The cause of the failure of the drama to establish itself in the land of opera is certainly not to be found in any preference on the part of the public for the tedious psychological analysis of the modern school of fiction over the rapidity and variety of the stage, but rather in some deep-seated trait of the national character. This is most probably the prevailing sensuousness of the people—a term not here used in any disparaging sense, but as expressing the national preference for the eye to the ear. Segnius irritant, as an ancient Italian has it. The shows of the Rappresentazioni were undoubtedly more attractive to the Florentine public than the verses which expounded them; and we have seen that magnificent scenic equipments were needed to bring the people to share the dramatic amusements of the courts of the sixteenth century. This tendency would probably be found to be inveterate, and to date from the period when the Atellan farces of Latium prefigured the Commedia dell’ Arte. It was not mere love of bloodshed that made gladiatorial shows popular at Rome. Professor Mahaffy remarks that while the refinement of Terence’s translations from the Greek in comparison with Plautus attests the improvement of the taste of the Roman aristocracy, “this brilliant success was not popular with the masses, and led to no further attempts in the same direction.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE REVIVAL
We have seen that the Italy of the eighteenth century had fully entered into the general intellectual movement of the rest of Europe. Scarcely any trace remained of the special characteristics of the Cinque Cento except the imperishable tradition of culture and refinement which still kept literature at a high level of style. The vagaries of the seventeenth century had passed without leaving a trace. The prevailing taste was that of France. The chief exception to this polished uniformity was found in the drama. On the lyrical stage, Italy, favoured by the musical capabilities of her language and the superior aptitudes of her vocalists, had created something really novel and national; and in the allied realm of instrumental music had emulated the architectural and pictorial triumphs of the sixteenth century. In tragedy and comedy, moreover, she had at length attained to a semblance of a national drama; but this, being the achievement of two exceptionally gifted men, who in comedy at all events left no worthy successors, was comparatively apart from the national life, and could not be expected to prove an important element in the literary development of the future.
What Italy was at that time as regards originality, she has continued to be until our own day. While claiming her full share in the conquests of science, and by no means behind-hand in the study of antiquity, she has produced little that can be regarded as an absolute creation. Leopardi, alike in genius and art the most consummate among her men of letters, has wrought on old lines, exalting the forms he found to more eminent perfection. Manzoni’s innovations are chiefly introduced from beyond the Alps. Carducci has rendered a priceless service in repressing the language’s tendency to fluent inanity, and has widely expanded its metrical capabilities, but has mainly worked upon hints derived from antique or foreign literatures. If, however, Italy has originated none of the great movements which have transformed European literature since the middle of the eighteenth century, she has participated in them all. As she then fully associated herself with the enlightened and humanising tendencies of that beneficent if prosaic age; she has since entered freely into the four great movements which have broken up eighteenth-century formality and bought life and liberty at the price of intellectual disorder—the naturalistic, the sentimental, the romantic, and the revolutionary.
The naturalistic impulse to the living and accurate description of natural beauty, and the recognition of a living spirit in Nature, is no modern phenomenon. It is present as a vivifying influence in the classics and in the poetry of Palestine and the East, and even more so in Celtic literature, where more than anywhere else it appears spontaneous and exempt from literary manipulation. Whether from a Celtic admixture of race or from some other reason, it seems among modern literatures the more especial property of the British. The descriptions of Shakespeare and Milton, like those of their Greek predecessors, may have been surpassed in the minute elaboration of detail, not in truth or feeling. Spenser affords a still better example, for—the multitudinous melodies of his peculiar stanza excepted—this is the one point in which he transcends his Italian models. In propriety of plan, in human and dramatic interest, in terseness and polish of style, he is greatly their inferior; but the natural descriptions of Ariosto and Tasso, beautiful as they often are, fall far behind his in rich warmth and glowing splendour.
This national gift fell into abeyance in the later half of the seventeenth century: there is scarcely a vestige of it in Dryden except where he reproduces Chaucer. Thomson’s Seasons mark its revival, and were not without their effect in Europe; yet it must be owned that its modern herald and hierophant is not a Briton, but a Swiss justly reckoned among French authors—Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was the mission of this extraordinary man to inaugurate not merely the naturalistic, but the sentimental movement also, which, taken up by Sterne and Goethe, filled Europe with imitators, and, among other consequences, gave a great impulse to the novel at the expense of the drama. Neither the description of nature nor the analysis of feeling is peculiarly congenial to the Italian character, and it may be doubted whether the latter impulse would have been very deeply felt but for the unhappy political circumstances of the country, which engendered among the noblest minds a prevailing disgust and despair conducive to the diffusion of morbid sentiment and a generally mournful cast of thought. Both the naturalistic and the sentimental tendencies inaugurated by Rousseau found a powerful representative in Ugo Foscolo.
The next great development of taste by which Italian literature came to be modified was one with which the Italian temperament has naturally so little sympathy, that the influence which it exercised and continues to exercise must be regarded as a strong proof of the susceptibility of Italy to all great currents affecting intellectual Europe. The romantic school is at variance with all her literary traditions and all her canons of taste. Had it been anything but an exotic, it would have come into being centuries before among a people rich in popular legends, and whose history abounds with subjects adapted for ballad poetry. Little, however, is seen or heard of it until, as the cosmopolitan drift becomes more and more powerful, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Scott excite the curiosity of the Italian reading public. One reason for this backwardness may be plausibly alleged in the absence of Gothic architecture from Italy. The earliest architectural remains were either classical or Byzantine, which passed so easily into the Palladian and other modern Italian styles as to render Gothic architecture in Italy little more than an episode, and to leave no room for those impressions of vague sublimity and solemn grandeur which Gothic architecture produces, and which so naturally spring up in the minds of the inhabitants of countries covered like England and Germany with ruined castles and abbeys. Every feeling which the artist of the romantic school would address is aroused by the mossed keeps and mouldering fanes of mediæval antiquity. Horace Walpole may have been a dilettante in architecture as in literature; nevertheless the romantic school in England is inaugurated by Strawberry Hill and the Castle of Otranto; and Goethe’s residence at Strasburg had much to do with Goetz von Berlichingen. When, on the other hand, the Northern man is initiated into the beauties of Italian architecture, his romantic feeling is apt to wane, as he himself admits:
’Tis not for centuries four for nought
Our European world of thought
Hath made familiar to its home
The classic mind of Greece and Rome;
In all new work that would look forth
To more than antiquarian worth,
Palladio’s pediments and bases,
Or something such, will find their places:
Maturer optics don’t delight
In childish dim religious light,
In evanescent vague effects
That shirk, not face, one’s intellects;
They love not fancies just betrayed,
And artful tricks of light and shade,
Put pure form nakedly displayed,
And all things absolutely made.