ALESSANDRO MANZONI.

Alessandro Manzoni. Reminiscenze di Cesare Cantù. Milano. Fratelli Treois. 1882.

IT

T is the blessed gift of some men, living and dead, to inspire warm personal attachments, and this was Alessandro Manzoni's. His friend, Cesare Cantù, writing of him, brings us within the charm of his presence and influence by the magnetism of his own devotion. The author of "I Promessi Sposi," is a friend already to those of us who have moved through the fine air where Cardinal Federigo and Lucia have their being; but having read Cantu's two volumes, we distinctively realize that that pure atmosphere was native to Manzoni himself, and that at no time could he have written of things that were not of virtue, and of praise, and of good report.

We learn that his life knew its hour of doubt, and that his faith was bought with a price; but this is a fleeting shadow over his eighty years of singularly serene spiritual experience. There is the restful, if passionless, tranquility of certain phases of Greek art in the record of that long life-time. Not that he was spared the domestic sorrows, the physical pains that are our common heritage; but in a certain pliability of disposition, in a certain adaptability to circumstances, Manzoni was one of those children of the times who yet "possess it," in the sense that the meek possess the earth, the gentle, the heavenly-minded.

His birthday takes us back to 1785, during which year his father, Don Pietro Manzoni, was married to Donna Giulia Beccaria, first by civil contract, and afterwards in due religious order in the family chapel of the Beccarias in Milan. Don Pietro was fortyfive years old at the time, and survived in his son's memories as a gentleman of what was the old school in the first years of this century, costumed as for one of Goldoni's plays, pigtail, kneebreeches, ear-rings, gold snuff-box and cocked hat. His quaint figure passes directly across our stage and out of sight, but the lovely, graceful personality of Donna Giulia lingers. She was a woman of more intense individuality than of great intellectual grasp, capable of inspiring ardent attachments, and, in her own sphere, exceedingly, if delicately, strong. Cantù gives us an exquisite portrait of her, lithographed from an acquarello taken in 1829 which vividly suggests Manzoni's own refined, chiseled, sensitive features. Cantù tells us that she retained her beauty after

the soft, clustering ringlets on her forehead were snow-white, and that at that later day one was accustomed to see her with a fleecywhite shawl drawn about her; in the picture she wears a close frilled cap, undoubtedly as becoming as might be; Donna Giulia was of that order of women. It is easy to see her in cap and shawl, exercising a gentle tyranny in her son's house in after years. She worshipped his genius; she measured all other men. by the standard of their appreciation of him; but she never abdicated her own sovereignty. It is possible that she never forgot that she brought to the family coffers the means to keep up a certain household dignity; at all events the linen was marked with her cipher; her judgment regulated the domestic expenses; her word was law in all domestic affairs; her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren deferred to her as the final domestic authority. The gentle soul who was Manzoni's first wife, and who had an angelic wisdom in holding her own in all matters of real importance and in yielding on all minor points, shared her woman's kingdom with Donna Giulia for long years. Sadly enough, when this sweet creature died, Donna Giulia was compelled to resign the sceptre so long swayed. She herself passed away finally in 1841, her naturally strong character sublimed by then into a saintship of its own; infinitely benevolent in alms-giving, practically religious, full of toleration for the follies and vices of all except for those who ignored her Alessandro's claims. Over her mortal remains, her son inscribed this epitaph:

"To Giulia Manzoni, the daughter of Cesare Beccaria, a matron revered for her great intelligence, her liberality to the poor, her profound practical religion; who is committed by her inconsolable son and by all her afflicted family to the mercy of God and to the prayers of the faithful."

But it was in his early manhood that Donna Giulia made the' most direct impression upon the life of her son. She made Paris her home throughout Alessandro's childhood, and it is impossible to deny the fact that he was in a great measure left to shift for himself during these years of dependence. He drifted about from one school to another, spending some years at the University of Pavia, where, however, his name is "writ in water" equally with that of Christopher Columbus and of San Carlo Borromeo, who are both said to have studied there. There survive various poetical efforts of his written at this time, in one of which he belabors his then instructors greatly to their subsequent resentment. In another he describes himself, but doubtless not as "ithers" saw him. There is all the pathos of outlooking, ignorant youth in the two last lines of this sonnet:

VOL. XIII.-47

"A stranger to the world, a stranger to myself;

The world and time to come thou show me what I am."

But in all his early verses there is the vagueness and the mannerism of the prevailing school of literature to which he is still in bondage.

In 1805 he joined his mother in Paris, returning there with her from a journey which she made into Lombardy for the purpose of interring the remains of her friend Carlo Imbonati, who had requested this last service of her in his will, the will in which he bequeated to her his worldly goods.

This is a curious old-world instrument, a document that could not well have been written in any other day than in that of the exaggerated sentiment surviving the eighteenth century. Cantù tells us that the youth of Donna Giulia was "free from errors, if not devoid of sentiment"; and we hence conclude that the bond between Donna Giulia and Imbonati was one of the platonic attachments of the period which delighted in the uttermost verbal expression. It was through Imbonati's bequest that the fortunes of the Manzonis were materially mended, and that Alessandro was enabled to share his mother's fascinating Parisian surroundings, when she was a bright particular star in a galaxy of charming, brilliant women and polished, learned men. In return, Manzoni conferred immortality upon his mother's friend by his first published poem, "Verses in Memory of Carlo Imbonati." But these verses are marred by the defects alluded to before. There were certain artificial methods then in vogue which Manzoni subsequently abandoned; such as putting abstractions in the place of realities; avoiding all real names; as well as an excessive use of figures and allegories. All such conceits and affectations were necessarily antagonistic to the genius of the man whose literary style, as it now stands, is simplicity itself, and who through the most crystalline form of language appeals to a universal experi

ence.

Imbonati's will alludes throughout to Donna Giulia as "my heir." It concludes by imploring "the high God, our common Father, to receive my prayers, made from the depths of my heart, for the best welfare of my heir, and to permit us finally to bless and to adore Him together."

It would seem that Imbonati's was not the only extravagant friendship inspired by Donna Giulia. In the same connection, we note that our own staid Benjamin Franklin, writing about this time from America to Madame Helvetius, whom he styles "Notre Dame d'Auteuil," exclaims: "I reach my arms to you across the waste of waters which separate us. I await the celestial kiss which I finally expect to bestow, one day, upon you." Cantù doubts

whether the religious connections of Madame Helvetius permitted her to await this heretic's kiss with equal certainty.

Madame Helvetius was one of Manzoni's best friends during his life in Paris, and a woman of much social importance. We get a glimpse of Manzoni at this time, in the memoirs of Madame Mohl, recently given to the world, by Kathleen O'Meara. Madame Mohl, at that time Mary Clark, was the intimate friend of Fauriel, one of Manzoni's associates. Among the few letters of Manzoni that have come down to us are some addressed to Fauriel; but they have small value for us. Manzoni had not yet struck the key-note of his attachment, and these letters contain little else besides commonplace compliments, trifles.

Call it a pardonable weakness if you will, but still a weakness— it was the fancy of Manzoni, in those days, to identify himself with his mother's rather than with his father's family.

He liked being called Manzoni-Beccaria, or even Signor Beccaria. Donna Giulia herself had much family pride and joyed in the belief that through herself the virtues and the intellectual gifts of the Beccarias had been transmitted to her son. These Beccarias had been for generations a typical Italian family of the rural nobility. Cantù draws a line between nobles and patricians, by the way, which it is difficult for us to appreciate from our republican standpoint; but he gives a most delightful picture of the surroundings of such a family as the Beccarias. It is a temptation to quote this page in its entirety; but were one to begin to quote verbatim from Cantù's volumes, it would be hard to tell where to stop. He is thoroughly fresh and simpateca; from his opening sentence, he takes his reader into his confidence and enlists his absorbed interest in the men, women and things he writes of; the soft Italian skies are above us; the soft Italian tongue is in our ears. The kindly Italian simplicity of feeling and speech pervades the whole record, but comes out especially in such characteristic fits as that which describes the life of Donna Giulia's ancestors. No doubt Alessandro's mental gallery was stored with pictures used later in his books, from his mother's own tales of the Beccarias, who had lived in their own lands like little kings, directing the affairs of their dependents, governing within their narrow sphere, in the midst of and yet above and apart from their subjects. We are told that these lords of the soil were doubtless aware of the existence of a sovereign; but only as a far-off king of whom they were themselves happily independent. It was their boast that they had never held public office or conducted lawsuits; it was equally their pride to have assisted for generations in conducting the services of the Church; to have sung in the village choir; to have swelled religious processions; to have been enrolled in devout confraternities;

to have visited the sick and to have fed the poor. Pride in such an ancestry is worthy and reasonable, and made a direct appeal to Alessandro's peculiar qualities of head and heart. A close bond sprang up between himself and his mother, and it was easy and natural for him "to see with her belief." She fostered his ambitious hopes in every way. Writing from Paris to his friend Pagani, he says: "my mother's continual occupation is to love me, and make me happy. I am content. I lack nothing except the inclination to apply myself to work; and if I fail in so doing, I am doubly to blame, since I have beside me so dear an incentive" (si dolce sprone). And again: "If you re-read former letters of mine to you, it will surprise you to be told now that my mother, that unique mother and woman, has redoubled her love and care of me."

About 1808, mother and son returned to Milan-we infer, with some regrets. Alessandro had already survived one desperate love affair-at twenty, this may be. Donna Giulia now took his matrimonial prospects in hand, and after casting about here and there, arranged a marriage for him with Mademoiselle Blondel, the daughter of a Genevese banker. This may fairly be cited as a successful instance of one of those marriages of convenience which are so foreign to our notions. The bride was sixteen, of a fresh fair beauty; gentle, easily moulded; the ideal wife for a man of genius. She bore Manzoni eight children, and won and kept his devoted attachment. Cantù speaks of her with sisterly affection, and this fair, gracious Signora Enrichetta smiles upon us from his graphic pages, in all the charm of pure and selfless womanhood. This union between a young Milanese noble and a Protestant burgher's daughter elicited a buzz of gossip, at which Manzoni exclaimed in his impatience: “Ah, blessed Paris, where not even the boot-black at the door would have known of it!" Both he and his mother, in truth, never ceased to rebel at the confined social atmosphere of Milan, after the independence of Paris. However, in spite of the disapproval of the gossips, in spite of the apparently commonplace and prosaic beginnings of this union, Manzoni and his Enrichetta, or Henrietta as we would say, were singularly blessed. Life was at very many times a sore burden to the poet, from physical causes; but his wife's pity and patience never failed him. The blonde, smiling little girl he married, who always spoke in French, and called Donna Giulia maman, grew to be his helpmate and cherished companion. She is the ideal Ermengarde of whom he affirms in one of his poems that she never knew all his love, nor learned "from the reserve of his lips the intoxicating secret of his heart."

Cantù declares that "her gentleness was the benediction of the poet's life; she guarded him with sisterly, almost with maternal