I
It was not till the turbulent days of the Napoleonic age were past,
that the theories and thoughts of Romance were introduced into Italy.
When these days came to an end, the whole political character of
the peninsula reverted, as nearly as possible, to that of the times
preceding the revolutions. The Bourbons were restored to Naples, the
Pope to Rome, the Dukes and Grand Dukes to their several states, the
House of Savoy to Piedmont, and the Austrians to Venice and Lombardy;
and it was agreed among all these despotic governments that there was
to be no Italy save, as Metternich suggested, in a geographical sense.
They encouraged a relapse, among their subjects, into the follies and
vices of the past, and they largely succeeded. But, after all, the
age was against them; and people who have once desired and done great
things are slow to forget them, though the censor may forbid them to
be named, and the prison and the scaffold may enforce his behest.
With the restoration of the Austrians, there came a tranquillity to
Milan which was not the apathy it seemed. It was now impossible for
literary patriotism to be openly militant, as it had been in Alfieri
and Foscolo, but it took on the retrospective phase of Romance, and
devoted itself to the celebration of the past glories of Italy. In
this way it still fulfilled its educative and regenerative mission. It
dwelt on the victories which Italians had won in other days over
their oppressors, and it tacitly reminded them that they were still
oppressed by foreign governments; it portrayed their own former
corruption and crimes, and so taught them the virtues which alone
could cure the ills their vices had brought upon them. Only
secondarily political, and primarily moral, it forbade the Italians to
hope to be good citizens without being good men. This was Romance in
its highest office, as Manzoni, Grossi, and D'Azeglio conceived it.
Aesthetically, the new school struggled to overthrow the classic
traditions; to liberate tragedy from the bondage of the unities, and
let it concern itself with any tragical incident of life; to give
comedy the generous scope of English and Spanish comedy; to seek
poetry in the common experiences of men and to find beauty in any
theme; to be utterly free, untrammeled, and abundant; to be in
literature what the Gothic is in architecture. It perished because
it came to look for Beauty only, and all that was good in it became
merged in Realism which looks for Truth.
These were the purposes of Romance, and the masters in whom the
Italian Romanticists had studied them were the great German and
English poets. The tragedies of Shakespeare were translated and
admired, and the dramas of Schiller were reproduced in Italian verse;
the poems of Byron and of Scott were made known, and the ballads of
such lyrical Germans as Bürger. But, of course, so quick and curious a
people as the Italians had been sensitive to all preceding influences
in the literary world, and before what we call Romance came in from
Germany, a breath of nature had already swept over the languid
elegance of Arcady from the northern lands of storms and mists; and
the effects of this are visible in the poetry of Foscolo's period.
The enthusiasm with which Ossian was received in France remained, or
perhaps only began, after the hoax was exploded in England. In Italy,
the misty essence of the Caledonian bard was hailed as a substantial
presence. The king took his spear, and struck his deeply sounding
shield, as it hung on the willows over the neatly kept garden-walks,
and the Shepherds and Shepherdesses promenading there in perpetual
_villeggiatura_ were alarmed and perplexed out of a composure which
many noble voices had not been able to move. Emiliani-Giudici declares
that Melchiorre Cesarotti, a professor in the University of Padua,
dealt the first blow against the power of Arcadia. This professor of
Greek made the acquaintance of George Sackville, who inflamed him with
a desire to read Ossian's poems, then just published in England; and
Cesarotti studied the English language in order to acquaint himself
with a poet whom he believed greater than Homer. He translated
Macpherson into Italian verse, retaining, however, in extraordinary
degree, the genius of the language in which he found the poetry. He
is said (for I have not read his version) to have twisted the Italian
into our curt idioms, and indulged himself in excesses of compound
words, to express the manner of his original. He believed that the
Italian language had become “sterile, timid, and superstitious”,
through the fault of the grammarians; and in adopting the blank verse
for his translation, he ventured upon new forms, and achieved complete
popularity, if not complete success. “In fact,” says Giudici, “the
poems of Ossian were no sooner published than Italy was filled with
uproar by the new methods of poetry, clothed in all the magic of
magnificent forms till then unknown. The Arcadian flocks were thrown
into tumult, and proclaimed a crusade against Cesarotti as a subverter
of ancient order and a mover of anarchy in the peaceful republic--it
was a tyranny, and they called it a republic--of letters. Cesarotti
was called corrupter, sacrilegious, profane, and assailed with titles
of obscene contumely; but the poems of Ossian were read by all, and
the name of the translator, till then little known, became famous in
and out of Italy.” In fine, Cesarotti founded a school; but, blinded
by his marvelous success, he attempted to translate Homer into the
same fearless Italian which had received his Ossian. He failed, and
was laughed at. Ossian, however, remained a power in Italian letters,
though Cesarotti fell; and his influence was felt for romance before
the time of the Romantic School. Monti imitated him as he found him in
Italian; yet, though Monti's verse abounds, like Ossian, in phantoms
and apparitions, they are not northern specters, but respectable
shades, classic, well-mannered, orderly, and have no kinship with
anything but the personifications, Vice, Virtue, Fear, Pleasure, and
the rest of their genteel allegorical company. Unconsciously, however,
Monti had helped to prepare the way for romantic realism by his choice
of living themes. Louis XVI, though decked in epic dignity, was
something that touched and interested the age; and Bonaparte, even in
pagan apotheosis, was so positive a subject that the improvvisatore
acquired a sort of truth and sincerity in celebrating him. Bonaparte
might not be the Sun he was hailed to be, but even in Monti's verse he
was a soldier, ambitious, unscrupulous, irresistible, recognizable in
every guise.
In Germany, where the great revival of romantic letters took
place,--where the poets and scholars, studying their own Minnesingers
and the ballads of England and Scotland, reproduced the simplicity and
directness of thought characteristic of young literatures,--the life
as well as the song of the people had once been romantic. But in
Italy there had never been such a period. The people were municipal,
mercantile; the poets burlesqued the tales of chivalry, and the
traders made money out of the Crusades. In Italy, moreover, the
patriotic instincts of the people, as well as their habits and
associations, were opposed to those which fostered romance in Germany;
and the poets and novelists, who sought to naturalize the new element
of literature, were naturally accused of political friendship with
the hated Germans. The obstacles in the way of the Romantic School at
Milan were very great, and it may be questioned if, after all, its
disciples succeeded in endearing to the Italians any form of romantic
literature except the historical novel, which came from England, and
the untrammeled drama, which was studied from English models. They
produced great results for good in Italian letters; but, as usual,
these results were indirect, and not just those at which the
Romanticists aimed.
In Italy the Romantic School was not so sharply divided into a first
and second period as in Germany, where it was superseded for a time by
the classicism following the study of Winckelmann. Yet it kept, in its
own way, the general tendency of German literature. For the “Sorrows
of Werther”, the Italians had the “Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis”; for
the brood of poets who arose in the fatherland to defy the Revolution,
incarnate in Napoleon, with hymn and ballad, a retrospective national
feeling in Italy found the same channels of expression through the
Lombard group of lyrists and dramatists, while the historical romance
flourished as richly as in England, and for a much longer season.
De Sanctis studies the literary situation in the concluding pages of
his history; they are almost the most brilliant pages, and they embody
a conception of it so luminous that it would be idle to pretend to
offer the reader anything better than a résumé of his work. The
revolution had passed away under the horror of its excesses; more
temperate ideas prevailed; the need of a religious and moral
restoration was felt. “Foscolo died in 1827, and Pellico, Manzoni,
Grossi, Berchet, had risen above the horizon. The Romantic School, 'the
audacious boreal school,' had appeared. 1815 is a memorable date....
It marks the official manifestation of a reaction, not only political,
but philosophical and literary.... The reaction was as rapid and
violent as the revolution.... The white terror succeeded to the red.”
Our critic says that there were at this time two enemies, materialism
and skepticism, and that there rose against them a spirituality
carried to idealism, to mysticism. “To the right of nature was opposed
the divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual
rights the State, to liberty authority or 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, whose 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
aspiration 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.”
The Romantic movement was as universal then as the Realistic movement
is now, and as irresistible. It was the literary expression of
monarchy and aristocracy, as Realism is the literary expression of
republicanism and democracy. What De Sanctis shows is that out of
the political tempest absolutism issued stronger than ever, that the
clergy and the nobles, once its rivals, became its creatures; the
prevailing bureaucracy interested the citizen class in the perpetuity
of the state, but turned them into office-seekers; the police became
the main-spring of power; the office-holder, the priest and the
soldier became spies. “There resulted an organized corruption called
government, absolute in form, or under a mask of constitutionalism.
... Such a reaction, in violent contradiction of modern ideas, could
not last.” There were outbreaks in Spain, Naples, Piedmont, the
Romagna; Greece and Belgium rose; legitimacy fell; citizen-kings came
in; and a long quiet followed, in which the sciences and letters
nourished. Even in Austria-ridden Italy, where constitutionalism was
impossible, the middle class was allowed a part in the administration.
“Little by little the new and the old learned to live together: the
divine right and the popular will were associated in laws and writs.
... The movement was the same revolution as before, mastered by
experience and self-disciplined.... Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor
Hugo, Lamennais, Manzoni, Grossi, Pellico, were liberal no less
than Voltaire and Rousseau, Alfieri and Foscolo.... The religious
sentiment, too deeply offended, vindicated itself; yet it could
not escape from the lines of the revolution ... it was a reaction
transmuted into a reconciliation.”
The literary movement was called Romantic as against the old
Classicism; medieval and Christian, it made the papacy the hero of its
poetry; it abandoned Greek and Roman antiquity for national antiquity,
but the modern spirit finally informed Romanticism as it had informed
Classicism; Parini and Manzoni were equally modern men. Religion is
restored, but, “it 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 re-appears 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.”
The pantheistic idealism which resulted pleased the citizen-fancy;
the notion of “evolution succeeded to that of revolution”; one said
civilization, progress, culture, instead of liberty. “Louis Philippe
realized the citizen ideal.... The problem was solved, the skein
untangled. God might rest.... The supernatural was not believed, but
it was explained and respected. One did not accept Christ as divine,
but a human Christ was exalted to the stars; religion was spoken of
with earnestness, and the ministers of God with reverence.”
A new criticism arose, and bade literature draw from life, while a
vivid idealism accompanied anxiety for historical truth. In Italy,
where the liberals could not attack the governments, they attacked
Aristotle, and a tremendous war arose between the Romanticists and
the Classicists. The former grouped themselves at Milan chiefly, and
battled through the Conciliatore, a literary journal famous in Italian
annals. They vaunted the English and Germans; they could not endure
mythology; they laughed the three unities to scorn. At Paris Manzoni
had imbibed the new principles, and made friends with the new masters;
for Goethe and Schiller he abandoned Alfieri and Monti. “Yet if 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 medieval 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.”
It is this fact which is especially palpable in Manzoni's work, and
Manzoni was the chief poet of the Romantic School in that land where
it found the most realistic development, and set itself seriously to
interpret the emotions and desires of the nation. When these were
fulfilled, even the form of Romanticism ceased to be.