Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism

A Festschrift for Peter Brand

Martin McLaughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351198530
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: History

"In this volume a team of experts in various fields considers the impact of Italian politics and culture on British life from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. The essays cover a wide range of topics: politics, music, the visual arts, literature and the intellectual life, as well as the emergence of Italian as an academic discipline. Edited, with an introduction, by Martin McLaughlin, the volume includes essays by Ian Campbell, Hilary Fraser, T. G. Griffith, David Kimbell, John Lindon, Denis Mack Smith, Brian Moloney and J. R. Woodhouse, as well as the last article written by the late Serena Professor of Italian at Cambridge, Uberto Limentani."

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Centrality of Dante

Martin McLaughlin

This volume deals with the relations between Britain and Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is dedicated to Peter Brand. His 1957 book on Italy and the English Romantics¹ was a pioneering work in this area and is still, forty years on, an obligatory point of reference for research in this field. The contributions in the present volume cover: politics, the fine arts (including music), literature and the intellectual life, and the emergence of Italian as an academic discipline. The four major sections into which Brand’s study was divided (Travel and Language; Literature; The Arts and Landscape; History, Politics, and Religion) still constitute the major categories of research for scholars working in this period, and all four areas are represented in the present volume, though in reverse order: here we begin with the infrastructure of politics (Mack Smith, Griffith), then work outwards towards the arts (Kimbell, Woodhouse, Fraser), literature and the intellectual life (Campbell, Lindon, Moloney), before discussing the development and institutionalization of Italian language and culture as an autonomous university discipline (Limentani).

However, this is not simply a Festschrift paying homage to a great scholars ground-breaking research. The general question of relations between Britain and Italy in the nineteenth century has since 1957 become something of a growth industry and remains the object of many contemporary studies.² If Brands volume dealt with the first half of the nineteenth century, the present work expands on that and takes coverage into the early decades of the twentieth. It attempts to cover the major facets of the political and cultural relations between the two countries in one of the most crucial periods of their respective histories, dealing primarily with the British reception of Italian culture and of Italian political issues rather than the Italian reception of British culture (though Brian Moloney’s essay does consider this latter phenomenon).

Denis Mack Smith’s contribution, which examines the political repercussions in Britain of the upheavals which led to the unification of Italy, charts the growing British enthusiasm for the Risorgimento in the first half of the nineteenth century. Two major turning points are singled out: the Foreign Office’s tampering with Mazzini’s correspondence in 1844, which led to influential letters of protest to The Times from the likes of Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle; and the election of the Liberal government in 1859, headed by three knowledgeable and powerful Italophiles: Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone. Both events were pivotal in swinging British public opinion behind the cause of Italian unification. Symptomatic of this enthusiasm was the curious fact that along with Garibaldi’s army entering Naples in 1860 was to be found the Public Orator of Cambridge University. This intermingling of the academic world with the major events of history and politics comes full circle sixty years later when Arthur Serena, whose father had helped defend the breakaway Venetian republic of 1848-9, established the first Chair of Italian at Cambridge University in 1919 (see the final chapter by Uberto Limentani).

The political reverberations of the Risorgimento in general and of Mazzini’s thought in particular are shown by Gwyn Griffith to be more far-reaching than is usually thought. The influence of Mazzini’s Giovine Italia is apparent in the Young Wales movement, but the power of literature is alsofelt: Dante’s message, especially as filtered through Mazzinian ideas, could still be relevant to contemporary political issues and be harnessed for (Welsh) nationalistic ends towards the close of the nineteenth century, even in areas on the margin of metropolitan Britain.

The Anglo-Italian cultural world of the time was as lively as the political scene. David Kimbell illustrates Italy’s pre-eminence in the world of British opera in the early years of Victoria’s reign, a period in which even works by non-Italian composers such as Mozart and Meyerbeer were regularly sung in Italian in England. The opening of Covent Garden in 1847 as the specific venue for Italian opera provides further testimony to the dominance of that country’s music in this period, while at the Haymarket theatre there is also evidence of Italian musical culture gradually reaching out to the new railway-travelling public who were able tofrequent Londons lyric theatres from further afield.

But it was in the world of literature and the visual arts that Italian culture had its most profound impact. The articles by John Woodhouse and Hilary Fraser concentrate on two major interdisciplinary figures, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin, whose contributions both to the visual arts and to literature were powerfully shaped by their encounter with Italian culture. Rossetti was the son of an Italian political exile and former carbonaro who had devoted most of his later life to an eccentric, cabalistic interpretation of Dante’s Comedy. The younger Rossetti’s development both as artist and as a writer was informed primarily by his own more sensitive, but equally individualistic, reading of Dante. John Woodhouse, in an essay which draws on important unpublished illustrations, shows that Rossettis highly personal reading of the Vita nuova played a major role in this development: Rossetti’s close identification with Dante himself meant that his life was as much shaped by art as his art was by his life. In fact, what Woodhouse terms Rossetti’s ‘uxorious’ approach to the Vita nuova finds parallels in Theodore Martin’s translation of the work, which is prefaced by a sonnet to his own wife, and in Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House.³

With Ruskin, the scene moves from Italian culture in Britain to an Englishman in Italy, an Englishman initially reluctant to accept either the technological modernization of the peninsula (railways, gas lamps) or its new political aspirations, though by the late 1850s Ruskin is more favourable towards the latter. Hilary Fraser shows us a Ruskin coming to grips with a world that had changed not just technologically and politically, but also intellectually, as Darwinism makes its impact on his studies and drawings in Italy. The year 1864, highlighted by Fraser as the date when Thomas Cook’s first package tours to Europe opened up Italy to the British middle classes, also has an equally powerful reverse image in Garibaldi’s triumphant 1864 tour of Britain, which set the seal on the overwhelming British support for the Italian political cause.

If the chapters by Woodhouse and Fraser document the profound influence wielded by Italian art and literature, particularly the works of Dante, on the intellectual formation of major figures such as Rossetti and Ruskin, the next two contributions concentrate on some of the figures who mediated this influence: Carlyle, Seymour Kirkup, and H. C. Barlow. Here too, however, culture could not be totally divorced from politics: Carlyle’s bookish culture, which led him to provide a definitive Victorian image of Dante as ‘poet-hero’, also had to come to terms with the political reality of the peninsula, in the shape of refugees such as Mazzini, a regular presence in the circles frequented by Carlyle and his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ian Campbell argues that Carlyle, despite never being an expert in Italian, had an extraordinarily intuitive sense of the moral significance of the founding text of Italian literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy.

John Lindon’s chapter also deals with the legacy of Dante, and in the figures of Barlow and Kirkup offers a fascinating contrast within the reception of Italian culture in the central years of the century. The eccentric Seymour Kirkup, who claimed to be visited by the shade of Dante, nevertheless performed a major service to Dante studies in instigating the 1840 discovery of the Bargellofresco of Dante attributed to Giotto: indeed the fresco was first copied by Kirkup himself before its clumsy restoration. Here again politics and culture collide, as the authorities hastily eliminated the original green, white, and red of Dante’s clothes, which at that time would be seen as too provocatively nationalistic. The perfect foil to Kirkup is his correspondent in the middle years of the century, the more academic figure of Henry Clark Barlow, who was a serious Dante scholar and who endowed a prestigious annual set of lectures on the poet at University College London. Barlow, in fact, is the figure that links the Dante scholarship of the middle of the century with the later achievements of the Oxford Dante school of Edward Moore and Paget Toynbee.⁴

By the beginning of the next century, while Dante’s political ideas were able to influence even Welsh nationalism, an Irish author, James Joyce, was undergoing a formative creative experience in Italy, just as Romantic writers such as Byron, Keats, and Shelley had done exactly a hundred years earlier. Brian Moloney’s piece on Svevo argues for an original way in which Joyce influenced one of the most important late stories of his friend, Italo Svevo. Once again there is a curious specular image to set against this. At the very time when Joyce was in the port city of Trieste, back in Britain the Venetian shipping-broker Arthur Serena was about to retire and endow the first chairs of Italian in British universities. The Serena bequest established the first professorial chairs in the subject at Cambridge, Oxford, Birmingham, and Manchester. Uberto Limentani, only the fifth professor of Italian at Cambridge, in the last article he wrote before his death in 1989, traces the intriguing history of the establishment of the Cambridge Chair of Italian, founded in 1919, and outlines the history of its first three incumbents, a history that is once more affected by political upheavals in Italy, this time the rise of Fascism.

This volume as a whole thus reflects the trajectory of Italian culture in Britain in a crucial 100-year period, and represents an attempt to bring up to date with the latest scholarship the pioneering work which Brand inaugurated some forty years ago. It charts the impact of Italy on wide areas of British culture and society in a crucial period of just over a century, a period which in literary terms goes from Romanticism to Modernism. In this time Italian politics as well as Italian literature and art come increasingly to the fore in Victorian society. By the end of the nineteenth century, Italian language, literature, art, and music are not just the preserve of the few aristocrats who could afford the Grand Tour, but are now appreciated by large sections of the populace, and eventually institutionalized in university education, in which a former basket-maker turned adult education lecturer, who had taken his working-class pupils on trips to Italy, could become the first Professor of Italian at Cambridge (see Limentani’s chapter below).

Alongside this social shift, there was another key development in the British perception of Italy: from being an Arcadian locus of classical ruins, which reflected the peninsula’s political fragmentation and absence from the European political scene, Italy changed to become a nation pressing successfully its own cause for a unified identity. By the 1850s and 1860s, the continued presence of exiles such as Mazzini, as well as the occasional but extraordinarily influential visit by Garibaldi, guaranteed that Italy now represented to the British imagination not so much a classical ruin as a new political reality. And if the emphasis in the chapters that follow is largely on England, and—to a lesser extent—Wales and Ireland (apart from Svevo, the impact on Joyce of Italian culture in general, and of Dante in particular, is immense),⁵ we must not forget that Scotland also comes under Italy’s spell.⁶ apart from Carlyle, who (as Ian Campbell’s chapter shows) was receptive to the lure of Italian culture even in distant Ecclefechan, it was, after all, another Scottish writer, James Thomson, who was the first to translate and disseminate Leopardi’s thought, in particular his prose works, in Britain in the late 1860s,⁷ and his most famous poem, The City of Dreadful Night, is deeply indebted to both Leopardi and Dante; similarly the ‘romantic’ imagery of the Italian carbonari surfaces evocatively in one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s finest tales, The Pavilion on the Links (1880): this mixture of Italian ‘exoticism’ with the Scottish landscape was a feature particularly appreciated by the late Italo Calvino.⁸ In the hundred years or so that elapse between the early 1800s and the first decades of the twentieth century Italian language and culture shift from being an exotic Other, the domain of only a few intellectuals, poets, and wealthy travellers, to becoming a familiar ingredient in British political and artistic milieux, as well as an established part of the academic curriculum. No other contemporary European culture had as profound and fertile a resonance in British life in this period.

It is clear from these chapters that the key, recurrent figure who bestrides the fields of culture and politics in this period is Dante. This is not the place for a history of Dante criticism in the Victorian age, though recent scholarship has emphasized the pre-eminence of the author of The Divine Comedy in this epoch.⁹ However, the reception of the Italian poet clearly constitutes a statistically significant barometer of British literary taste at the time, and it is important to contextualize that here in view of the constant reference to Dante in the chapters that follow.

In the late eighteenth century the adjective most often applied to the Comedy had been ‘whimsical’: William Hayley, for instance, in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), had declined to translate any more than three cantos of the Inferno since ‘the extreme inequality of this Poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking, and it appears very doubtful that such a version would intere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Tabula Gratulatoria
• 1 Introduction: The Centrality of Dante
• 2 Britain and the Italian Risorgimento
• 3 Italian Nationalism, Welsh Liberalism, and the Welsh Translation of the Divina Commedia
• 4 The Performance of Italian Opera in Early Victorian England
• 5 Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Translation and Illustration of the Vita nuova
• 6 Ruskin, Italy, and the Past
• 7 Carlyle and Italy
• 8 Dante ‘intra Tamisi ed A rno’ (and Halle-am-Saalle): The Letters of Seymour Kirkup to H. C. Barlow
• 9 Svevo and Joyce: ‘La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla’
• 10 Leone and Arthur Serena and the Cambridge Chair of Italian 1919-1934
• Bibliography of Publications
• Index