I
In 1748 began for Italy a peace of nearly fifty years, when the Wars
of the Succession, with which the contesting strangers had ravaged
her soil, absolutely ceased. In Lombardy the Austrian rulers who had
succeeded the Spaniards did and suffered to be done many things for
the material improvement of a province which they were content to
hold, while leaving the administration mainly to the Lombards; the
Spanish Bourbon at Naples also did as little harm and as much good to
his realm as a Bourbon could; Pier Leopoldo of Tuscany, Don Filippo I.
of Parma, Francis III. of Modena, and the Popes Benedict XIV., Clement
XIV., and Pius VI. were all disposed to be paternally beneficent to
their peoples, who at least had repose under them, and in this period
gave such names to science as those of Galvani and Volta, to humanity
that of Beccaria, to letters those of Alfieri, Filicaja, Goldoni,
Parini, and many others.
But in spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period,
Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this
long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French
republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and
letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business
of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue
to the social history of the time; but the idea which remains in
the mind is one of a tranquillity in which every person of breeding
devoted himself to the cult of some muse or other, and established
himself as the conventional admirer of his neighbor's wife. The
great Academy of Arcadia, founded to restore good taste in poetry,
prescribed conditions by which everybody, of whatever age or sex,
could become a poetaster, and good society expected every gentleman
and lady to be in love. The Arcadia still exists, but that gallant
society hardly survived the eighteenth century. Perhaps the greatest
wonder about it is that it could have lasted so long as it did. Its
end was certainly not delayed for want of satirists who perceived its
folly and pursued it with scorn. But this again only brings one doubt,
often felt, whether satire ever accomplished anything beyond a lively
portraiture of conditions it proposed to reform.
It is the opinion of some Italian critics that Italian demoralization
began with the reaction against Luther, when the Jesuits rose to
supreme power in the Church and gathered the whole education of the
young into the hands of the priests. Cesare Cantù, whose book on
_Parini ed il suo Secolo_ may be read with pleasure and instruction by
such as like to know more fully the time of which I speak, was of this
mind; he became before his death a leader of the clerical party in
Italy, and may be supposed to be without unfriendly prejudice. He
alleges that the priestly education made the Italians _literati_
rather than citizens; Latinists, poets, instead of good magistrates,
workers, fathers of families; it cultivated the memory at the expense
of the judgment, the fancy at the cost of the reason, and made them
selfish, polished, false; it left a boy “apathetic, irresolute,
thoughtless, pusillanimous; he flattered his superiors and hated his
fellows, in each of whom he dreaded a spy.” He knew the beautiful and
loved the grandiose; his pride of family and ancestry was inordinately
pampered. What other training he had was in the graces and
accomplishments; he was thoroughly instructed in so much of warlike
exercise as enabled him to handle a rapier perfectly and to conduct or
fight a duel with punctilio.
But he was no warrior; his career was peace. The old medieval Italians
who had combated like lions against the French and Germans and against
each other, when resting from the labors and the high conceptions
which have left us the chief sculptures and architecture of the
Peninsula, were dead; and their posterity had almost ceased to know
war. Italy had indeed still remained a battle-ground, but not for
Italian quarrels nor for Italian swords; the powers which, like
Venice, could afford to have quarrels of their own, mostly hired other
people to fight them out. All the independent states of the Peninsula
had armies, but armies that did nothing; in Lombardy, neither
Frenchman, Spaniard, nor Austrian had been able to recruit or draft
soldiers; the flight of young men from the conscription depopulated
the province, until at last Francis II. declared it exempt from
military service; Piedmont, the Macedon, the Boeotia of that Greece,
alone remained warlike, and Piedmont was alone able, when the hour
came, to show Italy how to do for herself.
Yet, except in the maritime republics, the army, idle and unwarlike as
it was in most cases, continued to be one of the three careers open to
the younger sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were
the other two. In Genoa, nobles had engaged in commerce with equal
honor and profit; nearly every argosy that sailed to or from the port
of Venice belonged to some lordly speculator; but in Milan a noble who
descended to trade lost his nobility, by a law not abrogated till the
time of Charles IV. The nobles had therefore nothing to do. They could
not go into business; if they entered the army it was not to fight;
the civil service was of course actually performed by subordinates;
there were not cures for half the priests, and there grew up that odd,
polite rabble of _abbati_, like our good Frugoni, priests without
cures, sometimes attached to noble families as chaplains, sometimes
devoting themselves to literature or science, sometimes leading lives
of mere leisure and fashion; they were mostly of plebeian origin when
they did anything at all besides pay court to the ladies.
In Milan the nobles were exempt from many taxes paid by the plebeians;
they had separate courts of law, with judges of their own order,
before whom a plebeian plaintiff appeared with what hope of justice
can be imagined. Yet they were not oppressive; they were at worst only
insolent to their inferiors, and they commonly used them with the
gentleness which an Italian can hardly fail in. There were many ties
of kindness between the classes, the memory of favors and services
between master and servant, landlord and tenant, in relations which
then lasted a life-time, and even for generations. In Venice, where it
was one of the high privileges of the patrician to spit from his box
at the theater upon the heads of the people in the pit, the familiar
bond of patron and client so endeared the old republican nobles to the
populace that the Venetian poor of this day, who know them only by
tradition, still lament them. But, on the whole, men have found it
at Venice, as elsewhere, better not to be spit upon, even by an
affectionate nobility.
The patricians were luxurious everywhere. In Rome they built splendid
palaces, in Milan they gave gorgeous dinners. Goldoni, in his charming
memoirs, tells us that the Milanese of his time never met anywhere
without talking of eating, and they did eat upon all possible
occasions, public, domestic, and religious; throughout Italy they have
yet the nickname of _lupi lombardi_ (Lombard wolves) which their
good appetites won them. The nobles of that gay old Milan were very
hospitable, easy of access to persons of the proper number of
descents, and full of invitations for the stranger. A French writer
found their cooking delicate and estimable as that of his own nation;
but he adds that many of these friendly, well-dining aristocrats had
not good _ton_. One can think of them at our distance of time and
place with a kindness which Italian critics, especially those of the
bitter period of struggle about the middle of this century, do not
affect. Emiliani-Giudici, for example, does not, when he calls them
and their order throughout Italy an aristocratic leprosy. He assures
us that at the time of that long peace “the moral degradation of what
the French call the great world was the inveterate habit of centuries;
the nobles wallowed in their filth untouched by remorse”; and he
speaks of them as “gilded swine, vain of the glories of their blazons,
which they dragged through the mire of their vices.”