Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/348

330 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