“Goethe's praise,” says a sneer turned proverb, “is a brevet of
mediocrity.” Manzoni must rest under this damaging applause, which was
not too freely bestowed upon other Italian poets of his time, or upon
Italy at all, for that matter.
Goethe could not laud Manzoni's tragedies too highly; he did not find
one word too much or too little in them; the style was free, noble,
full and rich. As to the religious lyrics, the manner of their
treatment was fresh and individual although the matter and the
significance were not new; and the poet was “a Christian without
fanaticism, a Roman Catholic without bigotry, a zealot without
hardness.”
The tragedies had no success upon the stage. The Carmagnola was given
in Florence in 1828, but in spite of the favor of the court, and the
open rancor of the friends of the Classic School, it failed; at Turin,
where the Adelchi was tried, Pellico regretted that the attempt to
play it had been made, and deplored the “vile irreverence of the
public.”
Both tragedies deal with patriotic themes, but they are both concerned
with occurrences of remote epochs. 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.
After all, there is but one Shakespeare, and in the drama below him
Manzoni holds a high place. The faults of his tragedies are those
of most plays which are not acting plays, and their merits are much
greater than the great number of such plays can boast. I have not
meant to imply that you want sympathy with the persons of the drama,
but only less sympathy than with the ideas embodied in them. There are
many affecting scenes, and the whole of each tragedy is conceived in
the highest and best ideal.
V
In the Carmagnola, the action extends from the moment when the
Venetian Senate, at war with the Duke of Milan, places its armies
under the command of the count, who is a soldier of fortune and
has formerly been in the service of the Duke. The Senate sends two
commissioners into his camp to represent the state there, and to be
spies upon his conduct. This was a somewhat clumsy contrivance of the
Republic to give a patriotic character to its armies, which were often
recruited from mercenaries and generaled by them; and, of course, the
hireling leaders must always have chafed under the surveillance. After
the battle of Maclodio, in which the Venetian mercenaries defeated the
Milanese, the victors, according to the custom of their trade,
began to free their comrades of the other side whom they had taken
prisoners. The commissioners protested against this waste of results,
but Carmagnola answered that it was the usage of his soldiers, and
he could not forbid it; he went further, and himself liberated some
remaining prisoners. His action was duly reported to the Senate, and
as he had formerly been in the service of the Duke of Milan, whose
kinswoman he had married, he was suspected of treason. He was invited
to Venice, and received with great honor, and conducted with every
flattering ceremony to the hall of the Grand Council. After a brief
delay, sufficient to exclude Carmagnola's followers, the Doge ordered
him to be seized, and upon a summary trial he was put to death. From
this tragedy I give first a translation of that famous chorus of which
I have already spoken; I have kept the measure and the movement of the
original at some loss of literality. The poem is introduced into the
scene immediately succeeding the battle of Maclodio, where the two
bands of those Italian _condottieri_ had met to butcher each other
in the interests severally of the Duke of Milan and the Signory of
Venice.