We have now reached a period of comparative stability in which dukes, viceroys, oligarchs, and Popes sit settled in their respective dominions with a security that appears a little tame after the whir and uproar of Barbarian invasion. To be sure, the wars between Spain, France, and Austria, waged first to abate the over-greatness of the House of Hapsburg and afterwards that of the House of Bourbon, were often fought out in the north of Italy; nevertheless, the period of confusion has passed, and each principality has a consecutive political history, which runs along for two hundred years. Our best course will be to glance at the careers of the several states, one by one, until they reach the tumultuous influences of the French Revolution. Venice, the noblest as well as the most powerful, deserves to come first.
Venice
Venice still ranked as one of the great powers of Europe; she was sought as an ally, she took part in European counsels, and bore herself with resolute dignity and pride. The change that was going on went on so slowly, and her statesmen were so well trained and so far-sighted, that her reputation remained intact after the power which had created it had shrunk and dwindled. In spite of the battle of Lepanto she lost the island of Cyprus to the Turks, but secured a peace which lasted for two generations, a surprisingly long time, considering that the two states were destined to fight each other till both were exhausted. She was less successful in keeping at peace with her Christian neighbours, and became embroiled in a celebrated quarrel with the Holy See.
There was an irritating papal bull which was issued and reissued under the stimulus of the reinvigorating Counter-Reformation, entitled In Coena Domini (for the Lord's Supper), usually read on Maundy Thursday. It was probably the very bull that Montaigne heard read from the balcony of St. Peter's. This bull asserted papal claims of extreme character, not unworthy of Boniface VIII, and, in fact, revealed complete consciousness of renewed youth and vitality. Other states in Italy bowed and accepted, or pretended to accept, this declaration of papal authority; but Venice refused to publish the bull. In fact, though Venice had always professed great respect for the Holy See, she had been consistently self-willed and opposed to papal pretensions, and likewise somewhat free-thinking. Moreover, there had been festering disagreements concerning territory and politics. Venice insisted upon the right to tax Church property within the state, and to try priests charged with crime before her lay tribunals. Acting upon the latter right she arrested and tried two priests guilty of crime. This action traversed the doctrine laid down in the papal bull. The Pope put Venice under an interdict (1606). In retaliation the Signory issued a decree of banishment against all priests and monks who should obey the interdict. Various Orders quitted the city. The Pope stood firm in his position that "there could be no true piety without entire submission to the spiritual power." All Europe looked on, the Protestants backing Venice, the Catholics supporting the Pope. War was in the air; but the danger of a European mêlée was too great. The French King, Henry IV, enacted the peacemaker; and the forces in favour of compromise succeeded in reëstablishing peace.
Out of the quarrel one man issued with a noble historic reputation. Fra Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623) was the last of the great Venetians. In boyhood he was so precocious a scholar that at eighteen he was made professor of Positive Theology, and, a little later, of Philosophy and of Mathematics. Grown up, he became a man of science, the foremost of his time excepting Francis Bacon. He discovered the valves of the veins, and also, independently of Harvey, the circulation of the blood. He made discoveries in optics. He studied heat, light, sound, colour, pneumatics, the magnetic needle. In astronomy Galileo called him, "il mio padre e maestro—my father and my master." Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambassador to Venice, said, Fra Paolo is "as expert in the history of plants as if he had never perused any book but Nature." In addition to these achievements, he wrote a very celebrated history of the Council of Trent. At the time of the breach with the Papacy, this brilliant savant was appointed Theological Counsellor to the Republic, and was abruptly flung into the confusion and passion of violent political strife. Deeply patriotic,—his last thought was for Venice, "Esto perpetua, may she live forever,"—he held a brief, as it were, for his country, and as her advocate argued her cause before all Europe with brilliant success.
At this period the Venetian Signory belonged, in spirit at least, to an international political party which was opposed to Spain and to the Papacy, and for that reason was favoured by the French, especially when Henry of Navarre was on the throne. In fact, this quarrel between Venice and the Papacy may be considered an episode in the great struggle between the party of European freedom and the tyrannical House of Hapsburg, seated on the thrones of Spain and Austria, and supported by the Papacy.
But Venice was not able to concentrate her attention upon European affairs. Later in the century war with the Turks was renewed; she was too weak to resist them single-handed, and, after a struggle which lasted for twenty-five years, she lost Crete (1669). Not many years later, having obtained allies, she renewed the war, fought with great gallantry, and actually conquered the Morea, which, on the conclusion of hostilities, was ceded to her (1699). This conquest, now best remembered from the fact that in the attack on Athens a Venetian bomb blew up the Parthenon, was the last great military exploit of the Venetians, and within twenty years the Morea was lost again.
Martial vigour ebbed slowly but surely. During the war of the Spanish Succession, when, the course of fortune having shifted, Europe combined to resist the overbearing power of Louis XIV and the House of Bourbon, Venice remained neutral. Like an old dog which has fought many good fights in its youth and prime, and now, lame and scarred, maintains a dignified abstention from canine frays, Venice lay back. In 1718, after the war with Turkey in which she lost the Morea, she took part in the treaty between Austria and Turkey. This was her last active diplomatic intervention in the affairs of Europe. She had lost Cyprus, Crete, the Morea; and now her province in Italy, bits of Illyria, and some of the Ionian Islands, alone remained from her old empire. She shut her eyes to the past, and concentrated her attention on making her beautiful city "the revel of the earth, the masque of Italy." On the eve of the mighty upheaval of the French Revolution, her old sea glory flashed up under her last great admiral, Angelo Emo (1731-92), who cleared the seas of the Algerine pirates; but it was too late, Venice had run her course, and the end was at hand.
Spanish Provinces
West of Venetian territory, the unfortunate duchy of Milan fulfilled its melancholy lot of being the prize possessed by Spain, yet coveted and fought for by France. Its history takes no special hold upon the memory. Against a constant background of French ambition (Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV), the Spanish governors step forward upon the Milanese stage, levy taxes, scheme how to circumvent the French, and how to extend Spanish dominion, and then go home, a little richer but without leaving any definite impression on the page of history except as they have served to create the scenes depicted in the romantic novel "I Promessi Sposi." One has a vague idea of ceremony, bows, obeisances, ignorance, rapacity, and cruelty, but the idea is nebulous, and we need not stop.
Leaving local affairs aside, we will proceed at once to see how the titles to Milan and other Spanish provinces in Italy passed from Spain into other hands. History here acts as an attorney and coldly records the transfer from one monarch to another. Like lots of land the provinces of Italy were bartered and granted in consideration of war, dynastic love, and affection, or for the sake of the political equilibrium of Europe. The great Powers fell to blows over the succession to the crown of Spain (1700-14), to the crown of Poland (1733-35), and other matters in which Italy had no voluntary concern; and, after years of war, made treaties to reëstablish European equilibrium by an elaborate system of weights and counterweights. Where the balances hung unevenly, a province of Italy was thrown in to restore them to a level. In this way Milan, Parma, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia were disposed of. All we need do is to remember that in place of conveyances there were treaties, and in place of offer, counter-offer, haggling, and bargaining, there were battles, sieges, devastation, and pillage.
The records of conveyances in the office of history read as follows:—
| LOT | GRANTOR | GRANTEE | DATE |
| Milan | Spain | Austria | 1713 |
| Naples | Spain | Austria | 1713 |
| Naples | Austria | Spanish Bourbons | 1738 |
| Sicily | Spain | Savoy | 1713 |
| Sicily | Savoy | Austria | 1720 |
| Sicily | Austria | Spanish Bourbons | 1738 |
| Parma | Spanish Bourbons | Austria | 1738 |
| Parma | Austria | Spanish Bourbons | 1748 |
| Sardinia | Spain | Austria | 1713 |
| Sardinia | Austria | Savoy | 1720 |
Milan was subject to only one transfer, from Spain to Austria, by the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt (1713-14), which closed the war of the Spanish Succession. Those same treaties took Naples and the island of Sardinia from Spain and gave them to Austria, and also took Sicily from Spain and gave it to Savoy. Spain, however, was dissatisfied, and attempted to recover what she had lost; but a new European coalition forced her to renounce her claim. In the general pacification after the war, for the purpose of making a more satisfactory arrangement, Sardinia was exchanged for Sicily, giving Sardinia to Savoy and Sicily to Austria (1720). Finally, after the war of the Polish Succession by the Peace of Vienna (1738), Austria ceded Naples and Sicily to younger sons of the royal family of Spain, the Spanish Bourbons, on condition that those provinces should never be united with the crown of Spain, and received in exchange the little duchy of Parma, which had fallen to a Spanish Bourbon on the extinction of the Farnesi. But ten years later, at the close of the war of the Austrian Succession, Austria ceded Parma back again to other members of the Spanish Bourbon family.
Tuscany
Another paragraph is necessary to complete the Austrification and the Spanification of Italy. The Medici of Tuscany died out. After the first Grand Duke, Cosimo, six successors had followed, dwindling away in incapacity, luxury, and bigotry. The last died in 1737. Then, by virtue of that general reapportionment after the war of the Polish Succession, the Grand Duchy was handed over to the Duke of Lorraine, husband of Maria Theresa, of the House of Hapsburg, Empress of Austria, and became an appanage of the Austrian Empire, under the rule of the younger sons of the Imperial house. It is a relief to turn from these Austrian and Spanish provinces to the two living powers, Savoy and the Papacy.
Savoy
It would be impossible to chronicle here the history of the Savoyard dukes, who were advanced to the title of Kings of Sardinia after the acquisition of that island. Savoy lay in the way of the three fighting nations, France, Spain, and Austria. The plain of Piedmont was an admirable fighting-ground, and the combatants chose it on all possible occasions, but it would not be fair to charge the whole blame upon those three nations. The Dukes of Savoy were ambitious men, full of all sorts of schemes for increasing their dominions and their personal glory. Whenever any one of them thought he perceived an opportunity to seize some neighbouring territory, he caught at it, reckless of collision with his powerful neighbours. The general upshot was that Savoy lost its old Swiss provinces and its old French provinces, and that Piedmont became the head and front of the new Kingdom of Sardinia. Equally important to Italy was the fact that, while the people of the other Italian provinces became more and more incapable of bearing arms or of making any real martial effort, the people of Piedmont gradually became a nation of soldiers. In devastation, war, and apparent ruin, Piedmontese valour and Piedmontese character were trained and developed, and Piedmont little by little came to feel, and likewise to impress upon the other Italian States, that she, and she alone, was the refuge and hope of whatever Italian patriotism might still exist.
The Papacy
The Papacy we left at the end of the sixteenth century in the full flood of revival. The Popes were swept on by the tide. The bold and successful front opposed to the enemy was supplemented by discipline within. Heresy was traced and tracked. Inquisitors roamed about, spying what they might; they frightened the learned from publishing, printers from printing, and almost all from freedom of talk and thought. Thus traitors were rooted out. And at the same time faithful soldiers of the Church were trained and educated. Seminaries for priests of divers nations were founded in Rome; Jesuit schools were helped everywhere. Sixtus V (Felice Peretti), 1585-90, was a Pope worthy of the great period. He entertained a plan to reconquer Egypt, and make the Mediterranean and Red Seas a high-road for armies and navies that should break up the Ottoman power. He attacked the banditti of the Papal State, as his predecessors had attacked the barons, and, for a time at least, suppressed them. He was a great builder; he completed the dome of St. Peter's, set up the Egyptian obelisk in the piazza before the cathedral, substituted statues of St. Peter and St. Paul in place of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius on the tops of the two great bronze columns that adorn the Foro Trajano and the Piazza Colonna. He brought fresh water, named after him Acqua Felice, into the city from over twenty miles away, and gave Rome an aspect worthy of the capital of the Latin world. He fixed seventy for the number of cardinals; he revised the Vulgate; and pondered many great designs, for which, as he said, his strength would have been inadequate, even had he lived.
But these Popes of the Revival, who carried into effect the papal principles of the Council of Trent, vigorous, and in many respects admirable, as they were, need not detain us, for the history of the Papacy in this period scarcely belongs to Italy. It has a far wider reach, and is intimately bound up with the great Catholic, one might say the great Latin, effort to restore or extend Catholicism and Latin supremacy throughout the world. In the British Isles, in Scandinavia, in Poland, in Russia, in Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, the Church fought with the old Roman spirit of conquest. Everywhere the Jesuit fathers went, busy, devoted, heroic. The ardour of St. Francis Xavier, the self-abnegation of St. Francis de Sales, the passionate mysticism of St. Theresa, infected and controlled thousands of disciples. Everywhere were great manifestations of activity. In South America there were bishops and archbishops, hundreds of monasteries and innumerable priests. In Mexico there were schools of theology. In India, thousands and thousands of converts clustered around the city of Goa. In China and Japan the Jesuits built churches, and converted to Christianity disciples of Confucius and Buddha. The Church had founded an empire on which the sun never set. But our business is not with this great Latin conquest, this great Catholic revival. We must pass on to the next series of Popes, less memorable for their imitation of Scipio and Cæsar, than of Lucullus and Crassus. Here we find the names of the founders of great papal families, so familiar in Rome, not as missionaries, teachers, or martyrs, but as owners of palaces, villas, pictures and statues: Borghese (Paul V, 1605-21), the Pope who quarrelled with the Venetian Republic; Ludovisi (Gregory XV, 1621-23), in whose pontificate the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (College for Propagating the Faith) was established; Barberini (Urban VIII, 1623-44), whose family, famous from the squib "Quod non fecerunt Barbari fecerunt Barberini," built its palaces out of Roman ruins. During the pontificate of Barberini, Galileo was brought before the Holy Office, and his opinion that the earth moved condemned as "absurd, false in philosophy, and essentially heretical."
Under his successor Panfili (Innocent X, 1644-55), Catholic Europe stopped fighting Protestant Europe, and the Thirty Years' War was closed by the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The Catholic Powers gave over the attempt to reduce the Protestant States, and acknowledged their independence. Panfili launched his bull against the treaty, but the weary world disregarded the old man's curses. After him came Chigi (Alexander VII, 1655-67), Rospigliosi (Clement IX, 1667-69), Odescalchi (Innocent XI, 1676-89), whose names mean little to us.
Long before this time the forces of revivification which had borne onward and upward the Catholic counter-charge on the Protestant ranks, had begun to fall away. The great Catholic monarchs of Europe turned their minds to personal ambitions; the Popes squandered papal revenues on their own families; the Jesuits loosened their rigid hold on their once high principles. The period of reform had passed, and the Papacy settled down into a policy of maintaining the ecclesiastical empire left to it and of enjoying its little Italian monarchy. In politics it pursued a shifting course towards Austria, Spain, and France, dictated rather by passing fears than by wisdom or lofty ambition. At the time of the close of the war of the Spanish Succession the Papacy was hardly regarded as a European power. The proof of decline was most visible in the concessions made by the Papacy to the Catholic sovereigns, by its forced acquiescence in the repeated attacks on the Jesuits, and finally, by its bull suppressing, or rather attempting to suppress, the Order (1773).
Throughout the eighteenth century the papal part in European affairs was insignificant; and in Italy the general effects of papal rule were steadily increasing poverty, superstition, and incompetence. It is a relief to turn away, knowing that the French Revolution is blowing its refreshing blasts ahead of us.
We should do wrong to leave these centuries to stand solely on their political record. Even this dreary period has contributed not a little to the sum of Italy's attractions. After the moral vigour of republican Florence, after the freshness of the Renaissance and its later grandeur, after the elegance of the courts of Urbino, Ferrara, and Milan, it requires time to adjust ourselves to a different standard and to acquire a relish for this period of dissipated little kings and dukes. But once familiar with the altered standard of excellence, these centuries, with their arts, their habits, their idleness, become exceedingly sympathetic, and lure with peculiar dexterity the idler who seeks entertainment and the picturesque. Not that there is no serious element in them, for there is. Italy, though known to us through her lovers as a woman land, has always happily commingled feminine charm and masculine strength. Like the Apennines which stretch their grim strength from the Alps to the toe of the peninsula, virility runs throughout the length of Italian history, though at times it avoids notice. In this period it is best represented by science; and we must not omit to mention a few of the most distinguished scientific thinkers.
Giordano Bruno (1550-1600) and Campanella (1568-1639) were philosophers rather than men of science; their philosophy ran counter to the scholastic philosophy sanctioned by the Church, and they came into collision with the stern spirit of the Catholic Reaction. Campanella was persecuted and punished; Bruno was condemned as a heretic and burnt to death in the city of Rome. Greater than either was Galileo (1564-1642), whose name is one of the most illustrious in astronomy. He was born at Pisa, where he was educated in the university. He devoted himself to study, especially to mathematics, and became a professor. In 1609 he heard that a Dutchman had made an instrument which in some way by means of a lens magnified objects. Acting on this hint he constructed a telescope; and, if not strictly the inventor, he was the first to use the telescope in astronomy. The next year he made various eventful discoveries: that there are mountains in the moon, and spots on the sun; that Venus has phases; that Saturn has an appendage, which later was proved to be rings; that Jupiter has four satellites, a discovery which increased the number of heavenly bodies from the mystically sacred seven (sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) to the uninspiring eleven. These discoveries persuaded Galileo to adopt the Copernican theory, and brought him into collision with the Church. Much has been said about his cruel persecution, but he appears to have received gentle treatment and to have undergone a merely nominal imprisonment. Another philosopher, Vico (1668-1744), a Neapolitan, enjoys a very high reputation in Italy as a thinker. He wrote a philosophy of history, in which he investigated the laws that govern human progress, showed that philosophical theories must treat mankind collectively, and anticipated Comte's theory of the three stages of social development.
Science is not the characteristic trait of this period; for that is to be found in the arts or in the pleasant enervating lassitude of life. In the grand-ducal atmosphere there is a sense of having browsed on lotus-flowers. As we glance back on the great centuries, their efforts look splendid, their high purposes noble, their infinite curiosity commendable, but we are content to sit in a ducal garden, to listen to the Tritons spout into the fountains, to sip chocolate, to meditate sonnets to a partner for the minuet, to gossip about "His Highness and Contessa B——, who, so that young milord, Horry Walpole, says, was once a ballerina," and to confess our sins to fat, amiable priests. We enjoy the badinage of the abbés, the ingenious vacuity of the littérateurs, the cheerful buzz of the café, the daily saunter on the fashionable promenade, the drive in the park, and all the details of theatrical make-believe existence.
As one becomes used to this lotos-laden atmosphere, one gets lenient impressions of the arts, of their peculiar and characteristic agreeableness, and rapidly loses one's previous too scornfully classical attitude. In an earlier chapter we indulged in some high-flown denunciation of the Baroque in architecture. That was because we were fresh from the Renaissance. Now that we have eaten of the lotos, we refrain from comparison and enjoy the arts in their new phases, in and for themselves. There is hardly an Italian city that would not be poorer for the absence of the Baroque. Rome, for instance, owes most of its charm to these decadent generations, to the Villa Medici, the Villa Borghese, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Piazza Navona.
A Neapolitan, Bernini (1598-1680), was the master spirit of the best Baroque, both in architecture and in sculpture. His greatest achievement is the splendid colonnade which reaches out like two arms from St. Peter's Church and clasps the sunny piazza in its embrace (1667). Bernini's statues, his fountains, his decorations and ornaments, make a good history of the time. They undoubtedly reveal decadence, yet they are respectfully imitative of the great achievements of the Renaissance, whereas the works of his numerous disciples are surcharged with contortion, obvious effort, and strain for effect. There is a maximum of visible exertion with a minimum of real accomplishment. Details are multiplied, and ornaments bear little or no relation to the organic structure of the buildings which they adorn; yet that practice is an Italian trait, and even in excess has a picturesque merit. The baser work of this style, exhibited in the vainglorious churches of the Jesuits, is sometimes called the Jesuit style. After this period of stormy ornament came a calm in the eighteenth century, façades became rectilinear, and there was a general subsidence of obvious effort.
In painting the school of Bologna, led by Lodovico Caracci (1555-1619) and his nephews, Agostino and the more noted and gifted Annibale, set the fashion. They endeavoured to combine faithfulness to nature with all the merits of all their predecessors, and are therefore called the eclectic school. They remained the cynosure of touring eyes until the middle of the nineteenth century. Sir Joshua Reynolds admired and praised them. Some of their disciples were for a long time almost as famous as Raphael. Domenichino's Last Communion of St. Jerome held a place of honour in the Vatican Gallery equal to Raphael's Transfiguration. Guido Reni's Aurora, painted on the ceiling of the casino in the Rospigliosi palace in Rome, had a tremendous vogue, and even now tourists, escaped from the critics, admire it privily. Guercino, Sassoferrato, and also the lachrymose Carlo Dolci are other celebrated members of the school. Another school, almost equally famous, was devoted to Naturalism,—imitation of starving old beggars and a general depiction of want, misery, and squalor. Of these painters the principal were Caravaggio (1569-1609), a Neapolitan, and his pupil Ribera, known as Lo Spagnoletto, because he was born in Spain. A later group, the Venetians of the eighteenth century, consisted of Canaletto, Bellotto, Guardi, and others who painted again and again the idle canals and pleasure-loving palaces of Venice. The greatest of this group was Tiepolo (1693-1770), who attained in a measure the grand manner of the great masters of the sixteenth century.
In literature, though that also had flashes of seriousness, as in Filicaia's celebrated sonnet to Italy adapted by Lord Byron,—
the spirit of the Baroque, in its lightest and pleasantest manner, expressed itself to the full by means of the Academy of Arcadia. The unreality of the whole Italian world was concentrated in this Academy, which soon had branches, imitations, colonies all over the peninsula. It was founded in Rome (1692) by Gravina, a jurist, Crescimbeni, a priest, and other dilettanti, for the ennoblement of literature, the purification of taste, and other meritorious purposes. The members called themselves Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses, took pastoral names, composed sonnets by the bushel, wrote one another's biographies, and were altogether delightfully silly. Goldoni, the playwright, gives a glimpse of these littérateurs in the eighteenth century as he observed them in Pisa.
One day he passed a garden gate and saw within the garden a crowd of ladies and gentlemen grouped by an arbour. He was told, "The assembly which you see is a colony of the Arcadia of Rome, called the Colony of Alpheus, named after a very celebrated river in Greece, which flowed through the ancient Pisa in Elis." Goldoni went up to the circle and listened to a number of gentlemen who recited poems, canzoni, ballads, sonnets, etc. He observed that the company looked at him as if desirous to know who he was. Eager to satisfy their curiosity, he asked the president if a stranger might be permitted to express in poetry the satisfaction which he experienced in being present on so interesting an occasion. Goldoni had a sonnet in his head, composed by him in his youth for some similar festival; he hastily changed a few words to adapt it to the present occasion, and recited the fourteen lines with the tone and inflection of voice which set off sentiment and rhyme to the best advantage. The sonnet had all the appearance of being extemporaneous, and was very much applauded. Whether the meeting had come to its appointed end or not he did not know, but everybody got up and crowded about him. Thereupon he was introduced to a whole troop of Arcadian shepherds, who welcomed him most heartily. At another meeting the president, whose proper title was Guardian of the Shepherds, drew a large packet from his pocket, and presented Goldoni with two documents, a certificate of his membership in the Arcadia of Rome under the name of Polisseno (Polixenes), and a legal deed which bestowed upon him the Fegean Fields in Greece; whereupon the whole assembly saluted him under the name of Polixenes Fegeus, and embraced him as a fellow shepherd. Goldoni says that, in spite of the formality of the conveyance, the Turks never acknowledged his title.
Mention of the Arcadia and of Goldoni leads to another art, most characteristic of these two centuries, the player's art. The drama had never been a success in Italy; Machiavelli and Ariosto wrote comedies, but they were no better from a dramatic than from an ethical point of view. After the acknowledged failure of serious comedy, another species took the field, the "Commedia dell'Arte," and definitely established itself at about the time of the beginning of the Baroque. In this species of comedy the dramatis personæ were masked and always impersonated certain definite characters, and the dialogue was improvised. These masks were Pantalone, our Pantaloon, a Venetian merchant, who always wore a black robe and scarlet stockings, and spoke the Venetian dialect; Il Dottore, the doctor, a pompous ass from Bologna; Arlecchino, Harlequin, a silly and credulous servant in tight hose and motley jerkin, and Brighella, a quick-witted and knavish servant, both speaking the patois of Bergamo; Colombina, the soubrette, a pretty maid-servant from Tuscany; Capitano Spavento, Captain Terrible, a fire-eater from Naples, etc. This comedy, necessarily kept within narrow limits by these characters, was strictly improvisation, except that the playwright provided a scenario, a skeleton plot. It had great success, and troops of Italian comedians went all over Europe; but by the eighteenth century it had run its course and become mere vulgar horseplay, and Goldoni (1707-93), the only brilliant comic playwright that Italy has produced, gave it a death-blow.
Goldoni was a Venetian, and a perfect embodiment of the happy, careless, amiable, entertaining society of the time. He led a roaming life, going to Tuscany to learn good Italian, and finally ending his career with twenty years in Paris. Some of his plays are in the Venetian dialect; two were written in French. There are more than a hundred, counting tragedies, interludes, and all. Their virtue is their lightness. They are made of foam, a delicious dramatic soufflé, and in the hands of accomplished Italian actors, like Eleonora Duse or Ermete Novelli, retain their charm to this day. They are essential for the history of the period, with their counts, barons, marquesses, their ladies, their waiting-maids, their innkeepers, camerieri, cobblers, adventurers, and all their gay mockery of the idle habits of the time.
It will throw a little more light upon the customs of that day to mention cicisbeismo, an unwritten rule of an artificial and idle society, which prescribed that a lady should have a cavaliere servente, a gentleman dangling in attendance upon her. Every lady had a husband, as maidens were not allowed in society, and widows had to choose between a convent and a second marriage; but the husband could not wait upon her, for his own duty as cavaliere servente required him to be in attendance upon somebody else's wife. The duties of the cavaliere servente were to devote himself solely to his lady, to write billets-doux, compose sonnets to her lapdog, to hand her chocolate at conversazioni, to give her his arm on all occasions, to ride beside her coach when she was out driving, and so on. In fact, he was required to do all those little offices, petits soins, which a young gentleman is accustomed to render to the lady whom he is engaged to marry. It was a state of active flirtation, not only sanctioned but required by society. It is said that in some cases the cavaliere servente was agreed upon before marriage, and his name inserted in the marriage contract.
Besides Goldoni's comic drama and the "Commedia dell'Arte" this Baroque Italy gave the world another and far more important gift, the Opera. Italian genius flared up once more and led the world in music. As far back as the days of the Council of Trent the reforming spirit of the Church found its noblest expression in Palestrina's (1524?-94) masses, but after his death, after the Catholic Revival had lost its deeply serious feeling, music took another step. Florence, the old home of genius, was the spot. A group of music lovers, who were full of classic theories about art, wished to revive antique Greek drama, with its combination of poetry, music, and dance. They decided that the words were the chief element, that the music must be subservient to the full emotional expression of the poetry, must intensify the dramatic significance of the story. To give effect to their opinion they devised a method of setting music to declamation, the earliest form of recitative. They meant to revive the Greek drama, but they produced the opera. After a few years of work over the new ideas, in 1600, at the Pitti Palace, an opera was publicly performed in honor of the espousals of Maria dei Medici and Henry IV of France. This was the first public performance of a secular opera. Soon afterwards Monteverdi (1567-1643), a revolutionary genius in the history of music, produced his operas at Mantua. In 1637 the first public opera house was opened in Venice; others quickly followed; the opera became a favourite diversion, and Italian singers carried it to France, Germany, Austria, and England. In the same year as the performance in the Pitti Palace, a dramatic oratorio, "The Soul and the Body," was publicly performed in Rome. The oratorio was greatly developed by Carissimi (1604-74) of the Roman school, and with him and his successors acquired much stateliness and beauty. Its influence on the opera, however, was not good, at least if we adopt the opinion of those Florentine Hellenes and of Wagner, for it developed music as an independent element, and did not subordinate it to dramatic action.
With the exception of this misdevelopment of the opera, all music evolved brilliantly and well in Italy, and especially in Naples, which eclipsed all other cities, and showed that she, too, had her individual genius. Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) wrote a great number of operas and oratorios, and composed a vast quantity of ecclesiastical music. He was followed by his son Domenico Scarlatti, by Durante, Leo, and Jommelli, by Pergolesi, Piccinni, Cimarosa, and Paisiello, who followed one another, like a flight of singing birds, through the eighteenth century. The Italian opera, even then, had the characteristics of subordinating dramatic propriety and all semblance of reality to arias, trills, and vocal exaggeration, but it was not till the beginning of the nineteenth century—with Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti—that the Italian opera (if I may venture to adapt a famous phrase) became melted Baroque. There were other schools of music at Rome, Bologna, and Venice. It was in Venice that the four famous asylums for girls, conservatori, were turned into music schools, and gave their name to training schools for musicians all over the world.
Besides the opera one must note, in mentioning Italian musical genius, the violin-makers, the Amati of Cremona, the greater Stradivarius (1644-1737), and other famous makers of Cremona, Brescia, and Venice; also the organ-builders, the Antignati of Brescia; the great Italian singers, then as now favourites of the world; as well as the greatest of libretto-writers, Metastasio.
Metastasio (1698-1782) had a career that can only be compared to that of a successful prima donna. As a boy he was adopted by the Arcadian lawyer, Gravina, and brought early to drink of the Pierian spring. After Gravina's death he spent his money, got into the company of singers and musicians at Naples, and composed the words of an opera "Dido," while still a youth of five-and-twenty. "Dido" had immense success, and from this time on Metastasio poured out play after play in words that went halfway and more to meet the accompanying music. His renown was triumphant throughout Europe; he became the pet of lords, ladies, kings, and Popes. He flitted from court to court, and sipped the honey of facile success; he serves as the embodiment of the Italian opera, or rather as a poetical spirit, a kind of baroque nightingale, to chant the charm, the sentiment, the sweetness, the unreality, of these two make-believe centuries.
As we take leave of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (a somewhat ignoble pair), their architecture, painting, literature, and music, we must, as in other matters, remember the good and forget the bad. We must keep in mind the Spanish Steps, which offer at their base ample room for all the flowers of all the flower-sellers of Rome, then rise in easy flight, pause, rest, and mount again, tier upon tier, till the top step stretches out into a terrace, where the pedestrian, glad to pause, turns and looks back over Rome towards the majestic dome of St. Peter's. We must remember the Trevi Fountain where gods and nymphs and waters splash and frolic together, or Guido's Aurora, where Apollo looses the rein to his heavenly horses as they gallop after Lucifer, while the straight-backed hours dance divinely alongside. We must recall the sweet sentiment in Metastasio, the light nothingness of Goldoni, the merriment of Harlequin and Columbine, the violins of Stradivarius, the singing of Farinello and Pacchierotti, the melodies of Pergolesi, and the general pleasantness of an idle, amiable society. Then we want to join the eighteenth-century travellers,—Addison, Walpole, President de Brosses, or Goethe,—and we look back with vain regret to that happy lotos-eating time, and wish it would return again.
Now come those great events, most important to Italy, the French Revolution and the invasion by Napoleon. The storm burst upon a scene of quiet. Italy was still like a comedy of Goldoni, dukes enjoying taxes and mistresses, priests accepting oblations and snuff, nobles sipping chocolate and pocketing rent, while the poor peasants, kept behind the scenes, sweated and toiled for a bare subsistence.
Before the Revolution came the premonitory breezes of philosophical philanthropy wafted across the Alps from the Encyclopedists. As they affected the various rulers differently, it is necessary to descend to some particulars. In Piedmont no philosophical philanthropy warmed the king; he wrapped his cloak tighter about him, and deemed the old ways good enough. He maintained his court in imitation of Versailles, and drilled his soldiers in imitation of Frederick the Great. Nobles alone were employed in the higher ranks of the civil service, nobles alone were made officers in the army; in return, they were treated like schoolboys, not allowed to leave a prescribed path without permission. The clergy had the privileges of the old régime; their tribunals had sole jurisdiction over priests, and tried to maintain jurisdiction over the laity for all offences that had a smack of sin. King, nobility, and clergy clung to the autocracy, and were resolved to maintain it in full vigour. A rash admirer of Montesquieu wrote a treatise upon "Constitutional Monarchy," and was put in prison.
In Lombardy the House of Austria really plunged into reform; it reorganized the administration, reapportioned taxes, curtailed clerical privileges, abolished the Inquisition, improved roads, favoured agriculture, stimulated trade, and encouraged manufacture. New ideas were broached. Beccaria published his famous book "On Crimes and Punishments," which began the attack on the atrocious, old penal cruelties. French philosophy was discussed. The physicist Volta, famous for his electrical discoveries, occupied a chair in the university at Pavia. Austrian garrisons indeed were on duty, but Lombardy prospered as it had not done since the days of the Sforzas.
In Venice the new ideas did not affect the government. The old system continued. The Great Council of Patricians sat in conservative indolence; the ornamental Doge shuffled about, the Senate talked, and the Council of Ten maintained its petty despotism. Venice was moribund. Her voice was no more heard in European affairs. Her army had dwindled to a few undisciplined and inefficient regiments; her arsenal was little employed. Gayety, luxury, vice, reigned triumphant; all the young blades of Europe went thither to carouse.
In Parma the flood of philanthropic reform had flowed strong; the minister of state, a Frenchman, full of Parisian ideas, had introduced many beneficial changes, but a new duke, dissipated and devout, slipped back into the old ways; and its little neighbour, Modena, concentrated its attention on avoidance of all possible offence to its neighbours.
In Tuscany, an appanage of Austria, reform bounded along. The Grand Duke, Leopold I, proposed to destroy every remnant of the Middle Ages; he attacked the power of the ubiquitous priests, granted free trade in grain, and equalized taxes,—without discrimination even in favour of his own estates. He improved the universities of Pisa and Siena, drained the marshes of the Maremma, and led the way in abolishing torture and capital punishment; he rendered a public account of the state's revenues; and, in short, put in practice the advanced philanthropic ideas on government.
In the Papal States, on the other hand, mediævalism lay heavy. There was no commerce, no manufacture, little agriculture. Priests were everywhere, greedy relations of the Pope almost everywhere. No laymen were given office. Ancona, a seaport, and Bologna, with its university, were the only exceptions to general wretchedness. The finances were in extreme confusion; the offerings of the faithful, the sale of offices, the multiplication of taxes, did little more than pay interest on the bonded debts. Rome was a little, unimportant, ecclesiastical city.
In Naples, however, even the Bourbons felt the fresh breath of reformation. A reforming minister expelled the Jesuits and tried to reduce the number of superfluous priests, monks, and nuns, and to root out the old feudal privileges. In the city itself a goodly company of men gathered together, cultivated ideas, and followed the lead of the French philosophers. Poor Sicily, overridden by barons and priests, lagged behind, a prey to the feudal system, and so unsusceptible to new ideas that the reforming prime minister could not budge the dead weight of custom. The people preferred to help one another in their own way, and resorted to that mysterious society, the Mafia.
Thus was Italy, half philanthropically inclined, half despotically, with few outward indications of the great awakening of the nineteenth century. One such indication might have been found in the life and character of a gentleman of Turin. Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) was a kind of antique Roman, a new Brutus, of passionate and lofty nature. He embodied his ideas of liberty in classic tragedies, which stirred Italian manhood in those days, but now are extremely tedious to read. He boldly gave vent to his hatred of foreign oppression, preached freedom, and appealed to the "future Italian people." His autobiography, somewhat condensed and expurgated, might be put into Plutarch. He stands in history, not as a great tragedian, but as the first example of the rebirth of that antique virility which was to display itself so brilliantly in the nineteenth century.
Down into this little world of periwigs and lavender came the French Revolution. All who had applauded Alfieri's tragedies were delighted, except Alfieri himself, who hated the French. But the Italian princes took fright at the democratic volcano, and talked of a general union against France. Piedmont alone was vigorous enough to take action; she made a league with Austria (1792). Nothing important happened until young Napoleon took command of the French army of invasion (1796), and began to tear "the heart out of Glory." It would be useless to relate in detail his wonderful career in Italy. He arranged the peninsula as a housekeeper shifts the furniture in an unsatisfactory room. He took Nice and Savoy from Piedmont, Lombardy from Austria, formed the little states south of the Po into a republic, took the temporal power from the Pope, and set up a Roman Republic. He turned the Kingdom of Naples into a republic and then back again into a kingdom, first for his brother Joseph, and then for his general, Murat (1808). He converted Genoa into the Republic of Liguria. Venice, like old Priam before bloody Pyrrhus, fell at the whiff and wind of the victor's sword; the Great Council resigned without a struggle, and the Republic of St. Mark after an existence of a thousand years came to its end. It was then handed over to Austria, but after Austerlitz taken back again. In 1805, having become Emperor, Napoleon turned the northern part of the peninsula into the Kingdom of Italy, and put the iron crown of Lombardy on his own head, saying, "God has given it to me, woe to him that touches it." In 1806 he put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, and forced the Emperor, Francis II, to resign the Imperial crown.
The old laws of political gravitation ceased to act, and Italy was moulded and broken and moulded anew, as if creation had begun again. The revolutionary ideas on which Napoleon's power at first rested had spread everywhere; liberty, equality, democracy were a part of every man's stock of familiar thoughts, and the conception of an Italian kingdom, vaguely associated with the poetic dreams of Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, had become a political fact. Italy was changed forever, the old Goldoni comedy was gone; Napoleon had given the coup de grâce to the old régime.
There was another side to the Napoleonic domination. A multitude of men had been forcibly enlisted in Napoleon's armies; twenty-six thousand, it is said, perished in the terrible retreat from Moscow. The French were arrogant and they were foreigners. Changes had been made too quickly and with too reckless a disregard for Italian wishes. Nobles and clergy had been despoiled of privileges, peasants had been confused and bewildered, the pious had been scandalized by Napoleon's treatment of the Pope; all these longed for the restoration of the old political divisions and of the old easy ways.
After Napoleon's overthrow the Napoleonic states in Italy fell almost immediately. The viceroy of the Italian kingdom, Napoleon's stepson Eugène Beauharnais, slunk away; and in the south, after some vicissitudes, Murat was caught and shot (1815). Kings, dukes, and Pope came tripping back to their thrones. The Congress of Vienna decided that the doctrines of the French Revolution were quite wrong, that law, order, and the principle of legitimacy were bound up together, that states belonged to their royal families in tail male, and reparcelled Italy among its petty sovereigns, acting quite as despotically as Napoleon had done. It gave Venice to Austria, Genoa to Piedmont, and Parma to Marie Louise, the Austrian wife of Napoleon, for her life, as she had to be decently provided for. The Dukes of Parma received Lucca until her death, when they were to return to Parma, and then Lucca was to be annexed to Tuscany. Metternich, Hardenberg, Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and their associates complimented one another on the happy completion of their task, and the Congress broke up.
In Piedmont the king, loyally welcomed home, put back everything to the position in which it was before the disturbances; the old dispossessed nobles were restored to their places in the civil and military service, and the carrière ouverte aux talents was closed. In Lombardy and Venice Austrian officials held a tight rein, and a watchful secret service (sbirri) prowled about ready to pounce on plotting youth like owls upon field mice. In Parma and Modena the eye of the Austrian government was always peering and peeping. In Tuscany Austrian influence also was dominant; but the Grand Duke was a gentle, kindly, paternal person, and his subjects were placidly content, for the old Tuscan fire had died out, and no Tuscan was so crazy as to dream of revolution or of a united Italy. In the Papal States the reaction was complete; the Inquisition was restored, the Jesuits recalled, the civil service limited to priests. But in Naples the reaction was worst. The despicable Ferdinand, who dropped his number IV of Naples to become Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, restored the old régime, and swept away the autonomy of Sicily, which had had a separate parliament for hundreds of years, and since 1812 a constitution also. Ferdinand humbly followed every hint from Austria. The will of Austria was supreme from Venice to Naples, and behind Austria was the conservative judgment of the ruling classes of all Europe, still frightened by the Revolution. European nobles and landowners agreed that the riotous desires of the middle class and proletariat for political privileges must be crushed down.