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Romanticism in Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Kenneth McKenzie
Kenneth McKenzie*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Italy, for obvious reasons, always kept closer than other countries to ancient classical literature. There the classic spirit was native, for the Italians were always conscious of being the heirs of the ancient Roman Empire; there Humanism and the Renaissance arose; there the counter-Reformation resisted the Protestant spirit of the northern countries; there Arcadian academies and pseudo-classicism flourished. But the Romantic attitude was present in many Italian writers from the Middle Ages on. Petrarch was romantic in his introspective melancholy, Ariosto was romantic in his love of picturesque adventure; yet both are classic in the perfection of their style as well as in their knowledge of antiquity. Thus the two tendencies existed side by side, frequently in the same man, although in theory Italy remained classicist until the end of the eighteenth century. The pre-romantic literature of France, England, and Germany was modified in Italy by the prevalent classical tradition, but it found there a fertile soil. As a literary movement, Romanticism in Italy is best considered as represented by a group of writers in the period which followed the collapse of Napoleon's empire.

Type
Romanticism: A Symposium
Information
PMLA , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 1940 , pp. 27 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

1 See a book with the provocative title Il Romanticismo Italiano non esiste, by Gina Martegiani (Firenze, 1908); and Guido Calgari, Il Romanticismo in Germania e in Italia (Milano, 1929).

2 In the eighteenth century Baretti and Bertòla spread in Italy a knowledge of English and German literature. The influence of Rousseau, of Richardson, Young, and Gray, and of the poems ascribed to Ossian was especially significant. But we have only to mention the names of Goethe, Mme de Staël, Stendhal, Musset, and Byron to show that the influence was far from being all in one direction.

3 Natali maintains that even without foreign influences romanticism would have developed in Italy simultaneously with its appearance elsewhere.

4 This recalls Stendhal's famous definition: “Le romantisme est l'art de présenter aux peuples les œuvres littéraires qui, dans l'état actuel de leurs habitudes et de leurs croyances, sont susceptibles de leur donner le plus de plaisir possible.” The articles in the Conciliatore here cited, with a complete index of the 118 numbers of the journal, may be found in P. A. Menzio, Dal “Conciliatore” (Torino, 1921).

5 The letter was not intended for publication. In 1846 it was printed without Manzoni's permission; later he was induced to revise it and in 1871 he published it with the title “Sul Romanticismo.” It may be found, both in the original version with the title “Sopra i diversi sistemi di poesia” and in the revised version, with notes and bibliography, in Scritti Postumi di Alessandro Manzoni a cura di G. Sforza (Milano, 1900), vol. i. For the relations of Manzoni to Fauriel, Stendhal, and Hugo, see R. Bray, Chronologie du Romantisme (Paris, 1932), Chap. v.