SOURCE: “Literary Criticism: History and Literature,” in Alessandro Manzoni: The Story of a Spiritual Quest, Edinburgh University Press, 1974, pp. 69-85.

[In the following excerpt, Chandler surveys Manzoni's critical writings and his Fermo e Lucia, the precursor to I promessi sposi.]

The early 1820s were the period of Manzoni's intensest creative activity as he moved towards the climax and resolution of his spiritual and artistic quest. The Lettre à M. Chauvet sur l'unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie belongs to early 1820 and the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia was begun in autumn 1820 and published in 1822; of his creative works, Marzo 1821, Il Cinque Maggio, Adelchi and La Pentecoste were written in these years. On 24 April 1821, however, Manzoni began work on a historical novel, now referred to as Fermo e Lucia, and completed it on 17 September 1823. From this, I Promessi Sposi was eventually to emerge.

The Lettre à M. Chauvet replies to criticisms from this French critic of the ideas on tragedy expressed and exemplified in Il conte di Carmagnola, especially regarding the unities of time and place, but, in fact, goes beyond them to become an important statement of the relationship of tragic poetry to history. It was published in 1823 in Paris together with Fauriel's translations of the two tragedies. Manzoni attacks these two unities as arbitrary concepts unrelated to the nature of a particular action, which should unfold within the period and locations inherent in it and thus necessary for the coherent development of the characters involved—‘le système historique’, Manzoni calls it. Observance of the unity of time, defined as twenty-four hours, had prompted a predominance of the love motive in French tragedy: in his Andromaque, for example, Racine was compelled to elevate the secondary motive of Pyrrhus' love for Andromaque to prominence over the voice of compassion and humanity in the sacrifice of the child Astyanax. In contrast with Shakespeare's Othello, Voltaire in his Zaïre had been reduced to unconvincing expedients within a single day and A. W. Schlegel had exposed the weakness of his reasoning. If the two unities were enforced, much in Shakespeare's and Goethe's plays would have to be removed in favour of reported narrative: Manzoni examines Richard II to prove his point.

The subject-matter of tragic poetry, he writes, must be drawn from the real, the historically true, because mere invention represents the lowliest part of the human mind. The greatest poetry has been based on historical events or what were once regarded as such—Racine, for instance, invented nothing. But how do the roles of the historian and the poet differ? The historian finds a series of events which the human mind through its very nature regards as interconnected with links of cause and effect, precedence and consequence; it brings under one point of view, as by a single intuition, a number of facts separated by the conditions of time and place and discards others connected only by accidental coincidence. The historian presents the essential facts in the order in which the human intellect finds them, but for him the series is indefinite. The poet, on the other hand, stages a detached portion of history, the reason for whose isolation lies in the events composing it, a reason which the spectator can grasp with ease and pleasure. The poet chooses from history interesting and dramatic events, so closely interconnected but so weakly linked with events before and after that the mind takes pleasure in making of them a single spectacle and seeks eagerly to grasp the full extent and depth of their relationship, and to unravel as clearly as possible the governing laws of cause and effect. This unity is more marked and more readily apprehended when interconnected events are grouped around one principal event as means or obstacles: an event that appears at times as the accomplishment of human plans, at others as a stroke of Providence which annuls them, or as a goal glimpsed afar that a man wishes to avoid, yet towards which he rushes by the very road he had taken in order to reach the opposite goal. The poet may be guided to his choice of events by coming upon an imposing character, observation of whom will illuminate an aspect of human nature.

The historian looks at events from the outside, but the poet contemplates not only men's actions but their thoughts, the feelings accompanying their deliberations and designs, successes and failures; the speeches with which they have endeavoured to make their passion and will prevail over those of others, have expressed their anger or sadness, have, in fact, revealed their originality. With his sympathetic imagination, the poet apprehends and communicates the secrets of the human will. Poetry fills out history by restoring its lost parts, imagining facts where history offers only indications, inventing characters to represent the known way of life of an age, but in such a way that invention accords with reality and sets it in greater relief. All this, affirms Manzoni, is ‘creation’. Dramatic poetry is the expression, according to their actions, of men's feelings, desires and sufferings, of men regarded as inseparable from history. Conversely, the creation of ‘facts’ in order to adapt defined feelings to them has dominated the novel since Mlle de Scudéry, though some novelists have, like dramatic poets, created poetic truth.

The poet will strive to render faithfully a dramatic idea from history and thus bring out its moral effect. The portrayal of the true will absolve him from the need to inspire passions in the spectator with the hope of attracting him. It is not in sharing the delirium and anguish, the desires and pride of tragic characters that we feel the highest degree of emotion: above this narrow, agitated sphere, in the pure joys of ‘contemplation désintéressée’, we are most vividly seized with pity and terror for ourselves when we see the useless sufferings and vain joys of men. The poet should assist us in our development of a moral force through which passions can be mastered and judged. By showing us the passions that have tormented mankind, the poet can make us feel that common basis of misery and weakness which disposes us to an indulgence formed, not of weariness and disdain, but of reason and love. In presenting events to us as witnesses, he can help us acquire the habit of fixing our thoughts on the great and serene ideas which are cancelled out and vanish through the impact of the daily realities of life. The poet may touch our minds strongly but ‘en vivifiant, en développant l'idéal de justice et de bonté que chacune [âme] porte en elle, et non en les plongeant à l'étroit dans un idéal de passions factices' [by animating, by developing the ideal of justice and of goodness that each soul bears within it, and not by restricting them to an ideal of artificial passions]; in this procedure, he elevates our reason.

For Manzoni, the true had an intrinsic interest and he believed that an increasing taste for historical studies was finally transforming history into a science. With a clearer view of history, the public would prefer it to single inventions of fiction.

In his rejection of the distinction between the ‘bello morale’ and the ‘bello poetico’ (published as Pensiero XVIII by Chiari and Ghisalberti in the third volume of Tutte le opere), Manzoni insists that poetry is impossible without ideas and that the pleasure felt by readers of a literary work consists of the acquisition of ideas, of assent and of the consequent mental repose. When a work arouses ideas contrary to those suggested by the author, pleasure turns to conflict and mental distress. Poetic beauty (‘bello poetico’) is identical with moral beauty (‘bello morale’). Poetry lacking in moral beauty will be unfavourably judged:

A misura che gli uomini si coltiveranno, abbandoneranno errori e riconosceranno verità. Quelli che vedranno più verità morali saranno i migliori ragionatori, gli uomini i più avanzati. Ora il giudizio di questi sarà sfavorevole alle opere mancanti del bello morale. Ragione: perchè gli uomini non possono acconsentire a ciò che si oppone ad una verità da essi riconosciuta. [According as men become more cultivated, they will abandon errors and recognize truths. Those who see more moral truths will be the best in using their reason, the most advanced men. Now the judgment of these people will be unfavourable to works lacking moral beauty. Reason: because men are unable to give assent to what is opposed to a truth they recognize.]

Their adverse criticism and indignation will be proportioned to the degree of artifice in the means employed to make immoral ideas triumph. Elsewhere, in his Postille to A. W. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (in the second volume of the Opere inedite o rare, edited by Ruggero Bonghi), Manzoni asserts that a dramatic poet, like everyone else, must desire whatever contributes to the perfecting of society, provided that he regards his art as a means rather than as an end. Manzoni adds that, although a reader is quite willing to transport himself back to a writer's age, there is no doubt that eternally valid themes arouse the deepest feeling and the highest praise.

Turning to the Materiali estetici, we find Manzoni insisting that the only greatness in a poet lies in saying things useful to all men: indeed, literature should be considered a branch of the moral sciences. These sciences, he goes on, progress more slowly than other sciences, because convincing the intellect of their valid points does not suffice: the passions that abhor these truths and the habits that will be disturbed by them have first to be overcome. The deeper the penetration into the human heart the more extensive is the discovery of the eternal principles of goodness, which are commonly forgotten in the normal circumstances and passions of everyday life. The dramatic poet should carry his readers with their imagination beyond the ordinary run of life to the infinite region of possible ills where they can realize their weakness and understand that only goodness and an upright conscience, together with God's help, can alleviate their mental and spiritual distress: everybody feels this effect after reading a tragedy of Shakespeare. To conclude these excerpts from the Materiali estetici, the following oft-quoted sentence sums up Manzoni's outlook: ‘La rappresentazione delle passioni che non eccitano simpatia, ma riflessione sentita, è più poetica d'ogni altra.’ [The representation of passions that do not excite sympathy, but a reflection that is felt, is more poetic than any other.]

A similar stress on the true as the only source of noble and lasting pleasure is attributed to the Romantics in Manzoni's Lettera sul romanticismo of 22 September 1823 addressed to the Marchese Cesare Taparelli d'Azeglio, father of Massimo, who married Manzoni's eldest daughter, Giulietta, in 1831. Manzoni acknowledges the difficulty of defining the ‘vero’ as being different in this context from the word's normal connotation. In this letter, he looks back to the Romantic-Classicist controversy that began in Italy in 1816 and reviews the arguments on each side, basing himself on the claim that, in Milan, the term ‘Romanticism’ had referred to a body of ideas more rational, ordered and general than those in any other Italian centre. Manzoni outlines the negative criticism of neoclassical practice and the positive proposals advanced by the Romantics. He rejects mythology as expressive of a bygone society and as at variance with Christianity, towards which Romanticism tended; imitation, which the admired classical authors had themselves not practised; and the use of rules founded on special facts rather than on the nature of the human mind. In the original letter, but not in the revised text of 1870, Manzoni offered as a general principle, to which all the positive propositions of Romanticism could be reduced, the following: ‘che la poesia e la letteratura in genere debba proporsi l'utile per iscopo, il vero per soggetto e l'interessante per mezzo’ [that poetry and literature in general should propose for themselves the useful as their purpose, the true as subject matter and the interesting as means]. In a letter of 6 July 1824 to the critic Paride Zaiotti, who had attacked the Romantics though praising the Adelchi, Manzoni emphasized the Romantics' sincerity in examining their own and opposing opinions and the correctness of their views, which had, in fact, prevailed, even if everybody was not yet prepared to concede this point.

The Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia, begun in autumn 1820, develops some points made in a letter to Fauriel of 17 October of that year. Scholars in times ‘postérieurs à la renaissance des lettres’ had amassed facts and theorized on medieval customs but had never discerned ‘ce qu'il y avait d'important et de vrai dans les institutions, et dans le caractère de cette époque’ [what was important and true in the institutions and in the character of that age], while the ‘philosophes’ had seen what was not there. Misjudging all the evidence, historians had regarded the Lombards as Italians simply because they had been in Italy for two centuries. ‘Les Turcs à ce compte’, comments Manzoni, ‘doivent être bien Grecs.’ [By this count the Turks must certainly be Greeks.] He had consulted the histories collected by Muratori in Italy and Augustin Thierry in France but was seeking a modern work which discussed the condition of the Italians, subjugated and ‘possessed’. In due course, he would compose a historical work to show that the history of the barbarians' establishment in Italy was still to be written and to persuade someone to undertake it or at least to destroy many firmly held, but absurd, beliefs.

In the Discorso, then, Manzoni investigates several problems arising from his study of Lombard domination in Italy: the fallacy of a union between conquerors and conquered and of a supposed Lombard beneficence towards the Italians, the role of successive popes in invoking Frankish aid against Lombard attacks, and the relevant views of various historians. In a discussion of the approaches of Muratori and Vico, he foresees the advantages accruing from the mass of factual information and specialized judgments of the former if allied with the wide-ranging glance and synthesizing power of the latter. The main point of interest, however, is less his search for exactness than his moral judgment of the facts thus established. Modern criticism of the Discorso has tended until recent years to be dominated by Benedetto Croce's stricture that Manzoni's mind was not adapted to the historian's task: he treated history as an instrument, not as an end, in accordance with his eighteenth-century intellectualism, which, in turn, was reinforced by his rather Jansenist Catholicism, meticulous and of extreme moral rigidity. Croce held that we interrogate history, not to estimate the moral goodness or inadequacy of men, but to understand what they accomplished through their virtues and vices, an accomplishment which operates within us and stimulates our thought and action.

Manzoni expresses his viewpoint in the introduction. A series of material, external facts, even if completely authenticated, is not history, nor does it suffice in order to form a dramatic concept of a historical event. In the facts themselves a number of essential features is missing: the climate of laws, customs and opinion in which the leading characters operated; the justice or injustice of their intentions and inclinations, regardless of the human conventions for or against which they acted; the desires, fears and sufferings and, in short, the general condition of the immense number of people who had no active part in events but felt their effects. These considerations form the criteria of the judgment to be made upon the events.

Thus Manzoni inquires which of the forces represented by popes and kings tended to lessen the woes of the multitude and introduce a little more justice; and, after a careful examination of the final contests between the papacy and the Lombards, he assigns to the former the limited justice possible in human affairs. Let the apologists of the Lombards declare what would have been the condition of the Roman people if the Lombard King Astolfo's plans against the Papal States had succeeded, what part equity, security and dignity would have played in the subsequent administration and all the social benefits which make it less difficult for men to be just. By calling in the Franks, the popes consulted the best interests of the subject Italians, for Charlemagne's advent safeguard them from barbarian invasions. Manzoni emphasizes the cardinal moral concept of disapproval of actions and feelings in proportion to the sorrow voluntarily caused by them. The Christian ethic proclaims that injustice is always despicable, whereas paganism forgave and sometimes admired crimes springing from pride. Thus, too, Manzoni condemns writers who not only ridiculed for the benefit of posterity the conquered Italians of the period after the fall of Rome but also excused and praised their persecutors: and yet ‘il più forte sentimento d'avversione dovrebb'essere per la volontà che si propone il male degli uomini’ [the strongest feeling of aversion should be for the will that proposes evil for men]. Similarly, he expresses surprise that writers, in other respects upright and perceptive, could be so motivated by anti-papal sentiment as to ask posterity to shed tears, not for the grief occasioned by death or for such sufferings as every man laments and may feel personally, but for the loss of power and for the defeat of the ambitious plans of those who had deliberately caused so many tears. To be acceptable, a thought or deed must conform to the duties deriving from equity and universal charity.

Interest in the feelings of all people actually affected by specific events prompts Manzoni to insist on the autonomy in history of each generation. No generation should be deemed a mere stepping-stone to those following nor should a series of events be judged by the interests of posterity rather than of the human beings involved. No man or generation is a mere instrument of another. We have seen that Manzoni imputed to each generation a distinctive ‘spirit’. The basic inspiration is the Christian concept of each person's value as a creature of God, but readers of Kant will recall his view of man as an end in himself and the moral impossibility of using another as a means. According to Manzoni, it is neither reasonable nor human—the coupling of these epithets is notable—to consider one generation simply as a means for those succeeding. He is obviously reacting against the tendency of some Enlightenment thinkers to regard past ages as functions in the evolution of their own lofty times, a tendency inevitable to proponents of the idea of progress. Manzoni's position contrasts sharply with that current in Lombardy and elsewhere in the years after 1830. In his Del dramma storico of 1830, for example, Mazzini asserted that the thought and the moral law of the universe are progress: whatever generation passes its time on the earth in idleness without promoting the process of perfection by a single degree has no life in the records of Humanity; the next generation tramples upon it as a traveller tramples the dust. Manzoni reaffirmed his position even more strongly many years later in his La rivoluzione francese del 1789 e la rivoluzione italiana del 1859. Since each human action is to be judged according to an eternally valid moral law, such a judgment cannot be postponed so as to take account of the consequences of such an action: each action being subject to an eternal moral law, if it is wrong at the time of its commission, it remains so ever after. Since each man is equally human and created in the image of God, he cannot be subordinated to the supposed needs of some abstract entity called ‘humanity’ and consequently the people of one period cannot be subordinated to the assumed good of those of a later age; men of the present must be considered: ‘Noi persistiamo quindi nel credere che tra gli uomini si devano contare anche quelli che vivono’ [Therefore we persist in thinking that, among mankind, those now living must also be counted]. Manzoni does believe, however, that each generation builds on the work of its predecessors, viewing it as capital productive of new directions rather than a wealth to support idleness.

Though eternally valid premises govern Manzoni's judgments on history, a prerequisite is the identification of facts and causes. Thus, the anachronistic pre-dating of a Lombard-Italian union which had, in fact, derived from many causes operating in a long succession of ages, prevented the identification of the origin and development of these causes and the consequent knowledge of an essential part of the ‘corso della società’. This Vichian phrase recurs in Manzoni's attack on Muratori's monolithic conception of the Middle Ages: the various periods of which Manzoni saw as exemplifying ‘il differente corso della civiltà’.

For Manzoni the past is complete and immutable. Historians must seek out and weigh the evidence—Manzoni seems not to have appreciated the immense difficulty of defining admissible evidence and of obtaining agreement thereon—and then produce the only correct or ‘just’ interpretation: ‘nessun interesse, nessuna considerazione, nessun ostacolo dovrebbe ritenerli dall'essere interamente giusti in parole’ [no interest, no consideration, no obstacle should prevent them from being wholly just in their words]. If the facts are known, then only one interpretation—or judgment—is possible: an interpretation based on the Christian ethic. A common attitude and outlook are prescribed for historians just as, in I promessi sposi, Manzoni expects in his readers the same outlook and reactions as his own. The historians of any Christian age were required to align themselves with him. If Manzoni shared the Romantic emphasis on the special features of different ages, he also accepted the idea of a basically unchanging man, though he saw the constant factor not as reason in the eighteenth-century sense but as a rational Christian morality. He could not admit a subjective viewpoint governed by the historian's own experience of life and his commitment to a course of action in his own society, which are now generally regarded as operative after the vain attempt at ‘scientific’ history by the school of Ranke. Manzoni's criticism of modern historians for viewing distant ages by the measure of their own is justified, except that it assumes a single outlook in their age. Croce's opposition is predictable. Manzoni would have rejected outright his concept that the past has no real being, but is something posited by the spirit in a constantly changing present, so that all history is contemporary history.

Despite his preoccupation with Christian ethics and their implication of eternal law, Manzoni rarely alludes to them directly. In one passage, however, he sums the question up succinctly:

i vari svolgimenti e gli adattamenti della natura umana nel corso della società; di quello stato così naturale all'uomo e così violento, così voluto e così pieno di dolori, che crea tanti scopi dei quali rende impossibile l'adempimento, che sopporta tutti i mali e tutti i rimedj piuttosto che cessare un momento, di quello stato che è un mistero di contraddizioni in cui l'ingegno si perde, se non lo considera come uno stato di prova e di preparazione ad un'altra esistenza [the various developments and the adaptations of human nature in the course of society; of that state so natural to man and so violent, so deliberate and so full of sorrow, which creates so many goals of which it renders impossible the attainment, which endures all ills and all remedies rather than desist for a moment, of that state which is a mystery of contradictions in which the mind gets lost, if it does not consider it as a state of trial and of preparation for another existence].

These words suggest that society, with its sorrows and frustrations, was an inevitable human condition and functioned as a moral proving-ground for mankind. The next life and Christian moral standards were the controlling factors, restored by Manzoni after the Enlightenment repudiation of Christian teleology and its introduction of posterity as a substitute higher tribunal, as in Diderot's ‘La postérité pour le philosophe, c'est l'autre monde de l'homme religieux’ or Schiller's ‘The world's history is the world's court’. [For the philosopher, posterity is the other world of the religious man].

During his stay in Paris in 1819-20, Manzoni established contacts with three friends of Fauriel: the historians Augustin Thierry and Guizot and the philosopher Victor Cousin. In 1820, Thierry began his systematic study of the sources of French history, animated by a desire to illuminate some dark corners of the Middle Ages. With learning, knowledge of life and imagination, a historian could recreate the men and women of the past in their full humanity: indeed, for the imagination there is no past. Thierry's theory of the two races, conquerors and conquered, who later became social classes, is expounded especially in his La conquête d'Angleterre and influenced Manzoni in the Adelchi and Discorso. With his theory that the novel can contain the truest part of history which is excluded from the compilations of historians, Thierry is in harmony with Manzoni's observations on dramatic poetry and history.

The direction of Manzoni's thought is revealed by a letter to Fauriel of 29 January 1821 concerning his friend Tommaso Grossi's narrative poem I Lombardi alla prima crociata. Grossi's intention, said Manzoni, was to depict an age through a fable of his own invention, more or less as in Scott's Ivanhoe; to invent actions so as to develop historical ways of life—‘une ressource très heureuse’. Mere historical narration would not permit the inclusion of poetic invention:

mais, rassembler les traits caractéristiques d'une époque de la société, et les développer dans une action, profiter de l'histoire sans se mettre en concurrence avec elle, sans prétendre faire ce qu'elle fait mieux, voilà ce que me paraît encore accordé à la poésie, et ce qu'à son tour elle peut faire [but, to gather together the characteristic features of an epoch of society and to develop them in an action, to profit from history without putting oneself in competition with it, without claiming to do what it can do better, this is what I think is still granted to poetry and what for her part she is able to do].

It is significant that Manzoni had informed Goethe six days earlier that he had accepted the latter's advice and not divided the characters of the Adelchi into historical and ideal.

On 24 April 1821, then, Manzoni began work on Fermo e Lucia, which he completed on 17 September 1823, after an interruption for the Adelchi. He is reported to have told a friend that he went to his country-house at Brusuglio after the Piedmontese failure to invade Lombardy in March 1821, taking with him the History of Milan of the seventeenth-century writer, Giuseppe Ripamonti, and a work which can be identified as the Sul commercio de' commestibili e caro prezzo del vitto (On the food trade and the high cost of food) of 1802 by Melchiorre Gioia. Without Sir Walter Scott, he explained, it would not have occurred to him to write a novel, but when he found in Ripamonti the figures of Gertrude, the Innominato and Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, the descriptions of the famine and rioting in Milan, the passage of the mercenaries and the plague and, in Gioia, the edicts of the governors of Milan, he wondered if it would not be possible to invent an action including these characters and events: it was the edict that the lawyer Azzeccagarbugli showed Renzo in which reference is made to threats of violence offered to a priest so as to prevent a marriage that impelled him to invent the action of the novel. From the political economist Gioia, Manzoni derived ideas on the supply and price of food and the two shared ironical attitudes to seventeenth-century governments. A useful commentary is furnished by a letter of 30 April 1821 from Ermes Visconti to Victor Cousin, probably inspired by Manzoni himself. According to Manzoni, says Visconti, Scott's originality lay in showing ‘le parti qu'on peut tirer des mœurs, des habitudes domestiques, des idées, qui ont influé sur le bonheur et sur les malheurs de la vie à différentes époques de l'Histoire de chaque pays’ [the use that can be made of the customs, of the domestic habits, of the ideas which have influenced the happiness and the unhappiness of life at different ages in the history of each country]. Manzoni would avoid Scott's falsification of history and intended ‘conserver dans son intégrité le positif de faits auxquels il doit faire allusion; sauf à ne les effleurer que très rapidement’ [to preserve in its integrity the positive feature of facts to which allusion must be made; except that they should be touched upon only very rapidly]. The fictional parts would form the basis of the novel and not conflict with historical fact: ‘ces fictions en outre, seront telles que les historiens puissent aisément les avoir ignorées ou négligées ’[these fictions besides will be such that the historians may easily have not known or neglected them].

Manzoni's most explicit statement on the historical novel occurs in his letter to Fauriel of 3 November 1821:

Pour vous indiquer brièvement mon idée sur les romans historiques, et vous mettre ainsi sur la voie de la rectifier, je vous dirai que je les conçois comme une représentation d'un état donné de la société par le moyen de faits et de caractères si semblables à la réalité, qu'on puisse les croire une histoire véritable qu'on viendrait de découvrir. Lorsque des événemens et des personnages historiques y sont mêlés, je crois qu'il faut les représenter de la manière la plus strictement historique; ainsi par exemple Richard cœur-de-lion me paraît défectueux dans Ivanhoe. [In order to indicate briefly to you my idea of historical novels and to set you on the way to correcting it, I shall tell you that I conceive them as a representation of a given state of society by means of actions and characters so similar to reality that they could be considered a true history that had just been discovered. When historical events and characters are mixed in, I think that they must be presented in the strictest historical manner; thus, for example, Richard Cœur de Lion seems defective to me in Ivanhoe.]

The historical novel is a ‘given state of society’ in which all classes must obviously be included if the ‘state’ is to emerge clearly; invented actions and characters must be such as could have existed, inasmuch as they will merge with their historical counterparts. The whole thing presupposes that the novelist has conducted the historical research required to arrive at the ‘reality’ of the period.

The composition of a serious novel in Italian embodying a profound view of life was a bold undertaking. In the eighteenth century, Italy had not seen a development of the novel comparable with that in Britain and France. Except for a few examples of the philosophical and satirical novel, Italian novels had usually described long series of adventures, often in several countries, with little real characterization or coherence of construction. The novels of Pietro Chiari are typical. Many English and French works were translated into Italian, the former often from already existing French versions. In general, the Italian novel of the eighteenth century had aimed to move its readers by stories of love.

At the turn of the century, Ugo Foscolo's Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis marked a new direction. With Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther as its forerunner, it investigated in a series of letters Jacopo's increasingly tormented mind. Unlike Goethe, however, Foscolo introduced political as well as amorous disillusionment: the French, who had been welcomed in Italy as liberators, had handed Venice over to Austria by the Treaty of Campoformio. The Jacopo Ortis, however, was a far cry from the kind of novel planned by Manzoni. The first imitations of Sir Walter Scott did not appear until 1827, the year in which the first version of I promessi sposi was published. Afterwards, a polemic arose in regard to the historical novel. On the whole, then, as they contemplated the novels of the eighteenth century, Italian critics held the novel form in low regard as a rather frivolous intrusion into the traditional literary genres and as mere entertainment suitable mainly for women.

A more serious problem for Manzoni related to language. A novel containing the adventures and dialogue of humble characters and accessible to a wide public could hardly be written in the traditional literary language with its Tuscan basis and its remoteness from popular speech. Manzoni refers to the poverty of the Italian language compared to French, which had been spoken for so long that writers could choose the correct word from personal experience. In Italy, the non-Tuscan writer was forced to use a language he had almost never spoken, which few people indeed did speak, and which some alleged had been corrupted by modern authors: a language little used for works of ‘moral science’. General types of expression for modern ideas were lacking; no feeling of communion was possible between writer and reader. No sure criterion existed for judgment of vocabulary. The purists were right in demanding a fixed standard but wrong in identifying it with the Italian classics. A modern writer, says Manzoni, can achieve at best an approximate perfection of style: he should have read the Italian classical authors and works in other languages, especially French, and have conversed on important topics with other Italians. Manzoni concludes that the composition of a novel in Italian is extremely difficult, though the same difficulty existed, to a less degree, for other subjects.

Manzoni informed Fauriel on 29 May 1822 of his conception from the records of the period chosen for his novel—1628-31 in Lombardy—the conception from which the novel grew: an extraordinary social situation with an arbitrary government and feudal and popular anarchy, an astonishing state of legislation, a profound, fierce and pretentious ignorance, classes with opposite interests and outlooks; a plague which had brought out extreme evil, the most absurd prejudices and the most moving virtues. He was striving to immerse himself in the spirit of such an original age. He believed that he could best develop the action and plot of his novel by observing human action in reality and especially its difference from ‘l'esprit romanesque’. He would avoid the artificially contrived unity of all the novels he had read, even though readers were conditioned by habit to expect such a unity.

If the reading of Scott provided an example of a new literary form, Manzoni's adoption and elaboration of the historical novel stemmed from both spiritual and artistic reasons. His acceptance of this world with all its shortcomings and the resultant conviction that it is impossible to contract out of life prevented the recurrence of an Adelchi or a Conte di Carmagnola. He no longer sought Providence in history and had moved far from the assured position of Bossuet. In addition, God was no longer a detached observer, operative only after death. Justice—and thus a limited happiness—was sometimes possible in this life. Tragedy had become inappropriate. Manzoni's Romantic and Christian concept of history as embracing all men in a given age, including the humble of whom no trace survived in documents, was incompatible with the traditional characters and language of tragedy and, in any case, the Romantics preached that literature should deal with subjects of interest and concern to the majority. In the tragedies, Manzoni had reserved a ‘cantuccio’ for his own direct intervention, but the novel permitted many degrees of intervention, not least in the narrative passages between the ‘scenes’ or dialogues, and yet preserved and adherence to history.

Critics have devoted much attention to Fermo e Lucia in their investigation of the creative process of I promessi sposi and the charting of Manzoni's artistic and spiritual development, although, as Giacomo Devoto pointed out, Fermo e Lucia is really an independent work, since the writer's inspiration, vision of life and, consequently, expression are markedly different. It was still the period of the Adelchi and of Manzoni's elaboration of his ideas on history and literature.

Compared with I promessi sposi, Fermo e Lucia is an inchoate mass of disparate elements: discussions of narrative technique, sometimes with the reader, in the manner of Fielding, which indicate Manzoni's own uncertainty; protestations that he is transcribing history, not relating invented actions; historical passages as such; psychological analyses; realistic descriptions or lengthy dwelling on sordid themes, as in the episode of Geltrude (as she is called in Fermo e Lucia), which fills out the perversity of the age; excessive moralizing; many of these features interrupt the narrative flow and prevent the attainment of a coherent structure founded on various levels of narration. The integration of individual lives into historical backgrounds and events is incomplete and the formulation and motivation of character inadequately worked out. A tendency to gloomy tints and strong contrasts, especially of good and evil or between humble and powerful, suggestive of the preceding Gothic novel, here expresses a profound pessimism reminiscent of the Adelchi. There is no hope of reward in this world for good deeds and, given the conditions of the time, the virtuous Cardinal Borromeo is not appreciated. Padre Cristoforo's parting words to Renzo in the lazzeretto foretell worse times to come, for the sons will be more arrogant and violent than their fathers; the plague will not set the world aright since it strikes a vineyard already accursed. Earlier, he had confessed to becoming a friar so as to escape this infamous world, but had discovered that escape comes only with death.

Like the form, the language is somewhat uneven and disorderly. In the second introduction, written on the completion of the work (the first being contemporary with the initial chapters), Manzoni refers to an undigested compound of Lombard, Tuscan, French and Latin elements in his work. Fermo e Lucia, that is, uses the artificial, invented language defined in the letter of 3 November 1821 to Fauriel: surviving elements of traditional literary Italian, expressions from current speech and some derived from French, which was open to new terminology and was far richer than Italian. The use of Milanese would have been easy and natural to him, but not for most of his readers. Though acknowledging the superiority of Tuscan, he wonders whether it is adequate for contemporary usage. He has, in fact, reached the fundamental linguistic question; what kind of Italian should be employed in the novel, a literary form of recent origin which reflected changing social conditions? Manzoni had appreciated the crisis in the Italian language as early as 9 February 1806 in a letter to Fauriel: in a fragmented Italy, a widespread inertia and ignorance had separated the written and spoken languages to such an extent that good writers could not instruct the mass of the people. Obviously, a literary non-spoken Italian would not suffice. In Marzo 1821, Manzoni had looked for an Italy united in arms, language, religion, memories, blood and hearts: it was he who raised the language question to a social and political level in the context of the Risorgimento and removed it from the exclusive realm of literature. The question remained, however: was there a common Italian language in the peninsula?

Among the various solutions, the purists, as Manzoni had mentioned in his letter of 3 November 1821, advocated a return to the great Tuscan writers of the fourteenth century, although some admitted the sixteenth century also. Among the classicists, Vincenzo Monti could attack their narrowness and admission of outdated words, but he still relied upon the traditional literary language, distinguishing it from speech. The Romantic demand for a literature related to the contemporary world required a simpler, more comprehensible Italian, free from imitation of past works and drawn from current usage in both vocabulary and structure. Since speech was based on an abundance of dialects, however, a selection was needed. At first, in the second introduction to Fermo e Lucia, Manzoni goes beyond the artificial compound language defined on 3 November 1821 by positing the need for a language formed from reading ‘well written’ books and from conversation with cultured people, a language established by convention among numerous writers and speakers, but he did not know whether it existed. Writing to Luigi Rossari in June 1825, he referred to their joint desire for a ‘lingua toscana-milanese’, that is, a language employing expressions common to both Tuscan and Milanese.

The transformation of Fermo e Lucia into the 1825-7 edition of I promessi sposi includes the use of this ‘Tuscan-Milanese’ language. Thereafter, Manzoni concluded that a living language was required and that Tuscan was the only possible candidate, since it alone was at all common among Italians. He believed that the Italian dialects shared a common element with Tuscan. He therefore set himself to Tuscanize the language of his novel with the aid of Cherubini's Vocabolario milanese-italiano and of Tuscan friends; but here again there was no guarantee of conformity with actual Tuscan current usage. The only solution was direct contact with the living language in Tuscany itself, as Manzoni later declared in letters to Giuseppe Borghi on 25 February and 7 April 1829. Though at first Manzoni did not differentiate between Florentine and other Tuscan usage, he eventually noticed divergencies. Thus he decided on Florence as the location of his stay in Tuscany and, together with his family, he left Milan on 15 July 1827. He remained in Florence from 29 August to 1 October. He wrote to Tommaso Grossi on 17 September: ‘ho settantun lenzuolo da risciaquare, e un'acqua come Arno, e lavandaie come Cioni e Niccolini, fuor di qui non le trovo in nessun luogo’ [I have seventy-one sheets to rinse and water like the Arno and washer-women like Cioni and Niccolini, away from here I don't find them anywhere]. While in Florence, Manzoni also met Gianpietro Vieusseux, editor of the periodical L'Antologia, which had Romantic leanings, Pietro Giordani, the classicist and friend of Leopardi, Gino Capponi and Leopardi himself, who described him as full of amiability and worthy of his fame. The eventual product of Manzoni's sojourn in Florence was the revised and final edition of I promessi sposi published in 1840-2.