VIII

FOSCOLO

A RESOLUTE effort is necessary to prevent Alfieri from being looked upon as exclusively and narrowly Italian either politically as the apostle of the national Risorgimento, or from a literary point of view as having enriched Italian literature with tragedy, sole among literary forms which is supposed to have been lacking to it, and to present him as a European writer and an extreme individualist, which he was really, or, as others are now crudely putting it, as a libertarian and an anarchist. It is an easier matter, to a certain extent anticipated by common consent, to affirm that Ugo Foscolo was a European man and writer; although the European literary world has happened to be ignorant of his personality as a whole and as expressed in his most important works. His youthful Ortis was, however, read outside Italy, from his own days onwards, and is still translated and reprinted. This work directly connects him with the pre- and early romantics of despair and suicide. His poem the Sepulchres forms one of the series which critics and philologists place with the English, French and German poetry of that time dealing with tombs and cemeteries. During his residence in England, his criticism at once found its place in the chief English reviews. A work recently published by the lamented Joseph Manacorda cites at every step Hölderlin,

Novalis, Tieck and Heinze, Goethe, Rousseau and Chénier, not as authors whom he imitated or knew, but as kindred spirits, belonging to the same period and to the same spiritual environment as he. Certainly we have no intention of denying that Foscolo had an even greater share than Alfieri in powerfully stimulating national sentiment, and that the Italian patriots of the nineteenth century had every right to claim him as their father, as he had claimed Alfieri, whose name, he said, was "sacred" to him "to the point of adoration." Perhaps it may even be said that Foscolo's influence was hardly equalled by that of any other writer, since he had influenced Mazzini, and Mazzini the young men of the new generation. But the use made by a people of its poets and writers does not suffice to determine the character and meaning of these poets and writers, considered in themselves.

Foscolo's view of things was dark: he felt himself oppressed by an unknown violent power, which forces men into the world under the sun and obliges them to live out their life with that "fever" in their veins of which Shakespeare speaks, and then inexorably hurls them into the darkness of death and of oblivion. The thought of death, if it did not predominate in him, at any rate dominated. He liked to be at home with death since a boy, just like a character of Shakespeare, and not only with that form of death which comes upon us as fate, but also with that other form of it, which must be invited and desired, suicide, a way out of life that must always be kept open. This conception and disposition of spirit produces as a general idea the most different practical attitudes in life-asceticism and cynicism,

ferocious renunciation and frivolous enjoyment, acting and abstaining from action, quietistic selfabandonment and fervent labour and travail of spirit. This last form alone was possible to Foscolo, with his sensitive, energetic mind, requiring expansion and action, and open to generous impulses of all sorts. And here we find a definite instance of the relation between life and philosophy, to which life offers itself, that is to say, the experience of itself, which thought then restores to it rendered more clear and more strong. His mind and thought enabled Foscolo to detect a light in the darkness of overpowering, unknown and external and therefore materialistic forces, which served as a rallying point from which he was able to regain his spontaneity, autonomy and freedom. What does it matter if he found this freedom in the beat of "pleasure" or of "pain"? What does it matter if he symbolized the negative yet dialectical and propulsive moment as "ennui," ennui that obliges to action? What does it matter that he called the ideals of beauty, virtue, friendship, fatherland, humanity, "illusions"? By calling them so, he recognized their existence practically and asserted them theoretically, paying them homage and admitting their necessity. Hence his life as a citizen, a soldier, an artist, a learned man, a friend and a lover. He always felt and affirmed with pride the loftiness, the dignity and the profound excellence of this life, a view shared by all the youth of Italy at the period of the Risorgimento, and to-day held to be such by those who are able to judge of human value, even when it is mingled with human vices. This holds true of Foscolo's life in the face of those malignant, petty and envious minds who have often exercised their spurious

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morality, their lack of understanding, in speaking ill of him. May they receive their deserts!

This is not the place to narrate or even to illustrate briefly the life of Foscolo as soldier and citizen, or to recall once more the epigram of Cattaneo, so full of truth, to the effect that Foscolo, whatever he may have failed to do for Italy, at any rate provided her by his own example with a new institution to be of the utmost utility in the future: exile. I shall also not dwell at length upon his work as a thinker and critic, although it would provide me with the occasion to repeat a favourite thought of mine, that the habit of seeking the history of philosophy exclusively among philosophers by profession should be corrected, because many of these scholars, writers of treatises and compilers of systems, have far less value than certain thinkers who are not professionals, but speak of things, while the professionals utter words. Very well: Foscolo held to a speculative position that was agnostic and materialistic and of great importance to him both practically and politically, but is of little importance and of little originality in the history of thought; this was his boundary in philosophy, the hemispheres of darkness which surrounded him. But Socrates also renounced philosophizing as to nature and the Cosmos, yet he produced, as is well known, something extremely philosophical, which has been fruitful in the course of centuries. I mean by this that Foscolo, although he limited his researches to the sphere of the human mind and declared that he did not wish to ascend to the origin of things, was yet the author of lively and fecund thoughts upon man, art, politics, morality, history and religion.

Here too he belonged to the highest level of European culture of his time, and here too the names representative of that spiritual period rise to the lips. Foscolo was among the profound renewers, among the very first of those who profited by the doctrines which Vico had enunciated a century before on the theory of poetry and criticism. He was fully conscious of the close connection between life and poetry, denying the possibility of producing or of judging poetry to those who were learned in rules and models of art, but had never known human passions in their own hearts, nor fought the fights of the will, who had never quivered or suffered, loved or hated. Polemic, against academical writers, against desk writers and "cloister men," against the schools of old Italy, runs all through his pages. His remedy for all this is the historical interpretation of poetry, of true poetry, which, since it nourishes itself with the passions and affections of man at various times, can only be understood in that way. He was romantic in this respect and romantic in the best sense, culminating in admiration of the " primitive poet"; but he was also classical, because he did not like “the sentimental tinge" so "often artificial" of modern writers, preferring the naturalness of the ancients "who described things as they saw them, without desiring to magnify them before the eyes of satiated readers" and placing "harmony" at the summit of

He always preferred the energetic, sober and condensed style of the Greek writers to the easy, flowing style of the modern French, which " dissolves one thought into ten periods." He met the romantic theories of "national drama" and of "historical drama " with the remark that poetry is by no means