Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature

Leopardi's Discourse on Romantic Poetry

Fabio A Camilletti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317321330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

In 1816 a violent literary quarrel engulfed Bourbon Restoration Italy. On one side the Romantics wanted an opening up of Italian culture towards Europe, and on the other the Classicists favoured an inward-looking Italy. Giacomo Leopardi wrote a Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry aiming to contribute to the debate from a new perspective.

1 Romanticism, Classicism and Leopardi's Discourse

DOI: 10.4324/9781315655192-2

Idle Enquiries

In his book on Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, Joseph Luzzi discusses the long-debated problem of the actual existence of an Italian Romanticism, trying to understand the reasons for the relatively scarce attention paid to the Italian early nineteenth century by literary criticism outside of Italy.¹ As Luzzi summarizes, traditional explanations of Italian Romanticism's ‘ubiquity in Italian scholarship yet … invisibility in foreign criticism’ have primarily been three:

First, Italian authors of the early nineteenth century continued to emulate the same Greco-Roman classical culture that the rest of Romantic Europe had begun to regard with suspicion. Second, Italian Romanticism promoted a pious Catholicism that was out of step with the more rational Protestant cultures of northern Europe. Third, Italian Romantic authors failed to transcend the chaos and contingencies of Italian history and politics to address international currents of thought.²

All of these reasons are particularly weak, as Luzzi himself clearly demonstrates by challenging them one by one.³ Though it is true that the Italian Romantics’ understanding of foreign trends was in many ways a limited one, neither the Greco-Roman imaginary nor the fascination of Catholicism were forbidden or considered suspicious topics for that European scene that we currently label as ‘Romantic’. More correctly, Luzzi argues, the problem of Italian Romanticism should be addressed by paying attention to other issues, the most important of which is ‘the diffusion of Italy as a premodern culture in the Romantic foreign imaginary’, determining, as we have seen in the introduction, a ‘Meridionalist’ and exotic perception that still haunts contemporary criticism to a great extent.⁴

Yet beyond considering Italian Romanticism from a purely external point of view, the quarrel that took place between 1816 and 1827, as well as the subsequent, ambiguous positions taken by Italy's most prominent writers of that time, give rise to significant questions about the existence itself of an Italian Romantic movement. In fact, an overview of the most representative Italian authors’ positions of the time in relation to the quarrel and among themselves produces quite surprising results: plausibly, if directly asked about the nature of Romanticism and their positions towards it, not only would their answers have differed from those of Milanese Romantics, but also, quite remarkably, from each other.

Self-exiled in London, Ugo Foscolo opted out of the debate. In these years, his activity was dominated, on the one hand, by critical essays in English and Italian on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio that sought to reassess the Italian literary canon from a perspective that – especially as far as Dante is concerned – would prove itself to be highly influential for both British and Italian scholarship; and, on the other hand, by the drafting of the quintessentially Neoclassical poem Le Grazie (The Graces), begun in 1812 and still unfinished at the time of his death in 1827. Writing in 1818 an essay ‘On the Present Literature in Italy’, Foscolo labelled the quarrel as an ‘idle enquiry’; and the possibility that the subchapter in question was in fact written by John Hobhouse, who in 1816 had followed Byron to Italy and had met the principal protagonists of the Classicist-Romantic quarrel, reinforces the perception that Italian distinctions were incomprehensible from a foreign viewpoint:

The [Classicists] would adhere solely to the mythology of the ancients; the other party would banish it totally from all their compositions. It would not be very difficult to state the true merits of this idle enquiry, on the decision of which may, however, depend the turn taken by the literature of the next half century.⁵

Alessandro Manzoni, after having agreed with several points raised by the Milanese Romantics, especially as far as the bypassing of Aristotelian units in theatre was concerned, contributed to the debate only as late as 1823. In a letter to the Marquis Cesare D'Azeglio of that year and later published, he praised the extinction of the word ‘Romanticism’ itself:

se uno straniero, il quale avesse sentito parlare dei dibattimenti, ch'ebbero luogo qui intorno al romanticismo, venisse ora a domandare a che punto sia una tale questione, si può scommettere mille contr'uno, che si sentirebbe rispondere a un dipresso così: – Il romanticismo? Se n’è parlato qualche tempo, ma ora non se ne parla più; la parola stessa è dimenticata, se non che di tempo in tempo vi capiterà forse di sentire pronunziar l'epiteto romantico per qualificare una proposizione strana, un cervello bislacco, una causa spallata; che so io? una pretesa esorbitante, un mobile mal connesso. Ma non vi consiglierei di parlarne sul serio: sarebbe come se veniste a chiedere, se la gente si diverte ancora col Kaleidoscopio. – Se l'uomo … insistesse per sapere, che cosa intende per romanticismo il suo interlocutore, vedrebbe, che intende non so qual guazzabuglio di streghe, di spettri, un disordine sistematico, una ricerca stravagante, una abiura in termini del senso comune; un romanticismo, insomma, che si sarebbe avuta molta ragione di rifiutare, e di dimenticare, se fosse stato proposto da alcuno

(if some stranger, having heard of the disputes that have taken place here on Romanticism, came here asking what point we have reached on this question, one could bet a thousand against one that he would hear an answer along the lines of: – Romanticism? This has been debated for a while, but now it is over; the very word is forgotten, though from time to time you might happen to hear the adjective Romantic being employed to denote a strange sentence, some weird mind, a fanciful cause; what can I say? Some exorbitant claim, some unhinged piece of furniture. But I would not recommend that you discuss it with any seriousness: it would be like asking if people still amuse themselves with the kaleidoscope. If this man insisted on knowing what his interlocutor means by Romanticism, he would come to see that he means an indistinct confusion of witches and ghosts, a systematic disorder, an odd inquiry, an abjuration as far as common sense is concerned; a sort of Romanticism, in sum, that we would be extremely right to reject, and to forget that anybody had ever proposed it)⁶

Nonetheless, Manzoni asserts that the main principles asserted by the movement should be preserved:

In tutta la guerra del romanticismo, non è dunque perita che la parola. Non è da desiderarsi che venga in mente ad alcuno, di risuscitarla: sarebbe un rinnovare la guerra, e forse un far danno all'idea che, senza nome, vive e cresce con bastante tranquillità

(Throughout the entire fight over Romanticism, nothing but the word itself has perished. One has little desire to see it resuscitated: this would mean starting the fight anew, and perhaps jeopardizing the very idea, which, nameless as it is, it can live and grow in full tranquillity)⁷

Leopardi, the youngest of the three, joined the Classicist flank of the quarrel, and although he maintained a problematic relationship to this choice, he continued to question the Milanese Romantic vulgata for the rest of his life.

The nature of Italian Romanticism results thus in the paradoxical opposition between a self-styled ‘Romantic’ movement and a number of authors, each one isolated from the other, who shared common concerns and themes with the wider European Romantic scene, simultaneously, however, contesting the definition itself, as well as the possibility of being framed within a fixed and determined ‘school’. The first question we should pose ourselves is therefore: what did it mean to be a ‘Romantic’ in the Italy of 1816?

Everything and nothing, in a few incisive words; and indeed this was the position of the scholar Giuseppe Nicolini (1788–1855), a native of Brescia, who in 1819 published the pamphlet Il romanticismo alla China (Romanticism According to the Chinese Fashion). In this work, Nicolini relocates the Classicist/Romantic quarrel to the Chinese empire, making cutting remarks about the wide, potential flexibility of the term that had become so fashionable:

Certo letterato ha la bontà di chiamar romantico tutto ciò che non è scritto nella così detta bella lingua; ho udito un medico chiamar romantico il polso d'un suo ammalato; romantica, secondo un mercadante, è la porcellana di Germania e classica quella della China; le donne poi, che per romantico intendono romanzesco, sono infinite.

(A certain species of scholar tends willingly to label as ‘Romantic’ everything that is not written in the so-called beautiful language; I heard a doctor calling ‘Romantic’ the pulse of one of his patients; according to a merchant, German porcelain is Romantic, whereas the Chinese one is classical; and the women who identify ‘Romantic’ with ‘Romanesque’ are countless.)⁸

In case we wanted, however, to fix more precise coordinates, Nicolini continues, the adjective ‘Classical’ would coincide with stillness, absence of critique and good common sense; ‘Romantic’ would refer to mobility, subversion and youth. In fact Nicolini equated Romanticism with the propulsive drive that characterized modernity, and actually both Ludovico di Breme and Leopardi himself – in drafting his reactions to Breme's review of the Giaour in the Zibaldone – tended to take, as we have seen, ‘modern’ and ‘Romantic’ as synonyms. Thus, in writing from China, Nicolini's speaking subject notes that Classicism and Romanticism form a dichotomy that does not uniquely pertain to the literary domain, but actually entails two reciprocally opposed visions of the world:

Fa conto che le persone attempate, le teste quadre e gli uomini del buon senso sieno tutti classicisti; il romanticismo sembra riservato per le così dette teste calde e pei giovani … Nondimeno si può stabilire, così allo ingrosso, che il classicismo qui alla China consiste nel pretendere che le cose vadano, come si dice, sul piede antico, e nel far guerra alle idee nuove e forastiere; e dici a un di presso il contrario del romanticismo. Non è quindi classico alla China solo chi crede nell'infallibilità di Aristotile, nelle unità di tempo e di luogo, e nelle necessità di elementi omogenei nella composizione; ma classici ancora tutti quegli irremovibili fedeli, che sanno preservarsi dai moderni scandali, tenendosi stretti stretti ai loro buoni antichi, e lasciando che questo pazzo mondo cambi a ogni generazione di coltura e di gusto, che l’ignorante pubblico domandi una letteratura conforme alle sue nuove inclinazioni, che i libertini gridino alla riforma; classici quegli uomini d’esperienza che trattano col sorriso della superiorità questi riscaldamenti di testa

(Assume that all the elderly and intellectually rigid, and the men of good common sense, were all Classicists; Romanticism seems only reserved for the riotous ones and the youth. Still, roughly speaking, one may say that Classicism, here in China, consists in claiming that things still go, as one may say, in the ancient way, attacking new and foreign ideas; and you can say quite the contrary about Romanticism. Classicists, in China, are not therefore simply those who believe in Aristotle's infallibility about unities of time and place, or in the necessity of homogeneous elements in poetic compositions. Classicists are also all those immovable devotees who manage to preserve themselves from modern scandals by sticking tightly to their beloved ancients, and leaving this crazy world to change in culture and taste at every generation; leaving the ignorant public to ask for literature to be more in compliance with its new inclinations, and the libertines crying for reformation; Classicists are all those experienced people who regard with a patronizing smile each of these youthful caprices)⁹

Nicolini could not put it more forcefully. The Classicist/Romantic quarrel exposes a subterranean tension, which is eloquently compared to the conflict between generations, and which involves by necessity a radical choice between eternity and caducity, the elite and the wider public, between the Ancien Régime culture of slow contemplation and elegant conversation and that of the modern, self-phagocytizing literary market. In other countries, this process had taken place much earlier on, as was the case of the French Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes ¹⁰ and the English Battle of the Books,¹¹ both of which occurred between the end of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. In Italy, it took shape as an aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, as if to replicate the political divisions of the peninsula under a literary disguise, and thus importing the ‘crisis of European consciousness’ – to paraphrase the original title of Paul Hazard's acclaimed book¹² – with a strikingly uncanny sense of posthumousness.

Undoubtedly the Classicists had an advantage: they knew exactly what they were talking about. Unlike the notion of ‘Romanticism’, those of ‘Classicalness’ and ‘Classicism’ had witnessed since the Renaissance a progressive systematization, never fully denoting a sole classical antiquity, but rather, as Salvatore Settis points out, an understanding of literary praxis as being essentially rooted in normativity and in the imitation of specific authorial sources constructed as auctoritates.¹³ Italian Classicists therefore understood well that Italy was witnessing something that had already occurred elsewhere, and in a much stronger way insofar as Italian culture had reclaimed the legacy of classical antiquity and its normative value as intrinsic features of its own existence. In the introduction to the Italian edition of his essay ‘Les abeilles et les araignées’, Marc Fumaroli quotes the French aphorist Joseph Joubert, who had concisely declared that antiquity, in France, ceased in 1715.¹⁴ However, it was not only the legacy of classical antiquity that was, in 1715, at stake. Throughout the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, an increasingly pervasive process of critique began slowly to erode the principles of slowness, of contemplative distance and of the dialogue with the predecessors (il principio di lentezza, di distanza contemplativa e di dialogo con i predecessori), replacing them with a principle of instability and distraction (di instabilità e di distrazione) grounded in the exaltation of novelty and originality against ‘oldness’ and ‘belatedness’.¹⁵ The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes opposed the Classicist ideal of the bee (abeille), derived from a simile that was already present in ancient sources, with the spider's (araignée) modern individualism. Whereas the bee chooses from each flower the materials through which honey can be distilled, epitomizing a model of literary composition in which creation only consists in the meticulous re-combination of already existing sources, the ‘modern’ spider has an infallible faith in its own individual resources, thus giving birth to an endless autophagy (‘creazione’ autofaga) that knows no shared or common memory. Instead it produces uniquely isolated experiences that randomly intersect within the archipelago of other, equally isolated, individualities.¹⁶ The bee, on the contrary, acknowledges that language pre-exists the author, thereby conceiving poetic invention not as a ‘creation’, but rather as a ‘finding’ (trovare), locating its highest achievement in the renovation of a shared heritage.¹⁷ Abandoning this tradition, some of the Italian Classicists argued, would mean pursuing new rules, whose validity had not, however, been verified. This was the position of the magistrate Paride Zaiotti (1793–1843) – a Classicist from Trento who in 1831 undertook an inquiry on patriotic groups on behalf of the Austrian government – who stated that ‘il fuggir le regole antiche non è che una regola nuova, molto peggiore di esse’ (abandoning the ancient rules is nothing but a new rule in itself, and one much worse than its forerunners).¹⁸ In particular, the imitation of the ancients should not be abandoned given that, unlike the Romantics’ confused precepts, it represents a safe and well-tested model: as the historian Carlo Giuseppe Londo...