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Modern Italian Poets - Essays and Versions by William Dean Howells
page 126 of 358 (35%)
and skepticism, and that there rose against them a spirituality
carried to idealism, to mysticism. "To the right of nature was opposed
the divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual
rights the State, to liberty authority or 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, whose 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
aspiration towards the infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore
melancholy.... To Voltaire and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De
Stael, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Lamennais. And in 1815 appeared the
Sacred Hymns of the young Manzoni."

The Romantic movement was as universal then as the Realistic movement
is now, and as irresistible. It was the literary expression of
monarchy and aristocracy, as Realism is the literary expression of
republicanism and democracy. What De Sanctis shows is that out of
the political tempest absolutism issued stronger than ever, that the
clergy and the nobles, once its rivals, became its creatures; the
prevailing bureaucracy interested the citizen class in the perpetuity
of the state, but turned them into office-seekers; the police became
the main-spring of power; the office-holder, the priest and the
soldier became spies. "There resulted an organized corruption called
government, absolute in form, or under a mask of constitutionalism.
... Such a reaction, in violent contradiction of modern ideas, could
not last." There were outbreaks in Spain, Naples, Piedmont, the
Romagna; Greece and Belgium rose; legitimacy fell; citizen-kings came
in; and a long quiet followed, in which the sciences and letters
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