Part 3

When he had fled from France he had been compelled to leave some of his printed works behind him, and he was now in fear lest their appearance and eager appeal for liberty should seem to ally him with the Revolutionary cause. Above all things he condemned the French Revolution. To avoid this possibility he now advertised in the Italian papers a disclaimer, warning the public against any edition of his writings except such as he himself issued. With this formal announcement he had to be content.

Alfieri had determined to write no more tragedies, and turned to composition of comedies, of which he had six nearly completed when his health failed. He rested for a time and then resumed his methodical life of study and work. He was advised to give himself more recreation, but was too obstinate to adopt any plan but his own. His health gave way again, and neglecting the physician's advice, he tried to minister to his own illness. Gradually he grew weaker, and on October 3, 1803, he died. He was buried in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, and his monument, carved by Canova, rises between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli. An inscription states by whom the memorial was erected. "Louisa, Princess of Stolbergh, Countess of Albany, to Vittorio Alfieri of Asti, 1810." In 1824 she was buried in Santa Croce.

In his will Alfieri left everything to the Countess. Their love had grown deeper with time. She wrote to a friend, "You know, by experience, what it is to lose a person with whom we have lived for twenty-six years, who has never given us a moment of displeasure, whom we have always adored, respected, and venerated." Each, tormented alone, had found happiness finally in their united life.

What was Alfieri's part in the growth of that spirit which was preparing to set Italy free? Why did Mazzini later point him out as one of the great sources of inspiration for his "Young Italy"? We must remember that literature and the drama are more closely related to Italian public opinion than they are with us, that the appearance of a new book or play is often a vital subject to a ministry. What the people read they felt, and it was Alfieri who first showed them the immorality of national servitude. One of his best critics has said that when Alfieri first turned his glance toward the Italian stage, it presented anything but a hopeful aspect. "The degradation of a people enslaved under a foreign yoke, and without political life, could not fail to make itself felt in the theater as in the more extended arena of public affairs. No high effort of mind could be born amid such circumstances. A stage without authors soon ceases to have actors. When actors and authors both are wanting an audience will not easily be found. Thus it was, thus it had been in Italy through many troubled years. The opera,--the seductive, but enervating opera,--carried to great perfection by Metastasio, was almost alone in possession of the popular taste.... Alfieri's first thought was to improve the taste of his countrymen, by blending the amusement they were accustomed to with something better.... Instead of attempting reform by easy stages, he determined to attempt everything at once.... It was something more than an improvement of the stage that he attempted; it was the improvement of his countrymen; the regeneration of his country!... Throughout nearly all his tragedies and his prose works, the leading idea by which he was animated stood plainly out. Several pieces he specially calls tragedies of liberty. They well deserve the name. He never tired in his denunciations of tyranny, in his invectives against oppression. These were themes upon which the more he spoke, the more eloquent he became."

The dramas themselves, built in strict accordance with the three unities of classic taste, may seem strangely stiff and unemotional to us, but they carried an immense appeal to the Italian of the last century. They spoke a new voice and stirred a new spirit in their hearers. The voice once heard, the spirit once born, the new idea grew rapidly. Within a few years after Alfieri's death eighteen editions of his works had passed through the press. Two great theaters, one at Milan and one at Bologna, were built by men eager to present his tragedies. The influence of his writings was tremendous; the minds of Italians from Piedmont to Sicily were stirred to a higher pitch than they had been for many centuries.

Alfieri's character had many defects, at best his life was unmoral, but having regard to the society into which he was born and the early training he received, more was scarcely to be looked for. He was passionate, reckless, and untutored in all self-control, yet he harnessed himself to a work which possessed his fancy and in its service became the devotee of study and control. Like his life his writings lack peace and broad philosophy, but on the other hand they gain from his peculiar nature a certain domineering force. Giuseppe Arnaud in his criticism on the patriotic poets of Italy says, "Whoever should say that Alfieri's tragedies, in spite of many eminent merits, were constructed on a theory opposed to grand scenic effects and to one of the two bases of tragedy, namely, compassion, would certainly not say what was far from the truth. And yet, with all this, Alfieri will still remain the dry, harsh blast which swept away the noxious miasmas with which the Italian air was infected. He will still remain that poet who aroused his country from its dishonorable slumber, and inspired its heart with intolerance of servile conditions and with regard for its dignity. Up to this time we had bleated and he roared."

Let me only add the striking words of his fellow countryman, the gifted poet-statesman Massimo d'Azeglio. "In fact," he wrote, "one of the merits of that proud heart was to have found Italy Metastasian and left it Alfierian; and his first and greatest merit was, to my thinking, that he discovered Italy, so to speak, as Columbus discovered America, and initiated the idea of Italy as a nation. I place this merit far beyond that of his verses and his tragedies."

Alfieri reminded Italians that they had a native voice.

MANZONI, THE MAN OF LETTERS

The position of Manzoni in modern Italian life and literature is doubly interesting, both because his work in poetry and the drama marks the vital turning point in the historic battle of Classicism with Romanticism, and because his romance "I Promessi Sposi" is the greatest achievement in all Italian letters in the field of the novel. Walter Scott gave the country north of Tweed a history in the "Waverley Novels," and Alessandro Manzoni's writing a little later, at a time when Scott's work was a great factor in European literature, gave Italy a history in the same sense. The inestimable service that the Waverley Novels did Scotland "I Promessi Sposi" did the disrupted states of Italy.

The spirit of the French Revolution was all-engrossing, as subversive of the old religions, philosophies, and literatures, as it was of the old politics. It represented the actual thoughts of the men of that era, but it developed so rapidly and fell into such excesses that its downfall was sudden and complete. Then the reaction set in, which, as De Sanctis in his history of the movement says, was "as rapid and violent as the revolution.... The white terror succeeded to the red."

The same critic goes on to show that there were at this period two great philosophic principles, materialism and skepticism, and that in opposition to them there rose a spirituality which was carried to the heights of idealism. This spirituality approached the mysticism of mediæval days. "To the right of nature," he says, "was opposed the divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual rights the State, to liberty authority and order. The middle ages returned in triumph.... Christianity, hitherto the target of all offense, became the center of every philosophical investigation, the banner of all social and religious progress.... The criterions of art were changed. There was a pagan art and a Christian art, where highest expression was sought in the Gothic, in the glooms, the mysteries, the vague, the indefinite, in a beyond which was called the ideal, in an inspiration towards the infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore melancholy.... To Voltaire and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De Staël, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Lamennais. And in 1815 appeared the Sacred Hymns of the young Manzoni."

This spirit of idealism became the incentive for the new school of Romance in literature and the drama, in contrast to the drab materialism of the Revolutionary age. This school of Romance is not, however, to be considered as diametrically opposed to the Classical School, for they had much in common, and the contrast between them lay not so much in the spirit which animated them as in the strict regard of Classicism for the time-hallowed unities of time, place, and action, and the willingness of the Romantic School to sacrifice all these for freedom of movement and effect. The new school wished to find its poems in the experiences of men of that day, to write its dramas about any comedy or tragedy without regard to their classic form, it wished freedom to grow as its own spirit might dictate. In Germany and England great Romanticists were ripening into power, Goethe and Burger, Scott and Byron were being widely read in Italy, and the dramas of both Schiller and Shakespeare were continually translated and reproduced in Italian verse. The restoration of the Austrians and Bourbons after the Napoleonic downfall made any chance to speak political truths impossible, even in the half-veiled militant form used earlier by Alfieri. The Romantic School therefore, confined in its modern scope, turned backward, became retrospective, and sought its outlet in the glories of that mediæval world which had been so nearly akin in spirit to the modern sentiment. It turned from recent atheistic tendencies to a mood of great devotion, from lax morality to a high degree of upright conduct, from the regard of liberty as the greatest good to that of responsibility to mankind as the goal. Only distantly and secondarily political, this Romantic movement was first of all moral, and taught Italians that in order to be good citizens they must be good men first. As in all literary history the movement had a deep philosophic meaning, and this sense of moral responsibility was at the base of all Manzoni's great creative efforts.

First of all, then, the literary movement which succeeded the Revolutionary era in Italy was idealistic as compared with the materialism of the days of the Napoleonic occupation, and secondly, it was Romantic in contradistinction to the Classicism of the earlier times. Greek and Roman themes for artistic expression were abandoned for the stories of national mediævalism, the Papacy became the center of its poetic aspiration, and its spirit, though highly ardent, was far more truly modern than that of Classicism had been. Our former critic, De Sanctis, says that in this new movement religion "is no longer a creed, it is an artistic motive.... It is not enough that there are saints, they must be beautiful: the Christian idea returns as art.... Providence comes back to the world, the miracle reappears in story, hope and prayer revive, the heart softens, it opens itself to gentle influences.... Manzoni reconstructs the ideal of the Christian Paradise and reconciles it with the modern spirit. Mythology goes, the classic remains; the eighteenth century is denied, its ideas prevail."

Manzoni stood first for that new movement which opposed morality to license in national development, secondly for the temper which derided the classic limits of the three unities and held that a purely national event was as suitable for the purpose of artistic representation as the stories of classic history. In addition to this he first adopted that form of the Romantic spirit which was rising so rapidly into use in England in the novels of Walter Scott, in France in the writings of Victor Hugo and Lamennais, and in Germany in those of Goethe and Schiller, and gave Italy the result in his great novel of Italian life and history. For each of these reasons Manzoni represents a force potent in upbuilding Italian character and strengthening it at the time of its great crisis. Though he drew suggestions from abroad, he made his work Italian, and thoroughly Italian. "If," says De Sanctis, "the Romantic School, by its name, its ties, its studies, its impressions, was allied to German traditions and French fashions, it was at bottom Italian in accent, aspiration, form, and motive.... Every one felt our hopes palpitating under the mediæval robe; the least allusion, the remotest meanings, were caught by the public, which was in the closest accord with the writers. The middle ages were no longer treated with historical and positive intention; they became the garments of our ideals, the transparent expression of our hopes."

Alessandro Manzoni was born in Milan, March 7, 1785, at about the time when Alfieri was accomplishing his greatest work. His father, Pietro Manzoni, belonged to the nobility, and bore the title of Count, a title which Alessandro, when he inherited it at an early age, refused to adopt, and continued to refuse to use during his whole life. His mother was the daughter of Beccaria, a man well known throughout Europe for his studies of political economy and criminology, and whose treatise entitled "Crimes and Punishments" was greatly admired in the Voltairean circles of France. Alessandro's mother was a remarkably intelligent woman, with a fineness of nature which was inherited by her son, and which kept him unspoiled and simple through a life unusually acclaimed and applauded.

His earliest youth was spent among the hills of Galbiate, according to the custom of wealthy Lombard families, to send their children to the mountains in order to give them rugged health. The boy was in care of a woman who was successively his nurse and governess, and who taught him to read and stirred his interest in the legends and history of the neighboring countryside. When still a small boy he was sent to the church college of the Frati Lomaschi, education being then entirely in charge of ecclesiastics. He seems to have been in no wise an apt student, the close confinement, the strict discipline, and the dry manner of teaching subjects which were all of an eminently classical nature combining to dull his spirits and interest. Stories are current in Milan of Manzoni's inability to learn, almost bordering on stupidity, but such stories are popular of men who have later shown great ability, and deserve little credence. Suffice it that he showed no great aptitude for learning at the school of the Frati Lomaschi, nor even later at the Collegio dei Nobili. At the latter he did, however, meet the poet Vincenzo Monti, a man well known throughout Italy, who had had for patrons the Cardinals Borghese and Braschi, a poet and dramatist whose pen was too apt to serve the political party in power, but who had achieved wide popularity, and whose poems were praised by critics as diverse-minded as Byron and Napoleon Bonaparte. Monti met the young Manzoni when he was on a visit to the college, and took an interest in him. Alessandro admired the poet, and it was perhaps this acquaintance which first actively interested him in literature as a pursuit. The meeting of the boy Walter Scott with Robert Burns is a parallel in Scottish literary annals.

In 1805, when he was twenty, Alessandro's father died and the youth left the Collegio dei Nobili, and returned for a time to his mother. After a period of home life he was sent to the University of Pavia, the best-known of Lombard universities. His stay here was short. His mother, now a widow for several years, was advised to go to France for her health, and the close bonds which united mother and son would not allow of such a distant separation. Alessandro left the University and went with his mother to Auteuil, which was then a fashionable watering place where the _beau monde_ of French art and letters gathered. Here and at Paris he met the leading thinkers of the time, Volney, Cabanis, De Tracy, Fauriel, and Condorcet, all of whom were interested in the young man as the grandson of Beccaria and because of his own originality of thought. These men called themselves idealogues, and claimed to have shaken off all the conventions of the previous centuries. As a student Manzoni had been an extremely liberal Catholic, and was usually considered by strict critics a follower of Voltaire. At Paris and Auteuil, however, he met so many men of the then prevalent atheistic mode of thought that his own interest in his family religion was quickened and he emerged from his friendship with such men as Cabanis and Condorcet a more pronounced churchman than he had been before. It was characteristic of him to cling tenaciously to those precedents and standards which had so long survived in his own country. His religion, however, was soon to become more to him than a field for philosophic speculation, for in 1810 he married Louise Henriette Blondel, daughter of a banker of Geneva, who, herself a convert from Protestantism to the Church of Rome, became most ardent in the church of her adoption. She soon brought Alessandro to her own enthusiastic view, and from the date of his marriage his philosophy never varied. Henriette Manzoni possessed rare beauty, and was long remembered in Milan "for her fresh blond head, and her blue eyes, her lovely eyes," and the young husband was ideally happy with his bride. He had by now determined to try his skill at composition, and set himself as models the three men whose fame was then at its height in Italy, Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo.

His bride had brought Manzoni a country seat as well as considerable property, and so he settled in the country and studied to perfect his style in writing. His first works were a series of Sacred Hymns, written directly under the influence of the renewed religious faith attendant on his marriage. These were published in 1815, and were at once noticed as poems alike remarkable for deep religious feeling and great beauty of expression. Appearing as they did at a time when religion was being bitterly assailed, churchmen looked upon the young poet as a distinct acquisition to their forces. Manzoni was not, however, even then a believer in the temporal power of the Pope. He said to Madame Colet, the author of "L'Italie des Italiens," "I bow humbly to the Pope, and the Church has no more respectful son; but why confound the interests of earth and those of heaven? The Roman people are right in asking their freedom--there are hours for nations, as for governments, in which they must occupy themselves, not with what is convenient, but with what is just. Let us lay hands boldly upon the temporal power, but let us not touch the doctrine of the Church. The one is as distinct from the other as the immortal soul from the frail and mortal body. To believe that the Church is attacked in taking away its earthly possessions is a real heresy to every true Christian."

This was the same view which Manzoni held throughout his life, and which, stated in his quoted words, gives the position taken by the most enlightened men of the Nationalist party in those later days when the question of the temporal power of the Pope became vital for Italy. What the Sacred Hymns showed was that Manzoni looked to the Church as the center of all true aspiration and religion rather than to philosophic theories as the safeguard of morals.

His next production carried him a step further in advance of his contemporaries, and marked him as the leader of the Romantic School. In 1819 he wrote his first tragedy, published the following year under the title "Il Conte di Carmagnola." The subject-matter was the career of Carmagnola, a celebrated condottiere of the Middle Ages, and the dramatic form was entirely distinct from that classic construction which had so long tyrannized over the drama. In an introduction he explains his departure from the classic unities of time, place, and action, and gives his reasons for believing that the dramatist should be free to choose his own subject and to treat it in such fashion as shall seem to him best to express his idea. The Elizabethan dramatists had long before discarded the law of the unities in England, and had carried their plots over such courses of time and place as they pleased, and so had Schiller in Germany, but in Italy the law had been absolute from the time of Tasso to that of Alfieri. Eight years after Manzoni's "Carmagnola" appeared, Victor Hugo brought on the great dramatic war in France with his "Cromwell," and from the date of his ultimate triumph in Paris dates the downfall of the Classicists and the full glory of the Romanticists.

In Italy Manzoni's step was violently attacked and defended. Conservatives opposed him, but the younger element immediately acclaimed him as their leader. The following year, 1821, he wrote his great ode on the death of Napoleon, which had occurred on May 5th, at St. Helena, and the news of which had greatly affected all Europe. The ode, entitled "Il Cinque Maggio," was remarkable for great dignity, a deep and profound estimate of Napoleon's genius, and a tribute to his colossal fame which even the French recognized as the fittest expression of poetic power. The ode was at once translated into German by Goethe, and into English by Gladstone and the Earl of Derby. It immediately placed him at the head of the new school of continental poets.

Very soon afterwards, in 1822, Manzoni wrote his second tragedy, "Adelchi," a drama of the war between the Lombards and Charlemagne. It followed the lines of the Carmagnola, repeating the break from classical precedents, and establishing the value of the Romantic School. Both dramas were acted, but without success. The Carmagnola, when it was given at Florence in 1828, had the open support of the court to offset the attacks of the old school, and yet did not win even a mildly enthusiastic hearing. The Adelchi was tried with a similar result at Turin.

In spite of their ill reception on the stage, both of Manzoni's dramas were immensely popular with readers, and, although based on incidents remote in point of time, both thrilled with a patriotism that stirred the hearts of all Italians. Mr. Howells says of the tragedies in his "Modern Italian Poets," "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."