Other literary forms

Alessandro Manzoni’s vast range of intellectual endeavor is astonishing. He was a scholar and thinker in the best sense of the words, respecting thoroughness of documentation and clarity of analysis. His novel maintains an epic quality throughout, not simply because of the constantly expanding tableaux andnarrative but also because of the breadth of knowledge that informs it. It is a historical novel because Manzoni was a historian, the author of such works as the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (1822), the Lettre à Alphonse de Lamartine (1848), and the jurisprudential and humanitarian La storia della colonna infame (1842; The Column of Infamy, 1964). The best known of his philosophical and religious works include Lettre à Victor Cousin (1829), Dell’invenzione (1850), and Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (1819). His two historical tragedies, Il conte di Carmagnola (pb. 1820; Count of Carmagnola, 2002) and Adelchi (pr., pb. 1822), were much admired by Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. To round out his accomplishments, it must be added that as an agronomist he performed a number of experiments at his country retreat in northern Lombardy, some of which yielded positive and enduring results. For all these reasons, his published correspondence, Epistolario (1882), makes fascinating reading.

Finally, as a poet, Manzoni’s fame rests primarily on his religious poetry, the Inni sacri (1812-1815; The Sacred Hymns, 1904), an occasional political piece such as “Marzo 1821” (1821, 1848), and “Il cinque maggio” (1821;“The Napoleonic Ode,” 1904), the historico-philosophico-religious ode on the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps the most dispassionate view (compared to the poems of Victor Hugo and Henrik Wergeland on the same subject) of the emperor.

Achievements

Alessandro Manzoni understood many of his era’s religious and moral, historical and political, and aesthetic and linguistic problems, all of which he synthesized in different ways in his various works, particularly in his salient achievement of The Betrothed, judged by literary critics around the turn of the century in Geneva to be the greatest novel of the nineteenth century. In its pluralism of modes, it surpasses generic classification: It is at once historical, philosophical, sociological, metaphysical, psychological, realistic, naturalistic, idealistic, lyric, epic, dramatic, religious, optimistic, pessimistic, moralistic, ironical, oratorical, and both classical and Romantic—in short, universal. For the first time (aside from the picaresque, which exists in a class by itself), the “heroes” are peasants who are battered by historical events and yet around whom all historical events turn. Along with this, it may be said with justification that after Dante’s The Divine Comedy (c. 1320), The Betrothed established the literary Italian language, for there has been no better stylist to dispute this claim.

As a playwright, Manzoni has been credited with composing, in Adelchi, a truly Christian tragedy, regardless of the pronouncements of theorists that such a tragedy amounts to a contradiction in terms. The Column of Infamy stands out as a remarkable example of that two-edged combination of legal literature and literary jurisprudence, a provocative merging of both disciplines. Manzoni must be recognized as a fine Christian apologist and a democratic philosopher, and his historical works will be seen to take their rightful place in the area of historiography, documented as they are with objective rigor.

Biography

Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Antonio Manzoni’s putative father was Count Pietro Manzoni, and his mother, Giulia Beccaria, the daughter of the famous author of Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 1767). His early schooling took place in Lugano and Merate (under the Somaschi brothers) and in Milan (under the Barnabites), where he was born on March 7, 1785. Reacting against religion and sympathetic to the libertarianism of the French Revolution, at sixteen years old he wrote a Jacobin poem, “Il trionfo della libertà” (1801). Such liberal ideas attracted him to Paris, where his mother, legally separated from her husband since 1792, went to live with Carlo Imbonati in 1795. Manzoni returned to Paris in 1805 after traveling to Switzerland, Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venetia; Imbonati died, leaving Manzoni a goodly inheritance, to which Manzoni added the estate left him by his father, who died two years later.

During this period, still under the dictates of a classical aesthetic, Manzoni wrote a number of poems, including “In morte di Carlo Imbonati” (1805-1806). The Imbonati piece does not suggest that he was troubled by his mother’s questionable morality (as he was to be later); his close—and what was to become lifetime—friendship with the French historian Claude Fauriel, who lived with Sophie de Condorcet, may have had something to do with his acceptance of the situation. In fact, in “divine Paris,” he met many ideologues, freethinking philosophers and politicians such as Constantin-François de Volney, Marie-François Maine de Biran, Antoine-Louis Destutt de Tracy, Benjamin Constant, Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, and François Guizot, who filled his head with theories of skepticism, atheism, materialism, and other notions then in vogue.

How much this intellectual ferment actually shaped Manzoni’s mind is hard to say. A heightened awareness of history and historical studies, thanks to Vincenzo Cuoco in Milan and Fauriel in Paris, remained with him to a degree significant enough to guide his research interests, but the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment were already in decline, and Manzoni always found more attraction in matters of the spirit. He frequented Jansenist circles and, his conscience in turmoil, underwent a spiritual crisis—his so-called conversion—after which he settled on a more serene, almost devotional view of life. Supposedly, the process began in the Church of Saint Roche, to which he had repaired in a state of confusion one day. Still in Paris, he met a “very sweet, very proper” young woman, “an angelic creature” of Calvinist background, Henriette Blondel, whom he married in Milan in 1808. Enrichetta, as he then called her, and to whom he remained devoted all of her life, was only sixteen when they married. Two years later, the marriage rite, originally evangelical, was celebrated in Roman Catholic fashion. About the conversion, Attilio Momigliano says,

In this development, the learned clerics Eustachio Dègola and Luigi Tosi played a key role. Manzoni’s mother also returned to Catholicism.

In Italian Romanticism, compared with the more mystically oriented German strain, Manzoni detected Christian indications—an inspiration that resulted, in 1812-1815, in The Sacred Hymns. When he read Jean-Charles-Léonard de Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen-âge (1807-1818; A History of the Italian Republics, 1832), in which Catholicism is accused of having corrupted Italian life, he wrote the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, a rationalistic apology that relies on his keen historical sense and on his knowledge of seventeenth and eighteenth century texts. During the next few years, he wrote prodigiously. Count of Carmagnola, begun in 1816 and continued in 1819, was readied for publication in 1820, along with its scrupulously documented historical introduction and a preface similar to the 1823 Lettre à M. C*** [Chauvet] sur l’unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie.

Wishing to give his historical inclinations further avenues, Manzoni began The Betrothed in 1821, also writing“Marzo 1821” and“The Napoleonic Ode.” In 1822 came the historical tragedy Adelchi with its companion piece, the scrupulous historical investigation Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia; the latter develops Augustin Thierry’s dualism between the conquerors and the conquered, the oppressors and the oppressed, a favorite perspective of Manzoni, whose instinctive sympathy always resided with life’s humble. Lettera sul romanticismo is a letter written in 1823 to Marquis Cesare D’Azeglio and published without Manzoni’s knowledge in 1846; it advances the notion that poetry and literature must aim at usefulness as a goal, truth as a subject, and what is interesting as a means.

Frequently in his country estate in Brusuglio and deep into the historical works of Giuseppe Ripamonti and the economic treatises of Melchiorre Gioia, Manzoni continued to compose his novel, the first version of which appeared in 1823 as Fermo e Lucia. He eliminated the excessive Romanticism of this version in a revised edition of 1827, at first titled Gli sposi promessi, just before he left for Florence “in order to rinse [his linguistic] clothes in the Arno [River].” The final version, hailed by Goethe and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, eventually saw light in its present form in 1840-1842.

The last forty years of Manzoni’s life were beset with sorrow. He described the passing away of his beloved Enrichetta in 1833 as “a great and irreparable misfortune.” His mother died in 1841; his second wife, Teresa Borri, whom he married in 1837, died in 1861; he was survived by only two of his eleven children. His close friend, philosopher Antonio Rosmini, the celebrated author of Della enducazione cristian (1837), Filosofia del diritto (1841-1843), Psicologia (1846-1848; Psychology, 1884-1888), Teosofia (1837), and many other works that influenced Manzoni, also died, in 1855; even his brother-in-law, writer Massimo D’Azeglio (Ettore Fieramosca, 1833; I miei ricordi, 1861, and other works), died during Manzoni’s lifetime. Thus it is understandable that after The Betrothed, Manzoni restricted himself to philosophy, linguistics, history, and criticism, publishing no more fiction or poetry.

From all corners of Europe, Manzoni’s fame received recognition, from Sir Walter Scott to Archduke Maximilian of Austria, John Henry Newman, and William Ewart Gladstone. He turned down many honors, including acceptance to the French Legion of Honor, the grand duke of Tuscany’s Order of Merit, and a deputyship in the Piedmont chamber. Other honors he accepted include a life pension by King Victor Emanuel II of twelve thousand lire annually, the senatorship of the kingdom, and the prestige of Roman citizenship. Though reserved and withdrawn by temperament, not given to fiery political leadership, he exercised a visible role in forging the national consciousness of several generations of Italians: In 1814, he joined the group that refused to ask Frenchman Eugène de Beauharnais to become king of Italy; in 1838, he did not participate in the Milanese celebrations for the despotic Bourbon Ferdinand I; he rejected Austrian honors; and as one dissatisfied with Austrian rule, he signed the document by Lombard moderates asking Carlo Alberto to intervene from Piedmont-Sardinia in 1848. In 1860, he voted to transfer the Italian capital from Florence to Rome.

Manzoni’s life, however, was primarily a life of thought and art, transcending Romantic literary squabbles as well as the arena of national politics. His retirement to Brusuglio to carry on agricultural experiments typifies his posture of serenity, of working on behalf of humanity, of finding solace in the beauties and miracles of nature. In his vision of life, he integrated all elements—political, literary, historical, religious, and artistic—so that whatever he wrote, in whatever category of thought or discipline, the personal stamp of his overall synthesis was always identifiable. All Italy mourned at the news of his death in Milan on May 22, 1873, and the event inspired composer Giuseppe Verdi to return to work on the Messa da Requiem, which he had put aside; it was dedicated to Manzoni and performed in Milan’s Church of San Marco on the first anniversary of his death.

Analysis: The Betrothed

The premise of Alessandro Manzoni’s only novel is a timeworn one: The author claims to have discovered an interesting, but primitive, anonymous manuscript of the seventeenth century dealing with the war, famine, and pestilence occasioned by the occupation of Lombardy by Spanish troops; because this narrative is poorly written, he has decided to retell the story in his own words.

Somewhere in the Milanese region, the story begins, around Lecco and Lake Como, two young peasants wish to marry and seek the services of the village priest. Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella are good, honest people, and at first they cannot understand Don Abbondio’s equivocation followed by a refusal, until it becomes known that the local tyrant, the evil and feared Don Rodrigo, wants Lucia for his own pleasures and through his bravi (ruffians) has threatened the priest accordingly. Eight hundred pages later, the two finally marry. The epic of The Betrothed lies in between.

From the microcosm of Lecco, the events swell into a macrocosmic panorama of life itself, with all its confusion and wandering, suffering and barbarism, death and destruction. The simple threads of private events weave into ever more complex fabrics until the tapestry of calamities reaches fateful public proportions. The lives of Renzo and Lucia fork at the outset. Fra Cristoforo, a sternly upright monk, arranges for the latter to leave her town and seek shelter in a convent directed by a nun with a dark past, Sister Gertrude, whose story shows Manzoni to be one of the finest psychologists in literature. For his part, Renzo looks for help from a crooked lawyer, Azzeccagarbugli; travels to Milan, where he is greeted by bread riots and other difficulties; and escapes to the Adda River after talking too long at an inn.

Meanwhile, angry Don Rodrigo requests assistance in his wrongdoing from a powerful and enigmatic figure, a kind of regional overlord whose name is never told but who goes under the appellation of the Unnamed (l’innominato). This spirit of evil (and as such he acquires impressive literary stature, to be considered along with Honoré de Balzac’s Vautrin, William Shakespeare’s Iago, and the like) has Lucia kidnapped and brought to his secluded castle. One of the most debated issues in literature occurs here: the conversion of this formidable figure to good, seemingly occurring overnight in the presence of the purity and radiance of the innocent peasant girl, but actually occurring over a period of time preceding the novel’s action. A famous colloquy takes place between him and the historical cardinal of legendary sanctity, Federico Borromeo.

The ills continue, however—indeed, multiply: drought, famine, war (a ramification of the Thirty Years’ War), infection introduced by the Spanish army, and the devastating plague of 1630, which decimated the population of the Milanese, whose bodies were carried off by hooded monatti to the hospital camp known as the lazzeretto or to burial ditches. Manzoni’s description of the terror of the “greasers,” or untori, the supposed spreaders of disease, and of the horrible plague itself, must be considered literary landmarks. Many characters perish: Don Rodrigo; his henchman, Il Griso; Fra Cristoforo; the village priest’s gossipy housekeeper, Perpetua; the ostentatious intellectual, Don Ferrante; and his wife, Donna Prassede. Lucia recovers miraculously, and her mother, Agnese, is spared. Fires burn the evil out, rains purify the land, and Renzo and Lucia are finally united in humble marriage.

The novel blends aesthetico-poetic and ethico-religious elements in a creative synthesis that conceals Manzoni’s concern to separate artistic invention from historical document. History is not a convenient mold into which to pour the vicissitudes surrounding the lives of Renzo and Lucia but a vehicle to expand the reader’s humanitarian consciousness, which must then outweigh narrowly political, social, or economic issues. Rocco Montano put it this way: The unity of the novel consists

Critics have put a great deal of emphasis—possibly too much emphasis—on Manzoni’s Catholic persuasion and have thereby failed to grasp his true universality. There is no denying his religious conviction, but this conviction never reached such doctrinaire proportions as to preclude a transcending commitment to poetry, in the broadest sense of the word. If the ending of the novel suggests the working of Providence, the fact is that, as in Adelchi, Providence comes not from without but from within and is something that people work out for and by themselves. If the Unnamed converts, he or she does so after long self-questioning that emerges from an existential anguish of loneliness and dread and self-doubt. If Fra Cristoforo appears at times hard to believe in his total unselfishness, like Victor Hugo’s Bishop Myriel in Les Misérables (1862), it is because, unlike Myriel, he is atoning for his former sinful ways, driven by a guilty conscience.

More than anything else, Manzoni embraced closely the fundamental attitudes of the Christian tradition—love, humility, forgiveness, and charity—in such a way as to seem to make Christianity itself a metaphor for the superior life of the spirit, the universal spirit. This was his true Absolute, a moral vision that, in the context of art, becomes poetic, even mythical. More than a “religious” novel, then, The Betrothed is a human novel, well worth its place in the original Harvard classics series.

Hence Manzoni’s profound feeling for the humble and the suffering who give history a common sense; hence, too, the absence of anyprotagonist of exalted individualism. Manzoni “deheroizes” the novel, yet every character stands out with recognizable humanity: Renzo, candid, ingenuous, excited, generous, like the perdurance of the human race; Lucia, pious, sensible, good, like a creature of light; Agnese, enterprising, affectionate, energetic, a woman of the people; Perpetua, protective, brash, the perpetual gossip; Don Abbondio, fearful, confused, vacuous, the model of a coward; Don Rodrigo, mean, capricious, vainglorious, an impenitent rascal; Fra Cristoforo, altruistic, concerned, impulsive, a fiery saint; the Unnamed, mysterious, awesome, demoniac, like an emanation of evil; Cardinal Borromeo, exemplary, firm, a noble figure of persuasive serenity; Sister Gertrude, proud, agonized, gloomy, a tragic victim of misguided parents; Azzeccagarbugli, false and niggardly; Don Ferrante and Donna Prassede, the pedant in his artificial world and the presumptuous Christian. All these characters need more than a few adjectives to describe them, for not one of them is two-dimensional. Each is greater than the sum of his or her parts, each is portrayed with the understanding and compassion of an author who has long observed humankind, and each is subjected to a delicately comic assessment. Manzoni’s is an art of indulgence.

This art is expressed in exquisite prose, highly sophisticated and precise. Action, commentary, soliloquy, dialogue—all are finely honed to the needs of analysis, humor, irony, or moral example. The style engages many tonalities—“rather a chorus,” says Giorgio Petrocchi, “a concert of languages.” Many passages have remained classics, such as the opening paragraph (an interesting adumbration of the novel in imagistic terms), Lucia’s farewell to her hometown as she escapes to the convent, Don Abbondio’s humorous donkey ride up the mountainside to the Unnamed’s castle, the bread riots in Milan (Manzoni handles crowds adroitly), and the agony of death in the throes of the plague. In Manzoni’s prose, the word has a communicative vitality, always contained, fitting, and significant. This virtue more than makes up for the repeated digressions, which have not gone uncriticized, even if they ultimately fit the tale’s epic dimensions, completing the background of the events, and are presented in a style consistent with the tenor of those events. Furthermore, images planted here and there structure the novel expressively and create desired tonalities. Individual words become word-symbols that interrelate within the novel, stimulating in the reader an associative process that gives certain images their own “plot.” (Bread, as juxtaposed to wine, is one such image.) They become the lifeblood of the novel and its characters; at the same time, through them, the human situations achieve an artistic dimension.

The Betrothed is unquestionably a unique novel. It will retain its power so long as human beings can read it, because in it, heroic measure is taken not in accomplishing great deeds in the face of danger but in unassuming strength of character in the middle of human suffering.

Bibliography