Manzoni, Alessandro

MANZONI, ALESSANDRO. - Writer, b. in Milan on 7 March 1785, d. there on 22 May 1873. Outwardly his life is that of a Milanese gentleman well provided with the goods of fortune, with a marked taste for study, little inclined to worldly life. Of him and of his family there had been talk all too much: his mother, Giulia, daughter of the most celebrated Marquis Cesare Beccaria (v.), had married an elderly nobleman, Pietro M., had left him, to live in London and Paris with another Milanese patrician, Carlo Imbonati, a pupil of Parini; and the little son had passed from boarding school to boarding school, from Merate and Lugano to Milan. Having returned to his father's house, he lived some years of unsatisfied dissipation, rejoined his mother in Paris in 1805, she being the widow of her husband and of her friend, married in 1808 Enrichetta Blondel, daughter of a Genevan banker settled in Milan and a Calvinist. His family life was peaceful and calm, between his wife and his mother: ever more detached from Paris, where he stayed in the early years, ever more gathered between the villa of Brusuglio, a few miles from Milan, and the house in the contrada del Morone, in the city center: it could be narrated in minute detail through the chronicle of births, illnesses, deaths; but it does not allow itself to be dramatized, so Christianly modest and nobly reserved is it. In 1833 Enrichetta died (he wrote cecidere manus on the draft of the hymn on death: he said "dear" and fell silent); he married in second nuptials Teresa Borri, widow Stampa, and almost all his children predeceased him. The fame, which took hold of him after his novel, grew after a united Italy; and yet he knew how to surround himself with silence, in every case. For the great event of that life, the organizing center of that very long series of days, is the conversion in 1810; which is a fact from which history descends, not that it has a history in itself; and the poet, even though he could speak of the episode of the church of S. Rocco, in Paris, where he entered asking for a sign, and came out a believer, preferred to keep silent, adoring. Among the most intimate circumstances will be placed the profound seriousness of Enrichetta, who gave a religious content to his moral expectation, and accepted with extreme decisiveness his uncertain beginnings (the Catholic Baptism of the firstborn Giulietta could be a generic act of homage; but Giulietta's mother, a Christian, was ready to accept extreme consequences of forgotten premises); among the external circumstances, that movement of return to Christianity, or at least of reconciliation between a profane society and a "substance of things hoped for," which had in Chateaubriand its poet and in the Napoleonic Concordat a political realization.

Between the externality of the chronicle, though so decorous and guarded, and the impenetrable intimacy of Faith, one must also seek the secret of his word. By birth and by life he belongs to the circle that operated most actively in Italian history between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the Lombard patriciate, of whose culture the most conspicuous component, but not the only one, was Enlightenment encyclopedism. A youthful man of letters, M. was received with enthusiastic affection by poets such as Monti and Foscolo, who onto the Parinian inheritance grafted the academic tradition of the grand manner and the lofty eloquence of the new historical humanism. And in the literary exercises that earned him a pre-eminent place, passing from the Dantesque imitation of the Trionfo della Libertà to the neoclassical carme of Urania, one perceives that he tends to go beyond the models of imitation, and to attempt a definitive solution, which he only uncertainly glimpses. In Paris, between the widow of Condorcet and Claude Fauriel, the nephew of Cesare Beccaria arranges the passage from a still sensualist culture to an already Romantic one. He comes to know other circles too, though he belongs to none, when he returns from Paris to Milan; and these too carry great weight in the historical life of the Risorgimento: he is among the "Indipendenti" at the fall of the Napoleonic regime, that is, among those who reject Eugene's Bonapartist solution, without being able to avert the disaster of Austrian hegemony, and who vainly ask the powers that the peoples of the Kingdom of Italy decide their own fate; and he stands beside the men of the Conciliatore on the literary eve that foreshadows the political trials and the uprisings of '21: preserving in faithful memory, until '48, the hymn Marzo 1821, the most inspired Risorgimento poetry. Once his novel was published (1827), fame tries to take possession of the man and draw him away from his wary defense: perhaps attempting to surround him with generic reverence in order to better escape the irresistible evidence of his word, and to divert attention from his Romantic and liberal Catholicism, the historical path he travels, and teaches others to travel, between time and eternity.

There has been talk, on the part of politicians and publicists who claim to exhaust in gestures, no matter how generous, the moral inspiration of life, of an M. timid and distracted amid events greater than himself: the Risorgimento gives no light, but receives it from such a man, who taught, with the purest of his companions of the vigil, Pellico and Confalonieri, to form a spiritual judgment of history, to conquer by suffering. If, then, you seek to probe him in the sphere of religious reconsiderations, avoid, in order to understand him, exhausting him within the sphere of a limited association, confusing him with persons even venerated and dear, identifying him with a doctrinal system. Whoever circumstantially chronicles his religious conversion, for example, encounters a Jansenist association: such is the religious circle he frequents in Paris, after he has returned there with his wife, having loosened his ties with the Condorcet at the Maisonnette, the catechist of the neophyte Enrichetta who was the Genoese abbot Eustachio Degola, formerly a follower of Bishop Scipione de' Ricci, such are the readings of the M. household, the veneration for the men, the writings and the memoirs of Port Royal. But even in this circle, and not in this one alone, M. maintains an assiduous custody of his responsibility, an immovable firmness in withdrawing from mediocre and lesser commitments, in binding himself to a sect, in adapting the dogma, which he investigates in its fullest purity, to a political situation. A friend of the Jansenists, but not himself a Jansenist, was Monsignor Tosi, provost of S. Ambrogio and later bishop of Pavia, to whose direction of conscience Degola recommended the new family, returned to their homeland; and here too the new environment certainly had a weight: although the religious itinerary of the convert was very slow, circumspect, meditative; and the new director freed, though doubtful of doing well, Enrichetta from the overly rigid instructions of the catechist, guided her toward traditional religious practices in the most Catholic Ambrosian church, though he himself had come out of the Pavia school of Tamburini and Zola. The fruit of years of meditation, but only in part of the insistences of Monsignor Tosi, the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, directed at refuting the assertions of Sismondi, who laid upon Catholicism the responsibility for the moral decadence of Italy in recent centuries: well then, what seemed a pensum imposed by the director of conscience on his spiritual son is in reality a most free meditation continued for years and years on the relations between morality and custom. The work was not completed; but it remains at the center of Manzonian thought and is essential in the history of the Promessi Sposi: history of meditation and history of poetics. Nor could the vicissitude of nineteenth-century Italian culture, down to its ultimate conclusions, from liberalism to socialism, to reach as far as the religious revival of twentieth-century culture, be explained without this appeal, which beyond every utilitarianism, every moralism of custom, every historicism, thus surpassing all the immanentist situations of old and new theories, demonstrates the unity of religion and of moral life, and that Catholic morality and morality with no attribution whatever are one and the same thing.

Through the golden little book of the Morale cattolica one better understands the meaning that the frequenting of the various circles of culture had in Manzonian spirituality: through the multiple he tends toward the unitary, through custom and history he tends toward the moral life, which is religious life. Thus even his biographical vicissitude is illuminated almost with a providential light: in fact he retraced in reverse the stages of the Protestant schism toward Catholic unity; and just as the schism had passed from the demand for moral reform to free examination to Calvinism to revolutionary encyclopedism, the young Alessandro had set out from this revolutionary encyclopedism precisely, had frequented and meditated the dramatic and pitiless Calvinist absolutism, had ascended to the meditation of Catholic morality by accepting all the responsibilities of a critical inquiry. But how could it have been otherwise, if the great epochs of his family life had been the milestones of a returning exile's itinerary? The civil marriage, the Calvinist marriage, the Catholic Baptism of little Giulia, the Catholic marriage. His life is a deliberate pinpointing of significant and responsible acts, and the poet of the new human comedy makes a total judgment on himself, before judging others. Such admirable coherence you may observe again in studying the horizons, the connections, the rhythms of development of his thought: encyclopedism, Romanticism, and liberalism are the indicative terms of some of his pre-eminent concerns; and they indicate well enough some of the assiduous chapters of his vast reading. But where encyclopedism overstepped into scientistic idolatry and the presumption of intellectualism, he rediscovered that dignity of human reason which had been the authorized premise of the Renaissance's conquests; and where Romanticism yielded in more than one of its zones to the seductions of pantheism and panlogism and decadentism, squandering anew the generous purpose of a culture that would be the life of the spirit traversed by the word of poetic creation, he does indeed free reflection on art from the entanglements of external rules, from the stale and deceitful traditionalisms of mythologism and formalism, but he drives it toward the synthesis of the true, the beautiful, and the good and toward the unity of the created image; and where liberalism soon settled into the defense of a class-based solution of economic life independent of morality, he placed once more beside the divine gift of reason the divine gift of liberty, the one and the other occasions of the dignity of the person. And the pre-eminent themes of his meditation are history, providence, and unity. The author of the finest historical novel of a European tradition that runs from Scott to Tolstoy is a historian expert in every subtle technicality of research, a scholar provided with every aid of complementary science, especially of juridical sciences, most acute in investigation and robust in synthesis: he is, above all, a philosopher aware of the decisive significance that the occasion of time assumes in the life of man, both individual and society; and he has, by native inclination as well as by the suggestion of his age, which witnesses the prevailing of sociality over individualism, a taste for collective movements, for crowd psychology: heir of Muratori and of Vico, and head of a school of the neo-Guelph historians and of the Italian medievalists, indirect promoter of studies in economic history. But beyond history, still along a track that linked the meditation of Augustine and of Bossuet back to Vico, he understands Providence, which gathers the scattered threads of human wills: a poet of Providence, even in the tragedy of his political pessimism, the Adelchi, he understands the succor that the people of the vanquished await in a sphere of religious expectation. And it is toward the metaphysics of unity that he moves through the meditation of the discordant: a search for unity is political life, which in his years sees the triumph of the unitary idea in the history of Italy; a search for unity is the linguistic definition that he attempts in the problematic of art; a search for unity is the intimate life of poetry, which gazes into the purity of the created image.

In the midst of a labor that assiduously ascends to life from all the peripheral zones of chronicle and discourse, the catalogue of works of thought and works of poetry can only amount to a provisional indication of a moral acquisition: so alien is he to the act by which the human spirit closes itself within its own work, thinking or poetizing, and fondly contemplates its own image: if the new culture denounces the placid conformism that isolated the life of the spirit and blissfully contemplated the perfect and empty form, M. is a Romantic because he accepts re-examining every moment of history and of the word, guiding man to face his definitive responsibilities, before God. The Notices that he appends to the tragedies are far more than the proof offered by a writer who documents himself: they propose from the very outset the problem of the relations between history and invention; and they isolate in treatise-like fashion individual problems of the greatest importance: such as that of the division between Lombards and Latins developed in the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia, which, continuing in the sphere of documentary research the image of the Adelchi, a tragedy of peoples, sees at the origins of the catastrophe of the Lombards the irreparable rift between rulers and subjects, between the humble and the powerful. And still another paragraph of an uninterrupted problematic of unity is the last of his historical works, carried forward into what some deemed an indolent or barren old age. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Italian Revolution of 1859, which indicates the historical potentiality of the Italian Risorgimento in the fact of having moved in a direction contrary to the French Revolution, toward unity, rather than toward its dissipation. The same movement is discernible in his aesthetic studies, beginning with the Lettre à M. Chauvet sur l'unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie, which develops and documents ideas sketched in the preface to the Conte di Carmagnola: unity is not an extrinsic fact, to be sought through external contrivances, such as representing events in a single place and confining them within the span of twenty-four hours, but the intimate substance of the work, to be sought through a meditation that detaches itself from circumstances, and touches the authentic truth of the work, moving from gestures to felt reflection. He thus takes part not in the polemic, but in the discussion on Romanticism, starting from one of the most debated and most observed points, given the popularity, especially French, of theatrical literature; but he drives the inquiry very far: even farther than the circle in which the Lombard Romantics, who recognized in him a head of a school, confined themselves, though he was averse to the business of publicistic literature. Even his Romantic "manifesto," the Lettera sul romanticismo to the Marquis d'Azeglio, of the same year 1823 as the letter to Chauvet, was in reality a private letter, the apology of a man of letters who had been directly asked the reason for his joining a school; and in it there is elaborated, through indications that were completed in successive drafts, the doctrine of the true, the beautiful, the good: a metaphysics of art, expounded in terms that were not unsuited to a literary defense. If this manifesto, which was believed to confine itself to a limited milieu of Lombard Romanticism, seems (but is not) theoretically less binding than the doctrines of contemporary German Romanticism, attention has been allowed to fall on the modest and easygoing tone of the discussion, rather than to evaluate the theoretical responsibilities of the thesis; which proposes to art, albeit along the track of a doctrine of Platonic origin never entirely abandoned through centuries of aesthetic culture, to be the way, the truth, and the life: thus to take its place in the meditation of the Christian message. To this too aims the dialogue Dell'Invenzione, which, discussing the term, dropped by one of the interlocutors, of artistic creation, investigates the divine origin of ideas, which the artist invents only insofar as he finds: a true finding in the mind of God the creator. And here M. could declare his debt to Antonio Rosmini: the most fervent of the Manzonian encounters, the one that allowed the poet to descend from truth to certainty, and to see his own intuition given form in a well-armed doctrinal systematization. Finally, the chapter of studies on language, summarizable in that work carried so far forward, and never completed, Della lingua italiana, entrusted chiefly to the posthumous little work Sentir Messa and to the letter Sulla lingua italiana to Giacinto Carena: a doctrine that, inserting itself into a centuries-old and mediocre tradition of linguistic studies, seemed to lower itself; and yet another paragraph of the doctrine of unity, as well as a political act of a community of speakers which, in order to resolve even practically the problem of semantic language, elected one among the many Italian dialects to represent all of them.

His ways of thinking have become proverbial, entrusted to humble and wise phrases such as "sentire e meditare" or "pensarci su," which are cited here also in order to note the contrast between many magniloquent attitudes of Romanticism and its Italian leader; and above all in order to point out the profound seriousness of the commitment that the writer takes upon himself and the indissoluble links that he establishes between poetizing and reflecting; and this is the most direct way to understand the virtue of his poetic work, after having set it in context retrospectively within his life and culture. He never loses sight of the responsibilities that bind poetry to thought, and the consequent acts of moral life; and if few or none possess in equal measure his habit of discriminating and his clarity of argumentation, as the conscious heir of a victorious rationalism, he never agrees to isolate poetic meditation from philosophical meditation in intellectual operations forever distinct. The poems before the conversion, beginning with the Trionfo della Libertà, where through Monti he seeks

Dante, and hymns the Italian campaigns that overthrow Austrian dominion and absolute governments, are something far more than the literary exercise of a highly gifted young man; he fixes the themes (liberty precisely, and morality: indeed, liberty as moral life) that prove to him, over time, to be problems resolvable only in the direction of a total relationship of man with God; and to the extent that he advances in philosophical speculation, to that same extent he gathers himself into a more guarded circle. The Trionfo is almost contradicted by the Autoritratto, where he awaits from men and from the years "to know who I am"; and the Sermoni, which oscillate between the Parinian model and the more ordinary and easygoing attentiveness of Gaspare Gozzi, await the solemn prosopopoeia of the poem In morte di Carlo Imbonati; and still between an ambitious objectification (the poetics of the Graces, this time) and an individual rethinking he oscillates as he passes from Urania to the Porteone.

The equilibrium between the individual world and the social world, which he had sought, neo-classically, in a clamorous solitude or in a refined reserve, is found with a far different fullness of life and felicity of poetry in the Inni sacri. There were to be twelve hymns, to celebrate the major feasts of the liturgical year; and he published five of them, in this order: Il Natale; La Passione; La Resurrezione; La Pentecoste; Il Nome di Maria. If in their literary stylistic features they also connect to an uninterrupted tradition of sacred poetry, their inspiration reaches back to the origins of the poetry and the language of Italy, calling the life of the people to liturgical participation, gathering it into a religious celebration that comforts it, instructs it, reveals it to itself, making it aware of the dignity of its customs, in which religious life has so large a part, and of the intimacy of family life, within whose circle the rite is relived. But the chronicle of the composition of the Inni reveals the poet's path: La Resurrezione (1812) also expresses the surge of life of his soul risen to the Faith, and gathers certain themes that will return to him dear in the episode of the conversion of the Innominato (with the counterpoint of the family and village festival, and its succor, to the theme of the redeemed proud man). Il Nome di Maria unfolds from the scene of the Visitation, in an intimate and fervent narrative, also of remote tradition, to the warrior image that closes it. In the Natale the scene of the Nativity, while broadening to the song of the angels and the remembrance of the prophets, gathers into an aura of family intimacy, from which it is easier to pass along fabulous thematic distances to La Passione, which unfolds from the initial darkness to a confident abandonment to the certainty of the Resurrection. But La Pentecoste, the last hymn composed, summarizes in the praise of the Consoling Spirit, and in the history of the Church, laboring on the face of the earth and through the centuries, and in the announcement of the freedom granted to the peoples of the world, the political and historical meditation that M. conducts in those most fervent years: it in fact takes its place at the end of the tragedies and the political lyrics; and it is a suggestive prelude to the novel, indeed a prayer: so vividly does it seal within itself the unity of the theme of the humble, and of liberty, and of Providence. Still to the poetics of the Inni sacri are connected, with the Strofe per una prima Comunione, the fragments for the hymn for Ognissanti, wonderful for the animation that sings in them the life of nature and the virtue of the humble unknown to the world, and of the Natale 1833, on the death of Enrichetta.

Always keeping La Pentecoste as the work that summarizes all of Manzoni's lyric poetry and as the condition of the novel, the tragedies and the political lyrics can be gathered into a single group of works. The song Aprile 1814 reflects the illusions of the independents and hastily hastens to ascertain a punctual intervention of Providence in history to heal, in full accord with the reasonable and obvious demands of men, human injustices. More disdainful and at the same time more meditative is the song Per il proclama di Rimini (1815), which uncertainly understands war as an act of sacrifice and redemption. Meanwhile he meditates on war and politics in the two tragedies, Il Conte di Carmagnola and Adelchi: tragedies of political pessimism, it has been said; but there is no need to dispute that misfortune, in his poetic meditation, is

"providential": providential for individuals, who are redeemed through sorrow; providential in the history of men, who suffer in order to open themselves to the dignity and freedom of a new life. The fifteenth-century condottiere, impatient of inaction and bold, falls victim to the machinations of the Venetian politicians, who would subordinate his strength to their aims of conquest, and who consider the human pity with which he frees the prisoners after the victory to be treason. And the Lombard Adelchi is subject to a historical force against which he vainly reacts, fighting as a man of valor and dying on the field: just as the passionate and forsaken Ermengarda vainly wastes away, she too innocent, she too a victim of that ferocious force. If the generous perish in the unequal struggle against selfishness, it is precisely through sorrow that they are redeemed; but peoples live beyond the momentary vicissitude of force and fortune; if the battle of Maclodio, in which the Carmagnola is victorious, is the mournful episode of a civil war that will resolve itself in the servitude of both the vanquished and the victors to the foreigner, the chorus that celebrates it extends to the whole history of Italy, finally understood as a moral judgment, to be understood not within the chronicler's limits of the event, but in a span of centuries, the particular event. And if Franks and Lombards alternate in the dominion over the vanquished Latins (but contemporaries easily read in this the story of the wars of predominance between France and Austria on Italian territory), the deacon Martino announces an appeal to a supreme power against the force of politics and of arms: thus the Neo-Guelphs would understand the aid of the Church to the historical life of the Italian people. The tragedies understand the human drama well beyond a contrast hardened in the clash of representative characters: they unfold, in fact, over an epic space, and, in the dialogues and choruses, play out in a space of concentrated popular attention. The political meditation continues in the political hymns: the Marzo 1821, which places in God, to whom the new popular weapons are consecrated, the sacral judgment on the history of peoples, and closes in unforgettable accents the tablets of the new Christian nationalism; and the Cinque Maggio, on the death of Napoleon, dramatically agitated between the immensity of the epic adventure and the solitude of the hero's decline: where the contrast is once again resolved in adoring resignation, while the tumult of history is prolonged, beyond the fate of individuals, who die only succored by the immortal Faith, into the vicissitudes of peoples.

Between 1821 and 1823 he composed the Sposi Promessi, submitted them to the censor's approval, announced to friends that they were ready for the press; and he made nothing of it: or rather everything, for, withdrawing them from expectation, he went through them again from beginning to end, made of them a new work which he published in 1826-27: I Promessi Sposi. The first novel accommodated itself to a situation of Romantic and markedly Scottian narrative, and certainly pleasing to the public of Europe, if that public continued to read the initial themes, more colorfully and theatrically dramatic, through the definitive transfiguration.

The outline says very little; yet one perceives that history is no longer a scenographic pretext, as in most fashionable historical novels, for a fantasizing escape, or a lively coloring of facts: the relationship already changes, if the center of the novel is no longer in the powerful, who believe they make history, but in the humble, who in appearance submit to it. In reality history moves toward them, and everything converges upon their poor vicissitude, overturning every intellectual and social prestige of solemn deeds. Already in the first novel the author's attention and the seriousness of his moral world and the firmness of his judgment are extreme; but if, in passing from the tragedies to the novel, he has, as he said, become "dialified," if he has set aside, for a firmer investigation of truth, the appeal to the eloquence of sentiments, he still indulges in an excess of artistic richness and inventive vivacity, avails himself prodigally of that substance and those modes whereby the vast tradition of the nineteenth-century novel is increased, and especially of costumism, of psychologism, of portraiture: observation of custom, finesse of analytical introspection, representational vivacity of human types. It is most singular, indeed unique in the history of European letters, that M. should renounce those evident riches that will be the currency of exchange of so many memorable works, in order to seek a more authentic treasure, giving his labor to the second novel: which preserves the old plot and the substance, psychological and historical, but reexamines everything in a deeper meditation, and brings it closer to a more intrinsic truth, investigates it in a perennial substance. There history became chronicle, and the succor given to the humble still had something of the mechanism prearranged for a theatrical vicissitude, which sets it right in the last act: here history becomes providence, not only because it widens the straits of ordinary life and dismantles the traps; but because it opens a living space of the soul to life, and immerses the vicissitudes and the creatures in an aura of active spirituality; in the wave of the consoling Spirit that he had invoked in the hymn, prelude to the novel. The word, in that strenuous craftsman, was still, before the Promessi Sposi, an artificial and painstaking decoration disposed to the thing; but now it becomes a mediation of truth in act, and the poet reveals a truth which, through his work, if he knows how to be faithful to it, passes over to other men. The fable embraces the whole world of nature, the whole world of men, the whole world of the spirit: a single thing, traversed by a single creative animation. Alive is that world of nature, which goes from the circumspect chorography of the proem (but even there you perceive how much earthly force in time is transforming the image of the country) to the verdant prodigy with which nature, in the mysterious force that pervades it in the year of the plague, invades Renzo's vineyard. Alive is that world of history, which likewise keeps the protagonists at a distance, now in the mediocrity of chatter (the march of the mercenary militias in the territory of Lecco is an episode of the Thirty Years' War); and of the heroes of that war, Wallenstein and Richelieu, there is talk at Don Rodrigo's table), now in the severity of condemnation. Alive is that moral world which at every instant summons the least behaviors to the judgment of the life of the spirit, which does not mock, but smiles, with a trusting and consoled cheerfulness, which demands a strict account from all of what they do, and yet never condemns them for what they are, nor confines them in a peremptory sentence. The whole history of nineteenth-century European literature oscillates between the pole of art and the pole of morality; but no poet has traversed the journey from one to the other with more tranquil firmness in his life: that is why what is said of Manzoni's work by investigating its moral life is said by investigating its aesthetic life: because it is a single life, summed up in a marvelous evenness of meditation and tone, absorbed into a pacified certainty. And even the most striking features that tend to isolate themselves in the reader's memory are there so that, urged on by the living recollection, the reader may retrace the whole territory that the poet has traversed: animation, in short; and it is by virtue of life, which in itself sums up every virtue of art and of genius, that the work is alive: every discrimination of reading in comparison with it is merely provisional: you have scarcely attempted to divide the world of fantasy from the world of religion, and everything in memory and in the word is recomposed, as a living presence.

Such is the Christian parable that the new poet recounted to the people of Italy and of Europe; and the literature of Europe finds that it has traveled, from Romanticism onward, toward so many forms of costumism, of psychologism, of moralism, the same road that the novel has traveled; and the people of Italy find that they have enriched their imagination, the popular memory, which has need of myths and of mimes, of a new comedy, precisely when the legacy of the ancient comedy was setting. Renzo and Lucia, don Abbondio and don Rodrigo, fra Cristoforo and the lawyer Azzecca-garbugli, the Unnamed and Card. Federico Borromeo, count Attilio, the Conte-zio and the provincial father of the Capuchins, Agnese and donna Prassede compared with the lady of Monza in her convent or the merchant woman at the Lazaretto, and anonymous creatures who arise for an instant, entrust themselves to a gesture or a word, unforgettable, and remembered forever sink back into silence, the infamous old age of one who wants to hang—

care the vicar of Provision, or the resigned caution of the innkeeper of the full moon, the bravoes who threaten Don Abbondio and the little troop that follows, armed, the unarmed Innominato against the looters, the monatti on the cart of the plague-stricken and the common folk who listen intently to Father Felice's sermon: one by one and all together the poet observes them and entrusts them to memory. But not to a nostalgic memory: to an active remembrance that in the act of recalling breathes of that spiritual air, most concrete and open, aware and warm-hearted, in which the author has immersed his creatures. The old comedy appealed, with its masks and its comic games, to a fundamental and irrevocable distinction between the sacred and the profane; and force and fraud were the motors of every gesture, the lovers vainly surrounding themselves with a pathetic aura, the buffoons vainly escaping toward the fictitious freedom of the lazzo and the comic retort: the new comedy sees that force and fraud do not interrupt life, perceives that between things and persons there is an active virtue which, leaving them apparently intact, opens sudden spaces both for exile and for returns; and laughter does not stiffen the human face into a mask, but rather the smile is the light of the truth that makes its way and helps one to make it, a new light of the word. Only before evil does the word become grave and that light grow dark: not that the voice does not open to prayer, and the soul does not open to hope.

The novel ends with the Storia della Colonna Infame: chronicle and history of that trial of the anointers who persecuted, with a tremendous judicial crime, innocent people. In the novel, the epic had widened from famine to war to plague, with an austere and solemn crescendo; and the poet's victorious rationalism had recounted those facts and those events always underscoring how much human designs, and more especially pompous ones, were inferior to events, and how short the judgment of politicians and administrators. But the judges called to judge the presumed anointers should have, reasonably applying their albeit imperfect jurisprudence, should have acquitted them of a crime not committed; and instead they yield to vulgar superstition, and torture, condemn and kill. The theme of the plague had introduced into the novel a picture of corrupted nature, the pitiable torment of the infected bodies, that malignant swelling of the buboes on human persons: almost as if to forbid the new morality to take refuge again in the easy Arcadian enclosure that fabled a nature, despite sin, easy and benign: an Arcadia ignorant of evil and of death. But this immense gloss on the novel that is the Storia observes with even more bitter anguish the pestilence of injustice in the social body, the unbridling of monstrous passions, the degradation of human dignity; and it reproaches the poets, in the face of horror, for having been able to yield to falsehood. Once again poetry is, for the new poet, no longer beautiful fiction, but authentic truth; and Christian pity is his guide and light.

In the literary history of Italy the unassuming figure of the Lombard nobleman gradually grows, as the years pass; and the chronicle of his fortune proves him present and active in ever wider territories of life and of speech. In the culture of the new people, which Romantic literature proposes to Italy, when the civilization of Renaissance humanism has closed its cycle, he comes forward in a circle of poets who, moved by Alfierian voluntarism, still elementary in its generous and ingenuous will, have attended to the founding of a new popular humanism, and he leads Foscolo's pietas, nourished by sentiment and by history, to its extreme and legitimate conclusions: securing Christian concreteness to that expectation which remembered Christianity without finding it whole again. And through the spiritual inheritance that entrusts itself to the least intonations of language, the Manzonian word, which is the most repeated among the people of today and which has summed up and brought to new intentions the natural inheritance of the dialect, obliges our civilization to retrace, willingly or not, the synthesis of Christian thought. Easily detectable, but even more active in its depths, is M.'s fortune in European culture: for he was received, with an attention that had not been repeated for centuries for a poet of Italy, by representative men of such different currents of thought as Goethe, Comte, Ste-Beuve; and directly, or through Stendhal, [he acted] on the orientations of the European novel, present every time an author or a school opposed itself to one or another of the Romantic codifications, urging narrative toward a total interest in human life and a moral problematic: from the historical novel to the verist novel to the spiritualist novel, it is always the Manzonian synthesis that operates on the narrative of Europe for a century. And if polemic continually halts to confine him within the presumed limit of gnomic literature (but gradually acknowledging in him an ever vaster spiritual experience: the first detractors attributed to him a mentality of Fra Galdino, without even perceiving how far the humble beggar rises in the wave of the fabulous expectation that unreflectingly echoes: today he is pointed to as heir both of the moralism of the seventeenth century and of the encyclopedism of the eighteenth), criticism continually ascertains new poetic values, and the creative animation of every moment of his feeling and his meditating.

Mario Apollonio