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ilmanzoni text integral passage complete quotation of the sources works historical five may poetry ode napoleon fifth in verses prologue preface, operaomnia # Written by Rev. J.F. Bingham This wonderful production, named simply Il Cinque Maggio [the fifth of May], date of the death of Napoleon I, many have wished to call Manzoni's poetical masterpiece; a claim disputed only by the Inni Sacri [Sacred Hymns] which hold the advantage of a theme grander still and of an expansion five times greater in quantity. On the other hand, the religious coloring of the Sacred Hymns, deeply tinged in mysticism, naturally, at first, limited the taste and appreciation of the great multitude of readers at home and abroad; and it was in fact the unbounded renown of the Napoleonic Ode following them which turned back the eyes of the literary world upon the Sacred Hymns already sent out by the great author into the world, almost unnoticed, earlier by six years and more. Beginning from that moment to increase in splendor before the eyes of all, thanks to the awakening glory of this Napoleonic Ode, they at last challenged the foremost rank in his poetical work. An undisputed claim also to stand, as poetry, in the first rank with these have the three other short productions written as choruses in the dramas Adelchi and Carmagnola; namely, the Battle of Maclodio, (1) The Awakening, (2) The Death of Ermengarda. (3) The first two for substance and argument, appealing rather to the political sentiment of the Italian race, have a less cosmopolitan voice and interest. The last is indeed a heartmelting Elegy over the lovely, innocent, cruelly repudiated Lombard wife of Charlemagne, and full of human interest and overwhelming power. However the controversy, not very important, surely, may or may not be decided, as to which of the great creations of the supreme Lombard poet shall bear the rank of Manzonian masterpiece, it is certainly an imposing and significant fact that of all the rest the Napoleonic Ode had the most extraordinary birth, the most extraordinary immediate reception and has been the battleground of the most extraordinary criticisms ever since its sudden leap into the world like Minerva full armed from the brain of Jove. In the early morning of the 17th of May, 1821, the Poet, seated on a bench in the garden of his favorite villa Brusuglio a few miles outside of Milan, was enjoying the lovely landscape and the refreshing breeze of spring when some one sought him bringing the Milan Gazette of the previous day. The journal contained an announcement of the death of Napoleon at St. Helena on the 5th. In a letter, years afterward, to CESARE CANTU, MANZONI says: "His death gave me a shock, (4) as if some component element had passed away from the world and I was taken with a madness of talking about him and had to throw out that Ode." He immediately withdrew to his study and wrote to the music of military marches, keeping his wife at the pianoforte playing and endlessly repeating the stirring music for two days, during which the first draft was accomplished. On the third day, silent and alone, he retouched the stanzas, and never again did he apply the file though pursued by infinite suggestions and criticisms. (5) The reason of this disregard he thus explains in the above-named letter to CANTŁ : "After the three days of convulsion in composing the trifle [corbelleria], though I saw the defects of it, I felt so knocked up and such a need of getting out of it and putting it away, that I sent it to the censor. He counseled me not to publish it; but from his own office came out the first manuscript copies of it." This curious fact was the result, in part, of a slight artifice of MANZONI himself, who sent two copies to the Censor's office, reckoning that very likely some one of the employes would carry off one of them, and so the poem would get abroad. Precisely this happened, and within 24 hours afterward, all Milan was reading it without the Poet being able to be blamed for it. Almost immediately GOETHE in some way not now known obtained a copy of the MS. and printed (6) of it a translation of his own accompanied by a critique abounding in lavish praise. Introduced by such a hand it flew like wildfire into every part of Christendom and was translated into nearly all the languages and dialects of Europe. (7) The first printed Italian edition was that of Lugano, (8) with the text on one side and on the other a translation in Latin hexameters by PIETRO SOLETTI, under the pseudonym of Erifante Eritense. Although prohibited by the censorship and confiscated by the police whereever found, the verses were diffused with great rapidity and eagerly read wherever Italian was spoken. Among all the great hymns which the fall and death of Napoleon occasioned, at home and abroad, of Beranger, of Lamartine, even of Wordsworth and Byron, in the temper of Englishmen, and of a legion of others with which Europe began immediately to echo, (9) the surpassing number of translations securely attested that the Cinque Maggio of MANZONI was judged by the great world to be the most effective of all to interest and satisfy the living and to send down the great memory to posterity. The unique creation quickly became and still remains a shining mark for literary criticism, both captiously adverse and idolatrously laudatory. "Everything reasonable and unreasonable," says MAMIANI, "has been written and written over again about the Cinque Maggio, pointing out here and there a word and a phrase, which is like finding a defective shoe in a marvellous painting of Apelles." Every stanza, almost every line, in this regard like Gray's immortal Elegy, has been pierced with objurgatory and more or less pedantic arrows. Of the infinite number and variety of condemnations and proposed improvements MANZONI accepted none. But the various errors which had crept into the unauthorized editions in which the Ode first appeared, in the grand edition of his poetry of 1840, the Author endeavored to correct. One reason, certainly, of this superabundant criticism was a natural fruit of the innate spirit of freedom which was manifested in all the great Lombard's words and acts -- a boldness which in his literary work purposely overstepped the fossilized classic rules, in obedience to his own later taste and judgment, and in the result made him high priest of the new romanticism. Another cause less legitimate and hardly pardonable was, often, a failure in the critics thoroughly to understand or appreciate the subtlety of the great Poet's great ideas, the profoundly and purposely veiled and often pregnant signification of his words, the frequent novelty, and, so to speak, the new music of the discords of his numbers. But all the same, as it has been of the great English Elegy, the world of readers and the greater critics generally have read and felt and enjoyed and careless alike of ignorant, or prejudiced, or overwrought criticisms, have voted the Ode a ranking place among the very highest poetry of Italy, the supreme work of DANTE ALIGHIERI alone excepted. To give a few specimens of this disagreement in the tipper heavens of criticism in Italy herself. Says BENEDETTO PRINA: "The Cinque Maggio beyond a Pindaric Ode, may be called an Epic poem, a marvelous drama, developed in 18 stanzas; and might almost be likened to one of those stupendous pictures such as is the Vision of Ezechiel, before which we feel ourselves raised to an almost dizzy height whence the astonished gaze sees the earth disappear below while the horizon enlarges into boundless expanse." PIETRO GIORDANI contemporary and bilious literary dictator (an Italian Francis Jeffrey), delivers himself thus: "I do not dispute on the argument; every one says what he pleases. But it seems to me as to the phrases that sometimes he does not know how to say what he wishes and sometimes he does not know what he wishes to say." Says the late brilliant Neapolitan professor, FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS : "After a magnificent prelude a la grande orchestra which introduces you after the manner of a ball into the highest regions of art, enlarging the proportions beyond the true, indeed, but which seem natural in so great and so sudden an excitement of fancy, comes the history of the Hero in nine stanzas, each of which, by the vastness of the perspective, is a little world and an impression of it comes to you like that from a pyramid. At each stanza the statue changes point of view yet is always colossal. The swift and penetrating eye of inspiration devours the spaces, groups the years, fuses the events, gives you the illusion of the infinite. By a treatment wholly of perspective the proportions are enlarged into the greatest clearness and simplicity of expression. The images, the impressions, the sentiments, the outlines in general in that vastness of horizon, are magnified and acquire boldness of color as well as of dimension. You find the life of the great man condensed in epic strokes, in gigantic antitheses, in unexpected comparisons, in original constructions. He stands before you in his warlike doings, in his inner sentiments, in his vicissitudes, in his power, in his fall, in his memories -- a mighty work of concentration in which the events and the centuries dash on as if crowded and dragged by a superior force in those impatient and galloping lines hardly reined in by a few scattered rhymes." Says the learned commentator, the Abbot LUIGI VENTURI : "This Ode, in the midst of some fugitive defects, that escaped in the boiling fecundity of his genius, has all the freshness, spontaneity, and felicitous daring of a composition almost improvised. Every stanza is one act of the great drama and in the swift flashings of so many great images which are grouped around the majestic figure of the Hero, all is ordered with the finest art and lighted up with a wonderful brilliancy." Says the Pisan critic, GIUSEPPE PUCCIANTI: "The contemporary history is seen by the Poet in its very true aspect, and at the same time in one very ideal and hence very poetical. He does not gather around the subject ideas poetical indeed but which are extrinsic to it; he regards it, instead, in its own essential verity and takes of it a keen birdseye view; so that he sees in it the sublime poetry which it contains; and as he sees it himself such exactly he makes the mind's eye of the reader to see it. The life, the undertakings, the glories, the misfortunes of the 'Man of Fate' are represented in all their historic truth and reality, but at the same time with that rapidity, that burst of genius, which among a thousand particulars sagely gathers only the greatest and most significant and paints these with such images as set them out in all their greatness." On the contrary, again, the abbot CESARE CANTU, a critic not to be suspected of prejudice or of incompetence, declares that "this Ode of Manzoni is unequal to his others." Thereupon, to CANTU replies the scholar, poet and statesman, TERENZIO MAMIANI : "Il Cinque Maggio stands alone and unique in modern literature, as stood alone and unique the person of whom it treats. An entire book would not afford too much room to indicate one by one the substantial reasons why the Italian poet writing on that dread theme was superior to all those of other nations not excluding BERANGER. After such an example, I do not think any one will hesitate to agree that in moral elevation is a great foundation of the lyric art. It has seemed admirable to all Europe to see MANZONI ascend, as it were, an observatory of the world and surrounded by the purest and calmest atmosphere discover from there and measure with mind in quiet and a most piercing glance the whole epopia of the 'fated man,' seeking rather the secret motives, than the external splendors, confronting all with the eternal principles of righteousness and with the hopes and gracious comforts of religion. It must be confessed that the Author was never satisfied with his work. In the year that it was composed and was flying through the world with applauses, the Poet with his habitual self-depreciation wrote in a letter to his close friend, GIAMBATTISTA PAGANI: "Seeking the reasons for the strange reception of that composition, I find two very potent ones in the argument and in the clandestine publication; perhaps a third in a certain obscurity, vicious in itself, but suited to set afoot the supposition of recondite and profound thoughts where there was nothing but the deficiency of perspicuity." One is reminded by this self-depreciation of its coincidence with a similar sentiment of GRAY over the extraordinary reception of the Churchyard Elegy. DR. GREGORY in a letter to the Poet BEATTIE says : "GRAY told me, with a good deal of acrimony, that the Elegy owed its popularity to the subject and that the public would have received it as well if it had been written in prose." And DR. BEATTIE himself says : "Of all the English poets of this age MR. GRAY is most admired and I think justly, yet there are but few, comparatively speaking, who know any thing of his but the Churchyard Elegy which is by no means the best of his works." So true it is that 'The public taught against its willIt is curious to observe that among the three most exalted contemporaneous poets of Italy, CESAROTTI and MONTI had celebrated the triumphs of NAPOLEON; but when he died, the former was no longer in life, the latter was silent, MANZONI alone spoke. On this fact TOMMASEO makes the acute remark that "MONTI who had sung: 'The rivals of Buonaparte live in the sky,'survived him seven years; but the sepulchre seemed to him a less poetical subject than the throne." However its relative place among the author's works may be fixed and however the conflicting criticisms settled, this is certain and obvious; that the Ode is not only absolutely unique in Italian, but is one of the grandest and most extraordinary in all languages and in all time, in the following respects: ist, The theme of fact is one of the greatest, strangest, most stirring the world has ever seen. 2d, Every conceit introduced in the Poem is important and great. 3d, The figures of speech are generally unusual and very striking. 4th, The condensation is at once most marvelous in degree, yet in result always felicitous. 5th, The words, simple and musical, are often heavily pregnant, always full of dignity. 6th, Elegant unity of the toutensemble like a marvelous picture of Apelles, leaves a clarified and unforgetable impression on the mind and in the heart a profound emotion. 7th, Finally, the mechanical structure of the stanzas and the whole architecture of the poem, like one of the small but exquisite monumental palaces in the Cemetery of Naples, is the consummate workmanship of a poet-artist who knew profoundly how and in this effort laid out all his capacity both to enchant the imagination and to stir the emotions of the reader by the various and utmost enginery of lyric verse. FRANCESCO D'OVIDIO has given the comprehensive word when he says : "You shall be able with the most subtle, the most refined, the most ireful critical discontent, to go around that monument and note there as many wrinkles in style as there are lines, to discover as many imperfections till now undiscovered as there are ideas; you will exercise thus your own genius and sharpen that of the others, but the monument, however so pecked and riddled, will continue to tower up on its solid base in all its own proud height." (10) In comparing the general argument of the Ode and the judgments of MANZONI on Napoleon I with the very different spirit and temper of Wordsworth and Byron on the same theme, it must of course be borne in mind that from his name, his birth, his mother tongue, the successes and glories of Napoleon were not only Latin, but in a sense Italian; and how grateful the Lombard and Piedmontese patriots of that day had been to the invincible Emperor for driving back the intolerable Austrian tyranny from the north and the establishment of the first "Kingdom of Italy" (Regno Italico) with Milan for its capital; which his fall necessarily undid, bringing back with a still more cruel grip the iron rule of the former despots. In view of which and not a few other reliefs and supports that accrued to the inhabitants of the oppressed Peninsula from gracious acts of the great conqueror, so reserved and acute a writer as D'OviDio says: "It is very difficult to determine whether the sum of good done by him [Napoleon I] is really greater than that of the evil." Yet neither blindness to facts, nor sympathy with misdoing can on any account be attributed to MANZONI who has nowhere expressed his affection, or approbation even, for the character of Napoleon as a man, as a member of the human family, only a sentiment of wonder and heartshaking astonishment at the 'fateful' phenomenon. On the contrary, in a letter to CANTU he wrote: "What shall I say to you ? He [Napoleon] was a man whom it was necessary one should admire, without being able to love him (11) -- the greatest of tacticians, the most tireless of conquerors, with the highest qualities of the statesman, knowing how to anticipate and knowing how to do." In addition to this, it must be distinctly observed that in this Ode MANZONI is the poet, consciously and professedly poetizing for the intellectual satisfaction and enjoyment of cultivated men, not the chronicler or moralist who is annalizing events for the exact instruction of students of history or professors of economics. Apropos to this is a remark of MANZONI preserved in one of his letters to FAURIEL written about this date: "Historic narration," he says, "is forbidden to poetry which does not wish to die, because the exposition of facts has, through the reasonable curiosity of men, a particular attraction which is changed into a feeling of disgust when poetic inventions are introduced, which also then seem childish. But to gather the characteristic traits of an epoch, to develop them in an action, to profit by history without setting one's self into making competition with it, without the pretense of doing that which it does much better, here is that which seems to me reserved to poetry and that which in its turn it alone can do." (12) But leaving out of view the natural prejudices of the poets in both directions and confining the comparison merely to majesty of thought and dignity and beauty of poetic expression, take the proud, prosy, prolix lines and coarse, metaphors of a poet laureate who with "safe outrage" could write of a dreaded foe: "That soul of Evil -- which from Hell let loose," etc.And of his fall, the almost sacrilegious figure : . . . . . . "The hideous rout Which the blest angels from their peaceful clime Beholding, welcomed with a choral shout."Or the jingling spite of the terrible rhymer: "Thanks for that lesson -- it will teach To after-warriors more, Than high philosophy can preach And vainly preached before."Confront with these barkings and sputterings of hate, the lofty solemnity, the majestic parsimony of speech, the startling novelty in metaphor of MANZONI'S Ode, the sublime purity of its spirit, clean of every expression of hatred, or envy, or any form whatever of malicious and brutal passion, dwelling in the celestial calm of moral, even mystic contemplation upon the profounder realities and wonders of existence. Then, apart even from the mellifluous flow of Manzonian numbers, whether rhymed or unrhymed -- so inimitable and indescribable, so precious to the Italian ear, absolutely untranslatable -- can it be denied that in those peerless qualities is the foundation of a sure immortality, the certainty that it is indeed "a song that will not die," but live applauded in the minds and mouths of men, when the stormy heats and hatreds of laureate enemies and thundering paganizing bards are sepulchred in dusty foglios on crowded shelves, or lie in state undisturbed in gilded and tapestried feminine boudoirs? ________________ (1) At the end of the II Act of Carmagnola. (2) That is of the Italians against the French under Charlemagne. At the end of III Act of Adelchi. (3) At the end of I scene of IV Act of Adelchi. (4) The notice of the rout of NAPOLEON at Waterloo, six years before, had so shocked MANZONI as to leave upon him a nervous trembling and liability to fainting, which followed him throughout his long life; on account of which he never afterward went abroad unaccompanied. (5) The original manuscript of these two days' furious labor, preserved in the museum at Milan which bears his name, shows the nervous rapidity with which it was written, and the multitudinous alterations and obliterations of swift and vibrating thought. (6) In the Review Ueber Kunst und Alterthum [On Art and Antiquity] Oct. -- Nov. 1822. It was a paper which he had read at the Court of Weimar on the 8th of August previous. (7) MESCHIA has collected translations of it in 27 languages. (8) It has no date, but 1822 is assumed from an appended letter of MANZONI to the translator bearing date of 2oth June, 1822. (9) Compare the last two lines of stanza iii. (10) Discussioni Manzoniane. (11) On two occasions at least MANZONI in his youth had seen the great warrior, with what emotions we know. For the first occasion, see note (2) to Stanza XIII. For the second time he had been filled with disgust and horror as he once narrated to CANTU, when in 1805 he saw him crossing the Place du Carrousel returning from having 'assisted' in Nótre-Dame at the Te Deum for the victory of Austerlitz, "in full bloom of pride and envy, with the air of a tragedian, as if he were addressing blandishments to his enemies which were hampering them, or brutalities which were terrifying them." (12) Cited by Sainte-Beuve. |
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