MANZONI, ALESSANDRO. — Writer, born in Milan on 7 March 1785, died there on 22 May 1873. Externally, his life was that of a Milanese gentleman well provided with worldly goods, with a marked taste for study and little inclination toward social life. Much has already been said about him and his family: his mother, Giulia, daughter of the celebrated Marquis Cesare Beccaria (v.), had married an elderly nobleman, Pietro M., left him to live in London and Paris with another Milanese patrician, Carlo Imbonati, a pupil of Parini; and the little boy was passed from one boarding school to another, from Merate and Lugano to Milan. Returning to his father’s house, he lived for several years in unsatisfied dissipation, and in 1805 he joined his mother in Paris, now widowed of both her husband and her companion. In 1808 he married Enrichetta Blondel, daughter of a Genevan banker settled in Milan and a Calvinist. His family life was peaceful and calm, shared between his wife and his mother: increasingly detached from Paris, where he had spent his early years, he became ever more devoted to his villa at Brusuglio, a few miles from Milan, and to his house in Contrada del Morone in the city centre. His life could be minutely narrated in the chronicle of births, illnesses, and deaths; yet it resists dramatization, so Christianly modest and nobly reserved is II. In 1833 Enrichetta died (he wrote “eccedere manus” on the draft of the funeral hymn: he called her “dear” and fell silent); he then married Teresa Borri, widow of Stampa, and nearly all his children predeceased him. Fame, which seized him after the publication of his novel, grew after the unification of Italy; yet he knew how to surround himself with silence in every circumstance. For the great event of that life, the ordering centre of that long succession of days, was his conversion in 1810—a fact from which history flows, not one that in itself has a history; and though the poet could speak of the episode at the church of S. Rocco in Paris, where he entered seeking a sign and left a believer, he preferred to remain silent, adoring in his heart.
Among the most intimate circumstances one must place the profound seriousness of Enrichetta, who gave a religious content to his moral attentiveness and decisively accepted his uncertain beginnings (the Catholic baptism of his firstborn Giulia might have been a generic act of deference; yet the mother, a Christian, was ready to accept the extreme consequences of forgotten premises). Among external circumstances, that movement of return to Christianity, or at least of reconciliation between a secular society and “a substance of things hoped for,” found in Chateaubriand its poet and in the Napoleonic Concordat its political realization.
He does not shed light, but receives it from a man who, together with the purest of his companions of that vigil, Pellico and Confalonieri, taught one to make a spiritual judgment of history, to conquer by suffering. If you attempt to grasp him in the sphere of religious reconsiderations, avoid reducing him to a limited sphere of acquaintance, confusing him with even venerated and dear persons, or identifying him with a doctrinal system. Whoever situates the chronology of his religious conversion, for example, encounters a Jansenist milieu: such was the religious circle he frequented in Paris after returning there with his wife, his ties to the Condorcet circle at the Maisonnette loosened, the catechist of the neophyte Enrichetta being the Genoese abbot Eustachio Degola, a former follower of Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci, such were the readings in the Manzoni household, the veneration for the men, writings, and memories of Port-Royal. Yet even within this circle, and not only in it, Manzoni maintained an assiduous guardianship of his responsibility, an unshakable firmness in avoiding mediocre and lesser commitments, in binding himself to a path, in adapting the dogma he was investigating 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 spiritual direction Degola recommended the new family upon their return to Italy; and here, too, the new environment certainly had its weight. Though the religious itinerary of the convert was slow, circumspect, and deeply meditated, the new director, though doubtful of doing well, freed Enrichetta from the excessively rigid instructions of the catechist and guided her toward traditional religious practices in the most Catholic Ambrosian church, even though he himself had emerged from the Pavia school of Tamburini and Zola.
The fruit of long meditation, though only in part due to the urgings of Monsignor Tosi, was the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, intended to refute Sismondi’s assertions that the Catholic Church bore responsibility for the moral decline of Italy in recent centuries. What seemed a task imposed by the spiritual director upon his protégé was in reality a freely pursued meditation over many years on the relationship between morality and custom. The work was never completed, yet it remains at the centre of Manzonian thought and is essential to the history of I Promessi Sposi: a history of meditation and a history of poetics. Nor could the course of nineteenth-century Italian culture, down to its final conclusions—from liberalism to socialism, arriving at the religious revival of twentieth-century culture—be explained without this appeal, which, beyond every utilitarianism, every moralism, every historicism, transcending thus all the immanentist positions of old and new theories, demonstrates the unity of religion and moral life, and that Catholic morality and morality without further qualification are one and the same.
Through the golden little book of the Morale cattolica one better understands the meaning that the various circles of culture had in Manzoni’s spirituality: through the manifold he tends toward the unitary, through custom and history he tends toward moral life, which is religious life. Even his biographical journey is thus illumined as if by a providential light: for he retraced the stages of the Protestant schism back toward Catholic unity. And just as the schism had passed from the demand for moral reform to free examination, to Calvinism, to revolutionary encyclopedism, so the young Alessandro had set out from this revolutionary encyclopedism, had frequented and meditated upon the dramatic and pitiless absolutism of Calvinism, and had ascended to the meditation on Catholic morality, accepting all the responsibilities of a critical inquiry. But how could it have been otherwise, when the great epochs of his family life had been the milestones of a returnee’s journey? Civil marriage, Calvinist marriage, the Catholic baptism of little Giulia, Catholic marriage. His life is a deliberate punctuation of significant and responsible acts, and the poet of the new human comedy passes total judgment on himself before judging others. Such admirable coherence must be studied by examining the horizons, connections, and rhythms of development of his thought: encyclo
Pedantry, romanticism, and liberalism are the terms that indicate some of his most prominent concerns; they also fairly well describe some of the chapters to which he devoted his vast reading. Yet whenever encyclopedism verged on the idolatry of scientism and the presumption of intellectualism, he recovered that dignity of human reason which had been the authorized premise of Renaissance achievements; and whenever Romanticism, in more than one of its zones, yielded to the seductions of pantheism, panagism, and decadentism—thereby dissipating the generous intention of a culture that would be the life of the spirit suffused by the word of poetic creation—he freed reflection on art from the encumbrances of external rules, from the blind and mendacious traditionalisms of mythologism and formalism, while propelling it toward the synthesis of truth, beauty, and goodness and toward the unity of the created image. And whenever liberalism quickly settled into the defense of a class-based view of economic life independent of morality, he reaffirmed alongside the divine gift of reason the divine gift of freedom, each a condition of the dignity of the person.
History, providence, and unity are the preeminent themes of his thought. The author of the finest historical novel in a European tradition stretching from Scott to Tolstoy, he was a historian thoroughly versed in every subtle technicality of research, a scholar equipped with every auxiliary science—especially legal studies—acute in inquiry and robust in synthesis. Above all, he was a philosopher keenly aware of the decisive significance that the occasion of time assumes in the life of the individual and of society. By native inclination and by the prompting of his age—witnessing the ascendancy of sociality over individuality—he cultivated a taste for collective movements and the psychology of crowds. He was the heir of Muratori and Vico, a leading figure not only among the Neoguelph historians and Italian medievalists but also an indirect promoter of studies in economic history.
Yet beyond history, still following a path that links his meditation to that of Augustine and Bossuet, he understood Providence as gathering the scattered threads of human wills. A poet of Providence—even in the tragedy of his political pessimism, *Adelchi*—he grasped the aid that the people of the defeated await in a sphere of religious expectation. And he moved toward a metaphysics of unity through meditation on discord: the search for unity is political life, which in his day saw the triumph of the unitary idea in Italian history; the search for unity is the linguistic definition he attempted in his reflections on art; the search for unity is the inner life of poetry, which finds its repose in the purity of the created image.
In the midst of a labor that assiduously traced life back from all the peripheral zones of chronicle and discourse, the catalog of his works of thought and poetry can only be a provisional indication of a moral achievement: so far was he from the act by which the human spirit closes itself within its own work, whether thinking or composing poetry, and dallies with its own image. If the new culture denounced the placid conformism that isolated the life of the spirit and blissfully dreamed of the perfect and empty form, Manzoni was a Romantic because he accepted the task of re-examining every moment of history and language, guiding man to face his ultimate responsibilities, before God. The notes he appended to his tragedies are far more than the evidence offered by a writer who documents himself: they first and foremost pose, from the very beginning, the problem of the relationship between history and invention. They isolate, in a treatise-like manner, individual problems of great importance, such as the division between Lombards and Latins developed in the *Discourse on Some Points of Lombard History in Italy*, which, pursuing documentary research, extends the image of *Adelchi*, a tragedy of peoples, to see in the origins of the catastrophe of the Lombards the irreparable schism between rulers and subjects, the humble and the powerful.
Another paragraph in his unceasing meditation on unity is the last of his historical works, advanced in what some considered a negative or sterile old age: *The French Revolution of 1789 and the Italian Revolution of 1859*, which points to the historical potential of the Italian Risorgimento in the fact that it moved in the opposite direction from the French Revolution, toward unity rather than its dissipation. The same impulse is evident in his aesthetic studies, beginning with the *Letter to M. Chauvet on Unity of Time and Place in Tragedy*, which develops and documents ideas sketched in the preface to *The Count of Carmagnola*: unity is not an extrinsic fact to be sought through external devices, such as representing events in the same place and compressing them within twenty-four hours, but the intimate substance of the work, to be sought through meditation that distances itself from circumstances and touches the authentic truth of the work, moving from gestures to felt reflection.
He did not take part in the polemic—rather, in the discussion—on Romanticism by starting from one of the most debated and observed points, given the popularity, especially in France, of theatrical literature. Yet he pushed his inquiry much further: beyond the circle in which the Lombard Romantics lingered, recognizing in him a leading figure even though he remained distant from the fray of journalistic literature. Even his “manifesto” on Romanticism, the *Letter on Romanticism to the Marquis d’Azeglio*, written in the same year, 1823, as the letter to Chauvet, was in reality a private letter, the apology of a man of letters asked directly why he had joined a school. In it, through indications later expanded in subsequent drafts, he elaborated the doctrine of the true, the beautiful, and the good: a metaphysics of art expressed in terms that were not out of place in a literary defense. If this manifesto, which some believed confined to the narrow milieu of Lombard Romanticism, seems (but does not) theoretically less demanding than the doctrines of contemporary German Romanticism, attention has been allowed to rest on the unassuming and easy tone of the discussion rather than on assessing the theological responsibilities of the thesis—which proposes that art, even if following a doctrine of Platonic origin never entirely lost over centuries of aesthetic culture, should be a way, truth, and life: thus placing itself within the meditation of the Christian message. This is also the aim of the dialogue *Invention*, which, discussing the term—slipped by one of the interlocutors—of artistic creation, investigates the divine origin of ideas, which the artist invents only insofar as he finds them: a true finding in the mind of the creating God. Here Manzoni could declare his debt to Antonio Rosmini: the most fervent of his encounters, which allowed the poet to descend from truth to certainty and to see his own intuition confirmed in a robust doctrinal system.
Finally, the chapter of his studies on language, summed up in that work advanced so far yet never completed, *On the Italian Language*, entrusted mainly to the posthumous essay *Attending Mass* and to the letter *On the Italian Language to Giacinto Carena: a doctrine that, inserted into a centuries-old and mediocre tradition of linguistic studies, seemed to lower itself; and yet another paragraph in the doctrine of unity, as well as a political act by a community of speakers that, to resolve the practical problem of semantic language, elected one among many Italian dialects to represent them all.*
The ways of his intelligence spread providentially, entrusted to humble and wise phrases such as “sentire e meditare” or “pensarci su,” which are cited here also to note the contrast between many magnificently romantic attitudes and his Italian master; and above all to highlight the profound seriousness of the commitment the writer undertakes and the indissoluble links he establishes between poetry and reflection. This is the most direct path to understanding the virtue of his poetic work, after having situated it in reverse within his life and culture. He never loses sight of the responsibilities that bind poetry to thought, the consequent acts of moral life; and if few or none have, to the same degree as he, the habit of discernment and the clarity of argumentation—conscious heir of a victorious rationalism—he never accepts the isolation of poetic meditation from philosophical meditation into permanently distinct intellectual operations.
The poems before his conversion, beginning with Il Trionfo della Libertà, where through Monti he invokes Dante and exalts the Italian countryside that overturns Austrian rule and absolute governments, are far more than the literary exercise of a highly gifted young man. He fixes the themes (freedom precisely, and morality: indeed, freedom as moral life) that, with time, prove to be resolvable only in the direction of a total relationship between man and God; and as his philosophical speculation advances, so too does his poetry gather into a more closely observed sphere. Il Trionfo is almost contradicted by Gli Sposi, where he awaits from men and years to know who they are; and Gli Sermoni, which oscillate between Parini’s example and the more casual and relaxed attention of Gaspare Gozzi, await the solemn grand style of the poem In morte di Carlo Imbonati; and again, between an ambitious objectification (this time the poetics of the Graces) and an individual reconsideration, he oscillates in passing from Urania to Parteneide.
The balance between the individual world and the social world, which he had sought neoclassically in a clamorous solitude or in refined reserve, is found with far greater fullness of life and poetic happiness in the Inni sacri. There were to be twelve hymns, celebrating the major feasts of the liturgical year; he published five, in this order: Il Natale; La Passione; La Resurrezione; La Pentecoste; Il Nome di Maria. While their literary stylistic features also connect them to an uninterrupted tradition of sacred poetry, their inspiration harks back to the origins of Italian poetry and language, summoning the people to liturgical participation, gathering them in a religious celebration that comforts, instructs, and reveals them to themselves, making them aware of the dignity of their customs—where religious life plays such 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 journey: La Resurrezione (1812) also expresses the life-impulse of his soul, reborn to Faith, and gathers certain themes that will return in flesh in the episode of the Innominato’s conversion (with the counterpoint of the family and village feast that aids the theme of the proud redeemed). 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 II. In Il Natale the scene of the Nativity, though expanding to the song of the angels and the memory of the prophets, is gathered in an aura of family intimacy, from which it is easier to move along fanciful thematic departures, to La Passione, which unfolds from the initial threnody to a confident abandonment to the certainty of the Resurrection. But La Pentecoste, as the last composed, summarizes in praise of the Consoling Spirit, and in the history of the Church—its work upon 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 Manzoni conducts in those most fervent years: it is indeed arranged at the close of the tragedies and 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 themes of the humble, of freedom, and of Providence. Also connected to the poetics of the Inni sacri, with the Strofe per una prima Comunione, are the fragments for the hymn of All Saints, splendid in the animation with which they sing the life of nature and the virtue of the humble unknown to the world, and of the Natale 1833, on the death of Enrichetta.
Keeping La Pentecoste as the summarizing work of all Manzonian lyric and the condition for the novel, the tragedies and political lyrics can be gathered into a single group of works. The canzone Aprile 1814 reflects the illusions of the independents and hastily hastens to affirm a timely intervention of Providence in history to heal, in full accord with reasonable and obvious human demands, human injustices. More indignation and at the same time more measured reflection is found in the canzone Per il proclama di Rimini (1815), which centrally 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 contest that misfortune, in his poetic meditation, is “providential”: providential for individuals, who through suffering redeem themselves; providential in the history of men, who suffer in order to open themselves to the dignity and freedom of a new life. The fourteenth-century condottiere, intolerant of inertia and bold, falls victim to the schemes of Venetian politicians, who would subordinate his strength to their aims of conquest and who consider human pity—with which, after victory, he frees prisoners—treason. And the Lombard Adelchi succumbs to a historical force against which he reacts in vain by fighting bravely and dying in battle: just as in vain does the passionate and forlorn Ermengarda waste away, also innocent, also a victim of that fierce force. If the generous perish in the unequal struggle against selfishness, it is precisely through suffering that they are redeemed; but the peoples live beyond the momentary vicissitudes of force and fortune. If the battle of Maclodio, in which Carmagnola wins, is the mournful episode of a civil war that will end in the servitude of both victors and vanquished to the foreigner, the chorus that celebrates it broadens to all Italian history, finally understood as moral judgment—not within the chronological limits of the event, but in a span of centuries. And if Franks and Lombards alternate in ruling the conquered Latins (though contemporaries easily read the event as the struggle for predominance between France and Austria over Italian soil), the deacon Martino announces an appeal to a supreme power against the force of politics and arms: thus the neo-Guelphs will understand the aid of the Church to the historical life of the Italian people. The tragedies understand human drama well beyond a conflict rigidly fixed in the clash of representative characters: they unfold, in fact, in an epic space, and echo, in their dialogues and choruses, in a space of concentrated popular attention. Political meditation continues in the political hymns: Il Marzo 1821, which reposes in God, to whom the new popular arms are consecrated, the sacred judgment on the history of peoples, and closes with unforgettable accents the tablets of the new Christian nationalism; and Il Cinque Maggio, on the death of Napoleon, dramatically agitated between the immensity of 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 prolongs itself, beyond the fate of individuals who die only aided by immortal Faith, in the events of peoples.
Between 1821 and 1823 MANZONI composed *Gli Sposi Promessi*, submitted it to the censors, and announced to his friends that it was ready for printing; yet he did nothing with II. In fact, he withdrew it from public expectation, reworked it from beginning to end, and produced an entirely new work which he published in 1826–27 as *I Promessi Sposi*. The first novel conformed to a romantic narrative situation and was quite evidently—and certainly to the taste of the European public—if one continued to read its opening themes, more vividly and theatrically dramatic, through the definitive transfiguration.
The outline says very little; yet one senses that the story is no longer a scenographic pretext, as in most fashionable historical novels, for a fanciful escape or a lively garnish of information. The relationship has already changed, for the centre of the novel is no longer among the powerful who believe they are making history, but among the humble who appear to suffer II. In reality, history moves toward them, and everything converges on their humble plight, overturning every intellectual and social prestige of solemn deeds. Already in the first novel the author’s attention, the seriousness of his moral world, and the firmness of his judgment are extreme; but if, as he himself said, he had moved from tragedy to the novel in order to strip away the appeal to the eloquence of sentiment in favour of a firmer investigation of truth, he still indulged in an excess of artistic richness and inventive vitality, drawing prodigally on the substance and mannerisms that swell the vast tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, especially costume, psychology, and portraiture: observation of manners, subtlety of analytical introspection, vivid representation of human types. It is most singular, indeed unique in the history of European literature, that MANZONI should renounce those evident riches which would become the currency of exchange for so many memorable works, in order to seek a more authentic treasure, labouring on the second novel so that it might preserve the old plot and its psychological and historical substance, yet re-examine everything in a deeper meditation and bring it closer to an intrinsic truth, probing a perennial substance. The story became chronicle, and the rescue of the humble still had something of the contrivance arranged for a theatrical denouement; but here history becomes providence—not only because it loosens the constraints of ordinary life and dismantles the traps, but because it opens a living space of the soul to life and immerses events and creatures in an aura of active spirituality, in the wave of the Consoling Spirit whom he had invoked in the hymn that prefaces the novel. In that strenuous craftsman, before *I Promessi Sposi*, language was still decorative artifice, diligently arranged for the occasion; now it becomes the mediation of truth in act, and the poet reveals a truth which, if he remains faithful to it, passes through him to other men. The fable embraces the whole world of nature, the whole world of men, the whole world of spirit: one single thing traversed by a single creative animation. Alive is that world of nature, from the bold circumstance of the prologue (though one also senses how much earthly force over time transforms the image of the countryside) to the living prodigy by which nature, in the mysterious force that pervades it, invades Renzo’s vineyard during the year of the plague. Alive is that world of history, which yet removes the protagonists now into the mediocrity of the everyday (the march of mercenary troops through the territory of Lecco is an episode of the Thirty Years’ War, and of its heroes, Wallenstein and Richelieu, one hears at Don Rodrigo’s table) now into the severity of judgment. Alive is that moral world which at every moment calls the behaviour of men to judgment in the life of the spirit, which neither mocks nor scorns, but smiles with a trusting and consoled gladness, which demands a strict account from all for what they do, yet never condemns them for what they are, nor seals them with a peremptory sentence. All nineteenth-century European literature oscillates between the pole of art and the pole of morality; yet no poet has traversed the distance between them with more tranquil firmness: this is why what is said of MANZONI’s work when investigating its moral life is also said when investigating its aesthetic life, because it is a single life, summed up in a marvellous equality of tonal meditation, absorbed in a serene certainty. Even the most striking traits that tend to isolate themselves in the reader’s memory are so because, stirred by vivid recollection, the reader retraces the entire territory the poet has traversed: in short, animation; and it is by virtue of life, which in itself sums every virtue of art and intellect, that the work is alive. Any discriminating reading in comparison is merely provisional: you have barely tried to separate the world of fantasy from the world of religion when, in memory and in word, everything recomposes itself as a living presence.
Such is the Christian parabola that the new poet told to the people of Italy and Europe; and European literature finds itself having traversed, from Romanticism onward, through so many forms of costume, psychology, and moralism, the path that the novel has taken; and the people of Italy find themselves having enriched their imagination and popular memory—which still needs myths and tales—with a new comedy precisely when the legacy of ancient comedy was fading. Renzo and Lucia, Don Abbondio and Don Rodrigo, Father Cristoforo and Dr. Azzecca-garbugli, the Unnamed and Cardinal Federico Borromeo, Count Attilio, Count-zio, and the Capuchin provincial, Agnese and Donna Prassede—compared to the Lady of Monza in her convent or the merchant woman in the Lazzaretto, and the anonymous creatures who appear for a moment, entrust themselves to a gesture or a word, unforgettable and forever recalled, then sink back into silence—the vituperative old age of one who wants to set fire to the vicar of Provvisione or the resigned caution of the innkeeper at the full moon—