A history of Italian literature

by Richard Garnett

Unlike the exuberant Monti, Foscolo wrote little poetry, but his scanty production is of choice quality. His most celebrated poem is the Sepolcri (1807), which in style and subject bears a remarkable resemblance to the finest poem America has yet given to the world, Bryant’s Thanatopsis. The American poet has conceived his work in a larger and grander spirit, and consequently surpasses Foscolo in the sublimity of his thought, though the latter’s poem is longer and adorned with episodes, and in merit of execution there may be little to choose. Bryant dwells on the majesty of death; Foscolo on the reverence due to the tomb, and the immortality of the memories of the great—a fine theme undoubtedly, and deserving of the monumental eloquence with which he has adorned it, but small if measured against Bryant’s. Foscolo’s other most considerable poetical composition, his Hymns to the Graces, celebrated as the beneficent spirits of Greece, Italy, and an ideal world, was long but an aggregation of fragments, and was recovered as a whole only in 1856. The fastidious author could never satisfy himself, and the result is a production more remarkable for high polish than warmth of poetic feeling. It is just such a poem as Landor might have written. Foscolo’s tragedies, Ajax and Ricciarda, are fine compositions in the spirit of Alfieri: the former, notwithstanding its classical theme, has a relation to contemporary circumstances, Moreau being depicted as Ajax, and Bonaparte as Agamemnon. The few minor poems of Foscolo are admirable, full of weighty lines that imprint themselves on the memory. As a critic he accomplished more than it will be easy to accomplish after him, coming just at the moment when Europe, weary of the superficial æsthetics of the eighteenth century, was anxiously looking for a guide to the spirit of the past. It is as much by this happy fortune as by their intrinsic merit that his essays mark an era in the literary history of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, and Boccaccio.

Foscolo’s agitated life has afforded matter for many biographers, but the essential facts lie in narrow compass. Born in Zante of mixed Venetian and Greek parentage, he early sought Venice, and learned the secret of literary style from Cesarotti, the translator of Ossian. The shameful extinction of the Venetian Republic by France and Austria combined with his own ill-regulated passions to make him write Jacopo Ortis and talk of imitating his suicidal hero. A spell of military service, partly at the siege of Genoa, partly in the army destined for the invasion of England, went far to cure him, and he spent several years as a man of letters at Milan, translating Homer, composing his tragedies, and too much engaged in unedifying literary quarrels for his own dignity or the credit of letters. He showed an honourable independence in rejecting the bribes offered to induce him to adulate Napoleon, and, equally spurning the proffered subvention of the Austrian Government, became an exile at the overthrow of the Empire. He ultimately took refuge in England, exchanged, he might have boasted, for Byron. Here he was warmly received in aristocratic as well as literary circles, and might have performed a distinguished part. But his extravagance and his irregular habits wore out his friends’ patience, though Mr. Smiles says: “Ugo Foscolo lived to the end of his life surrounded by all that was luxurious and beautiful.” If so, Hudson Gurney, who raised his tomb, must have given him bread as well as a stone. He was also affectionately tended by his natural daughter, whose mother was an Englishwoman. He died in September 1827. Some of his best critical work belongs to this last period, and a valuable correspondence from English friends is understood to be awaiting publication. His own letters are admirable, full of life and movement.

Little as IPPOLITO PINDEMONTE (1754-1825) resembled Foscolo either as an author or as a man, their names are frequently associated on account of Pindemonte’s reply to Foscolo’s Sepolcri, a fine poem breathing the spirit of resignation and tranquillity, for which his gloomy predecessor had left him abundant scope. Pindemonte’s best production, however, is his Antonio Foscarini, a true tale of unhappy love, recited with great pathos in elegant octaves. He is a kind of Italian Cowper, a gentle and amiable valetudinarian. Like Cowper, he sang country life, and touched the events and the manners of his times in a strain of soft elegiac melancholy; like Cowper, too, he translated Homer. He holds no such important position in Italian as Cowper does in English literature, but represents the large class of his fellow-citizens who, carrying the spirit of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, were rather ornamental than useful to their country.

Monti and Foscolo, with all their genius, could not escape the influence of their times. In the French and Italian literature of the Imperial period, and still more in its art, a certain pseudo-classical affectation is visible. Sublimity and grace are attained indeed, but there is something mannered about the one, and something fastidious about the other. The reigning taste required to be brought nearer to Nature, and the writer who could effect this was sure to mark an epoch in the literature of his country. The mission was discharged by ALESSANDRO MANZONI (1785-1873), a man who announces a new departure in many ways, and whose historical significance, even more than his fine genius, places him above the still more gifted Leopardi at the head of the Italian literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. From one point of view he signalises the invasion of the romantic spirit. Goethe, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott are more to him than the old Italian masters. From another, he founds the Neo-Catholic school, and personifies the revival of the religious spirit in its most gentle and edifying form. Monti and Foscolo had been sceptics; Manzoni is devout, while at the same time there is nothing grotesque in his mediævalism, and he keeps the spheres of religion and politics so apart as to be able to hail the downfall of the temporal power. Yet, again, he is a reformer of the language, and the first to form a style equally acceptable to his cultured and to his unlettered countrymen.

The hero of these various achievements was singularly unlike the usual type of great renovators and innovators. Such epoch-making personages rarely want for self-assertion. Manzoni was a gentle, undemonstrative man, though observant of others and not ignorant of his own worth, and capable of sarcasm on occasion; a valetudinarian, whose dread of crowds frequently confined him to his house, who made no display, mounted no rostrum, and ceased to write at forty. Hence, though I Promessi Sposi is probably more widely known than any Italian book after the Divina Commedia, the author has failed to personally impress the European imagination, and appears a mere shadow in comparison with Victor Hugo or even Lamartine, neither of whom, notwithstanding their infinitely greater productiveness, so profoundly influenced the literature of their country. Born at Milan, Manzoni was an Austrian subject, and, though a true patriot, shunned to offend the ruling powers. He led the life of a respectable Italian gentleman of moderate fortune, at one time greatly impaired by his father’s extravagance, and basked for nearly half a century in the tranquil enjoyment of European fame, which, after the success of I Promessi Sposi, he imperilled by no further venture. “Formerly,” he said in excuse, “the Muse came after me, now I should have to go after her.” The events of 1848 failed to draw him from his retirement; when the unity of Italy was accomplished he accepted public honours, but declined public duties; none criticised his inaction, for all felt that he had done his best by Italy. His death at the age of eighty-eight evoked such a unanimity of sentiment as has perhaps accompanied that of no great author of modern times except Sir Walter Scott. Goethe had hostile detractors. Settembrini and the few others who presumed to criticise Manzoni urged their scruples in a spirit of becoming reverence.

Manzoni’s claim to this universal veneration was three-fold. In the first place, he was really a great writer; in the second, he was the standard-bearer of Italian literature, the one contemporary author of his nation who could be named along with Goethe and Byron; thirdly and chiefly, he represented the most important intellectual movement of the post-Napoleonic age, the romantic and mediæval reaction—a necessity, for justice demanded it. The Middle Age was indeed no model for the nineteenth century, as the romanticists and reactionaries thought, but it did possess elements indispensable for the enrichment of the national life; and although the Italian mind was probably less in harmony with these than the mind of any other people, no Italian could forget that the greatest of his countrymen was also the greatest and most representative writer of the Middle Ages. It had been one of Monti’s chief merits to have emulated and revived the style of Dante, to the disgust of Pope Pius VI., who asked him why on earth he could not write like Metastasio. After the form came the spirit of the Divine Comedy, commended to the nation by the misfortunes and deceptions which succeeded the fall of Napoleon, when the exile of Florence appeared more than ever a symbol of his country. The worshippers of Dante were indeed divided, some seeing in him the Ghibelline, the enemy of the temporal power no less than of the foreigner; others, the apostle of mediæval Catholicism. Both views were right and both wrong, and the choice between them was merely a matter of temperament, but the latter was the more likely to be propagated by the air of the time.

The gentle and modest Manzoni obeyed the more potent influence. In 1812 he began to produce his hymns, mostly on the festivals of the Church, which perhaps suggested Keble’s Christian Year. They were published in 1815, but the finest, that for Whitsunday, is a later addition. They attracted little attention until the appearance of his famous ode on the death of Napoleon, Il Cinque Maggio, which, appearing at the right “psychological moment,” at a time when every man felt almost as an intimate of the great conqueror who had made so large a portion of his own existence, took Italy and Europe by storm. The note of personal compassion which pervades it was then in place, but now that Napoleon’s exploits and disasters are ancient history, and he is chiefly regarded as a great world-shaker and incarnate elemental force, we feel the need of a deeper insight and a wider sweep. Even Manzoni’s fire and eloquence, vivid as they are, scarcely rival Lamartine’s on the same subject. A patriotic poem of equal power, the ode on the march of the Piedmontese volunteers to succour the Lombards in 1821, imaginary as fact, but veracious as prophecy, has suffered less, or indeed nothing, from the lapse of time, expressing the deepest feelings of every Italian heart now as then. Though composed in 1821, it was not so much as written down until 1848, from apprehension of the Austrian police. No less fine are the lyrics in Manzoni’s tragedies, the Carmagnola (1820) and the Adelchi (1822).

These dramas themselves mark an epoch in Italian literary history, not so much from their absolute merit, as from being the first attempt to adapt Shakespearian methods to the Italian drama. Alfieri and Monti had adhered to the classical school; Manzoni struck into a new path, and by so doing revealed a new world to his countrymen, little as it followed that the old world need be entirely forsaken. The Carmagnola depicts the condottieri of the fifteenth century, the Adelchi the Lombards of the eighth. The latter is the more dramatic, and the two principal characters, Adelchi and Ermengarda, are depicted with extreme beauty and power. The pieces, however, are rather dramatic poems than plays, and rise highest where there is most scope for poetry. Martin the Deacon’s description of his journey in the Adelchi, for instance, so finely translated by Mr. W. D. Howells, is magnificent, but on a scale disproportioned to the play. The fire and spirit of the two martial lyrics in the Carmagnola and the Adelchi respectively are marvellous; “their wonderful plunging metre,” it has been said, “suggests a charge of horses.” That in the Adelchi should alone vindicate Manzoni against the accusation of unpatriotic lukewarmness. It paints the lot of the Italian people of the eighth century, transferred by the fortune of war from a Lombard master to a Frank, who unite to oppress them, and nothing can be more evident than the contemporary application to Italian, Austrian, and Frenchman. The following slightly abridged version is by Miss Ellen Clerke:

From moss-covered ruin of edifice nameless,
From forests, from furnaces idle and flameless,
From furrows bedewed with the sweat of the slave,
A people dispersed doth arouse and awaken,
With senses all straining and pulses all shaken,
At a sound of strange clamour that swells like a wave.