Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/535

 LITERATURE.] ITALY 513 without mercy the works which were then being published i in Italy. He had learnt much by travelling ; and especially ; his long stay in England had contributed to give an independent character to his mind, and made him judge of men and things with much good sense. It is true that his judgments are not always right, but the Frusta Letteraria was the first book of independent criticism, directed parti cularly against the Arcadians and the pedants. iatic Everything tended to improvement, and the character m - of the reform was to throw off the conventional, the false, the artificial, and to return to truth. The drama felt this influence of the times. Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio (the Arcadian name for Pietro Trapassi, a native of Eome) had endeavoured to make &quot; melodrama and reason com patible.&quot; The latter in particular succeeded in giving fresh expression to the affections, a natural turn to the dialogue, and some interest to the plot ; and if he had not fallen into constant unnatural over-refinement and unseasonable mawkishness, and into frequent anachronisms, he might have been considered as the first dramatic reformer of the 18th century. That honour belongs to Carlo Goldoni, a Venetian. He found comedy either entirely devoted to classical imitation, or given up to extravagance, to coups de theatre, to the most boisterous succession of unlikely | situations, or else treated by comic actors who recited impromptu on a given subject, of which they followed | the outline. In this old popular form of comedy, with the masks of pantaloon, of the doctor, of harlequin, of Brighella, &c., Goldoni found the strongest obstacles to his reform. But at last he conquered, creating the comedy of character. No doubt Moliere s example helped him in this. Goldoni s characters are always true, but often a little superficial. He studied nature, but he did not plunge into psychological depths. In most of his creations, the external rather than the internal part is depicted. In this respect he is much inferior to Moliere. But on the other hand he surpasses him in the liveliness of the dialogue, and in the facility with which he finds his dramatic situations. Goldoni wrote much, in fact too much (more than one hundred and fifty comedies), and had no time to correct, to polish, to perfect his works, which are all rough cast. But for a comedy of character we must go straight from Machiavelli s Mandragora to him. Goldoni s dramatic aptitude is curiously illustrated by the fact that he took nearly all his types from Venetian society, and yet managed to give them an inexhaustible variety. A good many of his comedies were written in Venetian dialect, and these are perhaps the best, iotic The ideas that were making their way in French society a in the 18th century, and afterwards brought about the re _ Revolution of 1789, gave a special direction to Italian [to literature of the second half of the 18th century. Love of sic- ideal liberty, desire for equality, hatred of tyranny, created in Italy a literature which aimed at national objects, seeking to improve the condition of the country by freeing it from the double yoke of political and religious despotism. But all this was associated with another tendency. The Italians who aspired to a political redemption believed that it was inseparable from an intellectual revival, and it seemed to them that this could only be effected by a reunion with ancient classicism, in other words, by put ting themselves in more direct communication with ancient Greek and Latin writers. This was a repetition of what had occurred in the first half of the 15th century. The 17th century might in fact be considered as a new Italian Middle Age without the hardness of that iron time, but corrupted, enervated, overrun by Spaniards and French, an age in which previous civilization was cancelled. A reaction was necessary against that period of history, and a construction on its ruins of a new country and a new civilization. There had already been forerunners of this movement; at the head of them the revered Parini. Now the work must be completed, and the necessary force must ouce more be sought for in the ancient literature of the two classic nations. Patriotism and classicism then were the two principles that inspired the literature which began with Alfieri. He worshipped the Greek and Roman idea Alfieri. of popular liberty in arms against the tyrant. He took the subjects of his tragedies almost invariably from the history of these nations, made continual apostrophes against the despots, made his ancient characters talk like revolutionists of his time ; he did not trouble himself with, nor think about, the truth of the characters; it was enough for him that his hero was Roman in name, that there was a tyrant to be killed, that liberty should triumph in the end. But even this did not satisfy Alfieri. Before his time and all about him there was the Arcadian -school, with its foolish verbosity, its empty abundance of epithets, its nauseous pastoralizing on subjects of no civil importance. It was necessary to arm the patriotic muse also against all this. If the Arcadians, not excluding the hated Metastasio, diluted their poetry with languishing tenderness, if they poured themselves out in so many words, if they made such set phrases, it behoved the others to do just the con trary, to be brief, concise, strong, bitter, to aim at the sublime as opposed to the lowly and pastoral. Having said this, we have told the good and evil of Alfieri. He desired a political reform by means of letters : he saved literature from Arcadian vacuities, leading it towards a national end; he armed himself with patriotism and classicism in order to drive the profaners out of the temple of art. But in substance he was rather a patriot than an artist. In any case the results of the new literary move ment were copious. Ugo Foscolo was an eager patriot, who carried into life Foscolo. the heat of the most unbridled passion, and into his art a rather rhetorical manner, but always one inspired by classical models. His life was a most exciting one : he was a soldier with General Massena, a professor of eloquence at the university of Pa via, an exile after 1815. Three strong passions were always united in him a passion for Italy, for art, and for beautiful women. Foscolo was born at Zante, and took pride in being a Greek. He translated some books of the Iliad, and the Coma Berenices of Catullus. He studied classical authors widely, and in his original works the reflexion of them is perceptible. The Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, inspired by Goethe s Wertker, are a love story with a mixture of patriotism ; they contain a violent protest against the treaty of Campo Formio, and an outburst from Foscolo s own heart about an unhappy love-affair of his. His passions were sudden and violent ; they came to an end as abruptly as they began ; they were whirlwinds that were over in a quarter of an hour. To one of these passions Ortis owed its origin, and it is perhaps the best, the most sincere, of all his writings. Even in it he is sometimes pompous and rhetorical, but much less so than he is, for example, in the lectures Dell Origine e delV Ufficio della Letteratura. On the whole, Foscolo s prose is turgid and affected, and reflects the character of the man who always tried to pose, even before himself, in dramatic attitudes. This was indeed the defect of the Napoleonic epoch ; there was a horror of anything common, simple, natural; everything must be after the model of the hero who made all the world gaze with wonder at him ; everything must assume some heroic shape. In Foscolo this tendency was excessive; and it not seldom happened that, in wishing to play the hero, the exceptional man, the little Napoleon of ladies drawing-rooms, he be came false and bad, false in his art, bad in his life. The Sepolcri. which is his best poem, was prompted by high XIII. 65