Recent Books on Italy

I CANNOT say that I have ever wholly admired that famous apostrophe of Robert Browning’s to Italy which begins with the alliterative line, —

There is a flaw in taste somewhere, a touch of commonness about it, from which the far more impassioned sonnet of Filicaja,

is entirely free.

But poets will be poets, and critics captious, and whatever be the nature of Italy’s perennial appeal to the affections of the more highly developed human creature, whether sensual, spiritual, intellectual, or a fiery mixture of the three, there can be no question about the reality of the spell. It is as old as recorded time, and shows no sign of decay. The shadow of that great name embraces the globe; the lure of the fleeting land (Italiam fugientem) pursued by the Trojan exiles is as potent as ever; and the making of many books about Italy will probably go on while the world endures.

It happens that the year just past was unusually prolific in what may be described without disparagement as popular books, upon the inexhaustible theme. Those we have now to consider may conveniently be divided into two classes: condensed compendia, or manuals of general history, and essays in description, often admirably illustrated, of which two or three, like Shelley in Italy and The Florence of Landor, aim at novelty by the endeavor to see the unrivaled spectacle of Italy, through the eyes of some one or other of its more illustrious lovers in the past.

It is a pleasure promptly to assign the first place in our first class to A Short History of Italy, by Henry Dwight Sedgwick. Mr. Sedgwick has done an exceedingly difficult thing better than it was ever done — in English, at least — before, and about as well, one may venture to affirm, as it ever can be done. His essays in miscellaneous literary criticism, collected and published in a book some two years ago, were so keen, clever, fairminded, and sweet-tempered, as to inspire good hope that a genuine light of humane letters had once more been kindled among us. But the essays were of curiously unequal merit, and the best of them, though so good, were certainly no better than those astonishingly brilliant and original studies in a few of the greatest writers by another of the younger Harvard men, John J. Chapman, of which the exhilarating promise has not yet been redeemed.

Mr. Sedgwick, on the contrary, has gone straight on to take his higher degree, and has won it summa cum laude. It is a fine thing, and not given to all, to “know the greatest wdien we see it;” to salute with appropriate homage, devout and yet intelligent, some transcendent individual reputation. It is another and much rarer thing to be able to embrace, in one unwavering view, a vast and momentous historic period, chaotic with strife, teeming with revolutions, pregnant with all manner of imperfectly analyzed influences on the life of to-day, and to draw, in strong outline, a comprehensive picture, the perspective of whose long vista shall be quite correct, and the lightly suggested hues and values even approximately right. It is this which Mr. Sedgwick has done for the story of the Italian peninsula from 476 to 1900 A. D. ; and the student who is already familiar with his Gibbon and Gregorovius, with the seven monumental volumes of Mr. Hodgkin on Italy and her Invaders, and the authoritative summary of Mr. Bryce, will be all the better prepared to appreciate the main accuracy and indefectible honesty of this concise but never dull account, of the passing of the classic Roman Empire, the rise of the mediæval Roman Church, and the secular struggle between popes and emperors for that second Roman imperium which is commonly described as Holy. One may note, as a single specimen out of many that might be cited of Mr. Sedgwick’s almost precocious capacity for an impartial charge to the jury, the way in which, after an admirable discussion of the curious relations between Charles, the Great and the first Nicholas, he sums up the case for the Pope in the obscure but hardly dubious matter of the Isidorian Decretals and the other so-called Donations in early Christian times of temporal sovereignty to the Church.

Very clear, too, considering the difficulty of the subject, is our author’s account of the rise of the Italian Despots, and his analysis of the widely varying motives which led those fierce competitors for power and territory to unite in fostering the great revival of letters and art in the Quattrocento, whereby it fell to the Italians, as a people, once more to lead the world.

In A Short History of Venice, by William Roscoe Thayer, we have, again, an excellent abstract of one of the most inviting separate chapters in the long tale of Italian civilization. There have been several attempts, in recent years, by more or less able writers, including the late Mrs. Oliphant, to epitomize the political development, and exhibit, on a small scale, the vividly picturesque drama of the unique Venetian state; but this of Mr. Thayer’s will easily supersede them all. The narrower scope of his theme permits him to treat it in a more personal manner than was possible for Mr. Sedgwick, and so, perhaps, to invest it with a keener human interest for the average reader. Mr. Thayer has, moreover, though duly subordinated to his obligations as an impartial historian, his point to prove, — his own distinct theory of what made Venice great, — and he indicates it openly in his preface. After premising that no other people has been the victim of more misconception than the Venetians, he goes on to say: “Venice pursued her own way, independent of all those nations . . . like the German, the French, the English, . . . which have dominated the modem epoch; and although she was, in a large sense, the product of the Middle Ages, she was the least mediæval of her contemporaries. . . . The trend of political evolution sets toward popular government; the Venetians formed a powerful state after a different plan. They developed a national organism perfectly adapted to their unique conditions, but so opposed to modern political ideals that few students have investigated it, and fewer still have treated it sympathetically.”'

There is no lack of sympathy, and certainly none of ability, in Mr. Thayer’s analysis of the evolution from humblest and most distressed beginnings of the great aristocratic and imperialistic commonwealth. The ugly word oligarchy does not frighten him in the least. It was because Venice had the clear foresight, and the rare good sense, early to place her fortunes unreservedly in the hands of her élite few, that she made of the shifting lagoon a firm foundation, whence to depart for the taming of seas and the conquest of continents. Her civil, commercial, and military achievements did, indeed, keep perfect step; and it has the oddest effect when Mr. Thayer interrupts, from time to time, the fine flow of his epic narrative, to recite monotonously, and, as it were, under his breath, the cold and cautious political creed of the distinguished minority in his own Congressional District. No symbol was ever more perfunctorily professed. For nothing is made clearer, by his own showing, than this: that while commerce might have made Venice as rich, and her private life as luxurious, as never was, it was arms that made her great. It was the eternal call to warfare, offensive as well as defensive, which punctually provided the man for the hour, and the captain for the host, in the persons of those great doges and admirals who were, I suppose, take them for all in all, the most stately and symmetrical antetypes of the desired Uebermensch which the world has yet seen. Mr. Thayer himself seems to think that the main debt of the modern world to Venice is for two things, which are, after all, but parts, or aspects, of one: a novel type of heroic human character, and its matchless representation on the unfading canvases of her great portrait-painters. The tenth and eleventh chapters of the Short History, on Venetian art and civilization, are among the most instructive and stimulating in the book; none the less because here, too, the author has his decided preferences, if not his parti pris. An ardent admirer of Venetian architecture, that is to say, of the richer and more highly decorated varieties both of the Byzantine and Gothic, Mr. Thayer has little enthusiasm, and affects none, for the early Venetian painters by whom Ruskin taught us to swear, — for the grave and simple dignity of the Bellini, and the sweet austerities of Carpaccio. It is the great colorists, whom we feel to have been, at the same time, great psychologists, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, who command his unstinted homage.

The book is provided with a few simple but admirable maps and plans, which illustrate, in the clearest manner, the growth of Venice afriong her islands, and her inevitable expansion along the mainlands of Italy and Dalmatia.

We fancy that we know exactly what to expect from the polite title, Salve Venezia, and the scrupulous external elegance of Mr. Crawford’s new volumes; nor does that accomplished and always agreeable author disappoint us. As in the companion books about Rome and the two Sicilies, we have the raw material of history, slowly amassed or laboriously epitomized by others, treated mainly from the artist’s point of view, and dexterously, though never dishonestly, manipulated, so as to produce the best scenic effect. The prominent figures are coaxed into graceful grouping; the bewildering chaos of events arranged in a brilliant series of classical tableaux. No phenomena of racial and political development could possibly lend themselves more kindly to such a mode of treatment than those of Venice, where the stage of the great play remains almost intact, — though, it may be, not for long! — and the most magnificent of its properties are still available for the amateur. Mr. Crawford’s intimate acquaintance with modern Italian life and sympathy with Italian characteristics make him a showman among a thousand for the pageant of Italy’s past: while his running commentary is always valuable, precisely because it is based upon a mass of long-assimilated knowledge, which the urbane writer would think it pedantic and in bad taste insistently to obtrude. Inconspicuous marginal notes refer the reader possessed by a rage for verification to such unimpeachable authorities as Darn’s lengthy chronicle, the Storia Documentata of Romanin, the encyclopædic work of Professor Pompeo Molmenti, and that of the two Browns, Rawdon and Horatio, by far the best of recent English writers upon Venice.

It is but just to observe, moreover, that Mr. Crawford never claims for his attractive book the honors of a formal history. Its modest sub-title is Historic Gleanings; and, while the first volume embraces a fairly consecutive narrative of the fortunes of the Adriatic state down to the close of the fifteenth century, the second, and perhaps the fresher and more fascinating of the two, consists mainly of separate essays on the shifting aspects, both political and social, of Venice during the long centuries of her decline,— “ The Last Magistrates,” “ The Last Doges,” “ The Last Homes; ” best of all, perhaps, “ The Last Great Lady.” The latter is a charming sketch of Giustina Michiel, nata Renier; a great beauty, though of diminutive stature, and a greater wit, to whom it fell, in the hour of her country’s deepest humiliation, to lead a forlorn hope against the overbearing young Napoleon, on the slippery field of the drawing-room. Her victory over the all-conquering Cad was as signal as that of another gran’ Signora, at the same period, in Milan (I think she was a Pallavicini), who met the rude affront of “ Tutti gli Italiani sono birboni ” by an affable smile, and the kind of soft answer which does not always turn away wrath, — “ Non tutti, sire — ma buona parte.”

The pages of Salve Venezia are lavishly adorned, and the worth of the book much enhanced, by a hundred or more illustrations from the original drawings of that admirable artist in black and white, Mr. Joseph Pennell. They are pretty evenly dispersed through the two volumes, and, while they bear little or no relation to the place where they are inserted, between the leaves, or in the text, they serve to fill the reader’s imagination with a sort of continuous vision of Venice. The pictures are of two kinds: pen-andink sketches of extreme delicacy, which often represent in a wonderful manner the more or less distant effect upon the eye of the rich details of Venetian Gothic; and wash-drawings of less uniform merit, but which are much less wronged, as a rule, than the others by the brute processes of reduction and multiplication. Whoever is happily familiar with the refinement of Mr. Pennell’s own touch, and his rare faculty of infinite poetic suggestion by the simplest means, will understand at a glance that it was never he who made Venice from the Lido (vol. i, p. 35) look like a New England village of three meeting-houses viewed from the further shore of a narrow stream; while, on the other hand, some of the washdrawings, like A White Morning from San Giorgio and The Last Rays on St. Mark’s, appear to do about all that can be done without color toward fixing upon paper some of those ineffable atmospheric effects which invest with a mysterious and undying glamour the dreamcity by the Adriatic.

The chief attraction for the general public of the modest little volume, With Shelley in Italy, will also be found in the profusion and beauty of its illustrations. They are not, indeed, signed by a distinguished hand, like those of Salve Venezia, but are mostly reproduced from photographs: either Alinari’s (of Florence), which are almost always what we call artistic, or those of the discriminating compiler herself. Such as they are, they must have been sought with infinite industry, and selected with the nicest care; for there is hardly a spot associated with the unique tragedy of Shelley’s ultimate years, from the beauteous pass by which he first crossed the Apennines to the soft waves whose “last monotony” closed over his dying brain in the Bay of Lerici, only four years later, which is not represented here; while every marvel of Italian scenery or art ever illuminated by the swiftly passing searchlight of his transcendent imagination has acquired an appropriate motto from his prose or verse. For the rest, the book furnishes a kind of breviary for the devout Shelleyworshiper; including, as it does, nearly all the poet’s letters from Italy, the greatest of his odes, lyrics, and elegies, — the Skylark, the West Wind, the Adonais, and others, — which were all written there, beside copious extracts from those longer and more studied compositions, such as the Prometheus Unbound and the Cenci, for which he found his inspiration at Rome, in Tuscany, or on the eastern Riviera. The sympathetic editor of this lovely collection, Miss Anna Beneson MacMalian, effaces herself almost entirely, furnishing, in her own person, only a brief and reserved, but refined and discerning preface, and the slightest possible thread of narrative to connect, in their proper chronological order, the letters and other quotations.

Self-effacement is not the foible of Miss Lilian Whiting, who has arranged a very handsome volume which it pleases her to call The Florence of Landor. She tells us, by the way, how cold it was, without a fire, in the shabby salons of that old Rucellai palace on the Piazza Trinita, once owned by the Dukes of Northumberland , when the Theosophic Society of Florence held its meetings there in the winter of 1900; and she appeals to the sympathies of the many American readers who are said to have found moral support in the mild optimism of her ethical essays &emdash; The World Beautiful, The World Radiant, and others — by copious extracts from Emerson, Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Kate Field, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The truth is that Walter Savage Landor had no Florence to speak of, though he lived there many years; and there is less need, even than of most modern authorship, for making a book about him there. He was one of those who by their very idiosyncrasies are foredoomed to live apart. Fine scholar and finished literary artist always, he was too selfcentred and self-absorbed a thinker either to have impressed his own personality on the classic environment, as Byron, Shelley, and the Brownings did, or largely to have nourished his peculiar genius by it; while his exclusive and overbearing temper would never permit him to shine in the circle of those distinguished refugees from England and elsewhere, who made Florentine society delightful during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. Miss Whiting even assigns a long and emphatic chapter to the shadowy Rose Aylmer episode, that most delicate and evanescent dream of Landor’s early youth, which he himself enshrined fitly — and it might have been thought finally — in two exquisite stanzas of four short lines each. But the book is beautifully printed, in large type upon flawless paper, and easy to hold, though so bulky, and it contains some new and interesting anecdotes and a few good illustrations.

Dante the Wayfarer, by Christopher Hare, is a work as much more important than either of the two last named as the mighty figure of Dante Alighieri towers higher in the landscape of the past than Landor’s, or even Shelley’s. Shelley shone upon Italy, and Landor loitered there; but Dante is Italy: the lord of her living language, the link between dynasties and dispensations, the exponent of her most heroic faiths; the seer and prophet, with Petrarch and Cola, but earlier even than they, of her predestined unity.

“ It is a good thing,” said J. J. Ampère, “ to see what Dante saw, to live where he once lived, to set one’s foot in the print left by his;” and following the evercharming Voyage Dantesque of the sympathetic Frenchman, — who was, in some sort, a pioneer in this kind of commentary, — there have been a good many separate monographs by countrymen of the poet’s own, on the traces of his passage through this or that ancient Italian town, — Dante in Siena, Dante in Verona, and the like, — or on the association of his name with more distant regions, such as the Istrian and Ligurian coasts, the Alps, and the secular Aliscamp at Arles.

The result of all these reverent researches will be found summed up, sifted, and checked by personal observation in Mr. Christopher Hare’s book. He has collected from the whole range of Dante’s works, but chiefly from the Divine Com-edy, nearly all the landscape bits, and one is astonished, when one sees them thus assembled, to find how many and how vivid they are, and how completely they enable one to follow the sad itinerary of the poet’s exile. To each extract Mr. Hare appends, after the manner of Mr. W. W. Vernon, in his priceless Readings in the Inferno and Purgatorio, a close translation in more or less rhythmic English prose. These renderings are often very beautiful, though not always quite as miraculously exact as Mr. Vernon’s. The chapter on “ Medieval Paris,” where it is now almost universally conceded that Dante lived for a time, as a student in the great university, is full of curious information; while a soothing glimmer of pale but peaceful light is shed over the fading days of the banished poet, in Mr. Hare’s concluding chapters on “ The Last Refuge,”— in Ravenna, — and “ The Pilgrim’s Goal.” Alla fin’ fine, when every fond ambition had been relinquished and every personal and patriotic hope resigned, the feet so weary with climbing the “stairs of others” found rest; the “dry wind of poverty” ceased, for one brief hour before a comparatively early sunset, to pinch the shrinking nerves of one of the proudest and most sensitive to pain, disgrace, and dependence, of all created souls. He was a guest still, who might have been the most royal of hosts; but eagerly invited by Guido Novello da Polenta, Francesca’s nephew, gratefully received, and tenderly and reverentially served. His children, long unseen, came to him there, — Beatrice’s namesake among them, — friends gathered about, and cherished, and even mildly jested with him. There came to Dante in Ravenna, as we may hope, some faint reflected ray of that ineffable joy —

which had flamed against the black background of his private woes with a steadfast splendor fairly dazzling to our weaker eyesight; and he began to understand, better, perhaps, than even in the Circle of the Sun, the supreme Consolation into which the radiant soul of the once tortured Boethius had entered nearly a millennium before his own day.

Mr. Hare’s fine compilation is fitted to be of such incalculable use to the earnest student of Dante that it seems needful, if a little ungracious, to point out the fact that the text of the present edition teems with minute typographical errors, — as, for example, ritorno for ritorna (p. 16; from Inferno, xiii), altro for altre (p. 45; Purgatorio, iii), rimango for rimanga (p. 112; Purgatorio, xiv), liada for biada (p. 148; Purgatorio, ii). These misprints occur chiefly in the Italian text of the quotations; but we have also (p. 161), “All for love and the word well lost;” and the Mangia tower of Siena is, of course, not the Campanile of the Cathedral, so labeled on the illustration facing page 52, but that airy shaft and belfry springing heavenward like a longstemmed flower from the roof of the Palazzo Pubblico.

In that school of recent writers, French and English, who may be described, collectively, as the literary Impressionists, Vernon Lee holds a distinguished place; and the “leaves from a diary” which she has lately published, under the rather loosely-fitting title of The Spirit of Rome, contain some of her subtlest and most suggestive word-painting. They are the merest shorthand notes of things felt rather than seen in Rome and its dintorni, during the transient spring visits of many successive years, by an Englishwoman of keen and rarely cultivated perceptions, who has passed almost her whole life in some part of Italy; yet that semi-pagan sensitiveness of hers to the religio loci, so remarkably shown in Belcaro Euphorion and the Haunted Woodlands, enables her to render often, in a few learned lines, the complete effect of an Italian view. “I have found it impossible,” says Vernon Lee naïvely, in her half-apologetic preface to the present collection, “to use up, in what I have written of places and their genius, these notes about Rome. I cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the color of one mood.”

Who ever could, or will ? But she carelessly hands us her unset gems; and the least practiced eye will readily discern that some of them, at all events, — like the vignette of Cicero’s Tusculum, and the first glimpse of Subiaco and its great convents, among the Sabine Hills, — are of the purest water.