Part 4

Manzoni's greatest work, however, was yet to appear, for admirable as were his poems and inspiring as were his heroic dramas it was as a novelist that he was to reach his pinnacle of fame. It was also as a novelist that he was to become one of the men who directly created that national spirit which made modern Italy. Italy had had many poets, but no great novelist since Boccaccio. Fortunately Manzoni had not been confined to the literature of his own land, but had studied Goethe, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Scott, and drew his inspiration largely from them. He owed much to the English novel, and especially to the author of "Waverley," a man whom he much admired, and who fully returned his admiration.

"I Promessi Sposi" appeared in 1825 and created a tremendous impression. Scott said that it was the greatest historical novel ever written, and Goethe said, "It satisfies us like perfectly ripe fruit." It was the first and greatest Italian romance, and it awakened an interest throughout Europe in Italian history. The scene is laid in Milan under the harsh Spanish rule of the Seventeenth Century, and the reader is carried through the story of war and famine, and the great plague. Its merits are hard to exaggerate, the beauty of its descriptions and the accuracy of its history, the intense interest of its characters, a galaxy that embraces every walk of life, the truth of its philosophy are equally remarkable. The universal feelings of humanity pulse through its pages; as Dr. Garnett says of it, "as a picture of human nature the book is above criticism; it is just the fact, neither more nor less."

Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables" wrote a book which appealed to the innate democracy of man, but Manzoni in "I Promessi Sposi" made the same appeal without having recourse to the Frenchman's use of the grotesque and gigantic. Through the whole of the latter novel runs the note of a profound sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, a note which is perhaps stronger in this book than in any romance ever written. It is the work of a great mind, fully alive to every sensibility and sympathy, accurate in its judgments, and to which, in the ancient words, nothing human is foreign.

Cardinal and priest, brigand and simple hero, grande dame and the lovely girl whose hand promised in marriage gives part title to the book, are each perfect in their way, and bring the characteristics of a past century vividly before the present. Goethe pointed out the too great prominence of the historical element, but the very careful attention paid by Manzoni to the accuracy of his setting must add to the sense of reality which he so completely gains. The novel was rapidly translated into all modern languages, and at once created a school of historical novelists in Italy.

To us who have seen the romantic movement give place in turn to that of realism, it is difficult to understand what Scott and Hugo, Goethe and Manzoni did for the men of the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. They made people feel as they had not felt before the wide scope of existence and the importance of the individual. Literature had been a matter of form and convention, of classic model, of purely aristocratic vision. The new movement was part of that same impulse which was demanding constitutions of kings and bringing the middle classes into political prominence. It was an awakening of public spirit which had slept soundly through several centuries. Voltaire and Rousseau, Alfieri and Foscolo had sounded the first notes of a new intellectual renaissance, and now Hugo and Manzoni went further and stepped boldly out from all classic restraints.

Although "I Promessi Sposi" is more widely known and more highly regarded than any Italian book, except the Divine Comedy of Dante, Manzoni's personality impressed itself but little upon his age. He had not the fighting nature of Victor Hugo, nor the mental unrest of Byron, two of his great contemporaries. He preferred the retirement of his farm to the excitements of Milan, and although he was always an ardent advocate of Italian unity and freedom he took but small part in the great events that soon delivered Lombardy from Austria. After the appearance of "I Promessi Sposi" he wrote little more. "Formerly," he said, "the muse came after me, now I should have to go after her." His quiet life laid him open to the charge of an indifferent patriotism, but those who knew him best understood that such an accusation was bitterly untrue.

When the Austrian government returned to Milan the members of the Lombard nobility were required to write their names in an official register or forfeit their titles. Manzoni preferred to lose his claim as a patrician, and later refused a decoration, saying that he had made a vow never to wear any order of knighthood. He afterwards offered the same excuse to Victor Emmanuel when the latter wished to decorate him. He was elected a Senator in 1860, when the first National Assembly met, and went to Turin to take his seat, but soon after retired to the privacy of his own home on Lake Maggiore. Here he entertained many great guests, among them Cavour and D'Azeglio, to whom he was warmly attached. His life flowed on an even current, the existence of a philosophic spirit interested as an observer rather than as an actor.

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!

The victor and vanquished in amity knitted, Have doubled the yoke to your shoulders refitted; One tyrant had quelled you, and now ye have twain: They cast forth the lot for the serf and the cattle, They throne on the sods that yet bleed from their battle, And the soil and the hind are their servants again."

Could Manzoni have meant such words to speak other than of the Austrians and Bourbons who were grinding Italians into servitude? Could his marvelous meter, which has been said in its "plunging" to suggest a charge of horses, have been meant other than to drive his countrymen to self assertion? Manzoni was patriot as well as artist, and read his times with no unskilful eye. When Victor Emmanuel visited Milan in 1859 he said that he should like to meet the poet, and, when told that the latter was ill, declared that he would go to him. Manzoni, however, would not hear of this, and as soon as he was able called upon the King. The sovereign's marks of regard and respect overwhelmed the poet. Later he said of the meeting, "I see in the character of the King the intervention of Providence. He is exactly the sovereign that circumstances require to accomplish the resurrection of Italy. He has rectitude, courage, incorruptible honesty, and disinterestedness; he seeks not glory or fortune for himself, but for his country. He is so simple, never caring to appear great, that he does not meet the admiration of those who seek to find in princes and heroes theatrical actions and grandiloquent words. He is natural because he is true, and this makes his enemies say that he is wanting in regal majesty. To found Italian unity he has risked his throne, and his life."

Manzoni's prophecies came true and he himself had no small part in accomplishing that great end towards which so many men of diverse forces worked. As well as king and statesman, warrior and prophet, the man of letters taught his people how to find their independence.

GIOBERTI, THE PHILOSOPHER

Gioberti's signal gift to his countrymen was his great book, "II Primato d'Italia," a statement of the causes of Italy's early primacy among European nations, and a philosophic theory for her regeneration. Like Savonarola he flayed the vices of his time and preached redemption through Christian living, but, unlike the great Fra, he undertook to teach that the Church was no less fitted to be the seat of statecraft than of religion. It was this that gained him the ear of Rome as well as that of Piedmont, and made it seem for a moment as though he had found the solution of Italy's troubles.

The effect of the "Primato" was felt from Turin to Naples. "The book," said Minghetti, the statesman of a later decade, "seemed to some an extravagance, to others a revelation. The truth is, that while many of its ideas were peculiar to the author, and partook of his character, his studies, and his profession, the substance of it responded to a sentiment still undefined, but which had been slowly developing in the minds of Italians. The idea of nationality had, in the previous years, spread far and wide through many channels, open and secret, and the desire of a great and free country had taken possession of the majority of the younger men; but the methods hitherto employed had proved so inefficient that weariness and disgust had followed. Experience had proved that conspiracies, secret societies, and partial insurrections were of no utility--that they made the governments more severe, retarded civil progress, arrested the increase of public prosperity, plunged many families into misery, and did not even win the approbation of civilized nations.

"The rumors of wars and of European insurrections which were circulated every spring time, the mystic declamations of Mazzini in the name of God and the people, ... all these things showed that the time had come to try another method, more serious, more practical, and surer.... Gioberti, a Piedmontese exile for the sake of liberty, had taken part in the earliest phases of the "Giovine Italia" or had been in relation with its chiefs, but had wearied of that pompous and impotent society. His intellect had anticipated that change which had been imperceptibly operating and now began to appear widely ... but obscurely in the consciousness of many men. This opportuneness and coincidence of the ideas of the author with the spirit of the day gave his book a special importance.... The purpose of the book was to prove that Italy, although it had lost all political value for the outside world, contained all the conditions of moral and political revival, and that to effect this change there was no need of revolutions, invasions, or imitations of the foreigner, since political revival is limited to three heads--unity, independence, and liberty--the first two of which might be obtained by a confederation of the various states under the presidency of the Pope, and the last by means of internal reforms in each state, effected by their respective Princes without danger or diminution of their real power."

Vincenzo Gioberti was born in Turin April 5, 1801, and was the only child of parents of very moderate means. At an early age it was decided that he should prepare for the priesthood, and his education was entrusted to the fathers of the Oratory in Turin. His nature was more conformable to the teaching of churchmen than was that of Alfieri or Manzoni, and whereas both the latter had chafed under the discipline and mental training of the Church schools the young Gioberti became a thoughtful student. He differed from Mazzini, a contemporary studying at Genoa, in that although he early learned that the condition of his country was wretched, his mind could only conceive of improvement by orderly and temperate steps. He was a brilliant scholar, and during the years of his training for the priesthood he delved deep into the history of philosophy, and studied closely the writings of the fathers and doctors of the Roman Church. In 1825 he was ordained a priest.

The young priest, a man of a serious and reflective mind, turned his attention to the affairs of his country, and gradually entered upon a careful study of the literature of the day, and the political theories that were then agitating men's minds. He took part in scholastic discussions of religious and political subjects, and in time widened his acquaintance in Turin so that he came in contact with the leaders of thought in the Sardinian capital. As he met men and spoke his thoughts more freely it came to be seen that he was occupied above everything else with the problem of freeing Italy from the foreign overlords, and this gradually marked him as a free-thinking priest. At first, however, he did not incur the enmity of the clerical party, for, although his conception of Italian freedom consisted in emancipation not alone from the arms of foreign masters, but from all modes of thought which were alien to the nation's genius, and detrimental to its national authority, this authority was always associated in his mind with the idea of Papal supremacy, but a supremacy intellectual rather than political.

The reign of Charles Albert of Piedmont was a continual battle between the conservative party and the enlightened liberals. The leaders of the conservatives were clerics, in large measure Jesuits, who kept in close touch with the Court of Vienna, realizing to the full that their aims and those of Austria were to all intents identical, the maintenance of the _status quo_ in Italy. The young priest Gioberti was not long in incurring the hostility of the Jesuits, because, although he sought the ultimate supremacy of the Papal See, he desired it as a moral rather than as a physical supremacy, and he most ardently hoped for the expulsion of the Austrians from Lombardy and the absolute independence of Piedmont from Viennese influence. His was, however, too brilliant a mind to be denied, and, despite the efforts of the Court party, Charles Albert, who was always cognizant of the abilities of other men, soon after his accession to the throne in 1831 nominated the young priest to be one of the royal chaplains.

As chaplain of the court Gioberti quickly assumed prominence. His nature was open and frank, he made friends easily, he wrote on ecclesiastical and political subjects, and his patriotism was known to be unbounded. He soon had gathered a party about him, and his influence over the King grew rapidly. Charles Albert's own views on Italian policy were at that time almost identical with Gioberti's, he would have been glad to acknowledge a confederation of Italian states under the presidency of the Pope, provided the foreign princelings could be disposed of without bloodshed. This, however, the clerical party did not approve of, any change being to their view revolutionary, and the realization that the chaplain was gaining the private ear of the King finally compelled them to mark him for exile.

Aware of this disaffection in the Church party at Turin, Gioberti in 1833 asked permission of Charles Albert to resign his chaplaincy, but, before his request was granted he was suddenly arrested one day while walking with a friend in the public gardens of the city, and placed in prison. The influence of the clerical party was so all-powerful in the Piedmont of that day that no attempt to secure Gioberti's release was effective, and no popular demonstration at such an outrage could take place. He was given no trial, and his case was the subject of no apparent judicial process. After four months' imprisonment he was informed that his banishment had been decreed, and he was at once conducted to the frontier in charge of a carabineer. At the same time his name was stricken off the roll of the theological doctors of the College of Turin.

Driven into exile because of his political opinions, even as Mazzini was exiled as a suspect rather than because of any proof against him, Gioberti reached Paris in October, 1833. Like so many other great Italians of that day he was destined to spend many years away from his beloved country. Without friends, family, or money, his career apparently ruined, his hopes shattered, Gioberti was to sound the depths of a courageous man's despair. Mazzini took himself to London to eke out a meager living as a teacher of Italian, and with the same thought Gioberti went to Brussels. Here he undertook to teach philosophy, and finally obtained employment in assisting his friend Gaggia in the management of a small college. All his leisure time he devoted to studying and writing on philosophy, rising early, and working the better part of the night, and producing work after work of great value in philosophic inquiry, all of which bore especially upon the needs of his own countrymen.

His stay in Brussels, which lasted from 1834 to 1845, saw the production of his greatest books, all deeply earnest, and each one causing in turn the greatest interest and emotion in Italy. The volume of his work was most remarkable, treatises appearing at short intervals, each one of which would have sufficed to represent a lifetime's study. His first work was the result of a friendship formed in Brussels with a young fellow-exile, Paolo Pallia, who on one occasion expressed to Gioberti certain doubts as to the reality of revelations and a future life. Gioberti at once commenced work upon his "La Teorica del Sovran-naturale," which was finished and published in 1838. This was followed in 1839 and 1840 by his three volumes called "Introduzione allo Studio della Filosofia." In all these writings he stands apart from his contemporary European philosophers. Method of speculation is with him subjective and psychological. He adopts much from Plato. Throughout all his writings religion is synonomous with civilization, and he repeatedly states that religion is the true and only expression of the _idea_ in this life, and is one with the real civilization of history. Civilization is the means to perfection, of which religion is the essence.

These strictly philosophic works were followed by the essays "Del Bello" and "Del Buono," and after a short interval by a magnificent exposure of the Jesuit Order, "Il Gesuita Moderno," and his "Del Primato Morale e Civile degli Italiani," and "Prolegomeni."