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.”

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:

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.