A history of Italian literature

by Richard Garnett

In truth, however, the human spirit at both epochs needed regeneration; to have perpetuated the eighteenth-century type, admirable as this is in many respects, would have denoted consent to dwell in decencies for ever. CESARE BECCARIA (1738-94) and GAETANO FILANGIERI (175-287) were nevertheless great reformers, who, the former in his Dei Delitti delle Pene (1763), the latter in his Scienza della Legislazione (1783), contributed greatly to overthrow mediæval notions of justice, and to infuse a humane spirit into legislation, not merely by the abolition of revolting and atrocious penalties, but by proposing the reformation of the criminal as a chief object of the lawgiver. This was the especial mission of Beccaria, who also introduced a very important principle by his clear separation of the legislative and the judicial functions. Filangieri combats in particular the excessive interference of governments, while he foreshadows the logic and simplicity of a universal code in the future, realised in some measure by the Code Napoleon. ANTONIO GENOVESI (1712-69), the first to show the necessity of Italian unity, besides making important contributions to ethics and metaphysics, expounded freedom of trade and the laws that govern prices, in his Lezioni di Commercio, o sia d’Economia Civile. Free trade in corn had also a powerful champion in the witty Abate FERDINANDO GALIANI (1728-87), whose most important works, however, were written in French. Galiani adorned the circles of the encyclopædist philosophers at Paris, whose views on many points he soundly refuted, and who avenged themselves by comparing the explosive little Neapolitan to a pantomime incarnate. His discourse upon trade in corn was speedily translated into Italian, and gave him rank as an Italian classic; the best known of his vernacular writings is probably his humorous account of the alarm created by an eruption of Vesuvius.

After this group of economists—to whom the historian PIETRO VERRI may be added—should be recorded another of literary historians, eminently useful though not brilliant writers, and consummate men of letters. Of GIOVANNI MARIO CRESCIMBENI, the historian of Italian poetry, we shall have to speak in mentioning the Arcadian Academy, which he so largely contributed to found and maintain. He may be justly termed a pedant, but neither his book nor himself can be spared from Italian literary history. A much greater name is LODOVICO ANTONIO MURATORI (1672-1745), but his imperishable monument was raised not as author but as editor. The publication of twenty-seven folio volumes of mediæval Italian historians displays a man singly equal to many learned societies. No one has stamped his name more deeply on the historical literature of his country than he has done by this publication, by his Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Ævi, and by his Annali from the Christian era to 1749. One of his original writings has an abiding place in literature, the Della perfetta Poesia, which indicates the high-water mark of good taste at the time of its publication. The affected style of the preceding century was then entirely out of fashion. On the negative side Muratori’s taste is almost faultless, and he often manifests great discrimination in the appreciation of exquisite beauties. Unfortunately he is all for the delicate and graceful, and has little feeling for the really great, of which the Italy of the eighteenth century saw hardly so much as the counterfeit until, late in the secular period, Cesarotti produced his version of Ossian. Muratori venerates Dante rather than admires him; like Confucius, he respects the gods, but keeps them at a distance.

The learning and industry of Muratori were almost rivalled by Count SCIPIONE MAFFEI (1675-1755), the sovereign of contemporary Italian, almost of European archæologists, author of the famous tragedy of Merope and of the equally famed Verona Illustrata; and by Count Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli (1707-65), who should have been the biographer-general of Italian men of letters, but who began his work on too large a scale for completion. GIROLAMO TIRABOSCHI (1731-94), librarian of the Duke of Modena, is the standard Italian literary historian. His great work has immortalised his name; it will nevertheless disappoint those who resort to it in the expectation of encountering a history on the modern plan. It is not, strictly speaking, so much a history of literature as a history of learning. The fortunes of schools and universities, the rise and decay of particular branches of study, are narrated very fully, while there is little literary criticism, and the lives of great men are recounted with astonishing brevity, except when some personal or intellectual circumstance regarding them has become the theme of erudite controversy, when the incident overshadows the life. One of the most potent literary influences of the age was the Giornale de’ Letterati, founded early in the century by Apostolo Zeno, which long served as a rallying-point for Italian literary men.

The number of historical works published in Italy during the eighteenth century was considerable, but they are chiefly monographs on local history, and, unless Verri’s history of Lombardy be an exception, none gained the author the character of a philosophical historian save CARLO DENINA’S Rivoluzioni d’Italia (1768-72), a work so superior to the writer’s other performances that it has been doubted whether he really wrote it. A valuable history of another description was produced by the ex-Jesuit LUIGI LANZI (1732-1811), also celebrated as an Etruscan scholar, in his Storia Pittorica dell’ Italia, long ago superseded by more accurate research, but excellent for the time. Art criticism was promoted by FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI (1712-1764), chamberlain and friend of Frederick the Great, Carlyle’s “young Venetian gentleman of elegance in dusky skin and very while linen,” a most voluminous writer, “who,” says the unmusical Carlyle, “took up the opera in earnest manner as capable of being a school of virtue and the moral sublime,” but whose chief title to fame is rather his popular exposition of the physics of Newton, a modest but meritorious service. Two miscellaneous writers deserve considerable attention. One is GIUSEPPE BARETTI (1719-86), “a wonderful, wild, coarse, tender, angry creature,” says Vernon Lee; endeared to Englishmen as the friend of Johnson and of Reynolds, and the imitator of the Spectator in his Frusta Litteraria, although an Ishmael whose hand was against every contemporary, and who carried personality to lengths which Addison would have highly disapproved. The most entertaining of his writings are his lively letters from Spain and Portugal. The other is GASPARE GOZZI (1715-86), brother of the famous dramatist, who also imitated the Spectator in a periodical, wrote excellent stories in prose and verse, and rendered a durable service to literature by his defence of Dante against the aspersions of Bettinelli, preluding the Dantesque revival of the next century.

Contemporaneously with this development of moral and economical science, another active movement went on which created far more agitation among Italian literati, and which, if it scarcely enriched the national literature with a single work of merit, at all events kept up the tradition of poetry. This was the universal itch for rhyming which seized upon the nation about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and dates from the foundation of the Arcadian Academy in 1692. This epoch-making event is related with unsurpassable verve in the brilliant pages of Vernon Lee, who rekindles for us the chief lights of the institution and the time: the frigid and sardonic, but really illustrious jurist Gravina, instructor of Montesquieu and of the Academy; the uncouth pedant but excellent administrator Crescimbeni, whose history of Italian poetry is a more valuable book than Vernon Lee allows; the fluent versifiers, not without gleams of a genuine poetical vein, Rolli and Frugoni; the marvellous improvisatore Perfetti, a sounding brass, but no tinkling cymbal, who actually received in the Capitol the crown awarded to Petrarch and designed for Tasso.

The seriousness with which these Alfesibeo Carios and Opico Erimanteos took themselves, their crooks and their wigs, is astonishing. But they got accepted at their own valuation, and none disputed their claims as the sovereign arbiters of elegant literature until, about 1760, Giuseppe Baretti arose to demonstrate that, as shepherds, they must be the representatives of the ancient Scythians. Settembrini in our own day rather opines that they were created by the Jesuits, just as the Cobbett of the Rejected Addresses denounces “the gewgaw fetters of rhyme, invented by the monks in the Middle Ages to enslave the people.” Every city in Italy had its offshoot of the Arcadia; every member did something to approve his literary taste, were it but one of the hundred and fifty elegies, in all manner of languages, on the decease of Signor Balestrieri’s cat (1741). The result was a deluge of insipid verse, preferable at any rate to the extravagance of the preceding century.

Two Arcadians alone evinced real poetical talent, the two Zappis of Imola. FELICE ZAPPI wrought on a small scale, but with exquisite perfection. His sonnets, madrigals, and lyrical trifles generally are among the very choicest examples of Italian minor poetry for elegance, esprit, and melody. It is true that he exposed himself to the merciless ridicule of Baretti by dreaming that he stood upon his hind legs and barked madrigals in the character of his lady’s lap-dog, but this lapse ought not to count against his genuine merits. His wife, Faustina, formerly Maratti, is more ambitious but less consummate. Her writings are nevertheless always estimable, and one sonnet is remarkable for an energy and vehemence sped straight from the heart:

Lady, on whom my Lord was wont to gaze
Complacent so, that oft unto mine ear
Of thy abundant tress and aspect clear
And silvery speech he yet resounds the praise;
Tell me, when thou to him discourse didst raise,
Seemed he, immersed in musing, not to hear?
Or, as to me may chance, did look austere,
And moody frown his countenance deface?
Time was, I know, when passionate and weak
Thy fair eyes found him, and I know that, till—
But ah! what blushes mantle on thy cheek!
Thy glance declines to earth, thy eyelids thrill!
Answer, I pray thee—no! hush! never speak
If thou wouldst tell me that he loves thee still!

All the minor Italian versifiers were speedily eclipsed by the genius of Metastasio, whose place, however, is with dramatic poets. But for him, the eighteenth century wore away without producing a poet of great mark, until, in 1763, Italy was startled by the appearance of the Mattina, the first part of the Giorno of GIUSEPPE PARINI. Parini is particularly interesting as the first eminent Italian poet who shows decided traces of English influence. The plan of his poem is taken from Thomson, the spirit is the spirit of Pope; the net result is much such a poem as Cowper might have written had he been an Italian. Just as Thomson in his Seasons depicts the entire course of Nature from four points of view, so Parini in his Giorno delineates the useless life of a frivolous young Italian of quality by exhibiting the occupations of his morning, afternoon, evening, and night. The spirit is that of Pope’s satires, but Parini, composing in blank verse, has been led into a style more nearly resembling that of Young, although he has little of the sententious abruptness of the Night Thoughts or of their fatiguing glitter: the four poems are perfect wholes, gliding from theme to theme by the most ingenious and delicate transitions, and replete with charming episodes; the diction is exquisite, and the blank verse the best that Italy had then seen. The work is invaluable as a picture of manners, and a masterpiece of delicate polished satire; the jeunesse dorée of Milan is or ought to be made thoroughly ashamed of the vapidity of its existence, but every phrase is urbane, and all the ridicule dainty and ironical. The subject is hardly susceptible of high poetry, but Parini has adorned it as only a poet could. The composition of the remaining three parts occupied him for many years, and the last two are not quite complete. His minor pieces reveal the same remarkable power as the Giorno of elevating trifling circumstances into the region of poetry. One sonnet especially is worthy of the Greek Anthology in finish and charm of invention:

Benignant Sleep, that on soft pinion sped
Dost wing through darkling night thy noiseless way,
And fleeting multitudes of dreams display
To weariness reposed on quiet bed:
Go where my Phillis doth her gentle head
And blooming cheek on peaceful pillow lay,
And while the body sleeps, the soul affray
With dismal shape from thy enchantment bred.
So like unto mine own that form be made,
Pallor so dim disfiguring its face,
That she may waken by compassion swayed.
If this thou wilt accomplish of thy grace,
A double wreath of poppies I will braid,
And silently upon thine altar place.