Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/537

 LITERATURE.] ITALY 515 Muzio, Castelvetro, Speroni, and others. Now the question came up again quite fresh, as if no one had ever discussed it before. At the head of the Lombard school were Monti and his son-in-law Count Giulio Perticari. This gave Monti an occasion to write Proposta di alcune Corre- zioni ed Aggiunte al Vocabolario della Crusca, in which he attacked the Tuscanism of the Crusca, but in a graceful and easy style, such in fact as to form a prose that is one of the most beautiful in Italian literature. Perticari on the other hand, with a very inferior intellect, narrowed and exasperated the question in two treatises Degli Scrittori del Trecento and Dell Amor Patrio di Dante, in which, often disguising or altering the facts, he only makes con fusion where there was none. Meantime, however, the impulse was given. The dispute about language took its place beside literary and political disputes, and all Italy took part in it, Basilio Puoti at Naples, Paolo Costa in the Romagna, Marc Antonio Parenti at Modena, Salvatore Betti at Rome, Giovanni Gherardini in Lombardy, Luigi Fornaciari at Lucca, Vincenzo Nannucci at Florence, ani. A patriot, a classicist, and a purist all at once was Pietro Giordani, born in 1774 ; he was almost a compendium of the literary movement of the time. His whole life was a battle fought for liberty. Most learned in Greek and Latin authors, and in the Italian trecentisti, he only left a few writings behind him, but they were carefully elaborated in point of style, and his prose was in his time considered wonderful. Now it is looked on as too majestic, too much laboured in phrases and conceits, too far from nature, too artificial. Giordani closes the literary epoch of the classicists. sm- 7. Contemporary Period. At this point the contem- T porary period of literature begins. It has been said that the first impulse was given to it by the romantic school, which had as its organ the Conciliatore established in 1818 at Milan, and on the staff of which were Silvio Pellico, Lndovico di Breme, Giovile Scalvini, Tommaso Grossi, Giovanni Berchet, Samuele Biava, and lastly Alessandro Manzoni. It need not be denied that all these men were influenced by the ideas that, especially in Germany, at the beginning of the 19th century constituted the movement called Romanticism. Nevertheless in Italy the course of literary reform took another direction. There is no doubt that the real head of the reform, or at least its most distinguished man, was Alessandro Manzoni. He formulated in a letter of his the objects of the new school, saying that it aspired to try and discover and express &quot; il vero storico &quot; and &quot; il vero morale,&quot; not only as an end, but as the widest and eternal source of the beautiful. And it is precisely realism in art that characterizes Italian literature from Manzoni onwards. The Promessi Sposi is the one of liis works that has made him immortal. No doubt the idea of the historical novel came to him from Sir Walter Scott, but he succeeded in something more than an historical novel in the narrow meaning of that word ; he created an eminently realistic work of art. The romance disappears ; no one cares for the plot, which moreover is of very little consequence. The attention is entirely fixed on the power ful objective creation of the characters. From the greatest to the least they have a wonderful verisimilitude ; they are living persons standing before us, not with the qualities of one time more than another, but with the human qualities of all time. Manzoni is able to unfold a character in all particulars, to display it in all its aspects, to follow it through its different phases. He is able also to seize one moment, and from that moment to make us guess all the rest. Don Abbondio and Renzo are as perfect as Azzeccagarbugli and II Sarto. Manzoni dives down into the innermost recesses of the human heart, and draws thence the most subtle psychological reality. In this his greatness lies, which was recognized first by his companion in genius, Goethe. With the exception of the Promessi Sposi, his works are important for the history of the author s mind, not for the history of literature. Some of them are rather in contrast to that masterpiece. It is chiefly the Inni Sacii and the two tragedies that explain why Manzoni became the head of the school of Roman ticism. It is not to be denied that even as a poet he had gleams of genius, especially where he describes human affections, as in some stanzas of the Inni and in the chorus of the Adelchi. But it is the Promessi Sposi alone that places him at the head of the Italian literature of the 19th century, on account of the artistic realism prevailing in it. But Manzoni shared this glory with another writer, Giacomo Leopardi. It may seem absurd, but still it is the case, that the mystic, the religious Manzoni, has his place side by side with the poet of atheism and despair : they are indissolubly bound together for all time by an artistic intention, identical although realized by different means. Leopardi was born thirteen years after Manzoni at Recanati, of a patrician family, bigoted and avaricious, and he almost entirely educated himself. His body was deformed, and he was of a sickly habit, so that in the years that bring cheerfulness and laughter to youths and children he shut himself up in his father s library and studied. He became so familiar with Greek authors that he used afterwards to say that the Greek mode of thought was more clear and living to his mind than the Latin or even the Italian. Solitude, sickness, domestic tyranny, prepared him for profound melancholy. From this he passed into complete religious scepticism. He sought rest in art, and first wrote a Canzone aW Italia and another for the monument of Dante Alighieri (1818), both full of classical and patriotic feeling. They show that for the time, though onlj 7 for the time, he was of the school of Alfieri, Foscolo, and the others we have spoken of. His love of classicism always continued, but he changed its subject. He passed on into the postry of sentiment and nature, describing with an unsurpassable realism what he felt and saw. The Passero solitario, the Quiete dopo la Tempesta, the Sabato del Villaggio, are pictures in which objective realism reaches its highest ideality; whilst beside them there are the Ultimo Canto di Saffo, the Ricordanze, the Genestra, and other poems, in which is poured out all the sorrow that weighs on the unhappy man to whom nature has denied every joy and every happiness. Everything is terrible and grand in these poems, which are the most agonizing cry in modern litera ture, uttered with a solemn quietness that at once elevates and terrifies us. The poetry of despair never had a more powerful or a more sorrowful voice than this. In this Leopardi surpasses even Byron and Shelley. But, besides being the greatest poet of nature and of sorrow, he was also an excellent prose writer. In his Operette Morali dialogues and discourses marked by a cold and bitter smile at human destinies which freezes the reader the clearness of style, the simplicity of language, and the depth of concep tion are such that perhaps he is not only the first poet since Dante, but also the most perfect writer of prose that Italian literature has had. As realism in art gained ground, the positive method in criticism kept pace with it. From the manner of Botta and Colletta history returned to its spirit of learned re search, as is shown in such works as the Archivio Storico Italiano, established at Florence by Giampietro Vieusseux, the Sloria d Italia net Meclio Evo by Carlo Troya, a remark able treatise by Manzoni himself, Sopra alcuni Punti della storia Longobardica in. Italia, and the very fine history of the Vespri Siciliani by Michele Amari. The same positive method is now being applied to literary history. But alongside of the great artists Leopardi and Manzoni,