István Csicsery-Rónay, Jr. — The Classical Historical Novel and the Mythology of liberal Nationalism: Scott, Manzoni, Eötvös, Kemény, Tolstoy.

CHAPTER III: I PROMESSI SPOSI

Lukács did not consider the realistic historical novel’s nationalist context in his definition of the classical mode. Scott’s achievement for Lukács lay in the artistic embodiment of a world-historical conscious­ness through the presentation of “the totality of certain transitional stages of history^“ (Lukács 35). Lukács believed that the intensity of Scott’s art (for almost a generation the most popular in Romantic Europe) and its value for cultural history came out of this clarity of dialectic, the progressive resolutions of historical conflicts, that could be extrapolated from English history to the history of Europe as a “totality.” Scott’s use of England’s national culture, not to speak of Scotland’s, interested Lukács only to the extent that English history represented most clearly the path that capitalist Europe was to follow.

Although full of praise for the richness of detail and psychological insight of I Promessi Sposi — in the latter he considered Manzoni great- ly superior to Scott — Lukács asserted that Manzoni’s achievement could not have been as great as Scott’s.

[Manzoni’s] basic theme is much less a given, concrete historical crisis of national history, as is always the case in Scott, it is rather the critical condition of the entire life of the Italian people resulting from Italy’s fragmentation, from the reactionary feudal character which the fragmented parts of the country retained owing to their ceaseless petty internecine wars and their dependence on the intervention of the great powers….

This lack of that great historical substratum, which Goethe ad­mired in Scott, cannot possibly be confined in its effects to subject matter alone. It also had inner artistic consequences: the absence of that world-historical atmosphere which can be felt in Scott even when he is presenting an extensive picture of petty clan wars, mani­fests itself in Manzoni in a certain limitedness of horizon on the part of his characters. Despite all the human and historical authen­ticity which their author bestows on them, Manzoni’s characters are unable to soar to those historically typical heights which mark the summits of Scott’s work. Compared with the heroic drama of Scott’s Jeannie Deans or Rebecca, the fate of Lucia is really no more than an externally menaced idyll, while an inevitable pettiness attaches to the negative characters of the novel: their negativity is unable to reveal dialectically the historical limits of the whole period and therewith also the limits of the positive figures… (70-71)

There is unarguably a “lack of world-historical atmosphere” in the Hegelian sense in I Promessi Sposi, a lack occasioned by Manzoni’s aesthetic choices no less than by the world-historical limitations that generated them. Manzoni chose peasants as his protagonists, petty aristocrats as antagonists, and an obscure, peripheral campaign of the Thirty Years War as his historical background. The configuration of characters and events lay outside the main line of European development — most parti­cularly the role of peasants as positive heroes, a choice unparalleled in any other classical historical novel. These choices reflected the histori­cal fact that Italy, rather than undergoing a process of progressive unification (i.e., assimilation and aggrandizement through the victory of a progressive, nationally conscious bourgeoisie ), experienced the reverse, a continual disintegration at the hands of foreign colonial forces and the centrifugal interests of the petty aristocrats who allied with them.

The novel also reflects the personality of the author, a man as dif­ ferent in emotional and intellectual makeup from Scott as the histori­ cal conditions that influenced their approaches to history. Scott, the “honest Tory” (Lukács), drew much of his historical and romance material from oral accounts and family legends still current in his youth. These he patterned according to the ideological structure of the British monar­chy, which appeared to him worthy of assent as the guarantor of civil peace and the unification of social interests. Manzoni was in many ways his op­posite. During the Revolution in France and the ascendancy of Napoleon, Manzoni witnessed as violent and confounding zigzags of loyalty and hope as any protagonist in Scott’s fiction. After a half-generation of betrayed expectations, from Bonapartists and Hapsburgs alike, Manzoni and the first stage of revolutionary idealism in Italy collapsed, with the fall of Napoleon, into exhaustion.¹

Nor was the confusion in Manzoni’s youth merely a moment in modern history. It had a long tradition, in which was reflected the power of fo­reign oppressors over the consciousness, and even the historical uncon­scious, of the Italian people. Manzoni discovered that it was impossible to portray a rich historical substratum when the sources of Italian history had nothing to do with the life of the people. While studying Lombard history for his tragedy, Adelchi, set in the Eighth Century under Charle­magne’s Bonaparte-like reign, Manzoni discovered that the historical con­creteness in which he wished to ground his nationalistic theme was missing from the chronicles of the period and their attendant commentaries. He found no sign of the subject Italian people’s existence. In a letter to his lifelong friend, the historian Fauriel, he begged for some historical text that had

tried, unsuccessfully or not, to pierce through the mists surroun­ding the barbarous invasions of Italy in the Middle Ages and which had above all mentioned the condition of the native people, subju­gated and possessed, the point on which history is the poorest. One scarcely finds a mention of the Italians in Lombard history, which was, after all, made in Italy. (qtd. in Colquhoun 157)

The silence surrounding the unmentioned multitude had profound aes­thetic consequences. Without a record, native characters and institutions would have to be invented; they would not be able to benefit from the concrete particularity that was precisely the advantage of historical literature over romantic fictions. Moreover, if foreign oppressors and their native collaborators were capable of imposing their historical conscious­ness on the native people, turning history into an institution of domination like laws and customs, then in what did specifically Italian national consciousness consist?

An immense multitude passing on the face of the earth, passing on its own native piece of earth, without leaving a trace, is a sad phenomenon the importance of which cannot be overlooked: and searching for the causes of this silence may give rise to even more important discoveries. (Ibid. 158)

Like Scott, Manzoni did not approach Italian history with a full­ fledged historical consciousness, the empirical interest in the past we associated in the previous chapter with the ideology of the concrete. Whereas Scott came to the historical novel with an Augustan sensibility, Manzoni had more in common with the prose writers of the Baroque. He was fascinated by logic and the precise observation of emotions. He shared with Baroque stylists the impulse to irony that leads on to paradox, anxiety, and the consolations of a faith in Providence. Baroque, paradoxical faith does not easily yield historical vision, or even narrative, as the work of Pascal, Racine, or Sir Thomas Browne amply shows. Both logic and morality insist that their lessons be learned before the story can progress far enough along to appear to be the “point” of the writing; otherwise, both logic and religion become glosses, mere “motivations” commenting on the main narrative action from above. For the writer in the paradoxical mode, paradox and the need for faith inhere in every event. S/he blocks every impulse to let the story flow, with an anxious wonder that emerges, distilled in the intellect, as an unresolvable conceptual contradiction. Every event is consequently an example of the same unchanging lesson.²

The Baroque-paradoxical mode is generally fatal to historical thinking. It gradually became ascendant in Manzoni’s writing until, in his essay Del Romanza Storico, he denied the possibility of historical fiction altogether. An irresolvable contradiction lay at the heart of the genre, he believed, for, in Wellek’s words, “it requires the author to supply the original and the portrait at the same time” (Wellek 264).  While writing I Promessi Sposi, Manzoni still felt capable of holding the different his- torical attitudes in balance. Tellingly, he chose as his setting a period reflecting the paradoxes of the historical Baroque. He wrote to Fauriel:

The memories that have come down to us from that period give a picture of a very extraordinary state of society: the most arbitrary government combined with feudal and popular anarchy; legislation that is astounding, both in its aims and its results; a profound, ferocious, pretentious ignorance; classes with opposing interests and ma­xims … finally, a plague which gives rein to the most consummate and shameless excesses, to the most absurd prejudices, and to the most touching of virtues, etc. (qtd. in Colquhoun 165)

Who Is Responsible for History?

Manzoni’s fascination with the grotesque incongruities of Seven- teenth Century Milan reflect an interest in pageantry, rather than natio­nal prehistory. Writing again to Fauriel in 1823:

…I have tried to show exactly and to paint sincerely the period and country in which I have placed my story, The materials are rich; everything that shows up the seamy side of man is there is abundance. Assurance in ignorance, pretension in folly, effrontery in corruption are, alas, among others of the same kind, the most salient characteristics of that period. Happily there are also men and traits which honor the human race; characters gifted with strong virtues, remar­kable by their attitude to obstacles and difficulties, and by their resistances, and sometimes subservience, to conventional ideas…. I’ve stuffed it with peasants, nobles, nuns, priests, magistrates, scholars, war, famine … that’s to have written a book! (Ibid. 169-70)

“Men and traits” — but, significantly, not events. Manzoni’s inclination to emphasize moral conscience in historical milieux had two impor­ant causes (among others): the political passivity of the Italians while their history was done to them, and Manzoni’s personal sensitivity to mo­ral psychology, itself a common response to conditions — personal and social — of limited action. The existential locus of experience dictated the parameters of historical meaning for Manzoni. As an account of events alone, the “many important events of the kind particularly dignified by the word ‘historical’” (Chap, 28),³ history had no meaning. It had to give an account of the cognitive processes of the historical actors. The historical artist’s role was to give an inner, human dimension to real historical conditions. In this lay his  power over both the empirical his­torian and the romancer. Writing to a critic of his historical drama, Il Carmagnola, who questioned history’s constraints on the imagination, Manzoni wrote:

… you will say perhaps if you remove from the poet that very thing which distinguishes him from the historian — the right to invent facts — what is left? What is left is poetry; yes, poetry, For in the long run, what does history give us? Events which are only known from the outside, as it were: what men did; but what they thought, the feelings which accompanied their deliberations and plans, their successes and failures, the words they used to make or try to make their passions and wills prevail over other passions and other wills, to express their wrath, to pour out their sorrow — in a word, re­veal their individualities: all this, more or less, is passed over in silence by history; and all this is the domain of the poet. (qtd. in Barricelli 98-99)

Nor would just any description suffice. The psychological dimension for Manzoni was in essence the dimension of individual freedom, ethical choice. In The Column of Infamy, a historical essay originally included as part of the plague section of I Promessi Sposi, and later appended to the novel, Manzoni developed this conception of the ethical-psychological focus of history in historical fiction and historiography. The essay deserves scrutiny here, for in it Manzoni presents explicitly the ethical arguments that tacitly underlie his historical novel.

In the Column of Infamy, Manzoni argued against his great uncle’s, Pietro Verri’s Osservazione Sulla Tortura, a widely known pamphlet written in 1764, that had served as one of his sources on conditions in Seventeenth Century Milan. A devotee of Voltaire, Verri had argued that the mass hysteria surrounding the alleged “smearers” or “anointers” during the great plague, and the judicial abuses committed in exacting confes­sions from accused anointers and sorcerers, resulted from the a priori benightedness of the offending judges and hysterical populace. They were victims of an age that was by its very nature ignorant and superstitious.

After three decades of unremitting upheaval in Europe, Manzoni did not view the past’s atrocities with the same equanimity and faith in his generation’s progress as his great uncle had. The Enlightenment’s blanket rejection of the past’s institutions could lead, he felt, to a rejection of any idea of order in the world.

If we regard a complex series of cruelties inflicted by man on man merely as the effects of times and circumstances, the horror and pity we feel is accompanied by a sense of discouragement, by a sort of despair. We seem to see human nature driven irresistibly to evil by forces beyond its control, caught in the toils of some evil and exhausting dream which it can neither throw off nor even become clearly conscious of. And so the indignation that spontaneously springs up in us against the men who did such things begins to ap­pear unreasonable, even while, at the same time, we feel it to be noble and religious. Our horror remains, but the deed itself seems to have lost its guilt; and our mind, seeking the true culprit, the right object for its revulsion, is dismayed to find itself between two alternatives, equally blasphemous and insane: a denial, or an indictment, of Providence. But if, on a closer examination of the facts, we are able to discern an injustice which those who commit­ted it could themselves have recognized; a violation of rules which they themselves accepted; an acting in clean contradiction to principles not only admitted in that age but also evidently respected, in similar circumstances, by the very men who acted in this way — then we can with relief conclude that if these men did not know what they were doing it was because they did not choose to know, and that theirs was the kind of ignorance which men adopt and discard as they please; not an excuse for crime, but itself a crime; and that such things as they did may be indeed be suffered, but not done, under compulsion. (Column 107)

History without conscience — without either “pure” awareness or awareness of responsibility — could offer no lessons; it would be an “evil and exhausting dream” dreamed by a demiurge utterly alienated from human effort. Manzoni wished to salvage Providence, the overtly religious mask of progress. If all historical good and evil could be shown to be a matter of human freedom, then an ethical logic would obtain in the histo­rical world: where moral, that is creative, God-loving, and charitable precepts of justice and law exist, all evil and mean-mindedness is a cho­sen ignorance. Without choice there can be no responsibility, no freedom, and therefore, no value.

The Column of Infamy is a meticulously argued brief for the culpability of the torturing judges during the great plague. It was not in ques­tion whether they had ordered the accused anointers to be tortured. Nor that it was abhorrent. Manzoni pressed the point that not only were they cruel and evil, they were free, and therefore guilty, as well.They had ignored the long tradition of local laws and juridical commentaries that had over the centuries mitigated the torture provisions of Roman law. The judges had transgressed the boundaries even of secular precepts designed to limit their arbitrary power. Thus, the laws themselves had not been as cruel as the men abusing them.

Moreover, historical institutions are not subject to absolute stan­dards of judgment, enlightened vs. benighted: “…the question is necessarily a relative one; it is not whether those writers [of juridical commentaries in the Seventeenth Century] were as enlightened as one would wish legislators to be, but whether they were more or less so than the men who formerly applied, indeed to a large extent invented, the law on their own bare authority”(Ibid. 126).

Past institutions were not to be judged on the basis of the actions of individual judges, ministers, or popes. Societies embodied their collective choices in their institutions. Where the institutions were bad, they did not function mechanically, independent of human intentions. The bad choices on which they were based had to have been reproduced by the society’s collective action. Where torture was permitted by Milanese laws after the reform work, it was because torture was the society’s mode of choice. The society, composed of individual wills acting and choo­sing collectively, was guilty, not the institutions. “…What matters, I think, is that we grasp the real and effective cause of what was done, and what could this have been if not the passionate perversity of the human heart” (Ibid. 105).

The Column of Infamy shows two of Manzoni’s paths of thought that are essentially contradictory working there in concert. The rationalist dismantles a historical prejudice, and the Catholic moralist advocates the “human heart” as the object of every inquiry. That the prejudice un­der attack was Verri’s rationalistic debunking of the past presents Man­zoni’s fundamental dilemma. He uses the rules of reasoned argument to show that the past cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, because it is pre­cisely analogous to the present (and all other ages) in the degree that the “passionate perversity of the human heart” influences the workings of earthly society. Rationalism, in this dialectic, leads to the limits of its own application, to reasons of the heart that reason cannot pene­trate, where all acts must be seen in terms of guilt or good, pride or charity, and all times are related, since people in every age have an equal freedom to choose well or badly. Here the logic of ethics must cede to the paradox of faith. “Life on earth,” Manzoni wrote to Fauriel, “is that state which is so natural for man and yet so violent and so full of pain, which creates so many aims whose fulfillment it prevents, which en­dures every evil and every remedy rather than stop for just one moment.” It is “a mystery of contradiction in which the mind is lost unless it is considered as a state of trial and preparation for another existence”(qtd. in Colquhoun 159).

The ‘Totality of Objects’ in I Promessi Sposi

In epic, according to Lukács’s discussion of Hegel’s genre theory, the essential movement of the action toward a collision and transformation is diffused and retarded as it navigates the object world of the society in which it occurs. Drama’s direct confrontations, in which even public struggles must be settled through personal conflicts, are mediated in epic by institutions and objects the society has established to deal with so­cial conflict. In this sense, epic is inverse to drama: in it the most personal antagonisms are seen as particular manifestations of very broad social antagonisms that are restricted to the private sphere by social institutions, When they are engaged, in a dialectical struggle with other institutions (of the past or the future, or of other cultures and value systems), these institutions lose their power to contain broad social conflict.

In Scott’s historical fiction, the epic “totality of objects” col­lapses in the struggle between parties, until it is restored on a new moral ground in a typical dramatic collision and restoration. Scott’s moral-historical world has no room for intimate responses or individualized passions.⁴ His object world consists only of those actions and codes that deal with public objects — those that embody each of the an­tagonistic cultures’ codes of heroism, loyalty, sacrifice, warfare, hospitality, legitimacy, and property. As codes of conduct, they are all posi­tive and active; they are standards to which all persons in their respec­tive cultures measure themselves when they act. Consequently, Scott’s human motivation of history comes not through character psychology, but through the public social codes of conduct. By the same token, the human part of progress is manifested in the actions that produce important pub­lic events, such as battles, riots, executions, etc. Each of the Waverley Novels is placed during dramatic historical-political conflicts that can only be resolved by decisive action representing the action of whole so­cieties. In Scott’s novels, the dialectic of history succeeds, in the end, by synthesizing the most heroic and publicly moral qualities of the antagonists.

Manzoni’s motivating of history comes from another locus altogether. The human content of the Italians’ history is found in the history of change within the private, individual consciousness; moreover, such changes of consciousness occur in opposition to public institutions that, far from having historical legitimacy, represent only the entropy of the feudal past concealed by externals: codes of behavior, rhetoric, and fo­reign powers. In direct opposition to Scott’s method of legitimizing so­cial institutions from the perspective of world history, in I Promessi Sposi, as in The Column of Infamy, Manzoni offers his readers:

Isolated events, without connection to the grand deeds of history; obscure actors, the powerful ones as well as the weak; errors of which no one could have been disabused among those who read; institutions against which no one could protect himself; it appears to me that all this has perhaps a point that touches on the dan­ gers — always alive for humanity …, in its perpetual struggle on earth. (Column 99)

For Manzoni, the value of history lies not in events, “grand deeds, but in the moral lessons to be learned from the “perpetual struggle” for each participant. There is no guiding force in events themselves: neither a national happy medium nor an Absolute Providence. Instead, there is an interaction between two poles: the historical totality of worldly institutions, and the individual moral conscience that must exercise personal choice in it.

The two poles are evoked at the beginning of the novel in the two “overtures.” In the first, the fictitious Anonymous Editor of the Seventeenth Century text of which I Promessi Sposi is to be the modernized ver­sion, prepares the reader for the “totality of institutions.” This object world is not the positive historical setting, the events and local color, i.e., the facts historians use to build their accounts. Rather, it is the ideological framework in which those facts are cast and interpreted: the language, social values, and consciousness that constitute the texts of his­tory, that provide facts with historical contexts. Most histories of the Editor’s period deal with “the illustrious Champions who garner Palms and Laurels in the Arena,” bearing off “only the richest and most brilliant of the spoils, embalming in their ink the enterprises of Princes, Potentates, and mightie Personnages” (xi). The author of the story the Editor wishes to modernize fortunately aspired only to record the experiences of people of “small import and low degree.”

Aware of the dullness of his text (a function of the overrought baroque style which “manages to be at once crude and affected in the same page, the same sentence, the same word” [xii]), the Editor declares his intention to rewrite the story in contemporary language. As soon as the decision is announced, however, the irony turns against the Editor himself. Implicit in the judgment passed on the Baroque style’s barbarities is the Editor’s faith in the modem style’s clarities. As an enlightened scholar, he strives to correct the past’s mistakes through historical criticism: “not a single criticism occurred to us without bringing a triumphant answer along with it, one of those answers which I wouldn’t say solve problems, but change them.” He weighs, probes, and compares other criticisms against the proper “facts and principles upon which a judgement should be based.” His research (which mocks Manzoni’s own research for the novel, as the clarification of style mocks Manzoni’s revision of the “barbarities” of Fermo and Lucia, the first version of I Promessi Sposi [Momigliano 66-67]) proves so exten­sive, however, that it threatens to bury the tale under a second book: “Seeing which, we gave up the idea, for two reasons with which the reader is sure to agree; the first, that a book written to justify another book not to mention the style of another book — might seem rather ridicu­lous; the second, that one book at a time is enough, if indeed it is not too much” (xiv).

The “Author’s Introduction” to I Promessi Sposi is a tour-de-force of irony cutting every which way but at the tale itself,. It lies between Sterne and Borges, creating a gloss with which to criticize an invented text, and then, implicitly, undermining the gloss with its own criticism. The historian’s mode of perceiving the historical world and recreating it in language — whether Baroque and allegorical, or Rationalistic and factifying — can bury the meaning of a beautiful tale. An honest historian of the Seventeenth Century obscures the tale with his “endless Lom­bard idioms, current phrases used all wrong, arbitrary grammar, sentences that don’t hang together, … Spanish pomposities,” and bombast applied at precisely “the most sublime or tragic points in the story” (xii). A modern historian, on the other hand, sets out to salvage the tale by esta­blishing the veracity of the background, of “what really happened.” But only the comparison of glosses can render such veracity, which becomes a giant crust of footnotes, annotations, and commentaries that threaten to crush the narrative kernel. The language of history cannot reveal the story at the heart of the matter. History can be no more objective than the language in which it is conceived and interpreted.

In the second overture, the opening pages of Chapter 1, Manzoni establishes the novel’s second main focus. The description of the Lecco re­gion is concrete, specific, descriptive. It has no need for the mediations of historical interpreters, it can be seen in any age by any person; it has been seen directly and concretely by so many generations of natives that it has the solidity of collective reality — the reality unequivocally shared by the storyteller.

That branch of the lake of Como which extends southwards between two unbroken chains of mountains, and is all gulfs and bays as the mountains advance and recede, narrows down at one point, between a promontory on one side and a wide shore on the other, into the form of a river; and the bridge which links the two banks seems to em­phasize this transformation even more, and to mark the point at which the lake ends and the Adda begins, only to become a lake once more where the banks draw farther apart again, letting the water broaden out and expand into new creeks and bays. The country bordering the lake, formed by the deposits of three great torrents, is backed by two neighboring mountains, one called San Martino, and the other, in the Lombard dialect, the Resegone, from its saw-like row of peaks; so that on first seeing it — looking northwards, for in­stance, from the ramparts of Milan — one can pick it out at once, on the name alone, from the vast and lengthy range of other mountains of obscurer names and more ordinary form.

The famous introduction adumbrates many of the romantic elements of the novel, While the satirical preface both questions and affirms the his­toricity of the tale, here the tale is concentrated in the panorama of Lecco almost without drama, without concrete characters, without transfor­ming events. The scene embraces change and the psychological tensions of perceiving consciousness within the superhistorical serenity of geology and the endurance of the inhabitants.

For a considerable stretch the country rises slowly and continuously; then it breaks up into little cliffs and valleys and level and rug­ged tracts, following the shape of the mountains and the erosion of the water. The shore itself, intersected by the bed of torrents, is almost entirely gravel and flint; the rest is fields and vineyards, and scattered farms, villages, and towns, with here are there a wood extending right on up the mountain side. Lecco, which is the largest of these towns and gives its name to the district, lies on the lake­ side not far from the bridge, and is even apt to find itself partly in the lake when this is high; it is a big town nowadays, well on the way to becoming a city. At the time of the events which we are about to describe, this township was already of some importance; it was fortified, and so had the honour of housing a commandant. It also had the adavantage of a permanent garrison of Spanish soldiers, who taught modesty to the wives and daughters of the town, tickled up the shoulders of an occasional husband and father, and, towards the end of summer, never failed to scatter themselves among the vineyards, to thin out the grapes and lighten the labours of the vintage for the peasants.

Within this enclosing geographical mind, history emerges intermit­tently, as Lecco’s future or the Spanish occupation of the past. When the traveler moves on along the paths the people have made for themselves, history disappears, giving way to different prospects. The region and the narrative — does not yield to a single panoramic view, a mountain peak from which a Philip IV, a Bonaparte, a Hegel, or a “world historian” might take in the whole topography of the nation.

Paths and tracks used to run — and still do from one to another of these villages, from the mountain heights to the lakeside, and from one precipice to the other. Sometimes they run steep, sometimes level, and often drop suddenly and bury themselves between two walls, from which, when one looks up, only a patch of sky and some mountain peak can be discerned. Sometimes they come out on open terraces; thence the eye ranges over prospects of varying extent, always full of interest and always changing, as each point of vantage takes in different aspects of the vast landscape, and as one part or the other is foreshortened, or stands out, or disappears. One can see a piece here, another there, and then again a long stretch of that great varied sheet of water…. The very spot from which so many different views can be seen has views of its own on every side. The hillside on which you walk unfolds its pinnacles and cliffs above you and around you, each standing out on its own and changing with every step, turning what had just seemed a single ridge into a whole series of ridges, and showing on a height something that a moment before had seemed down on the shore…

This is a peasant’s, and a pilgrim’s, eye-view, and stands for the knowledge of Providence that Renzo and Lucia acquire by the end of the novel, Moreover, it is a native observer’s eye-view. The narrator is within the region, so much so that even the dialectic of the Spanish aliens’ invasion merely serves as a stage of the walking-tour. It is a setting for history determined by a region, and perceived by the region’s natives, its peasants.

What remains is the story, developing between two sets of limits: the language of history and the language of the concrete perception of everyday experience. The former always deals in abstractions, it approaches the story from the angle of institutional meaning, ideological dis­course, as a commentary above the level of experience. The lyrical lan­guage of concrete perceptions, on the other hand, presents every concrete situation and condition according to each character’s perspective. For Manzoni, the pilgrim narrative had to accommodate both historical actuality and individual consciousness. But the story’s own province, and the way to synthesizing the two poles, is choice: the participation of freedom in objective history and geography. Through their consciousness of freedom, gained in the novel by accepting the laws of Christian charity and rejecting the feudal codes of isolation, Renzo and Lucia represent the movement of Italian national consciousness toward the dissolution of despotic custom, and the realization — on a small scale — of the Enlighten- ment’s and humanistic Christianity’s ideal of unfettered human contact.

This movement bears historical fruit in the creation of liberal-minded bourgeois city-states, like Bergamo, the lovers’ haven and political creation at the end of the novel.

Reified History: The Past of Institutions

The broad social world into which Renzo is hounded, Candide-like, is the novel’s historical world in the objective sense, like Scott’s famed local color. It is full of the Seventeenth Century’s buildings, streets, bakeries, riots, Commissioners of Supply, sieges of houses and fortresses, monasteries, police detectives, bad wine, collective hallucinations, famines and plagues. Each of these positive “objects” juts into Renzo’s mind or path. But unlike Scott’s serene vision of history as a field of living institutions, in I Promessi Sposi every object is a facade, behind which lies a complex society of manipulators and despots. These facades are so elaborate that even the despots cannot see past them to the victims of their manipulations; until, that is, their “honor” is challenged.

The political-ethical world of the novel before the conversions of L’Innominato, Don Rodrigo, and the lovers, reflects Manzoni’s Liberal anti-feudalism, derived from the influence of the Ideologues and the Italian Romantics of the Il Conciliatore circle. Institutions, in the novel’s Seventeenth Century Milan, exist by virtue of the aristocracy’s accumula­ted oppressions, in a present that reproduces the past’s inertia — the quasi-Gothic terror of Gertrude’s tale, and the power of his ancestors’ portraits over Don Rodrigo in Chapter 7. This is not a historical world replete with the compromises and syntheses of past conflicts, like Scott’s, so it does not bear the seeds of the new in itself. It is a rhetorical history, in which the past acts as the model for the present.

As noted earlier, for Scott history was decided by epic actions representing collective choices. His ethic was centered on epic honor: on the battlefield, honor to one’s cause and rank; in politics, loyalty to one’s conscience and one’s native land and class; in human relations, self-respect and fidelity. All of these Edward Waverley, like the other heroes of the Waverley Novels, either retains or regains as he works toward integration with his age and society. These are the “natural” values of the national aristocracy, articulated with Scott as the idealized moral goals of the rising, gentrified bourgeoisie.

In I Promessi Sposi, as well, the code of honor is at the center of the action, but it produces petrifaction, not historical movement, and generates every block in the way of the lovers. Seventeenth Century Italy’s petty aristocracy derived its legitimacy from the archaic code of honor that the new dispensation of democratic Christian charity seemed destined to overturn. An aristocrat’s identity, in the novel, is a func­tion of his identification with the past, and the privileges the past gua­ranteed to his class. Aristocratic honor — pride, in moral terms — can be maintained only by ever greater class-isolation from the affairs of the common people, and from the Enlightenment’s ideal of universal humanity. The blockers in I Promessi Sposi are obsessed with their honor.

Don Rodrigo’s designs on Lucia quickly cease to be the workings of lust — which is a form of contact, however perverse — when he perceives that his honor is threatened by yokels. “He had taken on a pledge (a rather shady one, it is true; but there it was — one can’t always con­trol one’s desires, the point is to satisfy them), and how had he gone through with it? By giving in. To a peasant and a friar? Uh!” (§18)

The main adversary of amour propre is charity and fellow-feeling. To preserve itself, therefore, honor affects the isolation of noli me tangere, developing institutions to block all intercommunication that might bring to consciousness the interdependence of humanity. It is direct contact, the dialogue and communion inherited from the Greek polis and Christian charity, that yields the knowledge of a common humanity and responsibility for others. To avoid “infection,” the usurping aristocratic society contaminates all its institutions with the fear of contact. Its totality of objects actively spreads ignorance, encourages division, and blocks the spread of truth even among the people it op­presses, who have no interest in maintaining the false order.

The plague is Manzoni’s great emblem for the perniciousness of aristocratic class-based power. When the Milanese Tribunal of Health goes to the Spanish governor, Don Gonzalo, to ask that the Spanish troops be barred from passing through the weakened and starving city, the governor’s honor and “great desire to cut a figure in history” prevent him from ac­cepting responsibility for the populace.

He replied that he did not know what was to be done about it; that the motives of interest and prestige which had caused that army to move outweighed the danger it represented, that, for all that, they must take what precautions they could, and put their trust in Providence. (§28)

At first, the contagion spreads irregularly and slowly enough for the famine and war-battered inhabitants of Milan, who are convinced that the rumor of plague is a doctors’ “intrigue to profit from public terror,” to intimidate even learned professors of medicine into denying that the disease is spread by contact. When cases with identical fatal symptoms suddenly begin to proliferate,

the doctors who had been opposed to the idea of contagion, not wanting to admit now what they had derided before, and having to find some generic name for the new disease which had become too common and too obvious to go without one, adopted the name of malig­nant and pestilential fever — a miserable expedient, in fact a swindle in words, which yet did a great deal of harm; for while it appeared to acknowledge the truth, it had the effect of preventing people believing what it was most important to believe and realize, that the disease was caught by contact. (§31)

Rather than admit that the infection’s source of power — like that of all power — is contact, and must be named and healed by purification, the populace submits to hysteria. It projects a collective hallucination to explain everything: the disease is caused by evil persons who smear public buildings and individuals with a poisonous substance; where no di­rect application can be proved, sorcery and witchcraft are inferred. At first the city authorities resist, then they pursue the prosecution of the fictitious anointers with a vengeance. Terror goes so deep that some citizens even admit to the anointing.

There is an ethical equation in Manzoni’s description of the plague: prideful isolation from others leads to a denial of their humanity and manipulation of them as objects; their own contact is poisoned as a result, and each oppressed and injured person passes the poison along, like a contagion. The oppressed hunt for scapegoats among themselves, while the true cause of their wretchedness is beyond their grasp. Thus, the tyrants, plague-causers, and blockers of peasant marriages, pervert humanity into a demonic parody of itself: “Those who provoke or oppress, all those who do wrong to others, are guilty not only of the harm they do, but also of the twists they cause in the minds of those they have injured” (§2).

Renzo and The Language of Institutions

Both the humor and pathos of I Promessi Sposi are generated by the constant, redundant deflection of the characters’ personal, existential contact by established institutions. Each obstacle in the lovers’ path brings a new institution into play, revealing its true nature as a front for the brute power of the despotic class. The lovers cannot confront and overcome their enemies, only those enemies’ surrogates. Don Rodrigo’s power is the direct cause of Renzo’s and Lucia’s separation, but his power is underwritten by the social order of Milan under the Spanish oc­cupation. Wherever the lovers turn for protection, the institutions remand them to their oppressors. Laws are either helpless against petty ty­rant or work actively against the common people. Civil government is incompetent and corrupt, and the Spanish governor is more concerned with enhancing his prestige at the Spanish court by taking the fortress of Casale than with the lives of his subjects. The Church is no exception, since it is the village priest’s, Don Abbondio’s, cowardice that sets the blocking action in motion, and Gertrude’s treachery at the convent of Monza that places Lucia into the hands of L’Innominato.

Most maddening for Renzo, in particular — since he is much more exposed to the world of social objects than the passive and sequestered Lucia — is that the blocking institutions are surrounded by a magical screen of language. The languages of power in I Promessi Sposi make the protection of anarchy by brute force seem like law and order. The “energetically and vigorously phrased edicts” against the bravoes only render the defenceless still more helpless: “these proclamations, which were reinforced and republished by governor after governor, only succeeded with all their bombast, in making obvious the impotence of their authors” (§1).

At first, the Church offers no protection, either. When Renzo first demands an explanation from Don Abbondio for the delay of his wedding, the priest prevaricates with his magical Church Latin.

“D’you know what the nullifying impediments to marriage are?”

“How d’you expect me to know anything about impediments?”

“Error, conditio, votum cognatio, crimen. Cultus disparitas, vis, ordo, ligamen, honestas. Si sis affinis…,” began Don Abbondio, telling off on the tip of his fingers.

“Are you malting fun of me?” interrupted the young man. “What d’you expect me to make of your latinorum?” (§2)

From the priest, Renzo is sent to the Law, in the person of Dr. Azze- carbuglia. Accustomed to the elliptical hints of bravoes trying to slip the law, the lawyer mistakes Renzo for a local thug. A good lawyer’s function, he comforts Renzo, is to take honest language and pervert it until it has no effect. “A lawyer must be told things frankly; then it’s up to him to muddle it up afterwards” (§3).  Like Socrates in Aristo­phanes’ Clouds, the lawyer turns morality upside down by making the wea­ker argument prevail over the stronger: “For you see, if you know how to manipulate the laws properly, no one’s guilty, and no one’s innocent.”

The Law has no aid for Renzo; Dr.  Azzecarbuglia throws him out as soon as he learns he is an honest man threatened by a lord. Nothing remains for Renzo but to place himself under Fra Cristoforo’s protection, and to go to Milan. But even the protection of a true man is vulnerable to the evil effect of corrupted language. Don Rodrigo gains the co-operation of his uncle, a senior member of the aristocratic Council of Milan, in arranging Fra Cristoforo’s transfer out of the region, and away from the petty despot’s intended victims. The uncle is a master diplomat, unrivaled at manipulating language to gain and maintain influence.

Ambiguous language, significant silences, sudden pauses in the middle of sentences, winks that meant “My lips are sealed,” raising hopes without committing himself, conveying a threat amidst elabo­rate politeness — all were techniques used to this end, all went to increase his own importance; so that, eventually, if he said “I can’t do anything about this” (sometimes because it happened to be the absolute truth), he said it in such a way that it was not to be believed, and that, too, served to increase the conception, and hence the reality, of his power — like those boxes still occasionally seen in some chemists’ shops, which have certain words in Arabic on the outside, and nothing inside, but are useful to maintain the prestige of the shop. (§18)

In a conversation with the Father Provincial of the Capuchins, the uncle brings the Church and the state into the same universe of corrupted discourse.

“It’s a step, and it’s not a step, very reverend father. It’s a natural thing, an ordinary thing; and if you don’t take this solution, and take it at once, I can foresee a whole heap of trouble, a whole Iliad of misfortunes. Some rash folly … I don’t believe my nephew would ever … I am here to see that…. But at the point this thing has reached, if we don’t cut it short at once, without wasting time, with one clean stroke, things can’t possible stay where this is and remain a secret … and then it won’t be only my nephew…. It would be stirring up a hornets’ nest, most reverend father. We are a powerful family, you see; we have connexions…”

“Illustrious ones.”

“You understand me….” (§19 — ellipses in original)

Renzo is aware of the perversion of language around him. After the first day of the Bread Riots, drunk and euphoric about his day’s revolu­tionary perfomance, he abandons his usual reticence to express the con­sciousness of the whole oppressed populace. He confides blissfully to the police informer that he refuses to sign the forms the police require of each new lodger in the city because he sees them as tools for using language against the poor,

… [ the gentry], they’re the ones who hold the pen; and so what they say can fly off and vanish into thin air; but they’re very care­ful about what a poor man says and soon impale and nail it down on paper with that pen of theirs, to use it later, at the right time and place. Then they’ve got another little habit; when they want to get into a mess some poor chap who’s never been educated, but who’s got a little… And they realize he’s beginning to see through their tricks, then swish! they throw some word of Latin into the conversa­tion to make him lose his thread and muddle him up. Enough! the practices that ought to stop! Today, luckily, everything was in plain language, and without pen, ink, or paper…. (§14)

Renzo believes that revolutionary “plain language” simply substitutes truth for obfuscation. That is the naive Rousseauian vision of the Revolution. In the novel, however, a paradoxical truth holds: only those who recognize that everyone is implicated in the perversion of human contact — through passions or institutions — is capable of getting free of it. A despotic class’ deceitfulness is not restricted to the dealings among its members or with the people it subjugates directly. The corruption of official, administrative language interferes with truth even among the oppressed who never use it. They are doubly-victimized, for they internalize their rulers’ deceit and oppose to it their own self-deceit. Ironically, the plain language Renzo praises in the rioters deceives no less than the golden style of the officials.

As Renzo listens to the accusations against the bakers for causing the famine that has actually been caused by the war and the depredations of the Spanish troops, the narrator comments:

Much as we want our poor mountaineer to cut a good figure, histori­cal accuracy obliges us to admit that his first feeling was one of pleasure. He had found so little to commend in the ordinary course of things that he was inclined to approve of whatever changes them in any way at all. And besides, not being in any way superior to the ideas of his age, he also shared the common opinion or prejudice that the scarcity of bread was due to the speculators and bakers. (§11)

The rebellious crowd’s language is not so much simple as impoverished.

….the streets and squares were swarming with men in the grip of a common rage, and dominated by a common idea…. Every conversation strengthened the conviction and fanned the passions of the listeners, as it did those of the speakers…. Here there was a confused murmur of many voices: there one man was making a speech, while others ap­lauded; here a man was asking his nearest neighbor the same question the latter had just put to him; another there was repeating some exclamation he had just heard echoing in his ears; complaints, threats, astonishment were everywhere; and the total vocabulary of all this talk was just a few words. (§12)

Language,  including the ruling institutions’ codes of conduct, keeps the lovers separated. Theirs is merely a particular case of the general tendency of the helpless to fall into the tyrants’ web, whose function it is to preserve the isolation required for class rule. Every code and special vocabulary in the novel is the fruit of a long tradition; not a tradition of growth, but of the continual reproduction of the same values. The history of this reified institutional world cannot generate new values. In it, historical relations are seen as given and unalterable by human action. Only through the radical transformation of consciousness through Christian morality, with the willingness to renounce isolation and self-love, can new values appear, and with them, a new sense of history and the future.

Generative History: Fra Cristoforo and the Lovers

When Renzo and Lucia confront the historical world, feudal society is no longer monolithic. At the end of the tale, Renzo is able to take his bride to Bergamo, where the Venetian government encourages the settlement of artisans and lays the foundation for an industrial bourgeoi­sie. The feudal institutions have lost much of their force. A new order is in the process of being born when the action of I Promessi Sposi be­gins. Its prophet and catalyst is Fra Cristoforo.

Before he appears on the scene, the novel moves on the flat, dimensionless plane of buffa comedy. Its characters are taken from the stock categories: young lovers, villainous lord, hypocritical priest, foolish servant, etc. The depiction of active consciousness is at first restric­ted to Don Abbondio’s tremulous responses to the bravoes’ threats. Don Abbondio is all obsessional response; he is reflexively defensive and passive. ” [Don Rodrigo’s] name had the effect on Don Abbondio’s mind of a flash of lightning at the height of a night storm, showing every­ thing up for a confused second, and increasing the atmosphere of terror” (§1). “Don Abbondio was continuously absorbed in thinking about his own peace and quiet, and had not bothered about advantages which were to be enjoyed only at the cost of a great deal of bother and a certain amount of risk” (Ibid.). Even his replies are less participation in a dialogue than reflexive defense:””Ready … always ready to obey…’ and as he ut­tered these words he himself was not at all clear if he was making a promise or paying a compliment” (Ibid.).

Fra Cristoforo is foreign to the historical archetypes of comedy. He enters the action from the realm of hagiography, as Lucia’s positive mediator, or donor, He is a modern saint, the carrier of the dynamic his­torical conception of Christian honor that Manzoni opposes to the reified history of feudal honor. Fra Cristoforo is the first character in the novel actually to have a history. Don Abbondio’s past is the unvarying story of “his own private system of defense;” we meet him at the precise moment of “sudden collapse of a system of living in peace which had cost him years of patience and study” (§1). Renzo and Lucia both have fully developed natures — indeed, so strong that they determine the course of their respective ordeals: Renzo, always active, Lucia, patient to the point of abjectness. But neither has a history. They have undergone no major changes and they have made no important choices.

Fra Cristoforo, by contrast, contains a dynamic tension between the past and the present in his character. In the past, he had been ruled by his unreflecting nature; in his present, by a changed concsiousness, the realization of his own and others’ humanity. The novella of how Ludovico, the rich merchant’s son, became Fra Cristoforo by killing a proud noble­ man in a street brawl in which one of his own beloved servants was also killed, interpolated into the comedy, transforms the constant rhetorical present into a background that includes the codes of the present (vio­lence, pride, honor, bullying) as a past within a single man’s scope of life. The Capuchin carries the past in himself, but as a foil for his “new life”; the two together create the possibility of changing the frozen past/present into a different future. From this tension he gains his personal depth and charisma. He interjects into the accident-filled world of comedy the dimension of choice, both as a renunciation of the past’s evil inertia (for Ludovico had been driven to murder by his nearly involuntary acceptance of the aristocratic social code) and the acceptance of the code of charity. The tension between the two worlds — the “natu­ral” passions of the past, and the disciplined choice of the present –­ are never resolved in Fra Cristoforo.

… he never lost an opportunity of carrying out two … duties he had imposed on himself: that of settling quarrels and that of protecting the weak. In this, without his realizing it, there entered something of his old self, and a spark of that warlike spirit which his humiliations and mortifications had not been able to subdue…. His whole bearing showed, as did his face, traces of the long struggle between a naturally fiery and violent temperament, and an opposing will that was usually victorious, always alert, and directed by higher motives and inspirations. One of his brother friars and friends, who knew him well, once compared him to one of those words in the vocabulary which are rather too strong to use in their natu­ral state, and which some (even educated people) use when carried away by passion, in a jumbled state, with a letter or so changed — words which remind one, even in this disguise, of their primitive energy. (§ 4)

In the conflict between the institutional world that protects the privileges of prideful passion and the individual responses of conscience, Fra Cristoforo embodies the energy of the “internal man” held in check by responsibility, but not yet capable of historical transformation.

Fra Cristoforo’s transfer to Renzo and Lucia of his personal, psychological knowledge of the possibility of choice in the social world re­presents the generative historical dimension of I Promessi Sposi. Only when Renzo has learned in his own skin how to renounce his hatred of Don Rodrigo, his personal version of the isolating pride at the root of the past society’s cruelty and ignorance, does he become fit for helping to establish the new order. Similarly, Lucia must meet Renzo halfway, and renounce her own version of refusing contact, the vow of chastity. The lovers each embody traits that appear together in Fra Cristoforo. But historically they appeared too early in him: the merchant’s son, Ludovico, was too close to his adversaries in spirit, in his love of luxury and prideful arrogance. The only alternative open to him after the murder of the nobleman was to withdraw to the periphery of the institutional world as a Capuchin. The peasant couple, however, repre­sent for Manzoni a historically mature petite-bourgeoisie, capable of com­bining the passive humility of respect for others with the active self­ respect of industry. Fra Cristoforo could not yet dissolve the past in a moment of change; the past continues to live on in his guilt. Renzo can move his family to a new state, under new new social conditions, by letting go of his attachment to the old code of pride and by forgiving the dying Don Rodrigo.

Thus, with Manzoni’s counter-history, we are in a world-view tradi­ionally considered ahistorical, and even antihistorical. In Manzoni’s ethical world the change of consciousness must precede any concrete and objective changes in the world of institutions. Fra Cristoforo can act as a positive mediator because the change has occurred in him. He has cho­sen charity, moving through the “bad innocence” of accepting social re­ality as unchangeable (the psychological counterpart of “bad infinity”) to experience choice and responsibility. Within the reified, oppressive construction of social reality, this is the only sort of freedom avai­lable. It requires renunciation of the past and faith in Providence.

But once this dimension of freedom enters the action of the novel through Renzo and Lucia, it transmutes everything. In contrast to Fra Cristoforo’s depth, which is a function of two characters and two social structures struggling with each other, Renzo and Lucia are light. For mere romantic comedy, unraveling on a flat plane of social reality frozen in the present, technical leads are sufficient. Fra Cristoforo’s exemplary tale makes it clear, however, that he is far more than a mere donor, fortuitously intervening in the lives of two hapless lovers. The modern saint’s tale is meant to exemplify what must be imitated to attain grace. Arguably, grace in I Promessi Sposi is no more mystical a state than peace of mind. And the Capuchin can only indicate how to reach it, his own self-contradictions do not allow him enough peace of mind for him to exemplify the final resolution of history’s suffering. That liberation out of historical contradictions is reserved for Renzo and Lucia, They carry the values that Fra Cristoforo cannot: children, simple industry, peasant humility, i.e., the rejection of historical “horizon” for the sake of human community.

Fra Cristoforo’s limitations are historical, as are the lovers’ ad­vantages. The former comes too early; the latter, at exactly the right time, when silk-spinners are needed by the northern Venetian city-states. But even with this historical edge, if they do not exercise their freedom to choose, they will not be able to use their advantage. At the very least, they will continue to be oppressed; at worst, they might be victimized to the full extent of an evil society’s power.

The lovers do not attain their full freedom until the climactic scene in the lazzaretto, where Fra Cristoforo marvelously reappears to push them through to the end of the maturing process he set in motion in the early chapters. Before then, Renzo’s Everyman typicality, and his consti­tutional indecisiveness, make him bad material for great choices. He is forever deciding to do one thing, and doing something else. He agrees to submit to Fra Cristoforo, and still goes forward with the ill-starred wedding-ruse. He sets off for the monastery in Milan at the Capuchin’s suggestion, and is distracted by the rioting crowd. He joins the rioters in front of the house of the Commissioner of Supply, then helps the Spanish Grand Chancellor rescue the Commissioner. He knows he must be dis­creet about his quarrel with Don Rodrigo, and yet spills his resentment in drunken revolutionary talk to a police detective.

While Renzo acts too much and too quickly, Lucia’s passivity is also unreflective, even if it is based solidly on virtue and Christian love. She sins by omission. Rather than upset the marriage process, she neglects to tell her mother and Renzo of Don Rodrigo’s advances, preventing them from taking appropriate measures until it is too late. In L’Innominato’s castle, her total withdrawal from the sphere of action, by vowing never to lose her virginity, purifies her sufficiently to be the vehicle for the arch-bandit’s conversion, but presents singular complications in the matter of bearing children and generating the future.

Every historical actor practices his or her choice, whether s/he is conscious of it or not. Whatever the characters may intend, they either reproduce the social relations of the old society, or they uphold the values of charity. They can uphold the old structure by giving in to oppression and division, internalizing aristocratic pride, passing on the bad faith of their relations with others, as do Gertrude and Don Abbon­dio; by accepting unreflectively commonly shared anti-human prejudices, to which isolates like Don Ferrante and the plague doctors are prone; or by opposing the ruling structure directly and giving it material for di­rect oppression, as Renzo does in his drunken tavern scene. In the fully entrenched feudal society, any unconscious act is a reproduction of op­pression. Only when the freedom to choose becomes conscious can one elect to act for a new society.

The subjective awareness of choice and the knowledge that such a pos-sibility exists objectively in the historical world occur in the same moment of realization. Thus, Fra Cristofaro, by reproducing the worst possible relation of the ruling society, murder motivated by a spurious honor, passes through to valuing the humanity of all men, even the worst of the aristocracy: “The fall of his adversary, the sudden change of that face, in one moment, from threatening rage to the quiet solemn calm of death, was a sight which changed the soul of the slayer at one stroke” (§ 4).

Nevertheless, the blood of his victim, the reproduction of the destructiveness of the aristocracy, is never fully expiated by Fra Cristoforo.

Gertrude and L’Innominato

Far more deeply implicated in the reproduction of the evil order is Gertrude, who matches Fra Cristoforo in the complexity of her psychology, and hence, her historicity. Gertrude is Fra Cristoforo’s foil: her exemplary tale is interpolated into the story like the Capuchin’s, and opens into the historical dimension in the same way. But where Fra Cris­toforo represents the possibility of conscience in history, Gertrude re­presents the failure to assert one’s freedom. She is subjected to the full power that the demonically self-reproducing aristocratic society can bring to bear in perverting human freedom — greater even than the force that destroys Ludovico, who at least had some male privileges of free movement and drastic action.

The theme of the demonic inertia of aristocratic social relations is explicit in Gertrude’s tale. Her father, a Prince and a great lord, in order to keep his property intact after his death, designated his first son to be his heir. Following the pattern established over gene­rations, the other children were to be excluded from social relations al­together, and placed in monasteries.

The girl-child was to have no choice in the matter, “The unhappy creature … was still hidden in her mother’s womb when her state in life had already been irrevocably settled” (§9). At birth, she was given a name appropriate for a nun; her toys were dolls dressed as nuns. She was subjected to a conditioning designed to manipulate her deepest fee­lings, She was made to associate parental affection and pleasure with agreement to their wishes. Worse, she was encouraged to envision her life in the convent as a delightful reproduction of the tyranny her parents practiced in the world at large.

If little Gertrude was ever found guilty of some slight act of arro­gance or haughtiness, towards which her nature easily inclined her, “You’re only a little girl,” she was told. “Such behaviour is unbe­coming. But when you’re a mother abbess, then you can rule with a rod of iron and order everyone about as you like.” (Ibid.)

As she came of age, she doubted many times whether to abide by her father’s decision — and each doubt met with cold reproofs and stinging rejections. The punishments for trying to consider choosing freely even­tually became so severe that she could withstand the pressure no longer, and acceded to her father’s “wishes.” The positive reinforcement, the great burst of affection and approval with which her father responded seemed like a liberation to her, and submission to his authority the essence of freedom, In the convent, however, the two sides of her perso­nality, her willful yet open nature, and the submissiveness forced upon her, conflicted, and perverted her clarity of conscience. She became a grotesque complex of exaggerated resentment against those who could have chosen differently, and resentment against her confiners. Her perversity ultimately drove her into a liaison with a bravo who had taken sanctuary nearby.

Thus, her life was a series of submissions. So little did she learn of choice, and so familiar was she with imprisonment — psychic and physical alike — that her one apparent choice was also a submission to compulsion. The illicit affair with the bravo is material for blackmail; in or­der to protect herself, she has to betray Lucia, the only person she has ever loved.

Between Fra Cristoforo and Gertrude, who represent the positive and negative responses to the historical world, lies L’Innominato’s tale. Unlike their stories, L’Innominato’s is not a flashback that adds temporal depth of motivation to a character acting in the present. His story unfolds as the novel’s story unfolds, from the conditions of the present into the future. It is a lyrical example of the possibilities of the fu­ture,. Fra Cristoforo and Gertrude carry their pasts in tension with their presents; by continually playing out their struggle with their pasts, they generate their actions, with opposite results. L’Innominato is Manzoni’s image of resolved transformation, a utopian example of the power of freedom. His role in Renzo’s and Lucia’s plot is not central; the only novelistic function of Lucia’s abduction is to make her the vehicle of his conversion, He is parenthetically interposed at the center of the novel.

This is true not only in structure, but also in the action. He lives in an impassable valley. His clients must come to him with their suits. He draws evil to himself, and finally good, like a drain. He is the exemplary version of the whole novel’s action, concentrated to a romantic pitch.

L’Innominato is at the pinnacle of earthly power. “From the castle heights, the savage nobleman dominated every spot around where the foot of man could tread, and never saw anyone higher or above him” (§20). Nameless himself, and living in a nameless region in the border zone, L’Innominato represents a romantic extreme of darkness, isolation, and evil, He is a “super-tyrant,” ruling over the realm of anti-order. His qualities are merely the exaggeration of the qualities of the aristocracy. His force is simply greater than that of all the other local tyrants, and he forces them to submit to their own fealty to force. Don Rodrigo turns to him because he is also the exaggeration of aristocratic honor: he is “known never to promise too much or in vain” (Ibid.).

Manzoni could, like Scott for the pivotal scene in Waverley, claim an actual historical incident as the basis for vraisemblance in the see- mingly miraculous conversion of L’Innominato. Ripamonti provided it in his record of a bandit nobleman, a certain Bernardo Visconti, who converted from the worst depravity of the thieves’ honor of the petty tyrants to the highest practice of Christian charity. But the foreshortening of the tale places the events around L’Innominato’s conversion in a magical space, further removed from history than any other section of the novel. L’Innominato’s direct role in the historical action occurs after his conversion, when he turns his enchanted valley and castle, once a dreaded pocket of vice, into a haven for the neighboring villagers against the raids of the Austrians and the Venetian capaletti.

As world history, in the form of war, intrudes on the peasants, Manzoni adopts the metaphor of a hurricane, an uncontrollable force of nature.

At length new and more general, graver, extremer disasters involved them, according to the world’s scale — just as a vast, sweeping, wandering hurricane, which uproots and strips trees, unroofs houses, untops spires, tears down walls, and scatters rubbish everywhere, even stirs up bits of straw hidden in the grass and searches out of comers the light dry leaves that a gentler wind had borne there, and whirls them off on its headlong course of destruction. (§27)

Seen from the peasants’ perspective, the war appears beyond human control. Because of the miraculous atmosphere surrounding his protection, L’Innominato reinforces this “metaphysical,” nonhistorical attitude to events. For this reason, critics like Fredric Jameson see Lucia’s portion of the novel as merely precapitalist nostalgia.⁵ But Manzoni generally does not permit human responsibility to be excluded from history, Even if in Lucia’s tale the war appears superhuman, its origins in human ac­tion are clearly, almost drily, expounded in Renzo’s tale. Ignorant and venal actions and ignorant and venal reponses create a closed, demonic circle in the historical world:

The people had tried to create abundance by sacking and burning, the government was trying to maintain it by the gallows and the rope. Such means were linked to each other, but the reader can see how little it had to do with the ends…; it is easy to see, and not uninteresting to observe, how there was a necessary connection between these strange measures; each was an inevitable consequence of its predecessor, and all a result of the first decree which fixed the price of bread so far from its real price — from the price, that is, that would have resulted naturally from the relations between supply and demand. (§28)

Manzoni’s historical vision was that of the late Enlightenment’s. He tried to combine the concretes of historical criticism with the concretes of human psychology, in order to reveal lessons that touched on the “dangers for humanity in its perpetual struggle on earth.” Providence, although constantly present as a guiding force in individual souls, must be incarnated in individuals. Thus, at the end of I Pro­messi Sposi, the historical consolation lies in Renzo’s decision to become a Berghamese burgher, and to do his small part in creating the bour­geois community that is ultimately to overthrow the forces of despotism.

Conclusion

From Lukács’ Hegelian-Marxist perspective, Manzoni’s ideology in I Promessi Sposi lacked one essential ingredient: a world-historical dia­lectical resolution. Such a resolution would have required an image of the evolution of social life through conflicts among institutions, embodied by typical individuals who choose to participate in them. Without these elements, according to Lukács, the concreteness of historical description and psychology lacks horizon, i.e., a future world in which new institutions embody changed, and putatively freer, social relations.

In The Historical Novel, Lukács demanded a revolutionary horizon, the prospect of humanly created progress perceived to be entirely the work of human wills working together. Manzoni’s religious conservatism in I Promessi Sposi did no more for Italian revolutionary thinking than to represent its ethical-religious origin among the people. That Manzoni had failed to provide what was needed from the historical novel was a view widely shared in his own lifetime. Luigi Settembrini’s lasting resentment was typical:

To write and publish in 1827, in the darkest and most ferocious time of the reaction, when the priests were in command, the Austrians were terrorizing Venetia and Lombardy, and tyrants were everywhere, a book which praised priests and friars and advised patience, submission and pardon, meant (Manzoni certainly did not want this, but it is the necessary consequence of the book) to advise submission to slavery, the negation of patriotism, and of every generous sentiment. (qtd. in Colquhoun 184)

In England, the Westminster Review (1837) accused Manzoni of “inciting people to patient suffering rather than action,” and pro­nounced the book “unequal to the necessity of the times and the demands of his Country” (Ibid. 180). Mazzini and Gramsci agreed that it did not satisfy the goals of the revolutionary Italian people (Kardos xvii).

Manzoni lacked the historical preconditions for a classical histori­ cal novel, a novel that would appear to be a prehistory of the political institutions of the whole developed, bourgeois world. Without living examples of national and political unity in the past, such a novel could have been at best a program. This is not to say, however, that I Promessi Sposi lacks a world-historical horizon altogether. Rather, Manzoni offers an antirevolutionary, Liberal world-history, in which significant social changes occur through the slow gathering of moral force among the least powerful members of the populace. He chooses peasants for prota­gonists, who are forced by the collective oppression of feudal tyranny and foreign domination to become bourgeois artisans.

If for Hegel, and most Liberal historians and historical novelists, the models of social change were the upheavals of the Reformation and the French Revolution, for Manzoni in Catholic Italy the model was the triumph of Christian morality through the self-sacrifice and charity of generations of disenfranchised Christians. The moderate Liberal Scal­vini’s appreciation of the novel pinpoints Manzoni’s conflation of Libe­ralism and Christian morals: “Christianity and that which calls itself Liberalism by those who understand it, work toward a single aim: which is to achieve the love of one’s neighbor, to abolish all vicious reasons for inequality, and to establish the reign of justice….” (qtd. in Colquhoun 184).

The fact that Scott was writing for the wealthiest of the newly self-­ conscious European bourgeois audiences is evident in the modes he used to figure forth his vision of the historical happy medium.He made this image speak to the petite-bourgeoisie’s new genteel tastes, perpetually in need of new stimuli and changes in fashion, and to their conservative poli­tical sensibilities, by combining modem and popular literary modes (the Gothic, the ethnographic travelogue, quasi-primitive oral literature, ro­mantic ballads and the Bildungsroman) with the most conservative among bourgeois ideological myths: the epic of national unification structured as a romantic comedy revolving around aristocratic property. Scott’s his­tory was about success. It provided ample compensation for the tragic los­ses. At its conclusion, the narrator, protagonists, and readers, all sat on a green philosophical hill, viewing the past’s conflicts from the high vantage of civil tranquillity in a restored pastoral empire.

Manzoni, by comparison, constructed his novel with much more tradtional modes: operatic buffa comedy, picaresque, the Baroque-Hellenistic adventure tale, rationalistic satire, hagiographic tales, and, at the dramatic center, plague narratives and medieval morality tales. Instead of creating an image of development, the correlative of bourgeois persona­lity and state formation, Manzoni remained with popular constructs: pea­sant protagonists and miraculous conversion-transformations in an quasi­ operatic context.⁶

The classical, English image of development could never have been realistically portrayed in Italy during Manzoni’s career. As the historian Guido de Ruggiero writes, the backward economic state of Italy re­tarded the social differentiation of classes, especially the formation of a large middle class. Foreign trade had shrunk because of the displacement of the great trade routes, and internal trade was impeded by the customs barriers resulting from the political divisions of the country. The transformation of the artisan system into a modern industrial bourgeois system was delayed partly by the scarcity of raw materials, and partly by the smallness of markets,. “Hence, no Italian district, except to some extent Lombardy, had passed through its industrial revolution till after the middle of the nineteenth century.”²⁸

Manzoni wrote his historical novel for a nation with a national consciousness, but without a tradition of state-formation. Institutional development in Italy was historically anti-national and entropic on the part of the feudal petty aristocracy and the Church. Manzoni wrote for that national mind, which could only respond to, while enduring in, world historical changes. He represented the prehistory of that conssciousness in his peasants, morally fully conscious beings without power to influence events directly. Inasmuch as no institutions could repre­sent the historical unity and thriving life of that national consciousness, Manzoni symbolized and embodied it in the Western code of free human contact, Catholic Christian charity,

Notes to Chapter III

1.”When the revolution ended in 1814, it was found that the whole of Europe, exhausted, loved with a true love the representatives of des­potism; first, because they seemed to bring back quiet; second, because very few can hate someone without loving that someone’s enemy,” Manzoni quoted in Archibald Colquhoun, Manzoni and His Times, 112; Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism 288.

2. For the characteristic of the paradoxical-Baroque style, see Morris W. Croll, “Muret and the History of ‘Attic Prose’,” in “Attic” and Baroque Prose Styles, p. 159.

3. All parenthetical chapter references, and quotations in the text, are from the Colquhoun translation of The Betrothed. E.P. Dutton.

4. A.P. d’ Entrèves, Introduction to The Column of Infamy. p. xviii.

5. G.M. Young, “Scott and the Historians” in Grierson, ed. Sir Walter Scott Lectures 1940-1948. p. 97; Lukács, op. cit., pp. 34-5.

6. A work remains to be written on the role of the operatic context in the reception of I Promessi Sposi. Under Italian conditions in the early and mid-Nineteenth Century, opera’s “feeling of musicality” carried revolutionary values for several generations, as the political power of Mozart’s and Verdi’s operas clearly illustrates. The Hungarian aesthetic historian, Géza Fodor, has written that in the pre-revolutionary period of the Enlightenment, when unification of consciousness was a prerequisite for revolutionary consciousness, the opera’s power to create a feeling of collective inwardness made it the pre-eminent art form of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Fodor, Zene és dráma [Music and Drama].