Ugo Foscolo

“ The work was rigidly suppressed and is now exceedingly rare. The government indicted Panizzi in his absence, sentenced him to death as contumacious, and debited him with the costs of the legal proceedings, for which he disclaimed responsibility in a humorous letter. After a short stay at Lugano he made his way to London, where he was welcomed by Ugo Foscolo, who despatched him to Liverpool with a letter of introduction to Roscoe, the chief patron of Italian literature in England. ”

“ Poor Ugo Foscolo, who, for some reason, had been unable to accept the invitation to Liverpool, and whom misfortune seemed to have marked for her own, died in London in penury on the 10th September, 1827. His death was at once announced to Panizzi by Giulio Bossi. The few books he left behind were purchased by some of his remaining friends; Panizzi bought as many as his means allowed him, and these he distributed among the most distinguished admirers 71of the deceased, one of whom was Mr. Macaulay, who acknowledged the presentation in the following letter ”

“ Bembo, the secretary of Leo, and a cardinal himself, and Berni, the secretary to several cardinals, give no more quarter to them than is given in the Decameron. No wonder then that laymen should take similar liberties, and that a friar should be regarded, as Ugo Foscolo observes, as a sort of scape-goat for the sins of the whole clergy. These considerations may explain how the Decameron went through several editions, both at Venice and Florence, without attracting the censures of the Court of Rome. ”

“ The treaty of Campo Formio (17th Oct. 1797) , by which Napoleon handed Venice over to the Austrians, gave a rude shock to Foscolo, but did not quite destroy his hopes. The state of mind produced by that shock is reflected in the Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798) , a species of political Werther,—for the hero of Foscolo embodies the mental sufferings and suicide of an undeceived Italian patriot just as the hero of Goethe places before us the too delicate sensitiveness embittering and at last cutting short the life of a private German scholar. ”

“ The writer toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw into our minds that sympathy with which we hang over the illusion of his pages, and become himself. ARIOSTO wrote sixteen different ways the celebrated stanza descriptive of a tempest, as appears by his MSS. at Ferrara; and the version he preferred was the last of the sixteen. We know that PETRARCH made forty-four alterations of a single verse: "whether for the thought, the expression, or the harmony, it is evident that as many operations in the heart, the head, or the ear of the poet occurred," observes a man of genius, Ugo Foscolo. ”

“ The sensation produced by this lecture had no slight share in provoking the decree of Napoleon by which the chair of national eloquence was abolished in all the Italian universities. Soon afterwards Foscolo’s tragedy of Ajax was represented but with little success at Milan, and its supposed allusions to Napoleon rendering the author an object of suspicion, he was forced to remove from Milan to Tuscany. The chief fruits of his stay in Florence are the tragedy of Ricciarda, the Ode to the Graces, left unfinished, and the completion of his version of the Sentimental Journey (1813) . ”

“ The mighty dead are summoned from their tombs, as ages before they had been in the masterpieces of Greek oratory, to fight again the battles of their country. The inaugural lecture on the origin and duty of literature, delivered by Foscolo in January 1809 when appointed to the chair of Italian eloquence at Pavia, was conceived in the same spirit. In this lecture Foscolo urged his young countrymen to study letters, not in obedience to academic traditions, but in their relation to individual and national life and growth. ”

“ FOSCOLO, UGO (1778-1827) , Italian writer, was born at Zante in the Ionian Isles on the 26th of January 1778. On the death of his father, a physician at Spalatro, in Dalmatia, the family removed to Venice, and in the University of Padua Foscolo prosecuted the studies begun in the Dalmatian grammar school. The fact that amongst his Paduan masters was the abbé Cesarotti, whose version of Ossian had made that work highly popular in Italy, was not without influence on Foscolo’s literary tastes, and his early knowledge of modern facilitated his studies in ancient Greek. ”

“ The young found hope and life in the new stage on which they were permitted to act a part; and though ridicule and blame might be attached to many of their public actions, still the more sanguine lovers of their country hoped that, when the first springtide of enthusiasm should ebb, prudence, unanimity, and strength would be the first born of national independence. Foscolo, however, was not among those. Irascible and misanthropic, and sensitively alive to the sufferings of his fellow-creatures, he saw the evils around him, and desponded. ”

“ I do not blame the reasons of state, through which nations are sold like flocks of sheep; it was ever so, and so will it ever be: but I grieve for my country, which I have lost. 'He was born Italian, and will one day regenerate his country:' others may believe this,—I never can. I replied, and shall always reply, 'Nature made him a tyrant, and a tyrant cares not for his country, nor does he possess one.'"
Ruminating on all these violent and bitter feelings, the offspring of patriotism and adversity, Foscolo took the road to Tuscany. ”

“ All these letters are full of the indignant struggles, and the sorrow, as well as of the opinions which ruled the heart of Foscolo, as he found himself driven a wanderer from his home, sometimes lamenting his own misfortunes, sometimes those of his country.
"How many of our fellow-citizens repent their flight from home," he writes, "and mourn! for what can we expect except indigence and indignity—or, at the best, that brief and sterile compassion which uncivilised nations offer to the stranger exile? And where shall I seek an asylum—in Italy? ”

“ Without a key it is impossible to understand it—alluding, as it does, to people little known, and to facts still more obscure; and when understood is not praised, even by his countrymen, who might be supposed to take some interest in a personal satire on men with whom they were acquainted.
Foscolo found tranquillity at Zurigo; and his disposition, not being inclined to intrigue, would have permitted him to remain there in peace; {Pg 385} but he was poor, and obliged to seek a country where he could turn his talents to some account. ”

“ He took a house in South Bank, Regent's Park, which he named Digamma Cottage—from his having contributed to the Quarterly Review an article on the Digamma—and fitted it up in extravagant style.
Foscolo could scarcely live at peace with anybody, and, as the result of one of his numerous altercations, he had to fight a duel. "We are," Lady Dacre wrote to Murray (December 1823) , "to have the whole of Foscolo's duel to-morrow. He tells me that it is not about a 'Fair lady': thank heaven!" ”

“ Apart from its impressive style, the book is weak and unwholesome, but it powerfully depicts an unquestionable tendency of the age, and as such has a right to live, apart from its influence on Leopardi, George Sand, and other more recent writers of genius. Foscolo's melancholy, fretful and egotistic as it is, is not pessimism; is not grounded in the nature of things, but is always remediable by a change in external circumstances. ”

“ How could such a man condescend at other times to rage with abuse, and to delight himself in images of infernal torment!
The dates of these fluctuations of feeling towards his native city are not known; but it is supposed to have been not very long before his abode with Can Grande that he received permission to return to Florence, on conditions which he justly refused and resented in the following noble letter to a kinsman. The old spelling of the original (in the note) is retained as given by Foscolo in the article on "Dante" in the Edinburgh Review (vol. XXX. no. 60) ”

“ The house itself, without being ruinous, is huge and desolate; but its vast cool halls are a pleasant refuge against the heats of mid-day. Here Foscolo studied through the morning, varying his life by spending his evenings with the family of count Giovio, a man of education and learning, whose young and gay family served to dissipate the fumes of melancholy in which the poet was rather fond of indulging. ”

“ Yet, though not gifted with liberty, the present epoch was a happy one for the north of Italy. After suffering from the persecutions of demagogues, and from the devastations of war, it reposed contentedly under the wise and liberal administration of Melzi. Foscolo continued to inhabit Milan: by day immersed in study, his evenings were spent in amusements. His sanguine disposition often led him to try the chances of a gambling table: when he won, he launched out into extravagant expenses; he bought horses and dress, and hired the most magnificent apartments. ”

“ Foscolo was a brave man, and faithfully loved freedom, and he must be ranked with those poets who, in later times, have devoted themselves to the liberation of Italy. He is classic in his forms, but he is revolutionary, and he hoped for some ideal Athenian liberty for his country, rather than the English freedom she enjoys. But we cannot venture to pronounce dead or idle the Greek tradition, and we must confess that the romanticism which brought into literary worship the trumpery picturesqueness of the Middle Ages was a lapse from generous feeling. ”

“ She proposed, and zealously promoted, the course of lectures on Italian literature which Foscolo delivered in 1823. Mr. Stewart Rose was another of his real and anxious friends; and Foscolo's acknowledged talents, and the interest excited by his exile, facilitated their endeavours. His lectures were numerously attended, and brought him a thousand pounds;—a small sum, if on it he was to found a sufficient income to maintain him for the rest of his life; a large one to an Italian, accustomed to look on a few hundred crowns as riches. ”

“ The machinery is mythological, the imagery drawn from the same source; and it is rather the work of one imbued with the poetry of the ancients, and translating remembered ideas into his native language, than the outpourings of a mind inspired by passion and nature. It is strange that Foscolo should have found time to compose verses at a period when the town he inhabited was being bombarded by the English fleet, when the Austrians were making daily assaults, and the streets were filled by a famished and dying multitude. ”

“ Though 'somewhat,' as Dugald Dalgetty says, 'too wild and salvage' (like 'Ronald of the Mist') , 'tis a wonderful man, and my friends Hobhouse and Rose both swear by him; and they are good judges of men and of Italian humanity.
"Here are in all two worthy voices gain'd:
Gifford says it is good 'sterling genuine English,' and Foscolo says that the characters are right Venetian. ”

“ We cannot refrain from observing, in this place, that we possess a proof, in the bent of Foscolo's genius, of how little the intellect is often in accord with the heart. Wild, vehement, gloomy almost to savageness, independent even to an incapacity of yielding to the common rules of society, he could not depict the wild furies of Ajax, nor, indeed, the more burning throes that often tore his own heart. His best {Pg 381} compositions, on the contrary, seem to emanate from an impassioned but brooding spirit, nursed in soft melancholy and elegant and fanciful reverie. ”

“ Each town of the peninsula sent some man esteemed for his talents; and names, scattered before over the surface of the country, now congregated together. Foscolo had thus an opportunity of becoming acquainted with all his more illustrious countrymen. In his "Letters of Jacopo Ortis," he mentions Parini especially with reverence and affection; and he became intimate also with Monti, who then displayed fervour in the cause of liberty, while his inward dislike for the {Pg 361} members of the actual government must have accorded with the sentiments of Foscolo. ”

“ The Brescians are a happy, gay {Pg 375} people; they live less in the town than the inhabitants of the rest of Italy, and take peculiar pleasure in rural amusements; they are hospitable and fond of festivity; not very refined, they are yet open-hearted and cordial, and noted for bravery when in the field. Foscolo's neighbours admired and visited him; persons of every sect and opinion, even the priests, flocked to his house; and often seated under a wide-spreading fig tree which was in his garden, he held forth to a numerous audience. ”

“ The Italians think as highly of Foscolo as they can of any man, divided and miserable as they are, and with neither leisure at present to read, nor head nor heart to judge of any thing but extracts from French newspapers and the Lugano Gazette.
"We are all looking at one another, like wolves on their prey in pursuit, only waiting for the first falling on to do unutterable things. ”

“ On the whole, Foscolo’s prose is turgid and affected, and reflects the character of the man who always tried to pose, even before himself, in dramatic attitudes. This was indeed the defect of the Napoleonic epoch; there was a horror of anything common, simple, natural; everything must be after the model of the hero who made all the world gaze with wonder at him; everything must assume some heroic shape. In Foscolo this tendency was excessive ”

“ Here again what most excites our admiration is the harmonious and easy versification. Among his prose works a high place belongs to his translation of the Sentimental Journey of Sterne, a writer by whom one can easily understand how Foscolo should have been deeply affected. He went as an exile to England, and died there. He wrote for English readers some Essays on Petrarch and on the texts of the Decamerone and of Dante, which are remarkable for the time at which they were written, and which may be said to have initiated a new kind of literary criticism in Italy. ”