I
The period of Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo is that covered in
political history by the events of the French revolution, the French
invasion of Italy and the Napoleonic wars there against the Austrians,
the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic and of the kingdom of
Italy, the final overthrow of the French dominion, and the restoration
of the Austrians. During all these events, the city of Milan remained
the literary as well as the political center of Italy, and whatever
were the moral reforms wrought by the disasters of which it was also
the center, there is no doubt that intellectually a vast change had
taken place since the days when Parini's satire was true concerning
the life of the Milanese nobles. The transformation of national
character by war is never, perhaps, so immediate or entire as we are
apt to expect. When our own war broke out, those who believed that we
were to be purged and ennobled in all our purposes by calamity looked
for a sort of total and instant conversion. This, indeed, seemed to
take place, but there was afterward the inevitable reaction, and it
appears that there are still some small blemishes upon our political
and social state. Yet, for all this, each of us is conscious of some
vast and inestimable difference in the nation.
It is instructive, if it is not ennobling, to be moved by great and
noble impulses, to feel one's self part of a people, and to recognize
country for once as the supreme interest; and these were the
privileges the French revolution gave the Italians. It shed their
blood, and wasted their treasure, and stole their statues and
pictures, but it bade them believe themselves men; it forced them to
think of Italy as a nation, and the very tyranny in which it ended was
a realization of unity, and more to be desired a thousand times
than the shameless tranquillity in which it had found them. It is
imaginable that when the revolution advanced upon Milan it did not
seem the greatest and finest thing in life to serve a lady; when the
battles of Marengo and Lodi were fought, and Mantua was lost and won,
to court one's neighbor's wife must have appeared to some gentlemen
rather a waste of time; when the youth of the Italian legion in
Napoleon's campaign perished amidst the snows of Russia, their
brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers, must have found
intrigues and operas and fashions but a poor sort of distraction. By
these terrible means the old forces of society were destroyed, not
quickly, but irreparably. The cavaliere servente was extinct early in
this century; and men and women opened their eyes upon an era of work,
the most industrious age that the world has ever seen.
The change took place slowly; much of the material was old and
hopelessly rotten; but in the new generation the growth towards better
and greater things was more rapid.
Yet it would not be well to conjure up too heroic an image of Italian
revolutionary society: we know what vices fester and passions rage
in war-time, and Italy was then almost constantly involved in war.
Intellectually, men are active, but the great poems are not written in
war-time, nor the highest effects of civilization produced. There is
a taint of insanity and of instability in everything, a mark of
feverishness and haste and transition. The revolution gave Italy a
chance for new life, but this was the most the revolution could do.
It was a great gift, not a perfect one; and as it remained for the
Italians to improve the opportunity, they did it partially, fitfully,
as men do everything.