Henriette Manzoni died in 1833, and in 1837 he married Teresa Borri, widow of Count Stampa. He saw his children grow up about him and go to take their places in the world. Gradually he saw the cause of national freedom win its way, and the King to whom he was so devoted unite the scattered states under one crown. He saw the fall of the temporal power of the Pope, and with it the consummation of his hopes. In 1873, at the age of eighty-eight, he died, universally mourned and revered. A Milanese journal said: “After the confessor left the room Manzoni called his friends and said to them, ‘When I am dead, do what I did every day; pray for Italy—pray for the king and his family—so good to me!’ His country was the last thought of this great man dying, as in his whole long life it had been his most vivid and constant affection.”
It was nearly fifty years since his last important work had appeared, but during that long half century of inactivity Manzoni’s fame had grown steadily. His romance had passed through one hundred and eighteen editions in Italian alone. Milan decreed him a state funeral, and representatives of all European countries appeared at the old Lombard capital with addresses from their sovereigns. It has been said that Manzoni’s death evoked a greater unanimity of sentiment than has been called forth by that of any other great author of modern times, except possibly by that of Sir Walter Scott. Even those who had criticised Manzoni had always spoken their opinions in a spirit of reverence. He was regarded as the great guiding figure in the course of the new national literature.
A singularly uneventful life for one of the great builders of a nation, uneventful even for that of a scholar or poet. Moreover the roll of his works is small numerically, comprising his Sacred Hymns, the two dramas, the Ode on Napoleon, the single novel, and in addition only a few essays, the “Innominata” or Column of Infamy, an historical note to “I Promessi Sposi,” an essay on the Romantic School, called “Letters on Romanticism,” and one entitled “Letters on the Unity of Time and Place,” the purpose of which was to show that the unity of action is the only unity of importance to the dramatist. The bulk of his work was not great, but each expression of it was masterful in its way, the Hymns true poetry as well as deep religious sentiment, the Ode considered the finest ode in all Italian poetry, the dramas pulsing with life and feeling, the novel unsurpassed. These were the literary values of his work, but these in themselves would not account for Manzoni’s influence on his times. He was a moral and political force, showing the men of his day that nations can only hope for liberty and peace when the citizens respect the law and virtue. A generation that had lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era needed some one to lead them back to moral sanity, and this was the greatest of Manzoni’s works.
Like Gioberti, like D’Azeglio, like Victor Emmanuel, Manzoni was a staunch Catholic as well as a true Italian. A close friend, Signor Bonghi, said of him: “He had two faiths, one in the future of Catholicism, another in the future of Italy, and the one, whatever was said, whatever happened, never disturbed the other. In anxious moments, when the harmony between the two was least visible, he expected it the most, and never allowed his faith in one or the other to be shaken. Rome he wished to be the abode of the King; Rome he wished also to be the abode of the Pope. Obedient to the Divine Authority of the Pontificate, no one passed a more correct judgment upon its civil character, or defended with more firmness, when speaking upon the subject, the right of the State.”
That he was the poet of resignation, as Monnier declared, is disproved by his dramas and his novel. The martial lyrics of the plays burn with a spirit only too evidently fired by the contemporary subjection of Italy to Austria and France. Take for example the first and last verses of one of the lyrics in the Adelchi, as rendered into English by Miss Ellen Clarke:
“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 clamor that swells like a wave.
In visages pallid, and eyes dim and shrouded,
As blinks the pale sun through a welkin beclouded,
The might of their fathers a moment is seen;
In eye and in countenance doubtfully blending;
The shame of the present seems dumbly contending
With pride in the thought of a past that hath been.
And deem ye, poor fools! that the need and the guerdon
That lured from afar were to lighten your burden,
Your wrongs to abolish, your fate to reverse?
Go! back to the wrecks of your palaces stately,
To the forges whose glow ye extinguished so lately,
To the field ye have tilled in the sweat of your curse!