Young Italy

“ Out of these and Dante sprang Young Italy. Italy was ripe for the teaching of the epoch-making society. The country was "a geographical expression." Conquerors, whose appetites had been tempted by the Southern land, had carved it into appanages for themselves. Austria held Lombardy and the lands of the Venetian republic; the King of Piedmont ruled the North-West, and Sardinia, and Savoy across the Alps; the Bourbons of Naples had the South; the Pope, the grand-duke of Tuscany, the petty dukes of Modena, Parma, and Lucca divided up the Centre. Nor had there been any serious demand for unity. ”

“ The happy hour has come to me—Heaven be praised!—while I am still young and strong and sensitive. Here I sit for the first time in the enchanted air in which love and faith and art and knowledge are warranted to become deeper passions than in my own chilly clime. I begin to behold the promise of my dreams. It's Italy. How can I tell you what that means to one of us? Only see already how fluent and tender of speech I've become. The air has a perfume; everything that enters my soul, at every sense, is a suggestion, a promise, a performance. ”

“ It was a not unfrequent custom for young men of ability to study at the Italian universities, or at least to undertake a journey to the principal Italian cities. From their sojourn in that land of loveliness and intellectual life they returned with their Northern brains most powerfully stimulated. To produce, by masterpieces of the imagination, some work of style that should remain as a memento of that glorious country, and should vie on English soil with the art of Italy, was their generous ambition. ”

“ When all hope of a brighter future for Italy seemed lost in the sorrowful result of its struggle for freedom, Catharina Ferucci wrote, with lacerated heart, but with firm hope and love, her work for the moral and intellectual education of la donna Italiana. She wishes to educate mothers, in the young women, who will give sons and daughters to Italy; to elevate its life effectually, and to make it noble and independent. ”

“ Italy rising from the grave was the living romance of myriads of young hearts that were lifted from the common level of trivial interests and selfish ends, from the routine of work or pleasure, both deadening without some diviner spark, by a sustained enthusiasm that can hardly be imagined now. ”

“ In exile he began the task of rousing the Italian people throughout the peninsula to the need of common effort for a common end. He organized a secret society, and named it Young Italy. Its purpose was to make Italy free, united, and republican. The first article of its constitution read: "This society is instituted for the destruction, now become indispensable, of all the governments of the peninsula, and for the union of all Italy in a single state under republican government." The new society spread rapidly, and was, perhaps, the greatest individual cause of final success. ”

“ Nor drink our tea without a stratagem,
like the lady in Doctor Young; the surest method is to drop into Italy; where a conversazione at Venice or Florence, after the society of London, or les petit soupers de Paris, where, in their own phrase, un tableau n'attend pas l'autre [One picture don't wait for another] , is like taking a walk in Ham Gardens, or the Leasowes, after les parterres de Versailles ed i Terrazzi di Genoa. We are affected in the house, but natural in the gardens. Italians are natural in society, affected and constrained in the disposition of their grounds. ”

“ But toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and in the first years of the Twentieth a vigorous spirit of reaction began to manifest itself in the young men of Italy against the preceding generation's ideas in politics, literature, science and philosophy. ”

“ The most enlightened Italians instead of relying on the mystery of oaths, the terror of assassination, the perpetual conspiracy of secret associations, are anxious that their young men should exercise themselves in some school of warfare—they wish that the new generation may be emancipated by their courage, their knowledge, their virtues ”

“ Yes, young men, Italy owes to you an undertaking which has merited the applause of the universe. You have conquered and you will conquer still, because you are prepared for the tactics that decide the fate of battles. ”

“ What if some nation, fresh from the woods and fields of the childhood of its growth, come with overwhelming yet preserving strength and infuse new blood into the withered veins of its predecessor? This is the problem we now have before us. How many writers of Italian history have entitled this chapter in its development "A new Italian Nation formed"! It is not the old glories of Rome, which had been Italy, returning; it is a new Italian nation formed. Each word tells a story of its own. It is not the old galvanized to a second life ”

“ It is impossible not to hope well for a country, whose poets, whose men of reflection and talent, without one exception, all use the gifts of genius or knowledge, to teach the noblest lessons of devotion to their country; and whose youth receive the same with devoted enthusiasm.
When we visit Italy, we become what the Italians were censured for being,—enjoyers of the beauties of nature, the elegance of art, the delights of climate, the recollections of the past, and the pleasures of society, without a thought beyond. ”

“ Italy indeed suffered terribly. At no date was the selfishness of nations more flagrantly exhibited than in these Italian wars. The peninsula became the spoil of the foreigner, never to regain her independence till our own day. Yet in the midst of her supreme agony, she had bestowed a priceless gift on Europe. The revived knowledge of Greek art and literature, the highest perfection of painting, the new style of architecture, the knowledge of man, and the spirit of criticism—these were to be her final legacies to Europe in the movement of the Renaissance, which was so peculiarly Italian. ”

“ There was a confederacy dreamed of in his day—Genoa, Milan, and Venice; Florence, Sienna, and Bologna. One rampart to the rolling Alps, one wall on which barbarian hordes might burst and waste themselves in foam. Northwards, a baffled sea; south, all Italy a tranquil haven, a watered garden, where knowledge with all its flowers should find space, and breathing-space to grow. Dost thou love Italy? Then why not a republic, Galeazzo?'
The Duke, as utterly impassive as if he were deaf, turned musingly to Lascaris. ”

“ It was in the course of those five hundred years that the Italians as a modern people, separable from their Roman ancestors, were formed. At the close of this obscure passage in Italian history, their communes, the foundation of Italy's future independence, and the source of her peculiar national development, appeared in all the vigour and audacity of youth. At its close the Italian genius presented Europe with its greatest triumph of constructive ability, the Papacy. ”

“ Oh, Florry, does not your heart yearn toward benighted Italy? Italy, once so beautiful and noble—once the acknowledged mistress of the world, as she sat in royal magnificence enthroned on her seven hills; now a miserable waste, divided between petty sovereigns, and a by-word for guilt and degradation! The glorious image lies a ruin at our feet: for the spirit that gave beauty and strength, and shed a halo of splendor round its immortal name, has fled afar, perhaps forever ”

“ It is the month in which the northern traveller, grown distrustful of the promised clemency of Italian skies, and with the winter bitterness still in his bones, lighting on a patch of primroses under a leafless bank, or on the running flame of tulips along the trenches of an olive orchard, learns that Italy is Italy, after all, and hugs himself at thought of the black ultramontane March. ”

“ The scholars of the time enjoyed an immense popularity. A new caste of society arose, not dependent on birth or wealth, but on learning and intelligence. Princes and cities sought for their services, for which they paid large sums. Everywhere they were received as equal to the noblest in the land. The movement reached its highest point in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the intellectual and artistic life of Italy was of almost incredible greatness. ”

“ At the period of which we write, Italy had become the leading nation of Europe in all that pertained to literature and the arts; her painters, sculptors, and poets, had thrown over her people and history a glory, or rather a glamour, which was but the iridescence which whispered of decay. Within a century all had sunk into insignificance and palsy. To-day the world visits Italy to see with curious eyes what she has been, not what she is. ”

“ When the prophecy of Garibaldi shall be fulfilled, when the priests, with spades in their hands, shall dig ditches to drain the Pontine marshes, when the monasteries shall be factories, when the whirling wheels of industry shall drown the drowsy and hypocritical prayers, then and not till then, will Italy be great and free. Italy is the only instance in our history and in the history of the world, so far as we know, of the resurrection of a nation. She is the first fruits of them that sleep. ”

“ This old Chronicon affords an illustration of the fact that the transition and early mediaeval centuries had brought nothing to Italy that was new or foreign, nothing that was not in the blood, nothing to deeply disturb the continuity of Italian culture and character which moved along without break, whether in ascending or descending curves.
Yet evidently the eleventh-century Italian is no longer a Latin of the Empire. For one thing, he is more individualistic. Formerly the prodigious power of Roman government united citizens and subject peoples, and impressed a human uniformity upon them. ”

“ While anxious not to break down what is really native to the Italian character,—defences and differences that give individual genius a chance to grow and the fruits of each region to ripen in their natural way,—they aim at a harmony of spirit as to measures of education and for the affairs of business, without which Italy can never, as one nation, present a front strong enough to resist foreign robbery, and for want of which so much time and talent are wasted here, and internal development almost wholly checked. ”

“ Yet the Italian eye is wonderfully expressive; some people think it says too much. The complexion, for the most part, is of a clear brown, sometimes fair, but very seldom florid, or of that bright fairness which is common in England and Saxony. It must be owned, that those features which have a fine expression of sentiment and meaning in youth, are more apt, than less expressive faces, to become soon strong and masculine. In England [71] and Germany, the women, a little advanced in life, retain the appearance of youth longer than in Italy. ”

“ If some prejudices passed away under the Napoleonic rule, many more still remained, and possibly, to eradicate so old an evil, no cure less drastic than universal servitude would have sufficed. Italians felt for the first time what before only the greatest among them had felt—that they were brothers in one household, children of one mother whom they were bound to redeem. Jealousies and millennial feuds died out; the intense municipal spirit which, imperfect as it was, had yet in it precious political germs, widened into patriotism. Italy was re-born. ”

“ But Italy—the Niobe of nations—defending with half-broken heart, the youngest child, hope, in her bosom; Italy, after long, dark centuries, awakened to new life, languishing after light, liberty, a higher humanity; longing to become herself, a pure harmonious note in the choir of free peoples—this Italy attracted me with irresistible power. ”

“ Except Venice, always individual, and the Papacy, freshly revivified, Italy has lost all moral force, and become wholly effeminate. In twenty-five years three hundred and twenty-six volumes of sonnets were published. Her political life has become what one may call grand-ducal; her religion formal, superstitious; her literature affected, stilted; her architecture Baroque; her painting and sculpture steeped in mannerism and exaggeration. Nevertheless, Italy is Italy, and has her own charm, her own individuality, her own coquetry. ”

“ Tradition has marked out and defined the characteristics of a high mission more distinctly in Italy than elsewhere. We alone, among the nations that have expired in the past, have twice arisen in resurrection and given new life to Europe. The innate tendency of the Italian mind always to harmonize thought and action confirms the prophecy of history, and points out the rôle of Italy in the world to be a work of moral unification,—the utterance of the synthetic word of civilization. ”

“ If what had finally, with infinite patience, passion, labour, taste, got itself done there, was like some supreme reward of an old dream of Italy, something perfect after long delays, was it not verily in ultima Thule that the vow would have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly enough nursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give, you must doubtless either be a rare raffine or a rare genius, a sophisticated Norseman or just a Gabriele d' Annunzio. ”

“ Its hard yet beneficent climate, with sharp delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of her cities and plains will in the end be saved. ”