Modern Italian Poets - Essays and Versions by William Dean Howells
page 126 of 358 (35%)
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 |
|