and the service of the Temple, so in
the Christian commonwealth the division of the nations is in a manner
involved in the order of the Catholic Church. And, the Church having a
supreme head, we must recognize a moral pre-eminence where Heaven has
established its seat, and where nearer, quicker, more immediate and
more uninterrupted are the in-breathings of its voice. This preeminence
certainly does not transgress the natural order of divine intentions,
real and efficient in their working and in the obligations they impose.
So that the Italians, humanly speaking, are the Levites of Christianity,
having been chosen by Providence to keep the Christian Pontificate, and
to protect with love, with veneration, and if necessary by arms, the
ark of the new covenant.... Let the nations, then, turn their eyes to
Italy, their ancient and loving mother, who holds the seeds of their
regeneration. Italy is the organ of the supreme reason and the royal and
ideal word; the fountain, rule and guardian of every other reason and
eloquence; for there resides the Head that rules, the Arm that moves,
the Tongue that commands and the Heart that animates Christianity at
large.... As Rome is the seat of Christian wisdom, Piedmont is to-day
the principal home of Italian military strength. Seated on the slopes of
the Alps, as a wedge between Austria and France, and as a guard to the
peninsula, of which it is the vestibule and peristyle, it is destined
to watch from its mountains, and crush in its ravines, every foreign
aggressor, compelling its powerful neighbors to respect the common
independence of Italy."
Such expression will suffice to show that Gioberti was in no sense a
reliable prophet, but a philosopher of deeply religious strain who was
seeking to reconcile the political freedom of Italy with the suzerainty
of the Pope. He discountenanced all plotting and conspiracy, both of
which were being advocated by Mazzini's appeals to "Young Italy," and
built his country out of a confederation of states. Mazzini, impractical
as he was in many respects, did at least realize that no such loosely
joined federation could stand six months, and insisted above all in
actual political hegemony of the states.