Exiles, Emigres and Intermediaries: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Exiles, Emigrés and Intermediaries

139

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Exiles, Emigrés and Intermediaries Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions

Edited by

Barbara Schaff

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

 

This book is the result of a collaborative international research project, In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions, generously supported by the British Academy.

Cover image: Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, 1852-55, oil on panel, oval 82.5 x 75 cm. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery. Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3068-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3069-5 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents BARBARA SCHAFF Introduction: Paradise of Exiles?

9

1. Early Cultural Mediations WILLIAM THOMAS ROSSITER ‘Amydde the see’ (‘in alto mar’): Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

23

RALF HERTEL Nationalising History? Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the Appropriation of the English Past

47

MICHAEL WYATT John Florio’s Translation of Kingship: An Italian Baptism for James VI/I’s Basilikon Doron

71

2. Diplomatic Interventions DONATELLA ABBATE BADIN Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

87

SIMONETTA BERBEGLIA James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence

117

PETER VASSALLO John Hookham Frere, Gabriele Rossetti, and Anglo-Italian Cooperation in Exile

131

OWAIN J. WRIGHT The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service? Contrasting British Diplomatic and Consular Experiences in Early Liberal Italy

141

3. Religious and Political Difference GABY MAHLBERG ‘All the conscientious and honest papists’: Exile and Belief Formation of an English Republican

161

XAVIER CERVANTES ‘Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra’? Cultural Politics, AntiCatholic Anxiety, and the Italian Operatic Community in London in the 1720s

177

MAURIZIO MASETTI The 1844 Post Office Scandal and its Impact on English Public Opinion

203

4. Itinerant Communities STEFANO VILLANI The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

217

PETER HOARE ‘A Room with a View – and a Book’: Some Aspects of Library Provision for English Residents and Visitors to Florence, 1815-1930

237

TONY KUSHNER Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s

255

5. Perspectives and Poetics of Literary Exile TOBIAS DÖRING Imaginary Homelands? D.G. Rossetti and his Father between Italy and England

271

FABIENNE MOINE The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Sentimental Journey to Italy or the Exile of a Fragmented Heart

289

CHRISTOPHER WHALEN ‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

301

MARA CAMBIAGHI The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

321

6. Mobile Aesthetics BRENDAN CASSIDY Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome

343

DAVID EKSERDJIAN Crowe and Cavalcaselle then and now

357

EMMA SUTTON ‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

375

Notes on Contributors

403

Barbara Schaff Introduction: Paradise of Exiles? I. Recent research in the humanities is coming increasingly to engage with transnational perspectives that address questions of cultural interaction, communication, and exchange across national boundaries. In accordance with this innovative research perspective, this collection of essays, based on the second colloquium of the British Academy project In Medias Res: BritishItalian Cultural Transactions held in 2007, investigates the historic resonance of transnational encounters and movements between Italy and Britain as two European cultures that look back on a long history of mutual cross-fertilisation. The following chapters are written by contributors from Great Britain, Italy, Malta, France and Germany, members of or affiliated with the European In Medias Res research project led by Martin Stannard, The University of Leicester. They are drawn from a range of academic disciplines including literary studies, history, musicology, art history and bibliography. They analyse the ways in which the activities of exiles and their cultural perspectives interact with the sometimes repressive and constrictive religious or political systems and ideologies that they encounter, exploring the dynamic and productive cultural forces engendered by exiles, liminal wanderers, and diasporic communities in Britain and Italy over a period of more than 500 years. In particular it is the borderland condition of exiles, émigrés, expatriates and intermediaries that leads not only to the articulation of a sense of loss and grief, but also to the cultural enrichment that displacement can engender.1 The myth of exile begins, at least in Western culture, with the account in Genesis of the expulsion from the garden. Historically, the typology of the exile is linked with the rise of the nation state. Literary scholarship has had a longstanding interest in the condition of the exile, through which it has explored ideas of the psychological and material circumstances of dislocation, of fragmentation of identity, of linguistic hybridity, and the kind of narrative incoherence that seemed perfectly to symbolise the modern

1

For an example see Sharon Ouditt (ed.), Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), which analyses the condition of exile in a wider European context.

10

Barbara Schaff

condition. Within this field of research, it is the 20th century exile that has excited the widest critical attention, not least because, as Edward Said has reminded us, “the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is, it bears stressing, scale: our age – with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers – is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration”.2 The hitherto unprecedented forced migration of thousands of well-trained professionals, writers and artists in the political climate of dictatorship and genocide which shaped the 20th century understanding of the condition of exile as a monumental human tragedy has thus resulted in plentiful research on the condition of exile and the consequences of geographical and cultural displacement for artistic production. Moreover, the condition of the exile has also been traditionally linked to the Romantic idea of genius, a creative mode of artistic expression that can be construed as a condition of displacement making it possible to negotiate positions of identity, as well as political and cultural affiliation, from an eccentric point of view. One expression of this idea is articulated by George Steiner whose notion of an extra-territorial literature in the context of the exiled artist finds an analogue in the Byronic hero: “It seems proper that those who create art in a civilisation of quasi-barbarism, which has made so many homeless, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely.”3 Seen from this perspective, exile then becomes the essential condition of the artist and intellectual, and is imbued, through loss, with creative power and energy as well as the critical advantage of the outsider. The exile or émigré is capable of surveying society from a broader perspective, on the assumption that it is only from a distance that one can understand culture as a totality. Terry Eagleton has similarly argued that English culture in the first decades of the 20th century was largely revitalised by exiles and émigrés, because neither the lower middle class novel nor the liberalism and elitism typical of the Bloomsbury milieu, despite their sometimes ostensible opposition to the dominant cultural orthodoxy, were capable of transcending the society to which they reacted.4 Displaced writers like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce could capture the contemporary fragmentation and

2

3

4

Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p.174. George Steiner, Extraterritorial. Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: Atheneum 1975), p.11. Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970).

Introduction

11

disintegration of modern Western civilisation because they could draw on the extra-territorial perspective as well as the eccentric experience of the émigré, thereby investing themselves with a greater sense of vision. For Eagleton then, modernity becomes synonymous with the condition of the exile. But if cultural reform and artistic renewal is always incumbent on the state of the exile or even becomes the condition sine qua non of avant-garde artistic expression, at the same time it runs the risk of losing its distinguishing traits. In the end, the Romantic conceit of the exile as a discursive mode of genius fails to do justice to the ontological complexity of the condition. A less mythologised understanding of the state of the exile, a less metaphorical and a more historically informed approach, is therefore needed to appreciate the cultural and political implications of various specific conditions of displacement that involve the exchange, circulation, or appropriation of ideas as well as the material transmission of culture. Exile – the condition of being barred from one’s native country, preoccupied with the idea of home, alienated and filled with longing – is then complementary yet distinct from the position of the émigré who finds favourable religious and political conditions in another country and therefore experiences his situation less as a loss and more of an assurance of belonging and identity. A third position is occupied by the intermediary or go-between, who moves and mediates, culturally as well as geographically, between spaces, untrammelled by restrictions. Thus can these categories be seen to refer to distinct kinds of agency: an exile is forced to leave, an émigré makes the choice to leave, while the movement of the intermediary, on the other hand, lacks the same degree of finality. As arbiters of culture they all of course share the condition of being in-between, and it is the fruitful interaction between variant cultures that informs the nature and form of their cultural interventions. By focussing on Britain and Italy as either home or host country, this volume hopes to bring a specific aspect into focus that tends to be neglected in more general studies of the exiled condition, predicated on the idea that emigration and exile is always entangled with a discourse of identity that gains precision when confronted with its other. Italy and Britain have long been perceived (and have perceived themselves) as two spaces defined by geographical, political, cultural and religious opposites. In the process of constructing their own national identities, Britain and Italy can look back on a long tradition of projecting counter-images onto each other that yield fascination as well as repugnance. The condition of the Italian emigrant in England or its counterpart, the English émigré in Italy, is therefore shaped in accordance with marked and persevering differences: religious, political and cultural. While Manfred Pfister, in his encyclopaedic anthology of British writings on Italy, has identified a catalogue of oppositions that informed

12

Barbara Schaff

British fantasies of Italy5, the same, if perhaps to a lesser extent, holds true for Italian views of Britain. The most distinctive, historically persistent and culturally productive opposition, as this collection demonstrates, is that of the Protestant North versus the Catholic South. As far as the cultural exchanges between Britain and Italy are concerned, a certain imbalance cannot be denied. Italy has a longstanding reputation for the British as a land with a more hospitable climate – not only in terms of intellectual culture, politics, and art, but also with regard to health, food and morals, having been epitomised by Shelley as the “Paradise of Exiles”. 6 . In assembling narratives of British and Italian exiles, émigrés and intermediaries from half a millennium, this volume shows that the symbolic attributes and material relations between Italy and England are however far more complex, and indeed so fluid and versatile as to bring into question the kind of dichotomy formulated by Shelley. The main interest of research in Anglo-Italian cultural transactions has overwhelmingly been on the unilateral investigation into British perceptions of Italy, perhaps because the legacy of its monumental past has resonated within British culture so productively over centuries. The infatuation of the British romantics with Italy is well-known, although Italy has been perceived as a dream-like, utopian space for northern travellers since the Renaissance. At times, the condition of the British exile in Italy appeared as merely performative or even parasitic: Byron and Shelley performed as exiles in a country whose cultural heritage, as well as the contemporary political rhetoric of the Risorgimento, allowed them to stylise themselves as heroic martyrs to British Philistinism and political repression. Ultimately, it was the social practice of the Grand Tour and eventually 19th century mass tourism that rooted the Italian experience firmly and permanently in the British cultural imagination. From the 19th century onwards, emigration to Italy had become an important element in the lifestyle of many British artists and intellectuals, as had an accompanying longing for the homeland. Browning’s sentimental “Home Thoughts, From Abroad” testify to a discourse, where the original stimulus of displacement, the fruitful

5

6

See Manfred Pfister (ed.), The Fatal Gift of Beauty. The Italies of British Travellers: An Annotated Anthology (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1996). “How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!” Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Julian and Maddalo, a Conversation”, in: The Complete Works of Percy B. Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Vol. III (London: Ernest Benn 1965), p. 108

Introduction

13

encounter with the host culture and the accomodation to new cultural forms of expression, had sedimented into a mode of refused exchange: O, To be in England Now that April ' s there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!7

The multitudes of British writers who travelled to and the expatriates that lived in, Italy have left a rich testimony to the powerful hold the South has held for the British. This particular literary tendency has been well researched in a plethora of critical studies on the cultural and literary practices of the British in Italy, though these rarely focus on the conditions of exile in the true sense of the word.8 Travel, tourism and temporary sojourns are relatively unrestrained forms of mobility taking the form of transient events, whereas the categories of the exile and the émigré refer to different kinds of social mobility, involving far more precarious agencies. Examples of religious and political Italian exiles in Britain testify to this kind of displacement, always involving politically and ideologically fraught conditions. Whether voluntary or otherwise, exiles and émigrés both divorce themselves from the linguistic, intellectual, political, ideological, social and material cultures of their homeland, and once they are abroad, they construe their emigrant visions of a community constructed as a transnational network, shaped by loyalty, support, and a shared set of practices, values and beliefs. At best, exiles and émigrés are able to negotiate cultural difference productively, translating

7

8

Robert Browning, “Home Thoughts, From Abroad”, in: The Poetical Works of Robert E. Browning, Vol. VI (London: Smith & Elder 1889), p.95. See for instance Brand, Charles Peter. Italy and the English romantics: the Italianate fashion in early nineteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1957); Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and The English Imagination (Basingstoke and London: MacMillan 1998). Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff (eds.), Venetian Views – Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999); Martin McLaughlin (ed.), Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism: A Festschrift for Peter Brand (European Humanities Res 2000); Alison Chapman and Janet Stabler (eds.), Unfolding the South. Nineteenth Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Bandiera, Laura and Saglia, Diego (eds.), British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).

14

Barbara Schaff

their cultural heritage into the new context, and providing a fruitful stimulus to the host culture. At worst their voices become marginalised and silenced. II. As the following essays – spanning from the Late Middle Ages to the 20th century – show, the diversity of transnational cultural and material interactions, transfers and exchanges, for which exiles, émigrés and itinerant intermediaries in their cultural in-between state serve as appropriate symbolic figures, does not allow for simple attributions. Accordingly, the six sections of the volume are arranged in a thematic rather than a chronological order in order to give attention to some of the different modes of intercultural exchanges and mediations at issue. The three articles included in Early Cultural mediations in several ways anticipate the scope of the volume: their emphasis on discursive mediations in a pan-European intertextual community makes clear that from the late middle ages onwards mobility, cultural translations and mediations by exiles, emigrants and itinerant were crucial agents in the formatting processes of European nations. With the discussion of Chaucer’s translation of Petrach’s rime 132, the first ever translation of a sonnet into English, William Rossiter identifies an apposite point of origin for Anglo-Italian cultural transactions. Connecting Chaucer’s translation with an influential network of Italian émigré communities, he shows how these same communities helped Chaucer to understand the socio-political conditions of Petrarch’s thought and work. As Ralf Hertel shows in his paper on the significance of Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia for Shakespeare’s Richard III, transnational influences sometimes operate covertly. This book, written in Latin by an Italian in England and informed by a supranational humanism, was the first British history in a modern sense, crucially informing the English people’s vision of their past. Polydore’s history highlights the intricate play of internationalism and nationalism in the making of English history, implying, as Hertel argues, that it was necessary for a foreigner to make history strange before it could become English. Michael Wyatt looks at the translation of King James I and VI’s Basilikon Doron, a treatise on kingship, translated into Italian by John Florio, and registers something of the incompatibility of two different linguistic traditions. Wyatt senses an irresolvable friction between the Renaissance elements of James’s treatise and the mentality of Italian Renaissance Italian culture, such that Florio’s effort to re-christen the Basilikon Doron in the linguistic medium of early modern Italian culture proves in the end to be an impossible task. Our second section engages with the tensions of political and ideological DIPLOMATIC INTERVENTIONS. Donatella Badin explores the radical Carbonari

Introduction

15

sympathies of Lady Morgan, whose travel book on Italy shaped perception of Italy for her British contemporaries, and traces her role as a mediator to Italian exiles and travellers in Ireland. The Irish Patron is seen as an exile in British culture herself, as well as an intermediary, who used her contacts in the publishing industry to support Italian intellectuals abroad. Another cultural mediator is portrayed by Simonetta Berbeglia: The journalist and public lecturer James Montgomery Stuart well known for his British liberal views in Italy, though his cultural mediations can be seen to run in two directions: whereas his History of Free Trade in Tuscany (1876) helped to make British Liberalism intelligible to Italian readers, he also took it upon himself to interpret the Risorgimento to the British public. The British diplomat and Freemason John Hookham Frere is presented by Peter Vasallo in his role as supporter of the politically persecuted poet Gabriele Rossetti, father to the Victorian poet Christian Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As Vasallo shows, the retired diplomat Frere helped Rossetti publish his verses and pleaded for an amnesty for Rossetti at court. When this failed, he made arrangements for Rossetti to escape to Malta aboard a British vessel and provided him with letters of introduction to some of his London acquaintances, thus helping to facilitate Rossetti’s settlement in England. Owen Wright’s chapter addresses the experiences of British consuls and diplomats in Italy from 1861–1883. Wright compares the different experiences of British representatives and analyses the reasons why diplomats tended to find acculturation easy and cherished Italian heritage and culture, whereas consular officers looked on their new social conditions with contempt and abhorrence. Over the centuries, perhaps no other framework has proved to be as precarious for Anglo-Italian relations and has triggered off more xenophobic reactions than RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL DIFFERENCE, the topic of our third section. Gaby Mahlberg shows how the exile in catholic Italy in the 1660s of the English republican Henry Neville and his friendship with his contemporary Italians helped him to develop a political position that was informed by religious tolerance. In a climate of religious anxieties after the so-called ‘Popish Plot’, Neville strongly argued for toleration towards English catholics as well as their social integration. Anti-catholic anxieties also inform the importation of the Italian opera to Britain in the 18th century, and Xavier Cervantes shows that the national, moral and cultural stereotypes that went along with the reception of this new art form were rooted in religious and political foundations. Italian composers in Britain had to face anti-catholic as well as anti-Jacobite hysteria that often destroyed their careers, as is evident in the case of Giovanni Bononcini, a collaborator with Handel, who was expelled from the Royal Academy and forced to leave

16

Barbara Schaff

England after the discovery of the Jacobite Atterbury plot in 1722. Perhaps the most famous Italian 19th century exile in Britain was Giuseppe Mazzini, who enjoyed celebrity status during his exiles in London. Maurizio Masetti takes a diplomatic incident in which Mazzini was involved (his correspondence having been opened with the consent of the Home and Foreign Secretaries) as a way into the ensuing public and parliamentary controversies regarding the principles of totalitarianism and democracy. The focus on the single exiled or emigrant figure is widened when it comes to the discussion of the situation of exiled or ITINERANT COMMUNITIES, as discussed in our fourth section which examines the situation of three very different groups in terms of their ideological, social and political formation: Italian protestants in England, English readers at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, and Jewish Refugees in Britain and Italy in the 1930s. Stefano Villani looks at the evidence of the Italian protestant Church in 17th century London as it faced serious institutional difficulties and found itself manoeuvring between Italian protestant reform and the liturgy of the Church of England. A more diverse community is analysed by Peter Hoare, who investigates the reading habits of itinerant British readers in Florentine libraries by looking at their archives, subscription lists, loan registers and accession records. The most famous was the Gabinetto Vieusseux, a public library that catered for British tourists and expatriates with an extensive lending library and reading room. Tony Kushner explores the treatment of Jewish refugees from Nazism in two places of refuge – Italy and Britain. He takes the example of the forced journey of the Jewish refugee Hilde Gerrard from Germany, first to Italy and later to Britain, as documented in her autobiography to reflect on more general notions of identity construction in relation to home and belonging within the bounds of the nation state. Ultimately, Kushner argues, the fate of Hilde Gerrard reveals the complexity involved when refugees attempt to re-establish a ‘place called home’. When the condition of exile shapes not only experience but also informs a person’s artistic strategies and expression, aspects of the PERSPECTIVES AND POETICS OF LITERARY EXILE require consideration. Our fifth section deals with four examples of literary itinerants from the19th and 20th centuries. Using Salman Rushdie’s coinage of the “imaginary homeland” as the frame for his analysis, Tobias Doering discusses cross-cultural transfers and poetic reinventions in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his father Gabriele that were induced by the conditions of exile and diaspora. Doering emphasises the fact that identities are always constituted through acts of cultural mediation and argues that, as a second-generation exile, Dante Gabriel poetically repositions himself not in the exiled language of his father

Introduction

17

but through strategies of citation and translation. The cultural exile in Italy of the Englishwoman Anna Jameson, who used this condition as a strategic device for manipulating generic and narrative standards of travel writing in her Diary of an Ennuyée (1826) is analysed by Fabienne Moine. According to Moine, Jameson suggests a new vision of Italy, situated between Romantic and Victorian representations that challenges received notions of national as well as gender identities. In his article on James Joyce, Christopher Whalen pays tribute to the outstanding cultural and literary importance of this primus inter pares of exiles. Whalen shows how the Trieste experience informed and was projected on the depiction of Dublin in Ulysses. The experience of living in such a diverse location, argues Whalen, affected Joyce’s view of Ireland, while the linguistic hybridity of the Triestino dialect provided him with a model for the polyglot to be found in Finnegans Wake. In her case study of Beppe Fenoglio, Mara Cambiaghi discusses the inner or metaphorical exile of the 20th century Italian writer whose use of the English language in Il Partigiano Johnny she reads as a willed moral and political choice. Fenoglio, she argues, resorted to the myth of English and American literature during the war years, creating his own highly idiosyncratic hybrid discourse in order to find refuge from the oppressive political reality of his home country. The last section of the volume, MOBILE AESTHETICS, is particularly concerned with forms of cultural mediation, material transaction and appropriation in the realm of Italian art and music. Brendan Cassidy traces the business transactions of the 18th century Scots art dealer Gavin Hamilton, a pivotal figure in the export of some of Italy’s finest pictures to Britain and consequently in the development of British artistic taste. David Ekserdjian explores the extraordinary scholarly collaboration of two 19th century art historians, Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, who coauthored seminal works on European art, compiling copious notes and making drawings of the originals in the process. Ekserdjian points to the different national modes in which authorship found its attribution: whereas documentary evidence exists that Crowe wrote most of the texts, this fact is not generally acknowledged in Italy. Emma Sutton explores in her essay the representation and in particular the English consumption of 18th century Italian opera in the fictional and critical work of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Sutton asserts that Lee challenges contemporary critical orthodoxy, offering an alternate narrative for music history that privileges Anglo-Italian affinities. Furthermore, Lee' s revisionary accounts of Northern-Southern European musical relations turned out to be formative to her mature understanding of national identity and cosmopolitanism.

18

Barbara Schaff

In the preparation of this volume there have been several debts of gratitude. In particular I would like to thank Pat Shaw for her painstaking efforts as a copy editor and Xenia Röcker, Thilo Weber and Tim-Christoph Tröger for their support and diligence in the publication process.

Bibliography Bandiera, Laura and Saglia, Diego (eds.), British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). Brand, Charles Peter, Italy and the English Romantics: the Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1957). Browning, Robert, “Home Thoughts, From Abroad”, in: The Poetical Works of Robert E. Browning, Vol. VI (London: Smith & Elder 1889). Chapman, Alison and Stabler, Janet (eds.), Unfolding the South. Nineteenth Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). D' Addario, Christopher, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007). Eagleton, Terry, Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). Lagos-Pope, María-Inés, Exile in Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 1988). Luyat, Anne and Tolron Francine, Flight from Certainty: The Dilemma of Identity and Exile (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2001). McLaughlin, Martin (ed.), Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism: A Festschrift for Peter Brand (European Humanities Res 2000). O’Connor, Maura, The Romance of Italy and The English Imagination (Basingstoke and London: MacMillan 1998). Pfister, Manfred (ed.), The Fatal Gift of Beauty. The Italies of British Travellers: An Annotated Anthology (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1996). –– and Schaff, Barbara (eds.), Venetian Views – Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “Julian and Maddalo, a Conversation”, in: The Complete Works of Percy B. Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Vol. III (London: Ernest Benn 1965).

Introduction

19

Steiner, George, Extraterritorial. Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: Atheneum 1975).

1. Early Cultural Mediations

William Thomas Rossiter ‘Amydde the see’ (‘in alto mar’): Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile At some point between 1370 and his death in 1374, Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, to use his anglicized name, composed an epistle to posterity. The incomplete letter details his life, his nature, and his achievements, and provides a valuable account of his sense of dislocation: Francis Petrarch to posterity, greetings. Perhaps you will have heard something about me, although this too is doubtful, whether a petty, obscure name would reach far into either space or time. […] I was born in exile in Arezzo in the year 1304 of this last age, which began with Christ, at dawn on a Monday, July [20], of honorable parents, Florentine in origin, of modest fortune, and, to tell the truth, verging on poverty, but driven from their homeland. […] I have dwelt single-mindedly on learning about antiquity, among other things because this age has always displeased me, so that, unless love for my dear ones pulled me the other way, I always wished to have been born in any other age whatever, and to forget this one, seeming always to graft myself in my mind onto other ages. (Sen., XVIII. 1. 672-74)1

In October 1302 Petrarch’s father Pietro, a notaro known as Ser Petracco, was sentenced to ‘a heavy fine, the cutting off of a hand, banishment from Florentine territory, and confiscation of his property’ following false charges which had been made against him.2 He absconded with his wife Eletta to Arezzo, a city to the south of the family home at Incisa, to where Eletta returned in early 1305 with her young son; as Wilkins notes, this was ‘the first of Francesco’s many journeys’ (Life, p. 2).3 Petrarch’s sense of being

1

2 3

Francis Petrarch, Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri I-XVIII, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), II, 672-79. Hereafter Sen. Future references will be included in the main body of the text, in order of book, letter and page number. The letter existed in an inchoate form prior to 1370-74, however, probably originating in 1355. See Ernest Hatch Wilkins, ‘On the Evolution of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity’, Speculum, 39 (1964), 304-8. Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 1. Ser Petracco was exiled in the same year as Dante Alighieri, who was banished following the triumph of Florentine Black Guelphs (Neri) over the White Guelphs (Bianchi). Traditionally the Guelph party was in support of the Papacy, as opposed to the Ghibellines, who favoured the Emperor. However, the parties soon fragmented, and in late medieval Florence political allegiances were adopted largely as a means of reinforcing existing family feuds, economic disputes, and of pursuing vendette. For brief overviews of Florentine

24

William Thomas Rossiter

‘born in exile’, in addition to the vital contribution it makes to his geographically itinerant lifestyle, is also linked to his conception of himself as being temporally ex patria, to his desire ‘to have been born in any other age whatever’. A focal point of Petrarch’s temporal and spatial exiles is the Papacy, and specifically the removal of the Papal See to Avignon in 1309. Petrarch’s father took his young family to Avignon in 1312, after finding work as a proctor to members of the Frescobaldi banking house, and Petrarch campaigned throughout his life for the return of the Papacy to its rightful place, as he saw it, in Rome. Indeed, Rome and Avignon constitute a binary opposition within Petrarch’s thought. He wrote letters to successive popes, and his fame ensured that they were read – it is not impossible that Petrarch’s 1366 letter to Urban V (Sen., VII) played some small part in his decision to return the See, albeit briefly, to Rome in 1367.4 Petrarch’s reverence for classical antiquity, in particular for the Roman world, exacerbated his sense of exile and is intertwined with what he calls the ‘shameful exile’ of the Church in ‘that most disgusting city [Avignon]’: as he says in the letter to posterity, ‘I call home that place of exile, Avignon’ (Sen., XVIII. 1. 674-76). It is a sad fact that the See returned to Rome in 1377, three years after Petrarch’s death.5

4

5

politics in the trecento see Robin Kirkpatrick’s introduction to English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 1-23 (pp. 9-15), and David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 9-64 (pp. 16-24). See also Gene A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society 1343-78 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), and The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). Petrarch’s anti-Avignonese sentiments recur throughout his works. For prominent examples see Rvf 136-38 in Franceso Petrarca, Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), pp. 664-75; Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976; repr. 2001), pp. 280-83; Petrarch’s Book without a Name, trans. by Norman P. Zacour (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973); and ‘Invective against a detractor of Italy’, in Invectives, ed. and trans. by David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 364-475. For discussions of Petrarch’s conception of Rome see Angelo Mazzocco, ‘Petrarca, Poggio, and Biondo: Humanism’s Foremost Interpreters of Roman Ruins’, in Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, ed. by Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1975), pp. 353-63 ; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 81-103, and ‘Resurrecting Rome: The Double task of the Humanist Imagination’, in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. by P. A. Ramsey,

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

25

However, it had been arranged in 1351, via his friend and acolyte Boccaccio, for Petrarch to return to the confiscated home in Florence from which his parents had been banished in 1302. The Florentine Signoria even offered Petrarch a professorship at the new university with carta bianca in terms of what he could teach. He gracefully declined, having already accepted the offer of Clement V to return to Avignon, much to the chagrin of the Signoria who promptly revoked their offer.6 Petrarch’s true home, as we have seen, lies in exile; it is in dislocation that he finds himself. Yet he later wrote an explanation (c. 1368), if one might call it such, of why he could not adhere to a fixed point, in a letter to his friend Francesco Bruni, the papal secretary: I know not by what power of the stars, or inconstancy of my flighty spirit, or hard, irresistible law of necessity governing human affairs […] or by what other reason unknown to me, I have spent almost all my life up to the present in wanderings. While perhaps I have gotten some good from this, I have certainly gotten the utmost evil. And if I were asked, ‘Then why do you not stop?’ I repeat what I said at the beginning: I know not the cause, but only the effect […] Of course, I have seen more by traveling than I would have seen at home, and I have added something to my experience and knowledge of things, but I have diminished my knowledge of literature. […] Therefore I decided not to travel just once on a very long journey by ship or horse or on foot to those lands, but many times on a tiny map, with books and the imagination, so that in the course of an hour I could go to those shores and return as many times as I liked (Sen., IX. 2. 328-29)

It is this equivalence between physical and mental wanderings that constitutes the core of the present discussion: the idea that Chaucer somehow met Petrarch in Italy, either in person or by means of ‘a tiny map, with books and the imagination’, and the extent to which Petrarch’s poetics of exile were translated by Chaucer when he reformed the Italian laureate’s sonnet, ‘S’amor non è’. By extension, it becomes necessary to examine Chaucer’s

6

(Binghamton, NY: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1982), pp. 41-54; Janet Smarr, ‘Petrarch: A Vergil without a Rome’, in Rome in the Renaissance, pp. 133-40; Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993; repr. 1999), pp. 14-32; Jennifer Summit, ‘Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer and the Making of Medieval Rome’, JMEMS, 30 (2000), 211-46. For Petrarch’s eloquent declination see Francesco Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975-85), II, 94-96. Hereafter abbreviated as Fam., and indicated by book, letter and page number. See also Wilkins, Life, pp. 99-102; Morris Bishop, Petrarch and His World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), p. 287; and Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, trans. by Richard Monges (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 90-91.

26

William Thomas Rossiter

cultural interaction with Italy both prior to and following his first recorded visit in 1372-73, and the degree to which his reception of Italian poetics left him wandering in literary exile, no longer able to return exclusively to his Anglo-French tradition nor willing to transpose the Petrarchan voice in its entirety. Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch finds itself in the same position as Troilus, who gives voice to it; both may be understood as being caught ‘Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, / That in contrarie stonden evere mo’ (Tr, I. 417-18).7 For many years it was thought – or at least thought possible – that Geoffrey Chaucer, the ‘father of English literary history’, met with Francesco Petrarca, ‘the Father of Humanism’.8 We know that Chaucer travelled to Italy twice, in 1372-73, and again in 1378, but it has also been claimed that Chaucer might have travelled to Italy in 1368. This earlier journey, if it took place, would have been to celebrate the marriage of Chaucer’s former patron, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo, lord of Pavia, which ‘took place before the door of Milan Cathedral on 28 May or 5 June 1368’ (DNB). The marriage itself ‘turned out very unluckily, [with] Lionel dying on 17 October 1368 […] after a five-month whirl of feasts and tournaments’.9 The marriage also turned out very unluckily for academics hoping for a tête-à-tête between the two literary figures. In the first place it cannot be proven that Chaucer travelled to Italy in 1368. The only evidence that there is to support the possibility is a warrant, stamped with the privy seal, granting ‘nostre ame vallet Geffrey Chaucer de passer en port de Dovorre’ (‘our beloved valet Chaucer [permission] to pass via the port of Dover’).10 No mention is made of his destination, and as Pearsall points out, ‘with the four-week or five-week one-way journey [to Milan], it would have been a whirlwind visit, and he is unlikely to have made it’ (p. 53) in order to be back in England before the end of October, as we know he was. Secondly, the date given for the warrant is 17 July (‘le xvii jour de Juyl’, Life-Records,

7

8

9

10

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson and others, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 471-585; hereafter Tr. See A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; repr. 1990), pp. 59, 88-110; James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe, Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898; Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), pp. 225-293. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 53. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 29. The translation is my own.

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

27

p. 29), which negates any possibility of his having met Petrarch, who had left Milan for Pavia two weeks before Chaucer had even left England.11 We may also discount any meeting having taken place in 1378 by virtue of the fact that Petrarch died on 19 July 1374, which leaves only the embassy of 1372-73. It is known for certain that Chaucer was in Italy upon this occasion, as there are series of documents which detail the journey made by Chaucer, in the company of Sir James de Provan and John de Mari (‘Jacobi Provan Johannes de Mari civis Januensis et Galfridi Chaucer scutiferi nostri plenam fiduciam’, Life-Records, p. 33). This embassy took Chaucer to Genoa as part of a trade mission and to Florence, most probably in relation to Edward III’s financial arrangements with the Bardi and other Florentine banking houses. It is possible that Chaucer could have met Petrarch or Boccaccio on his way down from Genoa to Florence […] but it is extremely unlikely that he did, or that he would have been well received if he had gone out of his way to do so. They were old and crotchety, and very distinguished, and did not have time for young travellers of no rank, and from England, of all places. (Pearsall, Life, p. 104)

It is also unlikely that Petrarch, a prolific correspondent, would have neglected to include the visit of a young Englishman to his house in one of his epistles.12 However, there remains the literary “evidence” for Chaucer’s potential meeting with Petrarch, which is to be found in the famous prologue to The Clerk’s Tale: I will yow telle a tale which that I Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, As preved by his wordes and his werk. He is now deed and nayled in his cheste […] Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete, Highte this clerk, whos rhetorike sweete Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie. (ClTPro., 26-33)13

The fact that Chaucer’s Clerk explicitly states that he learned his tale at Padua, which is where Petrarch was residing whilst Chaucer was in Italy in

11

12

13

‘At some time in June Petrarch went to Milan, called there, probably, to attend the festivities celebrating the wedding of Galeazzo’s daughter Violante to Lionel, Duke of Clarence. While in Milan he was confined to his bed, for at least much of the time, by an ulcerated leg. On the 3rd of July he rode back to Pavia’ (Wilkins, Life, p. 216). Whilst ‘crotchety’ seems an apposite description of the aged Petrarch, there is no reason to believe that he would have turned away a visitor on account his being ‘of no rank’. ‘The Clerk’s Prologue’, in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 137.

28

William Thomas Rossiter

early 1373, may count for something, but it would be imprudent to extrapolate a meeting between the two poets from this. In short, Chaucer is not the Clerk. Overall, it would appear that Chaucer and Petrarch never met in person; but once we have separated the fantastic, or removed the distorting lens of the desired, from the actual, then it becomes possible to investigate how Chaucer and Petrarch interact in other ways. Chaucer’s transposition of Petrarch’s Rvf 132 (‘S’amor non è’) into the Canticus Troili, for example, serves to illustrate the liminal spaces inhabited by both poets; the extent to which Chaucer translated Petrarch’s sense of geographical and temporal exile; and the degree to which Chaucer translated Italian culture and found himself ‘Amydde the see’, caught in medias res between 14th century England and trecento Italy, ostensibly between the late medieval and the early modern. As Pearsall points out in relation to the 1372-73 embassy, Chaucer would have been chosen for this commission ‘because of his knowledge of Italian, which he had probably picked up as a boy from the Italian merchants with whom his father and his step-cousins […] had had business’ (p. 102). Chaucer’s Italian thus predates his first visit to Italy, rather than being a product of it. His father, John Chaucer, had been a prosperous vintner, and as such had dealings with the Italian wine merchants who resided near to the family home on Thames Street, in the Vintry Ward. Howard Schless corresponds with Pearsall’s claim when he questions ‘the assumption that Chaucer’s knowledge of Italian and his first undoubted trip to Italy are more or less coincidental’.14 Yet Schless goes further than Pearsall when he argues that this assumption ‘excludes the possibilities, first, that Chaucer could have needed or could have acquired a knowledge of Italian before 1372, and, second, that Dante’s work could have arrived in England before Chaucer’s acquisition of it while he was in Italy on the journey of 1372’ (p. 3). This view suggests that Chaucer was subject to a twofold acquisition of the Italian language, that the Italian he may have learned as a youth in the Vintry Ward was supplemented by study of the vernacular in written form. The primary claim for Chaucer’s knowledge of Italian prior to the 1372-73 embassy appears straightforward: In 1372, however, Chaucer, although still a relatively unknown member of the court, would have had a distinct qualification for the Italian mission if he could have presented a fluency in the language. Without such a knowledge he would hardly have been more than another esquire of the king’s chamber whose selection for the trip we would have

14

Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1984), p. 3.

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

29

to ascribe to the plausible coincidence that brought up his name for assignment at the moment that an Italian mission was being formed. (Schless, p. 4)

As a counterpoint to this view, John Larner has pointed out that ‘in his work for the Crown, Chaucer had no need to learn any Italian language’ as ‘Italian merchants and nobles used French as a lingua franca; Italian officials, it goes without saying, knew Latin’.15 By extension, in the absence of primers or dictionaries, ‘any version of Italian he acquired must have been obtained orally’ and was the result of ‘a very powerful and intellectual and literary curiosity’ (‘Chaucer’s Italy’, pp. 18-19). The secondary claim that the Commedia arrived in England before Chaucer arrived in Italy is more open to question in the absence of any evidence. Schless depends here on links between the Bardi banking family and Dante himself. According to Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, the poet’s beloved Beatrice had been the daughter of the Florentine Folco Portinari, who gave her in marriage to another Florentine, Simone dei Bardi, of the banking family who subsidized both Edward III and Richard II.16 Schless thus reasons that the Bardi would have had a vested interest in the Commedia and that we must therefore ‘treat with extreme caution the argument that Dante’s work was unknown in England before Chaucer’s return from his Italian journey’ (p. 6). Wendy Childs offers another possible link between the Bardi and the opportunity their presence in England provided for those of a literary bent when she posits the likelihood that ‘the London representatives of the Bardi company even had a particular interest in the work of Boccaccio, once one of their junior representatives in Naples’.17 What these varying perspectives explain is that it cannot be ascertained exactly when Chaucer first learned Italian, although his upbringing in the Vintry Ward suggests that he would have had at least a smattering of the

15

16

17

John Larner, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. by Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 7-32 (p. 18). For a wider discussion of the Italy Chaucer encountered see Larner’s Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch 12161380 (London: Longman, 1980), and Culture and Society in Italy 1290-1420 (London: Batsford, 1971); Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 9-64; and Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 1-28. See Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. by P. G. Ricci, in Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), III, 423-538 (pp. 44546); Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. by J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus, 2002), pp. 14-15; R. W. B. Lewis, Dante: A Life (London: Phoenix, 2002), pp. 43-44; Schless. p. 6. See also of course Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, ed. by Domenico de Robertis (Milan: Ricciardi, 1980); Vita Nuova, trans. by Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Wendy Childs, ‘Anglo-Italian Contacts in the Fourteenth Century’, in Boitani, pp. 65-87 (p. 74).

30

William Thomas Rossiter

language prior to the 1372-73 commission. And whilst it is possible that the latest Italian literature had somehow made it to London, it is more probable that it would have remained in the hands of the Italian community, if it made the journey at all.18 Nevertheless, it can be stated that ‘in the City of London Chaucer would have been surrounded by Italians’ (Childs, p. 67). Similarly, Chaucer had been in the service of the king as ‘nostre ame vallet’ from 1367, and ‘encountering the Italians at court, would not, it seems, have been an unusual occurrence’ (Schless, p. 7), especially given the relationship between the monarchy and the Italian banking families. Furthermore, following his first mission to Italy, Chaucer was appointed, on 8 June 1374, the controller of customs for hides, skins and wools in the port of London, which brought him into direct contact with the capital’s Italian merchants on a regular basis as the Italians were the only alien group involved in the exportation of English wool during this period.19 What then was Chaucer’s direct reaction to Italy and Italian culture, and – more pertinently to this study – what was his experience of Petrarch and Petrarchism? In relation to the former, Chaucer’s Italian rezeptionästhetik formed by the embassies of 1372-73 and 1378, there are two possible responses: that of experiential congruity and that of experiential incongruity. The first is proposed by David Wallace when he argues that: No magic curtain separated “medieval” London and Westminster from “Renaissance” Florence and Milan; all sites were interlinked for Chaucer (and, indeed, through Chaucer) as part of a transnational nexus of capital, cultural, mercantile, and military exchange. […] suspend belief in cultural partitions such as “medieval”, “Renaissance”, and “humanist”. There is nothing going on in Petrarch and Boccaccio that cannot, with profit, be brought into intelligible relation with Chaucer (pp. 1-7)

The counterpoint to this interpretation may be found in Warren Ginsberg’s argument for Chaucer’s Italian Tradition:

18

19

Childs discusses how the Italian expatriate community, like their French equivalent, but ‘much further from home, wealthy, literate, should have maintained interest in their own literature and learning’, and suggests that ‘[s]cholars might also send for texts, and it is quite possible that books were brought to England by Italian merchants as a commercial venture […] merchants might well bring in one or two as personal property. Some of these they might have kept among the Italian colony in London, but it would have been easy enough to sell them, make presents of them, or have further copies made’ (pp. 74- 83). Yet it is debatable as to whether scholars would have been ordering books of vernacular literature. It is interesting to compare the Italian community in London in the 1300s with that of the 1800s as described by Donatella Abbate Badin in the present volume. See Childs, p. 68; T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 248-50, 255-56.

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

31

These Italians [trading in London] may have proved valuable ciceroni; nevertheless, both the country Chaucer visited twice and the literature he acquired there probably always retained some sense of remoteness for him. A land without a ruling sovereign, in which independent cities, each differently governed, fiercely competed with one another (and with the pope) for hegemony, surely was unfamiliar terrain. […] No doubt the civic structures Chaucer knew afforded some insight into those he observed; Florence’s sesti and arti certainly could be compared to London’s wards and misteries. But the scope and the pace of political life in Florence would have amazed any English visitor. (pp. 1-2)

In brief, Wallace argues that Chaucer’s experience of the bustling English metropolis and its mercantile operation prepared him for the city states of Northern Italy, whilst Ginsberg claims that the irreconcilable differences between the two cultures rendered Genoa, Florence and Milan terrae incognitae. We are effectively faced with the choice of Chaucer the Londoner versus Chaucer the Cosmopolite; yet surely the answer lies in the liminal space between these two extremes. Chaucer’s interaction with London’s Italian merchants, his experience at a court funded by Italian bankers, and also the conversation entered into with Sir James (Jacopo) de Provan, or rather his son Saladin, and John de Mari on his first journey to Italy would have helped to prepare him for Genoa and Florence, and this visit in turn would have prepared him for his 1378 journey to Milan in the company of Sir Edward de Berkeley.20 This second commission, which occupied the period 28 May-19 September 1378, was in order to discuss the King’s French Wars with Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan, and with the renowned (infamous?) English mercenary Sir John Hawkwood. As Ginsberg points out, ‘the fact that Richard presumably had sent Chaucer to Milan to enlist Visconti’s aid, should complicate our inclination to position Chaucer as an undeviating proponent of Florentine liberty against the “tirauntz of Lumbardye”’ (p. 3).21 Furthermore, although Hawkwood had married a Visconti he also spent many years in the pay of the Florentine Signoria. Whilst these journeys ultimately enabled Chaucer to introduce Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio to English audiences, there remained certain cultural differences which would have broadened the English traveller’s ‘horizon of

20

21

Childs points out that it ‘remains doubtful whether Jacob [Provan] made the journey’ (p. 74) in 1372-73. This inclination is Wallace’s, as Ginsberg reminds us. Kirkpatrick also points out that it would be anachronistic to think of Florence as democratic, and that the city’s republican sentiments were exploited by the higher guilds (pp. 11, 17); although Wallace himself admits Florence was not entirely utopian (pp. 15, 21).

32

William Thomas Rossiter

expectations’.22 One of these incongruities would have been the absence of nationhood. As Janet Coleman has noted, in England ‘men from whatever city, county or region defined themselves as Englishmen in the first instance, by distinguishing themselves from the French’, whereas in Italy the local and communal took pride of place.23 This would have been made clear by the social and political diversity of the cities Chaucer visited: the alberghi or noble clans which were prominent in Genoa differed from the mercantile oligarchy of the Florentine commune and Visconti-ruled Milan.24 As Larner points out, “Italy” was ‘nothing more than a sentiment or […] a literary idea. The reality was not unity, but a mass of divided cities, lordships, and towns, dominated by particularist sentiments and local interests’ (‘Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch’, p. 3). Chaucer’s encounter with this mass of divisions inevitably opens up a liminal space or threshold by which we may interpret his “reading” of the Italian landscape and culture. If one is to ‘suspend belief in cultural partitions such as “medieval”, “Renaissance”, and “humanist”’ then Chaucer himself becomes a limen through which subsequent English authors and readers may pass through to his translation of the trecento, as ‘all sites were interlinked for Chaucer (and, indeed, through Chaucer)’. Alternatively, if one is to maintain those cultural partitions, and hold with Ginsberg the view that ‘the country Chaucer visited twice and the literature he acquired there probably always retained some sense of remoteness for him’, then Chaucer occupies a liminal space between cultures, rather than constituting one; or perhaps as well as constituting one. Most importantly, Chaucer’s encounter with Petrarchan literature would have revealed to him a mind not only attuned to but also dependent upon the divisions which characterized trecento Italy. (Such a reading of Italy as a fragmented reflection or projection of the divided self is somewhat similar to that expressed by Anna Jameson, as Fabienne Moines discusses in the present collection.) At the same time, however, Petrarch maintained the ‘literary idea’ of Italy in the face of the rivalries and vendette of realpolitik:

22

23

24

The term ‘horizon of expectations’ (Erwartungshorizont) is central to the reception theory of H. R. Jauss. See Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester 1982), p. 44. See also Ginsberg, pp. 5-7 (p. 5). Janet Coleman, ‘English Culture in the Fourteenth Century’, in Boitani, pp. 33-63 (p. 33). See also Larner, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, for the question as to whether ‘Did “Italy” then in fact exist’ (p. 9). See Larner’s succinct account of the socio-political differences between Genoa (‘dominated by an oligarchy torn by complex rivalries’), Florence (‘ruled by a noble-merchant oligarchy that, though menaced by internal division and proletarian discontent’), and Visconti Milan (‘Chaucer’s Italy’, p. 8)

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile Italia mia, benché ’l parlar sia indarno a le piaghe mortali che nel bel corpo tuo sí spesse veggio, piacemi almen che’ miei sospir’ sian quali spera ’l Tevero et l’Arno, e ’l Po, dove doglioso et grave or seggio. Rettor del cielo, io cheggio che la pietà che Ti condusse in terra Ti volga al tuo dilecto almo paese. Vedi, Segnor cortese, di che lievi cagion’ che crudel guerra; e i cor’ che ’ndura et serra Marte superbo et fero, apri Tu, Padre, e ’ntenerisci et snoda; ivi fa’ che ’l Tuo vero, qual io mi sia, per la mia lingua s’oda. Voi cui Fortuna à posto in mano il freno de le belle contrade, di che nulla pietà par che vi stringa, che fan qui tante pellegrine spade? […] Vostre voglie divise guastan del mondo la piú bella parte. […] Non è questo ’l terren ch’ i’ toccai pria? Non è questo il mio nido ove nudrito fui sí dolcemente? Non è questa la patria in ch’io mi fido, madre benigna et pia, che copre l’un et l’altro mio parente? (Rvf 128. 1-20, 55-56, 81-86) Tr.: My Italy, although speech does not aid those mortal wounds of which in your lovely body I see so many, I wish at least my sighs to be such as Tiber and Arno hope for, and Po where I now sit sorrowful and sad. Ruler of heaven, I beg that the mercy that made You come to earth may now make You turn to Your beloved, holy country. See, noble Lord, from what trivial causes comes such cruel war: the hearts that proud fierce Mars makes hard and closed, Father, do You open and soften and free: cause Your truth (though I am unworthy) to be heard here through my tongue. You into whose hands Fortune has given the reins of these lovely regions for which no pity seems to move you: what are so many foreign swords doing here? [...] Your divided wills are spoiling the loveliest part of the world. [...] Is not this the ground that I

33

34

William Thomas Rossiter touched first? Is not this my nest, where I was so sweetly nourished? Is this not my fatherland in which I trust, and my kind and merciful mother, which covers both of my parents?25

Petrarch’s open letter to the warring lords of Italy, begging them to end their internecine warfare (‘Vostre voglie divise’) and the blight of foreign mercenaries (‘che fan qui tante pellegrine spade?’) bears witness to the further division between the ideal and the actual, between the political and the literary. Petrarch embodies Italy within an image of warfare which aims to appeal to the hearts of those waging it – the loving mother ravaged by the invading army. Yet Petrarch’s literary idea of Italy is not only a desire for the future, but also an image drawn from the past; the Italian ideal was achieved by classical Rome, the move forward to unity is in fact a return. This is key to Petrarch’s thought; he is both a geographical exile and a temporal exile existing outside of a time which he projects as home.26 Petrarch’s “imaginary homeland”, as the term is discussed in the present volume by Tobias Döring, is not so much another place as another temporality. The fragments of that other time and its concomitant culture are not only tessellated by the temporal exile but are also his constituents. It may even be argued that the fact that Petrarch’s model of history is predicated upon the distinction between Italy as he perceived it to be during the Roman Empire and Italy as he experiences it in the trecento renders it postcolonial. In brief, the temporal colonization which characterizes Petrarchan historicism is born of a temporal exile which is itself postcolonial.27 We witness this sense of temporal exile operating upon Rvf 128, wherein Petrarch castigates the Italian warlords’ employment of German mercenaries: the Italian rulers evidently do not recall how Marius pierced the flanks of that uncivilized people (‘come si legge, / Mario aperse sí ’l fianco, / che memoria

25 26

27

Bettarini, pp. 612-15 (pp. 612-14); Durling, pp. 256-63 (pp. 256-61). A great deal has been said about Petrarch’s historical consciousness. See for example Theodor E. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 226-42; Benjamin E. Kohl, ‘Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus’, History and Theory, 13 (1974), 132-44; Greene, Light in Troy; and Mazzotta, pp. 102-28. The link between Avignon, that place of exile which Petrarch calls home, and classical Rome as a spiritual and cultural patria, is expounded in the ‘Invective against a detractor of Italy’, pp. 432-35, when Petrarch posits the Rhone as a place of exile in the Roman world. It might be argued that Petrarch’s Roman idea is similar to the epic imaginative world Mara Cambiaghi’s essay discusses in the present volume. On ‘the epistemological colonizations of time’ in relation to the medieval period(s) see J. J. Cohen’s introduction to The Postcolonial Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 117 (p. 5), and the study by Kathleen Biddick in the same volume (pp. 35-52). See also John Dagenais, ‘The Postcolonial Laura’, MLQ, 65 (2004), 365-89.

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

35

de l’opra ancho non langue’); not to speak of Julius Caesar, who turned the grass crimson with German blood (‘Cesare taccio che per ogni piaggia / fece l’erbe sanguigne / di lor vene’); indeed, Nature herself set the Alps in place as a shield against Teutonic rabidity (‘Ben provide Natura al nostro stato, / quando de l’Alpi schermo / pose fra noi et la tedesca rabbia’ [33-51]). For Petrarch, the past has concrete examples to teach the present.28 It is also worth recalling that one of the reasons Chaucer went to Italy in 1378 was in order to meet with a notorious English mercenary, or condottiere, who had been making a very lucrative living in the peninsula since 1362 (and continued to do so up until his death in 1394).29 And whilst there is no evidence that Chaucer knew Rvf 128, we know that he encountered the work of ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete […] whos rhetorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ in some form, as we have the evidence of The Clerk’s Tale and the Canticus Troili.30 The Canticus, which is of primary concern here, appears in book II of Troilus and Criseyde – itself a translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato (1339?) – and is the first ever translation of an Italian sonnet into English: If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me, When every torment and adversite That cometh of hym may to me savory thinke, For ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke. And if that at myn owen lust I brenne,

28

29

30

As Petrarch asks in a letter which he wrote to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in 1341: ‘who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?’ (Fam., VI. 2. 293). See also the long preface to De viris illustribus: ‘this is the profitable goal for the historian: to point up to the readers those things that are to be followed and those to be avoided, with plenty of distinguished examples provided on either side’ (Kohl, p. 141). Such an exemplary model was still being used by Lady Morgan in the 1820s, as Donatella Abbate Badin notes in the present volume. Interestingly, Badin notes that Morgan was exhorted by her friend Pecchio to write on the subject of Cola di Rienzo, who was a quondam friend of Petrarch’s and shared his humanist enthusiasms. ‘Galfridi missi in nuncio regis versus dictas partes Lumbardie tam ad dominum de Mellan quam ad Johannem de Haukewode pro certis negociis expedicionem guerre tangentibus’ (Life-Records, pp. 58-9). The Clerk’s Tale is Chaucer’s translation of Sen., XVII. 3, itself a translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, X. 10. I discuss Petrarch’s reception of Boccaccio’s tale and Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch’s redaction in my forthcoming monograph Chaucer and Petrarch (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010).

36

William Thomas Rossiter From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte? If harm agree me, whereto pleyne I thenne? I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte. O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, How may of the in me swich quantitie, But if that I consente that it be? And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, iwis. Thus possed to and fro, Al sterelees withinne a boot am I Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, That in contrarie stonden evere mo. Allas, what is this wondre maladie? For hote of cold, for cold of hote, I dye. (Tr, I. 400-20)

One may gauge the fidelity of Chaucer’s translation by placing it in direct juxtaposition to its source: S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento? Ma s’egli è amor, perdio, che cosa et quale? Se bona, onde l’effecto aspro mortale? Se ria, onde sì dolce ogni tormento? S’a mia voglia ardo, onde ’l pianto e·lamento? S’a mal mio grado, il lamentar che vale? O viva morte, o dilectoso male, come puoi tanto in me s’io nol consento? Et s’ io ’l consento, a gran torto mi doglio. Fra sí contrari venti in frale barca mi trovo in alto mar senza governo, sí lieve di saver, d’error sí carca ch’i’ medesmo non so quel ch’io mi voglio, e tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno. (Rvf 132)

The Canticus Troili constitutes one of the great mysteries of English literature – why did Chaucer, out of the 366 poems which constitute Petrarch’s sequence, choose this one? Why does he never return to Petrarch’s scattered rhymes following this instance? And in what form did he encounter the poem? These are questions to which one can provide only conjectural answers. It may be that Chaucer only ever came across this one vernacular poem by Petrarch whilst in Italy, although given Petrarch’s fame this appears somewhat unlikely. It is to be noted however that Petrarch’s fame during his lifetime was dependent upon his humanist credentials. It was the author of

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

37

the unfinished Latin epic, the Africa, who was crowned upon the Capitoline Hill in 1341. Similarly, it would have been the ‘worthy clerk’ who wrote the De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies against good and evil fortune) and De uiris illustribus (Lives of Famous Men) that Chaucer’s Clerk revered, not the unrequited lover of madonna Laura. Yet there remains a danger of oversimplifying this case. E. H. Wilkins has shown that Petrarch circulated copies of certain poems from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta during his lifetime, and Chaucer’s Clerk avers that Petrarch’s ‘rhetorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ (emphasis added), although this could still be a reference to the Africa. However, Petrarch himself complains in a letter written the very same year that Chaucer first set out for Italy that: At this age, I confess, I observe with reluctance the youthful trifles that I would like to be unknown to all, including me, if it were possible. For while the talent of that age may emerge in any style whatsoever, still the subject matter does not become the gravity of old age. But what can I do? Now they have all circulated among the multitude, and are being read more willingly than what I later wrote seriously for sounder minds. (Sen., XIII. 11. 500)31

It may well have been that Chaucer came into contact with one of these ‘youthful trifles’ which ‘have all circulated amongst the multitude’. It has even been suggested that Chaucer encountered a Latin translation of Petrarch’s original by Coluccio Salutati but as Wilkins points out this translation ‘was made from the early text of the sonnet, and Chaucer agrees with the final Italian text rather than with Salutati at the points at which the Italian and the Latin versions differ’.32 To return to the translation itself, although ‘Chaucer, while rendering Petrarch’s meaning very exactly, departs from the form of the original’, he still manages to achieve a ratio between his three stanzas of rhyme royal and the Petrarchan sonetto.33 Chaucer’s first two stanzas correspond to the two

31

32

33

The letter, addressed to Pandolfo Malatesta, closes by revealing that it was written in ‘Padua, January 4 [1372], with frozen fingers and war raging’ (Sen., XIII. 11. 501). The peninsula was thus as divided at the end of his life as it had been when he wrote Rvf 128, almost thirty years earlier (c. 1344-45). E. H. Wilkins, The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Studies (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), p. 307. Kirkpatrick, p. 52. See also Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992; repr. 2002): ‘[Chaucer] might not even have recognized what the form was; but he does seem to echo Petrarch’s sectioning in his own 21 lines, thus: 4 to 7; 4 to 7; 4 and 2 to 5 and 2’ (p. 66). For further discussion of Chaucer’s formal transformation of Rvf 132 see E. H. Wilkins, ‘Cantus Troili’, English Literary History, 16 (1949), 167-73; Patricia Thomson, ‘The “Canticus Troili”: Chaucer and

38

William Thomas Rossiter

quatrains which constitute Petrarch’s octave, whilst the final stanza incorporates the sestet. Also, as Kirkpatrick posits, ‘Petrarch’s sonnet exemplifies this poet’s capacity both for moral debate and for psychological torment’ (p. 52); the antitheses, paradoxes and chiasmi which provide the tropological basis of the sonnet ‘represent a subtle tracing of mutually destructive tendencies’ (ibid.). In other words, Chaucer – either by design or by serendipity – came into contact with a sonnet that exemplified the division central to Petrarch’s thought, and his translation of it not only set the standard that later English poets such as Wyatt and Surrey would have to reach, but it also manifested the divisions experienced and felt by the English poet upon being exposed to Italian culture. What Mazzotta terms ‘Petrarch’s poetics of fragmentation’ (p. 60), in which ‘the unity of the work is the unity of fragments in fragments’ (p. 79), is linked to his sense of ‘misero esilio’ (‘miserable exile’, Rvf 45. 7). The sense of home, which as we have seen is geographically and temporally dislocated, is as irretrievable or impossible as the perfect, unfragmentary totality; the essence of Petrarchan poetics is desire for a telos which is always tantalisingly out of reach. The image which most clearly captures that desire in Rvf 132 and Chaucer’s translation of it is the ‘frale barca’. The provenance of the ‘I’ configured as a storm-tossed ship may be found in the love poetry of another exile, Ovid: odi, nec possum cupiens non esse quod odi: heu quam, quae studeas ponere, ferre graue est! nam desunt uires ad me mihi iusque regendum; auferor, ut rapida concita puppis aqua. [...] ut subitus prope iam prensa tellure carinam tangentem portus uentus in alta rapit, sic me saepe refert incerta Cupidinis aura [...] erro uelut uentis discordibus acta phaselos, diuiduumque tenent alter et alter amor. Tr.: I hate myself, but can’t not do the thing I Hate, though I try. How hard a burden seems One longs to shed! My self-control has failed me I’m swept away like boats on rushing streams. […] Or when a sudden wind almost at landfall Sweeps a ship, making harbour, out to sea.

Petrarch’, Comparative Literature, 11 (1959), 313-28; and my own ‘The Chaucerian Sonnet’, in Interculturalidad y Traducción: Revista Internacionale, 2 (2006), 177-99.

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

39

So I’m the sport of Cupid’s chancy breezes […] I waver like a yacht when winds are warring; This love, that love, they keep me torn in two. (Amores, II. 4. 5-8, II. 9b. 7-9, II. 10. 910)34

Although the Amores were written prior to Ovid’s banishment in 8AD, his work would have been synonymous with exile for the late medieval reader, as the Tristia – the primary source of information concerning the poet’s life – was well-known throughout the period which has been termed the aetas Ouidiana.35 Indeed, there were two reasons for Ovid being sent into exile: an undisclosed error and a poem, the Ars amatoria; by means of the Ovidian elegiac tradition love becomes esilio. Unsurprisingly, Petrarch draws repeatedly on Ovidian tropes and images throughout the sequence, combining the lyric voice of the Amores with the events of the Metamorphoses. Chaucer also draws heavily upon Ovidian poetics, in dream visions such as The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, and of course throughout Troilus and Criseyde. However, Petrarch’s fusion of classical and Christian subtexts within his sonnet sequence possibly points to a further reference which underpins his ‘barca’. In Matthew 14. 24 the Apostles’ ship upon Lake Galilee is described in very similar terms to those which Petrarch uses to illustrate his psychomachia, or internal war: ‘nauicula autem in medio mari iactabatur fluctibus erat enim contrarius ventus’ (‘But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary’, emphasis added). The language of Chaucer’s translation appears to reinforce the possibility of this reference: ‘Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, / That in contrarie stonden evere mo’. This concept of the translation as revealing more than may be immediately apparent in the original certainly corresponds with the translation theory of Walter Benjamin which Ginsberg employs in his

34

35

Ovid, Amores; Medicamina faciei femineae; Ars amatoria; Remedia amoris, ed. by E. J. Kenney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964; repr. 1991), pp. 1-108 (pp. 38, 52-54). For the English translation see Ovid, The Love Poems, ed. by E. J. Kenney, trans. by A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; repr. 1998), pp. 1-82 (pp. 32, 40-41). See also Ars amatoria, I. 411-12 and II. 514. The continuing influence of the exiled Ovid is discussed in the present collection via Tobias Döring’s examination of Gabriele Rossetti’s La Vita Mia. See for example James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350-1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; repr. 2004), pp. 121-90. Although Simpson separates Ovid and Petrarch in this work, he does admit Petrarch’s ‘Ovidian inheritance’ in ‘Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Africa and Trionfi’, JMEMS, 35 (2005), 489-508 (p. 490).

40

William Thomas Rossiter

discussion of Chaucer’s translative methodology.36 Chaucer’s translation sounds the ostensibly Ovidian subtext but in doing so allows his audience to hear simultaneously Petrarch’s Christian voice and thereby illustrates the intertextual heteroglossia which constitutes the entire Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Furthermore, this form of translation, which glosses the text from which it derives, may be seen to conform to the medieval process of translatio as explained by Rita Copeland. Texts would be provided with an explanatory gloss as part of this process, both of which would then be subsumed by the translation.37 Another key element of late medieval translatio is its duality. As Copeland posits, the term translatio was understood ‘as interlingual paraphrase and as metaphor […] [both being] linguistic acts of turning meaning’.38 It is this element of translation as ‘turning meaning’ that has such relevance for Chaucer’s reformulation of ‘S’amor non è’. Chaucer not only reiterates the Petrarchan ‘I’ as being compounded of the Ovidian lover, the doubting Christian dependent upon diuina prouidentia, and the divided voice of the exile, but he also appropriates that composition in relation to his own hermeneutics of Italy’s political diversity. Wallace argues that the writings of Boccaccio and Petrarch offered Chaucer literary manifestations not only of Italian political systems but also of possible outcomes for English politics in the light of this: The narratives generated by the collaborative enterprise of Boccaccio’s Florentine brigata exemplify and critique the associational ideology of Florentine polity; the

36

37

38

‘Benjamin maintains that the translator’s task is not to duplicate a text’s meaning but to recreate its mode of meaning—the way, that is, its language is oriented to the material differences of sound and letter that constitute language in its “pure” state [reine Sprache] […] Once a corresponding mode has been fashioned, the adaptation will simultaneously illuminate the different orientation of the source and reveal its language to be as partial and secondary as that of the retelling’ (p. viii). See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zorn, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 70-82, and Paul de Man, ‘Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”’, in The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 73-105. An interesting example of this process is Sir Thomas Wyatt’s translation of Petrarch’s ‘Una candida cerva’ (Rvf 190), as his most famous sonnet, ‘Whoso list to hounte’. Wyatt not only paraphrases Petrarch’s original but also appropriates the glossa of the phrase ‘Noli mi tangere’ provided in contemporary editions of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, such as that of Alessandro Vellutello in 1525 (Wyatt travelled to Italy in 1527). Rita Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation in the Middle Ages’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 9 (1987), 41-75 (p. 42). See also Copeland’s Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

41

deracinated individualism of Petrarchan poetics finds a home within the ambit of Visconti despotism. These polarized Italian options […] offered Chaucer (as poet and political subject) clarifying visions of possible English futures. (p. 63)

Whilst Chaucer was exposed to these ‘polarized Italian options’ and may have had them reinforced by the Decameron and Petrarch’s translation of Boccaccio’s tale of Walter and Griselda (Sen., XVII. 3), which constitutes the final day of Boccaccio’s mercantile epic, what are we to make of the Canticus in relation to such a politicized interpretation? It is possible that the ‘wyndes two / That in contrarie stonden evere mo’ are translated out of the Petrarchan psychomachia and resituated within a political discourse: one blows towards Florence, the other towards Milan. Yet it is not entirely possible to declare that Chaucer prefers one over the other, at least not in relation to the Canticus and its context. For example, the fact that Chaucer replaces the two stanzas of ottava rima which constitute Troiolo’s song in Filostrato (I. 38-39) with a Petrarchan sonnet would suggest that he has chosen Petrarch (and therefore despotism) over Boccacccio (and republicanism).39 However, this is the only sonnet of Petrarch’s that – as far as is known – Chaucer ever consciously translated, and it is effectively stranded ‘Amydde the see’ of his translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, which suggests that the latter’s associational form wins the day. Yet it is worth stressing that such association is not as central to Filostrato as it is to the Filocolo and the Decameron. Furthermore, the association of Petrarch with despotism is dependent upon the eight years he spent in Milan with the Visconti (1353-61).40 Aside from the fact that it

39

40

From an aesthetic perspective Troiolo’s original complaint is a stock reiteration of familiar tags and tropes; John V. Fleming has thus suggested that Chaucer ‘invoked the profounder Petrarch to redress the amatory puerilities of Boccaccio’. See Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 183. Also, Chaucer would have encountered Petrarch’s sonnet written in two seven-line stanzas, ergo the transposition into rhyme royal would not have been too great a leap of the formal imagination. Although Boccaccio and his other Florentine friends and admirers were appalled by Petrarch’s decision, following as it did his refusal to accept the offer made by the Florentine signoria two years previously, they eventually saw the wisdom in his choice. As Petrarch would later write to Boccaccio: ‘you also bring up that I wasted a good part of my time in the service of princes. So that you may not err in this, here is the truth: I was with the princes in name, but in fact the princes were with me; I never attended their councils, and very seldom their banquets. I would never approve any conditions that would distract me even for a short while from my freedom and from my studies’ (Sen., XVII. 2. 650). See Branca, pp. 98-100, and E. H. Wilkins, Petrarch’s Eight Years in Milan (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1958).

42

William Thomas Rossiter

would be somewhat erroneous to judge all of Petrarch’s works on the basis of this move to Milan, it must also be mentioned that the sonnet translated by Chaucer was composed during Petrarch’s third residence in Vaucluse (134547), his haven to the north-east of ‘that place of exile, Avignon’, which he was to call home. It is to Petrarch’s poetics of exile that one must return when evaluating Chaucer’s translation of ‘S’amor non è’, and upon which I will conclude. As valuable as Chaucer’s political or ideological readings of Petrarch are, the most immediate effect of the first ever Petrarchan sonnet to be translated into English concerns the literary hermeneutic enabled by such readings. The socio-political obviously plays an important role in providing the opportunity for Chaucer’s encounter with Italian literary culture in 1372-73 and again in 1378. Similarly, one might question the extent to which Petrarch’s poetic, humanist ‘I’ would have developed had it not been for the factionalism which led to his being ‘born in exile’, or that which resulted in the Babylonian captivity of the Papacy. Both of these events were crucial in the production of what I have referred to throughout as Petrarch’s poetics of exile, whether that exile be spatial or temporal. However, it remains debatable as to whether Chaucer knew of the import of these factors to the development of Petrarch’s thought and writings when he first encountered the source for the Canticus Troili. The immediate effect of ‘S’amor non è’ to the modern reader familiar with Petrarchan poetry is how entirely representative it is of the sequence: the language of paradox and antithesis; the ‘double consciousness’ of classical and Christian source texts; the expression of an ‘I’ divided from that which it desires, and indeed from itself; all of these elements taken together sound the voice of the Petrarchan exile. The immediate effect upon the English poet is made manifest by his translation, and its interposition at a key juncture in what is his most complete work. Whilst Chaucer may not have known the details of the specific political divisions which enabled Petrarch’s writing, he does not fail to understand the psychological divisions expressed by it. This is not to say that Chaucer failed to see the political divisions within trecento Italy, far from it; one of the ways in which he would have translated them was via the Petrarchan voice. The poet who lamented the fragmentation of ‘Italia mia’ is translated into the fragmented io of Troilus; the country exiled from the unity of its past (and future) finds expression through the poet who makes his home in such exile. It is this voice, first translated by Chaucer, which would become the

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

43

touchstone for generations of poets who sought a way of sounding out their own exile. 41 Bibliography Alighieri, Dante, Vita Nuova, ed. by Domenico de Robertis (Milan: Ricciardi, 1980). ––. Vita Nuova, trans. by Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Becker, Marvin B., Florence in Transition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zorn, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999). Benson, Larry D., and others, eds, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Boccaccio, Giovanni, Life of Dante, trans. by J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus, 2002). Boitani, Piero, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, trans. by Richard Monges (New York: New York University Press, 1976). ––. ed., Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 10 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1964 – ). Brucker, Gene A., Florentine Politics and Society 1343-78 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). ––. The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, The Postcolonial Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). Copeland, Rita, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation in the Middle Ages’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 9 (1987), 41-75. ––. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Crow, Martin M., and Clair C. Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

41

Poetically speaking, Chaucer’s Italian experience may be seen to exile him from his peers. As Kirkpatrick notes, ‘No English poet makes fuller or more critical use of Italian sources than Chaucer. It is probable that he alone, among his literary contemporaries, had travelled to Italy, where he would have met Italian intellectuals [...] there is nothing in the fifteenth century to compare’ (p. 24).

44

William Thomas Rossiter

John Dagenais, ‘The Postcolonial Laura’, MLQ, 65 (2004), 365-89. De Man, Paul, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). Durling, Robert M., ed. and trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976; repr. 2001). Fleming, John V., Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Ginsberg, Warren, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Jauss, H. R., Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester 1982). Kirkpatrick, Robin, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (London: Longman, 1995). Kohl, Benjamin E., ‘Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus’, History and Theory, 13 (1974), 132-44. Larner, John, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch 1216-1380 (London: Longman, 1980). ––. Culture and Society in Italy 1290-1420 (London: Batsford, 1971). Lewis, R. W. B., Dante: A Life (London: Phoenix, 2002). Lloyd, T. H., The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993; repr. 1999). Mommsen, Theodor E., ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 226-42. Ovid, The Love Poems, ed. by E. J. Kenney, trans. by A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; repr. 1998). Pearsall, Derek, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Petrarca, Francesco, Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975-85). ––. Rerum senilium libri: Letters of Old Age I-XVIII, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). ––. Invectives, ed. and trans. by David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile

45

––. Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. by Rosana Bettarini, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). Ramsay, P. A., ed., Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth (Binghamton, NY: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1982). Robinson, James Harvey, and Henry Winchester Rolfe, Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898; Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004). Rossiter, William Thomas, ‘The Chaucerian Sonnet’, Interculturalidad y traduccion: Revista Internacionale, 2 (2006), 177-99. Scaglione, Aldo S., Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1975). Schless, Howard H., Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1984). Simpson, James, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350-1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; repr. 2004). ––. ‘Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Africa and Trionfi’, JMEMS, 35 (2005), 489-508. Spearing, A. C., Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; repr. 1990). Spiller, Michael R. G., The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992; repr. 2002). Summit, Jennifer, ‘Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer and the Making of Medieval Rome’, JMEMS, 30 (2000), 211-46. Thomson, Patricia, ‘The “Canticus Troili”: Chaucer and Petrarch’, Comparative Literature, 11 (1959), 313-28. Wallace, David, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, ‘Cantus Troili’, English Literary History, 16 (1949), 167-73. ––. The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Studies (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951). ––. Petrarch’s Eight Years in Milan (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1958). ––. Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Zacour, Norman P., trans., Petrarch’s Book without a Name (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973).

Ralf Hertel Nationalising History? Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the Appropriation of the English Past The preoccupation with history plays a pivotal role in the development of an emergent national identity in late 16th century England. Chronicles and history plays alike serve to propagate the idea of a shared past and of common roots, and are thus fundamental to the shaping of a specific English identity. In this context, it is striking to note that many of these patriotic appropriations of the past such as Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1542/48) or Shakespeare’s history plays were – directly or indirectly – indebted to a book not by an Englishman but by an Italian: Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (1534/55). With Polydore, who arrived in England in 1502 as the sub-collector of Peter’s Pence and was subsequently commissioned by Henry VII to write the first English history in a modern sense, it was an Italian who crucially shaped the English vision of the past. How the English made sense of this Italian immigrant who stayed more than fifty years in their country, making sense of their own history will be the focus of the following chapter. De-nationalising English history: Polydore Vergil and the Anglica Historia In 1502, Polydore Vergil was a lucky man. The young priest from Urbino had just published two books which were winning him great acclaim and making his name in humanist Europe. His Proverbiorum Libellus or Adagia (1498), a collection of ancient proverbs, had re-introduced a classical genre that was soon to become highly popular again; only two years later, Erasmus entered the same market with his own collection and popularised the genre. In fact, after a short quarrel about priority that was caused by Erasmus not being aware of Polydore’s first edition, the two scholars became close friends. Polydore’s other major publication, De rerum inventoribus (1499) or On Discovery, was even more successful. This book dealt with the origins and inventions of such diverse cultural achievements as tragedy, medicinal herbs, the interpretation of dreams, the calendar, the use of passwords, wrestling, playing at dice, the potter’s wheel, and the labyrinth, thereby arousing a broad spectrum of public interest. It saw no less than thirty Latin editions, and was translated into Italian, English, Spanish, French, German,

48

Ralf Hertel

Russian, and Polish. In short, when in 1502 Polydore was sent to England as sub-collector of a papal tax, he was at the beginning of a promising career. At first glance, his voyage to England would seem to have ended his lucky streak. With Henry VIII’s split from Rome, Polydore must have found himself on the wrong side. He was a stranger in many ways: not only an Italian in England but also a Catholic in a fiercely anti-Catholic country severing all ties with Rome. Indeed, he was to experience open hostility soon enough: in 1515, he was imprisoned after the interception of some of his letters critical of Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, mastermind of Henrician politics.1 Yet, after interventions by Pope Leo X, Cardinal Giulio de Medici, and Oxford University, Polydore was soon released when Wolsey was to be promoted to the position of cardinal and Polydore’s support was of use. Despite his spell in prison, Polydore seems to have done surprisingly well in England where, at least after the split from Rome, he was bound to have been considered a representative of the Papal arch-enemy. During his fifty-yearlong stay, state religion changed no less than three times, from the Roman Catholicism of Henry VII to Anglican reformed Catholicism under Henry VIII to Protestantism under Edward VI and back to Catholicism under Mary Tudor. While others in far less prominent positions fell victim to the religious turmoil of the era, Polydore, who had soon also become archdeacon of Wells, managed not only to keep his head on his shoulders but also his position and privileges. He remained in England for more than half a century before retiring to his native Urbino at the age of around 80, not without having first secured a generous pension.2 Spending most of his life in England turned him into an Italian anglicised: he was naturalised in 1510, and he speaks of ‘our English’ as if he was one of them.3 He obviously felt at home in England: when in 1508 Pope Julius II appointed Pietro Griffo as new sub-collector to

1

2

3

Polydore was to have his revenge when he included a mischievous description of Wolsey in his Anglica Historia and helped to create the image of Wolsey as a scheming Machiavellian, which has been influential to the present day. His final reward might have been less generous than it seems at first, as J. D. Alsop argues. Nonetheless, the fact that he was allowed to leave for Italy and retain his income speaks of his high reputation. See J. D. Alsop, ‘Polydore Vergil’s Final Rewards’, Notes and Queries, 27 (1980), 299-301. Beno Weiss and Louis C. Pérez, ‘Introduction’, in Polydore Vergil, Beginnings and Discoveries: Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus Rerum. An Unabridged Translation and Edition with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by Beno Weiss and Louis C. Pérez (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1997), p. 13. Denys Hays, on the other hand, notes that ‘on the few occasions that the word “nostri” is found in the Anglica Historia it is always used in connexion with crusades (where in medieval Latin it had an almost technical connotation) and never with purely English groups’. Denys Hays, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 117, ftn. 2.

Nationalising History?

49

replace Polydore, he violently resisted and refused to hand over his office for half a year – he was back in his old position three years later.4 Thus, Polydore became a true go-between figure, moving almost effortlessly between Italy and England, overcoming barriers not only of language but also of nationality. In fact, he seems to have harboured mistrust towards over-much patriotism of any kind; as a humanist, he obviously believed more in a supranational community of learned men than in national communities. This ‘internationally minded Italian regretting the rise of the new national spirit’ (E. M. W. Tillyard) ridicules pretentious national myths by dryly observing that ‘each nation believes that it descends from the gods’ (p. 31).5 Although his On Discovery at first sight seems to exploit national differences by foregrounding the divergence between customs among various peoples – he notes the English in particular for their toughness in war, their expertise in navigation, their drinking habits, and their promiscuity – and by asking which nations preceded all others in particular inventions, his book on the whole rather plays down national differences by stating that, ultimately, all inventions and discoveries originate in the same Judaeo-Christian culture. His point is clear: despite all apparent differences between the various peoples, in the end they all stem from the same root – they are not so different from each other as nationalism might want to make us believe. Apparently, this supranational stance stems from both a humanist conviction and a Christian belief in Noah as ancestor of all men and a pre-Babylonian community of mankind from which all nations developed.6 It was precisely for this cosmopolitan, humanist stance that four years after his arrival, Polydore was commissioned by Henry VII to compose a history of England. Not that there were no English chroniclers at court who could have accomplished the task, but Henry wanted something different. He wanted a history book with a message, and the message was to be that England, this island at the edge of Europe, claimed its historic place among the major European powers. To underline this claim, the history of England

4

5

6

See Griffo’s account of his difficulties in obtaining his office from Polydore: Pietro Griffo, De officio collectoris in Regno Angliae di Pietro Griffi da Pisa, 1469-1516, ed. by Michele Monaco (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1973). E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Penguin, 1991 [1944]), p. 42. I quote the first eight books of Polydore’s Anglica Historia from the early modern translation reprinted in Polydore’s English History, vol. 1, The Period Prior to the Norman Conquest, ed. by Sir Henry Ellis (Camden Society: London, 1846; reprinted AMS: New York, 1968). His account of Richard III is quoted from the same translation reprinted in Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, ed. by Sir Henry Ellis (Camden Society, 1844). Weiss and Pérez, p. 39.

50

Ralf Hertel

had to be written with a Continental readership in mind, and it had to be written according to the latest humanist fashion. Henry needed an Italian humanist to undertake this task for him, and he found Polydore. In other words, the English relied on the mediation of a foreigner to appropriate their own history. The way into the past was not a direct one but one via Italy: English history had to be sanctioned by Italian humanism before it could become truly a national history through an intricate web of reappropriations.7 Through its many re-printings, and re-writings such as Edward Hall’s and Raphael Holinshed’s chronicles as well as Shakespeare’s history plays, it has shaped the view of English history even to the present day. With its decidedly international scope, Polydore’s Anglica Historia bespeaks a de-nationalisation of history: It is a history of England written in Latin by an Italian relying not only on English but also on Greek, Latin, Italian, and French sources, designed for the Continental reader, printed in Basle, and looking foreign already in its elegant design which distinguished the book at first sight from its English counterparts. In short, with Polydore’s Anglica Historia the writing of national history became an international business. The book was not only foreign in appearance, some of the ideas it propagated must have struck the English as alien, too. In effect, Polydore continued the de-nationalisation of history up to the point of effrontery. This shows rather subtly in the first sentence already: The whole countrie of Britaine (which at this daie, as it were in dowble name, is called Englande and Scotlande), being an Ilonde in the ocean sea butting over agaynste the French shore, is divided into iiij. partes; whereof the one is inhabited of Englishmen, the other of Scottes, the third of Wallshemen, the fowerthe of Cornish people. (P. 1) (Britannia omnis, quae hodie Anglia et Scotia duplici nomine appellatur, insula in oceano contra Gallicum litus posita, dividitur in partes quatuor, quarum unam incolunt Angli, aliam Scoti, tertiam Walli, quartam Cornubienses.)

Obviously, this is a close echo of the opening of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico: ‘The whole country of Gaul is divided into three parts; whereof one

7

Incidentally, the case was similar for early modern French historiography where with Paolo Emili another Italian humanist was employed to compose a national history. Comparing Emili with Polydore, Hay reaches the conclusion that ‘their very employment was suggested by a desire to present French and English history to the critical scrutiny of Europe; the sanction of international humanism was precisely what the French and English dynasties wished to invoke. To secure this they were willing to jettison portions of the national myth which (for other reasons) they encouraged among native authors. Polydore and Emili, writing in Latin, enjoyed privileges denied to the vernacular historian.’ Hays, Renaissance Historian, p. 151.

Nationalising History?

51

is inhabited by the Belgae, the other by the Aquitani, and the third by a people who call themselves Celts, but are known to us as Galli’ (my translation, the original reads: ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur’). Of course, Polydore might merely have been imitating a classical formula to ennoble his subject. Implicitly, however, his first sentence already calls into question the uniqueness of Britain – one can describe it in much the same terms as France. In fact, the opening sentence depicts the position of the isles exclusively in relation to the French shore. It subtly implies that Britain is not so distant, and not so different, from France – a message which accords with the intention of placing the island among the major European powers, but which is also an insult to Britain’s singularity. In addition, this sentence not only calls into question the uniqueness of the country but also the unity of its population by stressing its division, and Polydore continues in this vein when he goes on to split up England into even smaller parts, namely 34 shires and 17 dioceses. In fact, the British do not seem to be very British in his account of the island’s early days. Describing their appearance he states that they ‘differed emong them selves in feature of boddie […]; some resembling in stature and visage the Germaines, some the Frenchemen, some the Spaniards, of whome longe sence thei hadd theire discent’ (p. 49). The British do not have a specific look but resemble a motley crew of foreigners from all parts of the Continent. They learn Greek letters, and their architecture, their dress, and even their religion remind Polydore of the French (p. 50). Moreover, in Polydore’s account the British not only look like foreigners, they are foreigners. He flatly refutes the founding myth of early modern Britain: the nation’s descent via Brutus from Aeneas, a fable depicting the British as the true successors of Greek antiquity and, ultimately the gods. Countering it, he holds that […] in olde time […] manie nations weare so bowled as to derive the beginninge of theire stocke from the Goddes (as especially the Romaines did), to thentent the originall of there people and cities mighte bee the more princelie and prosperus, which things, albeit thei sownded more like fables then the sincere witnesses of noble acts, yet weare thei received for trewthe; for the which cause even those things which last of all were committed to writinge of the antiquities of Britaines, were with soe easye credit received of the common sorte that thei have ascribed the fownteine of their genialogie to Brutus […]. (P. 31)

He does not believe that the island could have been uninhabited before the time of Brutus and phrases this conviction in a sentence that again puts Britain in relation to France:

52

Ralf Hertel Seing that the Ilond, on brighte dayse, maye easlie bee seene from the Frenche shore, and hathe a farre of geven prospect unto the saylers bie reason of the white rockes abowte the bancke (whereof it was called Albion), surelie it could never bee obscure or unknowne to the regions lieng rounde aboute it. Wherefore it is not to bee thought that at enie time it lacked inhabitants, which might then receave them when all other londes didd, not awayghting or intertaining the exiled or hurtfull roge runninge awaye owt of Spain, Germaine, Fraunce, or Italie, as late Historians make reporte. (Pp. 31-2)

In short, Polydore transforms the English from the sons of gods to those of runaway exiles. Not surprisingly, the Anglica Historia provoked extreme reactions. They demonstrate the inherent dilemma of Polydore’s attempt to compose a national history from a supranational point of view: He is bound to denationalise English history for his purpose of integrating it into the wider context of European history and thus to provoke nationalist reproaches. While some humanist-minded readers welcomed his account since it stressed the Roman origins of British culture and placed it in the humanist tradition, many reactions were extremely hostile. Interestingly, these hostilities betray a nationalistic attitude diametrically opposed to Polydore’s cosmopolitan stance. John Leland, for instance, dismisses the historian scornfully as ‘Polydorus Italus’ and John Bale claims that Polydore was ‘polluting our English chronicles with his Romish lies and other Italian beggarys’.8 Xenophobia gave birth to a veritable myth; according to this fable propagated by writers such as John Fox, Polydore not only misrepresented history but also burned his sources wherever they contradicted his anti-English purpose. A variant depicted him as Papal spy, secretly shipping his sources to Rome. A commentary scribbled by a contemporary in the margins of a copy of Bale’s Scriptores demonstrates the extent to which Polydore was vilified: Polydorus Vergilius – that most rascall dogge knave in the worlde, an Englyshman by byrth, but he had Italian parents: he had the randsacking of all the English lybraryes, and when he had extracted what he pleased he burnt those famous verlcome manuscripts, and made himself father to other mens workes – felony in the highest degree; he deserved not heaven, for that was too god for him, neither will I be so uncharitable to judge him to hell, yet I thinke that he deserved to be hanged between both.9

8

9

H. Christmas, Select Works of John Bale (Parker Society, 1849), p. 8. Quoted from Hays, Renaissance Historian, p. 158. Quoted from Hays, Renaissance Historian, p. 159. For an account of the reactions Polydore’s history caused, see Hays, Renaissance Historian, pp. 157-60 and Frank Rexroth, ‘Polydor Vergil als Geschichtsschreiber und der englische Beitrag zum europäischen Humanismus’, in Diffusion des Humanismus: Studien zur nationalen Geschichtsschreibung

Nationalising History?

53

A go-between rather between England and Italy than between heaven and hell, Polydore was denounced as a Romish agent erasing English cultural memory or stealing it as he was, in the eyes of his opponents, stealing the dominance over how to interpret English history. His vociferous enemies made it clear that he was not merely a criminal but, worse, an Italian criminal – his de-nationalisation of history had met with the nationalistic response. Ironically, by sparking off patriotic reactions like these, Polydore’s denationalisation of English history might well have eventually contributed to the re-nationalisation of the following decades, to a re-appropriation of English history from a particularly patriotic perspective. For Polydore forced the English to reconsider their national past and thus contributed significantly to the emergence and shaping of an early modern national identity. Re-nationalising English history: Shakespeare’s Richard III Not only historians emigrate; histories, too, can leave home. Never intended for the English market and designed for a Continental readership, the Anglica Historia was supposed to travel. It was never meant for the English market – tellingly, it has to the present day not been published in English in its entirety – but was supposed to find a new place for English history abroad on the Continent.10 In addition, with its attack on national myths it soon became a historia non grata in England; there were strong attempts to, as it were, exile it from the canon of English historiography. Yet its story is not only one of exile but also one of a homecoming: despite all of the attacks, it was to become the single most influential book in the shaping of the English view of the national past. In spite of all initial vilification, English historians and playwrights made ample use of it. As E. M. W. Tillyard notes, ‘whether or not the writers of Elizabethan History Plays read him, they did read chroniclers who were ultimately indebted to Polydore for a way of writing history that gave a new kind of help to the historical play’.11 Through an intricate web of translations, editions, and re-writings, Polydore’s book crucially shaped early modern English self-perception. Yet, how was English history re-appropriated by the English, and how was it re-nationalised? How

10

11

europäischer Humanisten, ed. by Johannes Helmrath e.a. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), pp. 423-35. There is, however, a hypertext critical edition and translation of the entire work provided by Dana F. Sutton <www.philological.bham.ac.uk/polverg> (accessed 28 March 2007). Tillyard, p. 42.

54

Ralf Hertel

did it resurface in the Tudor chronicles and, not least, in Shakespeare’s history plays? Being aware that it took literary criticism around four centuries to establish the relation between Shakespeare’s histories and their sources and that some disputes are not likely ever to be settled, and with only limited space at my disposal, I do not intend to enter into this sophisticated discussion but would rather like to focus on one particular detail. I will limit myself in the following to a study of Shakespeare’s Richard III, a play which was not only influenced by the Anglica Historia and its rewritings in the Tudor chronicles but which presents events crucial to the re-nationalisation of English history. More specifically, it is the play which chronologically ends the sequel on the Wars of the Roses and introduces Richmond, who as Henry VII becomes the founder of the Tudor dynasty. Thus, the play provides the decisive link between the events depicted in the history plays and the dynasty in power in Shakespeare’s own days; it is, as we shall see, the one play which eventually attempts to make sense of the Wars of the Roses from an Elizabethan point of view and discusses the origins of Shakespeare’s own Tudor nation. Even when restricting ourselves to a study of Richard III, and more specifically to the confrontation between Richard and Richmond, the despotic tyrant and the Tudor saviour, we can observe how far Polydore’s text travelled. From his Latin manuscript to the three editions he supervised during his lifetime, to the Tudor translation, his description of Richard’s reign made its way into Thomas More’s The History of Richard III, a fragmentary portrayal of the king which in turn had a strong influence on Shakespeare’s history play. For the final confrontation between Richard and Richmond, Shakespeare could, however, not rely on More, for his text breaks off before this event. Yet, Shakespeare’s other potential sources all go back to Polydore’s account, too, and they stick to the Anglica Historia even more closely: the relevant section in Edward Hall’s chronicle The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1542, extended edition 1548) is a reprint of More’s text, extended by a wordy translation of Polydore; Richard Grafton copies Polydore from Hall, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, extended edition 1587) copies Hall and Grafton, and John Stow’s Chronicles of England (1580) is another copy of Hall – early modern historiography as a palimpsest of postmodern dimensions. This sounds confusing, but essentially it is simple

Nationalising History?

55

enough: at the bottom of all early modern accounts of Richard III as well as of Shakespeare’s play lies Polydore’s Anglica Historia.12 At first sight, the question of national identity does not figure prominently in Richard III. Among all of Shakespeare’s history plays, it is the one drama which comes closest to a tragedy; indeed, it was originally published as The Tragedy of King Richard the Third: Containing His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephews; his tyranicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death. Accordingly, it focuses more on Richard’s wicked ways in usurping the throne and on his fall than on English history. Despite the large number of speaking parts – Anthony Hammond counts no less than 52 – this play focuses strongly on its protagonist and does not measure out the population in its diversity as, for instance, Henry IV Part 1 does.13 The play concentrates on the elite, on the protagonist and his relation to, and dealings with, his family members and political adversaries. When figures of the lower classes appear such as the two murderers of Clarence, the play reduces them to tools in the hands of Richard whom he utilises to serve his ambitions. Tellingly, when the English people enter the stage as indiscriminate ‘citizens’, they are denied a voice: When Buckingham suggests to an assembled crowd that Richard’s brother on the throne was a bastard and that Richard should hence claim the throne, bidding them to cry ‘God save Richard, England’s royal King!’, they keep conspicuously mute; they still remain silent after Buckingham’s words have been repeated to them by the recorder, the civil magistrate for the city. Just as Richard’s outrageous scheming leaves them speechless, the play silences them. Despite the large

12

13

Of course, a closer study of how chroniclers such as Hall and Holinshed amended Polydore’s text would merit attention, for it seems to be primarily through these sources that Shakespeare was acquainted with the content of the Anglica Historia. However, having only a limited space at my disposal here and seeing that there has already been done much research on the relation between Shakespeare and his immediate sources, I will in the following, rather than include an extra section of the Tudor chroniclers, take those changes into consideration which are significant in the context of this paper. In addition, my interest is not so much in the singularity of Shakespeare’s genius – the focus of much comparative work done on Shakespeare and his immediate sources – as the gradual emergence of national identity. In the context of analysing this process, it seems to make more sense to consider a longer span of time and to reach back further than to the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed – to Polydore. For a study of the relation between Shakespeare’s play and his sources see George B. Churchill, Richard the Third up to Shakespeare (Berlin: 1900; reprinted Dursley: Allan Sutoon, 1976), and Alison Hanham, Richard III and his Early Historians, 1483-1535 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). See Anthony Hammond’s introduction to his Arden Shakespeare edition of King Richard III (London: Thomson, 2002), pp. 1-119 (p. 62).

56

Ralf Hertel

number of roles the drama therefore does not represent a cross-section of the English nation at the time of Richard III. What it does represent, however, is disunity. There are so many warring factions, so many protagonists interpreting history their own way, and so much scheming that it is difficult not to get lost in the intricate web of intrigues. In other words, the spectator or reader of the play is bound to experience the political confusion of Richard’s short reign and the final phase of the Wars of the Roses through his own irritation towards the play’s complex alliances. If the cast of the play is extremely numerous, the spatial setting is extremely restricted: the topography of Richard III is obsessively Londoncentred. 19 out of 26 scenes are set in the capital, and, a short interlude of a mere 26 lines apart, the action does not leave the city until the last act. If Henry IV Part 1 is centrifugal in its social and spatial setting, Richard III is centripetal. The evil nature of the protagonist exerts a fascination that swallows all; next to spellbinding Richard, there is no space for other foci. Tellingly, most of the scenes are set indoors: It is as if the play zoomed in not only on London as the centre of power but also on Richard gnawing his way into the royal palaces and the heart of power like a worm in a rotten apple. Eventually, the play zooms in even further towards its end, when it penetrates the misshapen body of the protagonist to reveal his wicked thoughts, when it penetrates Richard’s heart of darkness. It is as if in composing his play Shakespeare himself could not resist Richard’s evil charme and was drawn into his vile character as if into an irresistible vortex. Like its power-hungry protagonist, Shakespeare’s play is exceedingly single-focused; like him, it forgets about the nation. Thus, Shakespeare’s play appears to share the disinterested stance of the Anglica Historia towards the national, although this is due rather to its tragic conception than to a humanist perspective. However, this changes in the last act. Here, the action finally does move beyond the palaces of London, and this is highly symbolic: Richard loses his grip on power and no longer manages to act as the centre holding all; history, which he had centred on himself almost magnetically, becomes decentred and will eventually marginalise him. The protagonist’s movement into the countryside, towards the decisive battle at Bosworth Field is highly suggestive: Just as the demonic king for the first time is forced to encounter England beyond his palace walls and to face the country and its people, the play opens up towards the national. The drama eventually does not let him get away with all his egocentrism: in this last act, Richard is forced to realise that history is not all about himself but about England. And it is this shift in focus that eventually marks his fall; when the picture broadens from a close-up study of the charismatic king into a national panorama, this widening perspective simultaneously dwarfs him,

Nationalising History?

57

exposing his hubris. The movement towards Bosworth Field, into the country, into the territory of the people, is a movement towards his destruction. The growing awareness of the national dimension of history shows already in the semantics of the last act. Faced with the threat of Richmond the conqueror, Richard appeals to his soldiers’ patriotic pride, calls them ‘gentlemen of England’, and rallies their support by rhetorically turning Richmond into a foreigner, denouncing him as Welsh ‘milksop’ and ‘paltry fellow,/ long kept in Bretagne at our brother’s cost’, leading an army of ‘stragglers’ and ‘overweening rags of France’, ‘a sort of vagabonds, rascals, runaways;/ A scum of Bretons and base lackey peasants,/ Whom their o’ercloyed country vomits forth’ (5.3.317-39).14 As Greg Walker notes, it is ‘always the race card that [Shakespeare’s] losers play as the last resort’ and the final battle ‘is envisaged as a race war’.15 Indeed, in Richard’s mouth, patriotism is discredited as merely a last trump played out to serve personal ends: despite all its xenophobic and pseudo-patriotic evocation of country and nation, his words are directed against Richmond ad hominem – Richard conceives of the final battle as a personal contention for power rather than as an event deciding England’s fate. His use of the rhetoric of patriotism is rather a thinly veiled strategy to discredit a personal adversary than a sudden awareness of the national dimension of his deeds. Yet, the turn towards the national in the last act of Richard III goes beyond the purely rhetorical of this particular oration and informs the entire imagery of the final confrontation. Tellingly, unlike in Polydore, in Shakespeare both Richard and Richmond invoke St George, patron saint of England, and thus a cause greater than their own. Yet, while Richard’s invocation is as distorted as his shape – as Wilson Knight observes, his battle-cry ‘fair Saint George,/ Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!’ (5.3.350-51) appeals to both of the legendary antagonists, St George and the Dragon – Richmond indeed seems to fight for a higher cause: ‘God, and Saint George! Richmond and victory!’ (5.3.271).16 Like the national patron he

14

15

16

If Janis Lull is correct in assuming that the original reading of the line ‘kept at our mother’s cost’ is not merely a mistake in Holinshed duplicated by Shakespeare but implies that Richard denounces Richmond as somebody kept at the cost of ‘our mother-country England’, this would stress the national dimension of Richard’s words even further. William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. by Janis Lull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 203. Greg Walker, ‘Richard III and the Shape of History’, in Astraea, 10 (2000), Nouvelles Perspectives Critiques, 31-48 (p. 47). Wilson Knight, The Souvereign Flower (London: Methuen, 1958), pp. 22-5, quoted from Hammond, p, 327. John Jowett spots a ‘dramatic irony’ in the fact that only a few lines

Ralf Hertel

58

invokes, he rids England of a monster – the dragon-like Richard who has held the country in the claws of his ambitions. Richard becomes the nation’s fate turned flesh: his contorted body seems to grow directly out of England’s twisted fate in the Wars of the Roses. The body politic deformed by decades of civil war materialises in the monstrous body natural of the hunchback king and there finds its ‘final physical manifestation’.17 Richard’s death symbolically purges the nation of the evils of civil war. In this context, it is worthwhile reminding oneself of the most fundamental difference between Shakespeare’s play and its sources. While Polydore, Hall, Holinshed, and More tell of Richard, Shakespeare makes him come alive on the theatre stage in the flesh and blood of an actor. In Shakespeare, history is not narrated but re-enacted, and this is a difference as simple as it is crucial: when history repeats itself in front of the eyes of the spectators, they become eye-witnesses of sorts; they do not so much learn about history – as they might learn from a piece of historiography – but reexperience it; in a way, they are there when Richmond slays Richard and ends his terrible reign. There is no narrative frame, no mediating ‘I’ of a narrator putting a distance between the historical events and the recipients.18 From students of history, they turn into participants. Thus, Richmond’s victory has something of a commonly celebrated ritual, and indeed, Shakespeare’s play is characterised by strong ritualistic qualities – again a feature we do not find in Polydore or the chronicle.19 This shows, for instance, in Margaret’s prophetic speeches and the wailing women’s formulaic, anaphoric language which at times has the quality of an incantation: Margaret:

17

18

19

I had an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him; I had a husband, till a Richard kill’d him: Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him; Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill’d him. (4.4.40-44).

before his invocation Richard intends to slay another George – Stanley’s son whom he holds as ransom. This subtly adds to the impression that Richard is rather the dragon than the dragon-slayer. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard III, ed. by John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 353. Jowett, p. 356. For the early modern interest in deformity see Francis Bacon’s essay ‘On Deformity’, which gives a good explanation of Richard’s character from an Elizabethan perspective, in The Essayes or Counsels Civill and Morall (London: J. M. Dent, 1928), pp. 131-32. Polydore in particular keeps reminding us of the distance in time to the events and frequently foregrounds the narrative frame, commenting on the events, adding a morale, or voicing his doubts about certain reports (e.g. in the ghost scene, p. 222). For a discussion of the ritualistic qualities see Hammond, pp. 103-07.

Nationalising History?

59

It becomes particularly obvious in the third scene of act five, the famous ghost-scene. While Polydore and his Tudor mediators present this scene as an uncertain piece of hearsay, in Shakespeare it turns into a full-blown ritual played out in the midst of the audience.20 The highly stylised appearance of the ghosts of Richard’s opponents the night before the battle is pervaded by qualities of ritual; they appear in the same order as they were murdered, using the same formula of cursing Richard and of encouraging Richmond: the ghost of Prince Edward addresses Richard and concludes with ‘despair therefore, and die’ before assuring Richmond that ‘the wronged souls/ of butcher’d princes fight in thy behalf’; the ghost of Henry VI addresses Richard with ‘despair and die’ before wishing Richmond to ‘live and flourish’; the ghost of Clarence addresses Richard with ‘despair and die’ before wishing Richmond to ‘live and flourish’; with similar words, there follow the ghosts of Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, the two young princes, Lady Anne, and Buckingham – an impressive procession of ‘wrong’d souls’ indeed. Not only these scenes are imbued with a sense of enchantment; indeed, the action of the entire play can be read as a ritual of sacrifice, with Richard playing the role of ‘the perfect example of the anti-Christ’, whose ‘moral perversity afflicts […] not only family and friends, but the entire nation’: Richard’s is the one act of sacrifice needed to redeem England from her accumulated sins […]; it restores England to grace. The anti-Christ takes the sins of the world on his shoulders not for altruistic, but for selfish reasons; he does not offer himself as ransom, but is pushed, fighting and shouting, to his fate. It is an awe-inspiring concept. It can be an overwhelming one, theatrically, as Evil and Good – personified as if in a morality play, in Richard and Richmond – face each other on the bare stage in 5.4. […] England collectively was guilty of permitting the Lancastrian usurpation; this guilt must be purged by a series of blood-lettings, culminating in the scourge of Richard, against whose career the warnings and threats of Margaret can be seen as the expression of a fearsome Nemesis awaiting its time.21

20

21

Polydore merely has: ‘Yt ys reportyd that king Rycherd had that night a terrible dreame’ (Three Books, p. 221). Hall has: ‘The fame went that he had the same night a dreadfull & a terrible dreame, for yt seemed to hym beyinge a slepe that he saw diverse ymages lyke terrible develles wchiche pulled and haled hym, not sufferynge hym to take any quyet or rest’ (The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, excerpt reprinted in Hammond, p. 368). Hall is copied verbatim in Holinshed (Richard Hosley, ed., An Edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587): Source of Shakespeare’s History Plays, King Lear, Cymbeline, and Macbeth (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, 1968), p. 262). Hammond, pp. 102-3, 107.

60

Ralf Hertel

There is a direct line from St George to the historical Richmond and the Richmond on stage: again and again, the beast has to be slain; again and again, England has to be purged of the dangers of tyranny. Each performance of the play contributes to the ritual of purification by re-enacting and revalidating it. Not only does Richmond’s victory cleanse England, the theatrical re-embodiment on the stage symbolically exorcises Richard antiChrist in order to keep evil away; Richard III is the cleansing of the nation through the rituals of theatre. Even if at first the audience might feel drawn towards the enigmatic Richard or experience some sort of ‘complicity’, as Besnault and Bitot suggest, this ultimately only contributes to the cathartic effect: Not only is England purged of Richard, eventually the spectators are similarly cleansed of their sympathy for him, his selfishness, egoism, and ignorance towards the national dimension of monarchic deeds.22 Potentially, this process makes them aware of the national dimensions of history exactly by demonstrating Richard’s failure to grasp it. Thus, implicitly, this play is always about England when it seems to be all about Richard. There is a literally tragic irony in this: Richard, who stands so much for the will to shape his own fate, is ultimately assigned a passive role in the exorcism of English historiography. If he is ‘determined to prove a villain’ (1.1.30) as he categorically states at the outset of the play, this claim in its ambiguity neatly encapsulates his dilemma between self-determination and pre-determination: while he intends to play the villain, he is also under the spell of the ‘crippling, mortal force, that has determined that role for him before the play began’ – a tragic constellation indeed, for he can only embrace his fate.23 In stark contrast to the absorbing Richard, his opponent is a bore; he lacks all depth of character. This flattening of Richmond is again Shakespeare’s invention: While Polydore and the chroniclers provide him with a detailed biography and describe his hopes and fears concerning the invasion, thus presenting him as a round character, Shakespeare discards most of this information. In his play, Richmond appears as a monarchical equivalent of a deus-ex-machina, as rex-ex-machina so to speak. Lacking a past and all psychological development, his Richmond is a man without qualities; everything about him is impersonal, from his non-descript looks to his

22

23

Marie-Hélène Besnault and Michel Bitot, ‘Historical Legacy and Fiction: The Poetical Reinvention of King Richard III’, in Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 106-25 (p. 113). Walker, p. 33.

Nationalising History?

61

conventional language.24 He frequently uses the royal plural as though he had no voice for his personal opinions; hence in his own speeches, he is not even grammatically marked as an individual. Indeed, he is quite literally interchangeable: At the battle, Richard kills five doppelgängers before finally encountering the real Richmond – again a Shakespearean invention undermining Richmond’s singularity. Of course, in the context of a turn towards the national dimension of history this makes sense. From a national perspective, Richmond as an individual does not matter; only his role in freeing England counts. He is an instrument of fate, or, in the words of Friedrich Gundolf, ‘ein Beamter des Verhängnisses’.25 Thus, the shift in focus from the egomaniacal Richard to the nondescript Richmond is also a shift in perspective from the individual close-up of the monarch to the national panorama: The final defeat of Richard drives home the point that ultimately, history is not about monarchs as such but about their role in the wider context of history, not about persons but people, not about the king but about England, which, as Wolfgang Clemen suggests, eventually turns into the secret hero of the play.26 If Richard is the demonic monarch, Richmond promises to become a demotic king. It is highly significant that while Polydore’s account of Richard’s reign, as well as those of his Tudor mediators, ends with a description of the despot’s character and appearance, zooming in on Richard as an individual, Shakespeare’s play ends on a national note with Richmond thinking of England. De-nationalised history has been re-nationalised.27 Indeed, Shakespeare not only flattens Richmond but at the same time Englishes him by playing down his indebtedness to Wales. In Polydore, Wales figures prominently, not only as the country of origin of the Tudor dynasty and the location where Richmond is brought up, but also as the place where he later invades the island and rallies support and which he promises to a potential ally for tactical reasons. Milford Haven, Dale, Haverfordwest, and Cardigan are all stops on Richmond’s route Polydore mentions, yet Shakespeare deliberately ignores most references to Wales in order to make

24

25 26 27

For a description of his language see Wolfgang Clemen, Kommentar zu Shakespeare’s Richard III (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1957), p. 314 Quoted from Clemen, p. 279. Ibid., p. 326. The chronicle material anticipates this national outlook, yet it is only in Shakespeare that it is dramatised to full effect. Shakespeare turns a one-sentence interpretation into an oration of more than 20 verses. Holinshed has merely: ‘By reason of which marriage peace was thought to descend out of heaven into England, considering that the lines of Lancaster and York were now brought into one knot and connexed together, of whose two bodies one heir might succeed to rule and enjoy the whole monarchy and realm of England.’

62

Ralf Hertel

Richmond more suitable to become an English national hero. In the context of presenting Richmond as a national hero, the royal plural he employs so frequently is telling, for it does not merely mask his individuality but also implies that he speaks for a community – while Richard’s leitmotif ‘I’, repeated like an incantation, bespeaks his egocentrism, Richmond’s ‘we’ implies that he speaks for a community and potentially for the nation. Even more important in terms of potential theatrical effect is Richmond’s elusiveness here, for it invites projection: he appears as a theatrical equivalent of what Wolfgang Iser termed ‘Leerstelle’, a gap or lacuna to be filled in by the spectator’s imagination. His featurelessness provokes imaginative engagement: the less clear the picture of him is, the better he serves as a foil for patriotic projections, and the more readily his royal ‘we’ becomes the ‘us’ of an imagined national community. Thus, Richmond’s final speech bridges the gap of more than a hundred years to Shakespeare’s own days. Tellingly, it is exactly those parts in the final act which do not appear in Polydore that are most instrumental in linking past and Elizabethan present: the great speeches preceding and following the battle. Although based on the rhetorical conventions of early modern military oration, their function within the play goes beyond the purely rhetorical: it is here that Richmond is stylised into the saviour of the nation and that Richard’s failure to grasp the national dimension of his actions becomes most evident, or rather the fact that he employs the rhetoric of the national merely for his own ends.28 Yet, despite their importance in marking the play’s final turn towards the national, these orations appear oddly extraneous: The orations are completely separable, in that the immediate dialogue and action proceed unimpaired without them, and there is no moment elsewhere in the play that anticipates, recalls, or presupposes them. They retrieve the sense of historical actuality, but they do so at the expense of imposing major set-piece speeches between Richard’s ‘conscience’ soliloquy and his death, thus diminishing the impact of the soliloquy on the play’s ending.29

28

29

For these conventions see R. Chris Hassel, ‘Military Oratory in Richard III’, in William Shakespeare’s Richard III, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), pp. 7383 (p. 74), although I do not agree with his conclusion that ‘Richmond is simply a better orator than Richard’ (p. 82). Hassel merely checks the speeches of Richard and Richmond against early modern manuals of military oratory and finds that Richmond sticks more closely to the rules they propagate, ignoring the fact that it is exactly the fact that Richard breaks those rules that makes his speech more personal and immediately arrests our attention. Jowett, p. 385.

Nationalising History?

63

Even typographically, they are set apart: both opponents’ addresses to their soldiers are marked off by the stage direction ‘His oration to his soldiers’ (5.3.237 and 314); a stage direction which is unique in the play for it neither indicates exits or entries nor gives any other indication for how to stage the play; instead, it simply serves to mark off the orations from the rest of the text. It plays no role at all in the performance of the play and its significance only unfolds when the text is read; it is essentially ‘literary in quality’.30 In fact, it is rather an element of the chronicle than of the history play, and it might be no coincidence that it is here, in the speeches, that Shakespeare’s play adheres most closely to its chronicle sources – but not Polydore, who does not include the orations –; it is as if here the conventions of the chronicle leaped into Shakespeare’s play.31 Yet, despite their extraneous nature, Shakespeare thought these orations not to be superfluous. I would like to suggest that it is not least for their role in engaging the audience that he might have found them indispensable. They are directed not only at the soldiers at Bosworth Field but also at the audience; John Jowett suggests that they might have been spoken ad spectatores, and it is indeed easy to imagine the two orators turning towards the audience for dramatic effect as they rally support.32 What might this effect have looked like? Addressing the audience as though it were standing in for their armies, the Richmond and the Richard on stage might have given the spectators the illusion that they somehow formed part of the fighting forces at Bosworth Field; that they were participating in the making of history rather than merely witnessing its presentation on stage. Of course, assumptions like these are little more than guesses since we cannot rely on accounts of Elizabethan theatre-goers in this case. However, one may at least assume that Elizabethan stage conventions might have worked in favour of such an illusion: exits and entries through the crowd, performances in broad daylight that were not yet characterised by the separation between a lit stage and a dark auditorium, orators acting in the midst of spectators as if in the middle of their soldiers on a proscenium protruding into the auditorium – all this might well have contributed to audience engagement.33

30 31

32 33

Ibid. Ibid., p. 384. Through their inclusion of the orations, Hall and Holinshed differ from Polydore significantly, a fact that indicates that they anticipate the nationalisation of history which then is staged for dramatic effect in Shakespeare’s play. Ibid., p. 346. s London (Cambridge: For these conventions see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare' Cambridge University Press, 1987) and The Shakespearean Stage, 1574 – 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

64

Ralf Hertel

If we further pursue this speculation for a moment, this involvement might well have turned out to be a paradox: If the audience was imaginatively recruited, how could it possibly join both armies? From the two orations alone it is difficult to judge which might have been more attractive; both appeal, albeit for different reasons: Richard’s for the graphic power of his language, Richmond’s for the justness of his cause. Possibly, to push the speculation a little further, the audience might have found it difficult to decide which army to support. If so, their confusion again mirrored that of their countrymen in the epoch presented on stage, and the play made them reexperience once more the hesitation to decide which standard to follow, the national uncertainty during Richard’s tyranny when the English nation fell into warring factions and turned on itself. In other words, the play works as a time machine of sorts, potentially making the audience re-experience the confusion of the Wars of the Roses. Again, the performative surplus surfaces: engagement with history is no longer – as it was in Polydore or the chronicles – concomitant with learning about the facts, but an almost corporeal reenactment. And was the return of this national schizophrenia not also a threat to them, feared by an Elizabethan society towards the end of Tudor rule, reigned by an aging monarch who had long turned from a virgin queen into an old spinster – a society with no heir apparent, facing the potential danger of yet another civil war? If these assumptions are speculative, it is clear enough, however, that the play, and in particular its final act, abounds with allusions to Elizabethan reality, allusions which, of course, cannot be found in Polydore and which are likewise absent in the Tudor chronicles. To name just two prominent examples: the night before the decisive battle, the ghosts of the two princes bid Richmond to beget ‘a happy race of kings’ (5.3.160) as though they were bestowing their right to the crown on Richmond and his Tudor successors. In other words, they are, in the last consequence, legitimising Elizabeth’s claim to the throne. Furthermore, Richmond’s final speech not only relies heavily on the Tudor myth as propagated in Shakespeare’s source Hall but also does so in a way closely recalling the imagery of Elizabeth’s coronation procession: Richmond: We will unite the white rose and the red. Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction, That long have frown’d upon their enmity […]. O now let Richmond and Elizabeth, The true succeeders of each royal House, By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together, And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so, Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac’d peace, With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days.

(5.5.19-34)

Nationalising History?

65

This conspicuously echoes the coronation procession of Elizabeth I in which the pageant stage was decorated with red and white roses illustrating ‘The Uniting of the Two Houses of Lancaster and York’, as the title of one triumphant arch informed. When the Queen arrived, a child petitioned: Therefore, as civil war and shed of blood did cease When these two houses were united into one, So now, that jar shall stint and quietness increase, We trust, O noble Queen, thou wilt be cause alone.34

Indeed, there is a double-entendre hidden in Richmond’s words: not only are Richmond and his future wife Elizabeth of York the ‘true succeeders of each royal House’, but his verses construct a direct line from Richmond, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, to Elizabeth I, its last representative on the throne. In the ambiguity of these lines, Richmond and his successor Elizabeth I walk hand in hand bringing peace to England as if the last Tudor queen was a re-incarnation of her namesake. For his purpose of celebrating this union, Shakespeare readily discards historical details that run counter to his argument – no mention here of the fact that Richmond had planned to marry the daughter of Walter Harbet, as Polydore reports.35 Similarly, he omits not only the names, given in Polydore, of many of the men present at the battle and the chronicles but also its date – Shakespeare’s battle is not so much a historical one fought by particular men at a specific time as a symbolic one. Thus, the play in general and Richmond’s speech in particular reverberate with allusions to Elizabethan England, and the projected paradisiacal future can be understood not least as the Elizabethan present. Shakespeare’s play is hence an act of double transference: an Elizabethan projection onto the national past in which the Elizabethan age resurfaces as projected glorious future. In other words, the play augments the Elizabethan age by presenting it as a past prophecy come true.36

34

35 36

For a description of the coronation process see Roy Strong, ‘The 1559 Entry Pageants of Elizabeth I’, in The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy: Pageantry, Painting, Iconography, vol. 2 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 33-54. Three Books, p. 215. For the use of prophecies in the context of an emergent national identity see my essay ‘”We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” – Henry V und die Verheißung der Nation’, in Drohung und Verheißung. Mikroprozesse in Verhältnissen von Macht und Subjekt, ed. by Eva-Maria Heisler, Elke Koch, and Thomas Scheffer (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 2007), pp. 263-85.

Ralf Hertel

66 Re-nationalising English History?

Or so it seems. For does Richmond’s prophecy of a glorious future really come true? Again, one might speculate in how far Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have agreed with a Tudor myth propagating their age as the end of all troubles. Yet at least potentially, the play might have backfired, for the Elizabethans might have reached the conclusion that the promised paradise had in fact not arrived, or at least was under constant threat, be it from Catholic powers, military invasions, the unsettled question of succession, or impending civil war. Richmond’s final speech itself carries some of these threatening overtones and is, at a closer look, not a straightforward celebration of the time to come. It ominously asks ‘What traitor hears me and says not Amen?’, and the promise of a bright future dawning over England ends in the gloomy picture of treason: Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again, And make poor England weep in streams of blood. Let them not live to taste this land’s increase, That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace. (5.5.35-39)

Among the heavy brass of the anthem of national glory, one notices jarring chords in minor key – and it is exactly this disharmony that saves the play from becoming plain Tudor propaganda. At this point, we have to specify our thesis. Even if Shakespeare’s Richard III stands for a re-nationalisation of history, it nonetheless avoids turning into mere patriotic propaganda. Rather, it registers the anxieties towards the end of the Tudor rule. Plain nationalism is already discredited by Richard turning it into a tool for his ambitions. Thus, the play makes us aware of how the rhetoric of patriotism can be employed for ill ends – this alone should make us wary of the assumption that Richard III is in itself a celebration of Tudor patriotism. In addition, the Tudor victor is, for reasons discussed above, a rather disappointing hero who at no point exerts a fascination similar to that of his opponent. His is a flat triumph of a flat character, and the play hardly presents the first Tudor ruler from a hagiographic perspective. Furthermore, while the focus of Polydore’s account oscillates between Richard and Richmond – a structure of alternation which is kept in the chronicles – the play up to the last act exclusively presents the contention from Richard’s point of view, despite the fact that Shakespeare’s medium, drama, particularly favours juxtaposition. Unlike in those sources, we do not see Richmond preparing his invasion, advancing towards the island with his ships, aborting his first attempt at landing, and returning – we only

Nationalising History?

67

become fully aware of him the moment Richard does. While the reader of the Anglica Historia or the chronicles imaginatively advances with Richmond, the spectator of Shakespeare’s play is caught up with Richard – in Polydore, we advance, in Shakespeare, we await. From this perspective, Richmond comes as conqueror – or as invader, bringing not only peace, but also the bud of yet another usurpation. His closing words (‘Now civil wounds are stopp’d; peace lives again’, 5.5.40) have an ominous ring of Richard’s opening verses (‘Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this son of York’, 1.1.1-2) – the circle closes, and although Richard the tyrant is deposed, there is a disturbing quality in the fact that his opening words, which have all too quickly turned out to be nothing more than mere rhetoric, are echoed by his successor – is history in all its bloodiness about to repeat itself? Richard III, composed in a time between the patriotism following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the growing concerns about the nation’s future in the late 1590s, does not simply celebrate the Tudor myth; by presenting Richmond, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, as a highly ambiguous figure, the play rather registers Elizabethan anxieties regarding the end of Tudor rule. *** Historiography not only tells histories but also stories. From Polydore’s Anglica Historia to Shakespeare’s Richard III, the story is one of estrangement and homecoming, of English history turning Italian, or rather cosmopolitan, in the hands of Polydore, before being anglicised once more, of history being de-nationalised only to be re-nationalised, before even this re-nationalisation is called into question. Polydore’s account of Richard III and its Tudor appropriations underscore the obvious fact that historiography is not about recording given facts but about amending, adding, deleting, interpreting, re-interpreting, and re-writing, and it shows how different attitudes towards national identity can inform these processes. It highlights the intricate play of internationalism and nationalism in the making of English history, implying that it was necessary to estrange history by a foreigner before it could become English. A play of self and other, of English and foreign, of home and exile, of ideas and texts emigrating as well as immigrating, Polydore’s Anglica Historia and its reception demonstrates that making history is a process of palimpsestical qualities. It is highly appropriate that in this process an emigrant like Polydore should play a pioneering role. Refuting nationalism from the cosmopolitan point of view of a humanist and being vilified exactly in terms of the national, his personal

68

Ralf Hertel

experience prefigures the conflict of de- and re-nationalisation which his English history was to set in motion. Finally, the appropriation of Polydore’s Anglica Historia tells of a performative surplus crucial to the emergence of national identity. The move from the Anglica Historia to Richard III is not least one of genre, from historiography to history play, from prose to drama, from telling to showing. With the novel genre of the history play, a new quality in writing history emerges which brings about a different form of reception and presents history as re-lived experience rather than as factual knowledge. Even if in prose texts, too, one might imaginatively visit the battle fields, a crucial performative surplus remains. For if the reception of chronicles is essentially individual, that of a history play such as Richard III is communal. It is the appropriation of the nation’s history by the nation in nuce, by a community of theatre-goers that, at least in the 1590s, is a close mirror-image of Elizabethan society. Thus, the communal experience of a common history in the theatre might well have contributed to a feeling of togetherness, a feeling that anticipated, and crucially contributed to, the emergence of early modern national identity. It is this English community which Polydore decisively helped shaping and which he, despite all efforts, like all other immigrants could never become part of. Covering two texts almost a century apart, the comparison of Polydore’s Anglica Historia with Shakespeare’s Richard III makes visible a fundamental shift in the self-conception of 16th century England. By de-nationalising history in order to integrate England into a wider European context, Polydore’s text betrays the anxieties of an isolated country, marginal not only in terms of geography, longing to become part of European historiography in particular and cultural development in general. Richard III betrays the anxieties of a nation whose point of view is the opposite of that of Polydore’s England: in the wake of Henry VIII’s severing of all ties to the continent – and to Italy and Rome in particular – it has turned inward, anxiously focusing on itself, its future, and its past as a model of a possible future. If the Anglica Historia resembles Polydore in its cosmopolitan scope, Richard III, like Shakespeare, is intensely concentrated on London, the focal point of the emergent English nation. Thus, the comparison reveals a development fundamental to the self-perception of early modern English: from the England of Henry VII to Elizabethan England, from England under the first Tudor to England under the last, from early to late 16th century England, the English focus more and more anxiously on themselves, becoming more and more aware of their national identity. In other words, the movement from the international to the national, from de-nationalisation to re-nationalisation to the questioning of the national, underlines the formation of a national identity

Nationalising History?

69

in 16th century England which was only then emerging and still had to be negotiated, both on the stage of the theatre and in the minds of the English. Bibliography Alsop, J. D., ‘Polydore Vergil’s Final Rewards’, Notes and Queries, 27 (1980), 299-301. Bacon, Francis, ‘On Deformity’, in The Essayes or Counsels Civill and Morall (London: J. M. Dent, 1928), pp. 131-32. Besnault, Marie-Hélène and Michel Bitot, ‘Historical Legacy and Fiction: The Poetical Reinvention of King Richard III’, in Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 106-25. Churchill, George B., Richard the Third up to Shakespeare (Berlin: 1900; reprinted Dursley: Allan Sutoon, 1976). Clemen, Wolfgang, Kommentar zu Shakespeare’s Richard III (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1957). Floyd-Wilson, Mary, ‘Delving to the Root: Cymbeline, Scotland, and the English Race’, in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, ed. by David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 101-15. Griffo, Pietro, De officio collectoris in Regno Angliae di Pietro Griffi da Pisa, 1469-1516, ed. by Michele Monaco (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1973). Gurr, Andrew, Playgoing in Shakespeare' s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). ––. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574 – 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Hanham, Alison, Richard III and his Early Historians, 1483-1535 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Hassel, R. Chris, ‘Military Oratory in Richard III’, in William Shakespeare’s Richard III, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), pp. 73-83. Hays, Denys, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952). Hertel, Ralf, ‘”We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” – Henry V und die Verheißung der Nation’, in Drohung und Verheißung. Mikroprozesse in Verhältnissen von Macht und Subjekt, ed. by Eva-Maria Heisler, Elke Koch, and Thomas Scheffer (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 2007), pp. 26385.

70

Ralf Hertel

Hoenselaars, A. J., Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558-1643 (Rutherford: Associated University Press, 1992). Hosley, Richard (ed.), An Edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587): Source of Shakespeare’s History Plays, King Lear, Cymbeline, and Macbeth (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, 1968). Jones, Emrys, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 84-99. Knight, Wilson, The Souvereign Flower (London: Methuen, 1958). Polydore Vergil, Beginnings and Discoveries: Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus Rerum. An Unabridged Translation and Edition with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by Beno Weiss and Louis C. Pérez (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1997). Polydore Vergil, Polydore’s English History, vol. 1, The Period Prior to the Norman Conquest, ed. by Sir Henry Ellis (Camden Society: London, 1846; reprinted AMS: New York, 1968). ––. Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, ed. by Sir Henry Ellis (Camden Society: London, 1844). Rexroth, Frank, ‘Polydor Vergil als Geschichtsschreiber und der englische Beitrag zum europäischen Humanismus’, in Diffusion des Humanismus: Studien zur nationalen Geschichtsschreibung europäischer Humanisten, ed. by Johannes Helmrath e.a. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), pp. 423-35. Shakespeare, William, King Richard III, ed. by Anthony Hammond (London: Thomson, 2002). ––. King Richard III, ed. by Janis Lull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ––. The Tragedy of King Richard III, ed. by John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Strong, Roy, ‘The 1559 Entry Pageants of Elizabeth I’, in The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy: Pageantry, Painting, Iconography, vol. 2 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 33-54. Tillyard, E. M. W., Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Penguin, 1991 [1944]). Walker, Greg, ‘Richard III and the Shape of History’, in Astraea, 10 (2000), Nouvelles Perspectives Critiques, pp. 31-48.

Michael Wyatt John Florio’s Translation of Kingship: An Italian Baptism for James VI/I’s Basilikon Doron The Elizabethan period had witnessed an extraordinary burgeoning of translations into English from Latin, Greek, and a number of contemporary vernacular literatures,1 and the rapid diffusion of so many texts from so many different cultural traditions fueled to a great extent the explosive growth of the English lexicon at the same time that it contributed to the profoundly ‘textual’ identity of Elizabethan cultural politics. The presence in England of liminal figures such as John Florio, caught in their cultural self-identities between several linguistic worlds, made an additional and equally significant, if markedly diverse, contribution to the self-fashioning of the Elizabethan world. While translations domesticated foreign cultures by turning them into English, Florio’s work enabled those willing to learn Italian in England to imagine themselves into a figurative space of the original language, where what was foreign remained so but was met on its own terms, rendered fruitfully accessible through language learning and lexicography, a process from which English students of Italian emerged empowered to re-imagine their own culture in a more powerfully variegated manner. Elizabeth herself was the paradigmatic exemplar of this form of cultural appropriation in her mastery of ancient and modern languages, never having set foot off of her ‘sceptred isle’. The disappearance of this particular kind of ‘second world’2 with James’s accession to the English throne is both a sign of England’s invigorated culture and the assimilation of those who had earlier been associated with the cultivation of the ‘foreign’ on English soil. The turn toward translation is a marker of the simultaneous turn away from the advocacy of foreign cultures in their original linguistic dress in England, and the valorization of English as a legitimate bearer of cultural weight in its own

1

2

Julia Ebel, in her unpublished dissertation Studies in Elizabethan Translation (Columbia University, 1964), notes that between 1560 and 1603 there were a total of 338 translations from Latin into English, 295 from French, 104 from Italian, 59 from Spanish, 43 from Dutch, 11 from German, and 2 from Portuguese. The term was coined by Harry Berger in an influential early essay, “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World,” republished in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. by John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 3-40.

72

Michael Wyatt

right. It is in this light that we turn to the only translation Florio evidently ever made into Italian, of the Basilikon Doron, which James had written in Scotland, in Middle Scots, and then had translated into English for its initially limited circulation. This treatise on kingship dates from 1599; written for the instruction of his Prince Henry, who though only four at the time was next in line of succession to the Scottish throne, the king shows himself throughout his text concerned about the possibility of his own imminent death. James had been crowned in 1567 at the age of only thirteen months, when his mother, Mary Queen of Scot,s fled to England. The Basilikon Doron was meant to be a primer in the practical matters of governance for a son the king wished to spare the difficult lessons he had necessarily learned through the four successive regents who governed Scotland in his stead until he reached his majority in 1578. As Jenny Wormald explains it, at the time that James wrote the Basilikon Doron, “the Scottish context” that informed the king’s views “was ... confusing and potentially dangerous,”3 given the conflicting strategies of communitarian values imposed on him by his brilliant but fierce tutor, George Buchanan and the fixed sense of primogeniture embedded in the Stuart monarchy from early in the 15th century. But Buchanan’s ‘contractual theory’, based on longstanding agreements between the kings of Scotland and local communities that granted them a degree of selfdetermination, came to be read in James’s understanding of monarchy against the continental political theorists Budé and Bodin, and (at least in theory) absolutism prevailed in his thinking, though James’s views on the divine right of kings are more forcefully spelled out in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, written just shortly before the Basilikon Doron. How soothing it must have been to turn from the thunderings of Buchanan, with his terrifying stories of what had happened to wicked kings–which gave James nightmares years later–to assertions such as ‘Maiestie or Soveraigntie is the most high, absolute, and perpetuall power over the citizens and subjects in a Commonweale...’4

The king’s assertion of his royal prerogatives was thus in a very real sense a repudiation of the ideological underpinnings of his education, or at least those aspects of it controlled by Buchanan, though he remained throughout his life

3

4

See Jenny Wormald, “James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation”, in The Mental World of the Jaobean Court, ed. by Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 39-44, whose reappraisal of the Basilikon Doron within the framework of ‘translation’ has been very helpful in my thinking about the treatise. Ibid., p. 43, citing Bodin.

John Florio’s Translation of Kingship

73

shaped by its emphasis on the study of classical and theological literature.5 James’s library in Scotland provides a useful gauge of his intellectual and imaginative horizons, so different from those of his predecessor on the English throne, and a telling contrast to the library that prefaces the dictionaries of John Florio.6 The languages represented are, for the most part, Latin, Greek–a hodgepodge of classical literature, the Vulgate, patristic and medieval theology, some history – as well as French. There were only nineteen books in English, among which Ascham’s Scholemaster, but no Chaucer, Sidney, or Spenser. Sixty-eight books in French had come to him through his mother, who had left them behind when she fled in haste in the wake of the scandals that had fatally compromised her sovereignty. Much of James VI’s acquaintance with contemporary vernacular literature was the result of this accident, through which he was able to read the poets Marot, Du Bellay, and Ronsard, as well as French translations of Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio. It seems that his knowledge of Castiglione was acquired through Hoby’s 1561 English translation, but there is no sign in his library of any of the other important Elizabethan translations from Italian. Though his linguistic skills were formidable, James’s narrowly focused learning might well be seen to have contributed to a number of the problems he would later encounter as king of England. Wormald maintains that the translation of the Basilikon Doron – not only into the English language but also into the English context – “reinforced by some of James’s own assertions after 1603, contributed to, if they did not wholly create, an atmosphere of unease. Yet it can be argued that this was not so much, as the English thought, because the king did not understand them. It was because they did not understand the king.”7 So the already multiple translations of the Basilikon Doron – from Middle Scots into English, and then into England itself through the medium of print–well before Florio

5

6

7

James’s formal education ended soon after he assumed his majority, by the age of fourteen. Besides Buchanan, there were three others involved in the young king’s formation: Peter Young, whose teaching did not take the severe tack of Buchanan’s, and the Abbots of Cambushkenneth and Dryburgh; see David Mathew, James I (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1967), pp. 23-24. Here I follow Mathew, pp. 25-31. He also discusses, pp. 120-122, the great library assembled by Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland. It contained works in the most representative of the languages of the first century of print culture with the exception of German, which Percy did not read. Classical texts were represented in “relative completeness,” there was a wide selection of contemporary French and Italian literature, Rabelais and Erasmus, several books in Spanish, scientific treatises, architectural books, and literature dealing with the voyages of discovery. Wormald, p. 48.

74

Michael Wyatt

turned it into Italian, had a notable impact on the degree to which the book was susceptible to misreadings far from what James had meant to convey to his son, and he felt so strongly about these misunderstandings that he felt compelled to address them in a ‘Preface to the Reader’ in the 1603 London edition of the Basilikon Doron which Florio did not include in his translation: If I in this book have been too particularly plaine, impute it to the necessitie of the subject, not so much being ordained for the institution of a Prince in generall, as I have said, as containing particular precepts to my sonne in speciall: whereof he could have made but a generall use, if they had not contained the particular diseases of this kingdome [Scotland], with the best remedies for the same; which it became me best as a King, having learned both the theoricke and praticke thereof, more plainely to expresse, then any simple schoole-man, that only knowes matters of kingdoms by contemplation.”8

This explanation, though evidently genuine, did not in itself quiet James’s English critics, and though it represents an attempt on the king’s part to help his new subjects to understand the intent of the Basilikon Doron, he was never fully capable of effecting the relationship with the English people that his mimetic rhetoric of hierarchy convinced him was already a reality by dint of his divinely sanctioned office. Though originally meant as a private communication, and despite his protestations to the contrary, James’s advice to his son nevertheless reveals something of what it meant from the king’s perspective to be “a Prince in generall,” but his English subjects were rarely able to penetrate the language through which the king represented his relationship with them. A speech of March 21, 1610 could have proven more acceptable to the king’s English subjects than either the Basilikon Doron or the more openly absolutist Trew Law had proved to be, for though it was “a genuine assertion of James’s belief that kingship did indeed involve vast powers,” he stressed that “wise kings did not invoke them without concern for the law and for the bond between monarchs and subjects.”9 One of James’s consistent problems on the English throne was one of tone, and through it the image that he projected. He was a monarch who wrote books, an unusual accomplishment in any era, and he had a command of very specific vocabularies – those of theology, political theory, and historiography above all – but as a ‘stranger’ himself in England he spoke a language inflected by a rhetoric (if not the

8

9

BASILIKON DORON of His Maiesties Instructions to His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (London: John Norton, 1603), ‘Preface to the Reader”, n. p. [subsequent citations in brackets, following the text]. Wormald, p. 53.

John Florio’s Translation of Kingship

75

actual practice) of absolutism that proved to be incomprehensible to his English subjects. Given the character of James’s education under Buchanan, what was lacking, from the perspective of this present study, was the sufficiently tempering influence of contemporary vernacular cultures, and particularly their literatures,10 a serious lacuna that Florio’s version of the Basilikon Doron sought to address by translating its royalist ideology into the linguistic and cultural world of the Italian cinquecento. Wormald argues that “what above all informs [the Basilikon Doron] is not its theory of kingship” but rather “its low-key and admirable commonsense and wit,”11 an arguable position that would see the treatise as a Scots version of the courtesy-book, though intended for a specific addressee and originally meant to be read by only a select few. The date of Florio’s translation has not been established with any certainty beyond that it was prepared prior to the appearance of the 1616 edition of James’s collected Workes. Neither is it obvious for whom the Italian translation of the Basilikon Doron was intended, a dedicatory epistle to the King notwithstanding (there is no record of his having acknowledged it). Possibly it was prepared as a gesture of gratitude for the position he had acquired with Queen Anne, but I don’t believe that there is any reason to think that this was “perhaps a text dear to her heart,” as Giuliano Pellegrini suggests.12 If Florio was also involved in teaching Italian to Prince Henry, the translation might have been prepared in order for him to exercise the language with a text that had originally been written expressly for his benefit. But unlike all of Florio’s previous work, the translation of the Basilikon Doron has no identifiable public and, as it remained in manuscript, has no connection to the print culture which had so significantly shaped both his career and its intellectual parameters. In Florio’s hands, through the medium of the contemporary Italian vernacular, the Basilikon Doron tries to speak with the voice of early

10

11 12

James Craigie, in the Introduction to his edition of the Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh: William Blackward, 1950), p. 78, notes that James was familiar with a number of Renaissance authors, including Erasmus, Castiglione and Thomas Elyot, though “all indebtedness to post-classical writers [in the Basilikon Doron] was carefully concealed,” and his reading in this direction was determined by his theological, ethical, and political concerns. Wormald, p. 48. Giuliano Pellegrini, John Florio e il BASILIKON DORON di James VI: un esempio inedito di versione eliabettiana (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), p. 21 [translation here and elsewhere of Pellegrini my own]. Even if I disagree with some of his conclusions, I am very much indebted to Pellegrini’s work in what follows here; Frances Yates only mentions the translation in passing in her John Florio: the Life of an Italian in Shakespeare' s England (Cambridge: Cambridge Uniuversity Press, 1934), p. 248. Citations of Florio’s text in Pellegrini’s edition are indicated in brackets after they are cited in my text.

Michael Wyatt

76

modernity, but we must ask: does this translative gesture achieve its end? Pellegrini, whose edition of Florio’s translation is the first and only print version of the text, suggests that it does succeed in a number of respects. Given the Basilikon Doron’s pragmatic orientation, “King James’s treatise finds its place within a specific tradition, in an already established literary genre, whose origins are in the ideals of the Renaissance and linked to even earlier historical periods.”13 But there is a tension, unregistered here by Pellegrini, between the Renaissance elements of James’s treatise and that distant past that he notes which is brought into sharp relief by the rendering of the Basilikon Doron into Italian. While it is true that the divine right of kings is not the text’s principal focus, this preoccupation so much in evidence elsewhere in the king’s written legacy is certainly not incidental to his practical advice here. The consequent opposition between aspects of conduct that take at least some of their cues from the literature of courtesy, and a considerably more antiquated understanding of the exercise of political power (even if in Budé and Bodin it had its contemporary proponents), both refracted through an essentially theological imagination, conspire to produce a treatise that could not be farther from the mentalità of Italian Renaissance political culture, and yet in Florio’s translation this is precisely the tradition that the Basilikon Doron aspires to join. While Pellegrini notes Florio’s aim to effectively translate “the spirit of a text,” he goes on to describe the method used to do so as an “adaptation of its expressive form by means of a process that could be called ‘naturalization.’”14 This process takes different turns throughout the translation, from the naturalization of the Scottish highlands to “circa i Mediteranei” [p. 72], to the re-elaboration of a simple idea in the original, rendering it “considerably more elegant than the original itself and expressing its content more clearly,”15 as in Ma sopra tutte le virtù, v’ingegnerete a studiare di ben’ sapere la vostra professione e grado, il che consiste in ben’ regolare, e rettamente governare il vostro popolo. [p. 112]

for but above all virtues, study to knowe well your owne craft, which is to rule your people. [p. 44]

The prevalence of copia in Florio’s dictionary definitions and, most notably,

13 14 15

Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 36.

John Florio’s Translation of Kingship

77

in the translation of Montaigne is very little in evidence in his restrained translation of the Basilikon Doron, which on one level closely reproduces the sense of the original text as it seeks to naturalize it in another linguistic and conceptual framework. The Bible is, for James, the touchstone of all authority: Tutto il corpo della sacra scrittura contiene precipuamente due cose, cioè un commandamento, ed una prohibitione: a far’ tai cose, ed astenersi dal’opposito. Siate obbediente ad ambedue: ne vi sembri bastante lo astenervi dal male, e non fare bene: ne pensate voi fate molte buone cose, ciò vi possa servire in vece d’un palio, d’intrometterci de’ maleficij. E come tutta la santa scrittura consiste massimamente in queste due parti: così in duo gradi subsiste tutto il servitio che l’huomo debbe far’ a Dio: interiore o celeste; esteriore o terrestre: il primo, mediante, l’oratione in fede verso Dio, l’altro con l’opere in presenza de’mondo, scaturendo da esse: il che non è altro, che un essercito di religione verso Dio, e di equità verso il vostro popolo [pp. 49-50] The whole scripture chiefly containeth two things: a command, and a prohibition, to do such things, and to abstaine from the contrarie. Obey in both; neither thinke it enough to abstaine from evill, and do no good; nor thinke not that if ye doe manie good things, it may serve you for a cloake to mixe evil turnes therewith. And as in these two points, the whole Scripture principallie consisteth: so in two degrees standeth the whole service of God by man: interiour, or upward; exteriour, or downward: the first, by prayer in faith towards God; the next, by workes flowing therefra before the world: which is nothing else, but the exercise of Religion towards God, and of equitie towards your neighbor [p. 5]

Florio makes only slight modifications here: ‘Tutto il corpo della sacra scrittura’ for ‘The whole scripture’, a change that actually reenforces the link James emphasizes elsewhere between the Bible and the community, or body, of Christians whose standard it constitutes. Likewise, celeste for ‘upward’ and terrestre for ‘downward’ help to clarify the king’s language. A disjunction occurs, however, when we consider that the convictions expressed here at the outset of James’s text, just shortly after he tells his son that God ... v’ha fatto huomo; e poi...v’ha fatto un’picciol’Dio, da sedere in sul’suo trono e reggere sopra gl’altri huomini ... [pp. 47-48] ... hee made you a man; and next...he made you a little God to sitte on his throne, and rule over other men ... [p. 2]

are closer to those of a Savonarola than to any of the figures of the Italian Renaissance with whom Florio had earlier so clearly demonstrated his

78

Michael Wyatt

sympathies, and yet the characteristically excessive language of the Dominican friar is remote from the measured lexicon that Florio employs in his translation of James’s text.16 Incongruities multiply in the second book of the Italian Basilikon Doron, “Del debito d’un Rè nel’ suo officio” [Of the Kings Dutie in his Office]. In a passage that Florio must have been particularly pleased to translate, we read, ... habbiate l’Inghilterra per essempio, la qual’ha fiorito ed in politia ed in richezze, da che prima diede ingrosso a gli Artefici stranieri. Però non solo permettere, ma con ogni bel modo allettare i forestieri a venirci ad habitare: dando così severo ordine, che ogni abotinamento fatto da’ nostri contr’essi sia represso; come fecero in Inghilterra quando vennero ad habitarci et ad esservi accettati. [p. 84] ... take example by England, how it hath flourished both in wealth and policie, since the straungers Crafts-men came in among them: Therefore not only permit, but allure strangers to come heere also; taking as strait order for repressing the mutining of ours at them, as was done in England, at their first in-bringing there. [p. 52]

As King of Scotland, James admired the active participation of ‘strangers’ in what I have elsewhere described as the elaboration of the early modern English ‘nation’, and Florio translates the marginal annotation to this paragraph as “Bona politica in Inghilterra.” Good politics indeed, from the viewpoint of one who was clearly a marginal figure in this “bona politica” and yet through his work as a language merchant had proven himself to be at the center of one of the principal technologies of Elizabethan cultural politics. Florio’s additions to the original text clearly reflect his own experience as a “forestiero” who was long “ad essere accettato.” For James’s part, something had apparently shifted in his attitude by the time he arrived in England, for the advice he gives his son here he does not seem later to have taken very seriously himself. Further on in the second book, James lists, in order of precedence, the

16

Given the totalizing significance that King James assigned to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in both his understanding of the world and his place in it, it is not surprising that the most important cultural artifact of his patronage as King of England should have been the 1611 Bible that bears his name. Though a detailed consideration of that enormously complex project, involving 49 translators over a period of six years, would be beyond the scope of this study, it is worth pondering the effect such a massive effort (and, it must be admitted, splendid result) had on the shift in elite cultural politics away from the foreign, and largely secular, paradigms of the Elizabethan period. Olga Opfell’s The King James Bible Translators (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982) is as lively an account of the Jacobean court between 1604 and 1611 as it is a fascinating examination of the work of the various Westminster, Cambridge, and Oxford ‘companies’, the committees of Biblical scholars and experts in ancient languages, whose joint efforts produced the King James Bible.

John Florio’s Translation of Kingship

79

authorities that are to guide his son’s studies. First, of course, is the Bible, after which Henry is urged: ... studiate, e siate ben versato nelle vostre proprie leggi; conciosiache, come potete voi discernere delle cose che non sapete ... [p. 114] ... studie well your owne lawes: for how can yee discerne by the thing yee know not? [p. 90]

Civil law thus follows the rule of religion, is in fact determined by it, in James’s view, again recalling the religious politics of Savonarola and at the same time suggesting a marked contrast with Machiavelli’s very different understanding of political realities in Il principe, where the rule of law is the guarantee of a community’s political sanity no less so than is its fear of God. James goes on to recommend that Dopo le leggi, io vorrei che foste molto ben’versato nelle authentiche historie, et croniche de’vostri regni: ma precipuamente nelle vostre historie (ne sis pregrinus domi) l’essempio delle quali vi tocca e concerne più apresso. Io non voglio già dire si fatte mordaci ai infami invettive; come le cronache di Buccanano overo Knoxe, e dove alcuno di questi infami libelli vengano a trovarsi a’vostri giorni; esseguite le leggi sopra quegli che gl’haveranno. [p. 116] And next the lawes, I would have you to be well versed in authentick histories, and in the Chronicles of all nations; but specially in our own histories (Ne sis peregrinus domi [Lest you be a foreigner at home])17 the example whereof most neerely concernes you. I mean not of such infamous invectives as Buchanans or Knoxes Chronicles: & if any of such infamous Libels remaine untill your daies, use the Law upon the keepers thereof. [p. 92]

The study of history is thus circumscribed by an appeal to authenticity, defined by a warning against the wrong kind of historiography; the variety, that is, forced upon the young king by the tutor who is anathematized here and who had insisted upon a radically presbyteral understanding of the functioning of both religion and state. Florio had earlier correctly used the term republica [p. 82] to stand for James’s ‘Common-weale’ [p. 49], but the discrepancies between James’s text and Florio’s translation become more evident when the advice about history turns to just what kind of history is acceptable to this king: ... tra tutte le historie profane, non voglio tralasciare di massimamente raccomandarvi i

17

See Johann P. Sommerville’s King James VI and I, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 278, n. 312.

80

Michael Wyatt Commentarij di Cesare; si per la melita fluenza, e dolce facondia dello stile, come altresì per la dignità ed altezza del soggetto. Imperoche io sono sempre stato di parere, che tra tutti gl’Imperatori Pagani, che giamai furono, egli, tanto in esperienza e pratica, quanto ne’suoi precetti circa la disciplina militare, ha non solamente aguagliato, ma di gran precorso ed avanzato tutti gl’altri. [p. 117] ... among all prophane histories, I must not omit most speciallie to recommend unto you the Commentaries of Cæsar; both for the sweete flowing of the stile, as also for the worthinesse of the matter it selfe. For I have ever bin of that opinion, that of all the Ethnicke Emperours, or great Captaines that ever was, he hath farthest excelled, both in his practise, and in his præscept in martiall affaires. [p. 94]

For Machiavelli, Cæsar represented the end of the republican tradition in Rome, and the Discorsi are a detailed examination of the period in Roman history preceding Cæsar’s triumph. James is here referring to Cæsar’s own account of his brilliant military career, but as it was his dexterity as a military strategist that led to his victory over the last weakened remnants of Roman republicanism, there is a clear link between the qualities James – a pronounced anti-militarist – recommends in this ‘Imperatore Pagano’ and his subsequent association with tyranny. It is strikingly evident in the comparison that the Basilikon Doron in Italian begs with Machiavelli’s more skillful manipulation of history and politics – gained as it was not only through contemplation but also in years of service to the Florentine Republic – that James had not himself sufficiently absorbed the historiographical tradition that he here proposes his son consider a fundamental component of his education. Given the strong bias he had acquired against certain forms of history it is hard to imagine that James’s own perspective could have been any more coherent than it was. The limitation imposed on Henry’s history reading extends to other areas associated with several of the fundamental coordinates of Renaissance culture: Toccante lo studio delle altre arti liberali e morali scientie, mi piacerebbe che foste mediocramente versato in esse; pure, senza sforzarvi di riuscir troppo curioso bacalario in esse; conciosiache, ciò non può non alienarvi dalle altre parti della vostra vocatione, come già v’ho mostrato altrove: e quando, dal nemico, essendo in procinto di vincere o debellare la città, voi verrete ad esser’interrotto od impedito nella vostra dimostratione, come fu già Archimede , il vostro popolo (come mi do a credere) vi vederà con torto squardo et fosco occhio. [p. 117] As for the studie of other liberall artes and sciences, I would have you reasonablie versed in them, but not preassing to bee a pass-master in any of them: for that cannot but distract you from the points of your calling, as I shewed you before: and when, by the enemie winning the towne, yee shall bee interrupted in your demonstrations, as Archimedes was; your people (I thinke) will looke very bluntly upon it. [p. 94]

John Florio’s Translation of Kingship

81

One wonders what Florio must have been thinking as he translated these sentences, diametrically opposed as they are to everything his earlier career aimed to advance and which Elizabethan cultural politics had so actively promoted. In his translation of Montaigne’s essay, “De l’institution des enfants,” Florio had inserted this passage from Tasso: Philosophie being a rich and noble Queene, and knowing her owne worth, graciously smileth upon, and lovingly embraceth Princes and noble men, if they become suters to her, admitting them as her minions, and gently affording them all the favours she can...and therefore we see by experience, that if a true Gentleman, or nobleman shall follow her with any attention, and woo her with importunities, he shall learn and know more of her, and prove a better scholler in one yeare, than an ungentle or base fellow shall in seven ...18

Read against the Basilikon Doron, Tasso’s faith in a sovereign enlightened by Lady Philosophy appears to be something of a fantasy. James’s mistrust of humanistic learning is a further key to the differences that the shift in dynastic power effected by his accession to the English throne had brought about. But as distressing as such thinking certainly must have been to its translator, the hypocrisy of this final passage – intelligible as such only in the light of James’s subsequent reign in England – would prove to be equally unsettling to a teacher dedicated to the art of not only “instructing” but also “delighting” his students: Non dilettarvi d’havere ne comedianti ne ballerini ordinariamente nella vostra compagnia: imperoche, solo i tiranni si sono più dilettanti di essi; gloriandosi di essere et autori, et attori di comedie et tragedie essi stessi. Donde la risposta che il poeta Philosseno chiede già sdegnosamente al tiranno di Siracusa incirca cio, è hora divenuta in proverbio, reduc me in latomias. E tutto l’uso et utile, che Nerone fece di sè, quando venne a morire, fù, Quali artifex pereo? havendo relatione alla peritia, ch’egli haveva in musica, o nel recitare di comedie e tragedie: come in vero tutta la sua vita non fu altro che una tragedia. Non vogliate altresì dilettarvi d’esser’sonatore d’instromenti voi istesso: massime in quegli co’quali molti comunemente si acquistano il pane ... [p. 141] Delight not to keepe ordinarilie in your companie, Comœdians or Balladines: for the Tyrants delighted most in them, glorying to be both authors and actors of Comœdies and Tragœdies themselves: Whereupon the answere that the poet Philoxenus disdainefully gave to the Tyrant of Syracuse there-anent, is now come in a proverbe, reduc me in latomias [lead me back to the quarries]19 And all the ruse that Nero made of

18

19

Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, trans. by John Florio (London: Edward Blount, 1603), p. 111. The poet’s response to a poem of the Tyrant’s that he had been released from prison to hear; see Sommerville, p. 281, n. 447.

82

Michael Wyatt himselfe when he died, was Qualis artifex pereo [What an artist is dying]?20 Meaning of his skill in menstrallie, and playing of Tragœdies: as indeede his whole life and death, was all but one Tragœdie. Delight not also to bee in your owne person a player upon musicall instruments; especially on such as commonly men winne their living with: nor yet to be fine of any mechanic craft ... [p. 127]

Despite what James says in his 1603 ‘Preface to the Reader’ about monarchs not publically criticizing their predecessors, it is difficult not to see in this piece of advice to his son a swipe at Elizabeth, whose pleasure and participation in the spectacles that celebrated her reign was patent. That James had had practically no exposure to such entertainments at the time of the writing of the Basilikon Doron little mitigates his retention of the passage in later editions of the text, revealing as it does the myopic sense of cultural politics that the Scots king brought with him to England. Though he remained a silent observer of the Magnificent Entertainment,21 we know from the subsequent history of theater and masque in the Stuart court – the promotion of which was almost entirely the provenance of Queen Anne, Florio’s patroness – that James moved aggressively to appropriate the ideological possibilities of spectacle in order to consolidate his control of the apparatus of royal power in England. Gone is the imaginative dynamism of the Elizabethan ‘second world’, displaced in Jacobean England by the imperative that culture serve the posturing rhetoric of absolutism, largely uninformed by the mediation of the vernacular traditions that had flourished under the Færie Queen. The interplay of cultures that the term ‘translation’ effects appears to be increasingly marginalized during the Jacobean period, and so Florio’s effort to re-christen the Basilikon Doron in the linguistic clothing of early modern Italian culture proves in the end to be an impossible task. For though “its linguistic culture and...its evident acquaintance with other contemporary texts...is shown above all in a process of subtle but unmistakable adaptation that removes almost entirely the coarse and often lifeless tone one encounters in James’s text,”22 the new clothing does not in the end fit the body of the king’s text. All language bears an accumulation of associations, and the language that Florio had advocated during the course of his career in Elizabethan England was a vigorous and polyvalent one whose native practitioners had taken it in a great variety of directions. Were he to have adopted the contemporary linguistic politics then in force on the Italian

20 21

22

Sommerville, p. 281, n. 448. See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their contemporaries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 31. Pellegrini, p. 37.

John Florio’s Translation of Kingship

83

peninsula for his Italian version of the Basilikon Doron – wedding a conservative linguistic politics to a similarly conservative understanding of the exercise of political power (and what should inform it) – it would perhaps be possible to judge the translation a success. But Florio’s authority as lexicographer and translator rested on entirely different principals, and such a retrograde maneuver would have been entirely out of keeping with them. Trying to accomplish the impossible in uniting the language of a laicizing Renaissance humanism with the divine right of kings, the Basilikon Doron in Italian serves as an unhappy metaphor for Florio’s increasingly marginalized position in the increasingly self-reliant world of English cultural politics in the Jacobean period. Bibliography Berger, Harry, ‘The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World’, in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. by John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 3-40. Ebel, Julia, Studies in Elizabethan Translation (Unpublished dissertation: Columbia University, 1964). Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). King James I, BASILIKON DORON of His Maiesties Instructions to His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (London: John Norton, 1603). ––. Basilikon Doron, ed. by James Craigie (Edinburgh: William Blackward, 1950). Mathew, David, James I (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967). Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, translated by John Florio (London: Edward Blount, 1603). Opfell, Olga, The King James Bible Translators (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982). Pellegrini, Giuliano, John Florio e il BASILIKON DORON di James VI: un esempio inedito di versione eliabettiana (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961). Sommerville, Johann P, King James VI and I, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Wormald, Jenny, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’, The Mental World of the Jaobean Court, ed. by Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 39-44.

84

Michael Wyatt

s England Yates, Frances, John Florio: the Life of an Italian in Shakespeare' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934).

2. Diplomatic Interventions

Donatella Abbate Badin Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles1 Starting from the 1820s, London (and, to a lesser extent, the other major cities of Great Britain) was thronged with Italian refugees who had fled there in the aftermath of the 1820-1821 risings in Naples and Piedmont and the general crackdown on would-be agitators that followed throughout Italy.2 These exiles3 joined earlier ones, such as Foscolo, who had also sought shelter in Great Britain4 and preceded the wave of those who would have to

1

2

3

4

All translations, if not indicated otherwise, by the author. No corrections have been made to the often incorrect usage of French and English by Morgan’s Italian correspondents. The status quo in Italy, resulting from the Congress of Vienna (1815), was shaken in the years 1820-1821 by a wave of constitutionalist uprisings taking the lead from Spain, where the Bourbon king had been obliged to return to a constitutional monarchy after a mutiny of army officers in 1820. The revolt spread to Bourbon-governed Naples, where the troops in revolt lead by former Napoleonic officers (most prominent among them, Guglielmo Pepe) obliged King Ferdinand I to promulgate the constitution. In a matter of a few months, however, the troops of the Holy Alliance had intervened crushing the rebellion which had been animated by symapthisers of the former French regime and by the Carbonari. About the same time, another revolt broke out in Piedmont, also inspired by the Carbonari, and spread rapidly to the army obliging King Victor Emanuel I to flee and leave the regency to Carlo Alberto, the presumed heir to the throne, who seemed sympathetic to the movement’s ideals. He did grant the constitution as requested, however, soon after he changed his mind, joined the legitimist regiments in 1821 and defeated the rebels led by Santorre di Santa Rosa. In the Lombardo-Veneto Kingdom, the Austrians, well-informed by their espionage system, forestalled insurrection by cracking down with a wave of arrests and trials on all Carbonari meeting places and other hotbeds of dissent. Federico Confalonieri, Pietro Maroncelli, Silvio Pellico and other suspects were sent to the Moravian fortress of Spielberg, one of the harshest prisons of the Habsburg empire. Many others avoided the arrest by fleeing to Switzerland, France and, especially to England. I use the terms refugee and exile almost interchangeably although Said and Suvin, in the typology they propose, differentiate between the two (see Edward Said, Reflections on Exile (London: Granta Books, 2001) and Darko Suvin, ‘Displaced Persons’, New Left Review, 31 (2005), 107-122). While for both categories of people, return to the original country is impossible since they were driven out by the political powers of their original countries, exiles, however, are single and prominent individuals while refugees are fleeing the country in droves and under threat of death. In the case of the Italians in London, both terms apply: most of them were prominent personalities but they also had to leave the country precipitously and arrived in Switzerland, France or England in large numbers and almost at the same time. The poet, novelist and patriot, Ugo Foscolo, born in the Ionian island of Zante (Zakynthos), was a supporter of the French in Italy until Napoleon disappointed him by becoming a tyrant. He served in the army that defended the kingdom of Italy. After the defeat of

88

Donatella Abbate Badin

flee Italy after the disastrous outcome of the 1831 and 1848 insurrections. As Cattaneo wrote about Ugo Foscolo, the most prominent of Italians in London, “[egli] diede alla nuova Italia una nuova istituzione, l’esilio” [Tr.: “[He] gave Italy a new institution, exile”]5, indeed, a distinctive institution for a country often a victim of despotic governments. Generations of Italians would, from that moment on, be physically displaced and have to cross borders to experience a sense of otherness and the loss of familiar links, economic security and dignity. The typology of the political exile is closely linked to the rise of nationstates. Since the idea of an Italian nation established itself with the arrival of the French, and a newly-hatched sense of an Italian identity gave rise to patriotic discourse and patriotic action, we can localize in that period the beginning of those waves of exiles which would lead thousands of people to adopt new ways of feeling, thinking, and living. As Said argues, “Exile is 6 predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place.”

5

6

Napoleon, Foscolo, then in Milan, refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Austrian government and left as a voluntary exile for Switzerland (1815) and, being threatened with extradition there, for England (1816). His flamboyant temperament and his brilliant literary achievements (Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, [The Last letters of Jacopo Ortis], Dei Sepolcri [On Sepulchres], the translation into Italian of A Sentimental Journey and a great number of odes, plays and essays made him the fulcrum of the exile community in London. Indeed, as Olga Ragusa writes “His connections with English literature and English literary life were closer and deeper than those of many other major Italian writers” (Italica, 50/3, Autumn 1973, p. 451). Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Ugo Foscolo e l’Italia’, in Scritti letterari, artistici, linguistici e vari, ed. by Agostino Bertani (Firenze, Le Monnier, 1948), pp. 275-319. The exiles from Napoleonic despotism, those of the Risorgimento (1820-1861) and of the tragic season of anti-Fascists and Italian Jews fleeing Mussolini’s regime, stand to justify Cattaneo’s boutade. Many authorities have dwelt on the issue of exile as a quintessentially Italian condition. Standing virtually at the beginning of Italian literary culture, Dante Alighieri’s exile sets the tone and many histories of Italian exile start with him. As Dino S. Cervigni writes in his introduction to the issue of Annali d’Italianistica devoted to “Exile and Literature” (vol. 20, 2001), “Most obviously the experience of exile is unique neither to Dante alone nor to Italians as a people. And yet, the Italian peninsula’s political fragmentation until the second half of the 19th century, the dictatorship that the newly formed country experienced for most of the 20th century’s second quarter, and finally Italy’s participation in the Second world War caused many Italians […] to experience exile because of political, religious, and economic reasons” (p. 11). On exile in Italian literature see the above mentioned issue of Annali d’Italianistica and Giovanni de Marco, Mitografia dell’esule: da Dante al Novecento (Napoli, 1996). On Foscolo’s exile see E.R. Vincent, An Italian in Regency England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953), John Lindon, Studi sul Foscolo inglese (Pisa: Guardini, 1987), and Glauco Cambon, Ugo Foscolo: Poet of Exile (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980). Edward Said, Reflections on Exile (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 185.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

89

No better words than those of an exile in London, Giuseppe Pecchio, can describe the variegated political origins of the exiles who had sought shelter under “the most beautiful sun of England”, the sun of freedom [in Italian “Il più bel sole dell’Inghilterra è la libertà”] 7: Nel 1823 Londra era popolata d’esuli d’ogni specie e d’ogni paese; costituzionali volenti una sola camera, costituzionali volenti due camere, costituzionali alla francese, altri alla spagnola, altri all’americana. Generali, presidenti dimessi di repubbliche, presidenti di parlamenti sciolti a bajonetta in canna [...] e uno sciame di giornalisti, poeti, e uomini di lettere. Londra era l’Eliso (un satirico direbbe il Botany Bay) d’uomini illustri e di eroi manqués.8 Tr.: In 1823 London was peopled by exiles of all kinds and from every country; constitutionalists asking for a single chamber, constitutionalists asking for two chambers, French-style constitutionalists; Spanish-style and American-style ones. Generals, and demoted presidents of republics, presidents of parliaments dissolved by bayonets […] and flocks of journalists, poets and literary men. London was the Elysium (a satirist would say the Botany Bay) of heroes manqué.

Some of the first-wave exiles to England returned, however, to Italy to participate in the 1848 events. England thus became an in-between place where the refugees were on the one hand trying to integrate into local society and on the other continued to be involved in national politics. Many of them kept in touch with their native country, operating, when possible, in its behalf and plotting for their return as soon as an opening would present itself. Moreover, a number of the Italians were also involved in political action in favour of other countries engaged in nationalistic action. Greece, where the fight for independence from the Ottoman empire was raging at that time, attracted several of the London exiles, such as Porro and Santa Rosa; the latter actually lost his life there. The double nature of the exilic stance, the fact of being neither fully in the host country nor physically in one’s own, (Said talks of “plurality of vision,” “awareness of simultaneous dimensions,” moving “according to a different 9 calendar” ), thus influenced the relationships of the Italian guests with their English patrons and supporters who were expected to champion the Italian cause – and thus make the return of the exile possible – and were also

7

8 9

Giuseppe Pecchio, Osservazioni semi-serie di un esule sull’Inghilterra (Lugano: Ruggia, 1831), pp. 104-105. The Milanese economist, a contributor of the Conciliatore and Confalonieri’s right arm, had succeeded in fleeing Lombardy where he was accused of high treason for hosting in his house near Milan a meeting which had the purpose of asking Carlo Alberto’s help against the Austrians at the time of the Piedmontese rising. Ibid., p. 105. Said, p. 186.

90

Donatella Abbate Badin

depended upon for assistance (although often with many misgivings) thus to make permanence possible. In London the exiles, teetering between assimilation and marginalization, found a sympathetic welcome within the Whig circles that met at Holland House or Lansdowne House. In those famous international and liberal salons, Italian exiles had the opportunity of meeting like-minded intellectuals they could sensitize to their ideals even while they made contacts in order to find suitable means of subsistence – mostly teaching Italian or writing, which were the only available opportunities for the proud men and women who in their former lives had, as a rule, belonged to the upper classes and even hosted some of their new patrons.10 A less well-known source of encouragement came from Dublin, from the salon and the pen of Lady Morgan, née Sydney Owenson. When the letters addressed to her by some prominent Italian exiles of the 1821 revolutions are made available in print,11 they will add a new piece to the complex mosaic of the history of that age and shed fresh light on the delicate relationship between the host country, its reluctant visitors and the network which was built among the refugees, as well as between them and their patrons. Meanwhile the portrait of that extraordinary woman will be enriched with a new facet.

10

11

The history of Italian exiles in England at the times of the Risorgimento and the role their protectors played has been analyzed in several general and individual studies, but there is still much work to be done. The most thorough and comprehensive publication in English on the subject is still Margaret Wicks’ The Italian Exiles in London 1816-1848 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1937), which goes back to 1937. A sizeable number of letters from prominent Italian exiles of the 1821 revolutions (and some from later exiles) are to be found among Lady Morgan’s manuscripts held at the Beinecke Library of Yale University in the James Marshall Osborn Collection. Manuscript material on Lady Morgan is also held at The National Library of Ireland, at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in several other archives, but the bulk of it does not regard Italy. Unfortunately, most of Lady Morgan’s letters to her correspondents have not been preserved except for the few which are included in the published correspondence of some of her Italian contacts as, for instance, in Confalonieri’s Carteggio. Among her exiled correspondents whose letters are in the Marshall Osborn Collection are Andryane, Berchet, Calbo, Capponi, Confalonieri, Dal Pozzo, Foscolo, Gallenga, Pecchio, Pepe, Piasasco, Pucci, Porro Lambertenghi, Ravina, and Radice. Unless otherwise noted, all letters quoted in this essay are from the James Marshall Osborn Collection of Lady Sydney Morgan. General Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

91

The Irish novelist, Lady Morgan (1876-1859),12 was the mother of the national tale, a genre through which she made a plea for the cultural identity of her nation, Ireland. In 1821, in the wake of her success, she published the travelogue, Italy, the outcome of a Grand Tour which took her and her husband, Sir Charles, to the principal cities of Italy in the years 1819 and 1820.13 During this time, Lady Morgan became friendly with members of the enlightened aristocracy, many of them Freemasons (like herself and her husband) and with some of the presumed leaders of the Carbonari movement.14 She just missed by a few months the outbreak of the 1820-1821 uprisings in Naples and Piedmont, as a consequence of which some of her friends (Confalonieri15, Porro Lambertenghi,16 Pellico17, dal Pozzo,18 Pecchio

12

13

14

15

For a study of Lady Morgan’s life and personality see Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora, 1988), and Lionel Stevenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: The Life of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936). Numerous entries about Lady Morgan’s Italian correspondents and visitors (and copies of some of their letters) may be found in the diary she started keeping in 1825 and which was published under the title of Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, 2 vols, ed. by T.W. Hepworth Dixon and Geraldine Jewsbury (London: W. H. Allen, 1862). Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Italy, 2 vols (London: Colburn, 1821). About Italy, the first full-length study is Donatella Badin, Lady Morgan’s Italy: Irish Sensibilities and Italian Realities, (Bethesda MD: Academica Press, 2007). Un’irlandese a Torino (Torino: Trauben, 2003) by the same author, explores Morgan’s impressions of Piedmont on the eve of the 1821 rising and provides also a reprint of chapters ii, iii, and iv with their translation into Italian. The secret society of the Carboneria, which started in the Kingdom of Naples and in the State of the Church and spread to the rest of Italy, flourished during the first decades of the nineteenth century inspired by the democratic ideology of the French Revolution. It borrowed its name and its secret jargon from charcoal-burning and had many points in common with Freemasonry. Members of the aristocracy, the upper middle–classes and the intelligentsia were part of it, while the movement was out of touch with the common people. The purpose of the Carbonari was to bring about a constitutional monarchy or a republic, and to defend the rights of the people against all forms of absolutism. The Carbonari were the inspiring force of the 1820-1821 risings in Naples and in Piedmont. Federico Confalonieri (1785-1846) was an Italian patriot and Milanese Liberal. Born of a noble Lombard family, Count Federico Confalonieri, who believed in the possible unity of Italy, went to Paris after the fall of Napoleon with other Lombard delegates to plead his country’s cause, but his hopes were frustrated as Lombardy was destined for Austria. He then joined the Carbonari movement and in Milan he devoted himself to promoting the economic and social progress of his country. In 1818 he founded the short-lived liberal review Il Conciliatore together with Count Porro Lambertenghi and Silvio Pellico. On the outbreak of the Piedmontese revolt (March-April 1821), the Austrian authorities made several arrests and tried him and other revolutionists for conspiracy and high treason. He was jailed in the fortress of Spielberg, pardoned in 1836 and he found refuge in America. He

92

Donatella Abbate Badin

all from Northern Italy and Gabriele Rossetti19 and General Pepe20 from Naples), were arrested or fled into exile.

16

17

18

19

20

died on his way to Milan from Paris, where he was continuing his life as an exile. Confalonieri and his wife, Teresa Casati, were the Morgans’ best friends in Milan. A prominent member of Milanese aristocracy, Marquis Luigi Porro Lambertenghi (17801861), was a reformist and a modernizer, he brought gas-lighting to Lombardy having ordered machinery from England, and had a treatise on street- lighting translated by Silvio Pellico. With Confalonieri, he set up several free Lancastrian schools and co-founded Il Conciliatore which he supported financially. He arrived in England in 1822 after fleeing from Milan and spending some time in Switzerland and Paris. With Santorre Santa Rosa he rented Foscolo’s Green Cottage. Both he and Santa Rosa became involved with the fight of Greece for independence from the Ottoman Empire and Porro stayed several years in Greece serving with the army and the government until, having almost lost his life because of typhus, he continued his life as an exile in Marseilles. Silvio Pellico (1789-1854) was the only one of the Morgans’ circle in Milan who did not belong to the aristocracy, indeed he was the tutor of Porro Lambertenghi’s sons. Born in Piedmont (Saluzzo), in Milan he came in contact with the literary circles where he shone thanks to his dramatic production. His Francesca da Rimini (1815) was a great theatrical success and was much admired by Lady Morgan as was his editorship of Il Conciliatore. As a consequence of both activities, he was, as Lady Morgan writes, “incarcerated in the dungeons of the police of Milan and buried in solitary confinement.” (Italy, I, v, p. 106) and then sent to the Spielberg. On his return to Turin, he commemorated the experience in the moving memoir Le mie prigioni (1832), a great literary success of the time. Ferdinando dal Pozzo (1768-1843) was a Piedmontese lawyer and politician who held important offices both in the Napoleonic era and in the reign of Carlo Alberto. He was the author of several polemical writings which sent him into exile in England. Lady Morgan had expressed admiration for him in Italy but only met him when he came to England. Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1864) was esteemed by Lady Morgan as “one of the best, and certainly one of the most amusing “improv[v]isatori”.” She had the opportunity of seeing him in action in Naples in the salon of Marchese di Berio accompanied on the piano by Gioacchino Rossini and noted “He assured us, that having once uttered his inspirations, he could not write them down, nor even remember a word” (Italy, II, xxiv, p. 405). His exile in Malta and London, and his paternity of such artistic personalities as Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti are dealt with in this volume respectively in the articles by Peter Vassallo and Tobias Döring. There is no sign in Lady Morgan’s Memoirs or in the letters she received that they renewed the relationship. Guglielmo Pepe (1783-1855) was one of the leaders of the revolutionary army of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799. When the rebellion was subdued, he was arrested and exiled to France. There he joined Napoleon’s army, fought at Marengo and returned to Italy in 1813, with the rank of general, to help reorganize the Neapolitan army trying meanwhile to obtain a constitution from Murat. After Napoleon’s fall, Pepe organized the Carbonari into a national militia, and when in 1820, Ferdinand, who had promised a constitution, obtained the intervention of Austria to restore absolute power, Pepe took command of the Carbonari troops and marched against the Austrians, but was defeated. As a consequence, he spent several years of exile in England, France, and other countries, until he came back again to fight in the 1848 revolution and once again had to seek refuge abroad. In England, Pepe was on the margins of the close but cantankerous group of the Conciliatore but entertained a

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

93

Lady Morgan’s visit had, indeed, taken place at a time of great intellectual, cultural and political fervour, “la più bella epoca che da secoli abbia giammai brillato per l’Italia” [Tr.: “the most shining era for Italy in many centuries”] as Federico Confalonieri defined the period of preparation for the 1821 uprising, in a letter to Lady Morgan written when the first attempts to overthrow foreign power had been stifled.21 The climate had also infected her, as transpires from her work, making her take up her hosts’ cause as her own. The singularity of her position is brought into relief by the political indifference of many of her female contemporaries. How different, for example is the attitude of the narrator of Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826) whose lack of interest in Italians is explained by the fact she says she is “a nameless sort of person, a mere bird of passage, […] a pilgrim” as well as “a wanderer, a stranger and a heretic” who is searching for comfort 22 among Italian artistic and natural beauties. Far from being “birds of Passage”, the Morgans’ were so involved as to be considered extreme not only by adverse critics but also by friends such as Carlo Pucci who, addressing Sir Charles shortly after the failure of the Piedmontese revolution, charges the couple with having been too close to ineffectual Italians “che dovevano esser attori in questa commedia,” [Tr.: “who should have been actors in this comedy”]. He declares he had been sceptical from the very beginning not sharing the visitors’ optimistic belief in the power of words and negotiations: Ecco pur troppo avverato il mio dubbio che [l’Italia] non fosse ancor forte abbastanza da sostenere un volo che la sollevasse dal suo fango, ecco quello su cui né voi, né Lady Morgan, per affetto a noi stessi non voleste convenire.

21

22

warm relationship with Lady Morgan. Several of his letters to her are extant. “Curious visitors”, reads her diary for 1825- , “General Pepe, the Neapolitan chief, and Federico Confalonieri, letter of November 7, 1821, Carteggio, ed. by Gallavresi (Milano: Tipo-Litografia Ripalta, 1911), p. 470. By contrast, on the same page, Confalonieri complains to Lady Morgan about the present time: “[d]al colmo delle speranze […] ci trovammo ad un tratto caduti nella più profonda schiavitù accompagnata dalla vergogna e dal disonore.” [Tr.: “from the acme of hope […] we found ourselves fallen into a pit of utter enslavement accompanied by shame and dishonour.”] Anna Jameson, The Diary of an Ennuyée (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1836), pp. 70 and 131. Quoted by Fabienne Moine in “The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Sentimental Journey to Italy or the Exile of a Fragmented Heart” also in this collection.

94

Donatella Abbate Badin Tr.: This unfortunately confirmed my doubt that Italy was not strong enough to sustain a flight that would lift her from the mire; this is what neither you nor Lady Morgan would 23 agree to out of sympathy for us.

The Morgans may have indeed consorted with ineffectual revolutionaries but the months spent among them impressed the writer with the feeling of being in the middle of history in the making, an impression that informed Sydney’s writing and marked her for the years that followed making her act as a gobetween for the people she had known at that time. Reflections on the political climate preceding these events, and on the historical facts of which they were the consequence, permeate the travelogue which for many years was the best-known book about Italy, an object of admiration as well as of fierce criticism. Italy is not simply a guidebook. It was inspired by the author’s radical sympathies and by Enlightenment theories about the freedom of citizens as individuals and permeated by republican ideals inherited from Machiavelli and Sismondi. The purpose of the book went beyond the simple representation of a country or a culture but aimed at promoting the cause of Italy (still “representing” it, but in a different sense, as an advocate represents her client). Foreseeing criticism of her liberal minded text on the part of the conservative press in England and Ireland, in one of the last chapters of her monumental work, Lady Morgan wrote: It is in vain that reviewers calumniate! and journals denounce! That Quarterlys and Quotidiennes fulminate bulls, and utter anathemas. Their briefs of condemnation (like other briefs) are now but waste paper; while days and nights passed in the societies of Geneva, Milan, Florence, Bologna and Naples are entered in the records of the heart, and are at once the reward and stimulus of exertions, which, however inadequate, have never been made, but in the full conviction that they tended to forward the cause of truth and of virtue.24

Lady Morgan’s “exertions […] to forward the cause of truth and of virtue, mentioned above,” took various forms which all directly or indirectly relate to the role of champion and confidante of Italian refugees she was to assume soon after. Her profound awareness of exile as a feature of her own national

23

24

Letter from Carlo Pucci, April 9, 1821. Carlo Pucci, a member of an “illustrious family”, was one of the underwriters of the Society for the establishment of a fund to allow 348 children to attend the Lancastrian schools established in 1818 in Florence by Gino Capponi and Luigi Serristori who had travelled to England and France to study the method. Lady Morgan was a great enthusiast of the Lancastrian method and entertained a lively correspondence on the subject with its Italian promoters in Florence, Piedmont and Milan. Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Italy, 2 vols (London: Colburn, 1821), II, xx, p. 398.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

95

heritage and of the collective imaginary of Ireland25 predisposed her to sympathize with Italian refugees to whom she felt also close out of a shared ideology as well as from old friendship. Her text was intended to have a pragmatic purpose, that of winning support for the Italian cause by spreading knowledge about the actual and historical wrongs suffered by Italy and awakening a sense of revulsion for the despots but also of blame for the role England had played in crushing revolutionary movements, betraying hopes, or disregarding people’s rights. Through Italy, as Stuart Curran argues, “she appeals over the heads of her government, as it were, invoking a standard of political rectitude among her readers that, at some point, must deliver Italy as a people from its degradation”26 and establish civil and political rights throughout Europe. Italy also makes a plea for those patriots who had exerted themselves or were in the process of exerting themselves to obtain a constitutional government and, in the days when Italy was going to press, were beginning to seek refuge in Great Britain following the failure of their revolutionary movements. In describing in rousing words the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 and the ambiguous role England had played in the persons of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, Lady Morgan tries to counter the support of the crushing of the 1821 rising in the English press: “[L]et those who rejoice in the defeat of the Neapolitan patriots of 1821,” she admonishes, “remember the fate of those 27 who were exposed to the royal clemency of Ferdinand the Fourth in 1790.” Italy thus was a series of exempla from the past, but also a book based on the present and projected towards the future and its success resulted in a more favourable attitude towards Italy and Italians, usually represented quite negatively in 18th century literature. It goes without saying that a favourable representation of Italians would induce her readers to consider the political

25

26

27

The Irish rhetoric of exile has been explored by several authorities. Declan Kiberd, in his seminal book, Inventing Ireland, (London: Vintage, 1995), sees exile as a "nursery of nationality" (p. 2). The poet Thomas Kinsella in his The Dual Tradition (Dublin: Carcanet, 1995) explores the reasons for Irish identity being rooted in exile. The relegation of the language and the poetry to the West and to "the under-privileged and dispossessed" is equated by Kinsella to their going "into a kind of internal exile" (p. 3). To this removal, however, he attributes the development of a cultural identity which is specifically Irish, a fragmented identity, exiled from itself, yet enriched by its duality. Lady Morgan, too, was aware of the linguistic and cultural rift that followed on the British colonization of Ireland, and many of her national tales, such as The Wild Irish Girl or The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties, dwell on the rhetoric of dispossession and loss. Stuart Curran, ‘Reproductions of Italy in Post-Waterloo Britain’, in Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British Romanticisn, ed. by Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002), pp. 135-151 (p. 141). Morgan, Italy, II, xxiv, p. 377.

96

Donatella Abbate Badin

situation of the country with more attention and sympathy. It also contributed in the long run to explain and justify the presence of exiles in England. From their return from Italy onwards, the Morgans, as is testified by Sydney’s Memoirs and the letters she received from various exiles, became a rallying point for Italian refugees, many of whom had played the role of hosts to them but a few months earlier and were now in England in much changed circumstances. As Lady Morgan wrote in 1824 in the “Preface” to her Salvator Rosa, remembering her recent visit to Italy, “Of the number of distinguished friends I made and left in that country, few now reside there; many have been condemned to death; the greatest number have saved their lives by perilous evasion, and exile.”28 Sociologically speaking, the Italian exiles belonged to the upper middleclasses or the aristocracy, were highly educated and implicated in intellectual activities which submitted the political realities of their place of origin to critical analysis. They were in Darko Suvin’s definition, “critical intellectuals,” attempting “to articulate meanings and make sense of the forces shaping [their] lives, as Brecht and Gramsci put it, combining a lived 29 concern for knowledge and for freedom.” Lady Morgan, too, would fit the definition: thus in the relationship with her protégés there was a high level of intellectual and experiential participation. Although she was not properly subjected to “the existential alienation” of exile she was familiar with the feeling of not quite belonging, being at odds with the English powers in force in Celtic Ireland. At the root of the Italians fleeing into exile and of Lady Morgan taking their defence, there were similar concerns for freedom and a similar unease at home. Because of her book and the assistance she was always ready to dispense, not only did she deserve a statue erected in her honour when Italy would be 30 free, as Pepe had advised, but all Italians, as Pecchio wrote, “vous adoptent parmi les plus estimables de leur compatriotes. Quant à moi je vous regarde comme une illustre Puissance Alliée de l’indépendence de l’Italie” [Tr.: “Italians adopt you as one of their most valued compatriots. As for myself, I consider you as an eminent Power allied to the cause of Italian 31 independence”)]. The correspondence Lady Morgan entertained with the protagonists of the first phases of the Risorgimento (and, especially with the editors of the

28

29 30 31

Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (London: Colburn, 1824), pp. 9-10. Darko Suvin, ‘Displaced Persons’, New Left Review, 31 (2005), 107-123 (p. 107). See above. Morgan, Memoirs, II, pp. 215-216. Letter from Giuseppe Pecchio, March 13, 1824.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

97

Conciliatore, the journal that spread liberal ideas while launching Romanticism in Italy),32 paints a very graphic picture of the anxious times that preceded the exile and, especially, of the life of an intellectual refugee in Great Britain or elsewhere (some of the letters were addressed to her from Geneva or Paris). It also gives us the measure of the dignity and pride of her correspondents who, rather than ask for favours and protection, write to inform her about the sufferings of their group and impress their point of view on her. Indeed, from the letters of Porro, Dal Pozzo or Pecchio we get the impression that they are briefing one who had been favourable to the cause in the past so that she might continue being their advocate, indeed their ambassador. Ferdinando Dal Pozzo, whose Opuscoli on the benefits of the revolutionary system Lady Morgan had praised in Italy,33 was one of the most explicit in recognizing her role. In evaluating the impact of her travelogue, he comments: C’en est bien une douceur pour les coœurs sensibles, celle de savoir qu’on propage les bonnes idées, qu’on met en circulation les pensées dignes de l’homme, qu’on défait petit-à-petit les préjugés, qu’on pulvérise les méchants, et surtout les hypocrites de quelque masque qu’il se couvrent. Voilà ce que vous avez fait, digne et immortelle 34 Lady, voilà ce que votre lumineux génie fera toujours, et avec succès.

32

33

34

The Morgans had participated in the editorial vicissitudes of the Conciliatore even contributing some writings. During their two-month stay in Milan, Sydney and her husband shared the occupations and preoccupations of their aristocratic and patriotic friends and, especially, of Luigi Porro Lambertenghi and Federico Confalonieri, who with Silvio Pellico and Ludovico di Breme had founded the Milanese journal, which was suppressed by the Austrian police as subversive shortly after the couple’s departure from Milan. Lady Morgan absorbed from them many of the ideas she voices in Italy about the political and literary situation, but also about social reform and industrial progress (Steamboats, gas-lighting and “schools of mutual instruction” were some of the pet projects of the group). She must also have been informed of the steps some of them were taking to extend to Lombardy the plans Piedmontese revolutionaries were hatching and which led to the 1821 rising. When Carlo Alberto deserted the cause and the Constitutionalists were defeated at Novara, voluntary exile was, for the most fortunate, the only way to escape imprisonment or death. Porro, Pecchio, and Dal Pozzo, known for their anglophilia, sought asylum in England while Confalonieri and Pellico were arrested and jailed before they could leave. About Dal Pozzo’s Opuscoli di un avvocato Milanese originario Piemontese she writes: “one of the ablest political and legal writers that Italy has produced, has proved that in spite of the misrepresentations which have been carefully circulated since the restoration, the estates of his Sardinian Majesty flourished and improved under the revolutionary system; and justified the intention of Providence in favour of a people highly endowed and eminently meritorious” (Italy, I, iv, p. 53). Letter from Ferdinando Dal Pozzo, May 30, 1822.

98

Donatella Abbate Badin Tr.: It is a comfort for sensitive hearts to know that one is spreading sound ideas, circulating thoughts befitting the dignity of man, gradually undoing prejudice, pulverizing the wicked and especially the hypocrites, whatever mask they may hide behind. This is what you have done, my worthy and immortal Lady, this is what your luminous genius will keep achieving successfully.

Dal Pozzo’s faith in the power of her writing also transpires from his desire to influence her opinion. In another letter he insists on her reading Santorre Santa Rosa’s account of the latest revolution in Piedmont (Bonstetten, too, had suggested the same thing)35: Vous connaissez les malheurs de cette révolution, du moins en gros. Je désirerais bien qu’il fût parvenu dans vos mains le seul bon et véridique ouvrage, qu’on ait publié sur ce[t] événement politique, qui est intitulé De la Révolution Piemontaise, sans nom d’auteur, mais avec l’épigraphe ‘sta la forza per lui, per me sta il vero’ – Alfieri. Il est écrit par un homme jeune et loyal, et qui écrit à même de tout savoir: c’est le Comte de S. Rosa, qui eut, sous le dit régime, le portefeuille de la guerre. Vous auriez par lui une juste idée de cette catastrophe.36 Tr.: You know the mishaps of this revolution, at least approximately. I wish you had chanced upon the only good and reliable work published on this political event, entitled De la Révolution Piemontaise, without the author’s name, but with the epigraph by Alfieri ‘sta la forza per lui, per me sta il vero’ (“power may be on his side, truth is on mine”). It was written by a young and loyal man, who writes being in a position of knowing it all: he is Count de S. Rosa, who under the aforesaid government held the Ministry of War. You could get from him a correct opinion of that catastrophe.

There is more than expedient opportunism in the words of praise about her travelogue contained in the letters received between 1821 and 1824; her correspondents, indeed, recognize the role her book was playing in spreading news about the injustices suffered and the hopes entertained by Italians, and express gratitude and the subtle satisfaction at seeing how unpopular her book was with the hated governments ruling the country. This unpopularity, too, was, in their eyes, a proof of its power. Porro Lambertenghi, in whose Milanese palace the editors of the Concilatore used to meet,37 praises her work and its effects warmly: Non le parlai della bellissima sua opera sopra la nostra Italia. Non ha idea quanto piaccia, ma nel tempo medesimo quanto al governo austriaco abbia doluto. […]

35 36 37

Santorre Santa Rosa, La révolution piémontaise, Paris 1823. Letter from Ferdinando Dal Pozzo, January 7, 1822. Porro has “been one of the kindest persons we have met with in Italy” Lady Morgan wrote in her Memoirs (II, p. 107). She dined frequently in his Milanese palace “celebrated for its Etruscan vases” (Memoirs, II, p. 93) and was taken to his “two superb villas on the lake of Como” (Memoirs, II, p. 107).

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

99

Quell’opera fa conoscere come ella conosce il nostro stato politico, e tutto il 38 machiavellismo dei nostri nemici, che vi sono smascherati. Tr.: I have said nothing about your marvellous book about our Italy. You cannot imagine how it is liked and at the same time how it has aggrieved the Austrian government. […] That work shows how well you know our political situation and all the machiavellian arts of our enemies whom you unmask.

This warmth should also dissipate the accusations in the English press that held her responsible for the arrest of her friends.39 A person such as Confalonieri, whose personality and prominent role had been praised in Italy, far from being resentful about the notoriety she had given him, even after having suffered the consequences of his commitment, emphasized the comfort he had experienced in reading those pages which brought him back to the happy days on the shores of Lake Como and to their common cause. Ah! L' Italia sua quanto è diversa ohimè dalla presente. La lessi questo agosto sul lago di Como [...] Non le so dire quanto quella lettura mi fu dolce balsamo al cuore, fummi come al vegliardo la memoria dei suoi verdi anni. […] Eguali sensazioni furon divise da tutti i nostri amici; e qual giudizio avvi più eloquente ed inappellabile che quello delle sensazioni? Il governo perseguita l' opera e perseguiterebbe d' ogni potere la sua autrice. L' una e l' altra ne sono ben degne.40 Tr.: Ah! How different is, alas, your Italy from the present one. I read it last August on the shores of Lake Como […]. I cannot tell you what a sweet balm that reading was for my heart, it was like the memory of his green years for a hoary old man […]. All our friends shared similar impressions; and what judgment is there which would be more eloquent and final than that dictated by sensations? The government persecutes the book as, with all its might, it would persecute the author. They are both worthy of it.

Indeed, the letters exchanged between Confalonieri, Porro or Dal Pozzo and Lady Morgan, testify to great intimacy and mutual respect: “la dolce di lei memoria vive ne’ nostri animi in questi luttuosi tempi come ne’ giorni

38 39

40

Letter from Porro Lambertenghi, February 20, 1822. Not only critics but also people who were sympathetic to her shared this opinion. Bonstetten in a letter of December 1821 while complimenting her for Italy (“J’approuve , je chéris, j’honore votre courage et votre franc parler” [Tr.: I approve of, hold dear and honour your courage and your openness of speech”] denounces, however, the fact that simply naming a person might endanger him or her (“la tyrannie est tellement féroce en Italie.”[Tr.: “So brutal is tyranny in Italy”). Lionel Stevenson quotes a note in the diary of Lord Holland’s son: “Lady Morgan’s book has done incalculable harm here, especially to those she praises for having liberal opinions, and for that many have been banished, imprisoned or watched” (229). Federico Confalonieri, Carteggio, ed. by Gallavresi (Milano: Tipo-Litografia Ripalta, 1911), pp. 471-472.

100

Donatella Abbate Badin

migliori in cui ci conobbimo” writes Confalonieri before being tried. [Tr.: “your sweet memory lives in our souls in these woeful times as in the happier 41 days when we met.”] Others, encouraged by the impact her work had on public opinion, invite her to write similar books which would forward the cause of Italy. Pecchio, for instance, referring to previous correspondence, suggests a subject with serious political implications: Vous voulez que je vous propose un sujet italien à traiter? Cola da’ Rienzo. C’est un sujet que j’ai beaucoup étudié, c’est le tableau le plus brillant, le plus riche et le plus varié de notre histoire. Mais je n’ai pas assez de livres italiens à ma disposition, et peutêtre je n’aurais pas assez d’imagination et d’érudition italienne pour peindre au même tems un personnage tragique, ses tems et ses contemporaires. C’est pour ça que je vous le cède. Les lecteurs me sauront gré quelque jour de cette cession”42 Tr.: Would you like me to suggest an Italian topic for you to deal with? Cola da’ Rienzo. It is a topic I have studied extensively, the most brilliant, rich and varied picture of our history. But I have not enough books at my disposal and perhaps I would not have enough imagination and erudition about Italy to paint at the same time a tragic character, his times and his contemporaries. This is why I let you have it. Some day the readers will be grateful to me for this transaction.

In later years, Antonio Gallenga, an exile of the 1821 revolution who had been a professor of Italian at University College, wrote to Lady Morgan from Turin where he had returned at the outbreak of the 1848 revolution. As he foresaw that the changed tide would soon force him to go back to England, he looked forward to a common writing project they had been discussing: You must not doubt but that I shall be most happy to accept any charge or trust you may destine to me. As soon as we are in London together, we will go to work and accomplish what we have so long meditated. Look over your papers and sound the depth of your memory. The world has yet a great deal to hear from you.43

Unfortunately there are no traces of this cooperation but, to the very last, writing about Italy was on Morgan’s mind. One of her last publications, indeed, was A Letter to Cardinal Wiseman (1850) and it concerned Italy.44

41 42 43 44

Confalonieri, p. 470. Letter from Giuseppe Pecchio, March 13, 1824. Letter from Antonio Gallenga, February 10, 1849. The occasion for the pamphlet was the nomination of the first English Catholic Cardinal after the Reformation, Nicholas Wiseman, who in 1830 had criticized her for her disrespectful information in his Remarks on Lady Morgan’s Statements Regarding St. Peter’s Chair. In her pamphlet, Lady Morgan defended the affirmation she had made in

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

101

Moreover, five weeks before her death she wrote to Sir Charles Nicholson, in very shaky handwriting, that so great a demand “has been made for my Italy that I hope to have a new edition revised and improved appear in a few 45 weeks!” A long letter from George M. Butt about copyright questions confirms that Lady Morgan was serious about the project and that the continuous insistence of her correspondents that her book should continue to be circulated was about to bear fruit now, at the eve of the dreamt-for unification which would make it obsolete. Besides praising Lady Morgan’s work, her correspondents pay her the compliment of treating her as one of their own; they openly discuss Italian politics, the range of subjects going from Pucci’s complaint regarding the 46 wrong methods adopted during the Piedmontese revolution to Gallenga’s mention of Mazzini’s “mad pranks” in Rome and of Cavour’s involvement in 47 the Crimean war. Confalonieri, taking advantage of the fact that his letters were not travelling by regular mail but were entrusted to friends like Count Salazar or Gen. Cockburn, reported without restraint on censorship48, police violence,49 and the government, using freely insulting epithets towards the

45 46

47 48

49

Italy that the so-called St. Peter’s chair in the Vatican was a fraud. Not even at the end, could she accept that the Church should take advantage of the credulity of the people. Letter from Lady Morgan, March 10, 1859. I cambiamenti di sistema non si fan con cangiar semplicemente i nomi, e con le teste coronate non vi è da tentare transazioni,” [Tr.: “Changes in the system are not made simply by changing names, and one must not attempt to reach a compromise with crowned heads.”] Letter from Pucci, April 9, 1821. Letters from Gallenga, February 10, 1849 and January 18, 1855. “[D]ue lettere ch’io le scrissi per la posta una verso il finire dell’anno scorso, l’altra nel corrente [1821] subirono la sorte che l’infame nostra Polizia riserba a persone di invisa fama. Duolmi […] per una lunga lacuna ch’esse portano nella nostra corrispondenza e nella dolorosa storia delle nostre sciagure” (Carteggio, p. 471).[Tr.: “I sent you two letters through the mail, one about the end of last year, the other this year (1821); they suffered the same fate our infamous Police reserve for people whose reputation irks them. I am sorry […] for the interruption this has caused in our correspondence and in the painful history of our calamities ”] “Passai questi mesi battendomi contro le lentezze di una convalescenza difficile, e contro le vessazioni, le visite domiciliari, ed il tuttora pericolo di arresto per parte della polizia e del governo Austriaco.” [Tr.: “I spent these months fighting against the slowness of a difficult recovery and the harassment, the house searches, and, the still extant danger of arrest on the part of the police and the Austrian government.”] Confalonieri, however, does not complain about his own condition: “Questa è la sorte di tutti i buoni cittadini, e non me ne lagno né me ne dolgo. Mi glorio d’averla meritata, e son determinato di non abbandonare il mio posto quando anche le maggiori vessazioni e la prigionia mi sovrastino” [Tr.: “This is the fate of all good citizens and I do not complain nor feel sorry for myself. I am proud, indeed, of having deserved it and am determined not to forsake my position even if more harassment, indeed imprisonment, are impending”] (November 7, 1821; Carteggio, p. 471).

102

Donatella Abbate Badin

Austrians (“imbecille Nerone,” “infame polizia” “Misera Italia [….] l’Austriaco artiglio tutta la domina e la opprime”) [Tr.: “the idiot Nero,” “infamous police” “miserable Italy […] Austrian claws dominate it and oppress it all.] His, and also, in part, the other correspondents’ letters, are like a war bulletin with news of the arrests, sufferings or whereabouts of their friends, as well as of their own tribulations. Porro, too, acts as a relayer of information about their group with the hope that Lady Morgan would spread it further among sympathisers. A letter addressed to Pecchio from Alexandre Andryane (who had been imprisoned in the Spielberg for his adopted country) and containing intelligence about his fellow prisoner, Confalonieri, is among Lady Morgan’s papers. Rather than summarizing it, Pecchio had preferred to let her have the original, knowing that her concern for her Italian friends was equal to his and that she would take it upon herself to circulate the news. Thus, through correspondence with the more intimate friends, she was continuously informed of the fate of the larger group. Although, for instance, there are no traces of a direct exchange of letters by Pellico with Lady Morgan, she is always aware of his lot, and his death is recorded in the chapter of Lady Morgan’s Memoir entitled “Fall of the Leaves”: she remembers him as “the delight of all” adding that his imprisonment had 50 broken his character and “prostrat [ed] his intellect.” . Besides being the recipient of affectionate reminiscences, of a shared grief for the common friends and of the airing of compromising political opinion, Lady Morgan’s role, however, like that of other patrons, was principally a practical one. In the collection of manuscripts of the Beinecke Library there are, as was usual in those days, a great number of letters of introduction of travellers (some of them quite famous) to Dublin or London or, given the times, also many requests for her social and even pecuniary aid. Giovanni Berchet wrote from London to recommend James Ciani (he, too, an Italian exile) and his brother, Philip Ciani, who were visiting Ireland and would tell her “how often you are remembered by your Italian friends in 51 London.” Dal Pozzo, too, underlined her generosity towards Italian refugees: “Vous vous intéressez beaucoup au sort des Italiens, de quelque partie de l’Italie qu’il soient, qui ont dû s’expatrier” [Tr.: “You take great interest in the fate of Italians, from whichever part of Italy they are, who have had to expatriate”] and on this basis he recommended his friend, De Marchi, to her attention:

50 51

Morgan, Memoirs, II, p. 524. Letter from Giovanni Berchet, April 30, 1825.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

103

[P]ermettez-moi que j’appelle votre intérêt sur un de mes infortunés compatriotes. […] Dites-moi si à Dublin il pourrait utilement s’occuper? Et si vous le protégeriez? Rien alors ne lui manquerait. […] Pour peu qu’il y ait de l’espoir à Dublin, j’aimerais de préférence qu’il fût sous votre égide, et que vous lui fussiez sa divinité tutélaire et bienfaisante. Vous devez l’être pour tous les Italiens, et pour tous ceux qui pensent libéralement.”52 Tr.: Allow me to call your attention on one of my unfortunate compatriots. […] Tell me if in Dublin he could find a useful occupation? And if you would protect him? In which case he would be wanting in nothing. […] Little though there may be hope in Dublin, I would prefer it if he were under your protection and if you became his benevolent tutelary deity. You must be so for all Italians and for all those who entertain liberal thoughts.

A few years later, the same Dal Pozzo, addressing her as “friend of all Italians and admirer of this country’s great authors” (“amie des italiens et admiratrice des grands auteurs de ce pays”) introduced Alfieri’s nephew, 53 Marquis Colli, from Piedmont) and in 1833 an actor and singer, Mr Piozzi, who was Mrs Piozzi’s nephew and the elder brother of her adopted son.54 Many approached her directly invoking her help like a descendant of Amerigo Vespucci, Maria Elena America de’ Vespucci who introduces herself with these piteous words: “n’ayant pour auréole que mon courage, riche de mon nom et de mes malheurs, j’ai frappè à la porte de Londres avec le baton de l’exilé.” [Tr.: “having no other halo but my courage, rich only in my name and my misfortunes, I knocked at your door with the exile’s 55 staff”]. The Morgans were behind several public subscriptions (e.g. the one of Times of 1824) to relieve the financial difficulties of the less fortunate refugees, those that had no relatives who sent them remittances or who had had their property confiscated or had been obliged to flee before they could realize a livelihood by sales or loans on the security of their properties. Although some of these letters of introduction or direct requests concern artists, musicians (Lady Morgan was an opera buff and tried to bring the Italian opera to Dublin) or just ordinary people, most of the recommendations or requests for help regarded people who had been her equals, aristocrats or intellectuals fallen on hard times and who were now in search for a dignified

52 53 54

55

Letter from Dal Pozzo, May 30, 1822. Ibid., September 27, 1827. Ibid., March 3, 1833. By the same mail he sent her a book by Edward Mangin entitled Piozziana or, Recollections of the Late Mrs. Piozzi, with Remarks. By a Friend (London: Edward Moxon, 1833). Letter from Maria Elena America de’ Vespucci. Undated.

104

Donatella Abbate Badin

job. The desire for the certainty of a fixed income was a potent consideration which induced many refugees to seek a professorship of Italian in the too few universities of the British Islands. This meant fierce though generally fair competition (as will be seen in Pecchio’s case) among highly qualified candidates. Many, however, ended up giving private language lessons, which was considered a humiliating job. Giuseppe Pecchio, a former friend and well-known economist, was one of those who approached the Morgans for help. The couple had known the distinguished intellectual and patriot through their common association with the Conciliatore and although he was not in the innermost circle of their Milanese friends, Pecchio had everything to attract Sydney’s admiration. He had established Lancastrian schools and held views inspired by sociology regarding the arts, and literature in particular, which, both believed, could prosper only where individual liberties were assured by economic progress supported by government action. One can imagine how much it must have cost him to half humorously confess his need: L’Empereur des Lanziqueneques a saisi mes biens depuis deux ans et ne veux pas les rendre ni à mes héritiers ni a mes créanciers. La querelle ne finira pas sitôt; mes ayantsdroit ont à faire avec un rocher, un homme de pierre. Il faut donc que je pense à me mettre à l’abri pendant deux ou trois ans.56 Tr.: The Emperor of Lansquenets confiscated my possessions two years ago and will return them neither to my heirs nor to my creditors. The controversy will not be finished so soon; my rightful heirs have to contend with a rock, a man of stone. I must therefore seek shelter for two or three years.

Having heard that Trinity College, Dublin, had an opening for a chair in Italian and Spanish, Count Pecchio approached the Morgans through several letters full of qualms asking for their advice and help about whether he should apply or not without exposing himself to the risk of a refusal or having to compete in examinations or by presenting letters of recommendation. The letters are a pathetic example of the predicament in which these former lions of Milanese society found themselves now, torn between need and pride. Pecchio initially does not even dare ask in his own person but hides behind the mask of a pretended friend: Le hazard qui est un des grands bienfaiteurs du genre humain, me fit tomber hier dans les mains un journal de Dublin, où l’on annonce que le Trinity College de votre magnifique ex-Capitale doit nommer un Professeur de langue italienne et espagnolle pour le mois de novembre prochain. Voilà une belle niche pour un emigré italien. C’est

56

Letter from Pecchio, September 20, 1824.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

105

une place qui conviendrait fort bien à un de nos amis / que je ne peux pas nommer à présent / et chez le quel se réunissent la moralité etc. etc. et la capacité que l’on exige.57 Tr.: Chance which is one of the great benefactors of humanity would have it that yesterday a paper from Dublin fell into my hands containing the announcement that Trinity College in your splendid former capital must appoint a professor of Italian and Spanish by next November. This would be a splendid niche for an Italian émigré. It is a position that would perfectly suit one of our friends (whom I cannot name right now) who gathers in himself moral standards etc. etc and the abilities requested.

In the successive letter he drops the pretence and comes forth in his own tormented person: Il faut ouvrir le rideau; le prétendant à la chaire de langue italienne et espagnolle c’est moi. […] Mais vous sentez bien que je voudrais l’obtenir avec decorum. Par conséquent je ne voudrais lutter de trop près avec personne, et même je ne voudrais pas venir moimême à Dublin faire la cour aux Fellows car cela pourrait m’exposer à des attaques, ou à la médisance des autres concurrens, comme il y eut déjà lieu dans les journaux de Dublin entre deux des compétiteurs. Dans le cas seulement d’une réussite très probable, d’une victoire facile, veni vidi vici, je viendrais à Dublin une semaine avant la nommination.58 Tr.: We must lift the curtain; the candidate for the Italian and Spanish chair is none but myself. […] You certainly understand that I would like to obtain it decorously. Thus I would not want to compete too closely with anyone; indeed I would not want to have to come myself to Dublin to pay my courtship to the Fellows because this would expose me to open attacks or to gossip on the part of the other contestants, as has already happened in the Dublin papers between two competitors. Only in the case of a very probable success, of an easy victory, veni vidi vici, would I come to Dublin one week before the appointment.

Pecchio was one of the finest intellectuals of the age, the author of Storia della economia pubblica in Italia, the first history of Italian economic thought, which is still considered a classic of its genre and had made him famous. No wonder that he considered it as self-demeaning even to have to present the equivalent of a curriculum vitae: Je n’ai pas voulu faire comme les rois qui font leur panégyrique eux-mêmes; par conséquent je n’ai pas voulu dire aussi que j’ai pris le grade de Docteur en Droit de 59 l’Université de Pavie etc. etc. Ayez donc la bonté de suppléer à ma modestie.

57 58 59

Ibid., September 13, 1824. Ibid., September 20, 1824. Ibid., September 30, 1824.

106

Donatella Abbate Badin

Tr.: I did not want to act as those kings who write their own panegyric; therefore I would not say that I have the degree of Doctor in Law from the University of Pavia etc. etc. Please be so kind as to compensate for my modesty.

The distaste for having to curry favour with the people who would recommend him, or of debasing himself in “bowing” to the selecting committee of Fellows of the college transpires from the self-irony of his preliminary inquiries, Si moi donc, qui ai écrit dans le Conciliatore, qui suis l’auteur de l’Histoire des Finances du Royaume d’Italie depuis le 1802 au 1814, et des lettres sur l’Espagne, sur le Portugal etc. etc., je ne déplais pas aux Fellows, si vous les retrouvez disposés en ma faveur, alors / et alors seulement/ j’enverrai ma demande au Bursar avec les lettres de recommendation, et je viendrai moi-même à Dublin une semaine avant l’election, si cela sera nécessaire. Bref, vous concevez par tout ce ménagement que j’ai pour mon amour propre que je voudrais que l’on me conférât la chaire plutôt que de la solliciter avec des visites et des courbettes60. Tr.: If I, who have written in the Conciliatore, who am the author of the History of Finances in the Kingdom of Italy from 1802 to 1814 and of some letters from Spain and Portugal etc. etc, do not fail to please the Fellows, and if you find them favourably disposed towards me, then (and then only) shall I send the Bursar my application with some letters of recommendation and would come personally to Dublin one week before the election, if it were necessary. In short, you understand from the way I look after my self-esteem that I would like them to assign me the chair without my having to beg for it with visits and bows.

Finally on the basis of reassurance that the conditions were right, Pecchio applied for the job, providing letters of recommendation from Lord Holland, Lady Kinnaird and many others. Lady Morgan wrote to the Provost and Sir Charles (whom Pecchio dubs “le Bursar à Dublin pour les émigrés” [“the Dublin Bursar for émigrés”])61 delivered the application to the Treasurer personally. After so much ado, Pecchio, however, found himself in a quandary: his friend Evasio Radice, who had been in Spain with him and had been condemned to death by Carlo Felice, had also applied for the same post. Pecchio could not retire and lose face, having received so many promises of help; at the same time he did not want to spoil his friend’s chances. He therefore asked the Morgans to withdraw their support from him and concentrate all their efforts to help Radice:

60 61

Ibid., September 20, 1824. Ibid., September 30, 1824.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

107

[J]e vous prie d’intriguer en faveur de notre ami Radice, et oubliez-moi tout-à-fait ou regardez –moi comme un concurrent qui vous est inconnu […] tournez tous vos efforts en faveur de mon bien-aimé Radice mais je ne peux faire davantage pour lui.62 Tr.: I pray you to scheme in favour of our friend Radice, and forget me altogether or consider me as an applicant who is unknown to you. […] turn all your efforts in favour of my beloved Radice; I myself cannot do more for him.

Radice even travelled to Ireland to prospect about the job and we have a letter of his to Lady Morgan in which he invokes a testimonial from her on the grounds of her well-known partiality for Italian refugees: Ma se gl’Italiani si rivolgono alcuna volta a voi, attribuitelo, mia Signora alla special cortesia colla quale gli avete sempre accolti, e più ancora al nobile interessamento vostro per coloro che bruciarono qualche grano d’incenso in sull’altare della libertà.63 Tr.: But if Italians once more apply to you, ascribe it, milady, to the special kindness with which you always welcomed them and even more so, to the noble interest you took in the fate of those who burnt a few grains of incense on the altar of freedom.

The plot thickens as yet another refugee, Amedeo Ravina, also applied to Lady Morgan for that same post appealing to “the bienveillante disposition de votre grande âme envers les malheureuses victimes de la tirannie.” [Tr.: “The generous disposition of your great soul towards the unhappy victims of 64 tyranny.”] The story would be funny, were it not pitiable because of the tales of destitution and anguish that we read behind Radice’s confession about his “stringenti circostanze” (“pressing circimstances”) or Pecchio’s hesitations and defiant pride: “il est toujours bon de montrer à ses amis et ennemis qu’on sait maîtriser son sort” [Tr.: “It is always a good thing to show one’s friends and enemies that one knows how to master one’s fate] and the affirmation that, if he got the job, “je pourrais me moquer encore plus à mon aise de l’impuissance de la puissante Autriche” [Tr.: “I could mock even 65 more at ease the impotence of potent Austria.”] Another possibility of earning some money for exiles was writing, and again Lady Morgan, with her many acquaintances in the world of publishing, was applied to whenever one of those intellectuals in search of a livelihood or with an axe to grind had a book to publish or to publicize. Dal Pozzo sent her a “petit ouvrage” regarding “une nouvelle organisation judiciaire introduite

62 63 64 65

Ibid., October 19, 1824. Letter from Radice, September 29, 1824. Letter from Ravina, September 1824. Letter from Pecchio, September 30, 1824.

108

Donatella Abbate Badin

en Piémont” [Tr.: “A short piece of work [regarding] a new judicial 66 organisation introduced in Piedmont”] , and someone writing under the pseudonym of Alfieri called her attention to a brochure of his on the 1830 revolution of France, describing himself as one of “those who labour in the same glorious cause that has rendered the De Staël of Erin, the Hieromnema 67 of her Country, the advocate of freedom through the world.” A curious recommendation was addressed to her by Anna Babington, an Irish governess in the household of Count Stackelberg, the Prussian Ambassador in Naples, who wrote to ask her to subscribe to the publication of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Memoirs. The octogenarian author of Mozart’s libretti was living in near destitution in New York after his project to establish an Italian Library had failed. Babington never mentions the libretti as a title of merit but introduces Da Ponte as “the successor of Metastasio as Theatrical Poet to the Emperor Joseph the 2nd.” His Memoirs exceed, in Miss Babington’s opinion, “any others that I have ever read not excepting those of his countryman Benvenuto Cellini.” She presumes to ask Lady Morgan’s patronage because her “approbation might secure success” to a work she is endeavouring to make known to others: My hopes are founded on the pity which genius in the sunshine of prosperity ought to feel for genius bearing up with fortitude against all the storms of adversity; and which a supporter of the cause of freedom must experience for one, whose misfortunes 68 originated in the persecutions of Despotism.

The letter reveals the extent of Lady Morgan’s reputation in 1830 as a sponsor of Italian literati and a protector of exiles. Da Ponte too "was in early life driven from his native country by tyranny and oppression and persecuted 69 by misfortune wherever he fixed his abode” , although his exile (in England and the United States) preceded the Napoleonic era. But Babington knows that exile, whatever its motivation, is a chord she can touch to obtain Lady Morgan’s attention. Andrea Calbo, the Greek-Italian poet who had initially accompanied Foscolo in his British exile as his secretary, distinguishes himself from the rest because he approaches her from Geneva (where he had taken refuge after leaving Foscolo and London) not about a work of his own but about his plan to translate her Italy into Italian. His gesture is a homage to her work and an

66 67 68 69

Letter from Dal Pozzo, May 10, 1819. Anonymous letter signed Alfieri, September 25, 1830. Letter from Anna Babington, March 29, 1830. Ibid., March 29, 1830.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

109

act of faith in its possibilities, especially that of awakening the conscience of the oppressed. While the other correspondents place great faith in the effect Lady Morgan’s work could have on foreign public opinion, Calbo thinks especially of his country: Circa il mio lavoro, però, è un regalo ch’io desidererei di fare a quel paese sbranato. Non è vero, Mylady, che quel popolo ha molte e profonde ferite? Che la sola medicina che a lui nelle presenti circostanze si confaccia, è quella che può guarirlo dalla superstizione, dai pettegolezzi, dalle intralciate dissensioni, dall’ozio, dall’ignoranza? Non è vero che bisogna parlargli delle sue glorie antiche? Che bisogna indicargli a uno a uno i pugnali che lo lacerano continuamente, infamemente?70 Tr.: As to my work, it is a gift I would like to offer to that torn country. Is it not true, milady, that that people has many deep wounds? That the only medicine that would be appropriate in the present circumstances is one that can cure it from superstition, gossip, hindering dissent, sloth and ignorance? Is it not true that it must be reminded of its ancient glory? That it must be shown singularly all the daggers that rip it apart continuously, disgracefully?

He feels that she reflects so faithfully what he would want to write that he prefers choosing the “relaxing” activity of finding the best stylistic form for translating what she writes, rather than trying to express ideas which have already been expressed so well: Io aveva scritto alcune pagine, colla stessa veduta; ma ho letto la vostra opera, e ho trovato che avete espresso le mie idee con quella grazia e quell’ordine che non può mancare di farle gustare. […] D’altronde, vi confesso Mylady (confessione strana, certo, ma me la perdonerete spero) confesso ch’io sono affaticato, ho bisogno di riposo e di consolazione e (quello che sembrerà forse contraddittorio) ho bisogno ancor di occuparmi riposando. Il lavoro dello stile, non mi affaticherebbe tanto quanto quello delle Idee.71 Tr.: I had written a few pages holding the same views but I read your work, and found that you had expressed my ideas with such taste and such harmony that they could not fail to give pleasure. […] Moreover, I confess, milady (a strange confession, but you will forgive me I hope) I confess that I am tired, that I need rest and consolation and (this may seem to you paradoxical) I also need an occupation while I rest. The exercise of style would not tire me so much as the search for ideas.

Moreover, the project would relieve the boredom of an exile in the Alps (“più 72 di una noja a un esiliato fra le Alpi”). In spite of his enthusiasm and of the

70 71 72

Letter from Andrea Calbo, February 9, 1822. Ibid., December 31, 1821. Ibid.

110

Donatella Abbate Badin

samples he sent her where one can see that he had applied himself with great competence and a searching mind, (also correcting many of Lady Morgan’s factual mistakes), the translation was never completed nor published. And yet Calbo had been optimistic about the possibilities of its circulation: Le difficoltà di stampare una traduzione italiana non sono tanto grandi quanto ve le figurate, Mylady. Qui a Ginevra la stampa è libera. Il Governo non esigerebbe che il nome dello stampatore e quello del traduttore. Per la circolazione in Italia non vi dissimulerò s’incontrano degli ostacoli, ma i Libraj conoscono meglio di noi di quai mezzi deve uno servirsi in tali circostanze […] Non vi pigliate alcun pensiero per il mio pericolo personale. Il sistema attuale di proscrizione mi ha già chiuso ogni entrata in quel paese.73 Tr.: The difficulty of printing an Italian translation is not as unsurmountable as you imagine, milady. Here in Geneva the press is free. The government would only need the name of the printer and the translator. As for circulation in Italy, I shall not conceal that there may be obstacles, but booksellers know better than we do what means to employ in such circumstances. […] Do not worry about my personal danger. The actual system of proscription has already foreclosed all possibilities of entrance for me.

In the middle of the apparently idyllic relationship between Lady Morgan and the Italian refugees, there occurred however, a little drama. The Dublin Star of February 21-25, 1824 published a very harsh piece of criticism of her Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, accompanied by an approving letter whose author was alleged to be Ugo Foscolo.74 Lady Morgan was furious and wrote to her various friends. Pecchio took it upon himself to restore her reputation thus deserving to be nominated by 75 Lady Morgan as her “chevalier d’honneur.” He had a letter of support and a disclaimer published on the Freman’s Journal of Dublin which was also undersigned by Dal Pozzo, Ugoni and Berchet and he also made sure a laconic declaration would appear in the Times. Many of her Italian friends wrote trying to appease her. Pecchio privately commented “j’ai été vraiment indigné des sottises qu’on a osé imprimer” [Tr.: “I was really indignant at the nonsense they dared print”] and tried to excuse Porro who had been absent

73 74

75

Ibid., February 9, 1822. The article continued also on the 23rd and 25th of February. The critic finds fault with the political slant of the biography and with Lady Morgan’s habit of drawing analogies with the present situation of Ireland, and disapproves of her making "the worthless artist the very beau ideal of moral perfection, the friend of freedom, in fact a very NONPAREIL.” Lady Morgan is also accused of writing a work of pure fantasy (“the facts recounted [are] astoundingly marvelous, romantically wild”), of being ignorant of history and of committing “barefaced plagiarism.” Letter from Pecchio, March 13, 1824.

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

111

from London for some months “Voilà le motif pour le quel je n’ai pas pu joindre son nom à ceux d’autres italiens qui vous adoptent parmi les plus estimables de leur compatriotes” [Tr.: “This is the reason for my not adding his name to the list of the other Italians who adopt you as one of their most 76 estimable countrymen.”] Porro himself complained in mock indignation that she called him a deserter: Moi un déserteur! Ma chère Milady Morgan, comment vous avez pu même concevoir une pareille idée.[…] non seulement moi, mais tous nos amis d’Italie qui sont en Grande Bretagne vous aiment et vous estiment, mais vous les trouverez toujours prêts à le montrer en public cette attachement, et cette considération. Seulement, permettez moi que je vous fasse un reproche d’en avoir douté. Vous avez écrit des choses si (vrai[es], si fortes en politique dans Salvator non seulement contre le despotisme étranger mais même contre le despotisme intérieur, à l’égard de votre Irlande, que je ne suis pas du tout surpris qu’on tache de vous tracasser. Mais vous êtes un militaire en première ligne et il faut savoir souffrire longtems.77 (24 May 1824) Tr.: Me a deserter! My dear Milady Morgan, how could you even conceive of such an idea. […] Not only I, but all our friends from Italy who are in England love and esteem you and you will always find them ready to show their attachment and consideration in public. Only allow me to reproach you for having doubted me. You have written such strong and politically true things in Salvator not only about foreign despotism but even about internal despotism, regarding your Ireland, that I am not surprised if they try to harass you. But you are a front-line soldier and you must suffer.

Foscolo also wrote to her rather dryly declaring this was a despicable imposture intended to harm him rather than her. He also added a formal declaration “que je n’ai point ecrit ni une telle lettre, ni jamais aucun mal que l’on pourrait citer contre vous” [Tr.: “I have neither written such a letter, nor ever an evil word which could be quoted against you.”]78 inviting her to make whatever use of this declaration she felt right. In spite of this disclaimer, the Morning Star persisted in affirming that the original article was in Foscolo’s hand, that his denial was insisted upon by Colburn who was his own as well as Lady Morgan’s publisher and, finally, that the letter of recantation was a hoax. The Star even published a second letter supposedly from Foscolo confirming his first opinion and a number of letters from Italian intellectuals (including one purportedly from Pecchio) which all amounted to approval of the editor of the Star and of the presumed Foscolo and expressed disapproval of Lady Morgan “I am authorized by several of the Italian Nobility […] to

76 77 78

Ibid., March 13, 1824. Letter from Porro, May 24, 1824. Letter from Pecchio, March 4, 1824.

112

Donatella Abbate Badin

declare to you in their names, that they, in common with the Italian people devoted to legitimate Government, approve of your opinion regarding the works of Milady Morgan”79 said one of these letters. The Star even supported its position by publishing three experts’ testimonials that the letters were in Foscolo’s handwriting. It was only when it was revealed that one of the experts had been dead ten years, and another insisted on having a disclaimer published in the paper that the affair was revealed to be an elaborate hoax. In consequence of all the journalistic frauds committed in the Star and other papers, the Secretary of State brought an Act making similar offences a misdemeanor punishable by fine or imprisonment. This stupid controversy well illustrates the difficult position of exiles, torn on the one hand by internal strife, and on the other turned into pawns in the hands of their hosts. The unpopularity of Lady Morgan with the conservative press because of her radical ideas was compounded by suspicion of people who were clearly not “devoted to legitimate Government.” The Tory paper, the Star, chanced on a double opportunity of discrediting her by publishing counterfeit letters from the people she was defending and, at the same time, of discrediting the exiles, making them appear disloyal towards their champions. The presence of a highly qualified and politicized group of people in the country, plotting against allied countries and in favour of suspect causes, was considered a threat, then as in our times, to the stability of the government and every opportunity to diminish their prestige was pounced upon. However, Lady Morgan’s outrage did not last, and when at a dinner party in London in June 1825 she met the Italian poet, she records that he cried on hearing her sing Irish songs.80 The history of the relations between English hosts and Italian exiles was made of such stories, mixing comedy and drama, pettiness and generosity, rivalries and mutual support. As for Lady Morgan, she played her part to the hilt enjoying the compliments she received and the power she could yield, the intrigues and the scandals, but also caring sincerely for the fate of those who had been her friends or those who shared her ideals. Although most of her correspondents were privileged people, we get glimpses through their letters of how precarious the life of an exile always is. Edward Said puts it well

79 80

The Dublin Star, February 25, 1824. “Ugo Foscolo dined with us at Mrs. Brown’s; – full of paradoxes, – hated Italian music, – cried over my Irish song; – his account of his novel Jacopo Ortis, all true; was six times more in love than he described; defended England’s conduct to Italy; cried down the Whigs for originating the present system. He despised the society du bon ton of London; – it only gave him the trouble of writing apologies” (Memoirs, II, 217).

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

113

when he remarks: “No matter how well they may do, exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference (even as they frequently exploit it) as a 81 kind of orphanhood.” The frequent mention of homeland in the letters to Lady Morgan, the sense of estrangement, the refusal to belong shown in clinging to one’s linguistic group and to the people who, like her, were associated with the past, are all confirmations of the unease Italian exiles in London experienced. Moreover, this sample of the correspondence between a liberal-minded Irish patron and the exiles of the first wave of proscriptions, reveals yet another thing: a similar nationalistic rhetoric, made up of inflated language and overstatements is present both in the letters of the Italians and in Lady Morgan’s fictional and non-fictional prose. Lady Morgan, as mentioned earlier, also felt somehow estranged from the Ascendancy prevailing in Ireland and had a quarrel (at least from her youth to the 1830s) with the actions of British authority at home and abroad. These letters confirm what Porro had intuited in the passage quoted above, that Lady Morgan’s solidarity was the fruit of her reaction to “foreign and internal 82 despotism.” Once again, although her responses to her correspondents have not been preserved, we may assume that they espoused the "jargon of liberty 83 and of rights" which she used indistinctly when she wrote about Ireland or about Italy. Bibliography Annali d’Italianistica, 20 (2001). Special issue “Exile and Literature.” Badin, Donatella, Lady Morgan’s Italy: Irish Sensibilities and Italian Realities (Bethesda MD: Academica Press, 2008). Badin, Donatella, Un' irlandese a Torino: Lady Morgan (with a translation of chapters ii, iii, and iv) (Torino: Trauben, 2003). Branca, Vittor, ed., Il Conciliatore (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1965). Cambon, Glauco, Ugo Foscolo: Poet of Exile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Campbell, Mary, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora Press, 1988).

81 82 83

Said, p. 182. Letter from Porro, May 24, 1824. Morgan, Italy, I, p. 142.

114

Donatella Abbate Badin

Cattaneo, Carlo, “Ugo Foscolo e l’Italia”, in Scritti letterari, artistici, linguistici e vari, ed. by Agostino Bertani (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1948), 275-319. Cerutti, Toni, Antonio Gallenga: An Italian Writer in Victorian England (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Cheyne, Joseph and Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, eds., L’Esilio romantico: forme di un conflitto (Bari: Adriatica, 1990). Confalonieri, Federico, Carteggio, ed. by Gallavresi (Milano: Tipo-Litografia Ripalta, 1911). Curran, Stuart, “Reproductions of Italy in Post-Waterloo Britain”, in Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism, ed. by Crisafulli Lilla Maria (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002), 135-151. Dal Pozzo, Ferdinando, Opuscoli di un avvocato Milanese originario Piemontese (Milano: Pietro Giegler, 1819). de Marco, Giovanni, Mitografia dell’esule: da Dante al Novecento (Napoli e Milano: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996). Dionigi, Renzo, Antonio Gallenga: An Italian exile in Brahmin Boston, 18361839 (Varese: Insubria University Press, 2006). Eagleton, Terry, Exiles and Emigrés (London and New York: Schocken, 1970). Garosci, Aldo, Antonio Gallenga: vita avventurosa di un emigrato dell' Ottocento (Torino: Centro studi piemontesi, 1979). Ginsborg, Paul, “Il Risorgimento”, in Storia d’Italia. (Torino: Einaudi, 2006). Hearder, Harry and D. P. Waley, A Short History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1996). Kinsella, Thomas, The Dual Tradition (Dublin: Carcanet, 1995). Lindon, John, Studi sul Foscolo inglese (Pisa: Guardini, 1987). Mangin, Edward, Piozziana or, Recollections of the Late Mrs. Piozzi, with Remarks. By a Friend (London: Edward Moxon, 1833). Morgan, Lady [Sydney Owenson] Italy, 2 vols. (London: Colburn, 1821). ––. Letter to Cardinal Wiseman (London: Westerton, 1851). ––. The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (London: Colburn, 1824). ––. Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, 2 vols, ed. by T. W. Hepworth Dixon and Geraldine Jewsbury (London: W. H. Allen, 1862). Pecchio, Giuseppe, Osservazioni semi-serie di un esule sull’Inghilterra (Lugano: Ruggia 1831). Said, Edward, Reflections on Exile (London: Granta Books, 2001). Santa Rosa, Santorre, La révolution piémontaise (Paris 1823).

Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles

115

Stevenson, Arthur Lionel, The Wild Irish Girl: The Life of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936). Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed., Exile and Creativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). Suvin, Darko, ‘Displaced Persons’, in New Left Review, 31 (2005): 107-122. Vincent, Eric Reginald, Ugo Foscolo: An Italian in Regency Emgland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Wicks, Margaret, The Italian Exiles in London 1816-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1937). Wiseman, Nicholas, Remarks on Lady Morgan’s Statement Regarding St. Peter’s Chair (Rome: Salvucci, 1833). Manuscripts from the James Marshall Osborn Collection of Lady Sydney Morgan. General Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Simonetta Berbeglia James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence In a letter to her sister Henrietta, Elizabeth Barrett Browning introduced James Montgomery Stuart as ‘a very gentlemanly & refined Scotchman who has married an Italian wife’.1 The Brownings had met Montgomery Stuart in Bagni di Lucca in 1849 when he was ‘enlightening the English barbarians’2 with his lectures on Shakespeare. Much to the poets’ pleasure, he had been unable to ‘get through a lecture without quoting’ their friend Anna Jameson, and had declared ‘that no English critic had done so much for the divine poet as a woman…Mrs Jameson’.3 ‘We mean to use his society a little when we return to Florence where he resides’, Mrs. Browning wrote to Mrs. Jameson from Bagni di Lucca.4 Back in Florence, however, Stuart’s society was far from being used a little and the ‘cultivated’ Scotsman became so regular in the Casa Guidi salon that, a year later, Elizabeth could count him ‘among our few friends in Italy’.5 He felt so at home in Via Maggio that he sat ‘till past twelve’,6 or he arrived unexpectedly on a ‘monday morning’ and, without caring about Elizabeth writing letters, ‘he sits down in the chair opposite, takes off his great coat, .. is going to stay.. regularly’.7 The American man of letters Charles Eliot Norton thought Montgomery Stuart’s presence a bit obtrusive, when he wrote home complaining how he had spoilt his first visit to Casa Guidi: I had hardly entered when a Mr Stuart an Englishman, accompanied by an Italian gentleman, came in. This I regretted for of course the conversation became more general and less interesting to me than if I had been alone with Mr and Mrs Browning.8

1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8

The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. by Philip Kelley, S. Lewis, and E. Hagan (Waco: Wedgestone Press, 2007), XVI, p. 39. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. by Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1897), I, p. 416. Kenyon, I, p. 422. Ibid. Kelley, Lewis, and Hagan, XVI, p. 118. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella, ed. by Scott Lewis, 2 vols (Waco: Wedgestone Press, 2002), I, p. 534. Lewis, I, p. 558. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. by Sarah Norton & M.A. DeWolfe Howe, 2 vols (Boston: Constable, 1913), I, p. 74.

118

Simonetta Berbeglia

Who was this Scottish ‘gentleman in the highest sense, of liberal views & sympathies, and full of cultivation’9 who was admitted to the small circle of tea-takers at Casa Guidi? The son of Robert Stuart (1770-1828), a clerk to the Barons of the Court of Exchequer, and Julia Comb (1784-1816), James Montgomery Stuart was born in Edinburgh on 7 June 1816. Left as an orphan when he was a child, he grew up under the tender guardianship of Sir James Montgomery, 2nd Baronet of Stanhope, whose name he had borne since his birth.10 A delicate boy, he spent his childhood reading and, at five, he was already familiar with Shakespeare’s works. After leaving the Edinburgh Academy, his guardian decided it was time for him to face the world and, when he was fifteen, he was sent to Göttingen University, where the Grimm brothers were teaching and Otto von Bismarck was studying. That is why Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write to Mrs Jameson: ‘his speciality seems to lie among your Germans’.11 Paris welcomed Stuart when he was twenty. After taking his degree in Germany, he spent two years in France studying foreign literatures at university. His poor health, however, compelled him to swell the ranks of those pilgrims who went to Italy in the hope that the sun, the warm breezes and the blue skies would heal their constitutions. The first evidence of his Italian stay is his signing the members’ book at Vieusseux’s Scientific and Literary Reading Rooms on 10 July 1842, giving ‘Casa Coselli, Borgo SS. Apostoli’ as his address in Florence.12 Both Casa Coselli and Vieusseux’s were to play a crucial role in young Stuart’s life. It was in Casa Coselli that James Stuart met his future wife, Maria Gherardini, the sister of ‘his lodging house keeper’.13 She was ‘a clever woman and fairly educated’,14 but certainly not his social or intellectual equal. James and Maria were married in 1845 and they had four children: Julia,15 Robert, Mary and Rose16. Although

9 10

11 12 13

14

15

16

Kelly, Lewis, and Hagan, XVI, p. 118. National Archives of Scotland, SC70/1/38, Trust, Disposition and Settlement of Robert Stuart. Kelly, Lewis, and Hagan, XVI, p. 118. Archivio storico Vieusseux, Libro dei soci 3. Maria Gherardini (Castelnuovo Val di Cecina, 1822?- Perugia, 1892), daughter of Pietro Gherardini. Mary Cunliffe, Notes by the way, p. 26 [Typescript at The University Library, Santa Cruz University, CA]. Julia Adriana Stuart (Florence, 1846- Perugia, 1878), Robert’s twin sister, she never married. She died of diphtheria in the epidemic that affected the Stuarts while they were staying at Mandoleto, in the countryside near Perugia. In a few days James Montgomery Stuart lost the eldest of his daughters, his son-in-law and his little grandchild. Rose Euphemia Stuart (Florence, 1852– Leghorn, 1897). She died unmarried.

James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence

119

a Presbyterian, Stuart let all his children be baptized into the Catholic Church, thus perhaps causing a breach with his family in Scotland. If Casa Coselli proved to be instrumental to his family life, Vieusseux’s reading rooms were the springboard to Stuart’s entry into enlightened Florentine society. Since 1820 a Genevan merchant, Jean Pierre Vieusseux, had converted Palazzo Buondelmonti in Piazza Santa Trinita into an enormous literary workshop’, ‘the salon of a publisher, printer, and editor. […] The ground-floor held his printing-presses; the next was a library of great extent, with magazines, reviews, and newspapers from all Europe spread upon the tables […]. The upper stories were devoted to […] all the staff of an extensive publishing business.17

The high standard of the Gabinetto was acknowledged by Murray himself. According to his Hand-Book for Travellers in Northern Italy ‘Vieusseux’s, in Palazzo Buondelmonti, Piazza S. Trinita, is excellent, but the subscription of about 10s. a month is high. The collection of journals and newspapers of every country is very extensive and well chosen.’18 Yet Vieusseux’s was something more than merely a place to read the paper or borrow a book. Swept by a liberal wind, it was the forum where Italian intellectuals were engaged in that political cultural debate that made the Risorgimento possible. It was also ‘a place where sooner or later you meet every one you know among the foreign residents at Florence’.19 Going up the stairs of Palazzo Buondelmonti might mean a conversation with Niccolò Tommaseo, Massimo d’Azeglio, William M. Thackeray or Théophile Gautier.20 When in the summer of 1852, Montgomery Stuart was invited by Marquis Filippo Antonio Gualterio to see certain family papers in his possession, the Scotsman and the senator-to-be may well have already met at Vieusseux’s. The 1849 book of members records both their subscriptions.21 In his Reminiscences and Essays Montgomery Stuart writes that these family papers ‘proved to be the official correspondence of Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio, Papal Nuncio at the Court of Louis XIV during the first six years of the 18th century, and of his nephew Cardinal Luigi Gualterio, who appears to have been for many years the chief representative in Rome of the order of

17

18 19 20

21

Marc Monnier, ‘Italy’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 52 (New York, 1861), 403-420 (p. 407). Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (London: Murray, 1847), p. 474. William Dean Howells, Indian Summer (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 60. For the significant cultural importance of the Vieusseux, see also Peter Hoare’s article in this volume. Archivio storico Vieusseux, Libro dei soci 4.

120

Simonetta Berbeglia

the Knights of Malta’.22 Stuart suggested that the Marquis should sell the documents to the British Museum, and he was allowed to send copies of some of the Nuncio' s despatches to the historian Lord Macaulay to read. On Stuart' s request Sir Henry Bulwer, then minister at the Court of Florence, wrote to the librarian Antonio Panizzi, while Robert Browning sent a letter to the writer and politician Richard Monckton Milnes: Cardinal Gualterio was Papal Nuncio at Paris from 1700 to 1706. He returned there in 1712, in a private capacity. He was instituted “Cardinal Protector of England” subsequently, and acted in Rome as the confidential agent of the “King of Engd”; —the Pretender. He died in 1728. His descendant, the Marchese Gualterio, possesses the whole mass of his official and private correspondence—he talks broadly of “about 500 quarto volumes”—these include all the original despatches from the Papal Court to the Nuncio,—an unbroken series, together with copies of all papers transmitted thither by the Cardinal. The collection also includes a body of correspondence of the Nuncio’s nephew, Cardinal Luigi Gualterio, himself Nuncio at Paris and Naples. Out of all this, the documents relating to the Stewarts exclusively would make, it is stated, six quartos—“a parlous contribution.” The rest is the affair of the leading agents of the Pope in different parts of Europe. I suppose one rarely meets with such an occasion of inclining a curious eye upon these darknesses. I never saw the actual Gualterio, but the friend who has had the rummaging of his inheritance is divided between admiration of such a Godsend, and fears lest any but ourselves profit by it—so he has told me all this and more—and brought me a sample of the same—there it cumbers the edge of my table (of marble, luckily)—letters about the “blessed majesty of England,” fresh as if the ink had dried last week. Of course, Gualterio wants to sell his ware—and I believe he has offered it to the British Museum: if it ought to be secured to us, it ought—that’s all. And that one of those able to judge whether it ought, may have an inkling of the matter, I write this preliminary to the pamphlet which it accompanies—a sort of “saggio” or Taste of the Contents which Gualterio has had privately printed (’ware this paternal government and its white-coated friends!)—just a few copies, of which my friend brings me three—one for yourself, another quite naturally to […] Lord Palmerston, and a third for Mr. Hallam, if you will please to commend it to him.23

Two years later, on 8 April 1854, Thomas B. Macaulay wrote in his journal: ‘BM settled about the Gualterio papers. Deo Gratias. I have been bored to death about them.’24 On that day Sir Frederic Madden, then Keeper of Manuscripts, had laid before the Trustees of the Museum a letter from Marquis Gualterio offering to sell his collection for £ 1,200, a sum

22

23

24

James Montgomery Stuart, Reminiscences and Essays (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1884), pp. 15-16. New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. by William C. De Vane & K.L. Knockerbocker (New Haven, CT, 1950), pp. 55-57. The Journal of Thomas B. Macaulay, 8, Saturday, 8 April 1854. Quoted with the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence

121

Montgomery Stuart would later regard as ‘certainly above its real value’25 owing to the fact that ‘the papers of the two Cardinals Gualterio proved to be more remarkable for quantity than quality’.26 In his letter to Sir Frederic, the Marquis explicitly mentioned Stuart as his intermediary. The Trustees sanctioned the purchase of the collection, which is now in the manuscript section of the British Library,27 at the expense of Professor Tischendorf of Leipzig’s offer of some Greek manuscripts.28 It may have also been through Vieusseux’s that Montgomery Stuart got acquainted with Sebastiano Fenzi. The son of the powerful banker Emanuele Fenzi, Sebastiano was the black sheep of the family. A rebel, a dreamer, he spent his life conceiving grand plans which constantly collapsed leaving him heavily in debt. To mend his ways, Sebastiano was sent to England to work for one of his father’s business partners. He came back with an English wife and a new plan: the Rivista britannica. His aim was to introduce English literature to Tuscany, ‘to transfuse English thought into the veins of Italian society’, collecting articles from the best British journals and translating them into Italian. Introducing the new periodical, the editors remarked ‘that England alone has been exempt from the general fate of Europe – to struggle for freedom – to seem to win the fight for a moment – and then to fall back, having gained nothing more than a shadow.’ It seemed to them that the achievement of liberty is useless without the capacity to enjoy it in an orderly manner; and that the best preparation Italy can make is to study the popular literature of a nation possessing so eminently this capacity, and offering so excellent a point d’appui for those who would develop the elements of Italian society.’29

The first issue of the Rivista britannica came out in April 1851, a supplement, Scritti inglesi sulla politica contemporanea, was published in November, while the second issue appeared in March 1852. And that was all. Sebastiano’s only partner in this literary enterprise seems to have been James Montgomery Stuart. In an early address book kept by the Brownings, Stuart lodged in ‘Casa Fenzi, Via Larga 6060 & 61’ and this was presumably at the time when he worked for the Rivista britannica. It was certainly thanks to Stuart that the journal promoted Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows. The publication of the poem was triumphantly announced in the

25 26 27 28 29

Montgomery Stuart, p. 18. Ibid., p. 16. The British Library Manuscript Collections, Gualterio Papers, 20241-20686. The British Library Archives, Minutes, Acquisitions, 1852-1854. ‘Telegraph of Thought’, Littell’s Living Age, 30 (1851), p. 574.

122

Simonetta Berbeglia

first issue,30 while in the supplement a long laudatory article quoted extensively from Casa Guidi Windows providing the reader with an Italian translation.31 James Montgomery Stuart did not contribute to the last issue of the Rivista britannica. On 29 December 1851 he had been unofficially employed by Peter Campbell Scarlett, the British Minister at the court of the Grand Duke, in the Legation as a translator, clerk and secretary. In May 1852 he wrote to Sir Henry Bulwer: Considering that my first duties were henceforth owing to the Mission, […] I informed Mr. Sebastiano Fenzi next day that I could no longer carry on the Rivista britannica, which I in consequence abandoned making, I may be allowed to say, a very considerable pecuniary sacrifice, and relinquishing an employment, most congenial to my tastes.32

It was James Stuart who drew up a Memoir on the State of Tuscany from 1846 to 185233 for the benefit of Sir Henry Bulwer, Scarlett’s newly appointed successor. And in the same long letter of 28 May 1852 to the eminent diplomat, he pleaded to be officially recognised as ‘regularly employed in the service of the Mission’ to mitigate the severe state of his ‘pecuniary circumstances’. Stuart explained his financial troubles were due to unsound investments in the first Tuscan railway, the Leopolda, connecting Florence to Leghorn: In 1846 I was sucked in with thousands of others into the Railway Maelstrom, and though in all the changes of fortune thus occasioned I have not lost a single friend. I certainly gained a good many creditors. At the beginning of last year, I had 10000 Francesconi of debts in Florence which, by making immense sacrifices, I have now reduced to 1500. That too will be paid off, as surely as the rest, with time; but I am not in the condition to do so tomorrow, or this day week, or indeed, before the necessary arrangements are completed, and the requisite time accorded.34

The official post Stuart begged for, must have been refused because, a year later, Mrs. Browning wrote to her sister: ‘Mr. Stuart seems to me in a scrape with the Legation past recovering from’.35

30 31 32 33 34 35

‘Le fineste di Casa Guidi’, Rivista britannica, 1 (1851), 283-285. Ibid. (novembre 1851), 237-277. Norfolk Record Office, BUL 1/105/196. Ibid., BUL 1/107/1-4. Ibid., BUL 1/105/196. Lewis, I, p. 560.

James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence

123

January 1857 offered Montgomery Stuart the opportunity to earn a commission mediating once again between the British Museum and an Italian nobleman eager to convert old mouldy papers into ready money. On January 7 he wrote to Antonio Panizzi: ‘Signor Pietro Pecori, the gentleman charged with the sale of the Giraldi MSS called on me this morning, and signified his acceptance of your Lordship’s offer of £ 80’.36 The 8 volumes containing the dispatches of Cavalier Jacopo Giraldi, gentleman of the Chamber to Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Envoy Extraordinary to the British Court, 37 were purchased by the British Museum on 28 March 1857.38 It was Stuart’s opinion that the Museum ‘had made a much better bargain’ than securing the Gualterio papers, and he remembered that For this acquisition the trustees were chiefly indebted to the zeal and public spirit of their colleague, Lord John Russell, who on learning that the representative of the Giraldi family, Chevalier Pecori, had placed the papers at my disposal, honoured me with a visit, and passed some hours in a minute examination of their contents.39

Despite what James may have earned as an intermediary, financial troubles kept on knocking at the Stuarts’ door and spring 1858 seems to have been particularly hard with him trying to make ends meet giving lectures. ‘Mr Stuart is giving some very good lectures, on wednesday & friday, at one o’clock, on the influence of Italian on English poetry’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to Fanny Haworth, ‘Robert liked the first extremely– There are to be eight, the first having been delivered– Taken separately, the price is three pauls.’40 The two poets were very generous to their Scottish friend. Frocks, books, writing cases were given to the ‘Stewart’s children’, while 20 francesconi were lent to Mrs. Stuart in April and another 50 in May.41 Yet creditors sprang out on all sides, Vieusseux’s reading rooms themselves claiming back 400 lire. Tired of his promises, at the end of May, Jean Pierre Vieusseux wrote to the Scotsman offering him a job for the Archivio storico, his monthly historical journal, to pay part of his debt:

36

37 38 39 40

41

The British Library Archives, Correspondence of Sir A. Panizzi, Brit. Mus., Additional 36, 718, f.1. The British Library Manuscript Collections, Eg. 1,696-1,703. The British Library Archives, Minutes, Acquisitions, 1855-1857. Montgomery Stuart, p. 18. Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Euphrasia Fanny Haworth. [Manuscript at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge]. Robert Browning, Account book for expenses at Casa Guidi, Florence, 1858, British Library, Ashley 5715.

124

Simonetta Berbeglia

Firenze, 24 maggio 1858 Io non so come qualificare il di lei contegno a mio riguardo. Sarò moderatissimo chiamandolo poco gentile. Io non lo tormento per essere pagato delle £ 400 ch’Ella deve tuttavia al mio Gabinetto- al contrario le offro di liberarsi in parte del suo debito col fare pel mio Archivio un semplice spoglio bibliografico, cosa per Lei facilissima. Ella promette e ripromette, e poi mi volta le spalle!! Domando a Lei come io debbo qualificare il di Lei contegno? Nell’aspettativa di una Sua risposta la saluto distintamente.42 Florence, 24th May 1858 / I do not know what to make of your behaviour towards me. To be very restrained, I shall call it hardly polite. I am not badgering you in order to be paid the 400 lire you still owe my Reading Rooms- far from it; I am offering to settle part of that debt by doing a simple bibliographical index for my Archivio, which would be very easy for you. You say you will again and again, and then you give me the cold shoulder. / I ask you: what am I to make of such behaviour? / I look forward to hearing from you. / Yours, Vieusseux. [Tr. SB]

Feeling besieged, on June 1,43 the Stuarts moved to London perhaps to seek shelter under the wing of Algernon Borthwick, the editor of The Morning Post, the paper James contributed to as their Italian correspondent. The family, however, was large and the need for money great. Once again the Brownings took the Stuarts to their hearts and Robert recommended James to his publisher, Edward Chapman: Will you do me and my wife a great favour? An old friend of ours, Mr. James Montgomery Stuart has just gone to London. He is very able, very learned, – and variously learned too, – with as many ready accomplishments as if he were not learned. He is well known to distinguished persons in more countries than one, perfectly versed in German, Italian, and French contemporary literature, and with the best will to turn all these good gifts to account, he cannot get on at all here, because vine-bearing and olivebearing soils don’t want his wares; yet he wants something for his large family. He writes those clever letters to the Morning Post from “their own correspondent”. I should think him fit for any amount of popular magazine-work, reviews, etc. and lectures, and, if any of you really care about Italian politics, he is better able to make them intelligible to the public’s capacity than anybody else. He has influential friends in England and Scotland, but “while the grass grows (in Scotland)” etc. etc. Now for your concern in all this: surely you will get him any work you can, will not you? Help him to any Review or Magazine? He has letters to Editors sundry but I know nothing of Editors, and trust rather in you.44

42 43

44

Archivio storico Vieusseux, Copialettere XXX/2292. Archivio di Stato Firenze, Segreteria e Ministero degli esteri, Registri dei passaporti vidimati, 2818. De Vane and Knickerbocker, p. 106.

James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence

125

As soon as he arrived in London, James started a series of four lectures on the influence of ‘Italian on English literature’ at St. Martin’s Hall. Delivering his first lecture on 6 July 1858, he stated that English literature had been subject to three foreign influences- the Italian, the French and the German, ingeniously remarking that the influence of the Italians had been both imaginative and practical, that of the French practical but not imaginative, that of the Germans imaginative but not practical.45

The day after, The Times commented: ‘Mr. Stuart is not a practised orator, but his lecture abounds in instructive matter’.46 However, the importance of Stuart’s lecture at St. Martin’s Hall mostly lay in his mentioning ‘a most valuable collection of despatches’47 kept in the Florentine archives. They were the despatches of Francesco Terriesi, ‘the personal friend and confidant of James II, in whose carriage James made his escape, and who actually furnished the king with the money of which he stood in need.’48 In Florence Montgomery Stuart had made copies of Terriesi’s correspondence for Thomas B. Macaulay and, in his lecture, he suggested that the British national collection would have benefited by acquiring an extensive series of copies. Following Stuart’s advice, in autumn 1858, while visiting Florence, Antonio Panizzi made arrangements with Francesco Bonaini, chief superintendent of the Florentine archives, which resulted in the addition to the British Museum collection of twenty-four volumes of transcripts covering the period 1675-1691.49 Montgomery Stuart was still in London when, in March 1859, he received a letter from Vieusseux written in a completely different tone from the one the Genevan merchant had used a year before. Enclosed in the letter there was the pamphlet Austria e Toscana by Marquis Cosimo Ridolfi and other Florentine liberals, whose publication had made a stir in Tuscany and had caused the reintroduction of preventive censorship on political writings.50 Wishing to take advantage of the widespread favour the Italian struggle for liberty was enjoying at the time, Vieusseux asked Stuart to find the pamphlet an English publisher and supervise its translation.51 In perfect Italian the

45 46 47 48 49

50 51

The Times, 7 July 1858, p. 12. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 12. Montgomery Stuart, p. 19. British Library, Manuscripts Catalogue, 25,358-25,381. Archivio di Stato Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 4212-14. Biblioteca nazionale Firenze, Vieuss. 125, 224. Ibid., Vieuss. 125, 224.

126

Simonetta Berbeglia

Scotsman replied offering to translate the pamphlet and have it published in The Morning Post.52 Two days later, on 4 April 1859, the first part of ‘the historico-politico manifesto’ appeared in the columns of the Post, while the second part came out the following Monday.53 If the articles in the Post seem to have satisfied Stuart’s debt to the reading rooms, it was a different matter with Robert Browning. Filled with anger that his loan of 70 francesconi had never been repaid, ten years later, on 28 August 1869, the poet wrote to Isa Blagden from Scotland: The refusal of Stuart to pay a farthing of his debt to me – even by installments which I should have flung in his face – say, half-a crown a week – is a fine example of pure rascality: it cannot be anything else: nobody but a scoundrel would tell the lie that he was totally unable to pay a single paul: was I right or no when I declined to rejoice with you in the happy turn his fortunes had taken at last, his comfort after so much trouble &c. &c. That he may still be poor is likely enough, & I heartily hope it so, – but no poor man, merely poor & not dishonest, would refuse to give something at some time – all I asked of the fellow. A pleasant addition he must be to a Florentine tea-party! But I spit at him & have done with it.54

The ‘happy turn’ of Stuart’s fortunes was linked to the profound changes Florence underwent when it became the capital of Italy in 1865. Projects were often financed with British money, and Montgomery Stuart had benefited thanks to his renewed partnership with Sebastiano Fenzi. Setting his literary ambitions aside, Sebastiano had resigned himself to becoming a business man. His knowledge of the English language and his visits to England made him fit to mediate between his family’s companies and British investors.55 He became the manager of the Florentine branch of Florence Land and Public Works Limited, with Montgomery Stuart as the secretary. The company had been established in London in 1866 supported by the Anglo-Italian Bank, and Sir James Hudson, the British Minister to Turin, had been appointed chairman. Florence Land and Public Works Limited bought out from the Creswell Society the rights to build houses on the right bank of the Arno and, thanks to the favours granted by Ubaldino Peruzzi, the chairman of the Florentine Province, and by the Mayor, Luigi Guglielmo De Cambray Digny, it managed to win several municipal contracts. The

52 53

54

55

Ibid., Vieuss. 110, 116. The Morning Post, Monday, April 4, 1859. Ibid., Monday, April 11, 1859. Dearest Isa. Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. by Edward C. McAleer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), p. 322. Andrea Giuntini, Soltanto per denaro (Firenze: Polistampa, 2002), p. 165.

James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence

127

company went bankrupt in 1878 owing to some poor business done in Rome.56 Though engaged in redeveloping Florence, Montgomery Stuart did not give up contributing to English papers. An Italian reporter remembers him, as a correspondent of The Morning Post and The Manchester Guardian, sitting in the press gallery in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio where the parliamentary sessions took place.57 Although the Stuarts’ finances were now so prosperous as to allow them to buy a piece of land in the new redeveloped quartiere del Maglio,58 and to take ‘a good house’ ‘and let it out to English visitors’,59 James’s health was beginning to suffer. He needed the assistance of his son Robert60, and the two of them often worked together on the same project. L’Eco dell’Arno, a weekly journal, was edited by the two Stuarts who managed to publish it every Saturday from June 1867 to March 1868. It was for his son that Montgomery Stuart asked Carlo Fenzi, Sebastiano’s brother, for a ticket to the inaugural ceremony at the opening of the Suez Canal: Villa d’Elci Pellegrino fuori la Porta San Gallo 23/10/’69 My dear Fenzi, I have just heard that a certain number of tickets or free invitations, for persons connected with the press, had been placed at your disposal, to enable them to attend and report on the inauguration of the Suez Canal. It would not, I trust, be too great a presumption, if, in the event of your having one disposable, I asked it for my son. I would ask it for myself, on the ground that, ten years ago I was not only the earliest but, I believe, the sole member of the London press, who constantly advocate the desireableness and practicability of the Indian Mail going over Brindisi,- long before either Meridional Railways were voted, or Fell Railways thought

56

57 58 59 60

Romano Paolo Coppini, L’opera politica di Cambray Digny (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1975), pp. 119-121. Ugo Pesci, Firenze capitale (1865-1870) (Firenze: Bemporad, 1904), p. 453. Archivio storico Comune di Firenze, Comunità di Firenze, c. 407/016. Cunliffe, p. 26. Robert Pietro Stuart (Florence, 1846 – Perugia, 1892), journalist, novelist and translator. Among his novels were Il marchese del cigno (1875) and La marchesa di Santa Pia (1877). He translated Lothair by Benjamin Disraeli into Italian. A staunch conservative, he often wrote about political matters. He contributed to the Gazzetta del popolo in autumn 1870 and, from December 1879 to October 1880, he edited Il Conservatore, both being daily newspapers printed in Rome. He died unmarried on 29 February 1892 after a long illness. His obituary appeared in L’unione liberale. Corriere dell’Umbria, 29 Febr.-1 March 1892.

128

Simonetta Berbeglia

of! But it would be throwing away a ticket to give one to me, (who am three quarter blind) if your kindness could far more profitably secure it for my son, who has eyes keen enough to see every thing, and could and would turn his observations to account for both the English and the Italian press. If you could do this you would confer on me a very great favour, and on my son an obligation which I am sure he would never forget. Very truly yours J. Montgomery Stuart61

‘When on 20 September 1870, the dynasty of Savoy completed the unification of Italy by the absorption of the temporal power, Montgomery Stuart followed the Italian Government to Rome’62 where he wrote The History of Free Trade in Tuscany, the work by which he is remembered today. A fervent liberal and a staunch supporter of laissez-faire, Montgomery Stuart had found fertile soil for his views in Florence. He was on friendly terms with all the moderates who, when struggling to obtain unity, had looked to England as a model for constitutional rights and, when promoting the economic growth of the new kingdom, considered her as an example for putting aside the restrictions of protectionism. Among Stuart’s Italian allies were Emanuele Fenzi and Cosimo Ridolfi who had greeted Richard Cobden as the apostle of the new creed when he visited the Grand Duchy in 1847, and Francesco Ferrara who founded the first Italian Adam Smith Society in Florence in 1868. The History of Free Trade in Tuscany was published in London in 1876 under the auspices of The Cobden Club. ‘The Committee of the COBDEN CLUB publishes this interesting “History of Free Trade in Tuscany” because it proves clearly how great is the benefit arising from the practical application of Free Trade principles’, James W. Probyn wrote in his short preface. An overt manifesto against protectionism, the book shows how, ‘a century before Cobden’s crusade, its essential principles were anticipated by Sallustio Bandini of Siena, the eminent publicist and engineer, to whom Italy owes the draining of the Sienese Maremme.’63 The volume circulated widely through England and the States, and it was translated into French and into Italian. When his daughter Mary married the wealthy Romeo Gallenga,64 the son of Antonio, a patriot and foreign correspondent of The Times, James Stuart

61 62 63 64

Biblioteca Archivio del Risorgimento, Firenze, Carte Fenzi, filza 79, ins. 2, c. 200. The Scotsman, 28 January 1889, p. 7. Ibid., p. 7. Mary Victoria Stuart (Florence, 1848 – Perugia, 1905) and Romeo Gallenga (Frankfurt, 1849 – Perugia, 1878) were married in Rome on 25 April 1874. They had two children: Adriano (1875?-1878) and Romeo Adriano (1879-1939). In 1910 Romeo Adriano Gallenga was elected Liberal deputy, he became senator in 1929 after joining the Fascist Party.

James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence

129

moved to Perugia. There he died on 21 January 1889 ending his Italian life as he had started it – with a lecture. Tired, ill and almost blind, his last act was a lecture on the career of Mr. Gladstone delivered to the students of the local university, where ‘he took occasion, amid much that was hearty in his praise of the British statesman, to enter a vigorous protest against his Irish policy, which he showed was in direct contradiction to those principles which gave Italy her unity and which still kept her united.’65 He strongly reasserted his liberal views against ‘the enemies of Progress, Law and Order whether they fight under a red flag or a black one’,66 remaining to the last ‘a Whig of the old Scottish school’.67 Why should we rescue Montgomery Stuart from oblivion? First, because he was an important mediator between the English and the Italian cultural scene. If in Italy he lectured on the Shakespearean drama, in London he delivered papers on the diplomatic correspondence of the Tuscan Envoys.68 Political economy was one of his favourite themes: his History of Free Trade in Tuscany helped to make British liberalism intelligible to Italian readers. But his greatest significance, however, was to interpret the Risorgimento to the British public: in his editorials, he commented with passion, knowledge and power about the Italian struggle for independence. He converted much of the partisanship for Austria of the Morning Post, then a Palmerstonian organ, ‘into an intelligent sympathy with Italy’.69 Although he was in turn a man of letters, a historian, an economist, he never achieved the great eminence he would have wished. His role was to be a supporting player behind the scenes, but never to take centre stage himself.

Bibliography Ansidei, Vincenzo, ‘Giacomo Montgomery Stuart’, Rassegna di scienze sociali e politiche, 144 (1889), 1-22.

65 66

67 68 69

The Scotsman, p. 7. Vincenzo Ansidei, ‘Giacomo Montgomery Stuart’, Rassegna di scienze sociali e politiche, 144 (1889), 1-22 (p. 19). The Scotsman, p. 7. Montgomery Stuart, p. 19. The Scotsman, 29 January 1889, p. 5.

130

Simonetta Berbeglia

Coppini, Romano Paolo, L’opera politica di Cambray Digny (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1975). De Vane, William C. and K. L. Knockerbocker, eds., New Letters of Robert Browning (New Haven: CT., 1950). Fenzi, Sebastiano, and J. Montgomery Stuart, eds., Rivista Britannica (Firenze: Tip. Italiana, 1851). ––. eds., Scritti inglesi sulla politica contemporanea (Firenze: Tip. Naz. Italiana, 1851). Giuntini, Andrea, Soltanto per denaro (Firenze: Polistampa, 2002). Howells, William Dean, Indian Summer (New York: Random House, 1990). Kelley, Philip, and others, eds., The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 16 (Waco: Wedgestone Press, 2007). Kenyon, Frederic G., ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1897). Lewis, Scott, ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella, 2 vols (Waco: Wedgestone Press, 2002). Majolo Molinari, Olga, La stampa periodica romana dell’Ottocento, 2 vols (Roma: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1963). McAleer, Edward C., ed., Dearest Isa. Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). Monnier, Marc, ‘Italy’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 52 (New York, 1861), 403-420. Murray, John, Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (London: Murray, 1847). Norton, Sarah, and M.A. DeWolfe Howe, eds., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols, (Boston: Constable, 1913). Pesci, Ugo, Firenze capitale (1865-1870) (Firenze: Bemporad, 1904). Stuart Montgomery, James, ‘Tuscany and Austria’, The Morning Post, 4 April 1859. ––. ‘Tuscany and Austria’, The Morning Post, 11 April 1859. Stuart Montgomery, James, Reminiscences and Essays (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1884). ––. The History of Free Trade in Tuscany (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1876). ––. Storia del libero scambio in Toscana (Firenze: Tipografia della Gazzetta d’Italia, 1876). ‘James Montgomery Stuart’, The Scotsman, 28 January 1889. ‘The Late James Montgomery Stuart’, The Scotsman, 29 January 1889.

Peter Vassallo John Hookham Frere, Gabriele Rossetti, and Anglo-Italian Cooperation in Exile This paper will focus on the literary friendship between John Hookham Frere, a retired diplomat and poet, and Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian patriot from Vasto in the Abruzzi, an ebullient man, a composer of Arcadian verses, a librettist at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and author of a then much quoted revolutionary poem “Ode to the dawn of the Constitution Day”, which begins with the verse ‘Sei pur bella colle cogli astri sul crine’ about a beautiful woman (possibly Liberty banished from the lovely garden of Italy). Gabriele Pascuale Rossetti was renowned for his ability to declaim verses (in a resounding tenor’s voice) on any given theme, an improvvisatore in fact, whose patriotic sentiments compelled him to join the Carbonari in 1812 and to take a leading part in the revolutionary movement in Naples in 1820.1 After the abortive uprising of the Neapolitan populace led by General Guglielmo Pepe in 1820 and the subsequent restoration of the Bourbon King of Naples Ferdinand IV (by Austrian intervention) as the King of the Two Sicilies, Rossetti went into hiding since his name was high on the list of prominent revolutionaries who were to be brought to justice with rigorous severity (to be summarily executed, probably). He eventually sought the help of some British sailors and his rescue was in the manner of high opera for which he could possibly have written a libretto. Lady Dora Moore, who had come into contact with Rossetti, was quite taken with his poems and his noble aspect at the time when he was curator of the Naples Museum, persuaded her husband Admiral Graham Moore, commander of His Majesty ship the Rochfort, to rescue this cultured poet from probable death by hanging. The Admiral agreed to Rossetti’s being rowed on a skiff in the Bay of Naples, disguised in the uniform of an English officer, to his ship which was bound for Malta, then a British Crown Colony known for the island’s hospitality to Italian exiles. The Maltese professional classes, who at the time spoke Italian and who were au courant with Arcadian Italian literature, were

1

G. Rossetti, Carteggi, ed. by A. Caprio, P. R. Horn, S. Minichini, and J. R. Woodhouse, 5 vols (Naples: Loffredo), II (1984), pp. 17-19. See also Gabrielle Festing, John Hookham Frere and his Friends (London, 1899) and E. R. Vincent, Gabriele Rossetti in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). See also J. R. Woodhouse, ‘The Rossetti Siblings in the correspondence of their father’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 6 (2001), 202-220.

132

Peter Vassallo

particularly hospitable to Italian refugees. The Rochfort with Gabriele on board sailed into the Grand Harbour, Valletta on 2nd May 1821.2 A few months after his arrival Rossetti was befriended by John Hookham Frere, a former high ranking British diplomat (Ambassador Plenipotentiary in Madrid) who had resigned after the public outcry on the death of Sir John Moore, the commanding general of the British Force during the Peninsular Campaign. Apart from his brief chequered diplomatic career Frere was a Cambridge classical scholar (Fellow of Caius College). He was a main contributor to the Tory magazine The Anti-Jacobin, on which he collaborated closely with his Etonian friend George Canning. It was Canning (as Foreign Secretary) who had later recommended his friend to the post of Ambassador plenipotentiary in Madrid.3 Frere was also a prominent member (with William Gifford) of John Murray’s advisory board or rather ‘synod of literati’, as Byron facetiously put it, who met in the drawing room upstairs at 50 Albemarle Street London to give or withhold their ‘imprimatur’ on manuscripts offered to Murray for publication. Frere’s literary interests and natural flair for foreign languages took him beyond the boundaries of English Literature for he was also remarkably well-versed in Spanish, Italian, and French Literature. Earlier, he had in fact translated the Poema del Cid and, as is known, he adapted and anglicized a section of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante which he entitled The Monks and the Giants supposedly composed by the brothers Whistlecraft, saddlemakers to his Majesty. When Byron received a copy of Whistlecraft in Venice he immediately guessed that this versified jeu d’esprit was actually written by Frere under a pseudonym, and he wrote to Murray saying that Frere’s version sent him back to the Italian burlesque originals. The Monks and the Giants, as is known, influenced Byron in his new satirical ottava rima style in Beppo and the first two cantos of Don Juan.4 Four years before the publication by Murray of The Monks and the Giants Frere had married Elizabeth Jemima dowager countess of Errol, a lady known for her wealth and generosity. However, owing to his wife’s increasing bouts of ill health (she suffered from a severe bronchial ailment) and acting on the doctor’s advice, he

2

3

4

See P. Bianchi and P. Serracino Inglott, eds., Encounters with Malta, (Malta: Gutenberg Press, 2000), pp. 241-242. For a full account of Frere’s friendship with George Canning and Frere’s subsequent resignation after the ‘Spanish debacle’ see Wendy Hinde, George Canning (London: Collins, 1973), pp. 208-211. For Byron’s indebtedness to Frere’s poem see Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984).

John Hookham Frere, Gabriele Rossetti, and Anglo-Italian Cooperation in Exile

133

decided to retire to the island of Malta – which was a British Colony and which was known to have a warm climate and which, conveniently, used sterling as its currency. Frere and his wife arrived in Malta in 1821 (as voluntary exiles) a few months before Rossetti. They lived for a while in Casa Correa, a spacious house in Bakery Street, Valletta, before moving to a splendid villa with a large garden in Pieta overlooking the quarantine harbour of Marsamuxetto.5 Frere, who was a very wealthy man, was very influential on the island and soon became personal friend of the Governor, Francis Rawdon Marquis of Hastings and Admiral Graham Moore commander of the British fleet in the Mediterranean – the Admiral who had gone beyond the call of duty to save Rossetti. He was in fact the younger brother of Sir John Moore, who had died at La Coruna. Frere himself was a high ranking member of the Freemasons lodge and felt obliged to help freemasons who sought his aid. Bianca Fiorentini, in her account of the Italian exiles in Malta, argues that many of the Italian exiles sought the help of British freemasons in their attempt to seek safety in England.6 A few months after his arrival in Malta Gabriele Rossetti was invited to give a performance of his extemporizing skills before a select audience at the Valletta mansion of the affluent and influential Cavaliere Parisio Moskati, who at the time was adjutant to the Governor, The Marquis of Hastings. Members of the audience were invited to write down a theme on a paper which was deposited in an urn and passed round. The host picked a paper from the urn and read out the theme on which Gabriele instantly declaimed extempore verses with the art of an accomplished improvisatore. The theme that evening (not surprisingly) was St Paul and Gabriele linked the theme of St Paul’s travels and shipwreck with his own exile from his country. St Paul, in Rossetti’s version, is transformed into a patron of mariners and refugees in distress and appears to the poet to reassure him that he will find a warm welcome among the friendly Maltese, who had been so hospitable to him after his ordeal at sea. Tu vi discendi , io ti faro la tracia Vedrai figlio, vedrai come a te inerme Amorosa accoglienza apra le braccia 7

5

6

7

Paul Cassar, ‘John Hookham Frere in Malta (1821-1846)’, Melita Historica, 9 (1984), 4971. ‘Gli esuli cercavano sempre piu alleanza dei militari brittanici, frequentando i ritrovi masonici.’ Bianca Fiorentini, Malta Rifugio di Esuli durante il Risorgimento Italiano, (Malta, 1966). Gabriele Rossetti, L’Apostolo San Paolo che naufraga in Malta (Malta: Govt. Press, 1822), p. 8.

134

Peter Vassallo

Tr.: You will set foot there, I will lead the way You will see my son, how helpless as you are loving welcome will open its arms to you

It was on this occasion that Frere befriended Rossetti and a year later helped him publish his improvised verses at the Government printing press in a booklet with the title L’Apostolo S. Paolo che naufraga in Malta e se ne dichiara il protettore. Canto estemporaneo. 1822 When Frere moved to his villa at Pieta he allowed Rossetti the use of his splendid library and it is during this period that Rossetti drafted his eccentric Commentario on Dante’s Inferno and his interpretation of the poem in terms of masonic symbols (which he later published in London). Frere encouraged Rossetti in this literary study because he felt it would enable him later on to find employment as a translator of Italian poetry (or indeed prose) in London. Through his friends Frere found modest lodgings for Rossetti in Valletta. Frere also wrote to an acquaintance of his at the British Embassy in Naples, a certain Mr Hamilton, asking him to intercede for Rossetti with the Court of Naples in order to include his name on the list of those who were about to be granted an amnesty. Mr Hamilton’s reply was not at all reassuring. Rossetti, as far as the King Ferdinand’s Government was still concerned, was still regarded as a prominent member of the Carbonari and his verses on “I giorni dei Santi e Louvelli non son finiti ancor” (which Hamilton cites in his letter of reply) still rankled deeply. Mr Hamilton ended his letter by saying that Rossetti must ‘submit to his lot if the orders under which people are acting in Malta are to be “rigorously enforced”.’8 This was a veiled rebuke directed at the Governor of Malta himself, who was expected to comply with King Ferdinand’s request that all traitors (revolutionaries) who sought refuge in Malta were to be sent back to Naples to face the full rigour of the king’s justice. Frere relayed the unwelcome news to Rossetti in a letter of September 1822 written in French, since Rossetti’s knowledge of English was restricted to a few phrases, and he actually referred to Rossetti’s offending verses. I vindici coltelli Sapran passarvi il cor, I Sandi e I Louvelli Non son finiti ancor Tr. : The vengeful knives will pierce your heart,

8

G. Festing, p. 298.

John Hookham Frere, Gabriele Rossetti, and Anglo-Italian Cooperation in Exile

135

the Sandts and Louvels are not finished yet.

Lines resonating with revolutionary sentiments and which distinctly refer to two political assassinations – that of the Russian emissary Kotzebue by Sandt and the murder of the Duc de Berri (who was designated as future king of France) by the fanatic Louvel. Frere’s letter to ‘mon cher Rosetti’9 (dated September 1822) tactfully rebukes Rossetti for his naïveté and lack of guile. Frere argued that if Rossetti, as a poet, needed a rhyme for ‘coltelli’ he should not have inserted Louvelli, a name hateful to Ferdinand’s ears – especially if he was still hoping to see his name on the list of those who were to be granted an amnesty. The murdered Duc of Berri would have been the King of France and Ferdinand’s wife Queen Carolina of Naples was the sister of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette. But then, as Frere reflects ruefully, poets never made fine diplomats. It would have been more tactful if he had chosen to mention revolutionaries of old, republicans like Brutus or Scaevola as Alfieri had done in his plays. In another paragraph he reminds Rossetti that Kotzebue was a poet like himself, who had to make a living out of politics and jokingly surmises that another Sandt (who knows?) might be sent over by the Carbonari to assassinate the excellent poet Rossetti. Frere ends the letter by apologizing for ‘ce badinage’ about a serious subject which is really not ‘badinable’.10 In his autobiographical narrative poem La Vita Mia written years later after he had settled in London, Rossetti claimed that he was persecuted by spies and informers who were sent to Malta to keep him under surveillance. One particular informer, a certain Girardi, was assiduous in entreating the Maltese authorities to send Rossetti back to Naples. Rossetti was also aware of the fact that Ferdinand sent couriers over to the Governor of the island to remind him of former British Collaboration with the Bourbons in Naples. During the earlier1799 Neapolitan revolt Nelson had in fact helped evacuate King Ferdinand and his entourage by offering them a safe passage to Palermo on the Vanguard. He had dealt very harshly with Admiral Caracciolo, who had joined the rebels. On Nelson’s insistence the Italian admiral was as courtmartialed and eventually hanged on the ship in view of all sailors despite his repeated request to die with dignity by facing a firing squad. Rosseti’s verse account states that Admiral Moore remedied this outrage (“vilta”) when he rescued a prominent revolutionary (Rossetti himself) on his ship.

9 10

Ibid., p. 299. Ibid., p. 300.

136

Peter Vassallo

E exclamai: Grazie all Anglia, Italia renda Che d’un Nelson la colpa , un More emenda11 Tr.: And I exclaimed: thanks to Anglia, Italy makes Nelson’s blame be redressed by More

Frere, realizing that his friend was becoming increasingly anxious about his security in Malta (and that he was becoming an embarrassment to the Governor), made arrangements for him to leave the island on Admiral Graham Moore’s ship. Frere supplied Rossetti with a much-needed financial gift and with letters of introduction to some of his important London friends: to Edward Davenport MP; William Stewart Rose, a scholar of Italian literature who had cleverly adapted Casti’s Animali Parlanti and had written jocose verses to Byron in Venice in ottava rima. Other letters were addressed to the publisher John Murray, who might help with the publishing of the Commentario on the Divina Commedia; to Henry Francis Cary, renowned translator of Dante; to S. T. Coleridge and to Lord Holland, who was known to be kindly disposed towards Italian political refugees. Admiral Moore himself introduced Rossetti to the poet Campbell (a fellow Scotsman). In one particular letter of gratitude addressed to Frere from London when Rossetti had settled in 38 Charlotte Street he mentions a visit to Lord Holland’s library, where he was astonished to see a likeness of Frere which was so “lifelike that I could almost hear your words.”12 This was presumably the marble bust of Frere sculpted by Francis Legatt Chantrey in 1818, which was in the entrance to the Library. Mr Davenport wrote to Frere describing his first meeting with Rossetti, who seemed to him a good and clever man but with a certain “Parson Adamslike simplicity” which made him easy prey for pickpockets.13 Davenport himself undertook to gain subscribers for the first volume of Rossetti’s edition of the Divina Commedia, which he and Frere persuaded Murray to publish and which Rossetti eventually dedicated to Davenport. In London Rossetti continued his work on the treatise Sullo spirito antipapale, which he eventually published, copies of which he sent to Frere for distribution in Malta. Frere, however, realizing the strong anti-Catholic sentiments expressed there, prudently declined to pass the copies on to his friends saying that he was on his honour not to involve himself in religious matters on the island which was fervently Catholic.14

11 12 13 14

Gabriele Rossetti, La Vita Mia, (Lanciano, 1910), p. 98. G. Festing, p. 301. Ibid., p. 303. The Works of the Rt Hon. John Hookham Frere in Verse and Prose: A Memoir by the Rt Hon.Sir Bartle Frere, 2nd ed, 2 vols (London: Basil Montague Pickering), I, p. 240.

John Hookham Frere, Gabriele Rossetti, and Anglo-Italian Cooperation in Exile

137

William Stewart Rose, Frere’s good friend, rallied round and invited Rossetti to stay with him for a month to advise him on his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which was due for publication. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also responded to Frere’s request for assistance and wrote to the Rev Henry Francis Cary (the renowned translator of the Commedia) on behalf of his friend recommending Rossetti’s original interpretation of the Divinia Commedia, who, after reading the text, thought that Rossetti’s version was not altogether visionary. In 1824 Gabriele Rossetti received an invitation from Frere’s brother William Frere, who was Master of Downing College Cambridge, to spend a few days at his house in Cambridge. He wrote to Lady Moore saying that William Frere and his wife ‘loaded him with civilities’ and that he was delighted to be introduced to Signora Giuditta Pasta, a well- known soprano, who had been invited to sing four arias from Italian opera in a great hall. The crowd there, mainly Cambridge people possessed by “melomania”, was so immense that people were obliged to enter through the windows, the doors being blocked.15 The conductor that evening was no less a figure than Giacomo Rossini, whom Rossetti had met at the San Carlo in Naples when he was the librettist there. On that occasion Rossetti composed the verses Rossini, Rossetti Divini, imperfetti’ Tr.: Rossini, Rossetti both Divine and imperfect.

Soon after the Cambridge episode, Rossetti met and fell in love with the second daughter of Gaetano Polidori, another Italian exile, who had established a reputation as an excellent teacher of Italian and who was working on a translation of Milton’s poems into Italian. This was Maria Francesaca (Frances or Fanny, her mother was Anna Maria Pierce, an English lady) and she was the sister of Dr John William Polidori, who was travelling physician to Byron and part of the inner circle in Switzerland in 1816, author of The Vampyre. Frere and Rossetti kept up an intermittent correspondence while Frere was in his Maltese abode working on his translation of Aristophanes’ plays and cultivating his splendid garden. The correspondence shows that there was a genuine friendship between the two exiles which went beyond patronage (Rossetti eventually addressed him as “mio carissimo

15

Letter cited by E.R Vincent in Gabriele Rossetti in England, p. 6.

Peter Vassallo

138

benefattore ad amico”) and he revered the grand English man of letters. In his retrospective La Vita Mia he refers to him affectionately: Giovanni Huccam Frere , uomo dotto e saggio Privato consiglier della Corona Cortesia generosa e senza boria Dottrina immensa e pur maggior modestia 16 Tr.: John Huccam (sic) Frere, a wise and learned man Privy Counsellor to the Crown Courteous and generous without arrogance Immensely learned and with greater modesty

Their genuine friendship lasted until Frere’s death in 1846. William Michael Rossetti recalls (in Some Reminiscences) that when his ageing father, partly blind, received the news of Frere’s death ‘with tears in his half sightless eyes my father fell on his knees and exclaimed ‘Anima bella, benedetta sii tu, dovunque sei’’.17 Rossetti’s Spirito anti-Papale stood him in good stead when he applied for the post of Professor of Italian at the new Kings College in London, for the Anglican founders of the college were reluctant to appoint a “Papal” Roman Catholic scholar to the post.

Bibliography Bianchi, P. and Serracino Inglott P., Encounters with Malta (Malta: Gutenberg Press, 2000). Cassar, Paul, ‘John Hookham Frere in Malta’, Melita Historica, 6, 1 (1984). Festing, Gabrielle, John Hookham Frere and his Friends (London, 1899). Fiorentini, Bianca, Malta Rifugio di Esuli durante il Risorgimento italiano (Malta, 1966). Frere, Bartle, The Works of the Rt. Hon. John Hookham Frere in Verse and Prose: A Memoir, 2 vols (London: Basil Montague Pickering, 1874). Hinde, Wendy, George Canning (London, 1973). Rossetti, G., L’Apostolo San Paolo che naufraga in Malta (Malta: Govt. Press, 1822). ––. La Vita Mia (Naples:Lanciano, 1910).

16 17

La Vita Mia, p. 83. William Michael Rossetti, Some Reminiscences, 2 vols (London, 1906) I, p. 121.

John Hookham Frere, Gabriele Rossetti, and Anglo-Italian Cooperation in Exile

139

––. Carteggi, ed. by A. Caprio, P. R. Horne, S. Minichini, and J. R. Woodhouse, vols 1-4,(Naples: Loffredo, 1994). Vincent, E. R., Gabriele Rossetti in England (Oxford:Clarendon Press,1936). Woodhouse, J. R., ‘The Rossetti siblings in the correspondence of their father’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 6 (2001).

Owain J. Wright The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service? Contrasting British Diplomatic and Consular Experiences in Early Liberal Italy In 1875 Sir Edward Malet spent just a few months of his diplomatic career as a young attaché at the British Legation in Rome. When he came to write his memoirs a quarter of a century later, he recalled Rome as ‘the pleasantest post in the Service’.1 Malet’s words could easily have been those of a number of other British diplomats who showed a remarkable affection for Italy and the cities which served successively as its capital during the years following Italian unification: Turin (1861-65), Florence (1865-71), and Rome (from 1871). For certain other British representatives, however, life in Italy was a much less pleasant experience. Many members of the Consular Service found that their careers brought them experiences to be endured rather than enjoyed, leading them to form very different views on their country of residence. Although diplomats and consuls were professional émigrés, there is evidence to suggest that they might sometimes have felt more like exiles. During the mid-19th century the role of both diplomats and consuls was changing. The day-to-day value of diplomats to their home government had long rested in their ability to describe and explain foreign affairs, rather than in their higher-profile role as implementers of foreign policy.2 Similarly, despite existing officially for the promotion of British commercial interests and the protection of Britons overseas, the Consular Service could also make a significant contribution to the British government’s understanding of foreign affairs.3 The mid-19th century saw dramatic improvements in

1

2 3

Edward Malet, Shifting Scenes or Memories of Many Men in Many Lands (London: J. Murray, 1901), p. 83. Jeremy Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, 1688-1800 (Exeter: EUP, 2001), p. 58. See D. C. M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London, 1971); Lucia Patrizio-Gunning, The British Consular Service in the Aegean, 1820-60 (PhD thesis, University of London, 1997); G. W. Rice, ‘British Consuls and Diplomats in the MidEighteenth Century: An Italian Example’, English Historical Review, 92, 365 (1977), 84346; Peter Byrd, ‘Regional and Functional Specialisation in the British Consular Service’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7, 1/2 (1972), 127-45; John McDermott, ‘The Foreign Office and its German Consuls before 1914’, Journal of Modern History, 50, 1, On Demand Supplement (1978), 1001-34.

142

Owain J. Wright

communications technology,4 which arguably increased their importance in this respect.5 Their observations and opinions on their country of residence could therefore prove influential. A number of recent works have explored the personal experiences of British diplomats and consuls,6 and this paper aims to make a similar contribution regarding the relationship between them and the new Kingdom of Italy. By comparing and contrasting the personal experiences of British representatives in the country, it is intended to enhance our understanding of the perceptions of Italy formed by individuals who lived and worked there. It reveals and seeks to account for the combination of adoration and contempt felt towards the country by the British officials who performed a key role in shaping British perspectives on Italian affairs during this important period in its history. Between 1859 and 1861 the Unification of Italy brought about the creation of a liberal Italian state comprising the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, and the entire Italian peninsula except San Marino, the Austrian-ruled province of Venetia, and the Papal State of Rome. By 1866 and 1870 respectively, Italian leaders had acquired Venetia and Rome, but not without facing grave dangers which threatened to dismember the fledgling state. These changes were watched keenly by British leaders for various reasons. Despite initial hesitancy, in 1860 the Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston and his Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell offered cautious moral support and, ultimately, an official diplomatic endorsement to the new state.7 Their policy was consistent with a long-standing British cultural affection for Italy,8

4

5

6

7

8

See Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850 (Oxford: OUP, 2000); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London: Abacus, 1997), pp. 64-87. O. J. Wright, ‘British Representatives and the Surveillance of Italian Affairs (1860-70)’, The Historical Journal, 51, 3 (2008), 669-87. John Ure, ed., Diplomatic Bag: An Anthology of Diplomatic Incidents and Anecdotes from the Renaissance to the Gulf War (London: J. Murray, 1994); Gordon Daniels, Sir Harry Parkes: British Representative in Japan 1865-1883 (Richmond: Japan Library, 1996); Karina Urbach, Bismarck’s Favourite Englishman: The Embassy of Odo Russell to Berlin (London: IB Tauris, 1999); Scott W. Murray, Liberal Diplomacy and German Unification: The Early Career of Robert Morier (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); Katie Hickman, Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (London: Flamingo, 2000). See Derek Beales, England and Italy 1859-60 (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1961); Russell to Hudson, 27 October 1860, in Selections from Speeches of Earl Russell 1817 to 1841 and from Despatches 1859 to 1865, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1870), II, pp. 328-32. C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: CUP, 1957); John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Maura O’Connor,

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

143

pandered to the enormous enthusiasm felt in Britain for Garibaldi and his volunteers,9 and was also favourable to British strategic interests in the Mediterranean. The Unification of Italy established throughout the country the parliamentary government which had modernised Piedmont during the 1850s, opened up the peninsula to free trade, and created a railway and telegraph network which aided London’s communications with its global empire.10 Moreover, a strong and independent Italian kingdom promised to check the ambitions of France, Britain’s greatest rival in the Mediterranean.11 Naturally the principles of Britain’s foreign policy were determined mainly by the country’s own interests,12 and the British government therefore hoped to see the Kingdom of Italy emerge as a peaceful, prosperous and friendly new power. Consequently, British diplomatic and consular posts possessed a certain strategic importance during this period. Despite their significance, however, they were neither the most prestigious nor the most lucrative positions of their kind. The individuals appointed to head the British diplomatic mission to the new Italian kingdom during the first two decades of its existence were all competent individuals, and the first two even had prior experience of service in Italy. But in an age when diplomacy was ‘carried on in drawing rooms’ and dominated by classes considered to possess ‘a breeding and finesse that could only be found in the aristocracy and the gentry’,13 British diplomatic appointments to Italy did not necessarily include the most eminent names in the Diplomatic Service.

9

10

11

12

13

The Romance of Italy and the English Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: IB Tauris, 2005). See Derek Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England: The Politics of Italian Enthusiasm’, in Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, ed. by John A. Davis and Paul Ginsborg (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), pp. 184-216; Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Anthony Cardoza, ‘Cavour and Piedmont’, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by John A. Davis (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 112-22; Denis Mack Smith, Cavour (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 27-8, 97; Albert Schram, Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), pp. 105-10; D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815-1914 (Oxford: OUP, 1968), pp. 156-7. Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England 1830-1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 98-105; Paul Hayes, Modern British Foreign Policy: The Nineteenth Century 1814-80 (London: A. & C. Black, 1975), pp. 194-211; John Clarke, British Diplomacy and Foreign Policy 1782-1865: The National Interest (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 272-3. Bernard Porter, Britain, Europe and the World 1850-1982: Delusions of Grandeur (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 25. Robert T. Nightingale, ‘The Personnel of the British Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, 1851-1929’, Fabian Tract, 232 (London: The Fabian Society, 1930), p. 148.

144

Owain J. Wright

Between 1861 and 1888 the British diplomatic mission to Italy did not receive a single aristocratic appointment; during the same period the equivalent posts at Paris, St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna were dominated by aristocratic ambassadors.14 When such an appointment was finally made, it followed a perceived rise in Italy’s importance owing to its having joined the Triple Alliance in 1882, and its signing of the First Mediterranean Agreement with Britain in 1887.15 Before then, and even afterwards, Italy was treated as one of the Great Powers more as a sign of ‘international courtesy’ rather than on account of its actual economic or military might.16 It is also significant that until 1876 the professional rank of these representatives was that of Envoy Extraordinary and not Ambassador. Their position had been created by simply upgrading the extant British Legation to Piedmont in 1861. At that time the holders of similar posts elsewhere were paid between £2,000 and £6,000 per annum, and the salary of the new Envoy Extraordinary to Italy was set at £5,000;17 the mission was therefore placed towards the higher end of the scale, but the equivalent office in France commanded a much higher salary of £10,000.18 The fact that two holders of the Italian job rejected offers of promotion to more prestigious and financially-rewarding positions in 1862 and 1881 respectively suggests that they had motives other than professional ambition or the pursuit of greater wealth. When making his first diplomatic appointment to the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 the Foreign Secretary decided to appoint Sir James Hudson (1861-63), who had already served at Turin since 1852 and who effectively remained in his existing post as Piedmont ‘became’ Italy. Hudson’s tenure coincided with the ascendancy in Piedmontese politics of the chief architect of Italian unification Count Cavour, with whom he developed a close working relationship and personal friendship. During the Unification of Italy Hudson was widely believed to have acted beyond the call of his duties and without regard for the orders of either Conservative or Liberal administrations in London in order to further the Italian cause. This reputation earned him an unusually high and controversial public profile for a Victorian diplomat. Such was Hudson’s relationship with Cavour that he was described by the former Conservative Foreign Secretary Lord Malmesbury as having been

14 15

16 17 18

Ibid., pp. 151-2. Ray Jones, The British Diplomatic Service 1815-1914 (Gerrard’s Cross: Smythe, 1983), p. 185. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Abacus, 1994), pp. 313-4. Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, p. 100. Foreign Office List (London: Harrison, Jan. 1860), p. 159.

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

145

‘more Italian than the Italians themselves’;19 he was even celebrated by The Times for having been the ‘right-hand man and counsellor of Cavour, to whom he was simply invaluable’.20 This perception was not necessarily accurate,21 but such a reputation won Hudson much popularity among his pro-Italian contemporaries at home. It was on account of his experience of service at Turin that the Foreign Office opted to retain him in Italy after its unification. Palmerston and Russell were concerned about the new state’s fragility and vulnerability, confronted as it was by southern opposition to northern rule and surrounded by hostile European neighbours. In Russell’s opinion: ‘No one is better qualified than yourself to furnish Her Majesty’s Government with full and accurate information on a subject which you have studied with so much care, and judged with so much ability’.22 Hudson was presumably delighted to accept the offer, and was so attached to his post in Turin that he subsequently rejected another of promotion to the rank of Ambassador at Constantinople in 1862. Despite this being the second most prestigious office in the service, Hudson requested to remain at Turin; besides his undoubted affection for Italy and his alleged partisanship towards the Italian cause, he was reluctant to leave his Italian mistress, Signora Eugenia. After his retirement he remained in Italy, moving to Tuscany, becoming a principal director of the Florence Land and Public Works Company,23 and marrying Eugenia.24 Upon his retirement Hudson was succeeded by Sir Henry Elliot (186367), whose appointment prompted allegations of nepotism at home. Many Italophiles in Britain believed Hudson to have been pushed aside in order to make room for Elliot, who happened to be Russell’s son-in-law and a favourite of the Liberal party. Elliot has been derided as a ‘second-rate personality’ who would spend more ‘ink and choler’ complaining about his

19

20 21

22 23

24

Lord Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885), p. 475. The Times, 3 October 1885. Nicholas E. Carter, Sir James Hudson, British Diplomacy and the Italian Question: February 1858 to June 1861 (PhD thesis, University of Wales Cardiff, 1993); Carter, ‘Hudson, Malmesbury and Cavour: British Diplomacy and the Italian Question, February 1858 to June 1859’, Historical Journal, 40, 2 (1997), 389-413. Russell to Hudson, 15 March 1861, National Archives (hereafter NA), FO 167/122. Christopher Hibbert, Florence: The Biography of a City (London: Folio Society, 2000), p. 253. Charles Lacaita, Sir James Lacaita KCMG 1813-95 Senator of the Kingdom of Italy (London: Grant Richards, 1933), p. 261.

146

Owain J. Wright

mission’s accommodation than in reporting its business.25 But in later years William Gladstone defended his reputation as ‘an honourable and enlightened Christian diplomat’,26 and despite his connection with Russell Elliot was an appropriate choice to succeed Hudson. Like his predecessor he had prior experience of Italy, having been sent as a special envoy to Naples in 1859. During that mission he had been charged with the responsibility of re-establishing British diplomatic relations after a period of rupture, and had witnessed the arrival of Garibaldi and the Thousand in 1860. In 1862 he had been sent to Greece on a similar ‘civilising mission’, quite typical of British foreign policy of the period, where his task was to encourage King Otto to make administrative reforms in order to avert revolution. With Palmerston and Russell hoping to appoint someone who could ‘educate’ the Italians in the ways of parliamentary government, Elliot must have seemed a perfect candidate. Nor did he disappoint them, for he proved to be an astute observer of Italian affairs. While in Naples at the time of Garibaldi’s arrival in 1860, he had made the prophetic observation: For some weeks I have hardly had time for writing or thinking about anything except our own Neapolitan & Sicilian affairs and there is still no great prospect of their being near an end, for as ladies say under certain interesting circumstances it is by no means impossible that we must be worse before we are better.27

His prediction came to pass when the collapse of Bourbon power at Naples led to near anarchy in the South, and the new Italian state was compelled to fight a brutal five-year campaign to establish its authority across its new territories. Upon reading consular reports on the Palermo revolt of 1866, in which the city expelled its Italian rulers and established a provisional government, Elliot shrewdly observed that the Sicilians existed as a ‘nation’ distinct from Italy, whose preference was for self-rule. Elliot enjoyed his position in Italy so much that when he too was offered promotion to Constantinople, five years after Hudson had rejected such a move, he accepted it but regretted having to leave ‘the most easy and luxurious post in the whole service for one of real work and difficulty’.28 Elliot’s successor at Florence was Sir Augustus Paget (1867-83), who appears to have been considerably less enthusiastic than his predecessors

25

26 27

28

Kenneth Bourne, Foreign Policy of Lord Stanley July 1866 – December 1868 (PhD thesis, University of London, 1953), p. 12. Gordon Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh (London: J. Murray, 1963), p. 426. Elliot to Minto, 2 July 1860, National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), Minto Papers (hereafter MP), MS 12250. Elliot to Hammond, 11 April 1867, NA, Hammond Papers (hereafter HP), FO 391/21.

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

147

about the Italian national cause. When appointing Paget, the new Foreign Secretary Lord Stanley regretted that ‘there was so little to do there now that he didn’t like to send one of his [best men] to a place where he should be idle’.29 Like Elliot’s parting comment, Stanley’s remark provides a hint as to why so many British diplomats were happy to be posted to Italy; during the unification process it had offered a diplomat interesting professional challenges, but in more peaceful times it was if anything even more attractive for offering a comfortable life. When Paget took over the British Legation he began a tenure which would prove to be one of the longest British diplomatic appointments of the 19th century, and one which he would eventually relinquish only with the greatest reluctance. His family moved into the Palazzo Orlandini in the centre of Florence, where they enjoyed great notability as entertainers and socialites during the late 1860s.30 They became so attached to their home and to the city that their happiness impinged upon the diplomat’s perspective on the Italian acquisition of Rome, and the culmination of the Risorgimento, in 1870. Although successive British governments had been generally sympathetic towards Italy’s claim to the Eternal City, and had even on occasion sought tentatively to realise it through diplomatic means,31 Paget showed himself to be less than enthusiastic. Faced with the prospect of having to move there in the event of the Italians’ success, his private views contrasted considerably with the official British line on the matter: It is the most absurd notion that ever was, – in fact no one but the Italians who are a nation of great children would even persist in it. Rome is no more fitted for a big capital than the smallest village, it can’t be inhabited for 4 months in the year, & as for the Pope & the King & his Government coexisting in it the notion is simply preposterous.32

The observation reflects the apparent impossibility of the situation caused mainly by the Papacy’s abject refusal to contemplate surrendering its temporal power to the Kingdom of Italy. But it seems that Paget’s views were influenced considerably more by his reluctance to relinquish his comfortable home in Florence. Nonetheless, once the British Legation was transferred to Rome in 1871, the Pagets became similarly besotted with their new residence. In 1881 they even felt obliged to defend their position from Sir Austen Layard, an

29 30 31

32

Walpurga Paget, Embassies of Other Days (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1923), p. 219. Hibbert, Florence, p. 254. Ivan Scott, The Roman Question and the Powers 1848-1865 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1969), pp. 296-305. Paget to Hammond, 29 September 1870, NA, HP, FO 391/23.

148

Owain J. Wright

influential but then unemployed fellow diplomat who coveted Paget’s post. When Layard launched an undignified campaign to have the incumbents ousted and to secure his own appointment to Rome, Paget asserted that ‘nothing would induce me to leave it’.33 When the Layards visited the city the Pagets received the couple very coldly, despite their reputation for hospitality. A plan was hatched by Gladstone’s Liberal administration to transfer Paget to St Petersburg in order to free Rome for Layard, in response to which the embattled diplomat resorted to the extraordinary measure of producing a medical certificate which stated that it would be dangerous for his wife and daughter to live in such a cold climate.34 The government only escaped defeat by Paget’s Conservative friends in the House of Commons through abandonment of the idea.35 Even after the Pagets were finally transferred to Vienna in 1883, they hoped to return to Italy upon retirement. As for Layard, his failure to secure Rome for himself prompted his own departure from the Diplomatic Service, and he took up permanent residence in Venice.36 Paget and Layard were not the only British diplomats to show a great attachment to Rome. Prior to the city’s incorporation within the Kingdom of Italy, it hosted a separate diplomatic mission which could only be maintained on an unofficial footing owing to the British government’s refusal to recognise the temporal power of the Papacy. This unique position was occupied by Odo Russell (1858-70), nephew of Lord John Russell and future son-in-law of Lord Clarendon, but a man regarded as one of the brightest talents of his generation in the Diplomatic Service. Throughout the first decade of Italian unity Odo provided an extra dimension to the Foreign Office’s understanding of affairs in the Italian peninsula which complemented that provided by the occupants of the official British Legation to Italy. Like his Liberal relatives he had no love for the temporal power of the Papacy,37 and made no attempt to conceal his enthusiasm for the Italian national cause.38 But he nonetheless enjoyed a good relationship with the Papal government, and expressed his own reluctance to leave the post:

33 34 35

36 37

38

Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh, p. 456. Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, pp. 178-9. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice, ed., The Life of George Leveson Gower, Second Earl Granville KG 1815-91, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1905), II, p. 200. Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh, p. 467. Noel Blakiston, ed., The Roman Question: Extracts from the Despatches of Odo Russell from Rome 1858-70, (London: Chapman and Hall, 1962), p. xviii. Scott, The Roman Question and the Powers, p. 295.

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

149

I hope and pray you will be able to put off the evil hour of appointing me Secretary of Embassy [a promotion]. I don’t care being thrown back a few years in my profession, I don’t ask for money or for rank, but I do beg and pray not to be taken from a mission full of historical interest and useful labour during a period when the Roman Question is uppermost in men’s minds … 39

With his talents required at the peace conference which concluded the Franco-Prussian War, and subsequently as the first British Ambassador to Germany, Odo departed Rome just months before the city’s incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. His successor, Harry Jervoise, had little time to savour the role before the post was abolished upon the transferral of the Italian government, and consequently the official British Legation, to Rome in 1871. If British diplomats generally appear to have been reluctant to leave posts in early Liberal Italy, they felt this way regardless of certain negative experiences in the country. When rioting took place on the streets of Turin in 1864 as a result of the Italian government’s proposed transferral to Florence, Elliot witnessed a grizzly scene. The Carabinieri lost their nerve and opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in the Piazza San Carlo, their bullets massacring protesters, innocent bystanders, and even some of their comrades. When Elliot arrived in person just a few minutes later he saw the extent of the carnage for himself.40 During the aftermath of the tragedy he grew to hate the ‘cold raw rain’, the ‘dark leaden sky’, and the ‘miserable filth’ of the city, which suggested to him that ‘Turin is trying to show that it is not Italy’.41 Paget, his successor, became a frequent and outspoken critic of the Italian state despite the determination with which he sought to keep his post. During the succession of parliamentary crises which paralysed government in Italy during the late 1860s, Paget could barely conceal his disdain for the Italians’ apparent inability to make better use of their new constitutional system; he even commented privately that the country’s poor international reputation was quite justified.42 During the mid-1870s he was appalled by a succession of incidents in which several innocent and not-so-innocent British subjects found themselves locked up by the Carabinieri for travelling without identification. These episodes, and the failure of governments of both the

39 40

41 42

Blakiston, The Roman Question, p. 270. H. G. Elliot, Some Revolutions and Other Diplomatic Experiences, ed. by Gertrude Elliot (London: J. Murray, 1922), pp. 171-9. Elliot to Minto, 24 November 1864, NLS, MP, MS 12250. Paget to Clarendon, 23 December 1869, Bodleian Library, Clarendon Papers, MS. Clar. dep. c. 488. I am grateful to Lord Clarendon for permission to quote from the Clarendon Papers.

150

Owain J. Wright

Destra Storica and the Sinistra to make amends for them, created considerable friction between him and his Italian hosts.43 Such events were minor professional irritations compared with the experiences of many members of the Consular Service in the country. The situation of British consular officers was very different from that of their diplomatic counterparts, and they generally exhibited far less affection for their work and their residences. A considerable socio-economic gulf separated diplomats and consuls, and a variety of factors made consular positions far less desirable than diplomatic ones. Only the most important consular establishments provided their occupants with an official salary, and even then rates of pay were relatively low. The highest-paid British consular officers in Italy were Edward Bonham and William Perry, respectively the Consuls-General at Naples and Venice, who were paid £900 and £800 per annum.44 Others claimed to endure financial hardship. At Genoa Montagu Brown was lucky enough to have his annual salary increased from £400 in 1858 to £600 in 1871, but he lamented that this was not sufficient to match the rising cost of living in the city. In Rome Joseph Severn also saw escalations in house rent and the cost of hiring clerks which were unmatched by any increase in his salary.45 In 1869 Gustavus Gaggiotti, the Italian-born Vice-Consul at Ancona, pleaded to be elevated to the rank of Consul in the hope that he might obtain a better salary; typically the Foreign Office refused this request in the first instance, but subsequently agreed to it as part of a review of the status of offices located in the former Papal States. Around this time Edward Walker also complained about his annual salary at Cagliari which, at £350, had remained unchanged since the 1850s. Walker’s predecessor William Craig had maintained not only himself but also a consular assistant and a clerk on the same income, and had also benefited from the services of a son who served as an unsalaried vice-consul. Walker’s predecessor had been a merchant with his own private source of income to supplement his consular salary, while Walker was a career consul appointed from another post; he had no interest in or intention of engaging in commerce.46 He also appears to have been tricked into purchasing a consular flag, desk, arms, and seals from the son of his late predecessor at a price of

43

44 45

46

Paget to Derby, 30 May 1875; Paget to Derby, 10 July 1877, Paget to Melegari, 10 July 1877, all in ‘Correspondence respecting Police Outrages on British Subjects in Italy and Italian Subjects in Great Britain 1873-78’, NA, FO 425/107. Foreign Office List (London: Harrison, Jan. 1870), p. 197. Reports Relative to British Consular Establishments, Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), 1872 LX 1. Walker to Clarendon, 22 December 1869, NA, FO 45/148.

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

151

125 Francs. The Foreign Office refused to reimburse this sum on the grounds that it would have provided these items in due course.47 From 1877 all salaried consuls were prohibited by the Foreign Office from maintaining their own trading interests. Prior to this move, few enjoyed an official income which was high enough to cover all their expenses. Both before and after this change the majority of British consular officers in the Mediterranean were unsalaried, locally-born vice-consuls. They were appointed on the basis of their familiarity with their surroundings and the fact that they cost the Treasury virtually nothing. These individuals were no doubt attracted to the role because it afforded them the prestige of a ceremonial uniform and a brass plaque outside their door, and immeasurable potential for corruption. Their duties included the arbitration of disputes between British subjects in their city of residence, and they were normally permitted to keep the fees charged for their services. Consequently there was seldom any shortage of persons willing to take on the unpaid role, but such appointees received little official training and were not necessarily the most suitably qualified for the work. As the primary interests of many consular officers lay in areas other than their official role, they frequently failed to perform their duties in a professional manner. Where consuls availed themselves of their authority to trade, such as at Alexander Macbean’s salaried Consulate at Livorno and the Ingham family’s unpaid Vice-Consulate at Marsala, they sometimes found that their own private interests conflicted with their official responsibilities and affected their relationship with the community they were appointed to serve. Other consuls proved to be poor appointees for other reasons. Many gained entry to the service because they possessed an artistic or literary reputation, irrespective of their other qualifications or abilities. Charles Newton, the British Consul at Rome during the early 1860s, was a former employee of the British Museum whose appointment followed several other posts in Mediterranean locations of classical interest. His friend Dominic Colnaghi had been born into a family of London art dealers, and was likewise offered several appointments in the Aegean before being transferred to Turin in 1866. In both cases these men were sent to positions in Italy which were not insignificant; Rome continued to be a source of international attention and intrigue until finally absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, while Turin became a politically-sensitive location after the departure of the Italian government in 1865. Despite their questionable qualifications both men appear to have conducted their consular duties with a suitable level of

47

Walker to Clarendon, 12 October 1869, NA, FO 45/148.

152

Owain J. Wright

professionalism and dedication. The same could not be said of Newton’s successor at Rome, the artist Joseph Severn. Severn had been resident in the city since first arriving there with John Keats decades before. Not only was Severn over the age limit for new appointees to the service, but he suffered from delusions of grandeur and was described by Odo Russell as ‘utterly unfit and unqualified for his post’.48 Worse still was Charles Lever, who even had a rare salaried Vice-Consulate created for him at La Spezia in 1858, and repaid his employers’ generosity by completely failing to take his consular work seriously. Lever is alleged never even to have taken up permanent residence at his post, and on one occasion even met the Foreign Secretary in London without having previously requested a period of leave.49 Besides their relative financial hardship and, in many cases, their unsuitability for consular work, those consuls who took the trouble to live at their posts found that there were sometimes even greater experiences to endure. Even if 19th century British visitors to Italy enjoyed a fascination for the country’s ancient and medieval heritage, many were uncomfortable with its modern reality; some even described contemporary Italians as barbarians.50 After Italian unification, several consular officers expressed horror at the condition of the country in which they had to live. ConsulGeneral Bonham witnessed some of the worst disorder in Italy from his post at Naples, regularly providing the Foreign Office with reports on rampant brigandage throughout the South. He gained close experience of this particularly unpleasant scourge when two British travellers, William Moens and the Revd Aynsley, were captured by brigands in 1865; Bonham even made his own personal attempt at securing their release.51 At Palermo John Goodwin witnessed much of the shocking revolt of 1866 in person, after being awoken one Sunday morning to find the normal sound of church bells replaced by that of gunshots.52 In 1870, when the Sardinian-born ViceConsul Zamponi became the target of a local vendetta at Terranova (now Olbia), his superintending officer Consul Walker summoned a British

48 49

50 51

52

Blakiston, The Roman Question, p. xix. Blakiston, Inglesi e italiani nel Risorgimento (Catania: Bonanno, 1973), p. 43; Platt, The Cinderella Service, p. 29. C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 14. Martin Blinkhorn, ‘Liability, Responsibility and Blame: British Ransom Victims in the Mediterranean Periphery, 1860-81’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 46, 3 (2000), 336-56 (346-7). John Goodwin, ‘Seven Days of Disturbance in Palermo’, 9 October 1866, copy in Elliot to Stanley, 13 October 1866, NA, FO 45/90.

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

153

gunboat to the island.53 This bizarre incident prompted Walker to highlight a number of other episodes which, despite the fact that he had served previously in Africa, show that he was quite alarmed by his surroundings; these included a courthouse break-in, frequent reports of murder for the sake of money or for revenge, and the refusal of witnesses to assist police with their investigation of such crimes.54 In Sicily in 1861 a group of four horsemen even accosted a British resident, James Rose, while he was serving as the acting British Consul at Palermo. Upon being surrounded by the brigands, who demanded that he surrender his valuables, the Englishman gave them a gold watch and promised later to send them £100 (which he never did); the trick worked, and he was released by his captors.55 On a more mundane level, Henry Grant complained about being permitted only a single month of annual leave, on account of it not being sufficient to allow the Scot to gain some respite from the ‘unwholesome climate’ of Brindisi.56 In conclusion, there was a considerable contrast between the level of job satisfaction of British diplomats and the various consular officers based in Italy. While the first three British diplomatic representatives to the new kingdom were generally very content with their appointments, as was the British special envoy to Rome, their happiness was seldom shared by the consuls. The heads of diplomatic missions lived a very different existence from their consular counterparts, enjoying a far higher salary and a much greater level of prestige. They also lived in relative luxury in the capital city, wining and dining in élite circles, with the option of travelling at their leisure to other parts of the country if time allowed. On the other hand, British consular officers were either relatively poorly paid or not paid at all, and none enjoyed any great level of prestige. They were also usually confined to small provincial towns or Mediterranean ports during an era in which poverty, pestilence and crime were not uncommon in Italy. British diplomats appear to have enjoyed something of a love affair with Italy but their consular colleagues, and occasionally they themselves, witnessed some of the less pleasing aspects of a country more commonly thought of as an object of Victorian admiration and affection.

53

54

55

56

O. J. Wright, ‘Sea and Sardinia: Pax Britannica versus Vendetta in the New Italy (1870)’, European History Quarterly, 37, 3 (2007), 398-416. Walker to Paget, 7 February 1870, in Paget to Clarendon, 12 February 1870, NA, FO 45/161; Walker to Paget, 12 June 1870, NA, FO 45/172. Hudson to Russell, 18 June 1861, Papers respecting the Affairs of Southern Italy, PP, 1861 LXVII 375. Reports Relative to British Consular Establishments, PP, 1872 LX 1.

154

Owain J. Wright

Bibliography Primary Sources British Foreign Office: Political and Other Departments: Correspondence before 1906, Italy, The National Archives. British Foreign Office: Legation, Sardinia, Kingdom of Italy, (formerly Kingdom of Sardinia): general correspondence, The National Archives. British Foreign Office: Italy. Police Outrages on British Subjects in Italy and on Italian Subjects in Great Britain. Correspondence 1873-78’, The National Archives. British Parliamentary Papers, Papers respecting the Affairs of Southern Italy, 1861 LXVII 375 British Parliamentary Papers, Reports Relative to British Consular Establishments, 1872 LX 1 The Clarendon Papers, Bodleian Library The Foreign Office List (London: Harrison, 1860-70) The Hammond Papers, The National Archives The Minto Papers, National Library of Scotland Blakiston, Noel, ed., The Roman Question: Extracts from the Despatches of Odo Russell from Rome 1858-70 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1962). Elliot, H. G., Some Revolutions and Other Diplomatic Experiences, ed. by Gertrude Elliot (London: J. Murray, 1922). Malet, Edward, Shifting Scenes or Memories of Many Men in Many Lands (London: J. Murray, 1901). Malmesbury, James Howard Harris 3rd Earl, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885). Paget, Walpurga, Embassies of Other Days (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1923). Russell, Lord John, Selections from Speeches of Earl Russell 1817 to 1841 and from Despatches 1859 to 1865, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1870). The Times Newspaper, 1885. Secondary Sources Beales, Derek, England and Italy 1859-60 (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1961).

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

155

––. ‘Garibaldi in England: The Politics of Italian Enthusiasm’, in Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, ed. by John A Davis and Paul Ginsborg (Cambridge: CUP, 1991). Black, Jeremy, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, 1688-1800 (Exeter: EUP, 2001). Blakiston, Noel, Inglesi e italiani nel Risorgimento (Catania: Bonanno, 1973) Blinkhorn, Martin, ‘Liability, Responsibility and Blame: British Ransom Victims in the Mediterranean Periphery, 1860-81’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 46, 3 (2000), 336-56. Bourne, Kenneth, The Foreign Policy of Lord Stanley July 1866 – December 1868 (PhD thesis, University of London, 1953). ––. The Foreign Policy of Victorian England 1830-1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Brand, C. P., Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: CUP, 1957). Byrd, Peter, ‘Regional and Functional Specialisation in the British Consular Service’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7, 1/2 (1972), 127-45. Cardoza, Anthony, ‘Cavour and Piedmont’, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by John A Davis (Oxford: OUP, 2000). Carter, Nicholas E., Sir James Hudson, British Diplomacy and the Italian Question: February 1858 to June 1861 (PhD thesis, University of Wales Cardiff, 1993). Carter, Nick, ‘Hudson, Malmesbury and Cavour: British Diplomacy and the Italian Question, February 1858 to June 1859’, Historical Journal, 40, 2 (1997), 389-413. Cavaliero, Roderick, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: IB Tauris, 2005). Clarke, John, British Diplomacy and Foreign Policy 1782-1865: The National Interest (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Daniels, Gordon, Sir Harry Parkes, British Representative in Japan 18651883 (Richmond: Japan Library, 1996). Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmund, ed., The Life of George Leveson Gower, Second Earl Granville KG 1815-91, vol. 2, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1905). Hayes, Paul, Modern British Foreign Policy: The Nineteenth Century 181480 (London: A. & C. Black, 1975). Headrick, Daniel R., When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850 (Oxford: OUP, 2000). Hibbert, Christopher, Florence: The Biography of a City (London: Folio Society, 2000).

156

Owain J. Wright

Hickman, Katie, Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (London: Flamingo, 2000). Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London: Abacus, 1997). ––. The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Abacus, 1994). Jones, Ray, The British Diplomatic Service 1815-1914 (Gerrard’s Cross: Smythe, 1983). Lacaita, Charles, Sir James Lacaita KCMG 1813-95 Senator of the Kingdom of Italy (London: Grant Richards, 1933). Mack Smith, Denis, Cavour (London: Methuen, 1985). McDermott, John, ‘The Foreign Office and its German Consuls before 1914’, Journal of Modern History, 50, 1, On Demand Supplement (1978), 100134. Murray, Scott W., Liberal Diplomacy and German Unification: The Early Career of Robert Morier (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000). Nightingale, Robert T., ‘The Personnel of the British Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, 1851-1929’, Fabian Tract, 232 (London: The Fabian Society, 1930). O’Connor, Maura, The Romance of Italy and the English Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Patrizio-Gunning, Lucia, The British Consular Service in the Aegean, 182060 (PhD thesis, University of London, 1997). Pemble, John, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Platt, D. C. M., The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London, 1971). ––. Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815-1914 (Oxford: OUP, 1968). Porter, Bernard, Britain, Europe and the World 1850-1982: Delusions of Grandeur (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983). Rice, G. W., ‘British Consuls and Diplomats in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: An Italian Example’, English Historical Review, 92, 365 (1977), 843-46. Schram, Albert, Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). Scott, Ivan, The Roman Question and the Powers 1848-1865 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1969). Urbach, Karina, Bismarck’s Favourite Englishman: The Embassy of Odo Russell to Berlin (London: IB Tauris, 1999). Ure, John, ed., Diplomatic Bag: An Anthology of Diplomatic Incidents and Anecdotes from the Renaissance to the Gulf War (London: J. Murray, 1994). Waterfield, Gordon, Layard of Nineveh (London: J. Murray, 1963).

The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service?

157

Wright, O. J., ‘British Representatives and the Surveillance of Italian Affairs (1860-70)’, The Historical Journal, 51, 3 (2008), 669-87. ––. ‘Sea and Sardinia: Pax Britannica versus Vendetta in the New Italy (1870)’, European History Quarterly, 37, 3 (2007), 398-416.

3. Religious and Political Difference

Gaby Mahlberg ‘All the conscientious and honest papists’: Exile and Belief Formation of an English Republican* Introduction This essay will discuss a somewhat extraordinary Englishman. In the later 17th century, at the height of a succession crisis and growing fears of ‘popery and arbitrary government’1 in England, when most people in the country were suspicious of anything ‘popish’, he propagated a policy of toleration towards Catholics. This man was the republican Henry Neville; and his rare attitude towards Catholics, it will be argued, was largely shaped by his personal background and experience, especially by a four-year period of Italian exile in the 1660s, and – of course – by his many friends and acquaintances in the Catholic country. Henry Neville (1619-94) was the younger son of a Berkshire gentry family, whose first experience of Italy dated back to the early 1640s, when he visited the country as part of the Grand Tour every young man of a certain status was expected to undertake before settling for a respectable career back home.2 During his Grand Tour he forged first contacts in the country, which he would maintain throughout his life, for instance with Ferrante Capponi, a Florentine lawyer who lived in Rome and acted on behalf of the Tuscan court. Capponi and Neville used to see each other virtually every day when Neville was in Rome.3 With his stepfather Sir John Thorowgood Neville shared his love for all things Italian, as we know from Thorowgood’s will, in which he would leave his stepson among other things a brass statue of a Roman fencer as well as all

* 1

2

3

All translations from the Italian are the author’s own. She holds responsibility for any errors. The phrase is Andrew Marvell’s. See his Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (Amsterdam, 1677), in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart, 4 vols (London: The Fuller Worthies Library, 1872-75), IV, pp. 245-431. Neville left England for his Grand Tour in May 1641. Cf. Calendars of State Papers Domestic 1640-41, 11 May 1641, p. 574; John Thorowgood to Richard Neville on 30 January 1640/41, Berkshire Record Office D/EN/ F8/1/1. Ferrante Capponi to Henry Neville from Rome, 12 December 1643, BRO D/EN/F8/1.

162

Gaby Mahlberg

his Italian books.4 And judging from the letters he received from Italy from the early 1640s Neville must by then also have had a good command of the Italian language. The country, it seems, left a lasting impression both on his education and on his politics. On his return to England around 1645 the Civil War between King and Parliament was in full swing and Neville soon emerged as a staunch republican who sided with the puritan parliamentary party and sympathized with the more radical Independent faction.5 He was a low-Church Protestant in favour of liberty of conscience and opposed to the Church of England with its hierarchical structures and elaborate rites, which for many smacked of ‘popery.’ After the execution of King Charles I by the parliamentarians, he became a member of the Commonwealth government in the Interregnum of the 1650s, but had his political career cut short at the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. At the Restoration, Charles II had shown reasonable leniency towards the power brokers of the Interregnum and only executed a small number of men, most of whom had been regicides – which Neville was not. However, Charles’s government – with its divine right and absolutist pretensions – still felt weak and insecure and much threatened by political and religious dissent, so that his security enforcement officials were alerted by every hint of a plot or uprising and used every rumour to arrest people who might potentially

4

5

National Archives, Probates, 11/265/209. Thorowgood died in January 1656/7. See A True Register of all the Christenings, Mariages, and Burialles in the Parish of St. James, Clerkenwell, from the yeare of our Lorde God 1551, ed. by Robert Hovenden, IV, Burials, 1551 to 1665 (London, 1891-2), p. 313. On Neville’s live and times, see Gaby Maria Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville and English Republicanism in the Seventeenth Century,’ unpublished PhD thesis (University of East Anglia, 2005), ch. 2; the Introduction to Two English Republican Tracts, ed. by Caroline Robbins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Neville, Henry (1620-1694)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, (accessed 25 Oct 2004); Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses. An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their education in the University of Oxford…, ed. by Philip Bliss, 4 vols. (1813-1820), IV, cols. 410-11; Thomas Hollis’s introduction to Plato Redivivus (London, 1763), pp. 1-8, which, however, draws heavily on Wood, as does the old DNB. On the factionalism of the parliamentary party, see: David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 163749 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Mark A. Kishlanksy, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Exile and Belief Formation

163

threaten the government.6 Neville – known both as a political and religious dissenter – was one of them. On a warrant by Secretary Bennet, Neville was arrested ‘at his brother’s’ house in Berkshire in October 1663 and imprisoned in the Tower following his alleged involvement in the so-called Yorkshire Plot7, a planned rising in the North which allegedly aimed to force the King to stand by his promises made at the Restoration ‘to give Lyberty of Conscience to all save Romanists: to take away Excise, Chimney mony, and all taxations what soever,’ and ‘to destroy [th]e Government […] to restore a Gospell Magistracy and ministry.’8 The alleged plotters were mainly sectarians and dissenters, such as Quakers, Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchists, and some saw the rising as a protest against the government’s 1662 Act of Uniformity, which enforced the Church of England’s new Prayer Book and the 39 Articles.9 The rising was to renew ‘the old cause’ of the civil wars. However, ‘the King and Queen should not be hurt, nor any assassinated, but if the desired liberty was not granted, the Long Parliament should be called for.’10 In his examination, Neville claimed his innocence and that he had only ‘[h]eard of the rising through the News-book’ and not communicated with any of the disaffected.11 The evidence against him was contradictory, only relied on hearsay and was altogether insufficient to keep him imprisoned. But the government’s anxiety was too strong to release him. As a compromise, Neville was to leave the country as a political exile.12 Neville’s biographer, Caroline Robbins, seems to imply that Neville went to Italy on his own accord, ‘made his way to the court of Ferdinand II of Tuscany, and there obtained some kind of court employment.’13 But Neville’s moves were not as straightforward as Robbins implies. The government had a

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13

On plotting and the political underground, see Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: the Radical Underground in Britain, 1660-1663 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Henry Bennet’s ‘Warr[an]t to S[i]r John Robinson or to his Deputy for bringing ye person of Hen. Nevill before Mr Secretary’, 28 October 1663, Entry Book, SP 44/15, p. 220; CSPD 1663-1664, pp. 317-8; Warrant to Sir John Robinson for p[er]mitting off --- Neville to have accesse to Henry Nevill Esqr & discourse w[i]th him in [th]e p[re]sence of his Keeper, 10 November 1663, SP 44/15, Entry Book, p. 238. State Papers 29/84, f. 85, Captain Robert Atkinson his information, 26 November 1663. CSPD 1663-1664, pp. 323, 337, 338, 340, 507 etc. Ibid., 28 April 1664, p. 571. CSPD 1663-1664, pp. 317-8. Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville’, pp. 120-1. Two Republican Tracts, p. 13.

164

Gaby Mahlberg

say in his choice of exile, and certain government figures might have had a vested interest in sending Neville to Italy, where he had made contacts during his Grand Tour in the early 1640s.14 He was discharged from the Tower and in May 1664 received a pass to go abroad.15 Exile Neville went via France to Italy and initially settled in Florence, where he was closely associated with the Tuscan court. Ferdinand’s son Cosimo was a well-known anglophile, who maintained many friendships with Englishmen he entertained at court, not least to maintain good trading relations with England through the port of Leghorn.16 Yet, it is unlikely that Neville had any serious court employment, as Robbins seems to suggest, because he did not stay there on a permanent basis. He travelled to Venice, Pisa and Frascati, and also settled in Rome for a good while, returning to England in 1668.17 It is more likely that Neville was meant to serve the English government in Italy, and that he struck a deal with the Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, to let him go to Italy on the condition that he would keep the Chancellor informed about political developments in the country and maybe even serve as an unofficial ambassador for England. At least this is what a letter of December 1664 implies, in which Clarendon asks Neville to reproach the Venetians for ‘not having a constant ambassador’ in London, which was to the disadvantage of English trade with the republic. Clarendon also hoped that Neville’s temporary move to Rome – where he stayed between August 1665 and January 1667 – would benefit the country because he might be able to find out about any potential Catholic threat. In particular, Clarendon instructed Neville to find out about ‘the two

14 15 16

17

CSPD 1663-1664, pp. 461, 539. SP 44/16, Entry Book, pp. 23, 127, 3 February and 20 May 1664. Cf. Anna Maria Crinò, Fatti e Figure Del Seicento Anglo-Toscano: Documenti inediti sui rapporti letterati, diplomatici, culturali fra Toscana e Inghilterra (Firenze: Olschki, 1957). Neville stayed in Venice in September 1664, from where he sent a letter to Clarendon. He travelled from Florence to Pisa around 20 January 1664/5 and was planning to go to Rome after his return. He was staying in Rome between about August 1665 and January 1667, from where he travelled to Frascati in October 1666. For his whereabouts see Essex Record Office D/DBy/Z58, BRO D/EN F8/1/12, and the following letters from Henry Neville to Bernadino Guasconi from Rome, 1 August 1665; from Babylon [i.e. Rome, scilicet], 19 September 1665; from Rome, 9 January 1665/6; from Frascati, 30 October 1666; from Rome, 23 November 1666; from Rome, 1 January 1666/7, in Anna Maria Crinò, ‘Lettere inedite italiani e inglesi di Sir [sic] Henry Neville’, Fatti e Figure, pp. 173-208 (pp. 180-6).

Exile and Belief Formation

165

Crownes [of France and Spain] which will always be Candidates for the Pontificall Friendshipp,’ and also to ‘enquire as much as you can into the little intrigues of the Irish who have always some foolish designe in that Court.’18 So Neville was to promote English interests in Italy and at the same time to spy on various groups of Catholics. Yet, Neville was not eager to do Clarendon’s bidding. In 1666 the Lord Chancellor complained that Neville had not sent any news. Neville responded that not much of importance had happened, but filled two folio pages virtually void of content to please his master, reassuring him that he had ‘neither acted in or beine acquainted with, any designe to [th]e preiudice of his Ma[jes]ties affaires either at home or abroad.’19 Neville was safe for the moment, but he also knew that the government still did not trust him and that some of his letters mysteriously went astray. He kept count and told his brother Richard that he ‘never failed Fryday nor Tuesday since I came to Florence from writing to y[ou]r selfe fair wife or sister […] nor doe intend to faile you except I am sick or in Viaggio.’20 He also burnt secret and potentially incriminating letters he received – for good reason.21 The Secretary of State, Joseph Williamson, continued to watch Neville’s mail, and some of the letters to ‘that Grand Rebell in rome’ – as the King’s secret service called him – were intercepted.22 It is understandable that Neville was not eager to act for his own country, or to return. He felt victimised by his own government, although he kept claiming his innocence. His letters to his brother show a certain bitterness towards his own country, while also making clear how happy he was to have

18

19 20

21

22

Clarendon to Henry Neville, 24 December [1664], ERO D/DBy/Z58. The year must be 1664 as Clarendon sent this letter from Worcester House, which dates it before 1666, and he was in Rome by December 1665. An exchange with Paul Seaward helped to date this letter. Henry Neville to Clarendon from Rome, 3/13 March 1665/6, MS Clarendon 84, ff. 78-9. Henry Neville from Florence to Richard Neville in London, 20 January 1664/5. BRO D/EN F8/1/12. Henry Neville to Bernardino Guasconi from Rome, 1 January 1667/8, Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Miscellanea Medicea 81, quoted in Crinò, ‘Lettere,’ pp. 185/6. Bernard[in]o Guasconi had fought for Charles I as a mercenary captain and returned to Florence after having been saved from death under the Cromwellians. He came back to England around 1667 to enter the service of Charles II after three years in Italy. In England he was also known as Sir Bernard Gascoign. Cf. Crinò, ‘Lettere,’ pp. 176-7, Stefano Villani, ‘Guasconi (Gascoigne), Bernardo’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Catanzaro: Grafiche Abramo, 2003); and Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 258-9. CSPD 1666-1667, p. 218, SP 29/206, 21 June 1667, f. 134. Richard Neville from Billingbear to Henry Neville in Rome, 20 June 1667, sent by James Hicks to Secretary Williamson.

166

Gaby Mahlberg

found a safe haven in Italy. In January 1665, he wrote to Richard in London: ‘I find a sensible difference between being civilly treated, […] valew’d and esteem’d by princes abroad, and not only hatted but persecuted at home.’23 And in a letter to Bernardino Guasconi of January 1667, he writes that Florence is ‘the place in the world which I honour and estime most,’ while in another letter to the same he calls Italy ‘this paradise.’24 In fact, Neville seems to have had a good time in Italy. He made friends with a number of Tuscan courtiers, including Paolo Falconieri, Lorenzo Magalotti, Lorenzo del Rosso and Giovanni Salviati, as well as with the Grand Duke’s son, Cosimo, who would succeed his father in 1670. Neville ‘enjoyed hunting at Pisa,’25 and ‘the beautiful little towns and the Ladies of Florence,’26 and he also seems to have been madly in love with a married woman in Rome, with whom he had a secret affair.27 Rome was to Neville a city full of enjoyment but also contradictions – a beautiful city with many churches and replete with high-ranking clergymen, but also a Babylon full of corruption and sin, whose customs and double standards he did not always understand.28 He stayed on what today is Via del Corso in the vicinity of the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna, in the parish of San Lorenzo in Lucina, where he would have been surrounded by other foreigners, including pilgrims to the Holy See, but also other travellers, diplomats, and artists. In short, he enjoyed a multi-cultural but also religiously diverse environment. This was even true for his own lodgings, which he shared with two Protestant Welsh and English and four Italian Catholic servants.29 It seems he lived a rather comfortable life. The only time Neville was seriously contemplating going back to England was in October 1666 when he wrote to Guasconi from Frascati that he feared the Great Fire of London had destroyed important papers that ‘certain men of quality’ had left in his care.30 But it seems he never went. Instead of

23

24

25 26 27

28 29

30

Henry Neville from Florence to Richard Neville in London, 20 January 1664/5, BRO D/EN F8/1/11. Henry Neville from Rome to Bernardino Guasconi, 1 and 8 January 1667, ASF Misc. Med. 81, quoted in Crinò, ‘Lettere,’ pp. 185-7. Two Republican Tracts, p. 13. Henry Neville from Rome to Bernardino Guasconi, 1 August 1665, ASF Misc. Med. 81. Henry Neville from Rome to Bernardino Guasconi, 19 September 1665 and 9 January 1665/6, ASF Misc. Med. 81. Ibid. Archivio Storico Diocesano, Rome, Parrochia S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Stati D’Animi 1666. The author would like to thank Stefano Villani and Edward Corp for their advice on locating Neville’s address in Rome. Henry Neville from Frascati to Bernardino Guasconi, 30 October 1666, ASF Misc. Med. 81.

Exile and Belief Formation

167

concerning himself too much with the demands of his own country, he developed close sympathy both for his hosts in Italy and through them also for the situation of Catholics in England. Returning Home – the Situation of Catholics Only a year after Neville’s return to England, Cosimo had travelled the country with a small entourage and, among others, also came to see Neville and was entertained at his brother Richard’s house in Berkshire.31 Neville and Cosimo remained lifelong friends and exchanged regular letters, especially about the situation of Catholics in England from the 1660s through to the 1680s, when the climate of fear and persecution forced them to keep a low profile. From those letters we get a sense that Neville felt a strong allegiance with the Catholics in his country because they were discriminated against not unlike the Protestant dissenters, of whom Neville was one. One of his letters to Cosimo in particular reflects Neville’s concerns. Neville wrote he was aware of the historical hatred of Catholics in England which had emerged with the Reformation, when being a Catholic came to mean being a traitor, because Catholics adhered to the Pope first and to their country and its ruler second, and because papal bulls of excommunication had released English Catholic subjects from allegiance to their head of state.32 ‘Popery’ therefore was a very political matter. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, Neville did not share the common prejudice against ‘popery.’ He distinguished between Catholicism as a religion on the one hand, and Catholicism as an international political force on the other. Catholicism as a religion was harmless as long as Catholics kept it private and did not make it a political issue. Neville did not agree with their beliefs, but he did not object to them either. Only Catholicism as a political force was dangerous. It was the exclusion of Catholics from certain civil rights and their public stigmatisation that would drive them towards political extremism, whereas their inclusion into civil society without any distinction would help to keep the peace. In 1672, after Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence had suspended the penal laws against nonconformists and recusants, but still not allowed Catholics to worship in public, Neville wrote to Cosimo:

31

32

[Lorenzo Magalotti], Travels of Cosmo the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, through England, during the Reign of King Charles the Second, 1669 (London, 1821), p. 279. Henry VIII was excommunicated in 1538, Queen Elizabeth in 1570.

168

Gaby Mahlberg

Quel che dice V.A. de’ Catolici Inglesi io ricognosco con infinito mio dolore essere verissimo, cioè che si scuotere giornalmente in tutti gli ordini del regno e massimamente nella plebe grandissima aversione contra di loro. (It is extremely painful for me to admit that what your Highness says about the English Catholics is very true; every day one can see that all the orders of the kingdom - and most of all the common people – have a very strong aversion against them.)33

However, Neville did not think that the English hated the Catholics for their religious doctrines because, he writes, ‘tutti tollerano con pazienza i sociani, i quali negano la divinità di Christo’ (‘everyone tolerates the Socinians with patience, who deny the divinity of Christ’). He did not even think it was their political allegiance to Rome.34 Neville thought the people saw a much more immediate political threat, ‘che i […] Catolici Romani sieno una parte formata et unita per introdurre la tirania quando si fosse data l’occasione,’ (‘that the […] Roman Catholics are a faction formed and united to introduce tyranny as soon as the opportunity comes up’), and that they might have ‘[un] disegno […] in mutar il governo e riformarlo all’essemplar di Francia’ (‘a design to change the government and reform it according to the example of [absolutist] France’).35 Neville was aware that some Catholics had recently made themselves unpopular by joining into the absolutist arguments of Cavaliers and courtiers, ‘che sarebbe meglio non radunar più parlamenti, anzi che l’imperio fosse tutto in mano del Re’ (‘that it would be better not to assemble Parliaments any more, but that the kingdom should all be in the hand of the king’).36 But he assured Cosimo that the Catholics could remedy this situation if they restrained their speech and showed themselves as good patriots.

33

34

35 36

Neville to Cosimo, 15/25 July 1672, BRO D/EN F8/2/9, quoted in Crinò, ‘Lettere’, pp. 1967. For Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, see The Stuart Constitution, ed. by John Kenyon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 407-8. Neville to Cosimo, 15/25 July 1672. It is doubtful whether Socinians really were generally accepted, or whether Neville’s judgement was blurred by the freethinking circles he moved in. Neville’s willingness to tolerate Catholics differed from the attitude of his fellow republicans like James Harrington, John Milton, Algernon Sidney or later John Locke. Cf. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. by J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 127, 202; John Milton, Areopagitica and Of Education, ed. by K. M. Lea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 40; Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 122-30; John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. by John Horton / Susan Mendus (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 2. Neville to Cosimo, 15/25 July 1672. Ibid.

Exile and Belief Formation

169

Overall, Neville came to a similar conclusion as James II would much later, that one should treat the Catholics like any other dissenting group and integrate them into society rather than exclude them.37 This way, it would be easier to keep them under control and they would prove harmless. Catholics, Neville argued, were no longer the threat they had been in the 16th century. Neville then promised Cosimo that he would always stand up against the persecution of Catholics, not only because it was his duty as a Christian, but also because he knew many Catholics in Italy and elsewhere who had often helped him, especially Cosimo himself. Neville wrote: [N]on mancherò mai d’oppormi ardentissimamente contra la persecuzione di [...] catolici, credendo fermamente essere a ciò obbligato dalla fede cristiana che professo, dall’amor inverso la libertà del mio paese, dall’aver ricognosciuto tanta carità, humanità ed altre virtù morali ne i seguaci di quella religione in Italia e altrove, dalla gratitudine mia inverso molti di loro per mille favori e cortesie ricevute, e finalmente dalla venerazione particolare ch’io averò mentre vivo alla persona di V.A. professore zelosissimo di detta fede... (I will never fail to oppose myself most ardently to the persecution of […] Catholics, firmly believing that I am obliged to do so by the Christian faith which I profess, by the love for the liberty of my country, by the fact that I have found so much charity, humanity and other moral virtues in the followers of this religion in Italy and elsewhere, by my gratitude towards many of them for a thousand favours and courtesies I have received, and finally by the particular veneration which I will have as long as I live for the person of your Highness, the most zealous professor of this faith...)38

Only a couple of years later, Neville would get the chance to stand by his words, when a constitutional crisis caused him to make a public statement for the toleration of Catholics. The English Constitution and the Toleration of Catholics Neville’s toleration proposals were made in a pamphlet of 1681 entitled Plato Redivivus39 in the context of the so-called Exclusion Crisis or Succession Crisis, in which the political nation of England raised concerns about the political and religious future of the country. Charles II was the head of England’s Protestant monarchy, but he had no children from his marriage to Catherine of Braganza and therefore no legitimate heir, except his younger brother James, Duke of York, who had

37

38 39

Cf. ‘King James the Second his gracious declaration to all his loving subjects for liberty of conscience’ (4 April 1687), in Stuart Constitution, pp. 410-13. Neville to Cosimo, 15/25 July 1672. Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus (1681), in Two English Republican Tracts, pp. 61-200.

170

Gaby Mahlberg

recently revealed that he was a Catholic. For the opposition to the Court there could not be anything worse than a Catholic on the English throne. To them Catholics were still unpatriotic traitors; and they feared an absolutist government like that of France, where the Catholic Louis XIV claimed his throne by divine right and suppressed the liberties of his subjects. Conveniently, the so-called Popish Plot of 1678 gave Parliament a reason to act. Several ‘discoverers’ – with very questionable credentials – revealed a Catholic plot to kill the King and re-convert the country to Catholicism under Charles’s brother James, whose former secretary, Edward Coleman, was also implicated in the scheme.40 Many other Catholics too were under suspicion, Catholics were banned from London, and many of their houses were raided. Especially foreigners in the city were affected. Cosimo’s then resident in London, Giovanni Salvetti, was accused of being an accessory, while the Venetian ambassador was suspected of harbouring an accomplice in the plot.41 Those who were friends with Catholics became cautious. Many English correspondents of Cosimo, for instance, did not dare to write to him any more, out of fear their Catholic connections might be misconstrued – including Neville.42 Most importantly, however, the Popish Plot was used as an argument by the opposition that James was not fit to be king and that an alternative solution to his succession had to be found. While loyal supporters of the King defended his divine right and the hereditary succession in favour of the Duke of York, the opposition to the Court suggested a number of expedients to secure the freedom of the English constitution and a Protestant succession. The most popular suggestion was that to exclude James from the succession

40

41

42

On the events surrounding the Popish Plot, see Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Ana Maria Crinò, Il Popish Plot: nelle relazioni inedite dei residenti granducali alla corte di Londra (1678-1681) (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1954); David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, repr. 21956); John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972). Crinò, Popish Plot, pp. 34, 37. On Salvetti, see Stefano Villani, ‘Per la progettata edizione della corrispondenza dei rappresentati toscani a Londra: Amerigo Salvetti e Giovanni Salvetti Antelminelli durante il Commonwealth e il Protettorato (1649-1660)’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 599 (2004), pp. 109-25; the same, ‘Note su Francesco Terriesi (1635-1715), mercante, diplomatico e funzionario mediceo tra Londra e Livorno’, Nuovi Studi Livornesi, 10 (2002-3), pp. 59-80. Crinò, Popish Plot, p. 41.

Exile and Belief Formation

171

to the throne and replace him with the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, one of Charles’s illegitimate sons. The country was thus divided into two factions that would over the course of the crisis develop into the Tory and Whig parties – one side defending the divine right of the monarchy and the legitimate succession, even though it would involve a Catholic monarch, and the other side insisting that the King was bound by the parliamentary will, which could interfere with the succession to secure a Protestant monarchy. Masses of pamphlets were printed arguing either one point or the other.43 Neville’s Plato Redivivus was only one of many pamphlets. But Plato Redivivus stood out, because Neville argued that it did not matter whether the King was a Protestant or a Catholic as long as his powers were clearly defined and circumscribed by constitutional limitations, which would not allow him to declare war or peace, make foreign treaties, or employ office-holders without the consent of Parliament.44 In fact, Neville argued that the Duke of York should succeed, Catholic or not, but that the power of any king should be limited, not only if a Catholic succeeded, but immediately. Charles II was to hand over most of his prerogative rights voluntarily to make the transition with the least amount of trouble.45 Of course, Neville’s argument had a clear republican motive. He wanted a constitutional solution to the problem, which would make the king’s religion irrelevant, because a king without power could not do any harm. But his critics saw his argument as crypto-Catholicism and accused him of being a Jesuit and worse.46 In fact, in the anti-popish hysteria, one of the discoverers, Miles Prance, accused Henry and his nephew Richard of wanting to kill the earl of Shaftesbury, who was leading the opposition campaign against the succession of the Duke of York. Neville’s Italian contacts and letters from Rome in his possession were used against him in evidence.47 According to Prance, Neville did ‘hold a Correspondence with […] some persons at Rome, sending letters duly thither, and receiving great Pacquets back again from

43 44 45 46

47

See Knights, Politics and Opinion. On Neville, see pp. 17n, 24, 99, 101. Neville, Plato Redivivus, pp. 160, 186-8. Ibid., p. 177. It seems that even some of Neville’s friends and acquaintances tried to distance themselves from him on account of his Catholic connections. The Green Ribbon Club, which sometimes met informally at the bookshop of Neville’s publisher John Starkey, decided that he was ‘a Papist’. Cf. Samuel Pepys’s copy of ‘The Journall of the Green Ribbon Club at the King’s Head Taverne,’ Magdalene College Cambridge, Miscellanies, VIII, pp. 465-91. On the club, see J. R. Jones, ‘The Green Ribbon Club’, Durham University Journal, 49 (1956), pp. 1720. I owe these references to Kate Loveman. Crinò, Popish Plot, pp. 41 ff., and the same ‘Lettere’, p. 200.

172

Gaby Mahlberg

thence very frequently.’ He also claimed that Neville had hidden the letters for fear they could be discovered, as one of Neville’s servants had told him.48 Of course, Neville had correspondence with friends in Rome as well as Florence, and it was logical that he would try and hide this correspondence in the climate of fear and anti-Catholic sentiment in his country. But that did not mean he was a Popish Plotter. In fact, he disliked any form of religious indoctrination and clerical influence on politics.49 Yet, it did not help Neville’s case that he would also make a plea for the toleration of Catholics, which was highly unusual, especially coming from a republican. But Neville gave two good reasons. Firstly, that Catholics were to be pitied for being so deluded in their faith, but that they were not really dangerous; and secondly, that tolerating them would bring clear economic advantages for the country. Influenced by his period in Italy and by his many friendships forged during two prolonged stays in a Catholic country, Neville wrote that he knew that there were ‘great numbers’ of ‘conscientious and honest papists […] in the world.’ They might err in their faith which did ‘prejudice’ to ‘men’s souls’ and made them live in ‘perpetual superstition and idolatry,’ they were pitiable for not being masters of their ‘own faith,’ but not all of them agreed with ‘those foolish writings [of C16th Jesuits] about the lawfulness of destroying princes and states in case of heresy.’50 There were good as well as bad Catholics. Neville conceded that he understood his compatriots who saw the Catholics as a ‘wealthy, flourishing party amongst them, whose interest it is to destroy the polity and government of the country where they live.’ But, the ‘rigorous laws’ to suppress them only made the situation worse. Papists now were ‘little better than slaves […] their being what they are is a breach of the law.’ They were dangerous only because their freedom depended on the will of the king who had it in his power to suspend anti-Catholic legislation. So, for their own preservation, they might ‘join with the prince […] whenever he shall undertake anything for the increase of his own power, and the depressing his parliaments.’51 Neville also argued that Catholics should be tolerated for economic reasons, despite their errors in matters of faith, because he could ‘see these people […] live quietly under our good laws; and increase our trade and

48

49 50 51

A true narrative and discovery of several very remarkable passages relating to the horrid Popish Plot as they fell within the knowledge of Mr. Miles Prance of Covent-Garden, goldsmith, […] (London: Printed for Dorman Newman […], 1679). Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville,’ pp. 154 ff. Neville, Plato Redivivus, pp. 155, 118, 157. Ibid., p. 157.

Exile and Belief Formation

173

wealth with their expenses here at home: whereas now the severity of our laws against them, makes them spend their revenues abroad, and enrich other nations with the stock of England.’52 Neville supported the toleration of all those who were useful to the commonwealth, and he showed how Protestant dissenters and Catholics could share a common cause because both would benefit from toleration. This policy was later adopted by James II, paving the way to civil religion and a more secular state.53 Even for Protestant dissenters a Catholic king might have had advantages, because he would be more likely than a Protestant to provide a general toleration. No Catholic king in England could ever hope to convert his whole people to Catholicism, but he would have to make friends with all Protestants to remain in power.54 The necessity of comprehensive toleration to maintain his own position would thus limit the monarch’s control over religion. Maybe, this was why Neville would not argue for exclusion, but for the regular succession of James. A Catholic on the English throne would necessitate both toleration and limitations to the royal prerogative. Conclusion We may conclude from this evidence that personal experiences and intercultural exchanges played a major role in the shaping of personal beliefs, theories and policies in the early modern period, and that in this particular instance, the development of a political argument for toleration was at least partially the result of Neville’s personal friendships and a number of formative years in exile in Catholic Italy.

52 53

54

Ibid. Cf. Mark Knights, ‘”Meer religion” and the “church-state” of Restoration England: the impact and ideology of James II’s declaration of indulgence’, in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. by Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 41-70; and Blair Worden, ‘The question of secularisation’, in Nation Transformed, pp. 20-40. Cf. James II’s Declaration of Indulgence, in which he says: ‘We cannot but heartily wish… that all the people of our dominions were members of the Catholic Church,’ in Stuart Constitution, p. 410.

174

Gaby Mahlberg

Bibliography Archival Sources Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Miscellanea Medicea 81. Archivio Storico Diocesano, Rome, Parrochia S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Stati D’Animi 1666. Berkshire Record Office D/EN/ F8/1-2. Essex Record Office D/DBy/Z58. Bodleian Library, Clarendon MSS. Magdalene College Cambridge, Miscellanies. National Archives, Probates, 11/265/209. National Archive, State Papers 29/84, 29/206, 44/15, 44/16. Printed Primary Sources Calendars of State Papers Domestic 1640-41, 1663-1664, 1666-1667. Harrington, James, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. by J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Hollis, Thomas, Plato Redivivus (London, 1763). Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. by John Horton / Susan Mendus (London: Routledge, 1991). [Magalotti, Lorenzo], Travels of Cosmo the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, through England, during the Reign of King Charles the Second, 1669 (London, 1821). Marvell, Andrew, ‘An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (Amsterdam, 1677)’, in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart, 4 vols (London: The Fuller Worthies Library, 1872-75), IV, pp. 245-431. Milton, John, Areopagitica and Of Education, ed. by K. M. Lea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Neville, Henry, Plato Redivivus (1681), in Two English Republican Tracts, pp. 61-200. The Stuart Constitution, ed. by John Kenyon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). A true narrative and discovery of several very remarkable passages relating to the horrid Popish Plot as they fell within the knowledge of Mr. Miles Prance of Covent-Garden, goldsmith, […] (London: Printed for Dorman Newman […], 1679).

Exile and Belief Formation

175

A True Register of all the Christenings, Mariages, and Burialles in the Parish of St. James, Clerkenwell, from the yeare of our Lorde God 1551, ed. by Robert Hovenden, IV, Burials, 1551 to 1665 (London, 1891-2). Secondary Works Cochrane, Eric, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Crinò, Ana Maria, Il Popish Plot: nelle relazioni inedite dei residenti granducali alla corte di Londra (1678-1681) (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1954). ––. Fatti e Figure Del Seicento Anglo-Toscano: Documenti inediti sui rapporti letterati, diplomatici, culturali fra Toscana e Inghilterra (Firenze: Olschki, 1957). Greaves, Richard L., Deliver Us from Evil: the Radical Underground in Britain, 1660-1663 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Houston, Alan Craig, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). –– and Steve Pincus, ed., A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Jones, J. R. ‘The Green Ribbon Club’, Durham University Journal, 49 (1956), 17-20. Kenyon, John, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972). Kishlanksy, Mark A., The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Knights, Mark, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ––. ‘”Meer religion” and the “church-state” of Restoration England: the impact and ideology of James II’s declaration of indulgence’, in Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. by Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 41-70. Mahlberg, Gaby Maria, ‘Henry Neville and English Republicanism in the Seventeenth Century’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of East Anglia, 2005). Ogg, David, England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, repr. 21956). Robbins, Caroline, ed., Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

176

Gaby Mahlberg

Scott, David, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637-49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Scott, Jonathan, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Villani, Stefano, ‘Guasconi (Gascoigne), Bernardo’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Catanzaro: Grafiche Abramo, 2003). ––.‘Note su Francesco Terriesi (1635-1715), mercante, diplomatico e funzionario mediceo tra Londra e Livorno’, Nuovi Studi Livornesi, 10 (2002-3), 59-80. ––. ‘Per la progettata edizione della corrispondenza dei rappresentati toscani a Londra: Amerigo Salvetti e Giovanni Salvetti Antelminelli durante il Commonwealth e il Protettorato (1649-1660)’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 599 (2004), 109-25. Von Maltzahn, Nicholas, ‘Neville, Henry (1620-1694)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), (accessed 25 Oct 2004). Wood, Anthony, Athenae Oxonienses. An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their education in the University of Oxford…, ed. by Philip Bliss, 4 vols (Oxford, 1813-1820). Worden, Blair, ‘The question of secularisation’, in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. by Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 20-40.

Xavier Cervantes ‘Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra’? Cultural Politics, Anti-Catholic Anxiety, and the Italian Operatic Community in London in the 1720s The importation of Italian opera and its success among polite society was a matter of considerable controversy in England in the early decades of the 18th century. The implications of this wide-ranging cultural phenomenon were discussed not only in purely musical or even aesthetic terms but primarily in broader social, political, and even religious ones. The introduction into Britain of an alien element triggered a great deal of cultural anxiety. At that crucial period when the sense of British national identity was still in the making and was being defined by opposition to the French and southern Other(s),1 the introduction of a previously unknown form of thoroughly Italian entertainment was bound to provoke an upsurge of patriotism. For the many critics and satirists of Italian opera, its success in becoming an essential feature of élite culture wounded the traditional British sense of cultural insularity, vigorously trumpeted with nationalistic pride. Italian-Continental contamination offered evidence of the overall decline of the nation in general and of the corrupt cosmopolitan taste of the ruling élite in particular. The flood of criticism and satire of Italian opera was based upon a few recurring tropes, and these built on and reinforced at the same time the xenophobic stereotype of the Italian and of Italy that had begun to emerge back in the Renaissance. To borrow Chesterfield’s striking phrase, Italy was a ‘foul sink of illiberal Vices and manners’,2 and her typical inhabitant was a devious, greedy, hypocritical coward prone to violence, luxury and sexual debauchery, especially to sodomy, the Italian evil par excellence. Such national clichés were legitimised by a crude but highly evocative and efficient North/South bipolarity, and they decisively shaped the depiction of the Mediterranean Other. This depiction which was deeply anchored in the

1

2

See Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740-1830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (London: Pimlico, 1994). Some Unpublished Letters of Lord Chesterfield, ed. by Sidney L. Gulick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937), p. 78 (from Chesterfield’s planned treatise on education for the use of his godson written between 1762 and 1771).

178

Xavier Cervantes

British imagination acted therefore as a convenient foil for national pride by highlighting the gap between Britain and a degenerate and corrupt South.3 In the last analysis, however, such national, moral and cultural stereotypes of Italy and her inhabitants had a political and religious foundation. The counter-identity of the southern and Italian Other was expressed in simple contrapuntal terms: Britain was the land of the chosen people and God refused His favours to those who lived in slavish dependence on popery and superstition.4 The complicated history of Italy, that mosaic of small states, and her characteristic internecine struggles between aristocratic factions were considered the direct outcome of the undue influence of the Pope and of priests. Like the French or the Spanish, the Italians were Catholics by definition and were thus placed under the yoke of religious and secular despotism, whereas the English revelled in the liberties guaranteed by their mixed government. Many are the recurring motifs of early criticism of Italian opera in England. They are well-known and have been thoroughly studied, whether they be of a nationalistic, aesthetic, social, moral or sexual nature: Italian opera was foreign, hence automatically suspect; it was sung in a foreign tongue by foreign artists; it was a very costly form of entertainment that targetted a narrow and corrupt élite; it was only sung, hence completely alien to the indigenous tradition of a mixture of spoken theatre and musical episodes and it therefore subverted cultural and literary hierarchies as well as the distinction between genres; it addressed the senses superficially instead of elevating the mind or captivating the heart; it was so successful that it harmed the native theatrical tradition; by encouraging effeminacy, sodomy and all forms of debauchery, it threatened the stability of the gender paradigm that

3

4

On the production of such stereotypes and the bipolarity they rest upon, see for instance Marc Martinez, ‘Le Grand Tour dans la caricature graphique et le théâtre satirique anglais au milieu du XVIIIe siècle’, in Les Représentations du Sud: Du factuel au fictif, ed. by Jean Mondot (Pessac: Maison des sciences de l’homme d’Aquitaine, 2003), pp. 41-63 (especially pp. 58-59). See also Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner, The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), especially pp. 31-39, on the representation of the French. In this regard the theological discourse of England as the new Israel, which was established in the 16th century, was still in use 200 years later; see for instance Hans Kohn, ‘The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), 69-94 (pp. 81-85); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 27-87 and Colley, pp. 30-33. On the importance of the assimilation to the chosen people of the Old Testament as the ideological foundation of a typically English musical genre, see Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and EighteenthCentury Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

179

was the very pillar of a well-ordered society by blurring the traditional separation between the sexes – and the list could go on.5 One critical thread has been little explored by scholars, however, perhaps because it appears as considerably less prominent than others: the antiCatholic undercurrent, which is to be found in a substantial number of critical and satirical pieces. Another reason why this critical trope has been somewhat neglected is that it may all too easily be taken for granted and be considered not to deserve any comment. However, in spite of the overtly jokey tone of some of the excerpts that will be quoted below, it does seem that they are to be taken more seriously as the product of a genuine and deepseated religious and political anxiety. Like any import from the Continent, artistic or otherwise, Italian opera was inherently suspect because it was automatically associated with luxury, vice, and decadence. At a time when the Stuart Pretender and his Court had taken refuge in the papal states, the close connection between Catholicism and Jacobitism was even more obvious in the mind of every Briton. In the early decades of the 18th century, and particularly between the Fifteen and the Forty-Five, the threat, real or imaginary, of a Jacobite plot to oust the Hanoverian dynasty and restore the Stuart ‘king over the water’ was always present. Anti-Jacobite suspicion played a major part in domestic as well as international politics. It could also be exploited by a government as leverage to enhance the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession and more generally to strengthen its hold on power, as was the case with the Atterbury plot of 1722, the benefits reaped by Walpole from its discovery, and the arrests and trials that followed. *** The European diaspora of Italian composers, librettists, instrumentalists, scene painters and, especially, singers in the 18th century is a phenomenon well-known to musicologists. Italian music in general, and Italian opera in particular held sway throughout the Continent and there was a steady demand for Italian-born artists in all the main princely courts on the other side of the Alps. Unlike France, which resisted this cultural invasion and clung to its

5

See the very useful classification of themes in early Italian opera criticism to be found in Lowell Lindgren, ‘Critiques of Italian Opera in London, 1705-1719’, in Il melodramma italiano in Italia e in Germania nel’' età barocca / Die italienische Barockoper ihre Verbreitung in Italien und Deutschland, ed. by Alberto Colzani, Norbert Dubowy, Andrea Luppi and Maurizio Padoan (Como: Centro italo-tedesco / Deutsch-Italienisches Zentrum Villa Vigoni, 1995), pp. 143-65 (pp. 164-65).

180

Xavier Cervantes

native school of tragédie lyrique, England succumbed to the general craze for opera seria, albeit belatedly, in 1705.6 For itinerant Italian artists, London became a mighty magnet, a true ‘Paradiso terrestre’ (‘Heaven on Earth’), to quote a letter from one of them who settled briefly in England in the early years of the century.7 Only a few years after the British metropolis had become the new Mecca of Italian castrati and female sopranos, the actor and playwright Charles Gildon, who felt his livelihood jeopardised and became one of the harshest critics of the new operatic genre, complained thus: ‘the Italians having heard in Italy what Bubbles we Tramontani were in their Foreign Trash, they ventur' d over the Alps to share the Prize with the rest of their Country-men’8 Among these many opportunistic artists that spread Italian taste to England was for example Nicola Francesco Haym, who wrote or adapted many opera librettos for Handel in the 1720s. Making the most of the fashionable rage for everything Italian, he published in 1724 his own edition of a classic of Italian literature, Tasso’s Gierusalemme liberata, with the following preface: spero […] che l' Italia tutta, avrà l' istessa obligazione a questa Preclara Nazione, che io le professo, per la parzialità che mostrano d' avere per i nostri prodotti: Quì vedonsi le Scene Musicali passegiate da'nostri primi Cantanti, e null' altra Musica è quì gradita, che la nostra. I hope that just like me, all Italy will thank this mighty country [Britain] for appreciating so much all things Italian. We can see our most famous singers perform on the British stage, and none but our music is welcome here. [Tr. XC]9

6

7

8

9

The bibliography on the introduction of Italian-style opera, and soon thereafter genuine Italian opera, in London is vast. For a general overview, see Robert D. Hume, ‘The Sponsorship of Opera in London, 1704-1720’, Modern Philology, 85 (1988), 420-32. For a more detailed account, see in particular Curtis Price, ‘The Critical Decade for English Music Drama, 1700-1710’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), 38-76, as well as John Merrill Knapp, ‘Eighteenth-Century Opera in London before Handel, 1705-1710’, in British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660-1800, ed. by Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), pp. 92104. From a letter written by Luigi Mancia to Nicola Cosimi, dated 15 January 1702 and quoted in Lindgren, ‘Nicola Cosimi in London 1701-1705’, Studi Musicali, 11 (1982), 229-48 (p. 237). [Charles Gildon,] Les Soupirs de la Grand Britaigne: or, the Groans of Great Britain, Being The Second Part to the Groans of Europe (London: Baker, 1713), p. 78. The magnetism of London for Italian singers and instrumentalists remained strong throughout the 18th century and well into the next, for indeed ‘to all Foreigners England [was] Elyzium.’ (A Fair Enquiry Into the State of Operas in England [London: Cooper (c. 1760?)], p. 16.) La Gierusalemme Liberata di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Nicola Francesco Haym (London: Tonson and Watts, 1724), I, [*a4]. This taste for Italian music in Britain was noted much

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

181

Such wishful thinking certainly did not deter the barrage of xenophobic and patriotic criticism Italian opera was confronted with in England. Such criticism could take on a religious tinge: because singers at the opera house in the Haymarket were Italian, they were often charged with introducing into England the vices that were synonymous in the English imagination with Roman Catholicism and with the papal court. The usual rhetoric of contamination and disease imported from the Mediterranean South, with which all the various types of critical discourse taking Italian opera as its target are so heavily fraught, was exploited to the full. Italian vocal and instrumental artists were considered to be mere parasites and were thought to encourage idleness, which was obviously incompatible with the Protestant ethic. This appears in the following newspaper item from 1723, which takes up the Mandevillian metaphor of society and its economic framework: In Popish Countries, great Numbers of idle and useless Members of Societies are employ' d to support the Luxury of the Ecclesiasticks, or to contribute to their Superstition: as Organists, Fidlers, Singers. […] All these are a dead Weight upon Society, live like Drones in a Hive, and eat Honey without making any.10

More specifically, because castrati and female singers sang in a foreign tongue that was unknown to most of the public, they were sometimes suspected of taking advantage of the situtation by singing psalms and other texts belonging to the Catholic liturgy while pretending to sing harmless arias and recitatives. This seems to have been something of a running joke among satirists. Thus Richard Steele wrote in the epilogue to his 1723 comedy The Tender Husband: Britons, who constant War, with factious Rage, For Liberty against each other wage, From Foreign Insult save this English Stage. No more th' Italian squaling Tribe admit, In tongues unknown; ' tis Popery in Wit. The Songs (their selves confess) from Rome they bring; And ' tis High-Mass, for ought you know, they Sing.11

10 11

later by foreign visitors: ‘The Italian music is that which is most esteemed in England, where it is in some measure naturalized.’ (Jean-André Rouquet, The Present State of the Arts in England [London: Nourse, 1755], p. 111 (transl. of L’État des arts en Angleterre [Paris: Jombert, 1755].)); ‘The Britons prefer Italian musick to that of all Europe, except their own.’ ([Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli),] Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J. J. Rousseau [London: Cadell, 1767], p. 91.) The British Journal, 20 (2 February 1723). Richard Steele, The Plays, ed. by Shirley Strum Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 273.

182

Xavier Cervantes

A few years before, to avoid giving free rein to the alleged Catholic propaganda of Italian singers, Steele had already demanded that the directors of the then recently created Royal Academy of Music swear an oath on the sacraments of the established church, ‘otherwise we might have treason convey' d to us in a Song, and Popish Sounds introduc' d to affront Protestant Ears’.12 In 1727, an anonymous satirist perpetuated the idea in a libel alluding to the rival prima donnas who shone in the performances organised under the auspices of the Academy and whose respective merits were heatedly debated by a much divided audience: who knows but they are sent here to raise Dissentions among true Protestants! There are too many shrewd Causes of Suspicions. 1. They come from Rome; 2. The Pope lives at Rome; 3. So does the Pretender, 4. The Pope is a notorious Papist; 5. So is the Pretender; 6. So is Madam Faustina, 7. And so is Madam Cuzzoni. 8. King George (God bless him) is a Protestant; 9. The Pope hates King George; 10. The Pretender can' t abide him. 11. But Madam Cuzzoni and Madam Faustina, love the Pope, and in all Probability the Pretender Ergo * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From whence I infer, that it is not safe to have Popish Singers tolerated here, in England; but on the contrary, it would be a great Security to the Protestant Interest to have a Clause added to some Act of Parliament, obliging all foreign Singers […] to abjure the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender, before they appear in Publick.13

12

13

This passage, quoted in the April 1720 issue of a newspaper to which Defoe contributed, contains a glowing review of an article which Steele had written for his own periodical The Theatre some time before and in which he ridiculed Italian opera. ([Daniel Defoe,] Mercurius Politicus […] for the Month of September 1720 […] [London: n. p., 1720], p. 51.) (Strangely enough, the article in question cannot be found in the modern critical edition of The Theatre [The Theatre 1720, ed. by John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962)].) The Devil to pay at St. James’s: or, A full and true Account of a most horrid and bloody Battle between Madam Faustina and Madam Cuzzoni. also of a hot Skirmish between Signor Boschi and Signor Palmecini [recte: Palmerini]. moreover How Senesino has taken Snuff, is going to leave the Opera, and sing Psalms at Henley' s Oratory (London: Moore, 1727), pp. 4-5. That same year, the following dialogue appeared in a comedy: ‘Colonel Beaufort: "we are sing-song’d at once out of our Senses, and our Money." Colonel Severne: "Thanks to a good Government, that defends us from Popery! I’m sure our Diversions are Popish enough; that is, they are perform’d in an unknown Tongue. "’ (Leonard Welsted, The

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

183

In the early 1730s, another unknown pamphleteer also feared that the star singers of the company might be secret emissaries sent by the Pope to propagate Catholicism in London. His extravagant and amusing argument to prove his point also rests on the issue of the foreign tongue used by the singers on the stage. He thus alludes to a favourite aria sung by the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni playing the part of Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. At that moment in the plot, the Queen of Egypt, disguised as one of the Muses, uses all her charms to seduce the Roman dictator and win his support as well as his love, just as, in the eyes of the satirist, the singer is trying to ensnare the public of good Protestants and win them over to the Catholic faith: let it be particularly covenanted, that [the singers] sing not in an unknown Tongue […] for who knows but under Colour of an Opera, they may Sing Mass as they have done before; witness, A Hymn to the Virgin […] sung by Signora Catsoni to a Harp, &c. in the Opera of Julius Cæsar, the Words are these, V' adoro Pupille Saete D' amore Le vostre faville Son Grato [sic] nel Sen. Pietoso vi brama Il mesto mio Core Ch' ogn' ora vi chiama L' amato mio ben. In English thus, I worship thee, O Holy Virgin, Perfection of Divine Love, thy Sacred Influence fills my Soul with Comfort. My contrite Heart piously burns with fervent Desire towards thee, while my glad Tongue is ever singing forth thy Praise: O lovely and beloved Virgin, Author and Centre of my Happiness. The Responses were sung by Priests, who stood behind the Machine, fill' d with Images and Crosses, and other Popish Trinkums, and was purposely plac' d at the very farthest End of the Stage, and at the greatest Distance possible from the Audience: These Priests sang inwardly to themselves, (just as they do when they mumble Mass,) cover' d by a great Number of Instruments, who play' d what they call forte fortissimo, to prevent the Villany being discover' d.14

14

Dissembled Wanton; or, My Son get Money. A Comedy [London: Watts, 1727], pp. 1-2; from the first act.) Do you know what you are about? or, A Protestant Alarm to Great Britain: Proving our late Theatric Squabble, a Type of the present Contest for the Crown of Poland; and that the Division between Handel and Senesino, has more in it than we imagine. That the latter is no Eunuch, but a Jesuit in Disguise; with other Particulars of the greatest Importance (London: Roberts, 1733), p. 3. Known for his works against the profanity of the stage, Reverend Arthur Bedford had slightly different reasons to complain about Italian opera. Earnest though they are, his accusations of blasphemy and lasciviousness seem somehow risible and are nowhere to be found in the rest of the vast critical literature against that form of entertainment: ‘What Pity is it […], that there should not be as great Care taken of the

184

Xavier Cervantes

*** Three decades after Steele wrote the above-mentioned epilogue, the author of a newspaper essay still remembered his joke about castrati and prima donnas celebrating Mass under the pretence of singing innocuous opera arias on stage. He seems to take the joke seriously, however, and his criticism is devoid of any satirical or humorous intention: I am of Opinion […] that Italian Operas are an improper Entertainment for Englishmen. It has been […] well observed by a witty Writer, that for ought we know these People at the Opera are singing high Mass; and […] unless we are jealous of our Liberties, they will soon fade away; I am always jealous of hearing an unknown Tongue, which I look upon to be quite unconstitutional. They may be delivering Sentiments of Slavery and arbitrary Power; they may be insinuating the Luxuries of their effeminate Country.15

Above all, to give more weight to his earnest attack, the writer combines the religious motif of criticism with various other strands that are to be found in so many anti-opera pieces, namely the broad political and moral issues raised by the introduction and success of Italian opera in England. This potent mixture of complaints against Italian opera is certainly what caused the downfall of one of its leading exponents, the composer Giovanni Bononcini, in 1722. Nevertheless, his demise was not brought about by the adversaries of Italian opera, but by the aristocratic directors of the Royal Academy of Music, who had hired him two years previously, that is to say by

15

Words, as there is of the Notes? and that whilst the one is harmonious, the other should be offensive? But here the Poets take their usual Liberty, and scorn to be confin’d […] to the Rules of Modesty and Religion. Those Pieces are generally very full of Love-Songs, and the whole Plot and Contrivance of the Poets runs in this Way. […] they are too rampant and flaming in their Discourses on the Joys of Love, especially when we consider at another time they perswade to Whoredom and Adultery.’ (Arthur Bedford, The Great Abuse of Musick. In Two Parts. Containing An Account of the Use and Design of Musick among the Antient Jews, Greeks, Romans, and others; with their Concern for, and Care to prevent the Abuse thereof. And also An Account of the Immorality and Profaneness, which is occasioned by the Corruption of that most Noble Science in the Present Age [London: Wyatt, 1711], p. 105.) Bedford’s stance is all the more singular, perhaps even extravagant, for his religious caveats do not prevent him from largely approving of some of the Italian or Italianate operas which had recently been performed in London: ‘The Opera call’d Love’s Triumph […] is comparatively modest and inoffensive. Almahide and Hydaspes are better than any of our Stage Performances. Clotilda hath several moral Sentences, and concludes with very excellent Instructions collected from the Design and Plot of the whole: And tho’ I have no Intention to excuse the Faults of either, yet in this respect, there is something in them which excels, and may shame us.’ (Bedford, p. 121.) The Gray’s Inn Journal, 9 (24 November 1753).

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

185

those very people who not only formed the public of Italian opera in London but were its most eminent patrons. The case of Bononcini demonstrates that even for the lovers of opera seria, the popularity of the composer and the success his works had met with up to then were not enough to shield him from the anti-Catholic and anti-Jacobite hysteria that spread and inflamed political circles and the informed public opinion of that time. Yet, the London career of Bononcini had started very auspiciously.16 In all, Bononcini had eight operas of his (to which should be added one act of a composite work) staged under the auspices of the Academy between 1720 and 1727, and the cumulated number of performances was no fewer than 131.17 His popularity peaked in the first two of the Academy’s eight seasons. In the 1720-21 and 1721-22 seasons, his operas were overall far more successful than those of Handel, the other resident composer working for the Royal Academy. If Muzio Scevola, composed jointly by Handel, Bononcini and the cellist Amadei, is set aside, and if the creations and revivals of all operas by the two artists are taken into account, then Handel, with only twenty-six performances, is clearly eclipsed by Bononcini, who boasted seventy-one for those two seasons.18 In a letter to his employer, the secretary of the Duke of Modena in London assured him that Bononcini was then in his heyday, ‘stimato all’eccesso dalla Corte, e dalla Nazione p[er] la grande riuscita delle sue opere’ (‘the court and the whole nation have the highest esteem [for

16

17

18

For Bononcini’s very positive reputation in England before he was hired as one of the two official composers of the Royal Academy of Music in 1720, see Lindgren, ‘Parisian Patronage of Performers from the Royal Academy of Musick (1719-1728)’, Music and Letters, 58 (1977), 4-28 (pp. 6-7). For Bononcini’s early London success, see Lindgren, A Bibliographic Scrutiny of Dramatic Works Set by Giovanni and His Brother Antonio Maria Bononcini (PhD dissertation, University of Harvard, 1972), pp. 247-96. For the performances of his operas, see the tables in Elizabeth Gibson, The Royal Academy of Music 1719-1728: The Institution and Its Directors (New York: Garland, 1989), pp.143, 154, as well as those in Carole Taylor, Italian Operagoing in London, 1700-1745 (PhD dissertation, University of Syracuse, 1991), pp. 340-41. In decreasing order, the three most frequently performed works in these two seasons, all by Bononcini, were L’Astarto (twenty-three performances between 19 November 1720 and 28 June 1721, to which should be added a revival with six performances the following season), Crispo (eighteen performances between 10 January and 16 June 1722), and Griselda (sixteen performances between 22 February and 2 June 1722). In fourth position comes Handel’s Floridante, with fifteen performances between 9 December 1721 and 26 May 1722 (see Gibson, pp.143, 154).

186

Xavier Cervantes

Bononcini] because of the huge success of his operas’; Tr. XC).19 Even before his arrival in England, Bononcini’s style was appreciated by British connoisseurs for being ‘agreeable and easie’.20 Decades after he eventually left London for the Continent, ‘the elegant simplicity of Bononcini’21 was

19

19

19

19

20

21

Letter from Giuseppe Riva to Rinaldo d’Este, 26 January 1721, quoted in Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 269 (also quoted in Marta Lucchi, ‘Da Modena all’Europa melodrammatica: I carteggi di Giuseppe Riva e carteggi varii’, Teatro e musica nel ‘700 estense: Momenti di storia culturale e artistica, polemica di idee, vita teatrale, economia e impresariato, ed. by Giuseppe Vecchi and Marina Calore, Historiæ Musicæ Cultores Biblioteca, 73 [Firenze: Olschski, 1994], pp. 45-78 [p. 55]). Riva had been a close friend of the composer’s for some years and might have played a part in his engagement by the directors of the Royal Academy (see Lindgren and Colin Timms, ‘The Correspondence of Agostino Steffani and Giuseppe Riva, 1720-1728, and Related Correspondence with J. P. F. v19 For Bononcini’s very positive reputation in England before he was hired as one of the two official composers of the Royal Academy of Music in 1720, see Lindgren, ‘Parisian Patronage of Performers from the Royal Academy of Musick (1719-1728)’, Music and Letters, 58 (1977), 4-28 (pp. 6-7). For Bononcini’s early London success, see Lindgren, A Bibliographic Scrutiny of Dramatic Works Set by Giovanni and His Brother Antonio Maria Bononcini (PhD dissertation, University of Harvard, 1972), pp. 247-96. For the performances of his operas, see the tables in Elizabeth Gibson, The Royal Academy of Music 1719-1728: The Institution and Its Directors (New York: Garland, 1989), pp.143, 154, as well as those in Carole Taylor, Italian Operagoing in London, 1700-1745 (PhD dissertation, University of Syracuse, 1991), pp. 340-41. In decreasing order, the three most frequently performed works in these two seasons, all by Bononcini, were L’Astarto (twenty-three performances between 19 November 1720 and 28 June 1721, to which should be added a revival with six performances the following season), Crispo (eighteen performances between 10 January and 16 June 1722), and Griselda (sixteen performances between 22 February and 2 June 1722). In fourth position comes Handel’s Floridante, with fifteen performances between 9 December 1721 and 26 May 1722 (see Gibson, pp.143, 154). Letter from Giuseppe Riva to Rinaldo d’Este, 26 January 1721, quoted in Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 269 (also quoted in Marta Lucchi, ‘Da Modena all’Europa melodrammatica: I carteggi di Giuseppe Riva e carteggi varii’, Teatro e musica nel ‘700 estense: Momenti di storia culturale e artistica, polemica di idee, vita teatrale, economia e impresariato, ed. by Giuseppe Vecchi and Marina Calore on Schönborn and S. B. Pallavicini’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 36 [2003], 1-174 [p. 12]), but his opinion about Bononcini’s popularity at that time can hardly be considered an overstatement. John Ernest Galliard, Six English Cantatas after the Italian Manner (London: Walsh [1716]), p. 2. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: Davis and Rymers, 1757), p. 46. In what became a commonplace locus of early musical criticism, the author contrasts Bononcini’s style with ‘the manly, the pathetic, the astonishing Strains of Handel’ (Brown, p. 46). This is taken up much later by Charles Burney: ‘Bononcini’s peculiar merit in setting Italian words seems to have been out of reach of an English

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

187

still fondly remembered by his former admirers. Perhaps the best and most eloquent appraisal of the reasons why his music was so highly relished by the British public is formulated in a rather picturesque fashion by a Swiss lawyer, who heard some of his scores during a London stay later in the 1720s: J' ai entendu de la Musique de bien des maîtres, mais les uns par trop de bruit me font mal à la tête; leur sçavante multiplicité de parties fait une confusion où je suis toujours en cherche. D' autres font languir par la secheresse de leur idée; comme bien des femmes, ils ont babillé deux heures et n' ont rien dit du tout. Pour Mr. Bononcini son langage est aisé simple elegant noble; et plus que tout cela, son langage est celui du cœur; il s' y insinue, il l' échaufe, il le ravit, en un mot il me semble entendre ou voir un amant faire sa cour, et par tout ce que l' amour l' esprit et la politesse peuvent inventer de plus galant et de plus séduisant, gagner le cœur de la maîtresse. I have heard music written by many masters. Some of them make too much noise and give me a headache; their learned counterpoint confuses me and I cannot make sense out of their music. Others leave me cold because their scores are slight and dry; like many a woman, they talk for two hours but in the end they have hardly said anything at all. As for Bononcini, his music is easy on the ear, simple, elegant and noble. Above all, this is music that speaks the language of the heart. It penetrates it, warms it and ravishes it. In a word, methinks I hear or see a lover wooing his lady and conquering her heart thanks to the most gallant and appealing guiles of love, of the mind, and of politeness. [Tr. XC]22

Bononcini took advantage of the vogue for his music by publishing a set of cantatas and duets dedicated to George I in 1721. This, the composer’s only

22

audience, and […] Italians were alone competent to judge of it; who say, that his knowledge in singing and in their language was such as rendered his cantilena, or melody, more natural and elegant to vocal performers, and his recitatives more passionate, and expressive of nicer sensations and inflexions, to every hearer accustomed to the tones of Italian speech, than those of his rival; but in majesty, grandeur, force, fire, and invention, which are not local beauties, but striking and intelligible in all countries, Handel was infinitely his superior.’ (Charles Burney, ‘Sketch of the Life of Handel’, in An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3rd, and 5th, 1784. In Commemoration of Handel [London: Payne and Robinson, 1785; repr. New York: Da Capo, 1979], p. 18 [separate pagination]. See also John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2 vols (London: for the author, 1776; repr. London: Novello, 1853), II, p. 861, as well as the entry ‘Bononcini’ in [David Erskine Baker,] The Companion to the Play-House: Or, An Historical Account of all the Dramatic Writers (and their Works) that have appeared in Great Britain and Ireland, from the Commencement of our Theatrical Exhibitions, down to the Present Year 1764, 2 vols (London: Becket et al., 1764), II, unpaginated. Letter by Jean Beddevole in Paris to Giuseppe Riva in London, 25 February 1727, quoted in Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 359 (Beddevole heard Bononcini’s music at the private concerts he gave for the Duchess of Marlborough in the second half of the 1720s).

188

Xavier Cervantes

published score, boasts an impressive subscription list of 238 names reading somewhat like an abbreviated Complete Peerage. According to the list, the total number of copies sold was 442, for many subscribers were eager to display their admiration for the composer’s music and bought multiple copies; thirty subscribers ordered between two and fifty-five of them.23 In April and May 1722, the discovery of a Jacobite plot to restore the Stuart Pretender created a public sensation. This became known as the Atterbury plot, after the name of Francis Atterbury, Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Rochester, the most vocal and formidable supporter of the Pretender in England. He was implicated by the arrest of his secretary in May, was later arrested himself in August, and was eventually impeached and sentenced to permanent banishment the following year.24 Walpole was always prone to enhance and exploit anti-Jacobite furore to humiliate the Tories in general and strengthen his position at the head of the government. He seized the opportunity with characteristically vindictive and perhaps excessive zeal, trying to suggest that all Catholics were potential conspirators and traitors. He managed to push through both Houses of Parliament a bill imposing a fine of £100,000 on all Catholics, to cover the expenses incurred by the government in arresting and prosecuting the conspirators.25 All Catholics and/or Jacobites became objects of suspicion, even potential targets, especially those among Atterbury’s circle of friends and acquaintances. A few days before Atterbury was arrested, the magnificent

23

24

25

For the list, see Lindgren, ‘The Three Great Noises “Fatal to the Interests of Bononcini”’, Musical Quarterly, 61 (1975), 560-83 (p. 561). According to Lindgren, the total of subscribers is 237 and the total of copies bought 441; the number of subscribers may vary from copy to copy because some of them include names added in manuscript or late in the publishing process (the numbers mentioned above come from the copy in the British Library [shelf mark D.360]). The record of the number of copies subscribed for is held by Judith Tichborne, the wife of Charles Spencer, third Earl of Sunderland (she seems to have been a pupil of Bononcini’s; see Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 416). About the plot, see Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760, The Oxford History of England, 11, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), pp. 182-84. For a more detailed narrative and analysis, see Gareth Vaughan Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688-1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), especially pp. 256-75, as well as Edward Pearce, Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister (London: Cape, 2007), pp. 157-73. The fullest and most recent survey is to be found in Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). See J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (London: Cresset, 1960), p. 46. On Walpole’s political exploitation of the Atterbury plot to weaken the opposition, see also Jeremy Black, Walpole in Power (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), pp. 25-27, as well as Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), p. 201.

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

189

funeral of the Duke of Marlborough took place. As Dean of Westminster, Atterbury performed his duty in the burial service on 9 August 1722. Among the pieces of music played for the occasion, the main one was a specially commissioned anthem set to music by Bononcini. According to a contemporary newspaper,26 the composer was ’appointed‘ by Atterbury. This seems plausible enough – as will be seen below Atterbury was a good friend of Pope’s, who seems to have admired Bononcini’s music and in a letter from the Dean to the poet written probably in early June of that year, the composer is mentioned.27 The Atterbury connection would perhaps have been enough to bring about the composer’s fall from grace, but the links between Bononcini and some of the most notorious Jacobites who happened to be indirectly implicated in the conspiracy are certainly much more extensive. Bononcini was a member of a closely-knit community that brought together émigré Italian artists or diplomats and their Italianophile English friends or patrons, aristocratic or otherwise. What remains of the correspondence and diaries of some of the members of this community conjures up a very lively image of their social life, intellectual interests and plain gossip.28 A leading member of this group, and an additional link between Atterbury and Bononcini which further aggravated the composer’s situation in 1722 was Katherine Darnley Sheffield, dowager Duchess of Buckingham, who was both a Catholic and a Jacobite, as well as a close friend of Atterbury’s. Her flamboyant support of the Stuart cause was no doubt partly due to the fact that she was the natural daughter of James II. Another, more peripheral but certainly not less discreet member of the community was another Duchess, Adelhida Talbot née Paleotti, the Italian-

26

27

28

The Post Boy, 5153 (31 July-2 August 1722). The previous issue (5152, 28-31 July 1722) stated that all Catholic peers and dignitaries would be prohibited from attending the funeral. See Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 282. According to a letter from Giuseppe Riva to Rinaldo d’Este, the Duke of Modena, dated 14 August 1722, Bononcini was selected as composer for the funeral anthem by the king, the dowager Duchess, Sarah, and the daughter and heiress of the deceased, Henrietta Churchill (see Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, pp. 282-83). This piece of information is not incompatible with the one to be found in The PostBoy. See mainly Lindgren, ‘Musicians and Librettists in the Correspondence of Gio. Giacomo Zamboni (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Rawlinson Letters 116-138)’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 24 (1991), 1-194; Lindgren and Timms, as well as the extracts of Cocchi’s London diary transcribed in Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, pp. 33038.

190

Xavier Cervantes

born, Catholic, and extravagant wife of the Duke of Shrewsbury.29 A glimpse of the closeness of the community can for example be picked up in the diary of a Florentine doctor, Antonio Cocchi, who stayed in London in 1723-26 and became the protégé of his compatriot the Duchess and a very intimate friend of Bononcini’s.30 His social calls and other visits are described in detail in his diary. On 5 April 1723, for instance, he had lunch with Bononcini, the Modenese minister in London Giuseppe Riva, the merchant and agent of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt Giovanni Giacomo Zamboni, the castrato Gaetano Berenstadt, who was then secondo uomo in the Royal Academy cast, the former official librettist of the Academy Paolo Rolli, as well as the Frenchman Pierre Coste, the translator of Locke and others, who happened to be the private tutor of the young son of the Duchess of Buckingham. Later in the same afternoon, Cocchi called on the Duchess of Shrewsbury.31 Yet another Duchess, the younger Duchess of Marlborough, would later play a major and providential part in Bononcini’s London destiny, as will be seen below. She was not exactly a member of the Italian-English community, but she was introduced to the composer by a prominent member of the group: the English mezzo-soprano Anastasia Robinson, who was born in Italy and was also a Catholic.32 Whereas her relations with Handel, who wrote several roles for her in his operas, were sometimes difficult, she was very close to Bononcini. The only leading role she sang in her brief career was the title role in the latter’s very popular opera Griselda in early 1722. Not long thereafter, the singer retired from the stage because she secretly married Charles Mordaunt, third Earl of Peterborough, also a Catholic. When Atterbury attempted to prove his innocence, he declared that his planned hearing by the House of Commons was unconstitutional on the grounds that he was a Lord Spiritual. A motion was put to the vote on the issue and was defeated in the House of Lords by seventy-eight to thirty-one. Peterborough was one of the peers who voted against the Bishop’s interrogation in the Lower House.33

29

30 31

32 33

See the present writer’s ‘La Duchesse de Shrewsbury et son frère : Deux crimes, deux châtiments’, in Crime et châtiment dans les Îles Britanniques au dix-huitième siècle, ed. by Serge Soupel (Moscow: Rubrica, 2001), pp. 59-74. On this friendship, see Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, pp. 328-41. The diary extract appears in English translation in Lindgren, ‘Musicians and Librettists’, p. 44; it is also quoted in the Italian original in Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 330. See Hawkins, II, p. 871. See Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill, p. 206.

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

191

His ties with Bononcini seem to have been particularly close. Peterborough may have been instrumental in attempting to revive Bononcini’s fortunes in 1723 by procuring him a new commission from the Royal Academy. This was the opera Farnace, which opened the 1723-24 season. The printed libretto bears a dedication to Peterborough signed by Bononcini himself, which was quite exceptional at a time when libretto dedications were hardly ever written by the composer of the work, but by the librettist instead.34 It seems that the Earl met the composer in Paris towards the end of the summer of 1723, while the former was on a diplomatic mission and the latter was employed by the French Académie Royale de Musique to perform some of his works there between two seasons at the Royal Academy.35 Acting as middleman for the Royal Academy, Peterborough handed Bononcini the original Farnace libretto so that it might be adapted for the London stage with new music by the composer. This appears clearly from the dedication: ‘Quest’Opera che da V[ostra] E[ccellenza] mi fu data in nome della Reale Accademia, acchioche l’accommodassi al nostro Teatro, e la facessi la Musica, domanda ora la sua protezione.’ (‘This libretto, which was handed down to me by you in the name of the Royal Academy, so that I might adapt it and set it to music, now begs for your protection.’ Tr. XC) 36 As we learn from the London diary of Antonio Cocchi, the dedication was actually written by him and not by the composer.37 Nonetheless, according to a letter from Zamboni to Riva, Bononcini received a bounty of £100 from Peterborough for the dedication. Anastasia Robinson, who was probably the Earl’s wife by then, added £250, presumably from her husband’s purse, as a reward to the composer for his training and advice on how to sing the operatic parts he had written for her. Such generosity and Peterborough’s help to improve relations between Bononcini and the directors of the Royal

34

35 36

37

See the present writer’s ‘History and Sociology of the Italian Opera in London (1705-45): The Evidence of the Dedications of the Printed Librettos’, Studi Musicali, 27 (1998), 339382. See Lindgren, ‘Parisian Patronage’, p. 17. Farnace Drama Da Rappresentarsi Nel Regio Teatro di Hay-Market per La Reale Accademia di Musica (London: Wood, 1723), [A3]. Anastasia Robinson was part of the cast in the secondary female role of Cirene. The libretto was derived from one of the same name which had been set to music in Venice in 1703 (see Gibson, p. 195). See the entry for 2 November 1723 in Lindgren, ‘Musicians and Librettists’, p. 62 (in English translation) and Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 331 (in the Italian original). It appears that Cocchi also wrote the dedication to Charles Douglas, third Duke of Queensberry, officially signed by Bononcini, of the composer’s Calfurnia, premiered on 18 April 1724 (see the entry in Cocchi’s diary for 14 March 1724 transcribed in Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, p. 334).

192

Xavier Cervantes

Academy were not enough, however: still according to Zamboni, Farnace failed miserably because ‘the party against [Bononcini] is implacable’.38 The Italo-English network of friendship, appreciation and support that was built around Bononcini also included another notorious Catholic Tory and one of Walpole’s most formidable literary enemies: Alexander Pope. Indeed the poet appears to have been at the hub of the network, for he was connected with Bononcini, Atterbury, the Duchess of Buckingham, and Peterborough and his wife; as Atterbury wrote to him probably in the spring or summer of 1722: ‘Mrs. Robinson haunts Bononcini, you follow her, and I plague you.’39 In a humorous letter he sent to the Earl while the latter was on his diplomatic mission in Paris, Pope teased him about his real activities in the French capital: Instead of confirming & strengthening our Alliances with forein Princes, you really take the same pains (tho not quite so successfully) in reconciling & healing the wounds of the various & discordant Potentates and Parties of the Opera?40

Pope and Atterbury had been in regular correspondence since at least 1716, and their friendship was personal as well as intellectual. It seems that the literary interests they had in common were backed by, or at least somehow connected with, their shared Tory allegiances and Jacobite leanings.41 Pope appeared as a character witness when the Bishop was on trial, and the letters they exchanged around that time testify to the intimate nature of their relationship.42 Pope continued to write to him after he was banished – and after the government had declared that any correspondence with the Bishop was treasonous – and eventually wrote his epitaph (Atterbury died in exile in France in 1732).43 Pope was also solicited for his literary expertise by the Duchess of Buckingham. After the death of her husband in 1721, she busied herself with promoting his works both for publication and for performance on stage. A

38

39

40 41

42 43

Letter dated 14 December 1723 and translated in Lindgren, ‘Musicians and Librettists’, p. 65. The Italian original appears in Gibson, p. 198. About Pope’s long-lasting friendship with Peterborough, see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 373-75, 649-51. Alexander Pope, The Correspondence, ed. by George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), II, 123. Ibid., II, 190. See Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill, pp. 17-19; about the friendship between the two men, see also Mack, pp. 336-37. Ibid., pp. 210-12. About Pope and the Atterbury plot, see Mack, pp. 393-402.

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

193

posthumous edition of his collected works was undertaken by Pope and came out in January 1723. The anti-Jacobite hysteria aroused by the Atterbury plot had not completely subsided by then, neither had Walpole’s determination to crush the hopes of the Pretender’s supporters. A mere two days after it was published, the collection was officially banned because of the pro-Stuart sentiments and allusions contained in several passages criticising the Revolution Settlement of 1688-89 (it appears that Pope himself was taken into custody but soon released).44 According to Pope' s biographer, the passages in question hardly deserved to be considered subversive by the authorities and barely justified the charge of seditious libel: it seems that Walpole was determined to maintain an unrelenting pressure on Jacobitism, especially because Atterbury was due to be tried not long after the publication.45 At around the same time, the Duchess attempted to stage performances of twin plays written by her late husband, Julius Caesar and Marcus Junius Brutus (both derived from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar). Buckingham had originally written the plays in 1712 and not long afterwards had asked famous men of letters to compose additional verses to be inserted as choruses at the end of each of the four acts of both works. Pope was invited to write the text of the first two choruses in Marcus Junius Brutus at some point between 1714 and 1716. These choruses were later set to music when the Duchess was trying to have the plays staged. Bononcini was commissioned to set all four choruses of Marcus Junius Brutus as verse anthems, and one may conjecture that the Duchess was prompted to approach the composer after she had heard a sample of his choral writing at the funeral of the Duke of Marlborough. The two plays and their incidental music were actually never performed, apparently for technical and religious reasons – the king refused to allow the choristers of the Chapel Royal to perform on a stage – but political censorship can reasonably be surmised. This seems all the more plausible since the historical characters of the Roman dictator and his adopted son were sometimes used as allegories in contemporary political pamphlets and newspaper essays, especially to allude to the rivalry between the Hanover de facto king and the Stuart de jure one, which might have rendered Buckingham’s tragedies even more subversive in the eyes of the king and his

44

45

See George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), pp. 220-28, as well as Mack, pp. 396-97, 430-31. This hypothesis is put forward in Mack, p. 399.

194

Xavier Cervantes

ministers.46 A private dress rehearsal of the plays took place on 11 January 1723 at the Duchess’s, however, to celebrate the eighth birthday of Edmund Sheffield, the young Duke (with mezzo-soprano Anastasia Robinson as one of the soloists).47 Either Atterbury or Pope, or perhaps both, may have encouraged the Duchess to commission Bononcini to set the choruses to music. The poet seems more likely, as can be hypothesized from the following letter he had sent sometime before to the Duchess: I beg your Grace' s Pardon for the Freedom with which I write to you […] Having a great Esteem for the famous Bononcini, not only for his great Fame, but for a Personal Knowledge of his Character; and this being increased by the ill Treatment he has met with here, I ventured, among other Persons of the first Distinction, who subscribed to me for his Composures, newly ingraved, to set down the Name of your Grace.48

Pope’s attempt to persuade the Duchess to subscribe to Bononcini’s collection of cantatas and duets was successful, for her name does appear in the list of subscribers, as do those of Pope himself and of Peterborough (as well as those of Riva and Zamboni). The true reasons for Bononcini’s dismissal from the Academy in 1722, or at least his fall from favour, remain elusive. This is not surprising because of the absence of any official or private document unambiguously testifying to the fact that his downfall came about because of, and only because of, his Catholic and Jacobite connections. Other factors may have played at least some part, such as Bononcini’s being a ‘proud man, who if he had valued himself less, the world would have esteemed him more’49 as the Earl of

46

47 48

49

An example of this allegorical use of these two Roman characters is to be found in A Letter from a Nobleman Abroad to His Friend in England, written in 1722 by George Granville, Lord Lansdowne (for these allusions and their complexity, see Cruickshanks and ErskineHill, pp. 87-88). See Lindgren, Bibliographic Scrutiny, pp. 290-94. Pope, II, pp. 99-100. This was written on 27 January of an unspecified year. 1721 was the year of the publication of Bononcini’s anthology of cantatas and duets, but the letter might have been written in 1722, which would better account for Pope’s allusion to Bononcini’s ‘ill Treatment’. Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 63th report, 4 vols (London: HMSO, 1905), I, p. 202. In another entry of his diary dated 31 August 1731, Egmont wrote down the following anecdote, true or fabricated, to give more credit to his judgment on Bononcini: ‘Bononcini, the famous composer, was in the Emperor Joseph’s favour to that degree that he made him extraordinary presents above his salary, yet he had the insolence often to refuse to play when he sent to him for that purpose. At last the Emperor made him come to Court, and asked him, "Do you consider it is an Emperor whom you refuse?" "Yes," replied the saucy fellow, "but there are many sovereign princes, and

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

195

Egmont jotted down in his diary nine years after the incident. Apart from his vanity, documented in other sources,50 and perhaps also his greed, Bononcini and the popularity of his operas with the British public up to 1722 may well have been further damaged by a cabal led by a jealous colleague in London, the minor composer Pietro Giuseppe Sandoni, who happened also to be the husband of the then prima donna of the Royal Academy company.51 Three pieces of evidence, one in print, the other two in manuscript, refer to Bononcini’s disgrace more or less explicitly, though with tantalizingly few details. The first reference is fairly vague and allusive, though it can be considered reliable as it comes from someone close to the composer. It was appended by librettist Paolo Rolli as a note to his Italian translation of Steele’s comedy The Conscious Lovers, published in London in 1724: l' ottima Musica [da Bononcini] ebbe […] da i [direttori della Reale Accademia di Musica], quasi la medesima Ricompensa del buon senso de i [miei] Drami, cioè quarta parte meno d' Onorario dell' Anno antecedente […] e persecuzione in avvenire. For his superb music, [Bononcini] received [from the directors of the Royal Academy] almost the same reward as I did for the excellence of my libretti, that is to say a salary reduced by a fourth as compared to that of the preceding year, and many persecutions to come. [Tr. XC]52

Paolo Rolli, who adapted many librettos for Handel and Bononcini, seems to have been dismissed by the Royal Academy as official librettist two years after Bononcini had suffered the same fate. The reasons for that dismissal

50

51

52

only one Bononcini." This insolent temper obliged him to leave that Court, and he came in the late Queen’s time for England.’ (Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, I, p. 201.) ‘He was easily elated with success, and apt to be intoxicated with admiration and applause.’ ([John Mainwaring,] Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel. To which is added, A Catalogue of his Works, and Observations upon them [London: Dodsley, 1760; repr. Buren: Knuf, 1964], p. 19.) This is asserted by the castrato Gaetano Berenstadt in a letter to his colleague Francesco Antonio Pistocchi dated 19 May 1724: ‘questo matto […] pretende tener testa a Bononcini e […] unito ad altri eroi della musica moderna ha suscitato mille persecuzioni e maledicenze contro Bononcini.’ (Tr.: ‘This madman is determined to harm Bononcini and, joining his forces with those of other heroes of music in the modern taste, he has managed to damage and tarnish his reputation in numberless ways’; tr. XC) (Quoted in Lindgren, ‘La carriera di Gaetano Berenstadt, contralto evirato [ca. 1690-1735]’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 19 [1984], 36-112 [p. 67].) The husband of Francesca Cuzzoni, Sandoni would later publish in London a collection of cantatas around 1730; in 1735, the so-called Opera of the Nobility brought his opera Issipile to the stage. The Conscious Lovers. Gli amanti interni Commedia Inglese Del cavaliere Riccardo Steele, trans. and ed. by Paolo Rolli (London: n. p., 1724), p. 165.

196

Xavier Cervantes

remain unclear, but it seems that Rolli’s haughtiness and greed were among them.53 It also seems reasonable to assume that the librettist and poet came to be considered, just like the composer, as a potential Jacobite sympathizer, because he was Italian and Catholic, and because he was at least peripherally involved with the Italo-English community described above, especially through his friendship with Bononcini.54 The second testimony is more detailed and is chronologically closer to Bononcini’s downfall. In a letter to her husband dated 5 October 1722, the Countess of Bristol thus wrote: ‘Bononcini is dismissed the theatre for operas […]; the reason they give for it is his most extravagant demands.’55 However, what is most interesting is that this titbit comes after a series of paragraphs within the same letter in which the Countess mentions the interrogations undergone by some of the suspects implicated in the Atterbury Plot, thereby pointing implicitly to the real politico-religious causes of Bononcini’s disfavour, and not the alleged reason. The third item is quite tangential but seems particularly reliable, for it comes from a letter written by the singer Anastasia Robinson, Bononcini’s intimate friend and admirer, as has been seen above. It is undated but appears to have been written after the composer had been dismissed, or at least cast aside by the Royal Academy, and when he was trying to get himself rehired by the company on financially satisfactory terms, probably with the help of the singer’s husband the Earl of Peterborough: I have great hopes Sig[no]r Bononcini' s demands may be agreed to, tho in another form than that which he propos' d, the di[ffi]culty is to get [his] benefit day certain, for [the directors of the Royal Academy] would have it to depend on their favour and generosity (a wretched dependence indeed). I took the liberty to say what they designed doing, must be by contract, for tho Bononcini was a papist, yet he had been long enough in this heretick unbelieving country to loose all his faith.56

After trying unsuccessfully to revive his fortunes by proposing the poorlyreceived Farnace in 1723 and Calfurnia the next year, Bononcini made plans

53

54

55

56

See Richard A. Streatfield, ‘Handel, Rolli, and Italian Opera in London in the Eighteenth Century’, Musical Quarterly, 3 (1917), 428-45 (p. 437), and especially Lindgren, ‘The Accomplishments of the Learned and Ingenious Nicola Francesco Haym (1678-1729)’, Studi Musicali, 16 (1987), 247-380 (pp. 304-06). See also Lindgren and Timms, pp. 84-85. We know for example, among other hints, that Pope was one of the subscribers of Rolli’s edition of Guarini’s Il pastor fido published in London in 1718. Rolli was also very close not only to Bononcini, but also to Giuseppe Riva. John Hervey, Earl of Bristol, The Letter-Books of John Hervey, First Earl of Bristol, 3 vols (Wells: Jackson, 1894), II, p. 35. Lindgren, ‘Parisian Patronage’, p. 16.

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

197

to leave Britain for Vienna. It seems that he was then introduced to Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough by Anastasia Robinson. He entered the service of the Duchess and provided her with music, organising her private concerts until 1731.57 She had not subscribed to the composer’s collection of cantatas and duets in 1721, but her husband, Francis, second Earl Godolphin, does appear in the subscription list and purchased two copies, one of which was presumably destined for his wife. Above all, the Duchess had probably come to appreciate Bononcini’s music after hearing the anthem that had been performed at the burial service of her father in 1722. Perhaps she was all the more inclined to bestow her lavish patronage on Bononcini since she appears to have been a Catholic, although a covert one, if one is to believe Lord Hervey, who wrote to his wife not long after the death of the Duchess in 1733 that ‘she is with some reason reported to have dyd a Roman Catholick’.58 It may well be, then, that by an ironic twist of fate, Bononcini' s Catholicism eventually helped revive his fortunes in London, after having hampered his popularity and even his livelihood as official composer to the Royal Academy of Music. His network of Catholic Italian friends and colleagues, as well as English patrons and admirers, eventually guaranteed that his music would be played in England for one more decade, even though the price paid by the composer was to move out of the public world of the opera stage and into that of private music for the personal entertainment of the Duchess of Marlborough and her guests. Bibliography Baker, David Erskine, The Companion to the Play-House: Or, An Historical Account of all the Dramatic Writers (and their Works) that have appeared in Great Britain and Ireland, from the Commencement of our Theatrical Exhibitions, down to the Present Year 1764, 2 vols (London: Becket et al., 1764).

57

58

According to a letter sent by Giuseppe Riva to the composer Agostino Steffani in Hanover on 27 March 1727, it was thanks to the intervention of the Duchess that Bononcini was able to have one last opera of his, Astianatte, performed under the auspices of the Royal Academy of Music in 1727 (the letter appears in the Italian original in Colin Timms, ‘Music and Musicians in the Letters of Giuseppe Riva to Agostino Steffani (1720-27)’, Music and Letters, 79 [1998] 27-50 (pp. 40-41), and in both the Italian original and English translation in Lindgren and Timms, p. 110. Letter dated 3 November 1733, Hervey, III, p. 108.

198

Xavier Cervantes

Bedford, Arthur, The Great Abuse of Musick. In Two Parts. Containing An Account of the Use and Design of Musick among the Antient Jews, Greeks, Romans, and others; with their Concern for, and Care to prevent the Abuse thereof. And also An Account of the Immorality and Profaneness, which is occasioned by the Corruption of that most Noble Science in the Present Age (London: Wyatt, 1711). Bennett, Gareth Vaughan, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688-1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Black, Jeremy, Walpole in Power (Stroud: Sutton, 2001). Brown, John, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: Davis and Rymers, 1757). The British Journal, 20 (2 February 1723). Burney, Charles, An Account of the Musical Performances in WestminsterAbbey and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3rd, and 5th, 1784. In Commemoration of Handel (London: Payne and Robinson, 1785; repr. New York: Da Capo, 1979). Cervantes, Xavier, ‘History and Sociology of the Italian Opera in London (1705-45): The Evidence of the Dedications of the Printed Librettos’, Studi Musicali, 27 (1998), 339-382. ––. ‘La Duchesse de Shrewsbury et son frère : Deux crimes, deux châtiments’, Crime et châtiment dans les Îles Britanniques au dixhuitième siècle, ed. by Serge Soupel (Moscow: Rubrica, 2001), pp. 59-74. Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (London: Pimlico, 1994). Cruickshanks, Eveline, and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Defoe, Daniel, Mercurius Politicus […] for the Month of September 1720 […] (London: n. p., 1720). The Devil to pay at St. James' s: or, A full and true Account of a most horrid and bloody Battle between Madam Faustina and Madam Cuzzoni. also of a hot Skirmish between Signor Boschi and Signor Palmecini [recte: Palmerini]. moreover How Senesino has taken Snuff, is going to leave the Opera, and sing Psalms at Henley' s Oratory (London: Moore, 1727). Do you know what you are about? or, A Protestant Alarm to Great Britain: Proving our late Theatric Squabble, a Type of the present Contest for the Crown of Poland; and that the Division between Handel and Senesino, has more in it than we imagine. That the latter is no Eunuch, but a Jesuit in Disguise; with other Particulars of the greatest Importance (London: Roberts, 1733).

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

199

Duffy, Michael, The Englishman and the Foreigner, The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986). A Fair Enquiry Into the State of Operas in England (London: Cooper [c. 1760?]). Farnace Drama Da Rappresentarsi Nel Regio Teatro di Hay-Market per La Reale Accademia di Musica (London: Wood, 1723). Füssli, Johann Heinrich, Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J. J. Rousseau (London: Cadell, 1767). Galliard, John Ernest, Six English Cantatas after the Italian Manner (London: Walsh [1716]). Gibson, Elizabeth, The Royal Academy of Music 1719-1728: The Institution and Its Directors (New York: Garland, 1989). La Gierusalemme Liberata di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Nicola Francesco Haym, 2 vols (Londra: Tonson and Watts, 1724). Gildon, Charles, Les Soupirs de la Grand Britaigne: or, the Groans of Great Britain, Being The Second Part to the Groans of Europe (London: Baker, 1713). The Gray’s Inn Journal, 9 (24 November 1753). Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Hawkins, John, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2 vols (London: for the author, 1776; repr. London: Novello, 1853). Hervey, John, Earl of Bristol, The Letter-Books of John Hervey, First Earl of Bristol, 3 vols (Wells: Jackson, 1894). Hume, Robert D., ‘The Sponsorship of Opera in London, 1704-1720’, Modern Philology, 85 (1988), 420-32. Kohn, Hans, ‘The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), 69-94. Knapp, John Merrill, ‘Eighteenth-Century Opera in London before Handel, 1705-1710’, British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660-1800, ed. by Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), pp. 92-104. Lenman, Bruce, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980). Lindgren, Lowell, A Bibliographic Scrutiny of Dramatic Works Set by Giovanni and His Brother Antonio Maria Bononcini (PhD dissertation, University of Harvard, 1972). ––. ‘The Three Great Noises “Fatal to the Interests of Bononcini”’, Musical Quarterly, 61 (1975), 560-83. ––. ‘Parisian Patronage of Performers from the Royal Academy of Musick (1719-1728)’, Music and Letters, 58 (1977), 4-28.

200

Xavier Cervantes

––. ‘Nicola Cosimi in London 1701-1705’, Studi Musicali, 11 (1982), 22948. ––. ‘La carriera di Gaetano Berenstadt, contralto evirato [ca. 1690-1735]’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 19 (1984), 36-112. ––. ‘The Accomplishments of the Learned and Ingenious Nicola Francesco Haym (1678-1729)’, Studi Musicali, 16 (1987), 247-380. ––. ‘Musicians and Librettists in the Correspondence of Gio. Giacomo Zamboni (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Rawlinson Letters 116-138)’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 24 (1991), 1-194. ––. ‘Critiques of Italian Opera in London, 1705-1719’, in Il melodramma italiano in Italia e in Germania nell’età barocca / Die italienische Barockoper ihre Verbreitung in Italien und Deutschland, ed. by Alberto Colzani, Norbert Dubowy, Andrea Luppi et Maurizio Padoan (Como: Centro italo-tedesco / Deutsch-Italienisches Zentrum Villa Vigoni, 1995), pp. 143-65. –– and Colin Timms, ‘The Correspondence of Agostino Steffani and Giuseppe Riva, 1720-1728, and Related Correspondence with J. P. F. von Schönborn and S. B. Pallavicini’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 36 (2003), 1-174. Lucchi, Marta, ‘Da Modena all’Europa melodrammatica: I carteggi di Giuseppe Riva e carteggi varii’, Teatro e musica nel ‘700 estense: Momenti di storia culturale e artistica, polemica di idee, vita teatrale, economia e impresariato, ed. by Giuseppe Vecchi and Marina Calore, Historiæ Musicæ Cultores Biblioteca, 73 (Firenze: Olschski, 1994), pp. 45-78. Mack, Maynard, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 63th report, 4 vols (London: HMSO, 1905). Martinez, Marc, ‘Le Grand Tour dans la caricature graphique et le théâtre satirique anglais au milieu du XVIIIe siècle’, Les Représentations du Sud: Du factuel au fictif, ed. by Jean Mondot (Pessac: Maison des sciences de l’homme d’Aquitaine, 2003), 41-63. Mainwaring, John, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel. To which is added, A Catalogue of his Works, and Observations upon them (London: Dodsley, 1760; repr. Buren: Knuf, 1964). Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 17401830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Pearce, Edward, Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister (London: Cape, 2007).

“Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra”?

201

Plumb, J. H., Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (London: Cresset, 1960). Pope, Alexander, The Correspondence, ed. by George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). The Post Boy, 5152 (28-31 July 1722) and 5153 (31 July-2 August 1722). Price, Curtis, ‘The Critical Decade for English Music Drama, 1700-1710’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), 38-76. Rouquet, Jean-André, The Present State of the Arts in England (London: Nourse, 1755). Sherburn, George, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934). Smith, Ruth, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Some Unpublished Letters of Lord Chesterfield, ed. by Sidney L. Gulick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937). Steele, Richard, The Conscious Lovers. Gli amanti interni Commedia Inglese Del cavaliere Riccardo Steele, trans. and ed. by Paolo Rolli (Londra: n. p., 1724). ––. The Theatre 1720, ed. by John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). ––. The Plays, ed. by Shirley Strum Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Streatfield, Richard A., ‘Handel, Rolli, and Italian Opera in London in the Eighteenth Century’, Musical Quarterly, 3 (1917), 428-45. Taylor, Carole, Italian Operagoing in London, 1700-1745 (PhD dissertation, University of Syracuse, 1991). Timms, Colin, ‘Music and Musicians in the Letters of Giuseppe Riva to Agostino Steffani (1720-27)’, Music and Letters, 79 (1998), 27-50. Welsted, Leonard, The Dissembled Wanton; or, My Son get Money. A Comedy (London: Watts, 1727). Williams, Basil, The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760, The Oxford History of England, 11, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).

Maurizio Masetti The 1844 Post Office Scandal and its Impact on English Public Opinion In June 1844 Giuseppe Mazzini, who was living in London as an exile, was involved in a major diplomatic incident. Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, and Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, opened his correspondence at the request of the Austrian premier Metternich. Mazzini protested vehemently and subsequent Parliamentary debates divided not just Parliament but also English public opinion. Analysing newspapers and magazines of the time, I intend to outline their concern for topics such as the limitation of individuals’ rights to protect national security, and contemporary attitudes to exiles and refugees. Surprisingly, Sir James’s conduct was supported by quite a large part of public opinion, whose ideas were voiced by papers like the Tory The Morning Herald and later even by The Times. Mazzini himself was attacked on the grounds that he was taking advantage of British generosity in order to plot against the established order in Italy. The Peel administration did not want any alteration of the ‘status quo’ on the Continent, in order to leave England out of any possible conflicts. Peel’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, condemned the more confrontational policy of the Whig Lord Palmerston, as well as his manner and method, a condemnation which was supported by the young Queen Victoria.1 The British attitude to the Italian question was clearly stated in the editorial comment of The Times on the 1844 insurrection in the Romagna, which was considered to be a result of the wretched local administration rather than the outcome of a revolutionary scheme.2 The Liberal The Morning Chronicle, one of the voices of the opposition to the Peel cabinet, excluded any possible link between the insurrection and Mazzini’s patriotic organization: ‘The Giovine Italia does not exist, and the disturbances are to be laid to the account of the wretched Governments of Italy, not to the exiles or theorists, whom they have ejected.’3 A definite solution was seen in a joint intervention of Austria, France and England: ‘not to uphold the stupidity of

1

2 3

Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830-1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 48. The Times, 1 April 1844, p. 6. The Morning Chronicle, 2 April 1844, p. 5.

204

Maurizio Masetti

despotism, but to insist on its providing for the moral and material wants of the population.’4 Nevertheless the official British practice towards Italian, and European exiles continued to be both humane and considerate of the right of political asylum.5 Giuseppe Mazzini had been welcomed when he arrived in London in 1837 and his free school for Italian children, opened in November 1841, gained him the support of influential people, both Whigs and Tories, and the friendship of Chartist leaders such as William Linton, who was to be later involved with him in the Post Office scandal. Within seven years, the Italian patriot had become a well-known and respected figure. It was therefore with amazement that the English public learned the news that on 14 June, 1844, Thomas Duncombe, M.P. for Finsbury, had presented a petition by Mazzini and Linton complaining that their letters had been tampered with at the General Post Office. Linton had discovered by chance that the letters had not only been opened but even resealed, and then delivered as if they had not been touched. He and Mazzini also obtained exact information from a subordinate in the Post Office.6 Mazzini was dismayed: he had never imagined that the English government would violate his right to privacy, even though he might have become suspicious when he read in an Austrian newspaper that the English authorities had undertaken to watch the movements of the Italian refugees in Great Britain.7 Such rumours seem to be confirmed by a letter from Baron Neumann to Lord Aberdeen in which the Austrian diplomat was asking for more information about Mazzini and his Apostolato Popolare.8 The Italian patriot therefore accused Sir James Graham and Lord Aberdeen of authorising the illegal act of prying into his correspondence on behalf of Metternich, who was looking for information about an insurrection in Southern Italy planned by the Bandiera brothers. Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, two members of the Young Italy Movement had fled to Corfu, a British Protectorate, after deserting from the Austrian Navy. Mazzini had written to them and unsuccessfully tried to dissuade them from their

4 5

6

7 8

Ibid. Harry W. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters (London: Allen & Unwin, 1940), p. 21. William J. Linton, Threescore and Ten Years, 1820-90. Recollections by W. J. Linton (New York: Scribner, 1894), pp. 51-52. Rudman, p. 58. The British Library Archives, Aberdeen Papers, Brit. Mus., Additional 43128, 22 September 1843.

The 1844 Post Office Scandal

205

enterprise. In the event, their uprising had turned into a disaster, resulting in the capture of both brothers who were later executed. The fact that Graham was an unpopular government minister, gave the Times the chance for harsh editorial comment. The Home Secretary was accused of pursuing an unconstitutional and un-English policy of spying on citizens. It was stressed how: Hitherto, it has been the peculiar boast of England that she is not as other countries, that her citizens are not liable to the same petty persecution, the same rigorous police, the same insidious and incessant watching, the same dogging of their footsteps, opening of their letters, and prying into cabinets as harass the subjects of continental states. But this 9 boast cannot now be uttered with justice. The national prestige has gone.

As for Mazzini: ‘We know nothing and care nothing about him. He may be the most worthless and most vicious creature in the world. But this is no reason of itself why his letters should be detained and opened.’10 The Morning Chronicle expressed similar opinions adding that in future it might be expected that such a practice could be used for political or electoral purposes. The incident was considered extremely serious since, undoubtedly, the examination of the letters had taken place at the request of the Austrian or of the Roman Government: ‘There was a time when one of our Ministers would have disdained to gratify a foreign Government by an introduction into this country of the disgraceful and non-English custom of letter-espionage.’11 Although strongly condemning Sir James’s conduct, neither newspaper had been sympathetic towards Mazzini. It was left to Thomas Carlyle, familiar with the patriot since 1837, to do justice to him in a letter to The Times: I have had the honour to know Mr. Mazzini for a series of years, and whatever I may think of his practical skill in world affairs, I can with great freedom testify to all men that he, if I have ever seen one such, is a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of mind, one of those rare men numerable, unfortunately, but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr souls, who 12 in silence piously in their daily life, understand and practise what is meant by that.

9 10 11 12

The Times, 17 June 1844, p. 5. Ibid. The Morning Chronicle, 18 June 1844, p. 6. The Times, 19 June 1844, p. 6. Lord Aberdeen did not forgive Carlyle for his public support of Mazzini. When Prince Albert proposed the Scottish historian for a pension in 1853, Aberdeen, at the time Prime Minister, ‘remembered with a shudder the Mazzini row, and shook his little head, and said

206

Maurizio Masetti

Punch was equally supportive though in a different way. On 20 June, The Morning Chronicle published an article from the comic magazine titled ‘A HOME SECRETARY OF LETTERS’. Apologies on letter delays on behalf of Sir Graham were made: If they have been delayed until now, it is because of the pressing avocations of the Right Honourable Secretary; Sir James will, however, cause all the letters to be posted directly he shall have read them. NB – A few good hands wanted who can open letters with secrecy and despatch. Persons who have studied FOUCHE’S plan will be preferred. 13 Apply at the Home-Office. Punch.

The magazine later created the character of ‘Paul Pry’, a gentleman in a top hat prying into other people’s correspondence, and in July proposed ‘antigraham wafers’ to stick to anyone trying to violate letters. Punch then invented a new verb, ‘to be Grahamed’, when referring to tampered letters. Charles Dickens, too, joined the protest. In his letters to his friends Tom Beard and John Forster on June 28, above the seal, on the flap of the envelope, he wrote: ‘It is particularly requested that if Sir James Graham should open this, he will not trouble himself to seal it again.’14 In his arrogant reply to the House of Commons, Graham remarked that a law dating back to Queen Anne allowed the practice of letter-opening in cases where plots against England were suspected, and that the same right had been exercised by all governments since then. Supporters of Mazzini answered that the Home Secretary’s right to take action on matters of national security wasn’t questioned, but that this was an illegitimate use of it. Mazzini’s letters clearly showed that there had been no plotting against England, and it was highly illegal to communicate the content of his letters to a foreign government. A call for an inquiry was rejected by a narrow majority in the Commons and caused a ferocious political controversy in newspapers and magazines. On 25 June 1844, The Times sarcastically commented on the matter and hinted at Graham’s possible resignation: We wish him joy of his majority; and we trust that Ministers will learn from this division how dangerous a thing it is to entrust extraordinary powers to a colleague

13 14

that was made impossible by Carlyle’s “heterodoxy”.’ David A. Wilson, Carlyle on Cromwell and Others (London: Kegan Paul, 1925) p. 265n. The Morning Chronicle, 20 June 1844, p. 5. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-), IV, p. 151.

The 1844 Post Office Scandal

207

whose acts and whose character, instead of inspiring confidence in the goodness of his 15 intentions, never fail to excite suspicion, jealousy and alarm.

The request for an inquiry stirred Sir James’s supporters into action. The following day, The Morning Herald assured its readers that only one or two of Mazzini’s letters had been opened, as a warning for him and his associates not to ‘expect permission to use the English Post Office as an instrument of hostility against the Governments of other countries, thus compromising the honour, perhaps the peace, of England.’16 The article’s conclusion seemed to mark an end to the British benevolent attitude towards exiles, who were now described as ‘intriguing foreigners, who come here under a pretence of destitution, but really with the purpose of prosecuting at leisure schemes of revolution.’17 It was The Illustrated London News that reminded English public opinion about the hardship of the exiles’ conditions and England’s responsibilities towards them: now, a compelled exile is a misfortune great enough of itself, even when not linked with want and poverty, and the least a great country can do, is to afford the stranger the advantages which made him select it for his asylum. If compelled to appeal to our benevolence, we may bestow our charity as a favour; but when he asks safety and protection, he only demands that which is his right. It is this right which the 18 Government is, and has for some time been, violating.

The Morning Herald, however, did not give up their support for Graham and attacked the Opposition. Lord John Russell, the ‘perfectly strict and rigid’ exminister in favour of the inquiry, was accused of the same crime: ‘Well, then, is he ready to have the inquiry extended over to his own reign? Is he ready and are his Whig colleagues, who, now being out, support him – are they “all” ready to have every exercise of the delicate, but necessary power in question, examined, during their own tenure of office?’19 The newspaper did not forget Lord Melbourne, the former Prime Minister: ‘Did LORD MELBOURNE never use the power? We pause for a reply. If he says yes, then we desire to know WHOSE LETTERS HE

15 16 17 18 19

The Times, 25 June 1844, p. 5. The Morning Herald, 26 June 1844, p. 5. Ibid. The Illustrated London News, 29 June 1844, p. 409. The Morning Herald, 29 June 1844, p. 4.

208

Maurizio Masetti

OPENED? It won’t do to shuffle off on this. It is quite notorious that he did. Then, Lord John Russell – INQUIRE.’20 In spite of this, on 2 July a committee of inquiry was appointed by the House of Commons, followed three days later by another in the House of Lords. Quite surprisingly Duncombe, the best informed MP on the facts, was not appointed as a member and later on, while the Committees were at work, Mazzini was refused permission to appear in person before them. According to the Duke of Wellington he had nothing to do with the object of the inquiry.21 The letters to the newspapers showed how deeply public opinion was divided. In a letter to the Herald, Duncombe, the MP who had presented the petition by Mazzini, was described as ‘a cur employed to grub in the dirt for truffles’ here ‘employed by the Chartists and other malcontents to grub for grievances, in order to pamper their diseased appetite for declaiming against the established order of government.’ The writer concluded expressing all his confidence in a satisfactory result of the inquiry: True, Mr. Thomas Duncombe has brought divers grave and weighty charges against the Government; but, if I be not much mistaken, the Report of the Secret Committee will prove to the world, that a busy meddling fool may talk loud and long without in reality 22 having anything to talk about.

Comments sent to the opposition papers stressed how England’s image abroad had been affected by the Post-Office affaire. The Leghorn correspondent of The Times wrote: It lowered England, which had previously stood so high in the esteem of Italians, to find that in a free country, whose example and remonstration they hoped would in time operate beneficially on their own Government, a system was tolerated and practised 23 analogous to that which causes such disgust among themselves.

A letter to The Morning Chronicle reported a conversation between a Russian and an Englishman heard in a hotel at Baden. The Englishman was vaunting British free institutions when the Russian interrupted him: ‘What! You a free people! Do you not pack juries? Have you not a parliament that in the course of twenty-four hours votes black is white and white black? And have you not

20 21 22 23

Ibid. The Illustrated London News, 20 July 1844, p. 42. The Morning Herald, 4 July 1844, p. 5. The Times, 11 July 1844, p. 6.

The 1844 Post Office Scandal

209

a secretary of state that opens your letters? Believe me, sir, your boasted freedom is all delusion.’24 At the beginning of August both committees presented their conclusions. These were, first, that Mazzini’s letters had been stopped and opened, under the assumption that he was engaged in designs which might have been dangerous for European security. Secondly, certain parts had been communicated to a foreign Government but without names or details that might have exposed any individual residing in that country to danger. This failed to address the main question: had the disclosure of the content of Mazzini’s letters to the Austrian government led to the murder of the Bandiera brothers and their comrades? The Illustrated London News underlined the hypocrisy and the discrepancies between the two reports: the report of the House of Commons was defined as just ‘the history of a secret practice which has never been entirely obsolete’;25 the argument of peace being threatened by Mazzini’s plots was utterly absurd and: ‘to allege danger to the peace of England as an excuse for opening the letters of foreigners, is a mere subterfuge.’26 Even the question concerning the legitimacy of the letter opening practice had not been solved: ‘Not knowing what to do, the Committee determine on nothing, and turn the troublesome question over to the consideration of Parliament.’27 However, in the editor’s opinion: ‘Publicity often furnishes a better remedy than legislation. […] The practice once known, it is not likely that many political secrets pass through the Post Office.’28 The report of the House of Lords was labelled as brief and uninteresting. As for the proposed abolition of the law allowing letter opening, it was the opinion of those Lords who had taken office in the past that the use of such power should be limited to war periods.29 An article in the September issue of The Westminster Review30 denounced the whitewashing operated by the Committees. The author claimed that, by considering the practice of letter-opening not as serious as it actually was, ministers might believe themselves justified in stealing, lying or committing forgery if that was considered necessary from the point of view of national security. On the ground that secrecy had undoubtedly affected the working of

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

The Morning Chronicle, 8 August 1844, p. 5. The Illustrated London News, 10 August 1844, p. 86. Ibid., 10 August 1844, p. 86. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 91. ‘Mazzini and the Ethics of Politicians’, The Westminster Review, 42 (1844), 225-251.

210

Maurizio Masetti

both Committees, a full and public investigation of the facts, as well as a reexamination of the principle of administrative governments, was demanded: ‘For public servants, we want responsibility; and responsibility cannot be obtained without publicity. Secrecy is but another word for fear.’31 The December issue of The North British Review was much more resolute in criticizing the Committees and their achievements: ‘To tranquilize and satisfy the public, a Secret Committee only was granted by the Government; to show their innocence they took care to appoint themselves their own judges.’32 Sir James’s ambiguity in his running the affaire was unveiled: Great credit was taken by Sir James Graham for his impartiality in choosing his own jury, and putting on it five of his opponents, as if the public were supposed to be such idiots as not to see through so bare-faced a conduct and give him credit for having 33 added water to the milk to prevent its proving too rich.

It was pointed out how Mazzini had not even been suspected of having broken English law: his letters had actually been transmitted unread from the Home Office to the Foreign Office, therefore Lord Aberdeen was openly accused of having lied to Parliament: ‘to support a Government who volunteered its services as a SPY to the King of Naples, and to enable it to continue with impunity, amidst the execration of the civilized world, an ignoble and abhorred vocation, which hitherto money alone has forced on baseness.’34 Mazzini had now become extremely popular in the role of the persecuted exile, and he wanted to make the most of his popularity to promote his real cause: the struggle for Italian independence. It was again Thomas Duncombe who gave him a chance: on 18 February 1845, in a session of the House of Commons commenting on the results achieved by the Secret Committee, he accused Sir James Graham of having detained and opened his letters. The fact was to be considered as a ‘personal insult, as well

31

32 33 34

The article was initially thought of having been written by Mazzini himself. Updated researches, considering the signature W. as an evidence, attribute it to W. E. Hickson, editor of The Westminster Review in those years, whose articles were often characterized by his great concern with ‘principles’ and with the ‘moral obligations of society.’ The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, III, p. 602. ‘Post-Office Espionage’, The North British Review, 3 (1844), p. 261. Ibid. Ibid., p. 294. The article was published anonymously. It was Constance Brooks who attributed it to Antonio Panizzi. A copy of the Secret Committee’s report was preserved in the British Museum and it was ‘liberally annotated in Panizzi’s handwriting, with notes which appear again in a more literary form in his article.’ Constance Brooks, Antonio Panizzi. Scholar and Patriot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), p. 74.

The 1844 Post Office Scandal

211

as an insult to the constituency which he represented, for if his correspondence were not to be free, he was unworthy the position he held.’35 Graham’s conduct once more came under attack. The Illustrated London News compared him to a despot: ‘If Mr. Duncombe’s post missives were violated, Sir James Graham must have felt one of the bitter mortifications of a limited tyranny – that, with the privilege of opening his letters, he could not unite the power of shutting his mouth.’36 Immediately came the Tory reaction: The Morning Herald at first doubted Duncombe’s reliability and defined the matter as a waste of time for Parliament;37 two days later it justified the Government on the assumption that the same MP had permitted Mazzini to have letters directed under cover to his address,38 and finally the idea of an anti-Government plot was taken up again. The paper attacked the main leaders of the Opposition right up to Palmerston, who was accused of pulling the strings in the dark: ‘Deeper, however, is Lord PALMERSTON! He stays away, and contents himself with feasting on the attacks upon the government in The Times next morning.’39 Much to Mazzini’s disappointment, even the more liberal papers turned their back on his expectations of support. Commenting on the debates in Parliament, The Times itself had taken an ambiguous stand on British responsibilities, denigrating the Bandieras and accusing the Italian exile of having taken advantage of their tragic end: It may suit Mr. Mazzini’s purposes to represent these hapless young men as political victims; but in reality they were the victims of nothing but their extravagant passions and impudence; and they rushed headlong to their own destruction, precisely because their designs were either not foreseen or no longer feared. If they had been detected, they would doubtless have been prevented, and these young men would not have died 40 an ignominious death.

Such comment seems to justify Graham’s dubious activities, and even hints that, had he been more zealous, the Bandieras would not have perished. On 13 March 1845 The Times again openly attacked the people fighting for a unified Italy. Mazzini’s pamphlet on the Corfu episode, Ricordi dei Fratelli Bandiera e dei loro compagni di maritrio in Cosenza, considering an armed

35 36 37 38 39 40

The Illustrated London News, 22 February 1845, p. 115. Ibid., p. 122. The Morning Herald, 22 February 1845, p. 10. Ibid., 24 February 1845, p. 4. Ibid., 27 February 1845, p. 10. The Times, 22 February 1845, p. 6.

212

Maurizio Masetti

insurrection against Austria as the only solution to the Italian question, was harshly criticized: let it not be supposed for one instant that the object of these men is to obtain freer institutions and wiser laws for their country […] their purpose is diametrically opposed to the improvement of any existing Government in Italy, or even in Europe. […] Conspiracies are their profession, and the subversion of all Governments their constant 41 task.

Once the matter had shifted from sympathy towards political exiles to a critical examination of their struggles, The Times, usually anti-Government on exiles’ individual rights, took up the attitude of more conservative papers. The fact that Mazzini had lost his most influential supporter in the eyes of English public opinion, encouraged The Morning Herald to advocate his expulsion from the country: We must therefore repeat our conviction, that such persons as Messrs. Mariotti and Mazzini ought not to be permitted to remain in this country. We do not propose to give them up to the Governments which they have injured, though we are far from satisfied that that would be unjust, but let them ‘seek new seats beyond the Western main,’ and cease to make this country the focus of all European conspiracies, and as such an object 42 of hatred and jealousy to Europe, in return for our hospitality.

Parliamentary debates on the abolition of the law allowing correspondence control by the Government continued, but public interest was waning. It was revived by Graham who accused Mazzini of incitement to murder basing his evidence on reports from France to Lord Palmerston in 1833 and on an article on the Moniteur of 7 June in the same year. Apparently, Mazzini had been the president of a secret committee who had sentenced to death two spies of the Duke of Modena on 31 May 1833 at Rodez. For Mazzini and Duncombe it was easy to prove that he had been discharged by the Cour d’Assisez of Aveyron on 30 November 1833, and that the same court had shown how the document concerning the existence of a secret committee was a forgery. Graham was compelled to publicly retract his charges against Mazzini.43 The revolutionary, trying to attract attention more to his cause than to himself, published a pamphlet in English with the title of Italy, Austria and the Pope, A Letter to Sir James Graham, Bart. In it he described the real situation of Italy, oppressed by Austria as well as by the Vatican and he invited England

41 42 43

Ibid., 13 March 1845, p. 4. The Morning Herald, 15 March 1845, p. 10. The Illustrated London News, 7 May 1845, p. 290.

The 1844 Post Office Scandal

213

not just to shelter Italian exiles, but even to help them in their struggle for independence. Even the Liberal papers ignored the work and, consequently, it went mostly unnoticed. Mazzini was aware of the change; he realized that to make the struggle for Italian independence popular in the eyes of British public opinion and contrast the adverse propaganda in the papers, it was now vital for him to resort to reliable English personalities to support his cause. A helping hand came from the poet Robert Browning: he and Mazzini were on friendly terms and Browning had travelled to Italy twice. It had been mainly in his second journey in 1844 that he had become aware of the miserable conditions of the Italian people, as well as of the necessity of an organized struggle against the oppressor. The following year he sent Mazzini one of his latest poems just published with the title Italy in England, as compensation for the fact that he had not been able to take part in the celebrations on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Italian Free School for Children. It is the story of the escape of an Italian revolutionary leader who, thanks to the support of a young peasant girl, gets safely to England, where he continues to plot against Austrian domination. The poem is very impressive, describing the anguish of the patriot who, betrayed by his bosom friend and dogged by the Austrian police, can’t even rely on his family because his brothers are on the Austrian side. The final lines of the poem convey all the loneliness of the refugee who could not even recall to mind the people he had left behind because that would take time away from his cause: So much for idle wishing – how 44 It steals the time! To business now.

The sad condition of the exile was so cleverly portrayed that Mazzini translated the poem for his mother and friends in Italy.45 The letter with his thanks to the poet shows the patriot’s awareness of what Browning, an Englishman with first-hand experience of the oppressive Austrian rule in Italy, could do for his cause: Vi sono gratissimo del dono fattomi. Ho letto, riletto e fatto leggere a miei amici l’ Italy in England. Non parlo della poesia: sono da lungo tempo vostro ammiratore sincero; ma parlo ora del sentimento che l’ha ispirata. Vi è bisogno assoluto di far nota qui in Inghilterra la nostra condizione e la nostra causa; e uomini come voi sono i migliori per diffondere la simpatia che cerchiamo.

44 45

Robert Browning, Italy in England, 161-162. For a full discussion see Maurizio Masetti, ‘Lost in Translation: The Italian in England’, Browning Society Notes, 32 (2007), 17-26.

214

Maurizio Masetti

Tr.: I am very grateful for the gift you have given me. I have read, re-read and read to my friends Italy in England. I do not speak of the poem: I have been for a long time your sincere admirer; but I speak of the sentiment that has inspired it. There has been a need in England to note our condition and our cause; and men like you can best spread 46 the sympathy we are looking for.

Browning, therefore, provided Mazzini with what he needed: a means by which he could engage the support of English public opinion when the free press, of both Conservative and Liberal persuasion, was closed to him. Bibliography Brooks, Constance, Antonio Panizzi. Scholar and Patriot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931). Bourne, Kenneth, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830-1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Hickson, W.E., ‘Mazzini and the Ethics of Politicians’, The Westminster Review, 1 (1844), 225-251. House, Madeline and G. Storey, eds., The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-). The Illustrated London News, June 1844-May 1845. Kelley, Philip and S. Lewis, eds., The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 11 (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 1993). Linton, William James, Threescore and Ten Years, 1820-90: Recollections by W. J. Linton (New York: Scribner, 1894). Masetti Maurizio, ‘Lost in Translation: The Italian in England’, BSN, 32 (2007), 17-26. The Morning Chronicle, April 1844 - August 1844. The Morning Herald, June 1844 - March 1845. Panizzi, Antonio, ‘Post-Office Espionage’, North British Review, 3 (1844), 257-294. Rudman, Harry W., Italian Nationalism and English Letters (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940). The Times, April 1844- March 1845. Wilson, David Alec, Carlyle on Cromwell and Others, (London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1925).

46

The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. by Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis, 16 vols (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 1993), XI, pp. 169-170.

4. Itinerant Communities

Stefano Villani The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century* The history of the Italian Church of London between 1609 and 1622 In November 1550 Michelangelo Florio began to assemble around him various Italian exiles who, for religious reasons had found refuge in England, forming the initial core of the Italian Protestant Church of London. Dissolved when Bloody Mary came to the throne, it was subsequently re-established under Elizabeth.1 In the 1580s Protestant Italian immigration to England fell drastically and the reformed Italian Church of London, which at its peak comprised more than a hundred members, was dissolved in 1598 and its members recommended to join either the Flemish or the French Church.2 However,

*

1

2

BL = British Library, London. CSPD = Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. DBI = Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. GL = Guildhall Library, London. Hessels = J. H. Hessels, ed., Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae archivum, III, 2 tt., Epistulae et tractatus cum Reformationis tum ecclesiae Londino-Batavae historiam illustrantes 15231874 (Cambridge: 1897). MC = Mercers’ Company, Mercers’ Hall, London. NA = National Archives, London. ODNB = Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). PHS = Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London. Returns of strangers = Irene Scouloudi, Returns of strangers in the metropolis 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639:a study of an active minority, Publications of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Quarto Series, 57 (1985). Luigi Firpo, La Chiesa Italiana di Londra del Cinquecento e i suoi rapporti con Ginevra in Id., Scritti sulla Riforma in Italia, Biblioteca del «Corpus Reformatorum Italicorum» (Napoli: Prismi, 1996); O. Boersma, A. J. Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity. The Minutes of the Coetus of London, 1575 and the Consistory Minutes of the Italian Church of London, 15701591, Publications of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Quarto Series, 59 (1997). Cf. also John Southerden Burn, The History of the French, Walloon, Dutch and other foreign protestant Refugees settled in England… (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1846), cf. pp. 225-229 for the Italian Church of London. The last minister Giovan Battista Aureli died at the end of 1596 and on the 3rd October 1598 the Italian Consistory informed the Coetus – the networking “committee” among the different foreign churches of London – that it was not possible to find a successor. From 1605 his son Abraham was appointed by the French church to periodically preach in Italian,

218

Stefano Villani

some ten years later, in 1609, the church was reopened for worship thanks to the work of Ascanio Boliano, a rather disreputable former Capuchin monk from Palermo who, having preached successfully in several European courts under the name of Brother Fulgenzio, abandoned the cowl in Brussels in 1608 and escaped to England, where he presented himself as Ascanio Spinola. Soon after his arrival, letters addressed to the minister of the Flemish Church, Simeon Ruytinck, denounced him as a impostor. Imprisoned by the King’s Council, he was personally examined by King James, who deemed the accusations against him to be slanderous and in January 1609 ordered him to be released. The King entrusted him with the task of reviving the Italian Church in the chapel of the Mercers’ Company (Mercers’ Hall), which had been granted to the Italian Protestants in 1566 as a place of worship. In the next few years Ascanio married an English woman, who bore him two sons. On 4 May 1612 he was naturalized as an English citizen.3 A few weeks after his naturalization, the Italian Protestant community of London received a visit from two other restless apostates, the Carmelite friars Giovan Battista Genocchi and Giulio Cesar Vanini, who came to London in the last week of May 1612. Hardly a month later, on Sunday 28 June, they abjured the Catholic faith in the Italian Church of London in front of a great crowd that had gathered there for the occasion. They subsequently gave Sunday sermons there on a number of occasions. Boliano, jealous of the standing of the two Italians, denounced Vanini in 1614 as an immoral atheist; but at the same time, through the Spanish ambassador in London, he forwarded a memorial to Pope Paul V in which he indicated that – if suitably recompensed – he would be willing to return to the Catholic Church. The Holy See in Rome was sceptical about Boliano’s motives and declined to answer, even when he presented a new petition the following year. Paradoxically, it was the two Carmelites who returned to the Catholic faith, in the presence of the chaplain of the Spanish ambassador. News of this soon got out and between the end of 1613 and the beginning of 1614 the two were convened in front of the High

3

presumably for the members of the already dissolved Italian church; cf. Boersma, Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, p. 49; J.-E. Cerisier, Le pasteur Nicolas Oltramare, 1611-1680: son origine, savie et son temps, avec une préf. de M. le pasteur P. de Félice (1905), p. 195. Cf. also Firpo, La chiesa italiana di Londra, p. 193 for the unsuccessful attempt to find a successor for Aureli. Cf. Luigi Firpo, Boliano, Ascanio, DBI (now also in Firpo, Scritti sulla Riforma in Italia, pp. 233-234), on Boliano. For his naturalization (not mentioned by Firpo), cf. A. Shaw, Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1603-1700, Lymington 1911 (, XVIII), p. 20. On the Mercers’ company cf. Anne F. Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130-1578 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

219

Ecclesiastical Commission. Genochi escaped from prison in January. Vanini was convicted, but eventually he too succeeded in escaping.4 Some two years after the departure of the two Italians, the former Bishop of Split, Marcantonio De Dominis, arrived in London in December 1616. The conversion to Protestantism of a Catholic bishop and his decision to seek refuge in England obviously had an enormous propaganda impact on the intellectual circles of European public opinion. Unsurprisingly, therefore, De Dominis’ arrival in London once again fuelled the jealousies of Boliano, who forged some letters, falsely attributed to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, in order to discredit the former archbishop. Realizing that his privileged position as sole representative of the interests of the Italian Protestants in England would probably wither away with the arrival of an authoritative and important figure like De Dominis, a few days after his arrival, on 7 January 1617, Ascanio Boliano left England and from that moment on we lose trace of him. The small Italian congregation, in spite of the defection of its pastor, continued to exist. On 30 November 1617 – nearly a year after his arrival in England – De Dominis gave his first sermon in Italian in Mercers’ Hall, which was followed by others in the weeks to come.5 For obvious propaganda reasons, the first two sermons were immediately published in Italian by John Bill.6 Boliano’s departure constrained the Italian Church to choose a new

4

5

6

Cf. Guido Dall’Olio, Genocchi (Ginocchi), Bonaventura, DBI. Cf. also Richard Copley Christie, ‘Vanini in England’, The English Historical Review, 10 (1895), 238-265; Giorgio Spini, ‘Vaniniana’, Rinascimento, 1 (1950), 71-90; Émile Namer, ‘Nuovi documenti su Vanini’, Giornale Critico della Filosofia italiana, 13, (1932), 161-198; Id., ‘La vita di Vanini in Inghilterra’, Rinascenza Salentina; 1 (1933), 281-303; 2 (1934), 113-142, 217340; Francesco de Paola, ‘Nuovi documenti per una biografia di Giulio Cesare Vanini’, Bollettino di Storia della filosofia dell’Università degli Studi di Lecce, 1 (1973), 353-97 (pp. 364-5); Francesco Paolo Raimondi, Giulio Cesare Vanini nell’Europa del Seicento con una appendice documentaria (Pisa - Roma: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2005), pp. 159-235, 397-488. Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, ecumenist, and relapsed heretic (London: Strickland & Scott Academic Publications, 1984); Eleonora Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas: Marcantonio De Dominis fra l’Inquisizione e Giacomo I (Torino: Franco Angeli, 2003). For the texts of De Dominis’ sermons cf. Predica fatta da Monsr. Marc’ Antonio de Dominis, Arcivo. di Spalato, la prima domenica dell’ Auuento quest’ anno 1617. in Londra, nella cappella detta delli Merciari, (ch’é la chiesa degl’ Italiani,) ad essa natione Italiana (Londra: Appresso Giovanni Billio, 1617); Scogli del Christiano naufragio, quali va scoprendo la santa chiesa di Christo. Alli suoi diletti figliuoli, perche da quelli possano allontanarsi ([London]: Stampato con licenza de superiori [J. Bill], 1618). Bill was again the publisher of the first Italian edition of Historia del Concilio Tridentino di Paolo Sarpi (1619). Cf. Gaetano Cozzi, ‘Fra Paolo Sarpi, l’anglicanesimo e la «Historia del Concilio Tridentino»’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 68, IV (1956), 559-619.

220

Stefano Villani

minister. On De Dominis’ advice, César Calandrini, the son of exiles from Lucca, was appointed ordinary preacher of the Italian Church on 18 April 1618. But relations between the two men began to deteriorate in the summer of 1621. Calandrini was an orthodox Protestant of solid Calvinistic convictions, while De Dominis pursued his irenic dream of reconciliation between the Churches. If we are to believe what Calandrini denounced, De Dominis, who occasionally continued to preach in the Italian Church, stated in a sermon that the Catholic Church, even if corrupt, was a genuine Church. According to Calandrini, he also said that no material separation, only a spiritual one, was necessary. In his sermon the following Sunday, Calandrini asserted the contrary. Infuriated, De Dominis complained about him bitterly to the Bishop of London and to King James, defining him “totus Genevensis”.7 The conflict was probably resolved with the removal of Calandrini, because in January 1619 the Valtellinese exile Alexander Torriano figures as the minister of the Italian Church.8 But the problems of London’s small Protestant community were not over. In January 1622 rumours spread to the effect that De Dominis had obtained a passage of safe conduct through the ambassador of Spain to go to Rome to submit himself and to rejoin the Catholic Church. These rumours proved to be true, and a little later in the year De Dominis was granted permission to leave England.9 The History of the Italian Church of London between 1622 and 1646 While we have the minutes of the Consistory of the Italian Church of London between 1570 and 1591, no such documentation is available for the period after that. It is therefore very difficult to reconstruct the life of our very small group of Italian Protestants. Because of the exiguity of this community very little information can be gleaned from the reports of the Coetus, the assembly of all the ministers, elders and deacons of the foreign churches of London that gathered once a month in the room of the consistory of the Dutch Church and was to all intents and purposes the body that liased between the Dutch,

7

8 9

Cf. A. G. H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain: 1596-1687 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 120-121, 124; Giorgio Vola, ‘I lucchesi a Londra nel XVII secolo’, in I lucchesi a Ginevra, da Giovanni Diodati a Jean Alphonse Turrettini, Actum Luce, 22 (1993), 111-129 (pp. 121-125); Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London. The Dutch Church in Austin Friars (1503-1642) (Leiden, New York, København, Köln: Brill, 1989), pp. 63-64. Cf. also note 40 below. Boersma, Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, p. 51. On Alessandro Torriano cf. note 44 below. Cf. CSPD 1619-1623, p. 342.

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

221

French and Italian churches.10 From the insufficient extant documentation, therefore, only individual scraps of a history emerge, and it is difficult to piece them together into a precise picture. In 1620 an Italian edition of the Psalms of David was published in London. The psalms were in rhyme “in the English way”, set to music with the “tones common to the Anglican Church”, and intended “for the use of the Italian Church”.11 In April 1625 the representatives of the Dutch and Italian Churches rendered homage to Charles I upon his accession to the throne, requesting the maintenance of their freedoms and the possibility to continue with their ecclesiastical order and discipline.12 Evidently to unify very modest forces, in 1627 Torriano and the Spanish minister, Juan de Luna, tried to merge their churches, a move opposed by the consistories of the Dutch and French churches, which probably had doubts about the orthodoxy of both ministers. (Their suspicions were probably well-founded because, as we know, Torriano had been called to replace Calandrini by De Dominis).13 In March 1636 Nathaniel Brent wrote a report on the foreign churches for the archbishop of Canterbury, in which he also mentioned the Italian Church.14

10

11

12

13

14

Both the minutes of the Consistory of the Italian Church between 1570 and 1591 and those of the Coetus between 1575 and 1598 have been integrally published by Boersma and Jelsma in Unity in Multiformity (The manuscript is preserved in the French church of Soho Square, London MSS, MS 16 Livre de coetus de l’anee 1575 à 1598). The minutes of the Coetus between 1649 and 1850 are preserved among the manuscripts of the Dutch Church of London deposited at the Guildhall Library of London (MS. 7412/1). Only the frontispiece of this edition of the Psalms is still extant and is preserved at the British Library: [Salmi de David.] Ridot[t]i in rime alla [ma]niera Inghlese. Et accommodati alli toni più communi della chiesa Anglicana. Per uso della chiesa Italiana (London: T. S[nodham] per R. Rounthwaite, 1620), shelfmark Harl. 5910, pt IV/21 (for a microfilm copy of the frontispiece: BL, Mic. B.815/1). For another edition in 1644 cf. below, n. 22. Adrian Charles Chamier, Les Actes des Colloques des Eglises françaises et des Synodes, Publications of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Quarto Series, 2 (1890), p. 66. Boersma, Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, pp. 51-52; cf. also Schickler, II, p. 389 (that erroneously speaks of Pierre de Luna). About Juan de Luna, the famous author of the second part of Lazarillo de Tormes, cf. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 4th edn (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos,1986-1987), Segunda parte dela vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, Edición, prólogo y notas de Antonio Rey Hazas (Madrid: Emiliano Escolar editor, 1982). Cf. Paul J. Hauben, “A Spanish Calvinist Church in Elizabethan London, 1559-65”, Church History, 34 (1965), 50-56 about the Spanish church of London in the 16th century. In 1624 the Mercers’ Company appointed a Spaniard to preach in their chapel and it may have been De Luna; John Watney, The Mercers’ Company (London: Blades, East & Blades, 1914), p. 15. CSPD Charles I, 1625-1649, p. 553; cf. Cerisier, pp. 203, 277-278.

222

Stefano Villani

The same year, a Calabrian named Vincenzo Gregori, who had been jailed at Westminster, tried to pass himself off as the minister of the Italian Church, landing himself in even deeper trouble.15 We can then hypothesize that when the Venetian Marco Antonio Filippi published a Protestant declaration of faith in Latin in London in 1631 he was in contact with the Italian Church.16 These minimal traces, apart from confirming the existence of an Italian Protestant Church in England, give us practically no information about either its size or its life and organization.17 We have no precise information as to who the minister after 1627 was, even though it probably continued to be Torriano,18 who presumably died around 1639. In this year, in fact, the Mercers’ Company granted 8 pounds per year as a stipend for the new preacher of the Italian Church, Nicholas Oltramare.19 Oltramare was born in Geneva in 1611 from a family of Genoese origin, and had already been to

15

16

17

18

19

CSPD 1636-1637, p. 427; CSPD 1638-1639, p. 207; cf. also Returns of Strangers, p. 291; John Diprose, Some account of the parish of Saint Clement Danes (Westminster) past and present (London: Diprose and Bateman, 1868-1876), I, p. 279. Confessio fidei Marci Antonii, Filippi, Itali, Veneti, philosophi, medici, nec non theologiae professoris: olim papisticis erroribus addicti, nunc verò verae orthodoxae fidei, dei affulgente gratiâ, cognitionem amplexi (Excusum Londini: Per Thomam Cotes, impensis Michaelis Sparke, 1631). After the publication of his “profession of faith”, Marco Antonio Filippi went to the Waldensian valleys. He was captured in 1637 at San Secondo and then conducted to Rome where he was imprisoned by the Inquisition. The Waldensian Antoine Léger spoke of him in various letters to Professor André Rivet at Leiden: 12/22 Feb. 1638, 26 Mar./5 Apr. 1638, 14/24 Apr. 1638, 20/30 Sept. 1639, 31 May./9 Jun. 1641. Cf. Albert de Lange “Antoine Léger, un «internazionalista» calvinista del Seicento”, Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi, 181 (1997), (Circolazione di uomini e d’idee tra Italia ed Europa nell’età della Controriforma, a cura di Susanna Peyronel-Rambaldi, Atti del XXXVI Convegno di studi sulla Riforma e i movimenti religiosi in Italia. Torre Pellice, 1-3 settembre 1996), 203-232, p. 220 n. 155. Among the few extant documents of this period there is a petition in Latin of the Italian Church to the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, written in the 1620s or 1630s, in which the vicissitudes of Valtellina are mentioned (BL, Add, MSS 6394, f. 25; the letter is enclosed in a volume of letters and documents mostly addressed to William Boswell, resident at The Hague), Cerisier, pp. 189-190, 275-277. Returns of strangers, p. 343 (Alexander Tartana in Grubb Street). The Italian preacher “Lucius Frerra” is recorded in 1627 in the Returns, Ibid., p. 286; cf. CSPD 1625-1626, p. 254. MC, Acts of Court, 1639, f. 102; cf. also Watney, The Mercers’ Company, p. 15. A document written by Cesare Calandrini mentions the names of “Jo. Clerk, Pieter Ryckau, Arthur Peaps; Josua Mainet” as the elders and deans of the Italian Reformed Church of London that appointed Oltramare as minister; cf. J. H. Hessels, ed., Register of the attestations or certificates of membership, confessions of guilt, certificates of marriages, betrothals, publications of banns… preserved in the Dutch reformed church, Austin Friars… (London, Amsterdam: David Nutt, Frederik Muller & co., 1892). Cf. note 51 below.

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

223

England in 1632, when he apparently made contact with the consistory of the Italian Church.20 There is practically no available information about the period in which Oltramare was minister of the Italian Church. All we know is that he was charged to preach in the French Church on 11 April 1643,21 and that the Italian edition of the Psalms was republished in 1644, seemingly demonstrating some vitality in the Italian Church.22 For reasons that are unknown Oltramare left London and the Italian Church in 1646 and moved to Cornwall to be Anglican minister of the parish of St John, remaining there until his death in 1680.23 It is likely that his decision to abandon the Italian Protestant Church was in some way connected to the difficult situation caused by the Civil War, then raging in the country, but given the current state of knowledge this inevitably remains in the realm of conjecture. From 1646 to 1662 In 1646 the elders and deacons of the Italian Church of London obtained a new grant of 8 pounds from the Mercers’ Company, undoubtedly in order to engage a new minister (the sum is the same as the one allocated seven years previously for Oltramare’s stipend).24 The position was probably filled by the

20

21 22

23

24

On Nicholas Oltramare cf. the already quoted biography written by J.-E. Cerisier (Le pasteur Nicolas Oltramare, 1611-1680: son origine, sa vie et son temps; cf. also the review of this book in Société de l' histoire du protestantisme français. Bulletin - Société de l' histoire du protestantisme français, 55 (1906), pp. 567-568). Nicolas was son of Antoine and Susanne Oltramare. His mother Susanne was the daughter of Francesco Fayorno or Falerno from Cremona, was baptized at Geneva on the 17 February 1611. He enrolled at the Académie of Geneva in 1629 and at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Leiden in 1638. The first of his ancestors to emigrate to Geneva was his grandfather Augustin Oltramare. Cf. Cerisier, pp. VII, 83, 139-142 for the possible travel of Nicholas in England in 1632. Cerisier, p. 205 Salmi di David. Ridotti in rime alla maniera Inghlese. Et accommodati alli toni più communi della chiesa Anglicana: per uso della chiesa Italiana. Con licenza de’superiori (In Londra: stampati da M.F. per Rodolfo Rovnthvvaite, MDCXLIV [1644]). For the first edition of the Psalms “to be used by the Italian church” (“per uso della chiesa Italiana”) cf. note 11 above. Oltramare became rector of this parish without Episcopal ordination (he was consecrated rector by the Bishop of Exeter on 4 October 1661). Cf. Journal of the House of Lord, p. 623, 1646 (22 Dec. 1646). Cf. Cerisier, pp. 210, 222. In Cornwall, Nicolas married Philip[pa] Gyll in 1646 and they had three children: Elisabeth (1648), John (1649), and Jonathan (1652). Ibid., pp. 218-219. Watney, The Mercers’ Company, p. 15.

224

Stefano Villani

Englishman William Middleton. Formerly Master of Charterhouse, he had been chaplain to Viscount Basil Feilding, extraordinary ambassador to the Republic of Venice, and had followed him to Italy, where he remained, between Venice and Turin, for approximately five years between 1634 and 1639.25 During his stay in Italy Middleton evidently perfected his Italian and we know that John Evelyn, on 17 December 1648, listened to him giving a sermon in this language.26 Middleton was almost certainly minister of the community until his death in 1651. At this point, though, there was apparently great difficulty in filling the vacant position. The Coetus therefore entrusted the minister of the French Church of London, Giovanni Battista Stoppa, with the task of preaching to the Italian community of Mercers’ Hall once every two weeks (“par quinzaine”).27 Stoppa was born in 1624 in Zurich. His family was from Chiavenna, but had probably moved to Switzerland after the so-called Sacred Slaughter (Sacro Macello), the massacre of Protestants in the valleys to the north of Lake Como that took place in 1620. Stoppa studied theology in Geneva without receiving pastoral ordination and for some years was preceptor in Dauphiné. In December 1651 he moved to London where, following the recommendation of the pastors of the Huguenot Church of Paris, he became minister of the French Church. In 1654 Stoppa was sent to France with the delicate assignment of sounding out the feelings of the Huguenot party about the various English foreign policy options that were then on the table. After his return to England, Stoppa assumed a prominent role in the proWaldensian propaganda that developed in England after the Pasque piemontesi.28

25

26

27 28

Cf. John Watney, Some Account of the Hospital of St. Thomas of Acon in the Cheap, London, and of the Plate of the Mercers’ Company, 2nd edn (London: Blades, 1906), p. 165. On Middleton, who was rector of Nutfield in Surrey from 1641 to 1646 and died as rector of Norton on 14 April 1651, cf. Bower Marsh and Frederick Arthur Crisp, eds., Alumni carthusiani: a record of the foundation scholars of Charterhouse, 1614-1872 ([London]: Priv. Print., 1913), p. 3; Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: the members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714…, 4 vols (Oxford, London: 1891-1892), III, p. 1011. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: 1955), II, 545 and note. Cf. Firpo, La Chiesa Italiana di Londra del Cinquecento, p. 193. Schickler, II, p. 154. About Stoppa, possibly better known with the French version of his name Jean-Baptiste Stouppe, cf. Giorgio Vola, “The Revd J. B. Stouppe’s travels in France in 1654 as Cromwell’s secret agent”, PHS, 27 (2001), pp. 509-526; Miguel Benítez, Le Jeu de la Tolérance: édition de la Lettre ‘À Madame de… sur les différentes religions d’Hollande’, in Guido Canziani, ed., Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestina. Secoli XVII e XVIII (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1994), pp. 427-468; Richard H. Popkin, “The first published reaction to Spinoza’s Tractatus: Col. J. B. Stouppe, the Condé circle, and the Rev. Jean

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

225

Apparently, no minister was appointed for the Italian Church of London between 1652 and 1656, and its members had to be satisfied with Stoppa’s biweekly sermons, at least in the periods in which he was in London.29 A new minister, probably of French origin, was finally chosen in 1656. He was a certain Philippe de Bresmal, a former Catholic priest and doctor in theology who, before converting to Protestantism, had been a Franciscan with the name of Crescent. In February 1656 de Bresmal was examined by the Coetus, which he officially became a member of on 21 May of that year. As minister of the Italian Church, he signed the petition to Charles II in 1660.30 The English Italian Church, like all the other foreign churches of London since the age of King Edward, had never conformed to the liturgy of the Church of England and had followed the “Calvinist discipline” instead. During the Interregnum the Episcopal Church had been suppressed, and following the Restoration the foreign churches’ non-conformation to the Anglican liturgy was clearly viewed with suspicion. It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that de Bresmal was careful to stress that, even though he used a different liturgy, he did not consider himself separated from

29

30

LeBrun”, Bulletin de Bibliographie Spinoziste, 18 (1995), 6-12; Elisabeth Labrousse, Conscience et conviction. Etudes sur le XVIIe siècle (Paris: Universitas, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation: 1996), pp. 60-68. For Stoppa’s role in favour of the Waldensians cf. Enea Balmas, Esther Menascé, “L’opinione pubblica inglese e le «Pasque Piemontesi»: nuovi documenti”, Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi, 150 (1981), 3-26. As minister of the French Church, at the Restoration Stoppa, welcomed Charles II on behalf of the London foreign churches, cf. Mercurius Publicus, 21 June 1660, p. 400. The news of this welcome was also given by the Nouvelles Ordinaires de Londres, num. 526, 24/14 Juin15/5 Juillet 1660, p. 2118. Cf. also Evelyn, The Diary, III, p. 248. After the Restoration Stoppa left England and went to France in the service of Luis XIV. GL, Ms. 7412/1, ff. 41, 48. Cf. also Schickler, II, pp. 154, 203; G. E. Lee, ed. and trans., Notebook of Pierre le Roy, Schoolmaster of S. Martin’s parish, in the island of Guernsey, 1600-1675 (Guernsey: Guernsey Historical and Antiquarian Society, 1893), pp. 33-34, n. 1. In the State Archives of the Island of Guernsey, Greffe, Royal Court, St Peter Port, Guernsey the brief of 15 June 1638 given by Pope Urban VIII to a Franciscan by the name “Crescent Bresmal” is preserved. It allowed him to be ordained before the legal age. In the register of the French church of Threadneedle Street is recorded the baptism of two daughters of Philippe de Bresmal and his wife Anne Le Clerc: Ester (28 July 1657) and Anne (14 Nov. 1658). For some references to the Italian minister in those years cf. Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres, num. 437, 10 Oct./30 Sep.-17/7 Oct. 1658, p. 1754. The Italian church of London is mentioned also in an “Address of the Foreign Churches of England, to the Lord Protector Richard Cromwell”, of 4/14 October 1658, Hessels, III, pp. 2407-8 (num. 3457). Cf. also Hessels, III, pp. 1328 (num. 1863), pp. 1971, 1973 (num. 2796); p. 2129 (num. 3009); pp. 2346-7 (num. 3351); pp. 2389-90 (num. 3431).

226

Stefano Villani

communion with the Church of England.31 Was this a tactical or a genuinely held position? There is no evidence to help answer this question. What is known is that when the Act of Uniformity was passed in 1662, which once again imposed the rituals and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer in religious services, Episcopal ordination for all ministers and the removal of all those who did not want to conform, de Bresmal was asked to leave his ministry in the small Italian “Calvinist” church in order to accomplish the delicate and complex task of securing the obedience to Anglicanism of a parish on the island of Guernsey in the Channel. Inhabited by a Frenchspeaking population, the island had always been Presbyterian and had enjoyed this particular ecclesiastical status without interruption. Following the Restoration it was deemed that this ecclesiastical independence was unacceptable and that the new Act of Uniformity should be applied in Guernsey as well.32 In October 1662 Philippe de Bresmal went to the island to replace the minister of the parish of Vale and St. Sampson, who had refused to conform. He was greeted with deep-rooted and rancorous hostility, and received insults and abuse, even inside the church building itself, from the supporters of the former minister. He died shortly afterwards, some time around October 1663, saddened and disappointed.33

31

32

33

Cf. John Durel, A view of the government and publick worship of God in the reformed churches beyond the seas (London: printed by J[ohn] G[rismond] for R. Royston, 1662), p. 92. Cf. Jonathan Duncan, The History of Guernsey (London Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1841), p. 342; R. A. Beddard, The Restoration Church, in J. R. Jones, ed., TheRestored Monarchy, 1660-1688 (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 163. Schickler, II, p. 514; Matthieu Lelièvre, “La Réforme dans les Isles de la Manche”, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme français, 34 (1885), 145-163 (p. 160); Id., Histoire du Méthodisme dans les Iles de La Manche (Paris: Librairie Évangélique, 1885), p. 114; Ferdinand Brock Tupper, The History of Guernsey (Guernsey, London: Le lieve, Simpkin, 1876), pp. 238, 362. Cf. also Lee (ed. and trans.), Notebook of Pierre le Roy, pp. 33-34. In the “notebooks” of Elie Brévint, minister of the Island of Sark, we can read the following statement: “On dit que le ministre qui est mort dans le presbytere de St Sampson en septembre 1663 avoit fort beaux meubles et entre autres les livres a la valeur de quinze cents francs. Sa vefve est demeure chargee (dit Samuel Hue) de 4 petits enfants” (the original of this “diary” is kept at Sark. For a transcript see Guernsey, Lee Coll. No. 35, p. 487). A daughter of Bresmal was buried at S. Peter Port in July 1664. I wish to thank Darryl Ogier for the most precious bibliographical references he has given to me and in particular for having sent me the transcript of Brévint’s passage.

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

227

After 1663 Further research is required to ascertain whether the small Italian Church of London had a new minister after the transfer of de Bresmal. In the minutes of the Coetus, no mention is made of the Italian Church after 1663, only of the French and Dutch ones. This, then, is when the Italian Church seems to have ceased to exist, the inevitable conclusion of a progressive and unstoppable decline.34

Nearly twenty years later, in 1685, an Italian translation of the Book of Common Prayer was published. This initiative seems to have been for reasons of propaganda rather than worship and cannot in any case be considered as proof of the existence of a community of Italian Protestants (even of a small one) in London. Moreover, as we have already said, both in the glorious years of the reigns of Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth, and in the course of the turbulent 17th century, the Italian Church had not adopted the Anglican liturgy but instead used the Calvinist liturgy.35 Paradoxically it was only after the Glorious Revolution, and the abolition of the obligation to participate in the Anglican worship, that the liturgy of the Church of England was apparently celebrated for the first time in the Italian language. In 1690 a certain Mr. Cafarelli was given permission, for three months, to hold religious services in Italian using the Anglican liturgy in the “église de la Place de St. James”, one of the numerous French churches established in London after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. We do not know anything about this minister, even though he can undoubtedly be identified as the Ferdinand Cafarelli who died in London in 1711 and who was married to a woman called Elizabeth, who died in 1715.36 Cafarelli probably tried, without success, to revive the Italian Church of Mercers’ Hall. Indeed in 1691 the Company refused the use of its chapel to an Italian preacher, whose name is not mentioned in the records, establishing formally that the chapel was to be

34

35

36

Apparently the last mention of the Italian church in the minutes of the Coetus is in October 1663 (cf. GL, Ms. 7412/1, f. 91). Boersma and Jelsma state that there are traces of preaching in Italian and also of a minister of the Italian church in the 1670s but they don’t give any bibliographical reference. Cf. Boersma, Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, p. 52. For the first Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer, cf. my forthcoming articles Un’identità mascherata nell’Inghilterra del ’600: la vicenda dell’ebraista Alessandro Amidei in “Quaderni Storici” and La prima edizione in italiano del Book of Common Prayer (1685) tra propaganda protestante e memoria sarpiana, in “Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa”. G.B. Beeman, Notes on the Sites and History of the French Churches in London, PHS, 8 (1905), p. 34. For the wills of “Ferdinando Cafarelli, Clerk of London” and of his wife Elizabeth cf. NA, PROB 11/521 and PROB 11/548.

228

Stefano Villani

used solely by the company.37 In February 1692, just a few months after this failed attempt to revive the Italian Church of London, use of the chapel of the Guildhall was granted to the Englishman Benjamin Woodroffe in order to celebrate an Anglican religious service in Italian. It would be interesting to know more about the reasons behind this ceremony. These were the years of the war of the League of Augsburg against the France of Louis XIV, a phase in which Vittorio Amedeo II sided with William of Orange. This service could conceivably be linked to this new season in Anglo-Italian relationships. What is certain is that the preacher, Benjamin Woodroffe, devoted a remarkable and unflagging amount of attention towards southern Europe. In the same year, 1692, he was appointed principal of Gloucester Hall in Oxford, where in the following years he tried to establish a Greek college to accommodate Orthodox students. In these same few years he worked on a Portuguese translation of the Book of Common Prayer (for the East India Company), which was published in 1695. It is almost as if, in reaction to the aggressive policies of Louis XIV, Woodroffe was pursuing a fanciful form of cultural politics with regard to the Catholic world, the aim perhaps being on the one hand to show the excellence of the Anglican liturgy (the translation into Portuguese of the Book of Common Prayer and the use of the Italian translation in Mercers’ Hall) and on the other to forge a concrete alliance with the Orthodox world in an ecumenical and anti-Catholic way.38 If this hypothesis is correct, preaching in Italian in Mercers’ Hall could be interpreted as an attempt to establish a kind of ideal continuity with the phase of optimism that had characterized the first years of the reign of James, when the Italian Church was rebuilt and when the patriarch of Constantinople, Cyrillus Lukaris, tried to introduce Calvinism into the Orthodox Church.

37

38

MC, Acts of Court, 1691, f. 122; cf. also Watney, The Mercers’ Company, p. 15. From the acts of the Mercers’ Company we know that the request of a minister was supported by a certain Mr. Houblon who can probably be identified with one of the seven Houblon Huguenot brothers then in England, cf. David Hayton, The House of Commons 1690-1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 396-398. Cf. HMC, 5th Rep., Pine-Coffin MSS, Appendix, p. 382. Woodroffe (1638-1711) was chaplain to James, Duke of York and then to Charles II. From 1684 to 1687 he was President of Sion College, London. Already Canon of Christ Church, he was appointed dean of the same church by King James II in 1688, but after a few days, with the Glorious Revolution he was deprived of this title. On him cf. A. H. Barrett, “Benjamin Woodroffe of the Greek College”, Oxoniensia, 53 (1988), 317-336. Cf. Edward Vallance, “Woodroffe, Benjamin”, ODNB.

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

229

The Members of the Italian Church Having tried to reconstruct the “institutional” vicissitudes of the Italian Church on the basis of the scant extant documentation, the next question that arises is who actually were its members. In the history of the Italian Church of London it seems possible to distinguish a first phase of about ten years, which goes roughly from Ascanio Boliano’s re-foundation of the Church in 1609 to the period when De Dominis was in England; a second phase that coincides with the period in which Alexander Torriano and Nicholas Oltramare were the ministers (more or less from 1619 until the beginning of the 1650s) and the last phase that concluded with the Church dying out at the beginning of the 1660s. In the first phase, which coincides with the years of the reign of James and with an age of ecumenical hopes and conversionist propaganda,39 it seems that the majority of the members were descendants of Italians who had emigrated to England in the 16th century. Membership seems to have been mobile and fluid. The sons or grandsons of Italians who had taken refuge in England back in the Elizabethan age or of those who had found refuge in Geneva in the 16th century and who, often for commercial reasons, chose to live in England in the 17th century, could, both for linguistic and cultural reasons, choose to join the Italian Church or another foreign church or the Church of England. Cesar Calandrini, for example, after having left his post as minister of the Italian Church, was for a long time pastor of the Dutch Church of Austin Friars and president of the Coetus.40 Likewise, Nicholas Oltramare, as we know, became minister of an Anglican parish.41 The same mobile and fluid membership probably also characterized the Diodati and Burlamacchi families; they were part of the French-Wallon community of Threadneedle Street but at the same time almost certainly had a relationship of patronage towards their “fellow countrymen” who gathered in Mercers’ Hall.42 Although the members of this second or third generation of religious exiles had never lived in Italy, they maintained strong ties with the land of

39

40

41 42

On this period of Anglo-Venetian relationships cf. Enrico De Mas, Sovranità politica e unità cristiana nel Seicento anglo-veneto (Ravenna: Longo, 1975); Fra Fulgenzio Micanzio, O. S. M., Lettere a William Cavendish, 1615-1628 nella versione inglese di Thomas Hobbes, edizione a cura di Roberto Ferrini, con introduzione di Enrico De Mas (Roma: Istituto storico O. S. M., 1987). Cesare was preceded in London by his father Giovanni (who died there in 1623). On Giovanni Calandrini (1544-1623) cf. DBI. Cf. note 7 above. Cf. note 23 above. We know, for example, that Burlamacchi played a role in the reconstruction of the Italian church by Boliano.

230

Stefano Villani

their fathers and grandfathers; they had not forgotten Italian and remained in contact with relatives in their native land. It can therefore be assumed that such a cosmopolite and polyglot minority, which was part of a sort of Protestant International of commerce and professions, constituted, perhaps indirectly, the “management group” of the Church, even if they were formally part of the Dutch or French Church.43 The second phase coincided with an apparent period of tranquillity in the life of the revived Italian Church. As we have seen, two Italian editions of the Psalms were published in London, in 1620 and 1644, and in this 25-year period the last small wave of Italian religious exiles found refuge in England. They were exiles and émigrés from the Valtellina and Grigioni, and included the minister Alexander Torriano, who arrived in England with his sons, Giovanni, who would later teach Italian in London and publish both grammars and Italian dictionaries, and George, who became a successful merchant.44 Giovan Battista Stoppa was also of Valtellinese origins, as was a certain Giovan Battista Cappello, who moved to London from Geneva no later than the beginning of the 1640s; he translated the Book of Common Prayer into Italian following a commission from the Anglican Edward Brown, who edited its publication in 1685.45 Two other Valtellinese families that settled in London in those years were both called Paravicini. The first was the family of Peter Paravicini, who moved to London presumably around the second half of the 1620s. Like Torriano, he was a teacher of Italian and an author of grammars and dictionaries, and like him, he had a son who, had he not died prematurely, would have undertaken an intellectual career, and another son who became a successful merchant.46 The other family, that of Giovan Battista Paravicini, came from the Grigioni area and settled in London in the 1650s.47 These Valtellinese exiles also seemed to have moved

43

44

45

46 47

Cf. Donald Clayton Dorian, The English Diodatis (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1950); William Birken, “Diodati, Theodore (1573–1651)”, ODNB; Vola, “I lucchesi a Londra nel XVII secolo”, pp. 125-129. See the bibliographical references on the Torrianos and the Paravicinis in a forthcoming article of mine. J. B. G. Galiffe, Le Refuge italien de Genève aux XVIme et XVII me siècles (Genève: Georg, 1881), p. 136 (Capello de la Valteline, Paul et Albert 1620-22). Giovan Battista was naturalized in 1657. His naturalization was then confirmed in 1663; cf. Shaw, Letters of Denizations and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England, 1603-1700, pp. 71, 91. Notes and Queries, 3rd Series, 1 (1862), p. 234; Returns of aliens, num. 2132, 2127. Giovan Battista Paravicini married Marie Bergerie in the French church of Threadneedle Street. They had many children (apparently the last one was born in 1677). He was naturalized English in March 1682, cf. Shaw, Letters of Denizations and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England, 1603-1700, p. 153.

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

231

backwards and forwards in a fairly mobile fashion from one church to the other. It is known that a “Mr. Paravicini” was among the elders of the Italian Church after the Restoration, but we do not know to which of the two families he belonged.48 It is also clear that gravitating around these Protestants of Italian origin from 1609 onwards was a world of destitute wretches, including unfrocked friars and priests, who passed from one confession to the other in search of some form of financial support. The final years of the Civil War and the Interregnum period were fraught with uncertainty and difficulty. In this third phase, the Italian Church seems to have been little more than a “virtual” entity, real only from a bureaucratic point of view, and in reality just an appendage of the French and Dutch churches. After Oltramare’s departure in 1646, as we have seen, his successor may have been an Englishman, William Middleton, a reflection, perhaps, of the difficulty in finding a native speaker for the post. With the appointment of de Bresmal in 1656, at least on a formal level, the Italian Church would seem to have reorganized itself. But soon after, with the Restoration, the Church died out, apparently without fuss, due to a lack of members, as had previously happened to the Spanish Church of London.49 Another issue about which it would be interesting to know more concerns the non-Italian members of the Church.50 The document in which the elders and deacons of the Italian reformed church of London in 1639 asserted that they had chosen Nicholas Oltramare as their minister was signed by four people: “Jo. Clerk, Pieter Ryckau, Arthur Peaps, Josua Mainet”. Only one has a surname that can possibly be considered Italian.51 There is no available evidence to identify Jo. Clerk and Arthur Peaps. Sir Peter Rycaut was born in Antwerp of a Brabantine father and Spanish mother and settled in London in 1600. He was one of the richest English merchants of the first half of the 17th century, with an extensive network of trading relations in the Mediterranean. Married to a Dutch woman, he was active, apart from in the Italian Church, also in the Dutch and French churches and in his parish of St Christopher-le-

48 49

50

51

Cf. note 56 below. As we have already mentioned the proposal to unify the Italian and Spanish churches was rejected by the Dutch and French churches in 1627 (cf. note 13 above). After that date we do not find any reference to the Spanish congregation in the minutes of the Coetus, so it is reasonable to suppose that the union took place, without any rumour if not in that very same year, very soon after. On the massive presence of non Italian members of the Italian church in the 16th Century cf. Boersma, Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, pp. 26-30. Cf. note 19 above.

232

Stefano Villani

Stocks.52 In all probability it was his Spanish ancestry that prompted him to become an elder of the Italian Church (which in all probability had been merged with the even smaller Spanish Church at the end of the 1620s),53 but his involvement in the various foreign churches confirms the pattern of a form of mobile and fluid ecclesiastical membership on the part of the people belonging to one of the foreign churches in London. The same can be said of the public notary Josua Mainet, who in his will in 1657 left money both to the Dutch and the French churches and to the Anglican parish where he resided.54 It would be interesting to know more about Mainet. Active in London as a public notary from the 1630s onwards, he married an English woman and was perhaps of Italian origin. It is certain that Giulio Cesare Baldironi wrote a letter to him in Italian in 1640, in which he recalled that he had been received into the Church of England through the good offices of Mainet himself. A copy of that letter was also addressed to a certain “Mr. Palavicino”, perhaps a lapsus calami for Paravicini,55 who, as we have already said, is mentioned as an elder of the church together with a “D. Theolati” who has thus far remained unidentified.56 If the vicissitudes of the Italian Church of London in the 16th century, reconstructed first in Luigi Firpo’s masterful essay and then by Owe Boersma and Auke J. Jelsma, constitutes an important chapter in the history of the Italian reformation, its 17th century history is of much less significance. However, it is not lacking in interest. It is clearly the history of a struggle for survival. But it is, as I hope to have shown, an interesting story not only for

52

53 54

55

56

Sonia P. Anderson, ‘Rycaut, Sir Peter (1578–1653)’, ODNB; cf. Sonia P. Anderson, An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667-1678 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 20. Cf. note 48 above. Josua Mainet married Barbara Hornblow in the parish of St. Mary Woolchurch in 1634; cf.J. M. S. Brooke, A. W. C. Hallen, The transcript of the registers of the united parishes of S. Mary Woolnoth and S. Mary Woolchurch Haw… (London: Bowles & Sons, 1886), p. 355. For his will (5 August 1657) cf. NA, PROB 11/266. Cf. also Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., Documents Illustrating the Impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham in 1626, Camden Society publications, new series, 45 (Westminster: 1889), p. 62. Cf. the will of Barbarah Maynet or Maynett, presumably his wife (28 December 1665), NA, PROB 11/318. An artisan named Jacques Mainet, possibly one of his ancestors, went to London in 1566. Cf. Boersma, Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, p. 238. Cf. CSPD 1640, p. 620 (NA, SP 16/464, ff. 165-168) for Giulio Cesare Baldironi. He would later be a teacher of Italian in Sweden, cf. Tönnes Kleberg, ‘Italienska Språkets Ställning I 1600-talets sverige’, in Lychnos. Lärdomshistoriska samfundets årsbok (1939), 1-49 (pp. 3032, 48). GL, Ms. 7412/1, f. 82, ‘2 elders of the Italian church viz. D. Theolati & Mr Paravicini’. Cf. note 48 above.

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

233

the rather singular characters that figure in it but also for the light it throws on an otherwise unknown world of fluid and composite identities and suggestive of points of intersection. And without a doubt it is significant that its members almost certainly included London’s most important 17th-century Italian teachers: Giovanni Torriano and Peter Paravicini. After the failure of the project dreamt up during the reign of King James to create the conditions for a Protestant propaganda offensive in Italy, and of the irenic plans of figures like De Dominis (and perhaps Torriano, who was recommended by De Dominis to replace the Calvinist Calandrini and about whose orthodoxy the French and Dutch churches expressed some doubt in 1627), what then was the role of the Italian Church of London? It is not easy to answer this question. We can reasonably assume that its management group consisted of people who kept it alive in order to maintain faith with their family tradition. It is also possible that the Church exercised a sort of micro-power: the minister’s post seems to have been a sort of sinecure, allowing its occupants – and we should not forget this – to have dealings with and to work with the much more influential ministers of the French and Dutch churches, and giving them the opportunity to enter into contact with the English political and religious authorities. The Church apparently also had an important charitable role, in that Italian immigrants tended to turn to it in search of help. In 1656, for example, a certain Alexander Amidei tried for weeks to be received by the consistory of the Italian Church in order to obtain a recommendation as a teacher of Hebrew, without success, however, because the members of the consistory were away. In the following years Amidei tried to pass himself off as a Jew who had converted to Christianity, before being implicated in a murder attempt.57 His picaresque story, which unfortunately we cannot narrate here, tells us a good deal about the strange world of penniless and rather shady characters that gravitated around the Italian Church. Bibliography Primary Sources British Library, London, Add, MSS 6394 Guildhall Library, London, Ms. 7412

57

On Amidei cf. Villani, Un’identità mascherata nell’Inghilterra del ’600: la vicenda dell’ebraista Alessandro Amidei, cit.

Stefano Villani

234

National Archives, London, PROB 11/266 PROB 11/521 PROB 11/548. SP 16/464 Mercers’ Company, Mercers’ Hall, Acts of Court John Durel, A view of the government and publick worship of God in the reformed churches beyond the seas (London: printed by J[ohn] G[rismond] for R. Royston, 1662). Salmi di David. Ridotti in rime alla maniera Inghlese. Et accommodati alli toni più communi della chiesa Anglicana: per uso della chiesa Italiana. Con licenza de’superiori (In Londra: stampati da M.F. per Rodolfo Rovnthvvaite, MDCXLIV [1644]). Secondary Sources Anderson, Sonia P., An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667-1678 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Balmas, Enea and Esther Menascé, “L’opinione pubblica inglese e le «Pasque Piemontesi»: nuovi documenti”, Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi, 150 (1981), 3-26. Barrett, A. H., “Benjamin Woodroffe of the Greek College”, Oxoniensia, 53 (1988), 317-336. Beddard, R. A., ‘The Restoration Church’, in J. R. Jones, ed., The Restored Monarchy, 1660-1688 (London: Macmillan, 1979). Beeman, G. B., Notes on the Sites and History of the French Churches in London, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 8 (1905). Benítez, Miguel, Le Jeu de la Tolérance: édition de la Lettre ‘À Madame de… sur les différentes religions d’Hollande’, in Guido Canziani, ed., Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestina. Secoli XVII e XVIII (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1994), pp. 427-468. Brooke, J. M. S. and A. W. C. Hallen, The transcript of the registers of the united parishes of S. Mary Woolnoth and S. Mary Woolchurch Haw… (London: Bowles & Sons, 1886). De Beer, E. S., ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols (Oxford: 1955). De Mas, Enrico, Sovranità politica e unità cristiana nel Seicento angloveneto (Ravenna: Longo, 1975). Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960-

The Italian Protestant Church of London in the 17th Century

235

Dorian, Donald Clayton, The English Diodatis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1950). Duncan, Jonathan, The History of Guernsey (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1841). Foster, Joseph, Alumni Oxonienses: the members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714… 4 vols. (Oxford, London: 1891-1892). Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, ed., Documents Illustrating the Impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham in 1626, Camden Society publications, new series, 45 (Westminster: 1889). Galiffe, J. B. G., Le Refuge italien de Genève aux XVIme et XVII me siècles (Genève: Georg, 1881). Hayton, David, The House of Commons 1690-1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hessels, J. H., ed., Register of the attestations or certificates of membership, confessions of guilt, certificates of marriages, betrothals, publications of banns… preserved in the Dutch reformed church, Austin Friars (London, Amsterdam: David Nutt, Frederik Muller & co., 1892). Kleberg, Tönnes, “Italienska Språkets Ställning I 1600-talets sverige”, in Lychnos. Lärdomshistoriska samfundets årsbok (1939), 1-49. Labrousse, Elisabeth, Conscience et conviction. Etudes sur le XVIIe siècle (Paris: Universitas, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996). Lee, G. E., ed. and trans., Notebook of Pierre le Roy, Schoolmaster of S. Martin’s parish, in the island of Guernsey, 1600-1675 (Guernsey: Guernsey Historical and Antiquarian Society, 1893). Lelièvre, Matthieu, Histoire du Méthodisme dans les Iles de La Manche (Paris: Librairie Évangélique, 1885). ––. “La Réforme dans les Isles de la Manche”, Bulletin de la Société de l' Histoire du Protestantisme français, 34 (1885), 145-163. Marsh, Bower and Frederick Arthur Crisp, eds, Alumni carthusiani: a record of the foundation scholars of Charterhouse, 1614-1872 ([London]: Priv. Print., 1913). Micanzio, Fulgenzio, O. S. M., Lettere a William Cavendish, 1615-1628 nella versione inglese di Thomas Hobbes, edizione a cura di Roberto Ferrini, con introduzione di Enrico De Mas (Roma: Istituto storico O. S. M., 1987). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Popkin, Richard H., “The first published reaction to Spinoza’s Tractatus: Col. J. B. Stouppe, the Condé circle, and the Rev. Jean LeBrun”, Bulletin de Bibliographie Spinoziste, 18 (1995), 6-12.

236

Stefano Villani

Riley, Henry Thomas, The Manuscripts of John Richard Pine Coffin Esq. at Portledge, North Devon, in Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Part I, Report and Appendix, London 1876 (Appendix, pp. 370-386). Scouloudi, Irene, Returns of strangers in the metropolis 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639: a study of an active minority, Publications of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Quarto Series, 57 (1985). Tupper, Ferdinand Brock, The History of Guernsey (Guernsey, London: Le lieve, Simpkin, 1876). Vola, Giorgio, “The Revd J. B. Stouppe’s travels in France in 1654 as Cromwell’s secret agent”, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 27 (2001), pp. 509-526. Watney, John, Some Account of the Hospital of St. Thomas of Acon in the Cheap, London, and of the Plate of the Mercers’ Company, 2nd edn (London: Blades, 1906).

Peter Hoare ‘A Room with a View – and a Book’: Some Aspects of Library Provision for English Residents and Visitors to Florence, 18151930 Introduction English residents and tourists were a significant feature of Florence in the 19th century and later, but the provision of reading matter for them has been less well studied.1 My interest in this topic was aroused by the discovery, in a charity shop, of a copy of The Electric Telegraph of Fun, a collection of early-Victorian jokes edited by ‘Alfred Crowquill’ and published in 1854.2 What attracted my attention was the label on the front board: ‘Florence English Church Free Lending Library’; I also found a list of rules on the pastedown and a donation inscription from 1865. This inspired me to investigate further what sort of library that might have been, and led me to discover a series of remarkable collections of archives and books, and set me studying how English people in Florence obtained their reading matter. Florence is, of course, one of the most-visited cities in Italy, and has been attracting the English since the Middle Ages. From the 19th century onwards it became a favourite destination for tourists and a sizeable expatriate colony grew up. There is much more evidence, from diaries, travel guides and novels, of what ‘the English’ did – that term follows Italian use of the term Inglese as a shorthand for English-speakers from the whole of the British Isles, as well as America. It has not been possible to undertake anything like

1

2

I am very grateful to a number of people in Florence for their assistance and encouragement. At the Gabinetto Vieusseux, Laura Desideri and Caterina Del Vivo, in charge respectively of the library and of the historical archives, were immensely welcoming and have provided generously from their own knowledge and from the vast stores of material in their care. Penny Mittler, archivist of St Mark’s Church, and Alyson Price, archivist of the British Institute, both gave me ample access to their collections and provided much important information. I am also grateful to Tony Webb for sharing his extensive knowledge of the English in Tuscany, and to Bill Bell for sharing his enthusiasm for English readers abroad. ‘Alfred Crowquill’ was the pseudonym of Alfred Henry Forrester. The Electric Telegraph of Fun appears not to be in the British Library (though it is in the Bodleian). It presents itself as a skit on the ‘Railway Library’ editions which were coming into prominence in the 1850s as train travel became more common: ‘It’s a “Railway Book,” and the railway is the greatest circulating librarian in the world!’ (‘Introduction’, pp. 6-7).

238

Peter Hoare

a full survey of all the published accounts of life in Florence, but some of the relevant sources have been drawn on here.3 I have taken the title of this paper from E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View – first published in 1908 and set partly in Florence in that period. It does not have a great deal about books or libraries in it, despite the presence of a lady novelist, but there are one or two indications worth following up. The young heroine Lucy Honeychurch visits ‘the newspaper-room at the English bank’, where Punch and the Graphic are available4 – obviously a social centre as well as providing a financial service – and one might have expected a circulating library or newsroom to have featured too; but no. Earlier, the lady novelist, Miss Lavish, takes Lucy on a whirlwind tour of the city, insisting that she should not take a guide-book: And no, you are not, not, not to look at your Baedeker. Give it to me; I shan’t let you carry it. We will simply drift.5

That was a pity, because Baedekers of this period do refer to libraries and reading-rooms. The 1913 English-language edition of Baedeker’s Northern Italy, for example, lists under Florence ‘Booksellers’ (seven shops, one specified as having American books), then two ‘Reading Rooms’ – one of them the Baedeker-starred Gabinetto Vieusseux, which it notes has ‘also a large circulating library’.6 By the early 20th century there was a long history of Italian booksellers ready to serve the needs of tourists, with English-language books and newspapers and some provision too of books in other languages. There were certainly Italian lending libraries and reading rooms specialising in serving visitors and expatriates, some of them mentioned in later Baedekers.7 The public library in Siena, for example, preserves more than 2000 volumes from

3

4

5 6

7

Francis King, Florence: a Literary Companion (London: John Murray, 1991) has a good selection of quotations from foreign residents and visitors, especially English and American, which I have been glad to draw on for this paper. E. M. Forster, A Room with a View, Abinger Edition (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 55. The editor of the Abinger Edition, Oliver Stallybrass, identified the bank visited by Lucy Honeychurch as ‘French, Lemon & Co. in the Via Tornabuoni’ (p. 228). The 1913 Baedeker lists three banks at different numbers in the Via Tornabuoni as ‘French, Lemon, & Co., Cook & Son, Maquay & Co.’, and the last of these provides a further link to libraries through its founder J.L. Macquay and his connection with Holy Trinity Church (see below). Ibid., p. 18. Karl Baedeker, Northern Italy including Leghorn, Florence, Ravenna and routes through France, Switzerland, and Austria, 14th remodelled edn (Leipzig, 1913), p. 551. F. Borroni Salvadori, ‘Riunirsi in crocchio, anche per leggere: le origini del gabinetto di lettura a Firenze’, Rassegna Storica Toscana, 27, 1 (1981), 11-33.

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

239

an English circulating library operated by the bookseller Bassi,8 and similar libraries certainly existed in other towns as well as in Florence. The Gabinetto Vieusseux The greatest of these libraries, the Gabinetto G.P. Vieusseux, goes back to the early 19th century.9 Originally a straightforward lending library, it quickly grew into a major cultural institution in Florence and indeed nationally, particularly through its links with major literary figures such as Leopardi, Manzoni and many later Italian writers. It was not directed at the English market, but was a genuinely Italian venture – though its significance within Italy has perhaps not been very well noted by library historians.10 Nonetheless, the extent to which it catered for the English reader – and also for readers of other nationalities – is quite remarkable, as a glance through the splendid history by Laura Desideri will show. The survival of extensive archives, including accession records, lists of subscribers and loan registers for much of the library’s first century, is note-worthy, and the current indexing and digitisation initiative will reveal much more information as it progresses. The Vieusseux’s Archivio Storico also includes copy-letters of outgoing correspondence from 1820 onwards, adding much to our knowledge of the European book-trade of the period. 11 The founder, Giovan Pietro (or Jean-Pierre) Vieusseux, originally from Geneva, had travelled extensively in Northern Europe before he announced in December 1819 the establishment of a ‘Gabinetto scientifico-letteraria’. The original manifesto described his aim of meeting the needs of ‘travellers, for the most part educated, who stay, perhaps for some time, in Florence,

8

9

10

11

Mario De Gregorio, ‘“Strangers in the Library”: proposte di letteratura per gli stranieri a Siena fra Otto e Novecento’, in Siena tra Storia e Mito nella Cultura Anglosassone (Siena: Betti, 1996), pp. 53-61. I am grateful to Daniele Danesi of the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati di Siena for drawing my attention to this collection and for providing a copy of De Gregorio’s essay. Laura Desideri, ed., Il Vieusseux: storia di un gabinetto di lettura 1819-2003. Cronologia, saggi, testimonianze, Nuova edizione rivista e aggiornata (Florenze: Edizioni Polistampa, 2004). The account below draws heavily on this detailed study of the Vieusseux, which includes a chronology of its development, accounts by readers and appreciations of its cultural role, and a full bibliography. Paolo Traniello, Storia delle Biblioteche in Italia, dall’Unità a Oggi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), pp. 33-34, refers only briefly to the Vieusseux, presenting it as a parallel to, or precursor of, public libraries. The incoming correspondence was sold by the Vieusseux family and is now in the Biblioteca Centrale Nazionale di Firenze.

240

Peter Hoare

rightly called the Athens of Italy, where the large number of scholars, the magnificent libraries, the masterpieces […] feed the erudite curiosity of foreigners’ and would provide ‘the most interesting periodical publications, from Italy and from overseas’. Vieusseux claimed later that he meant to address primarily the needs of Florentines, and would advertise his services to foreigners only in a single handbill, but they came to dominate the business during most of its first century, as we shall see. (G.P. Vieusseux died in 1863, and his nephews took over the library, which after the First World War passed to the care of the City of Florence, though still retaining the name of its founder.) The enterprise opened in January 1820, in three rooms in the Palazzo Buondelmonti, in Piazza Santa Trinità (it later moved twice before reaching its present location in the Palazzo Strozzi). It offered a lending library and – with a separate subscription – a reading room for newspapers, periodicals and reference works. Vieusseux also offered a Saturday conversazione, and this social role of the Gabinetto continued for many years – though after 1848, and certainly by the time of Italian Unification in 1861, the lending library function had become the major part of the business. As early as 1821 he founded a literary review, Antologia, which achieved considerable importance in the political and cultural life of Italy. He also founded the Archivio Storico Italiano, one of the most significant historical journals in Italy. The establishment in 1975 of the Archivio Contemporaneo ‘Alessandro Bonsanti’, containing many cultural archives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, complements the institution’s own historical archive, and adds to its importance in the contemporary scene. The material available in the very earliest days included ‘a wide selection of scholarly and literary journals from all parts of Italy, from France, England, and Germany’, as well as a range of ‘those newspapers, again from Italy and abroad, which may be defined as political journals’. The Times, the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review were present in 1820; by 1838 there were 41 French journals, 18 English and 2 German, as well as 54 Italian. Vieusseux’s original intention was to avoid novels and current politics, but as with many similar enterprises pressure from readers soon made the provision of fiction a major part of the library’s work. (Novels however retained a secondary place in all the published catalogues up to the 20th century, with a separate sequence always following non-fiction.) Foreigners soon began to subscribe: the first Englishman is probably John Francis Sloane, who signed the Libro dei Soci on 19 June 1820, together with Dmitri Petrovich Buturlin, the earliest of a series of significant Russian

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

241

members through the 19th century (including Bakunin and Dostoevsky, whose heavy use of the Vieusseux is attested by his wife’s diaries).12 A rollcall of English writers followed through the 19th and 20th centuries: Leigh Hunt in 1823, Thackeray and Ruskin in 1845, Robert Browning several times between 1847 and 1858, Walter Savage Landor in 1861, Rudyard Kipling in 1912, Aldous Huxley in 1921, D.H. Lawrence in 1926. American writers joined too: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper (a regular but apparently demanding borrower), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain (and his wife), Henry James, Gertrude Stein. As the American novelist William Dean Howells wrote in his Indian Summer (published 1886): Viesseux’s [sic] is a place where sooner or later you meet every one you know among the foreign residents at Florence; the natives in smaller proportion resort there too.13

Numbers of subscribers soon increased. A detailed analysis of the 636 subscribers in 1844 shows Italians amounting to only 16%, compared with 53% Anglo-American, 10% French and 1.6% German; of these only 27 (4.4%) were women.14 By 1880 there were some 2000 subscribers to the circulating library – of whom 45% were women. All subscribers personally signed the Libro dei Soci, and were entered again when they took out a new subscription, whether for a few days, a week or a month. The sequence of entries in the 23 volumes running up to 1926 can thus provide evidence of repeated visits to Florence and changes of address. A major project to identify and index the signatures and to digitise the 8000 pages is currently in hand.15 As a result of this remarkable archival record, the use of the Vieusseux by English readers, up to 1926 at least, can be traced with some accuracy. The system can be seen in action in an account of the Vieusseux in 1910, at that time in the fine building in Via dei Vecchietti which it moved to in 1898. The English novelist Arnold Bennett joined the library in that year and in his Florentine Journal reported on a number of visits. Of these the first are last are especially worth quoting: Monday, 4 April. Bibliothèque Viesseux [sic] this morning, with Mock: a fine spacious place, with all the newspapers and magazines of several countries, and big rooms full of books bound in half-vellum. A pleasant general impression of whiteness. I became a

12 13 14

15

Katherine Strelsky, ‘Dostoevsky in Florence’, Russian Review, 22, 2 (1964), pp. 149-163. William Dean Howells, Indian Summer (Boston: Ticknor, 1886), p. 85. Laura Desideri, ‘Un firmamento di firme: il Libro dei Soci del Gabinetto Vieusseux (18201926)’, in La Frontiere Digitale: 14º Seminario Angela Vinay (Venice, 2005). The Libri dei Soci can be seen in digitised form at www.vieusseux.fi.it/librosoci/libro_soci.html.

242

Peter Hoare

subscriber for 3 books for a month, 5 lire. I signed my name in a big tome. Mr Viesseux, an old active white-haired man with a fine brow and a brisk gay manner, of course asked me if I was of the N.Y. Herald.16 I chose Stendhal’s Rome, Naples et Florence. Viesseux knew the number of it, which was 60,000 something. Also a book of Grazio Deledda’s. Orders for production of these books seemed to be vague. But after a long wait they came, each by a different messenger. […] 19 April. At Vieusseux’s library, on changing my book this afternoon, the attendant said it was known in Florence, Florence being a cosmopolitan place, that A.B. the author was staying in the town. He then became enthusiastic about the demand for my books, and lyrical about the number of Tauchnitz copies of them that Vieusseux possessed. He said he knew them all from the first, The Grand Babylon Hotel, and to prove his bona fides he began reeling off the Tauchnitz series numbers of them. So I rewarded him by 17 shaking hands with him, whereat he was well content.

This insight into the working of the library, and the relationship between staff and readers, adds to our knowledge of the world of circulating libraries in general.18 Like most circulating libraries, the Vieusseux published printed catalogues, and these provide the best impression of the stock. The first catalogue was printed in 1835 when the circulating library alone contained about 2770 works in some 8000 volumes: more than half were in French, a third in Italian, with only 7% in English and 1.5% in German. Further catalogues appeared in 1842 and 1853, showing a slight increase in the proportion of English and German books. In 1857 a separate Catalogue des Livres Français was published, and revised editions and supplements appeared from 1912 onwards. A letter of 1868 from Eugenio Vieusseux, director after his uncle’s death, noted the shortage of German books and the difficulty of obtaining them. By 1911 the situation had improved enough for a Katalog der Deutschen Bücher to be published, though they still represented only 5% of the total stock of the library (it seems that the German-published Tauchnitz series such as the extensive ‘Collection of British Authors’ were treated as ‘English’ works). The number of English books grew strongly in the 1860s, and much more strongly from the 1890s. The proportion of English books had nearly doubled by the 1860 catalogue, and had reached more than one-third of the total by the early 1900s. The

16 17

18

This was a confusion with James Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the New York Herald. Quoted from The Journals of Arnold Bennett, selected and ed. by Frank Swinnerton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 293 ff. The library at this time is well illustrated in Desideri, ed., Il Vieusseux, pp. 84-85. The bindings in half vellum are still a notable feature of the library and are featured on the cover of Desideri’s book.

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

243

Catalogue of the English Books, fully revised, published in 1915, is an impressive and very substantial volume of 538 pages – it is hard to judge just how many works are included, because some are listed under different headings in the main non-fiction section (novels are still listed second – but they account for 250 pages of the 538). A supplement of English books was published in 1926, by which time the proportion had dropped somewhat (to 35% compared with 47% in 1915), perhaps an anticipation of the continuing rise in Italian coverage and Italian membership. There was also a notable collection of ‘libri gialli’ or ‘yellow books’, i.e. English-language thrillers – perhaps as many as 100,000 and many of them apparently uncatalogued, being treated as ephemeral (though Edgar Wallace and ‘Sapper’ appear in the catalogue). There is a story of an American lady who regularly appeared in the library and ‘uttered only one word: “Murder!”. She was duly given the latest giallo’.19 A remarkable manuscript catalogue of English books dating from the late 19th or early 20th century was recently discovered: it has the title Books for Childrens [sic] and lists 180 titles (including translations into English): clearly there was a definite demand for books like those of Hans Andersen and Lewis Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte M. Yonge and Jules Verne. The survival of pasted-up copies of the various catalogues, with manuscript additions ready for the next edition, is a further indication of how the bookstock grew. So too are the Libri di Matricoli, the accessions registers begun in 1822, which provided each book with its identification number (as referred to by Arnold Bennett) – though there was some adjustment and re-use of numbers as the years went by. What is more difficult is knowing what readers actually read or borrowed, despite the series of Libri dei Prestiti (loan registers) beginning probably in the late 1840s and again running up to 1926 when the reforms of the new director Bonaventura Tecchi introduced a less permanent form of record. These registers list titles in numerical order, with borrowers’ names inserted below and crossed out on the book’s return (and so often illegible); dates are sometimes given, especially for more recent loans, and it is easily possible to see just how popular a particular title was. Unfortunately there is no equivalent record under a borrower’s name, so that we cannot know what Henry James or Aldous Huxley borrowed during their membership. It is often difficult to read the names, so that even when it is likely that a particular

19

An exhibition catalogue of 1996 has the title Una Sola Parola: Murder! Il ‘giallo’ in lingua inglese al Gabinetto Vieusseux.

244

Peter Hoare

book was borrowed by a known member one cannot be sure. D.H. Lawrence wrote to his friend and publisher Martin Secker in April 1926: I’m reading Italian books on the Etruscans – very interesting indeed. I’ll join Vieusseux’s library here – they will have more things.20

Lawrence signed the Libro dei Soci on 17 May, but it seems that the system for recording loans had changed shortly before he got to the Vieusseux – at least the most likely books which do have identifiable borrowers do not include his name. References to the Vieusseux turn up unpredictably in the voluminous published diaries and correspondence of visitors to Venice, and occasionally in novels like Howells’s Indian Summer: “The difficulty is to read a little of Florentine history. I can' t find anything in less than s Library ten or twelve volumes," said Mrs. Bowen. "Effie and I were going to Viesseux' again, in desperation, to see if there wasn' t something shorter in French.”

And again: After breakfast he went without delay to Viesseux' s reading-room, to examine his catalogue, and see what there was in it to his purpose. While he was waiting his turn to pay his subscription, with the people who surrounded the proprietor, half a dozen of the acquaintances he had made at Mrs. Bowen' s passed in and out.21

And Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop of 1945 has a character who decides “to pop into the Bargello for a moment after a visit to Vieusseux’s Lending Library’, suggesting that it was even then regularly frequented by the English. The Vieusseux also features in autobiographical accounts such as Iris Origo’s Images and Shadows (1970): she describes life in the AngloFlorentine community before the First World War, listing the Vieusseux among the ‘focal points’ (along with the English Church and Macquay’s Bank), and mentions ‘silver rose-bowls and library books’ as part of the accoutrements of a typically English home even if set in a Florentine palazzo.22 Rather later, Kinta Beevor in her book A Tuscan Childhood (1993) recalls how even in the 1930s:

20

21 22

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 5, ed. by James D. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 444. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places was published by Secker in 1932, after his death. Howells, Indian Summer (1880), p. 85. Iris Origo, Images and Shadows: part of a life (London: John Murray, 1970), pp. 127-8.

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

245

the area around Via Tornabuoni still provided a shopping centre for fashionable British tourists and Anglo-Florentines. […] Vieusseux’s Circulating Library provided reading matter, with everything from Jane Austen to Ruskin and Dorothy Sayers.23

The Vieusseux remains a thriving institution today, with a wide range of cultural activities as well as its function as a lending library. It is, however, less specifically devoted to meeting the needs of English and other foreign visitors, and has become a major centre for the study of Italian culture. 24 Church libraries Returning to Baedeker and E.M. Forster’s novel, we find references to the religious side of English life in Florence. Baedeker gives details of church services, notably the Anglican services at Holy Trinity and at St Mark’s, and another of the characters in A Room with a View is the Rev. Cuthbert Eager, described as ‘no commonplace chaplain. He was a member of the residential colony’.25 Mr Eager makes it clear that he is particularly concerned with the English residents in Florence, rather than in the passing custom of tourists: If you will not think me rude, we residents sometimes pity you poor tourists a little […] Now, the English colony at Florence, Miss Honeychurch – and it is of considerable size, though, of course, not all equally – a few are here for trade, for example. But the greater part are students.26 [By this he means, quite clearly, students or lovers of art and especially of the Renaissance.]

Holy Trinity Church was founded in the Via La Marmora in 1827; its archives are now mostly either in the Guildhall Library in London, or at St Mark’s Church in the Via Maggio. The church had started a lending library early on, but this was ‘quite a small affair, consisting of about three hundred books contained in one bookcase’.27 In 1851 it was placed under the control of the Select Vestry, the Church’s governing body, and was taken in hand by Maurice Baruch, a long-time resident (probably of German origin) who acted

23 24

25 26 27

Kinta Beevor, A Tuscan Childhood (London: Viking, 1993), pp. 149-50. Its impressive website, at <www.vieusseux.fi.it/>, gives a good impression of its many initiatives. Forster, Room with a View, p. 50. Ibid., p. 60. Catherine Danyell Tassarini, The History of the English Church in Florence (Florence: ra Press, 1905), p. 107.

246

Peter Hoare

as librarian for 24 years until his death in 1875.28 He soon raised it to be ‘an important adjunct of the Church’, with some thousands of books and a remarkably wide range of material. A catalogue was printed in 1851, and another in 1877, but no copies of either seem to have survived. Maurice Baruch set about improving the library’s stock by soliciting donations of books and money. Donors’ names (and sometimes the titles of the donations) are given in detail at the minutes of the Annual General Vestry Meetings from 1853 until 1875.29 He received an annual honorarium for transcribing the parish registers, but insisted that the money should be used for the library. (The first historian of the church refers to the ‘almost pathetic intensity’ of Baruch’s annual reports on the library.)30 After Baruch’s death Mrs Anne Tottenham, the rector’s wife, took over the library for 15 years, then a Miss Robbins succeeded her; but the original drive had clearly faded. By the early 20th century there was again a devoted librarian in Miss Evelyn Gwynn Brown.31 What is lacking is any real evidence of how the library was used.32 Most of the names in the donation lists are clearly English or Scottish (there are a few titled names among them), though we also find ‘Mad Galiazzi and ‘Mad Lucchini’, perhaps English ladies who had married Italians.33 The name in ‘my’ Electric Telegraph of Fun, Mrs Young, appears in minutes of the 1866 meeting as the donor of 11 books.34 Other donors include the Rev. W. H. Hoare, who gave his own Outlines of Ecclesiastical

28

29

30 31

32

33

34

Maurice Herman Baruch was buried in the English Cemetery, where the memorial stone records his birth in February 1808 and his death on 31 October 1875, with the inscription ‘Wir sehen uns wieder’ which suggests that he was of German origin. (Information from Tony Webb’s database of Tuscan burials, kindly made available by Alyson Price.) The minute-books of the Holy Trinity vestry meetings are lodged, for continuity, in the archive of St Mark’s Church. Tassarini, History of the English Church, p. 107. William F. Copinger, in his book Holy Trinity Church Florence: forty years of its history 1905-1945 (Florence: Impronta Press, 1946), pays tribute to her work as Librarian, but little else is known of her apart from her appearance in the Vestry minutes and as a donor of some surviving books. (Dr Copinger was also involved in decisions about the library at St Mark’s in 1938.) Remarkably, a recent conversation with an old friend who had studied art in Florence in the 1930s revealed that the library at the English Church (probably Holy Trinity) was wellrecognised even at that late date. She and her fellow-students were also given access to the extensive private library of the art historian Bernard Berenson at his villa I Tatti. Tony Webb suggests that Madame Galiazzi was actually Italian, presumably a supporter of the English Church. She may have been the Mary Young who died in 1867 aged 77 (the widow of a Scottish minister), who kept a school in Florence. (Information from Tony Webb’s database.)

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

247

History in 1852 and a few other books over the years, the Rev. W. F. Hall, who gave 235 volumes in 1859, and Mrs Smillie with a large bequest in 1897. The SPCK, which supported many parish libraries in Britain, also helped the Florence library, with 90 volumes presented in October 1867 (when a special bookplate was printed). One of the notable early donors was John Leland Maquay (d. 1868), a prominent member of the ‘English’ community and founder of the Pakenham & Maquay Bank in Florence – sadly not the bank whose newspaper-room Lucy Honeychurch visited half a century later.35 In 1858, 22 volumes came to the library from ‘the members of the late Book Club’: this intriguing institution, of which very little is known, is referred to several times in Maquay’s diaries and was wound up in January 1858, when the books were divided by lot and Maquay ‘brought away Smiths and my own’.36 In February 1858 he gave ‘a munificent present of books’; this was reported to the Select Vestry in April, and specially minuted ‘as a lasting memorial of the gratitude of the whole congregation’; but how these relate to the Book Club donation is not clear. Between twenty and thirty books from Maquay’s gift have been identified, but none shows any link with the Book Club. Maquay also presented long runs of the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, which still survive. The surviving books contain a variety of bookplates, in a different colours and with varying wording. The most usual form is ‘Florence English Church Free Lending Library’, but others say ‘Florence Church Library’ or specify ‘Holy Trinity’ or ‘English Episcopal Church’. Much more interesting are the rules for the library, a normal feature of books from the earlier part of the library’s history.

35 36

Cf. footnote 4 above. Maquay’s diary for 12 January 1858 (in the archives of the British Institute); it is likely that these were (at least in part) the books he presented to the library. I am grateful to Tony Webb for this reference. (A substantial Maquay family archive, covering 1782-1897, was deposited at the British Institute in 1983 by Lord Caccia.)

Peter Hoare

248

FLORENCE ENGLISH CHURCH

FREE LENDING LIBRARY BRIEF EXTRACT FROM THE RULES. 1.

Members of the Congregation alone are entitled to the use of the Library.

2.

No Book to be kept beyond a fortnight.

3.

An extension of time, not exceeding a fortnight, may be granted on producing the Work, if it be not engaged by other Parties.

4.

No more than 3 Volumes to be allowed to any one individual or family, at any one time.

5.

The Volumes in hand to be returned before any new ones can be taken out.

6.

Parties returning Books must not put them back in their places themselves, but hand them to the hon. Librarian.

7.

No Books to be carried away without being first exhibited to the Librarian.

8.

Parties are requested to return the Books themselves, or, in case of illness or sudden departure, by some trustworthy person.

9.

Parties applying for the first time, to leave their address with the Librarian.

10. Children under 14 years of age are not permitted to interfere with the Books. 11. The Books must not be lent to others – least of all to Italian subjects – and cannot even be transferred to other members of the Congregation without the cognizance of the Librarian.

12. The Books are not to be taken away from Florence. (This does not apply to persons residing in neighbouring Villas). 13. Full compensation is expected for any Book lost or injured. 14. Parties contravening the above Rules in spite of admonition, shall be deprived of the use of the Library. _________________________________________________ NB. Donations of Books or Money thankfully received.

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

249

The rules reflect Baruch’s precise care for the library he had restored to life. They also give a glimpse of expatriate life, with some people residing in villas outside the city, some being suddenly called away – and with many untrustworthy people about, including children under 14. The most remarkable provision is in rule 11, which forbids lending books to others, least of all to Italian subjects. This is not simple xenophobia on the part of the English Church (though it may imply a fear that Italians would not return books), but originally it had a more serious point. The Anglican Church, like other protestant denominations, was strictly constrained by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Catholic hierarchy, and any signs of proselytism were regarded with suspicion (two Italians were sent to prison for six months in 1852 for a public exposition of St John’s Gospel in Diodati’s translation).37 After Unification in 1861, religion was no longer an issue, but probably through inertia the rules (or the labels) were not changed immediately, so explaining the appearance of this prohibition in a book which came to the library in 1865. Holy Trinity was the classic Low Church establishment, and a second Anglican church was founded in 1877 to offer worship ‘according to the principles of the Oxford Movement’, that is to cater for the High Church tastes of an increasing number of residents. This was St Mark’s Church, south of the river in Via Maggio (my friend remembered great rivalry between members of the two English congregations in the 1930s). This church, too, had a library, though less is known about its nature and contents. In May 1938 the general meeting of St Mark’s agreed that the library, ‘to all intents and purposes never used’, should be checked through; anything of theological value could be retained and the British Institute could be asked to advise on the secular material. In fact the British Institute catalogue lists 137 books from St Mark’s, and it is mostly theological material that now remains in the chaplain’s house above the church.38 By the mid-20th century, Holy Trinity had become the poor relation: the building was sold in 1968 and the congregation joined St Mark’s. The annual report of the British Institute for 1960/61 had recorded that ‘We have been fortunate in acquiring the Holy Trinity Library at a nominal price’ and well over 300 volumes are preserved in the British Institute’s collections (a few more are still with the remnants of St Mark’s library at that church). The books show a remarkably wide range, with theology in the minority: they are almost all in English, though there is more than a sprinkling of books of

37 38

Firenze Evangelica: Il Testimonio, October 1998. For the history of the British Institute, see below. Its library catalogue, including books from the church libraries, is accessible at <www.britishinstitute.it/en/library/>.

250

Peter Hoare

specifically Italian interest. There are several volumes of the Parker Society (a major Victorian collection on church history), Gibbon’s works and Robert Burns’s, Oliphant’s Journey to Kathmandu and Cassell’s History of the Boer War. Mawe’s Familiar Lessons on Mineralogy and Geology of 1820 shares the science shelves with Thomas Young’s works and the life of Michael Faraday. Novelists range from Walter Scott and Wilkie Collins to Marie Corelli and Conan Doyle. Altogether this is the range of a popular English circulating library, rather than of a typical church library, and so sheds light on the role it played in the expatriate community. Holy Trinity and St Mark’s were of course not the only source of English reading material in Florence. The American Episcopal Church, St James’s, also had a library of which one or two books have survived. And I have found a second-hand report of a library for English Catholics in Florence, run by the Irish Sisters. English churches were established across Italy in the 19th century and many had libraries. Book-labels on extant volumes now shelved with the Holy Trinity library include one from ‘Christ Church Library Naples’ and another came from Bagni di Lucca. The English Church in Rome once had a fine lending library (dispersed in the 1970s) with 16th and 17th century books in addition to a large collection of Tauchnitz editions. The English Library in Alassio seems to have been independent of the adjoining English church (which also had a library). The Alassio Library presented several dozen books to the British Institute a few years ago, some of them as recent as the 1950s and including a good number of modern novels – but it still operates and clearly still serves a local need. Somewhat similar, perhaps, is the Biblioteca Civica Internazionale at Bordighera: this is linked to the Bidwell Museum and claims to have 20,000 English books as well as a larger number of Italian books and fewer in other European languages. The British Institute The British Institute in Florence has, since 1917, provided rich cultural resources to Italians and expatriates alike, aiming to improve knowledge of Italian language and culture and to interpret British culture to Italians, through programmes of courses and lectures. Its Harold Acton library is now the largest collection of English books in Italy. As we have seen, it has also preserved many books from church libraries across Italy, and its archive collections illuminate the life of the English in Florence. The name of the Institute’s library commemorates a notable English resident. The ‘arch-aesthete’ Sir Harold Acton (1904-1994), the inspiration for the flamboyant Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

251

Revisited, was a prominent and unconventional member of the English community, and his own writings have an important place in the library which bears his name. Within the library are a number of special collections also recalling well-known English residents, and so adding to our knowledge of the reading habits of the English community. There are 350 volumes from the library of Vernon Lee, the pseudonym of the writer Violet Paget (18561935), many of them with annotations showing the range of her reading; similarly with the Edward Gordon Craig theatre collection and the Francis Toye music collection. It is the general library collections, however, which command attention, representing a broad range of English literature and history, and also many works on Italian history and culture. It is clear that for over 90 years the English community, together with visiting students and others, has been well served by the Institute, though detailed evidence of use is less easy to come by. The Institute also appears in a much less favourable, though fictional, guise in the 1981 novel Death of an Englishman, a murder mystery by Magdalen Nabb, set in Florence. Two English policemen visit the ‘English Library’, from which the dead man had borrowed science fiction: They went along narrow, thickly-carpeted corridors with black and white photographs of the Queen and of previous Directors of the library on the walls. The whole place was dark and there was a faint smell of mould. The reading room overlooked the river and its parchment lamps added their dull yellow light to the olive-coloured gloom of the morning. There were overstuffed, sagging armchairs, stern marble busts, shelves of ancient books and a stronger smell of mould. A very old man was sitting in one of the armchairs near the window, reading yesterday’s Times.39

The reading-room still overlooks the river (definitely a room with a view), but otherwise I am glad to say that today the British Institute and its readers can hardly be recognised in this gloomy description! Conclusion There is much still to be explored, not only in Florence but in other Italian cities, and I hope it will be possible for me to investigate some of the libraries I have mentioned more thoroughly. They are paralleled by the many libraries across Europe devoted to the needs of the English tourist – from the watering-places of the north French and Belgian coast, through the spa towns of Germany and central Europe and the winter-sports resorts of Switzerland,

39

Magdalen Nabb, Death of an Englishman (London: Collins, 1981), p. 60.

252

Peter Hoare

to the Garrison Libraries at Gibraltar and Malta, both used by a wider public than the title suggests.40 All these are undoubtedly part of the history both of British librarianship and of the British diaspora, and are worth much more extensive investigation in that context than I have so far been able to undertake. Bibliography Baedeker, Karl, Northern Italy including Leghorn, Florence, Ravenna and routes through France, Switzerland, and Austria, fourteenth remodelled edition (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1913). Beevor, Kinta, A Tuscan childhood (London: Viking, 1993). Bennett, Arnold, The journals of Arnold Bennett, selected and edited by Frank Swinnerton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Copinger, William F., Holy Trinity Church Florence: forty years of its history 1905-1945 (Florence: Impronta Press, 1946). De Gregorio, Mario, ‘“Strangers in the library”: proposte di letteratura per gli stranieri a Siena fra Otto e Novecento’, in Siena tra storia e mito nella cultura anglosassone (Siena: Betti, 1996), pp. 53-61. Desideri, Laura, ‘Un firmamento di firme: il Libro dei Soci del Gabinetto Vieusseux (1820-1926)’, in La frontiere digitale: 14º seminario Angela Vinay (Venezia, 2005). ––. ‘Fonti per la storia della lettura: luci e ombre dei registri del Vieusseux (1820-1926)’, in Studi e testimonianze offerti a Luigi Crocetti, a cura di Daniele Danesi, Laura Desideri e.a. (Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 2004), pp. 159-181. ––. ed., Il Vieusseux: storia di un gabinetto di lettura 1819-2003. Cronologia, saggi, testimonianze, nuova edizione rivista e aggiornata (Firenze: Edizioni Polistampa, 2004). Eliot, Simon, ‘Circulating libraries in the Victorian age and after’, in The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland, ed. by Peter Hoare and Alistair Black, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 125-46. Forster, E. M., A room with a view, Abinger Edition (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).

40

Some consideration of ‘commercial’ libraries for the British abroad is given by Simon Eliot, ‘Circulating libraries in the Victorian age and after’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ed. by Peter Hoare and Alistair Black, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 2006), pp.125-46, specifically p. 128.

‘A Room with a View – and a Book’

253

Howells, William Dean, Indian summer (Boston: Ticknor, 1886). King, Francis, Florence: a literary companion (London: John Murray, 1991). Lawrence, D. H., The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 5, ed. by James D. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Nabb, Magdalen, Death of an Englishman (London: Collins, 1981). Origo, Iris, Images and shadows: part of a life (London: John Murray, 1970). Salvadori, F. Borroni, ‘Riunirsi in crocchio, anche per leggere: le origini del gabinetto di lettura a Firenze’, Rassegna Storica Toscana, v. 27 no. 1 (1981), pp. 11-33. Strelsky, Katherine, ‘Dostoevsky in Florence’, Russian Review, vol. 22 no. 2 (1964), pp. 149-163. Tassarini, Catherine Danyell, The history of the English Church in Florence (Florence: Barbèra Press, 1905). Traniello, Paolo, Storia delle biblioteche in Italia, dall’Unità a oggi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002). Una sola parola: Murder! Il ‘giallo’ in lingua inglese al Gabinetto Vieusseux (Firenze: Gabinetto Vieusseux, 1996).

Tony Kushner Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s Refugees, anthropologist Liisa Malkki has argued, are ‘liminal in the categorical order of nation-states’. Such liminality has led to an objectification which is, she adds, ‘very evident in the scholarly and policy discourse on refugees’. Malkki concludes that refugees thus become viewed as dangerous, as people who do not fit.1 Drawing upon Mary Douglas’s classic work on pollution and taboo, Purity and Danger (1966), she suggests that they represent ‘matter out of place’.2 With reference to her own work on the huge refugee camps of Africa, Malkki has warned that ‘in universalizing particular displaced people into “refugees” – in abstracting their predicaments from specific political, historical, cultural contexts – humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees’.3 This contribution will attempt to avoid such pitfalls by focusing on the life story of one particular refugee, Hilde Gerrard, and the dilemmas she and her family faced as they attempted to re-make their lives. Such humanizing, however, will not be at the expense of context. In particular, her forced journey during the Nazi era from Germany to Italy, and then to Britain, will enable a comparative analysis of identity construction in relation to home and belonging within the bounds of the nation state. Jewish refugees from Nazism have become perhaps, next to the Huguenots, the most famous and revered of all refugee movements. With the benefit of hindsight the 1930s refugees have been praised for their enormous contribution to their receiving societies. Two titles from the first years of the 21st century give an indication of the recent and dominant memory work – Daniel Snowman’s The Hitler Emigres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (2002) and Jean Medawar and David Pyke’s Hitler’s Gift: Scientists Who Fled

1

2

3

Liisa Malkki, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Idendity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology, 7 (February 1992), 2244 (p. 34). Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1996 [orig.1966]), p. 41; Malkki, p. 34. Liisa Malkki, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11 (August 1996), 377-404 (p. 378).

256

Tony Kushner

Nazi Germany (2000).4 Snowman, for example, highlights the artists, architects, musicians, choreographers, film makers, historians, philosophers, scientists, writers, broadcasters and publishers who ‘made a lasting mark on the nation’s intellectual and cultural life’.5 This impact was indeed enormous, not least with regard to shaping and re-making concepts of national identity, as was the case with the emigre Hungarian Jewish film maker, Alexander Korda, and his invention of what Greg Walker has labelled ‘international Englishness’. To Korda, argues Walker, ‘the truest, deepest sense of Englishness […] was most readily apparent to an outsider. Indeed, to be an outsider was to be in the best position to judge the real essence of national identity of any kind. And to be able to do so meant that an outsider might be truly, deeply, “national” anywhere.’6 It remains, however, that even in this most celebrated of movements, of the 80,000 refugees from Nazism who spent some time in Britain during the 1930s,7the vast majority remain obscure. Moreover, as will emerge, their treatment at the time was often far from positive and their reception in many cases and at particular moments anything but welcoming. In its small way, therefore, this study is aimed to correct the increasingly celebratory historiography and wider memory work associated with the refugees from Nazism. A re-reading is especially necessary against the hegemonic interpretation and representation of past British treatment of refugees as it has run alongside, in recent years, a vicious campaign against contemporary asylum seekers – an ironic, but not purely coincidental, development.8 There is, however, a more general introductory point to be made before moving onto the specific case study. As is noted at different points in this volume, exiles and émigrés have contributed enormously to their adopted homes. Sometimes the process has not been easy, but generally the cultural transactions that are explored have been positive and enriching. Snowman and others have amply illustrated that possibility with the refugees from Nazism in relation to Anglo-German interchange.9 It would be possible to make a minor

4

5 6

7

8

9

Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Emigres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London: Pimlico, 2003 [orig.2002]); Jean Medawar and David Pyke, Hitler’s Gift: Scientists Who Fled Nazi Germany (London: Richard Cohen Books, 2000). Taken from the blurb on the back cover of the paperback edition. Greg Walker, ‘The Roots of Alexander Korda: Myths of Identity and the International Film’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37 (spring 2003), 3-25 (p. 23). This is the figure calculated by Louise London in her near-definitive account, Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Snowman.

Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s

257

case of elite impact with regard to the Gerrard family – and their cultural contributions will certainly not be ignored. The emphasis, however, will be placed on the more ambivalent aspects of cultural transactions that became manifest through the experiences of refugees during the 1930s. Italy and Britain, especially the latter, had traditions of welcoming refugees and in valuing the concept of asylum, the continuity of which, at least to some extent, enabled Hilde and her family to find temporary refuge in both countries. Nevertheless, they also possessed more negative tendencies with regard to those regarded as somehow ‘alien’ to the nation state. Such anti-alienism, with a specific animus against Jews, was to manifest itself in different ways and with differing consequences in Italy and Britain during the ‘devil’s decade’. There are parallels between the dominant historiography relating to antisemitism in Italy and Britain that has only recently been challenged. In both cases, especially in the modern, pre-fascist era, the Jewish communities were seen as well-integrated and accepted. If not fully accepted as ‘one of us’, antisemitism, it has been assumed, hardly impacted on the economic mobility or day to day lives of most Jews, especially those who had long roots in either Italy or Britain. Fin-de-Siecle Italy was marked ‘by the opening up of professional careers, including careers in science and public administration, to Jews and the absorption of a significant number of Jews into Italy’s ruling elites’.10 William Rubinstein goes even further in the case of Britain, arguing that ‘the story of the Jewish people throughout the English-speaking world has almost always been a success story, a success story without parallel in the post-exilic history of the Jewish people’ It is one, he adds, ‘astonishingly free of hostility’.11 The general trend of Anglo-Jewish historiography, at least until the 1980s, has been to suggest that even the difficult interwar years led only to the minor irritation and concern caused by Oswald Mosley and his members of the British Union of Fascists who were, in essence, foreign inspired.12 In Italy, more has to be explained away, especially the antisemitic legislation of 1938 and the eventual deportation and then murder of 15 percent of Italian Jews, or 8,000 individuals. Apologists traditionally blamed German/Nazi influence and pressure on the Italian turn to antisemitism. Yet although this

10

11

12

David Forgacs, ‘Building the Body of the Nation: Lombroso’s L’antisemitismo and Fin-deSiecle Italy’, in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture 1879-1914, ed. by Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), pp. 96-110 (p. 107). W. Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 6. For partial acceptance of this analysis, see Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 257. See the historiographical essays in The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, ed. by. Tony Kushner (London: Frank Cass, 1992).

258

Tony Kushner

cannot be denied, the dominant, though not unchallenged, direction of more recent and detailed scholarship emphasises the domestic roots of the 1938 measures and beyond, and a strong degree of local support for them. As Stefano Luconi concludes, ‘A consequence of these findings is that both the vision of a prevailing racial tolerance in Italy and the hypothesis of antisemitism as a German import, which had long provided scholars with the grounds for positing an alleged Italian sympathy with Jews, have turned out to be groundless.’13 On a much less agonised level, earlier historiographical attempts to dismiss antisemitism in Britain as foreign-inspired, as with Mosley, have given way to approaches that highlight the ‘local’ cultural antipathy towards Jews, especially alien Jews, in state and society.14 Similarly in Italy recent research has emphasised that ‘Italian popular literature by non-Jews had been imbued with antisemitic stereotypes since at least the early 19th century, and anti-Jewish attitudes were latent in Italian public opinion’.15 In both countries, ambivalent attitudes towards the Jews were the norm, but at specific moments and contexts – 1938 in Italy and 1940 in Britain – anti-alienism could come to the fore. The impact was very different, but in both countries the idea that intolerance was fundamentally alien to their respective cultural and political traditions was blatantly exposed. Through the autobiographical writings of Hilde Gerrard, we can see how one individual explored and narrated such positive and negative forces in first Italy and then Britain. Hilde’s unpublished memoir was deposited in what was then the Museum of the Jewish East End (now the London Jewish Museum) in 1984.16 It is not clear exactly when it was completed but it would appear likely from the text that it was written within a few years of its archival deposit. In relation to such autobiographical writings of refugees from Nazism, the timing was relatively unusual. It was not until the last decade of the 20th century that there was a growing demand for and desire to write about the experiences of leaving the Third Reich. Accounts such as Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses, published in the mid-1960s, which, like Hilde Gerrard, outlines the experience of being a domestic servant in Britain (in Segal’s case, her mother), were extremely rare.17 Therefore, that Hilde felt the need to provide an account of her

13

14

15

16 17

Stefano Luconi, ‘Recent trends in the study of Italian antisemitism under the Fascist regime’, Patterns of Prejudice (spring 2004), 1-17 (p. 10). See especially Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English literature and society: Racial representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Luconi, p. 10 referring particularly to Lynn Gunzberg, Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Hilde Gerrard, ‘We Were Lucky’, London Jewish Museum, MS 34/1984. Lore Segal, Other People’s Homes (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965).

Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s

259

life as a refugee reflected a very strong autobiographical impulse. Its successful deposit at the fledgling Museum of the Jewish East End revealed the beginnings of historic interest and memory work associated with the refugees from Nazism in Britain. Indeed, soon after it was to be renamed the London Museum of Jewish Life, reflecting a wider geographical and thematic scope beyond those who came from eastern Europe and settled in the East End.18 Yet that the account remains unpublished mirrors the still marginal status of refugees, including those from Nazism, in British society and culture, including the world of higher education and learning. Born in Germany in 1907 within an assimilated Jewish family, Hilde opens her story by stating her early childhood ‘was wonderful’. To her mind it was represented simply and topographically by ‘a large garden in my parents home’.19 Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson have outlined two tendencies in autobiographical practice which are particularly pronounced with regard to the construction of childhood. The first is the myth of the ‘good old days’ in which the ‘past here functions as a kind of reverse image of the present, a time when “everyone was neighbours”, and life was more secure’. The second and ‘alternative version of life history […] charts a progress from darkness to light. Here the past serves as a kind of negative benchmark by which later achievement is judged, and the narrative is one of achievement rather than loss.’20 It is not surprising that in the writings of those who were later to suffer forced migration, it is the former – the idealisation of childhood – that almost always dominates descriptions of the early (and in our specific case, pre-Nazi) life. Little further detail is provided of her first twenty odd years (at the point the emphasis on a full life story approach in the collecting of oral and written testimony was not yet dominant).21 By this stage of her life, Hilde had got married to Gerhard, a bookseller in Berlin and the couple lived a cultured life of concerts, theatre and literature.22 For four years they both worked and then in 1933 her husband lost his job in the early days of Nazism and the beginnings of the Aryanisation process. The Gerrards immediately thought of leaving Germany and with capital and a business that had an international nature, they

18

19 20

21 22

See Tony Kushner, ‘Great Britons: Immigration, History and Memory’, in Histories and Memories: Migrants and Their History in Britain, ed. by Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 18-34 (pp. 28-30). Gerrard, p. 1. ‘Introduction’ in The Myths We Live By, ed. by Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-22 (pp. 8-9). See Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Gerrard, pp. 2-3.

260

Tony Kushner

were, like the family of Anne Frank, in a relatively privileged position to do so. Their continued business connections in Germany, and the need to be close to Hilde’s elderly parents made them look closer to home to find refuge, even though their first thoughts were blatant: ‘We wanted to go to America.’23 Italy, where they were allowed to move along as they had the means to support themselves or set up a business, was thus chosen as an alternative. In this respect, they followed the majority of German Jews who left in the early years of the Third Reich, moving to neighbouring countries in the hope that an early return home would be facilitated.24 That they were moving to a fascist dictatorship does not appear as a concern in her autobiography: ‘Mussolini and Hitler were not friends at that time and we were safe from Hitler’s arm’.25 More generally, the relationship between the two dictators becomes dominant throughout Hilde’s writings on her five years in Italy, especially when she attempted to explain the later discrimination against the Jews. In this respect, Hilde’s account follows the pattern of many Italianborn Jews who have, it has been suggested, ‘downplayed the persecution that took place under the fascist regime in relation to the genocide that was carried out during the Nazi occupation’.26 What makes Hilde’s autobiography particularly interesting, however, in spite of its stylistic limitations, is the ambivalence that she reveals towards Italy. Whilst her dominant theme is loyalty and gratitude towards both countries that gave her and her family refuge, she provides enough counter-examples that enables a very different reading of her narrative. After having failed as booksellers in Italy, the Gerrards stumbled across a solution to their economic dilemma – they provided a German lending library service based in Milan to their fellow refugees. In the process, they became the heart of an exile community, exploring the Italian countryside and tourist sites in organised trips – romantically entitled ‘mystery tours’ – at the weekend.27 The German Jewish refugees formed a tight knit group and kept to each other’s company, but at the same time they took comfort in the beauty and culture of Italy, creating through these recreational outings an idealised form of ‘Italianness’. Hilde’s idenfication with Italy was manifested both positively and defensively at three key moments in her life story. First, in 1936, she

23 24

25 26 27

Ibid., p. 3. Herbert Strauss, ‘Jewish Emigrants from Nazi Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 25 (1980), 313-61 and 26 (1981), 343-409. Gerrard, p. 3. Lucconi, p. 3. Gerrard, pp. 3-5.

Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s

261

unexpectantly found herself pregnant (Hilde had been told in Germany that she would be unable to conceive). The Gerrards, in gratitude to the medical treatment Hilde received, called the resultant twins Renato and Gabriella.28 Second, the antisemitic decrees of 1938, which differentiated Italian and ‘foreign’ Jews, promising removal of the latter, numbering 10,000, were explained by Hilde through the power of external and elite forces: ‘The ties between Mussolini and Hitler became closer and the surveillance of the refugees stricter.’29 In contrast to the desires of the leaders, Hilde appears categorical that the expulsion [of Jewish refugees] was not popular amongst the Italian population. We knew a policeman, who was on duty one day in the piazza duomo and as soon as he saw us coming, he would turn the traffic the way in our favour and would greet us […]. It was most unimportant but just the gesture of friendliness and smile did us good.30

The third and final example of Hilde’s identification with Italy related to her life in Britain at the end of the Second World War – a moment of both triumph of survival and recognition of loss for the Gerrards. In the small Lancashire town of Colne they celebrated VE Day by cooking for their neighbours a ‘large bowl of risotto’. Whilst on one level trivial, to Hilde the fact that such a foreign offering was welcomed showed that ‘we were accepted’.31 By such processes of naming and food, Italian ‘tradition’ became part of the identity of the Gerrard family. There are, however, different tones within her narrative that suggest a greater ambiguity towards Italy and its people, even if they are not fully acknowledged by the author. For example, the marginality and insecurity of the German Jewish refugee community in Milan is alluded to just after the birth of her twins. A fellow female refugee told her not to take her twin pram in the public view, ‘telling me I should never bring such a treasure on view; that it could provoke jealousy and tempt fate’. Hilde adds that such ‘a way of thinking [had] never occurred to me’, perhaps a reflection of the Gerrards’ relatively secure economic and social position within the refugee community and in Italy more generally.32 Yet, before the birth of her twins, Hilde had already seen the force of Italian fascism with the treatment of two refugee lodgers staying with them who were locked up and poorly treated by the Italian police. Even then, this incident was blamed on the visit of Hitler and they were let out of jail, added Hilde, ‘the next

28 29 30 31 32

Ibid., pp. 6-8. Ibid., pp. 9-10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 8.

262

Tony Kushner

day after Hitler had left’.33 The final example of her confrontation with Italian intolerance provoked no analysis or even comment from Hilde, but is perhaps the most telling in providing a more complex picture than she was willing to formally concede. After their removal from Italy in 1938, the Gerrards met up with an Italian Catholic friend, Andrea, in Paris. She remarks that ‘He also had to leave Italy […] as he had remarked in the bank where he worked that he disagreed with the expulsion of the Jews. This led to a quarrel with a colleague who slapped Andrea and who then denounced him for anti-fascist activities. Andrea had to leave within a day in order to prevent being locked up.’34 Through their overseas connections, especially through PEN (the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists),35 the Gerrards were able to place themselves as domestic servants in Britain and find guarantors for their children. Hilde’s writing about Britain and Britishness reveals very similar tendencies to those about Italy. Gratitude is again dominant, though made more explicit in this case, yet there is a wealth of material provided by Hilde that enables a different interpretation of Britain’s treatment of refugees by state and public. Dirt, taking us back to the work of Mary Douglas, becomes the metaphor in which these contrasting emotions are expressed in Hilde’s autobiography. All in all, 20,000 Jewish refugees came to Britain as domestic servants, almost all of them women.36 The increasingly desperate Jewish need to leave Greater Germany in 1938/39 was matched by a British demand for cheap domestic labour that could not be locally fulfilled. If some in the British Home Office saw this as a convenient way to help refugees, not all in the British civil service agreed. A senior Foreign Office worker, Captain Jeffes, was, he wrote, having visited consular offices in Prague, Berlin and Vienna in June 1939, ‘appalled to see the bad type of refugee presenting Ministry of Labour permits who were so filthily dirty in their person and their clothing that they were utterly unfit to go inside a decent British home’. Jeffes’ prejudiced animus was directed especially at east European Jews.37 In contrast, the Gerrards feared that their impeccably bourgeois manners and appearance would hinder their chances of getting domestic visas. They had heard that the British consul in Milan ‘was

33 34 35

36

37

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 13. Helmut Peitsch, ‘No Politics’? Die Geschichte des deutschen PEN-Zentrums in London 19332002 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2006). See Tony Kushner, ‘An Alien Occupation: Jewish Refugees and Domestic Service in Britain, 1933-1948’, in Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom, ed. by Werner Mosse and others (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), pp. 553-78. National Archives, HO 213/107 E409, Jeffes to Cooper, 5 June 1939.

Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s

263

very critical of friends of ours who had clean and very unspoiled hands, questioning their ability to do housework. After that tip off we scrapped carrots and peeled potatoes and after a few days our hands were ingrained with dirt and we had no difficulties on that score.’38 Once in Britain, the Gerrards, separated from one another and from their children, had a series of domestic jobs in which their treatment varied. Worry over her parents and failed attempts to get them out of Germany added to Hilde’s woes, and with her husband interned on the Isle of Man in 1940, it is not surprising that she broke down with nervous exhaustion. Later, through Red Cross messages Hilde was aware that her parents were facing deportation: ‘I was in despair, being unable to help. Heartbroken about it, tears were running down my face almost all the time.’ Her parents, alongside many other close relatives of Hilde and Gerhard, were to perish in the Holocaust.39 At the same time that Gerhard was interned, Hilde lost her job and her accommodation through the new emergency regulations on aliens which restricted residence away from coastal and other districts. As she wrote, ‘We had no home, not even a temporary roof and had no idea where Gerhard was’.40 Yet despite the marginality, intensified at the start of the war with their new status as ‘enemy aliens’, Hilde’s emphasis within her autobiography was still uncritical of Britain and its people.41 Such sentiment even extended into the theme of dirt and her appointed role to remove it. The following extract from her autobiography, it should be emphasised, was narrated without any irony by its author. It relates to one family for which Hilde acted as a domestic in the early years of the war: Mrs Swift paid me a compliment, which cheered me up. She said to me: ‘Hilde, we never had such clean toilets as we have at present’ – and that gave me hope that if things got worse I could always make my way as a lavatory cleaner with such a recommendation!

Hilde’s final comment on this incident reveals much about the feelings of obligation that added further pressure to the refugee experience: ‘How else can one show one’s gratitude if one is employed to clean, than by doing it as well as possible. She thought that everything sparkled.’42 Not surprisingly, the production of gleaming toilets does not feature on the list of refugee achievements in Snowman’s book. It was, however, more typical of the

38 39 40 41

42

Gerrard, p. 12. Ibid., pp. 29, 32. Ibid., p. 20. More generally see The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain, ed. by David Cesarani and Tony Kushner (London: Frank Cass, 1993). Gerrard, p. 20.

264

Tony Kushner

experiences as a whole of those who came to Britain during the 1930s than those who became, for example, future winners of the Nobel Prize.43 What has been termed the ‘cult of gratitude’, one that reached its zenith with the creation in the 1960s of the Association of Jewish Refugees’ ‘Thank You Britain Fund’,44 stopped Hilde from overtly criticising the anti-alien sentiment they faced from state and public, especially in the early parts of the war. The internment of her husband, which inevitably led to practical and emotional problems for Hilde, is presented factually in her autobiography. Yet so desperate was her situation that she at one stage offered herself and her children to join him in confinement.45 Through perseverance and good luck, the family were able to be reunited and after the war opened bookshops in Lancashire towns, with Hilde teaching German to adults.46 The Gerrards, rarely for refugees, were thus able to re-establish their skills and culture from another place and were eventually in a position to bring up their children as British citizens. Hilde’s autobiography is entitled ‘We Were Lucky’, a title reflecting on their success as refugees in re-establishing a rich life in first Italy and then England, but also in relation to those, including the close relatives of the Gerrards, who did not get out and were murdered in the death camps. In contrast to the title, the abrupt conclusion to her account is particularly striking and discordant, revealing deep unease about their position in the world. Having outlined their comfortable status, with ‘good friends and […] nice neighbours’, Hilde ends the autobiographical fragment with a clear statement – ‘We were uprooted in 1933’ – followed by two open ended questions: ‘Are we really at “home” – are we cosmopolitans and able to live anywhere? Or are we strangers everywhere?’47 It will be useful, bringing this contribution to a conclusion, to return to the work of Mary Douglas. Douglas wrote that ‘Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained.’ Patterns that are regarded as discordant, she adds, tend to be rejected, and ‘ambiguous ones’ either remoulded to ‘harmonise’ at some moments or, at other, totally removed.48 In Italy and even more so, in England, Hilde and her family received positive treatment from individuals, in spite of and sometimes because of their status. Yet as Douglas states, ‘A private person may revise his pattern of assumptions

43

44

45 46 47 48

Medawar and Pike, pp.241-2 provide a list of Nobel Prize winners. See also Snowman, pp.170, 191, 194, 230, 334, 356, 389 for individual cases. See the Association for Jewish Refugees’ monthly journal, AJR Information, September 1964 to December 1965 for the setting up of this fund and debate about it. Gerrard, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 25-7, 29-30. Ibid., p. 37. Douglas, pp. 36-7.

Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s

265

or not. It is a private matter. But cultural categories are public matters. They cannot so easily be subject to revision.’49 In Italy in 1938 all foreign Jews were regarded as matter out of place. Six thousand Jews, mainly those without Italian nationality, fled Italy after the introduction of the antisemitic laws of 1938. Perhaps less than a hundred of these found their way to Britain on temporary transit visas. As the major historian of the British Italian experience, Lucio Sponza, suggests, ‘The cold attitude of the British authorities towards refugees in general, and Jews in particular, must […] have contributed to the small size of the immigration.’50 Just after the war the Gerrards were informed that they had been granted entry to America. She remarks ‘How much heartache, distress, homelessness would have been avoided if that permission would have come earlier! Heaven would have opened in our eyes.’51 If pre-Hitler Germany and America as a place of re-birth are idealised in Hilde’s narrative, Italy and then Britain retain an inbetween status. Confronting ambiguity, as Mary Douglas commented, can be stimulating and ambiguity itself is at the heart of much cultural production.52 For those who are regarded as ‘ambiguous’, however, it can also be dangerous and damaging, especially if it results in not fully belonging, whether legally, socially or culturally. Homelessness, as Hilde’s narrative finally forces us to acknowledge, should not be romanticised, as some postmodernists would like us to believe. Italy from 1938 regarded its foreign Jews as dirt that needed to be removed. Britain regarded the refugees as fit to remove unwanted dirt from its homes. No wonder, then, that Hilde could only finish her account of refuge by acknowledging that, to her, there was no longer any place called home.53 Bibliography Cesarani, David, and Tony Kushner, eds., The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1993). Cheyette, Bryan, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English literature and society, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

49 50

51 52 53

Ibid., p. 40. Lucio Sponza, ‘Jewish Refugees from Fascist Italy to Britain’, in The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity, ed. by Bernard Cooperman and Barbara Garvin (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2000), pp. 425-442 (p. 425). Gerrard, p. 35. Douglas, p. 38. Gerrard, p. 37.

266

Tony Kushner

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1996). Endelman, Todd, The Jews of Britain 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Forgacs, David, ‘Building the Body of the Nation: Lombroso’s L’antisemitismo and Fin-de-Siecle Italy’, in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture 1879-1914, ed. by Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), pp. 96-110. Gerrard, Hilde, ‘We Were Lucky’, London Jewish Museum, 34-1984. Gunzberg, Lynn, Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Kushner, Tony, ‘An Alien Occupation: Jewish Refugees and Domestic Service in Britain, 1933-1948’, in Second Chance: Two Centuries of Germanspeaking Jews in the United Kingdom, ed. by Werner Mosse (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr, 1991), 553-78. ––. ‘Great Britons: Immigration, History and Memory’, in Histories and Memories: Migrants and Their History in Britain, ed. by Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 18-34. ––. ed., The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness (London: Frank Cass, 1992). ––. Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). London, Louise, Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Luconi, Stefano, ‘Recent trends in the study of Italian antisemitism under the Fascist regime’, Patterns of Prejudice, 38 (March 2004), 1-17. Malkki, Liisa, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology, 7 (February 1992), 22-44. ––. ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11 (August 1996), 377-404. Medawar, Jean and David Pyke, Hitler’s Gift: Scientists Who Fled Nazi Germany (London: Richard Cohen Books, 2000). Peitsch, Helmut, ‘No Politics’? Die Geschichte des deutschen PEN-Zentrums in London 1933-2002 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2006). Rubinstein, William, A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Samuel, Raphael, and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990). Snowman, Daniel, The Hitler Emigres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London: Pimlico, 2003).

Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness: Refugees from the 1930s

267

Sponza, Lucio, ‘Jewish Refugees from Fascist Italy to Britain’, in The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity, ed. by Bernard Cooperman and Barbara Garvin (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2000). Strauss, Herbert, ‘Jewish Emigrants from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 25 (1980), 313-61 and 26 (1981), 343-409. Walker, Greg, ‘The Roots of Alexander Korda: Myths of Identity and the International Film’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37 (Spring 2003), 3-25.

5. Perspectives and Poetics of Literary Exile

Tobias Döring Imaginary Homelands? D.G. Rossetti and his Father between Italy and England1 Introduction In 1859, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote the following poem: After the French Liberation of Italy As when the last of the paid joys of love Has come and gone; and with a single kiss At length, and with one laugh of satiate bliss, The wearied man a minute rests above The wearied woman, no more urged to move In those long throes of longing, till they glide, Now lightlier clasped, each to the other’s side, In joys past acting, not past dreaming of: — So Europe now beneath this paramour Lies for a little out of use, — full oft Submissive to his lust, a loveless whore. He wakes, she sleeps, the breath falls slow and soft. Wait: the bought body holds a birth within, An harlot’s child, to scourge her for her sin.2

This sonnet, privately printed at the time, was long withheld from publication. It eventually appeared in 1904, more than two decades after the author’s death3, for reasons easily appreciated. Though the title announces a response to the momentous events in contemporary Italy, the homeland which a generation earlier Rossetti’s father had to flee as a political exile, the poem as a whole is less focussed on any details of historical developments than on a particular imagery to speak about them. In fact, the sonnet is most striking for the elaborate sexual conceit on which it is constructed, allegorically showing Napoleon III embracing Europe like his whore in a scene of wild and passionate – though paid for – love-making. It thus renews

1 2

3

I would like to thank Sarah Knor for excellent research and help with translation. Cecil Y. Lang, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1975 (1968)), p. 51. Ibid., p. 502.

272

Tobias Döring

and slightly varies the old topos of rape as a vehicle for conquest, a topos often used in the Western tradition, from Ovid’s classic narratives up to Yeats’s modernist version in “Leda and the Swan” and 20th century political poetry, such as Seamus Heaney’s “Act of Union”. In Rossetti’s case, however, it is the extraordinarily detailed and graphic nature of this vehicle, depicting the moment of post-coital exhaustion in just so many words, that seems almost to obscure a reading of the political tenor indicated by the title. The sonnet is thus likely to confirm the well-known Victorian indictment of Rossetti’s work belonging to the “fleshly school of poetry”, in the words of Robert Buchanan’s anonymous attack of 18724, just as it confirms the standard line of critical judgement which we find in many present-day biographies about him: that D.G. Rossetti’s search for the erotic or exotic left him little time to turn to topical public concerns, that his interests in Italy were all medieval, poetic and artistic but not politically committed and that, as a consequence, all attempts to identify his father’s rebellious heritage in him, i.e. any dedication to the liberty and unity of Italy, must come to nothing. By way of illustration we can think of the poet’s quip about his disciple A.C. Swinburne, who once fell to his knees in front of Mazzini, the great Italian republican exiled in London, reciting Mazzini’s “Song to Italy” as a personal tribute to the cause of liberty – a kind of enthusiasm which Rossetti called “the liberty-flibberty-gibberty style” of which he confessed himself weary5. Or we can think of the famous anecdote recounted by Max Beerbohm: “Why should I go to Italy?” he claims Rossetti said. “Got it all inside me.”6 Indeed, D.G. Rossetti never went to Italy, even though various opportunities arose and for any self-respecting Romantic poet an Italian tour should have been de rigueur. Still, I hesitate to follow the general assessments and, instead, would like to reconsider in this chapter the case of his Italian heritage in view of the diaspora experience that his father’s life and work exemplify. Given Dante Gabriel’s apparent lack of political commitment, most biographers see his Italianness manifest only in some internal traits, i.e. his character, artistic imagination or poetic inspirations. Above all, it has been regarded as a matter of his outlandish antics: he is said to have been “immoral and irreligious”, “arrogant and money-grasping”,

4

5 6

Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999), p. 431. Rosalind Glynn Grylls, Portrait of Rossetti (London: Mcdonald, 1964), p. 107. Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and his circle (New Haven: Yale UP, 1964), p. 11.

Imaginary Homelands?

273

“moody and aloof”, “fickle” and “given to wild excess”7. These are some of the adjectives employed to suggest a so-called “Italian” nature, collected for this purpose by Robert Cooper. Significantly though, Cooper adds another list of adjectives – like “moral and mystic, sensitive and generous, bluff and outgoing”8 – to suggest, on the contrary, Rossetti’s inveterate English character. His Englishness, indeed, is well attested. Several biographers, like recently Jan Marsh9, rather consider him “an Englishman to the grain”, emphasize his flourishing of “English patriotism” whenever he went abroad10 and point out that his Italian friendships or acquaintances all ceased with his father’s death11. With regard to his paintings, there have been more subtle approaches, beyond such dubious clichés, to locate his sources and their cultural background. Béatrice Pardini-Laurent identifies a specific alternation between the two traditions, English versus Italian, on which he drew for any given subject that he painted. On this basis, she argues, we find certain periods in his career when one or the other tradition was more dominant or more prominently used – a constant oscillation that shows what she calls “the dilemma of his Anglo-Italian identity”12. The same approach might well be tried when studying his poetry. “After the French Liberation of Italy”, cited at the outset, is no isolated example; several of his texts, some of them quite long and quite elaborate, clearly draw on Italian history and literature, often with strong resonances for diasporic lives. “A Last Confession”, for instance, is a Browning-style dramatic monologue, set in Northern Italy in 1848 and offering the voice of a partisan fighter against Austrian rule, a patriot “far away from home,/ If home we had”13. “Dante at Verona” is an extended verse narrative with a powerful focus on the poet’s plight in exile, “Arriving only to depart,/ From court to court, from land to land”14. So, in the way suggested

7

8 9 10

11 12

13

14

Robert M. Cooper, Lost on Both Sides: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Critic and Poet (Ohio, 1970), p. 241. Ibid. Marsh, p. 65. Oswald Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Romantic (London: 1987 (1949)), p. 83. Brian and Judy Dobbs, 1977. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Alien Victorian. London, p. 12. Béatrice Pardini-Laurent, ‘The Dream of a Victorian Quattrocento: D. G. Rossetti’s Answer to the Dilemma of His Anglo-Italian Identity’, in Flight from Certainty: The Dilemma of Identity and Exile, ed. by Anne Luyat and Francine Tolon (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 38. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems and Translations, 1850-1870 (London: Oxford UP, 1968 (1913)), p. 42. Ibid., p. 49.

274

Tobias Döring

by Pardini-Laurent’s categorization of the paintings, we might analyse his poetic output, too, so as to identify whether a text draws more on English or Italian sources for its subject matter. But this approach, I think, is bound to fail. Neither Rossetti’s paintings nor his poems can neatly be divided along the lines of these two cultural inspirations, because an attribution to such binary categories in many cases makes no sense. For key paintings, like “The Blessed Damozel”, even Pardini-Laurent must acknowledge a combination of both English and Italian influence at work. The same, arguably, holds true of his writing. The poem about Dante’s exile, for example, though clearly based on his Italian interests, makes use of the key phrase “bitter bread” to characterize life in banishment15, a strong echo from an English source: Bolingbroke’s wellknown complaint against the king’s command in Shakespeare’s Richard II, “Eating the bitter bread of banishment” (Richard II, 3.1.21). The point suggests more complex forms of mediation: the subject of Rossetti’s poem is Dante’s exile in Verona, but its language is itself exiled from this cultural location, as it were, because the key verse echoes a Shakespearean history drama and so transfers an English alliterative phrase unto the Victorian version of the medieval Italian poet. In what follows I would like to look more closely at such cross-cultural transfers, poetic reinventions and imagined figures, and to set them in the framework of “imaginary homelands”. This is the crucial term first introduced by Salman Rushdie in a 1982 essay about his own work as an Indian-English writer who had recently won world-wide fame with Midnight’s Children (1981), a novel reinventing the scenario of a Bombay childhood home, which he wrote while sitting in North London looking through some family photographs. Exploring the issues of memory and translation that arise here, Rushdie proposes to speak of postcolonial identity as at once plural and partial: “Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools”16. In this sense, I suggest exploring Rossetti’s writing, too, in postcolonial terms, i.e. in a context of contemporary critical approaches where issues of exile and diaspora have long been discussed and worked through. One of the main points here, in fact, has been to regard double or divided identities – or hyphenated identities, as they are more often called – not as marginal and exceptional but as central because they manifest the modes by which all

15 16

Ibid., p. 48 and 62. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991), p. 15.

Imaginary Homelands?

275

cultural identities have been made through acts of mediation and production, not simply given as existing entities. In the words of Stuart Hall, Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.17

Hall is concerned with issues of Black British identity in the African diaspora. But his argument, I think, is just as relevant for the Rossetti family and their Anglo-Italian predicaments. Such an approach, at any rate, could offer us more productive ways to engage with the Rossettis’s cross-cultural negotiations rather than reiterating the stereotypical notions of “Englishness” versus “Italienness”, by which this question has long been addressed – for instance when Dante Gabriel’s dislike of sports has been explained with reference to his “foreign origin”18 since any true-born Englishman would naturally love athletics. Instead of resorting to such problematic notions of “the typical”, this chapter sets out to consider “the ‘play’ of history, culture and power”, in Hall’s sense, while exploring the ways in which D.G. Rossetti and his father position themselves in – or are positioned by – their different narratives of an Italian past. This difference will indeed be crucial for my argument: with Gabriele, the father, we are looking at an exile and emigré in the strict sense of the word, a diasporic figure devoting all his life and academic work to the kind of cultural “recovery” that Hall refers to; whereas his eldest son, named Gabriel Charles Dante, is a second-generation figure, constructing his imaginary homeland in very different ways, as I would like to show, mainly by positioning himself in opposition to his father’s narratives.

17

18

Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, [1990], in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 394. Doughty, p. 43.

276

Tobias Döring

Uses of Translation: D.G. Rossetti’s book on the Early Italian Poets When Gabriele Rossetti died in London in 1854, aged seventy-one, his family chose a verse from Jeremiah for his gravestone in Highgate: “He shall return no more to see his native country.”19 The choice was apt: for more than thirty years, this had been Gabriele’s plight. Since going underground in Naples for fear of political persecution by the newly-empowered Austrian monarchy and, soon after, fleeing the city in disguise, he had never returned to see his beloved country. In 1821, with the help of a romantic English lady and her husband in the Admiralty, he escaped to Malta where he stayed for three years before sailing to London. There he married the daughter of Gaetano Polidori, an earlier Italian emigré, and soon fathered a family of four children, settling into the modest middle-class existence of a scholar. His professional life began to stabilize in 1831 when he was eventually appointed to the Chair of Italian at King’s College, then a new institution, though he at first received no salary for this post and continued to depend on private tuition for a living20. For decades, the Rossetti household was a vibrant centre of London’s emigré community, with frequent Italian visitors, Italian food as daily staple and the Italian language used for all communication in the home, at least wherever the father was concerned. Though a professional philologist, Gabriele never wrote in English nor seems to have spoken the language with sufficient ease or mastery to use it as a medium; for his own writing, he always relied on his London-born bilingual wife as a translator and, even in old age, spoke English with a noticeable accent. By all accounts, then, Gabriele remained a life-long exile, defining himself and his range of interests exclusively with reference to the place he had to leave behind at the age of thirty-eight: Naples – for “Italy” was at the time, of course, not yet existant – remained for him the true location of his audience and social counterparts. In 1836 he wrote to his wife, in a glowing letter, how his patriotic poems were copied in Naples by hand, secretly circulated among fellow-Italians at home and so fervently admired that he, should he ever manage to return, would be celebrated as a national hero. He was clearly flattered by this news, brought to him through an Italian visitor, but his letter goes on to comment on the general situation with a sceptical and telling image about the “optics” of imagination. In William Michael Rossetti’s translation:

19

20

Gabriele Rossetti, A Versified Autobiography, trans. and supplemented by William Michael Rossetti (London: Sands, 1910), p. 113. E. R. Vincent, Gabriele Rossetti in England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), p. 23.

Imaginary Homelands?

277

This shows once again that the physical optics are the reverse of the imaginary; for, as by physics distant objects seem to us small, so by imagination small objects the further off they are, seem the larger. I should be almost afraid of returning, even if I could, so that I might not verify that saying, Minuit praesentia famam.21

This strikes a note of caution, surprisingly sober in assessing his own fame. To speak of “imaginary optics” in this way means to acknowledge the enlargements and necessary transformations, not to say distortions, which occur when exiled poets are regarded from afar, a clear recognition of the epistemic change imposed on himself and his role in the diaspora. Such transformations, I suggest, are also crucial for his son’s large-scale translation project: the rendering of Dante’s Vita Nuova plus five dozen early Italian poets into English, a project begun when Dante Gabriel was just seventeen. While he was actually supposed to take art classes, the youth tended to while away his time in the British Museum or elsewhere, engrossed in reading and poetic recreation. The remarkable result of these solitary hours, which covers almost 300 pages in print, was later brought out as a book, published in 1861, seven years after the father’s death. Interestingly, a few months before starting this enormous project, Dante Gabriel excused himself from writing to his father in Italian, because of what he called “imperfect” command of the language22. Now, however, his competence was felt sufficient to recreate medieval poetry in English. The collection is extremely relevant to read in the light of Hall’s comments. Rossetti’s translations testify, not least for the translator’s own sake, to a continuous cultural history that has shaped him, just as it testifies what current transformations this legacy has undergone. As such, it does not show a mere recovery of the past, but rather its translation into present circumstances, redrawing its own cultural premise. To appreciate this process, the translator’s notes and comments are especially interesting because they often signal acts of self-positioning: The task of the translator (and with all humility be it spoken) is one of some self-denial. […] In relinquishing this work (which, small as it is, is the only contribution I expect to make to our English knowledge of old Italy), I feel, as it were divided from my youth. The first associations I have are connected with my father’s devoted studies, which, from his point of view, have done so much towards the general investigation of Dante’s writings. Thus, in those early days, all around me partook of the influence of this great Florentine; till, from viewing it as a natural element, I also growing older, was drawn within the circle.23

21 22 23

Rossetti, 1910, p. 126. Marsh, p. 18. Rossetti, 1968, p. 176 – 177.

278

Tobias Döring

This passage from the preface to The Early Italian Poets, from Ciullo D’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100—1200—1300), in the original metres, together with Dante’s Vita Nuova offers several relevant points. It is significant, for instance, that D.G. Rossetti speaks of “our English knowledge”, thus openly aligning himself with a domestic English readership, in clear contrast to his father. Throughout, his comments suggest nothing about double loyalities or a divided cultural self; rather, they exemplify the hermeneutic act which George Steiner has described as the capture or incorporation that goes on in all work of translation24 and that is here performed from an English point of view. If there is any sense of division, then it is less concerned with Italian versus English culture than with a division from the author’s youth. We should note how consciously the translation is placed into an autobiographical context, the scholarly atmosphere of the paternal household, deeply steeped in Dante’s work, from which this project now “divides” him, as he says – rather than, as one might otherwise expect, reconnect him with his home. In fact, all reminiscences about his father’s studies appear carefully framed and reworked: as much as he says he was once “drawn within the circle” of his family’s Italian interests, he now seems to redraw all these familiar lines, distancing, if not disowning, the paternal legacy. That is to say, Dante Gabriel Rossetti presents his English translation of the Vita Nuova as if to personally manifest the meaning of this title, staking out a new life for himself. In this view, many of the texts and poets chosen for translation are quite suggestive. Fazio Degli Uberti, for example, whose family was driven out of Florence in the 14th century, is called “an exile by inheritance”25, a curious and highly resonant phrase for Dante Gabriel’s own position. Among Umberti’s texts, he translates a long passage from the Dittamondo, a detailed travel narrative in verse from which he choses to present the poet’s imaginary tour through England: Now to Great Britain we must make our way, Unto which kingdom Brutus gave his name […]. We went to London, and I saw the Tower Where Guenevere her honour did defend, With the Thames river which runs close to it. I saw the castle which by force was ta’en With the three shields by gallant Lancelot […]. Also I saw the castle where Geraint

24

25

See George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975), p. 298. Rossetti, 1968, p. 187.

Imaginary Homelands?

279

Lay with his Enid; likewise Merlin’s stone, Which for another’s love I joyed to see.26

With many well-known spots of medieval Britain rendered in this way through a touristic trope of sight-seeing, the translated poem offers a curious double perspective combining outside and inside views of familiar places, so as to defamiliarize them in the process – another case of cultural transformation by means of the imaginary optics. Equally telling for Dante Gabriel’s self-positioning may be a sequence of twelve sonnets by Cecco Angiolieri, focussing on father-son relationships: The dreadful and the desperate hate I bear My father (to my praise, not to my shame,) Will make him live more than Methusalem; Of this I’ve long ago been made aware. Now tell me, Nature, if my hate’s not fair.27

As in this example, entitled “Concerning his Father”, these sonnets are all composed in the voice of an angry, impatient and rebellious son, with strong Oedipal overtones, telling a story of painful self-liberation from paternal power. It would surely be too crude to apply any such poetic roles directly to the Rossetti family and their internal psychological dynamics. Still, it is interesting to see how suggestively the son here plays with these roles that he finds in medieval poetry and now transfers into “our” English. All this serves to show that this translator, contrary to his own claim in the preface about “self-denial”, can be seen to engage in significant selfperformance. His book about the early Italian poets makes use of translation as a cultural technique in order to reverse the “optics of imagination” which his father has identified: Dante Gabriel seems to make the objects once held high significantly smaller, so as to turn them into manageable items, poems to be handled, transferred, translated and transformed. In Hall’s term, he makes them subject to continuous “play”. Translation did, of course, run in the family: Dante Gabriel’s maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, was a venerable translator, above all noted for his rendering of Milton into Italian. But the grandson here reverses the direction: he translates only into English, thereby appropriating the Italian heritage and expropriating it from ancestral guardians – this is the process he refers to in the preface as “dividing” himself from his youth. By way of contrast, we should now look at some of his father’s work.

26 27

Ibid., p. 282 and 284. Ibid., p. 443.

280

Tobias Döring

Uses of Interpretation: Gabriele Rossetti’s scholarly work on Dante It is significant that Dante Gabriel’s preface should invoke his father’s scholarship, because he presents his own work of translation as purely a poetic and aesthetic enterprise, decidedly unscholarly in all its aims and methods. At one point, he even mocks what he calls “the buttonholders of learned Italy, who will not let one go on one’s way”28, a phrase that might well apply to the professor of Italian at King’s. This difference between poetry and scholarship, however, is just as crucial for Gabriele’s own selffashioning, closely connected to the cultural reinvention of himself when settling in England. As he writes in La Vita Mia, Gabriele’s Versified Autobiography which occupied him in his final years: Having in England stayed my roaming course, And seeing my future less ambiguously, Like Dante’s “Vita Nuova!” was my work: He wrote but I resolved to practice it.29

The “new life” of the emigré in London, aged forty-one on his arrival, was to be a life of academic learning, no longer of poetry and creative writing, as his previous life had been in Naples. For the purpose of these new pursuits, Dante came to serve both as a critical object – Gabriele’s first book was a commentary on the Inferno – and as a personal model, as these lines from his poetic memoir suggest. La Vita Mia, never published during Gabriele’s lifetime, was later translated by William Michael Rossetti, his younger son, who edited the posthumous work and had it printed in English, together with explanatory notes and several supplementary documents. The result is a highly fascinating, hybrid text, with an intrusive translator and editor, all the time correcting his late paternal subject. With regard to our present point, however, William Michael confirms30 what his father’s verse implies: that Gabriele only turned himself into a Dante scholar when he had to leave his homeland. In fact, the precise moment when he gave up his poetic aspirations is dramatized in another poem, “Il Veggente in Solitudine” of 1846, which recounts how Gabriele was on board an English ship from Malta to Southampton. The boat stayed in Naples harbour for five days, yet Gabriele could not go ashore, unless he was prepared to risk immediate arrest. While

28 29 30

Ibid., p. 324. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 82.

Imaginary Homelands?

281

he had five long days to stare upon his native city, without hope of returning there, he recounts that a vision of Dante appeared to him from over the sea and revealed the hidden meaning of his works: Oh quanta, oh quanta dottrina ei nascose Sotto il velame dei simboli arcani!31

The insights thus received came to form the spur and substance of what Gabriele henceforth made his project to reveal: to show the world what arcane symbolism Dante had allegedly embedded in his writing, so as to encode secret political messages in an elaborate allegory which Gabriele, in endless variations, set out to unravel in his academic books. During the three decades of his exile years in England, before health and eye-sight failed him, Rossetti published numerous long studies of these revelations (and, mercifully, left many more unpublished), offering detailed readings of the mysterious meanings which he saw hidden not only in the Divine Comedy but also in a great number of other literary works, eventually including the entire canon of medieval, Renaissance and modern Italian literature. This theory soon became his idée fixe, a veritable obsession forever expanded and reiterated, and increasingly hard to accept even for the closest friends and staunchest supporters, such as his local benefactor Charles Lyell. Its main points are summarized in La Vita Mia: And that [book] in which I showed symbolic all Our Allighieri’s mystic Beatrice, Delineated by the schemes occult Of most remote gymnosophistic times, Which schools of magians had inherited, And through the Mysteries bequeathed to us.32

As here suggested, Gabriele Rossetti claimed to have discovered the existence of a secret society, a sect of revolutionaries with their own rites and secret language; the group was dedicated to a secular idea and therefore lived under constant threat of persecution by the church, so that members could communicate in public only by means of some symbolic code. It is this code which he thought to have identified in the poetic works he studied. Dante, of course, was to be a central member of this circle, just like Boccaccio and Petrarca and virtually all other Italian poets – just like the Freemasons and Carbonari, with whom Gabriele himself was actively

31 32

Vincent, p. 126. Rossetti, 1910, p. 84.

282

Tobias Döring

engaged in 1820s Naples. Their common target, he maintained, was the overthrow of papal power and the church, because they chiefly aimed to establish a humanitarian rule of civilization and brotherhood on earth – a state of moral perfection symbolized in Dante’s Beatrice. Under current conditions, all their wisdom and activities were therefore seen as highly dangerous and subversive and had to be kept underground, guarded in clandestine organizations. In short, he entertained a full-blown conspiracy theory about the liberating influence of unacknowledged historical forces, gathering power against the tyranny of Catholic establishments. His was not a Da Vinci code, but a Dante code, as we may truly call it, a symbolic system no less ingenious and historically meaningful than Dan Brown’s contemporary version. The visionary quality and missionary fervor of Professor Rossetti’s scholarship are often treated with embarassament, or outright ridicule, in the available biographies and studies33. However, I suggest taking it absolutely seriously. To begin with, it was this theory that played a decisive role in his election to the Chair at King’s. This college, after all, was an Anglican foundation set up against the threatening atheism of University College London. Given this religious basis, King’s encountered serious problems when seeking to make an appropriate appointment for Italian Literature, because all qualified candidates turned out to be devoutly Catholic. So Gabriele’s anti-Catholic passion, manifest in his Lo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la Riforma (1832), served as a strong recommendation. But there is more to it. I would like to suggest that his conspiracy theories enact a hermeneutics of suspicion and revelation that is politically quite significant. The product of an emigré, the theory of hidden meanings and secret societies exemplifies a diasporic imagination: the inclination to take nothing at face value but read everything as a sign of something else – an obsession which derives, I argue, from the state of being exiled. Whatever else it surely is, exile is a hermeneutic condition, a state of powerful semantic productivity and a habit of mind which easily turns everything into some allegorical construction and credits it with new significance that is to be retrieved through special acts of reading. For the exile, all surface reality is principally insufficient and frustrating because it consists entirely of alien signifiers. This is why the exiled imagination must seek other signifieds, beyond the domain of the visible, and seek for them at deeper levels, in view of alternative interpretations. What results is a cultural mode of allegory which is central for the state of otherness in which an exile finds himself. As

33

See Vincent, p. 73.

Imaginary Homelands?

283

indicated even by this term, derived from Greek allos, allegory involves the articulation of otherness and so offers an incentive to reveal a different meaning behind given symbols. What we may call Gabriele’s diasporic optics, therefore, suggests that revelation is an enunciative mode of exile. Such general claims, I am aware, may sound rather as sweeping and as problematic as the professor’s theories themselves. Against the background of Hall’s postcolonial argument, however, we should nevertheless acknowledge that such modes of cultural hermeneutics are also ways of selfauthorization. To offer some justification for my reading of Gabriele’s uses of interpretation, let me point to the contemporary reception of Rossetti’s theory. Needless to say, it was for the most part scathing, mocking, sometimes devastating. Yet his Dante publications were widely noted and even internationally reviewed – one of the most critical reviews, in fact, appeared in 1836 and came from Germany, written by August Wilhelm Schlegel34. In England, the most interesting response was an article published in 1832 by Arthur Henry Hallam (later to be the subject of Tennyson’s famous elegy). Though sceptical and critical, Hallam offers a sympathetic summary of Rossetti’s writing and still makes clear where for him the central problem lies: He cares for nothing but resemblances, finds them in every hole and corner, and takes them on trust when he cannot find them. The most heterogeneous elements are pressed into the service of his hypotheses with almost tyrannical eagerness. He has one way, and one alone, of accounting for everything strange, or unintelligible or doubtful in the whole extent of history. […] For him there is mystery in the most trivial incident. [… But] The world is full of coincidences that mean nothing. To find design in everything, is as great madness as to find it not at all.35

This response sums up what I have called the hermeneutics of suspicion and characterized in the habits of Rossetti’s diasporic mind: making Dante’s text his interpretative homeland, turning it into a sanctioned place for the regime of signs, he practised a constant mode of seeing double, beholding secret resemblances, hidden meanings and allegory everywhere – a homogenizing view of the world which identifies all things as part of one grand design, tolerating no contingent elements.

34

35

See August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Dante, Pétrarque et Boccace. A propos de l’ouvrage de M. Rossetti: Sullu spirito antipapale’, Revue des deux Mondes (1836), vol. VII, ser. IV, p. 400418; and Das Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes (September 1836), pp. 115-117. Arthur Henry Hallam, Remarks on Professor Rossetti’s “Disquisizioni Sullo Spirito AntiPapale” (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), p. 8–9.

284

Tobias Döring

This is why Hallam’s down-to-earth objection is particularly apt: “The world is full of coincidences that mean nothing”. Here, he simply points out the kind of semantic nothingness, absence of meaning or “writing degree zero”, we might say (following McGunn’s recent reading of D.G. Rossetti, 2000: xiii), which must be ruled out from the emigré’s imagination – principally, I would say, because the adverse circumstances of his own life of dislocation must be rendered meaningful and cannot remain a matter of contingency. The Dante code, which Professor Rossetti made his life-long object of interpretation, thus gave him the co-ordinates to locate himself in his imaginary homeland. What remains Against this background, let us now return to his son’s literary work. Another poem which D.G. Rossetti wrote in the 1850s is “The Woodspurge”: The wind flapped loose, the wind was still, Shaken out dead from tree and hill: I had walked on at the wind’s will,— I sat now, for the wind was still. Between my knees my forehead was,— My lips, drawn in, said not Alas! My hair was over in the grass, My naked ears heard the day pass. My eyes, wide open, had the run Of some ten weeds to fix upon; Among those few, out of the sun, The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one. From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory: One thing then learnt remains to me,— The woodspurge has a cup of three.36

Written within two years of his father’s death, this text is highly significant not just for its choice of subject – a rather inconspicuous plant that does not feature in a Dantean repertoire – but also for its rhetoric of negation. The negated phrases – “said not Alas”, “there need not be” – openly invoke an

36

Rossetti, 1968, p. 138.

Imaginary Homelands?

285

alternative reading or meaning that this poem chooses to leave out. Instead, it sets up a speaker and nature observer who contemplates all surface details just for what they are, trying to give as full as possible an account of the limited view he gains of the world – consisting of “some ten weeds” – with as much accuracy as he can muster. For, following Jerome McGann37, we should free his observations of this plant from all symbolic meanings that intrude into the act of our reading. Precisely because the formula “three cups in one” or “a cup of three” is so insistent and suggestive of religious symbolism, we are challenged to forgo it. The most radical point of the poem may simply be to state the flower’s unsymbolic fact and note the factual shape of its specific cup, resisting the temptation to see it as a signifier of anything else, thus negating whatever allegorical import the three-in-one formula might have. In another context, commenting on D.G. Rossetti’s prose text “Hand and Soul”, McGann stresses his general emphasis on literal meanings: “Through literality comes the evidence of things not seen.”38 This, crucially, also applies to his work as a translator of the early Italian poets where, again, literality is taken as the central value: “The effort in such cases is not ‘fidelity’ but ‘literality’, which for Rossetti means the execution of a poem”39. The same holds true for his aesthetic principles at large: “‘Literal’ translation is thus Rossetti’s chief figure for the practice of art. It is a practice for turning ideas into ideals, concepts into presences.”40 In the presence of the woodspurge, therefore, the well-know slogan “Truth to Nature”, which the Pre-Raphaelites made their battle cry in mid-Victorian England, gains in sense: it could be translated as making one’s imaginary home not elsewhere, in a Southern country far away or in some remote circle of secret meaning, but truly in the here and now of the immediate, natural world. “From perfect grief there need not be/ Wisdom or even memory”: written two years after the family’s grieving for the father’s death, these lines read like a memory of just the kind of wisdom Gabriele had to offer. For him, the grief of exile, as we have seen above, gave rise to hermeneutics of suspicion that saw resemblances and correspondences throughout – just as correspondences are curiously recreated in this poem, on the level of sound, with the four-fold repetition of monophthongs in the end-rhymes of each stanza. However, what remains to the poetic speaker is just the “one thing”

37 38

39 40

See Lang, p. 501. Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), p. 90. Ibid. Ibid.

286

Tobias Döring

he says he has learned from studying the modest plant: a “thing” which does not make it part of any grand design or allegorical construction. But then, he emphasises that he observes the woodspurge “out of the son”: given the Shakespearean inflections of D.G. Rossetti’s language noted earlier, we can hardly miss the double meaning in the homophone sun/son. So what the poem offers, clearly, is not an act of filial observation. The son here rather turns away from the specific sun light by which his father used to see the world; out of the son, he wants to make himself at home in just the English place where Gabriele, the eternal exile, never actually arrived. The term “diaspora”, Stuart Hall argues in his reflections on postcolonial identities41, can also be used in a metaphorical sense. Conversely, I have argued, that diaspora itself is a condition for the production of metaphor and extended allegorical readings, a habit of mind often focussed on transferring meanings and searching for some signs to carry across into another cultural domain. For this reason, the emphasis on literal meaning in Rossetti’s woodspurge-poem and, more generally, on the literality of personal experience is just as significant as the elaborate allegorical construction we noted in his sonnet, with the sexual conceit, quoted at the outset. For, interestingly, in “After the French Liberation of Italy” the scene of passionate love-making employed as a vehicle culminates in an illicit act of fathering: “the bought body holds a birth within”. Written when his own father’s lifelong political hopes were close to fulfilment five years after his death, the sonnet certainly is not submissive to paternal politics; it rather tries to free itself from the passionate embrace of exile visions. This is what, I suggest, the strikingly “fleshly” nature of its post-coital scene indicates: “wearied” of the “joys” of patriotic love, it seems intent to translate them into another kind of love altogether, literal love. The topical French liberation of Italy is thus transformed into a poetic vehicle for the self-liberation from an inherited Italian exile. “It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation”, Salman Rushdie explains in “Imaginary Homelands” and continues: “I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”42 It is this sort of obstinacy, I would argue in conclusion, that we encounter in D.G. Rossetti’s acts of cultural translation. An “exile by inheritance”, to use his own phrase for Uberti, he finds himself defined within a network of paternal signs and imaginary readings. So he uses the poetic strategies of citation, literalization and translation in order to reposition himself in specific ways

41 42

Hall, p. 401. Rushdie, p. 17.

Imaginary Homelands?

287

and find an exit from the exiled language of first-generation emigrés. For the second generation, everything is to be gained in translation. What remains for him is to make himself at home in the imagined community of England. Bibliography Beerbohm, Max, Rossetti and his circle (New Haven: Yale UP, 1964). Cooper, Robert M., Lost on Both Sides: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Critic and Poet (Ohio: Ohio UP, 1970). Dobbs, Brian and Judy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Alien Victorian. (London: Macdonald and Jane' s, 1977). Doughty, Oswald, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Romantic (London: Oxford UP 1987 [1949]). Grylls, Rosalind Glynn, Portrait of Rossetti (London: Macdonald, 1964). Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, [1990], in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 392403. Hallam, Arthur Henry, Remarks on Professor Rossetti’s “Disquisizioni Sullo Spirito Anti-Papale” (London: Edward Moxon, 1832). Lang, Cecil Y., ed., The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1975 [1968]). Marsh, Jan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999). McGann, Jerome, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000). Pardini-Laurent, Béatrice, ‘The Dream of a Victorian Quattrocento: D.G. Rossetti’s Answer to the Dilemma of His Anglo-Italian Identity’, in Flight from Certainty: The Dilemma of Identity and Exile, ed. by Anne Luyat and Francine Tolon (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 34-47. Rossetti, William Michael, ed., Preraphaelite Diaries and Letters (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1900). Rossetti, Gabriele, A Versified Autobiography, trans. and supplemented by William Michael Rossetti (London: Sands, 1910). ––. Poems and Translations, 1850-1870 (London: Oxford UP, 1968 [1913]). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981—1991 (London: Granta, 1991). Schlegel, August Wilhelm, ‘Dante, Pétrarque et Boccace. A propos de l’ouvrage de M. Rossetti: Sullu spirito antipapale’, Revue des deux

288

Tobias Döring

Mondes (1836), vol. VII, ser. IV, pp. 400-418; and Das Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes (September 1836), pp. 115-117. Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975). Vincent, E.R., Gabriele Rossetti in England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936). Weintraub, Stanley, Four Rossettis: A Victorian Biography (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1977).

Fabienne Moine The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Sentimental Journey to Italy or the Exile of a Fragmented Heart Anna Murphy’s life is that of a constant exile. Her ceaseless travels began when she left Dublin for England when she was four. While working as a governess to various families, she visited the Continent and described her Italian journey in the anonymous A Lady’s Diary that would later be published under the name of The Diary of an Ennuyée in 1826. She married Robert Jameson in 1825 and refused initially to accompany him when he was appointed governor of Canada. She wrote several books of diverse nature, among which was another travel book: Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad. She eventually joined her husband of her own accord in Canada and started her most famous travel book Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada in 1838. Judith Johnston in her monograph calls Jameson “an inveterate and enthusiastic traveller”.1 Indeed Jameson visited Europe several times and repeatedly settled in Italy between her journeys to France or Germany. These travels to Italy invariably inspired her writings, both travel narratives and books on sacred art. In 1846 she helped the Brownings on their journey to Italy and accompanied them from Paris to Florence in their sentimental exile. Travels and exiles contribute to Jameson’s personal success. To her, travelling to foreign places is not considered as an escape, but rather an experience of renewal. Neither political nor domestic pressure urged her to change place, but she can be identified as an independent and self-reliant go-between and as an unusual type of exile. Her recurrent visits to Italy, as well as to other places, indicate that she is always on the move, always crossing borders and investigating limits.2 Her first visit to Italy prompted her to publish her Diary of an Ennuyée at a time when the market for travel writing was already saturated and travel narratives out of fashion. Her true objective was certainly

1

2

Judith Johnson, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), p. 101. Emma Sutton, in this collection of articles, shows that Vernon Lee also felt free to travel between European countries, considering herself as an outsider. Sutton notes that numerous displaced characters in Lee’s works are musicians. Similarly Jameson’s heroine looks more like an art historian than like a tourist. Music on the one hand and history of art on the other may help the versatile and compulsive travellers Lee or Jameson to find a true place of residence.

290

Fabienne Moine

to use this book as the perfect tool to express both her sense of deracination and her artistic and literary yearnings. She lived and wrote her first books at the crossroads of the Romantic and Victorian eras, which enabled her to concentrate on transitory moments and places, in a fragmentary style, which is, needless to say, perfectly deliberate. Similarly, her travel book is at the junction of public considerations and private concerns but never suggests that one mode or the other has to be given greater weight. Italy, as is described in her Diary, looks rather like a patchwork of personal and artistic sketches, and its representation mirrors Jameson’s unstable and versatile narrator, her own use of permeable literary genres and her challenging of gender boundaries. I will first show that her artistic exile to Italy accentuates the lack of any sense of belonging, making her an incurable example of the go-between. Although the narrator often sounds broken-hearted and about to expire, exile becomes a life-enriching experience, preventing artistic barrenness. Her obvious insincerity never really hides her true literary objectives. The intention of my second part is to show that Jameson’s diary concentrates on the figure of the go-between as a schizophrenic narrator who sees Italy through the prism of her own inner instability. Italy becomes fragmented too, as if reconstructed through the eye and the writings of the beholder. Finally, I will suggest that the diarist constructs Italy as the perfect place of transition and exile. The representation of Italy prevents stasis of any form, as this country becomes the cradle of living processes for the diarist. I suggest that there is no possible permanent exile in Italy, but only various perpetual passages from one place to another and from one mood to another because Italy remains the locus of deracination. Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée is a work mixing fiction and non-fiction, travel writing and sentimental comments by a female narrator both lively and enthusiastic when she describes her visits to places of interest and dispirited when she recollects her tragic love. However these two voices clash as if two very different narrators composed the diary. Jameson seems first to comply with the genre she invests, following the long tradition of travel writing interspersed with personal annotations; indeed her diary is comparable to Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) and consistent with the 18th century literary trend, mixing facts and fiction. Judith Johnston insists that this tradition was over by the time Jameson wrote her diary and replaced in the 1820s by more realistic travel notes, focusing on facts that would prevent the intervention of a tearful, sometimes even pathetic, narrative voice. The serious voice of the cultivated traveller who provides a substantial amount of shrewd remarks is much more trustworthy than the voice of the abandoned woman who came to Italy as a place of comfort but who would eventually

The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Exile of a Fragmented Heart

291

die for love. Although contemporary comments – by Fanny Kemble for example3 – suggest that some readers believe in that tragic story due to the footnotes and the approval of a fictional editor as well as to the allegedly convincing tone of the lachrymose diarist, I believe that such an exaggerated, almost ridiculous narrator, cannot but have been unmasked by a more clearsighted reader. Jameson’s narrator is too sad to be true in reputedly realistic fiction. Jameson depicts an excessively emotional narrator, but also distances herself from the traditional expectations of female fiction brimming with emotions and tears. As the immoderate narrator is counterbalanced by the well-organized visitor, one cannot but mistrust the objective of the wretched traveller. Italy as a response to a broken heart, as is often the case in fiction by women narrators, the first of whom being Madame de Staël’s Corinne4, is denounced by Jameson through the voice of the diarist who is the victim of excessive emotions. Indeed she first announces her death at the beginning of her narrative and unsurprisingly dies as soon as she leaves Italy. The purpose of Jameson’s book does not lie in the narrator’s sudden fits of despair but in the accurate descriptions she gives of Italian museums, churches and landscapes. However, travel fiction, like sentimental novels, was still considered as a subgenre of little interest at the beginning of the 19th century. No woman novelist was expected to write a well-documented and perspicacious report on Italian history of art but readers rather expected from her an Italian history of heart. The sentimental subplot justifies the clever and discerning pages on art and history, allowing Jameson to distance herself from either sentimental or travel fiction as they were seen at the beginning of the 19th century. Going to Italy, a favourite destination for the British community, was thus in keeping with contemporary trends and expectations. It also allowed Jameson to assert her own skills in the history of art. To be acknowledged as a competent observer, she had first to debase her own narrator, accentuating the conventional features generally associated with female fiction.5 However, the emotionally excessive diarist does not succeed

3

4

5

“The Ennuyée, one is given to understand, dies, and it was a little vexatious to behold her sitting on a sofa in a very becoming state of blooming plumptitude”, quoted by Judith Johnston, op. cit, p. 101. It is important to notice here that the full title of de Staël’s illustrious book was Corinne, or Italy, thus making Italy a mirror image as of well as a companion to the emotional artist. Dorothy Mermin insists that the anonymous diarist constantly expresses her renouncement to write and publish her book: “The diarist’s denigration of herself and her work (her ‘poor little’ book), her helpless submission to the ebb and flow of contradictory emotions, her denial of any intention to organize or publish what she writes, her timid appeal to pity rather than to judgment, and above all her terror of displaying vanity and of ‘exposure’ to hostile

292

Fabienne Moine

in overshadowing her doppelgänger who is at variance with what is expected from a lady traveller. The diarist cannot but refer to Corinne and de Staël as genuine landmarks during travels in Italy. For example, while visiting the region between Velletri and Terracina, the narrator writes that the area is famous for being the setting of various classical books including Corinne, a book which “has superadded romantic and charming associations quite as delightful, and quite as true”6 (91) as the Aeneid and the Odyssey. Corinne’s story may thus be as true as de Staël' s and the narrator’s, justifying the real vogue of female visitors wanting to experience Corinne’s glory and fate: . – "Corinne" I find is a fashionable vade mecum for sentimental travellers in Italy; and that I too might be à la mode, I brought it from Molini' s to-day, with the intention of reading on the spot, those admirable and affecting passages which relate to Florence; but when I began to cut the leaves, a kind of terror seized me, and I threw it down, resolved not to open it again. I know myself weak – I feel myself unhappy; and to find my own feelings reflected from the pages of a book, in language too deeply and eloquently true, is not good for me. I want no helps to admiration, nor need I kindle my enthusiasm at the torch of another' s mind. I can suffer enough, feel enough, think enough, without this. (45)

Reading Corinne’s tragic story is like perusing one’s life, which does not fit in with the narrator’s mood on that particular day. The diarist is rather similar to Corinne as she achieves literary success and dies for love. Her momentary Italian exile from lost love constitutes an artistic pilgrimage, preventing her from simply indulging in emotional pangs. She remains ambiguous as she sometimes makes fun of tragic heroines and exiles like Hagar. Her exile as a cure for a broken heart makes her simultaneously close to those tragic heroes whose fate she is yearning for and more distant from them since she is torn between private ambition and selflessness. Being an exile in Italy was also Lord Byron’s lot; his experience echoes so well the narrator’s own attitude towards her sentimental exile in that she transcribes Byron’s notes from a copy of Disraeli’s Essay on the Literary Character that used to belong to Byron himself: What was rumoured of me in that language, if true, I was unfit for England; and if false, England was unfit for me. But ' there is a world elsewhere.'I have never for an instant regretted that country, – but often that I ever returned to it. It is not my fault that I am obliged to write in English. If I understood any present language, Italian, for instance,

6

eyes”. See Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England 1830-1880 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), p. xiii. The edition to which I refer in this paper is the 1836 edition: The Diary of an Ennuyée (A New Edition, by Mrs Jameson), Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1836).

The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Exile of a Fragmented Heart

293

equally well, I would write in it: – but it will require ten years, at least, to form a style. No tongue so easy to acquire a little of, and so difficult to master thoroughly, as Italian. (28)

The narrator often quotes Byron when she is at a loss to find suitable expressions herself. Her habit of borrowing words and phrases in French and quoting from poems in Italian also shows how distant from England and from the English she sometimes can feel. Imitating Byron as an exile and as literary figure validates her own exile since she is also ‘unfit’ for that country where the man guilty of abandoning her lives. Being closer to Byron and less attached to Corinne validates her own exile and makes it a genuine artistic experience rather than a simple sentimental escape. Ellen Moers suggests that Italy is the place “where one lives openly, in the open air and sun”. It is “most suited to women of artistic talent”; “For married happiness and domestic virtues, England is undoubtedly the place; but for love outside marriage, go to Italy”.7 Indeed, there will be no peaceful and successful love affair in England whereas Italy will offer her literary insights and freedom from the prison of love. The diarist’s position remains ambivalent throughout the text because she is not able to find a comfortable position as a sentimental novelist. She challenges sentimental fiction just as Catherine Morland challenges Gothic fiction in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Both within and beyond tradition is the position she has chosen; feelings give substance to her diary and justify her own writing as well as her journey, but at the same time they are discarded to be replaced by sound statements on art and life: “Have I been till now the dupe and the victim of factitious feelings? Virtue, honour, feeling, generosity, you are then but words, signifying nothing?” (4). That feelings cannot be trusted anymore is one of the constant reminders of the diary. However as a true Romantic heroine, she cannot but submit to the great power of her destructive feelings that will eventually kill her once in France. Thanks to her Italian tour, she manages to postpone her untimely death. I will examine now the fact that the diary cannot be apprehended as a complete entity, being the production of an almost schizophrenic narrator, exiled from her own self. Italy, as is represented here mirrors the fragmentary vision of the diarist. She starts her tour in Calais on June 21, stopping in Paris for a couple of months and leaving for Italy on October 10 after a quick halt in Geneva. Then she tours Italy, stopping in major places of interest. The last pages of her diary indicate that she went back to France, passing through

7

See Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1963; repr. 1986), pp. 202-3.

294

Fabienne Moine

Lyons and St Albin at the end of May. A note from the editor announces that the diarist died in Autun and was buried “in the garden of the Capuchin Monastery, near the city” (163). Italy is seen through the kaleidoscopic gaze of the diarist, who stresses Italy’s lack of unity, even if it is also the country that soothes her disturbed mind for a few months. The prose of her diary irregularly alternates with short and longer pieces of poetry, echoing the changing spirits of the visitor who hesitates between authentic description and lyrical reconstruction of her excursions. For example, when she visits the region of Velletri and Terracina, the sight of ruins and vestiges induces her to write a multi-layered passage, mingling prose and poetry, in which she shows how fascinated she can be by the various strata of history which overlap like historical palimpsests. The hidden Grecian ruins that so fascinate the diarist have been “swallowed up”: “nothing remains – their sites, their very names have passed away and perished. We might as well hunt after a forgotten dream” (92). She both complains about and relishes in vanishing civilizations as, for example, when she writes a short poem about places that are forgotten due to the lack of artistic transcription: Vain was the chief’s, the sage’s pride, They had no POET, and they died! In vain they toil’d, in vain they bled, They had no POET – and are dead. (92)

Italy’s stratified past accentuates the narrator’s ambivalent fear of dissolution. Her visit to Italy allows her to bury her past and her lost love, but it also makes her dig them up again since the presence of atavistic hauntings, allowing the irruption of the past into the present, is inscribed in what composes the identity of both Italy and of the diarist. Sightseeing in Gaeta leads her to Cicero’s villa and garden where he was murdered. The beauty of the nearby landscape makes the diarist unable to relate historical events without being overwhelmed by feeling, which pinpoints both the artistic mind she refuses to acknowledge and her involvement in the colourful heritage of the country: “The remembrances connected with all, and a mind to think, and a heart to feel, and thoughts both of pain and pleasure mingling to render the effect more deep and touching” (92). Italy thus fits and contributes to her disintegrating identity. The English community she meets and subsequently avoids, the presence of the Austrians in Naples, and the enforced stay in Paris, also urge the diarist to become even more estranged from her own self. She has not come to visit the Italians whom she barely refers to in her long diary. She even denies them any identity or distinguishing features and goes as far as being rather insulting:

The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Exile of a Fragmented Heart

295

Let the modern Italians be what they may, – what I hear them styled six times a day at least – a dirty, demoralized, degraded, unprincipled race, – centuries behind our thriceblessed, prosperous, and comfort-loving nation in civilization and morals; (…) I have not many opportunities of studying the national character; I have no dealings with the lower classes, little intercourse with the higher (131).

That Italy is seen as a chessboard of nations and identities can be noticed in the constant use of foreign words, starting with the title of the diary. As the narrator repeatedly suggests that words are insufficient and even useless, she uses foreign words as an attempt to fill the blanks of her perforated narration and life. Being an “Ennuyée” allows her to blur her real identity – she remains anonymous – and to renounce the task of grounding her narrative in clear-cut space and time references that would circumscribe her quickchanging character. Unsurprisingly enough, Italian is never used to describe her low spirits. The Italian poems that the diarist wrote or copied from artists celebrate the beauty and grandeur of places and cities and when they suggest lost love as in “Sonetto di Giambattista Zappi”, the diarist never identifies with the “I” of the poem in Italian. On the contrary, her poems in English, like “A Reply to a Complaint” (73), examine her own suffering and feeling of loss and announce her dissolution: The cloud will vanish away – The sun while shine to morrow – To me shall break no day On this dull night of sorrow!

Similarly “The Last Evening in Naples” tells of her impending death: Land of Romance! Enchanting shore! Fair scenes, near which I linger yet! Never shall I behold ye more, Never this last – last look forget! (116)

Poems in English talk of loss and death whereas inserted poems in Italian cling to reality and serve as commentaries on the real world. The layers of languages aiming at circumscribing reality once again reveal how estranged she is from her surroundings. Passages in Italian refer to more lively and happy situations but the “I” remains excluded from this sense of rapture. Her own native language leads on to her unavoidable death. As for French words and expressions, they suggest that France will be the place of her death. She suffers from a not so rare disease among sentimental heroines: her “ennui” stretches from spleen to world-weariness and grief. The French term is wide

296

Fabienne Moine

enough to include her despair and express how unfit she is to enjoy her Italian journey. “Quand on sent, on réfléchit rarement”8 (75). What she means is that feelings prevent thoughts. The following example of the use of French words enhances this feeling of estrangement. A visit to the Sistine Chapel overwhelmed the diarist who wished she could experience rapture, were she not so lonely: I never more deeply felt my own ignorance and deficiencies than I did to-day. I saw so many things I did not understand, so much which I wished to have explained to me, I longed so inexpressibly for someone to talk to, to exclaim to, to help me to wonder, to admire, to be extasiée! but I was alone: and I know not how it is, or why, but when I am alone, not only my powers of enjoyment seem to fail me in a degree, but even my mental faculties; and the multitude of my own ideas and sensations confuse, oppress, and irritate me. (130)

The French word “extasiée” entails that she would like to go through an ecstatic experience that would enable her to stop being an “ennuyée”, fixed in the present time. Being an “extasiée” suggests that she would stop suffering and go through a more spiritual experience. Escaping from stasis is equivalent to the hopeful exile from her own self she craves for during her Italian tour. Being an “ennuyée” or a “blue devil” as she refers to herself in the introduction, she considers herself as an outcast, unable to find “a place of her own” in Italy she cannot but apprehend as an image of fragmentation. She is paradoxically homeless in the cradle of art that was a shelter for many an expatriate poet in the 19th century. She perceives reality as a set of opposite and irreconcilable elements such as the foreign languages that are for her like the re-enactment of the Babel episode rather than a true gift of tongues. After the debasing remarks on Italians I have already quoted, she explains that she cannot feel any interest in them as she is only “a nameless sort of person, a mere bird of passage, (…) a pilgrim” (131), “a wanderer, a stranger and a heretic” (70) who is trying to find comfort among Italian treasures. As an almost schizophrenic narrator who cannot but see reality in terms of fragmentation and incoherence, she imprints her own split personality on her description of Italy. The diarist as a go-between considers Italy as a place of transition but not a place of definitive exile. Migrations in space and in mood that force her to see Italy as an ever-changing locus, make her feel like a castaway, almost like a vagabond, whose recurrent obsession is with her own death.

8

“When one feels, one rarely thinks” in English.

The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Exile of a Fragmented Heart

297

However, her self-imposed isolation has an aesthetic purpose, redeeming this outcast in the Italian Eden. Italy is also a place for exiles of her sort since it allows her to “articulate her sense of de-racination” in Alison Chapman’s words.9 Italy’s well-known power of restoration is familiar to the diarist who writes a poem on the subject. The speaker is a mermaid who addresses her fellow sea creatures; suffice it to say that this poem perfectly fits her situation and shows that Italy’s healing powers help her see her own pitiful situation differently: Ye who have fled your natal shores in hate Or anger, urged by pale disease, or want, Or grief, that clinging like the spectre bat, Sucks drop by drop the life-blood from the heart, And hither come to learn forgetfulness, Or to prolong existence! ye shall find Both – though the spring Lethean flow no more, There is a power in these entrancing skies And murmuring waters and delicious airs, Felt in the dancing spirits and the blood, And falling on the lacerated heart Like balm, until that life becomes a boon, Which elsewhere is a burthen and a curse. (98)

Italy allows the diarist to change her perspective on her grief and rancour. It represents for her the locus of deracination, providing the onlooker with a new speculative power. The Italy that is perceived by the diarist is almost magical – the land of mermaids and witches – since it offers the spectator the reflection she is in need of. She does not seem to consider Italy as a territory peopled by men but rather by dead artists. Italy’s interest to her lies in the way it is naturally transformed into fiction, into her imaginary land – which is a common feature of 19th century women artists. Examples of her aesthetic representation of Italy are legion throughout the diary. Each new discovery leads to such a transformation, as does her visit to the Roman Forum: All this sounds, while I soberly write it down, very sentimental, and picturesque, and poetical. It was exactly what I saw – what I often see: such is the place, the scenery, the people. Every group is a picture, the commonest object has some interest attached to it, the commonest action is dignified by sentiment, the language around us is music, and the air we breathe is poetry. (79)

9

See Alison Chapson and Jane Stabler’s introduction to Unfolding the South: NineteenthCentury British Women Writers and artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), p. 12.

298

Fabienne Moine

On the occasion of her visit to Lucca, she gives her own definition of the Italian picturesque, which justifies her aesthetic exile there. For her, the English picturesque only denotes rural and natural landscapes and is rather synonymous with “delightfulness”. Contrarily, all of Italy is picturesque, even “the commonest objects of every-day life” (153). The Italian picturesque comes from the fact that it is recreated and totally unnatural. The power of the Italian picturesque is “something beyond, and over all” (155). The impossible representation of truth and nature is due to the specific character of Italy that does not meet the diarist’s former expectations. Once in Genoa, she visits a castle that cannot but be “enchanted”, “a land of Faery” (91) to her eyes. She meets there an old Governatore who is akin to the villain Montoni! Like Ann Radcliffe’s heroines, she turns life into fiction or romance: I sat down on one of the cannon, and leaning on the battlements, surveyed the scene around, below me, with a feeling of rapture, not a little enhanced by the novelty and romance of my situation. I was alone – I had no reason to think there was a single human being within hearing. (…) [T]he scenery around me was such, as the dullest eye – the coldest, the most unimaginative soul, could not have contemplated without emotion. I sat, I know not how long, abandoned to reveries, sweet and bitter, till I was startled by footsteps close to me, and turning round, I beheld a figure so strange and fantastic, and considering the time, place, and circumstance, so incomprehensible and extraordinary, that I was dumb with surprise. (156-157)

Transforming the representation of Italy into what the narrator wants is the purpose of her journey from her too vivid and sentimental pain. The feeling of the sublime generated by Italy restores her to life, although Italian landscapes are nothing but life-like according to her. The journey to fiction, either apprehended by the senses or written in her little diary, is an exile from nature that kills to fiction and its healing powers. The first words she wrote in Calais, on arrival from Britain, show how imprisoned in grief she was: “I leave behind me the scenes, the objects, so long associated with pain; but from pain itself I cannot fly: it has become a part of myself” (1). Italy being beyond representation, the narrator is driven from her desperate mood, and her monosemic interpretation of signs, and flees to the “enchanted land” (91) that offers a dappled vision that neither feelings nor senses can circumscribe. The following quotation underlines the mottled character of the Italian landscape: There is in this climate a prismatic splendour of tint, a glorious all-embracing light, a vivid distinctness of outline, something in the reality more gorgeous, glowing, and luxuriant, than poetry could dare to express, or painting imitate. Ah that such beauty, varying in the light

The Diary of an Ennuyée: Anna Jameson’s Exile of a Fragmented Heart

299

Of living nature, cannot be portrayed s silent skill; (118) By words, nor by the pencil'

Her journey to Italy remains a short-lived exile from her old static and suffering self because she has temporarily banished her aimless feelings. When she describes herself as an “Ennuyée”, which is her state of mind at the beginning and close of the diary, she means that she is desperate and brokenhearted, but the adjective also evokes the fact that she suffers from weariness due to her idleness. Although she constantly pretends to be a dying woman, the episode on Mount Vesuvius shows how brave and lively she is. Debasing and even denying her ability to describe the thrilling adventure10, she nevertheless relinquishes her usual maudlin tone and literally feels inspired by the impressive sights: “roaring and hissing of ten thousand imprisoned winds; a rumbling sound like artillery; a stream of lava rushing to overwhelm us” (101). She concludes her description of the expedition to the volcano by saying: “I thought I had never beheld any thing so wildly picturesque” (102). The poor creature she wants us to believe she is turns out to be a very brave woman with genuine literary abilities she has continually denied throughout the diary: “I saw the danger without the slightest sensation of terror” (103); “I could scarcely believe in the reality of the tremendous scene I had witnessed” (104). Italy has truly revived her, allowing her to relinquish her morbid attitude and bad faith: from her balcony overhanging the bay of Naples, she feels “that indefinite sensation of excitement, that superflu de vie,11 quickening every pulse and thrilling through every nerve, is a pleasure peculiar to this climate, where the mere consciousness of existence is happiness enough” (105). The anonymous diarist will die in Autun, just a few days after the end of her one-year tour of Italy. Once there, the heartbroken speaker cannot but go back to her former state of depression and stasis.12 Her diary becomes “illegible” in the words of its alleged editor and as fragmented as her heart. Like Sappho whose poetical fragments mirror her shattered body after her untimely death, the diarist cannot survive with a broken heart. She

10 11 12

“I am not in a humour to describe, or give way to any poetical flights” (100). “excess of life” in English. In her article on feminine sympathy in The Diary of an Ennuyée, Kate Walchester points out that Autun is the French town in which Charles Maurice de Talleyrand was bishop at the end of the 18th century. Walchester signals that he helped the Austrians rule over and submit Northern Italy. The feminine and fragmented Italy as well as the heroine are both dying due to oppression and subjugation to masculine powers. See Kate Walchester, ‘“A Real picture of natural and feminine feeling?” Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée’, Journal of AngloItalian Studies, 8 (2006), 129-148.

300

Fabienne Moine

undoubtedly dies of consumption, having been literally consumed by her creeping despair. Italy was for her an enchanted place that allowed her to overlook her lack of ambition. Her tour of Italy represents her exile from her own broken heart and from her fate that cannot but be tragic for a PreVictorian heroine. Her sentimental journey turns out to be a poetical journal because Italy becomes the land of fiction that provides women with access to creative powers. Italy as a cradle of life and of new constructive feelings, represents the perfect locus of deracination, as an aesthetic place and as a welcoming country for all those who are challenging their own sense of fragmentation. The schizophrenic narrator shows the reader how she imprints on her representation of Italy her own awareness of decomposition; Italy resembles love-stricken heroines and is probably the perfect place for those who are contemplating escape or freedom. It embodies what they imagine when they wish to flee from any oppressive situation. The diarist becomes a go-between, bridging and criss-crossing the frontier between her destructive desires and her productive yearning for fictionalization. Her diary serves as a watershed13 she crosses back and forth and her exile is multifaceted, granting her the possibility of being free from her sentimental prison as well as to enter the world of fiction. Bibliography Chapman, Alison and Jane Stabler, eds, Unfolding the South: NineteenthCentury British Women Writers and artists in Italy (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1963; repr. 1986). Jameson, Anna, The Diary of an Ennuyée (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1836). Mermin, Dorothy, Godiva’s Ride:Women of Letters in England 1830-1880 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993). Johnson, Judith, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). Walchester, Kate, ‘“A Real picture of natural and feminine feeling?” Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 8 (2006), 129-148.

13

“Watershed” is the term used by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler in reference to Alice Meynell’s poem “The Watershed” to indicate that Italy is always a land beyond boundaries for women writers. See Unfolding the South, pp. 1-14), p. 11.

Christopher Whalen ‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste James Joyce lived in Trieste between October 1904 and July 1920, when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although he left it within that period for sojourns in Pola (October 1904 to February 1905), Rome (July 1906 to March 1907), three return trips to Ireland between 1909 and 1912, and a longer exodus to Zurich during the First World War, he was repeatedly drawn back to the Adriatic city that became his ‘second country’.1 His life there was often hard. He taught English in the Berlitz School and gave private lessons in the homes of Trieste’s upper classes. He relied heavily on borrowing and credit, and the generosity and patience of friends and family, especially Stanislaus, who was often left to deal with his brother’s debts when he left the city. He continued the Joyce family tradition of collecting addresses, staying in one place only for as long as the landlord would tolerate his late rent payments. Despite their financial hardships, James and his ‘wife’ Nora were spendthrifts, adopting a bohemian lifestyle not justified by their sporadic and always inadequate income. Joyce tried various money-making schemes, including the establishment of the Volta cinema in Dublin, which was sold for a loss in June 1910 only six months after opening. He also became an agent for the Irish clothes company Foxford Tweeds and was indeed listed as a ‘commercial agent’ in the Trieste burial register after the death of his third child by miscarriage in August 1908.2 Whilst in Trieste, Joyce published his first collection of poems, Chamber Music (1907); completed Dubliners and negotiated its eventual publication in 1914; reworked Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; wrote his only play, Exiles; planned and drafted the early chapters of Ulysses; and then, during the nine unhappy months he lived in a changed Trieste after the war, drafted ‘Nausicaa’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and parts of ‘Circe’. He also wrote occasional poems, some of which were published in Pomes Penyeach (1927); composed Giacomo Joyce, his only prose work not set in Dublin; gave lectures on English literature, Irish culture, and Hamlet; and wrote

1

2

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. edn with corrections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 389. Erik Schneider, ‘Towards Ulysses: Some Unpublished Joyce Documents from Trieste’, Journal of Modern Literature, 27, 4 (Summer 2004), 1-16 (pp. 2-3), (accessed 13 February 2009; Athens or ProQuest subscription required).

302

Christopher Whalen

articles on Ireland for the local irredentist newspaper, Il Piccolo della Sera. Trieste was the city in which he reached his artistic maturity, in which he developed from the precocious talent represented by Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait into the writer capable of creating Ulysses. Trieste’s importance is underlined by its appearance in the signatures at the end of Portrait and Ulysses: it is the site of creation. The growth of interest in Joyce’s life in Trieste is coterminous with the development of Irish studies of Joyce, re-examining his works through the focus of postcolonial discourse, fostering a greater sense of Joyce as rooted in place. The International James Joyce Symposium was held in Trieste in June 2001 after an absence of over thirty years. Also in that year, the SpringSummer edition of the James Joyce Quarterly was devoted to Joyce in Trieste, capitalizing on a spate of book-length studies of the subject,3 which have revised Ellmann’s portrait of the ‘rather dispirited place’4 he visited in the 1950s. According to McCourt, these developments affirm Trieste’s ‘central importance in Joyce’s creative consciousness and its continuing significance as a key Joyce city, in fact, the key city – after Dublin.’5 One of Joyce’s English pupils was a man named Ettore Schmitz, whom he first met shortly after returning from Rome in 1907. Schmitz, a neglected novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Austrian Jew with irredentist sympathies who worked for his father-in-law’s ship-varnish company. Joyce and Svevo developed a literary friendship, which always remained somewhat formal, partly because of their age difference (Svevo was twenty-one years Joyce’s senior – the approximate age gap between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom), partly due to Svevo’s higher social class (his wife Livia treated Nora with contempt). Svevo’s hybrid identity provided Joyce with a model for Bloom; he also spoke and wrote in the Triestino dialect,6 a precursor to the polyglot Finnegans Wake. Joyce

3

4

5

6

See Renzo S. Crivelli, James Joyce: Itinerari Triestini; or Triestine Itineraries, trans. by John McCourt (Trieste: MGS Press, 1996); Peter Hartshorn, James Joyce and Trieste, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 86 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997); and John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Richard Robinson, ‘A Stranger in the House of Habsburg: Joyce’s Ramshackle Empire’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38, 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2001), 321-39 (p. 323). John McCourt, ‘“My Second Country”: The Triestine Joyce’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38, 34 (Spring-Summer 2001), 309-19 (p. 312). Some Triestines argue that Triestino is a language rather than a dialect.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

303

encouraged Svevo’s writing and later introduced his works to the Paris literati.7 The year before his death following a car accident in 1928, Svevo delivered a memorial lecture in Milan, in which he underlined the importance of Trieste in Joyce’s creative imagination, particularly in relation to Dublin: ‘In his alert intelligence points of contact between the two cities were certainly established. That could easily be: Trieste was for him a little Ireland which he was able to contemplate with more detachment than he could his own country.’8 The purpose of this essay is to investigate some of these ‘points of contact’ between Dublin and Trieste, to reveal the sometimes neglected or understated influence of Trieste on Joyce’s fictional representations of Dublin and Ireland. The connections are not always made explicit; they exist below the surface, as if one place has been mapped on to the other. Like the topography of Homer’s Odyssey in the scheme of Ulysses, Trieste functions as a base text, a locus memoriae,9 over which Joyce inscribes his version of Dublin. A Tale of Two Cities Early 20th century Trieste had a number of similarities with Dublin, which were not lost on Joyce. Ellmann notes: ‘he saw in it certain resemblances to Dublin and felt he understood it. Like Dublin, Trieste had a large population but remained a small town.’10 Both cities had nationalist independence movements fighting against colonial occupation. Georgian Dublin had been the second city of the British Empire; Trieste was a crucial commercial outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, known as the ‘Hamburg of the South’, Europe’s second largest port behind Marseilles.11 Its large Italianate population wanted to be reunited with Italy. There was also a smaller Slav nationalist movement. Robinson observes: ‘Trieste had been under Habsburg control for over five hundred years – a fact that tended to blur the lines between occupier and occupied, rather as had and has been the case in the

7

8

9

10 11

For another example of cross-cultural literary friendship, see Peter Vassallo’s essay in this collection on John Hookham Frere and Gabriele Rossetti. Italo Svevo, James Joyce: A Lecture Delivered in Milan in 1927 by his Friend, trans. by Stanislaus Joyce ([Milan: Officine Grafiche ‘Esperia’], 1950), n. p., fol. 2r. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Between Inventio and Memoria: Locations of “Aeolus”’, in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays, ed. by Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), pp. 190-7 (p. 193). Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 196. Robinson, p. 323.

304

Christopher Whalen

long colonial occupation of Ireland.’12 Each city had a distinct, hybridized dialect: Triestino was based on Italian but fused elements from the city’s diverse population of Austrians, Hungarians, Greeks, Jews, Croats, Czechs, Slovenes, Turks, and Armenians in a polyglot language which ‘synchronically record[s] a history of ethnic plurality’.13 Niny Rocco-Bergera calls Trieste ‘that little Babel’14 for its confusion of tongues: the local dialect was sometimes incomprehensible between the different communities. Joyce’s children, Giorgio and Lucia, were brought up speaking Triestino and the Joyce household continued to use it even after they moved to Zurich in 1915 and Paris in 1920.15 The Dublin dialect of Hiberno-English is a hybrid combining literal transpositions of Gaelic, its syntax and rhythms, with the ‘acquired speech’16 of the country’s English occupiers. Joyce’s interest in Hiberno-English is reflected in his 1909 Italian translation of J. M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea in collaboration with Nicolò Vidacovich. McCourt notes Joyce was ‘very taken by the drama’s effect on the ear’, but did not attempt to reproduce the West-of-Ireland English in an equivalent Italian dialect; opting instead to convey the rhythms and sounds in standard Italian.17 There are physical and geographical resemblances between the cities as well. They are both provincial, lying at the extremes of their respective colonial territories. Their large bays mirror each other: Dublin’s facing east, Trieste’s south-west. There are popular bathing places south of Dublin, the ‘fortyfoot hole’18 in which Buck Mulligan goes swimming at the end of ‘Telemachus’; in Trieste the Fontana baths, which Joyce remembers in ‘On the Beach at Fontana’ (Pomes Penyeach; dated Trieste, 1914): ‘A senile sea numbers each single / Slimesilvered stone.’19 The Triestine baths perhaps anticipate the ‘snotgreen’, ‘scrotumtightening sea’ at Sandycove and

12 13 14

15

16

17 18

19

Robinson, p. 324. Ibid., p. 336. Niny Rocco-Bergera, ‘James Joyce and Trieste’, James Joyce Quarterly, 9, 3 (Spring 1972), 342-9 (p. 346). Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 389. See also Tony Kushner’s essay in this collection, which describes the experience of Hilde Gerrard, a German Jewish refugee in the 1930s. After taking temporary refuge in Milan, where Hilde gave birth to twins and gave them the Italian names Renato and Gabriella, the Gerrard family moved to Britain, where the children were brought up as British citizens. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 159. McCourt, The Years of Bloom, pp. 134-5. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (London: Bodley Head, 1986; repr. 2002), 1.600. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. by Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 56.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

305

Haines’s cigarette case, the epithet for Ireland: ‘a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone.’20 ‘Senile’ may also recall Svevo’s novel Senilità (1898), for which Joyce suggested the English title, As a Man Grows Older. Crivelli observes that Trieste’s grey neo-classical buildings ‘were reminiscent of the Georgian flowering in Ireland’ and that its Canal Grande is ‘set between the houses like the longer, winding, iron-bridged Grand Canal’ of Dublin.21 The two rivers are confluent in the Finnegans Wake character Anna Livia Plurabelle, which combines Dublin’s Liffey with the name of Svevo’s wife. Joyce wrote: ‘I have given the name of Signora Schmitz to the protagonist of the book I am writing. [...] the person involved is the Pyrrha of Ireland (or rather of Dublin) whose hair is the river beside which (her name is Anna Liffey) the seventh city of Christendom springs up’.22 Crivelli also suggests that Joyce’s familiarity with the brothels in Trieste’s old city (città vecchia), known as the Cavana district, informed his depiction of Dublin’s nighttown in the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses. Joyce lived near a brothel outside the old city when he stayed on via della Barriera Vecchia in 1910.23 An early 20th century account of the città vecchia describes ‘An old city with decrepit rotten-walled hovels huddled together in lurid, sinister alleyways, under which a multitude of stinking primitive canals pollute the soil and infect the air with their exhalations.’24 Some of these features are mapped on to Dublin’s nighttown: ‘Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. [...] Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes.’25 Later Bloom encounters ‘Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners’,26 which recalls the Paduan scene in Giacomo Joyce: ‘Under the arches in the dark streets near the river the whores’ eyes spy out for fornicators.’27 The nighttown of Ulysses therefore functions as a locus memoriae, combining Joyce’s experiences of Italian brothels in his fictional recreation of Dublin. Trieste was for Joyce ‘a little Ireland’ because he felt at home there. His letters to Nora from Dublin in 1909 ache with nostalgia and homesickness,

20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27

James Joyce, Ulysses, 1.78, 615-16. Crivelli, p. 70. Letter to Ettore Schmitz, 20 February 1924, in Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1975; repr. 1992), p. 301, n. 2 (translation). McCourt, The Years of Bloom, p. 55. M. Pozzetto (Peripatetico), La Città Vecchia di Trieste (Trieste: Stabilimento tipografico nazionale, 1926); quoted in Crivelli, p. 48. James Joyce, Ulysses, 15.3-4, 138-9. Ibid., 15.597-8. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, p. 230.

306

Christopher Whalen

longing for his return: ‘La nostra bella Trieste! I have often said that angrily but tonight I feel it true. I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes Miramar. After all, Nora, it is the city which has sheltered us.’28 In another letter he misses domestic comforts, a real mix of Irish and Triestine dishes: O, I am hungry now. The day I arrive get Eva to make one of the threepenny puddings and make some kind of vanilla sauce without wine. I would like roast beef[,] rice-soup, capuzzi garbi, mashed potatoes, pudding and black coffee. No, no I would like stracotto di maccheroni, a mixed salad, stewed prunes, torroni, tea and presnitz. Or no I would like stewed eels or polenta with… Excuse me, dear, I am hungry tonight. […] I am so glad I am now in sight of Miramar.29

Home for Joyce is wherever he finds Nora. In the Trieste Notebook (c. 19079) he writes under the heading ‘Nora’: ‘“Wherever thou art shall be Erin to me”’30 – a line from Thomas Moore’s song ‘Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin’: Tho’ the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me. In exile thy bosom shall still be my home And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.31

Nora thus becomes strongly associated with home in exile. The link between Nora and Trieste is confirmed by Roberto Prezioso, one of Joyce’s students and his commissioning editor at Il Piccolo della Sera, who refers to Nora affectionately as ‘little Ireland’ in his correspondences with the Joyces in late summer 1913.32

28 29

30

31 32

Letter to Nora Barnacle Joyce, 7 September 1909, in Selected Letters, p. 170. Letter to Nora Barnacle Joyce, 20 December 1909, in Selected Letters, p. 192. Food is also a symbol of Hilde Gerrard’s identification with place as a refugee: she celebrated VE Day in the small Lancashire town of Colne by cooking a ‘large bowl of risotto’ for her neighbours (see Tony Kushner’s essay in this collection). The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, ed. by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 103. (accessed 13 February 2009). McCourt, The Years of Bloom, p. 193. Prezioso, a close friend of Joyce, provided him with a model for Robert Hand in Exiles, having endeavoured to become Nora’s lover.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

307

The Site of Writing Trieste provided Joyce with an ‘observatory’33 from which to view Dublin, away from the stifling provincialism of Ireland. In the Trieste Notebook, Joyce writes of Ireland: ‘Its learning is in the hands of the monks and their clerks and its art in the hands of blacklegs who still serve those ideas which their fellow artists in Europe have rebelled against.’34 Despite the cities’ similarities, Joyce realized that in Trieste ‘he breathed a different atmosphere’35 which liberated his art. Joyce disapproved of the nationalist bent of the Irish literary revival. Stanislaus recalls how Joyce tried to encourage the directors of the Irish Literary Theatre to produce plays by European dramatists such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, and Maeterlinck: ‘But he couldn’t make them take him seriously. They wanted only patriotic plays, and Joyce maintained that a program of patriotism was just as harmful to art as commercialism.’36 Stanislaus also notes: ‘He couldn’t endure the melancholy of Irish poetry and music. He said that Ireland had contributed nothing but a whine to the literature of Europe.’37 Joyce found religious as well as artistic freedom in Trieste, away from the monolith of the Catholic Church. One suspects he took pride in declaring his entire household ‘without religion’ in the 1910 census of Trieste. Giorgio and Lucia were also listed as ‘without religion’ when they were registered to attend the local school in via Parini.38 Trieste was the site of Joyce’s Dublin ‘observatory’, but it would be wrong to think that he was oblivious to his surroundings, only ever gazing down the telescope towards his abandoned homeland. Hartshorn, for example, would benefit from looking at Joyce’s works from a more distant perspective: ‘He lived in Trieste for years before any of his writing focused on the city, and even then, only in a minor way.’39 True, with the exception of Giacomo Joyce (c. 1912-14), Joyce always writes about Ireland; but he draws upon features of Trieste in order to focus his vision of home as demonstrated

33 34 35

36

37 38

39

Crivelli, p. 68. The Workshop of Daedalus, p. 100. Claudio Antoni, ‘A Note on Trieste in Joyce’s Time’, James Joyce Quarterly, 9, 3 (Spring 1972), 318-19 (p. 319). Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce, trans. by Ellsworth Mason (New York: James Joyce Society, 1950), pp. 21-2. Ibid., Recollections, p. 15. Schneider, p. 8. For another example of an Italian city in which the British ex-pat community found tolerance of their political and religious differences, see Edward Corp’s essay in this collection on the Stuart court in Rome. Hartshorn, p. 136.

308

Christopher Whalen

above in the descriptions of the cities’ nighttowns. Stanislaus writes of Joyce’s plan for Portrait: ‘It was Joyce’s declared purpose to synthesize in literary form, by the broadest use of artistic freedom, the influences and environment which had produced him.’40 The author of Portrait was not a finished form: he was still developing. Svevo claims: ‘we Triestines have a right to regard him with deep affection as if he belonged in a certain sense to us’ and credits Trieste as the nursery of Joyce’s literary talent: ‘A piece of Ireland was ripening under our sun.’41 Roy Foster points out that the partial perspective displayed by Hartshorn – following only the direction of Joyce’s gaze, rather than also considering where he is looking from – is a common critical flaw: Irish writers may discover their voice in exile, but critical attention concentrates on the vision of Ireland thus achieved, rather than the way it may have been conditioned by their foreign surroundings. One would expect Joyce to be the exception, but critics and biographers’ attention has generally presented him as a committed exile who by a tremendous act of creative will magically preserved an unchanged Dublin within.42

Joyce’s Dublin does not remain unaffected by Trieste: he borrows, for example, Trieste’s hybrid demographic and recycles or translates it into his characters of Dublin – a diversity that would be hard to imagine back in Ireland.43 Joyce claims in his lecture ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’ (1907): Our civilization is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed [...]. In such a fabric, it is pointless searching for a thread that has remained pure, virgin and uninfluenced by other threads nearby. [...] No race has less right to make such a boast [of purity] than the one presently inhabiting Ireland.44

Joyce appears to be grafting Trieste’s hybridity on to Ireland; or, having seen Trieste’s diverse population at first hand, merely recognizes a similar cultural melting pot in Ireland’s history, in which ‘the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, the Anglo-Saxon colonists and

40 41 42

43

44

Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections, pp. 22-3. Svevo, fols 1v, 6r. Roy Foster, ‘Tarry Easty’, London Review of Books, 22, 23 (30 November 2000), (accessed 13 February 2009; subscription required). Hartshorn, p. 136. For another Anglo-Italian ‘imaginary homeland’, see Tobias Döring’s essay in this collection on D. G. Rossetti. James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 118.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

309

the Huguenots came together to form a new entity’.45 The Triestine ‘observatory’ gives him the perspective to view Ireland and its history in a sharper focus. A friend of Joyce’s in Zurich, once remarked: ‘Joyce had a deep interest in towns [...] and in their design and history. They appeared to him as collective individuals, history turned into shape and space, large reservoirs of life.’46 His journalism on Irish topics for an Italian audience exploits the parallels between Ireland and Trieste without explicitly linking them: the correspondences operate below the surface. On his last visit to Ireland in the summer of 1912, Joyce visited Galway, the home of Nora and her family. In August he sent back to Trieste an article for Il Piccolo della Sera entitled ‘The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port’ in which we can see Joyce forging points of contact between Nora’s homeland and his own adopted ‘second country’. Galway, in his hands, turns into a little Trieste. He notes: ‘Oliver Cromwell’s letters testify that Galway was the second port of the United Kingdom, and the first in the whole kingdom for Spanish and Italian trade.’47 However, Kevin Barry points out that Joyce’s source, James Hardiman’s The History of the Town and County of Galway (1820), makes no mention of Italy.48 In the middle ages the waters of Galway were ‘ploughed by thousands of foreign ships’, but ‘foreign merchants [...] have not landed here for many years.’49 Joyce also forges the identity of an ‘Italian’ mayor of Galway: he claims, ‘on the list of mayors in the 17th century we find the name of Giovanni Fante’; but Barry can only detect the names Martin Founte, Adam Faunte, and Geffry Font in the town archives.50 Again, Joyce has created a composite character from disparate parts, like Bloom, or the girl in Giacomo Joyce. The ‘Italian Memories’ are his own projections of Trieste imposed on the Irish port, seeking connections that are not there in order to justify the article to his Italian readership. Svevo considered it ‘a great title of honor for my city that in Ulysses some of the streets of Dublin stretch on and on into the windings of our old Trieste. Recently Joyce wrote to me: «If Anna Livia (the Liffey) were not swallowed up by the Ocean, she would certainly debouch into the Canal

45 46

47 48 49 50

Ibid., p. 118-19. Carola Giedion-Welcker, ‘Meetings with Joyce’, in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, ed. by Willard Potts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 261; quoted in Hartshorn, p. 21. James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, p. 197. Ibid., p. 340, n. 2. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., pp. 197, 340, n. 3.

310

Christopher Whalen

Grande of Trieste.»’51 Thus the two cities are inextricably linked in Joyce’s imagination. ‘An Irish-Italian Journalist’ On 10 September 1912, in the Dublin newspaper the Freeman’s Journal, Joyce was identified as ‘an Irish-Italian journalist’,52 indicating the duality of his identity. Between 1907 and 1912 he wrote a series of articles for Il Piccolo della Sera, the irredentist newspaper in Trieste. Prezioso, who was acting editor at the time because Teodoro Mayer was on one of his frequent trips to Rome to rally support for Triestine irredentists,53 commissioned the pieces ‘on the evils of empire as found in Ireland. The Piccolo’s readers could be depended upon to see the parallel with the evils of empire as found in Trieste’.54 Joyce had persuaded Prezioso of the similarities between the two nationalist movements, but that does not mean he was himself a nationalist sympathizer; he was merely engaged in the debate and exploited this opportunity to earn good money from his writing. Hartshorn is again somewhat lax in his judgement that Joyce ‘did not equate Ireland with Austria. Triestine politics were largely peripheral to his gaze.’55 The implied equation is not with Austria but with Trieste. Austria, like England, is the occupier; Trieste (Joyce’s ‘little Ireland’) is the occupied land. Triestine politics were certainly not ‘peripheral’ to Joyce: he spent many nights visiting the osterie popular with socialists, absorbing not only his favourite white Opollo wine but also much of Trieste’s socialist political culture.56 What is more, the first articles he wrote for Il Piccolo della Sera were on the eve of an election in which irredentism and socialism were the central campaign issues.57 He may not engage overtly with Triestine politics in his writing, but that does not mean he did not think about and discuss it, especially as he was an avid newspaper reader. Trieste provided Joyce ‘with foreign echoes of Dublin while at the same time offering distinctive material of its own to be moulded to fit the world of his Hibernian metropolis.’58 It

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Svevo, fol. 2r. James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, p. 342. Hartshorn, p. 48. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 255. Hartshorn, p. 25. McCourt, The Years of Bloom, p. 65. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 5.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

311

also moulded his own views. In the early years of his stay, he declared himself a ‘socialistic artist’;59 but by March 1907, Joyce wrote disillusioned from Rome: ‘The interest I took in socialism and the rest has left me. [...] I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary.’60 Joyce could not be called a nationalist either. He affects a kind of disinterestedness: ‘If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognise myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.’61 He disapproved of nationalist bigotry: ‘What I object to most of all in his paper [Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin] is that it is educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred’.62 Trieste had shown him that people are anything but ‘ourselves alone’. The races of Trieste, like the ‘tribes’ of medieval Galway and the long historical legacy of Irish invaders, are all mixed in together. Joyce is reluctant to be associated with any clearly defined ideology. Like Stephen Dedalus, he refuses to be politically pigeon-holed or honour the existing institutions: ‘I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.’63 ‘My Second Country’ Joyce’s remark that Trieste was ‘my second country’64 echoes the sentiments of Scipio Slataper, a Triestine writer and intellectual of mixed Italian, German, and Slav ancestry. Slataper was part of a group of young intellectuals called the Vociani, who chose to associate themselves with Florence over Rome because it was ‘a place open to other cultures, where new and less dogmatic ideas could be nurtured and developed’, whereas

59 60 61

62 63 64

Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, [? 2 or 3 May 1905], in Selected Letters, p. 61. Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, [? 1 March 1907], in Selected Letters, p. 151-2. Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 6 November 1906, in Selected Letters, p. 125. The taxonomy of Joyce’s status in Trieste is problematic. He was a voluntary exile, an emigré; not a refugee. He needed to feel betrayed by his homeland and its people (particularly Dublin), but he still wanted to write about it. For another example of voluntary displacement, see Peter Vassallo’s essay in this collection on John Hookham Frere, who retired to Malta in ‘selfimposed exile’. Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906, in Selected Letters, p. 111. James Joyce, Portrait, p. 208. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 389.

312

Christopher Whalen

Rome ‘symbolized the past, the mediocrity of the present and the possibility of an aggressive, nationalist-imperialist future’.65 According to McCourt, Slataper wrote about Trieste with ‘a profound sense of the city being a place apart and felt himself to be, above all else, a Triestine’. Slataper declares: ‘Trieste is my country. I discover more about Trieste everyday. [...] It is a point where cultures meet.’66 Notably, both writers claim to belong to the city as if citizens of a nation, reminiscent of the Italian city states of the middle ages. Their identification with Trieste is in the same spirit as Bloom’s definition of a nation as ‘the same people living in the same place’67 or the all-embracing address of Professor Jones: ‘Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybreds and lubberds!’ – all these living ‘Eins within a space’.68 Professor Jones’s hybrid formulations reflect the mixed population of Trieste: gentiles, Jews, and laymen; gents (gentlemen) and ladies (inverting the normal order – perhaps even excluding women; or combining gender in ‘lady-men’); gentlemen and ladies’ men (gallants). The Latin singular gens means ‘clan, family, stock, race; tribe, people, nation; or descendant’; its plural gentes denotes ‘foreign peoples’ or ‘foreign nations’. ‘Fullstoppers’ implies natives; ‘semicolonials’ those of mixed heritage like the Anglo-Irish, or Triestines such as Svevo, who had Austrian and Jewish blood but irredentist sympathies. ‘Semicolonials’ could also intend expatriates or exiles such as Joyce who claim a ‘second country’, thus halving their loyalty to one colony, splitting their identity, adopting dual citizenship; but also not stopping indefinitely in the same place like a ‘full’stopper. ‘Hybreds’ are high-breds and ‘lubberds’ low-breds (lubbers); highbrows and low-brows; but also hybrids (unnatural combinations) and loversof-earth (organically pure, from the Gaelic b for v plus German Erde for ‘earth’). The Triestine upper classes, many of whom were Joyce’s pupils, were high-bred hybrids: of mixed origins, particularly Jewish, such as the ‘young person of quality’ so admired in Giacomo Joyce.69 Hybrid is of course a horticultural term, so it is appropriate for Bloom, an Irish-born Jew of Hungarian ancestry, to be named after a flower and call himself ‘Henry Flower’ in his surreptitious correspondences. Both ‘Bloom’ and ‘Flower’, moreover, are translations of his original Hungarian family name, ‘Virag’. Not only is Bloom of mixed racial heritage, but his character is itself composite: grafted together from aspects of various Triestine Jews whom

65 66 67 68 69

McCourt, The Years of Bloom, p. 169. Ibid., p. 170. James Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1422-3. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 2000), 152.16-18. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, p. 229.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

313

Joyce knew, including Svevo (whom Joyce questioned ceaselessly about the Jews), Teodoro Mayer (the owner of Il Piccolo della Sera and therefore, like Bloom, a newspaper man), Mayer’s father (a Hungarian Jew who had a thick moustache like Bloom’s), and Leopold Popper (who also wore a moustache and provided his Christian name; he was the father of Amalia Popper, a student of Joyce’s and one of the sources of the mysterious girl in Giacomo Joyce).70 Hybridity is essential to Triestini; to define them in terms of purity would be a fallacy. Brian Caraher describes Joyce as ‘postnationalist’,71 living a more progressive and inclusive life in Trieste, a spiritual as well as a physical exile who would not serve the Irish nationalist cause. High breeding has nothing to do with ethnic purity. A large proportion of Trieste’s Jewish population intermarried. McCourt notes: ‘95 of the 428 religious marriages involving members of the community between 1900 and 1914 were mixed.’72 This was part of the secularization and assimilation of the Jewish community who until the late 18th century had been confined to the ghetto. Bloom is a lapsed Jew who buys a pork kidney in ‘Calypso’ and converted to Catholicism to marry Molly, having been baptised ‘three times’73 – and so is very much a Triestine in spirit. Joyce celebrates ethnic diversity in the ‘picturesque foreign delegation known as the Friends of the Emerald Isle’ in ‘Cyclops’, who ‘expressed themselves in the strongest possible heterogeneous terms’74 and include among their number: Commedatore Bacibaci Beninobenone […], the Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi, […] Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, […] Señor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, [...] Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli [...]75

– some of whom, despite the bawdy parody of their pompous names, sound as if they could have been members of the Triestine upper classes.76 Joyce in

70 71

72 73 74 75 76

Rocco-Bergera, ‘James Joyce and Trieste’, p. 347. Brian Caraher, ‘Semicolonial Cities and Triestine Joyce: The Cultural Politics of Reading Joyce’s Homeplaces’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38, 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2001), 505-18 (p. 512). McCourt, The Years of Bloom, p. 224. James Joyce, Ulysses, 17.542. Ibid., 12.554, 569-70. Ibid., 12.556-67. ‘Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler’ translated literally means ‘cockbath of balls valley’, while ‘Hurhausdirektorpresident’ is ‘director president of the whore-house’, who is also apparently a native of the Swiss-German city of Zurich, home of little cakes and low taxes (Chäs-

314

Christopher Whalen

fact knew both a Baron and a Count: Baron Ambrogio di Stefano Ralli and Count Francesco Sordina were both private students of his in Trieste. In his later years, Joyce expressed a great admiration for the colourful aristocracy of the Habsburg Empire: ‘They called it a ramshackle empire,’ he told Mary Colum, ‘I wish to God there were more such empires.’77 Joyce was very fond of the Jews he met in Trieste. They, like him, had adopted a ‘second country’ – being dispossessed of their homeland and forced into exile. This is why Bloom hesitates when he defines a nation as ‘the same people living in the same place’; he has to add, ‘Or also living in different places’,78 having realized that the diaspora is still a nation. Joyce is ‘postnationalist’ in the sense that he questions whether nationality is really just ‘a useful fiction’ and ‘must find its basic reason for being in something that surpasses, that transcends and that informs changeable entities such as blood or human speech’.79 In Giacomo Joyce he scorns his pupil for her unquestioning Italian patriotism: ‘She heard that at supper’, he claims dismissively – implying that she is not thinking for herself when condoning the zealous jingoism of the ‘Italian gentlemen’ who expelled the music critic Ettore Albini from a concert hall because he refused to stand for the national anthem in protest against the colonial wars in Libya.80 The young Stephen Dedalus is similarly subjected to his father’s views in Portrait: Stephen sat on the footstool beside his father listening to a long and incoherent monologue. He understood little or nothing of it at first but he became slowly aware that his father had enemies and that some fight was going to take place. He felt too that he was being enlisted for the fight, that some duty was being laid upon his shoulders.81

Nationalism has to be nurtured; it is not in our nature. In Giacomo Joyce the narrator sneers: ‘Ay. They love their country when they are quite sure which country it is’,82 pointing out the mixed nationality and hypocrisy of a Jewish irredentist in Trieste. Translated into the world of Ulysses, the same comment becomes anti-Semitic:

77 78 79 80 81 82

Chüechli are small cheese cakes or pies; Steuerli is the diminutive form of Steuer: tax). For further glosses of the names, see Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, ‘Ulysses’ Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, 2nd rev. and enlarged edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 334-5. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 389. James Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1428. James Joyce, Occasional, Political, and Critical Writing, p. 118. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, p. 234. James Joyce, Portrait, p. 54-5. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, p. 234.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

315

–And after all, says John Wyse, why can’t a jew love his country like the next fellow? –Why not? says J. J., when he’s quite sure which country it is.83

J. J. O’Molloy implies that the Jews do not have a country; they are always in exile; and yet the other ‘J. J.’ in this scene, James Joyce the artist hiding behind his handiwork, is defending Bloom’s right to call himself an Irishman. Bloom is just as Irish as the rest of them: –What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen. –Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.84

Bloom, like Joyce, is outwith his country: an outsider within, ‘inwader and uitlander’,85 both belonging and not belonging. Both Bloom and Joyce find a way of transcending nationality: they are, like Trieste or the wandering Ulysses, ‘nationally transient’86 or ‘semicolonial’. The editors of Semicolonial Joyce propose: ‘To identify points of difference, for Joyce, is to articulate a kind of connection.’87 Joyce performs an act of semicolonization in his parodic list of ‘Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity’ in which he homogenizes a list of Irish and non-Irish heroes, forging points of contact despite their differences. The list includes genuine Irish heroes such as Cuchulin, Brian of Kincora, Captain Boycott, and Theobald Wolfe Tone, alongside sham ‘Irishmen’ such as Dante Alighieri, the Last of the Mohicans, Patrick W. Shakespeare, and Ludwig Beethoven.88 The list implies that cultural heritage is always somewhat forged, that there is something inherently fraudulent about nationalistic labels. Yet Joyce admits: ‘I have lived so long abroad and in so many countries that I can feel at once the voice of Ireland in anything.’89

83 84 85 86 87

88 89

James Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1628-30. Ibid., 12.1430-1. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 581.03. Robinson, p. 335. Marjorie Howes and Derek Attridge, ‘Introduction’ to Semicolonial Joyce, ed. by Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1-20 (p. 2). James Joyce, Ulysses, 12.176-199. Letter to Nora Barnacle Joyce, 19 November 1909, in Selected Letters, p. 178.

316

Christopher Whalen

Giacomo Joyce Giacomo Joyce is unique in Joyce’s oeuvre as the only work set outside of Ireland; or rather, like Joyce, outwith Ireland, within and without: he recycles it, superimposing scenes from Trieste on to Dublin. Its central figure, the object of Giacomo’s affection, has a composite identity akin to Leopold Bloom’s. There is no one-to-one correlation between character and source. The most likely referent is Amalia Popper, but there are other possibilities, including Emma Cuzzi and Annie Schleimer. She resembles, as well, other women in Joyce’s Dublin. In Giacomo Joyce, the narrator’s voyeuristic gaze catches a glimpse of ‘A skirt caught back by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking.’90 This recalls Mangan’s sister in ‘Araby’: ‘The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.’91 This flash of white petticoat and stockings is also transposed into Ulysses. In ‘Lotus Eaters’ Bloom watches a woman across the street: ‘High brown boots with laces dangling. Wellturned foot. [...] Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!’92 When a tram passes he watches ‘her rich gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker: the laceflare of her hat in the sun: flicker, flick’,93 which recalls Mangan’s sister’s ‘hand upon the railing’. There is also a correspondence with the girls sledging with their father in Giacomo Joyce: ‘boots laced in deft crisscross over the fleshwarmed tongue, the short skirt taut from the round knobs of the knees. A white flash: a flake, a snowflake’.94 These scenes resemble (and reassemble) Gerty MacDowell in ‘Nausicaa’ (an episode written in Trieste, where Joyce may have consulted the Giacomo Joyce manuscript on his return from Zurich in mid-October 1919): She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded [...]

90 91 92 93 94

James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, p. 235. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 21. James Joyce, Ulysses, 5.117-18, 130. Ibid., 5.138-40. James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, p. 231.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

317

[...] and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white […] he had a full view high up above her knee [...]95

Gerty, like the mystery girl of Giacomo Joyce, becomes a composite figure, a network of points of contact between Trieste and Dublin. Conclusion We receive Trieste in translation: either through Joyce’s translated Italian lectures and journalism, or transposed on to Dublin. The Ireland Joyce writes about is in the past. McCourt notes that after 1912 Joyce ‘delivered no more clear-cut public pronouncements about his native land, wrote no more articles on Ireland and confined Ulysses [...] to 1904 and the period with which he felt most at home.’96 Living in exile, he no longer had the authority to write about his homeland in the present because he was no longer present to witness it. Thus he writes about Ireland from memory and through the locus memoriae of Trieste; as Svevo points out: ‘When an artist remembers, he creates at the same time.’97 What Joyce learns from Triestine irredentism is an inalienable independence of spirit, a kind of artistic self-detachment: ‘The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’98 This is why Hartshorn believes Triestine politics remained ‘peripheral’ to Joyce’s gaze: he appears ‘indifferent’ to them in his ‘handiwork’, his own position ‘refined out of existence’. It is striking, for example, how little the First World War appears to have affected Joyce’s writing compared to its impact on T. S. Eliot: its imprint is much more tangible on The Waste Land than it is on Ulysses – both works published in 1922. Apart from forcing him to leave Trieste in 1915, the war seems barely to have existed for Joyce. Ellmann relates Joyce’s first encounter with Oscar Schwarz, a former pupil, on his return to Trieste from Zurich after the war: ‘Schwarz asked him, “And how have you spent the war years, professor?” Joyce replied with utter nonchalance, “Oh yes, I was told there was a war

95 96 97 98

James Joyce, Ulysses, 13.695-9, 724-9. McCourt, The Years of Bloom, p. 239. Svevo, fol. 12r. James Joyce, Portrait, p. 181.

318

Christopher Whalen

going on in Europe.”’99 Evidently joking, there is nevertheless the suggestion that Joyce was so consumed by his writing that outside events did not faze him a great deal, did not penetrate his work. In June 1920 he wrote to Ezra Pound from Trieste: Since I came here I suppose I have not exchanged 100 words with anybody. I spend the greater part of my time sprawled across two beds surrounded by mountains of notes. I leave the house at 12:22 and walk the same distance along the same streets buy the Daily Mail which my brother and wife read and return. Idem in the evening.100

Neither Trieste nor Joyce were the same after the war.101 As the irredentists were gaining the ascendancy, Joyce became more independent in spirit, refining himself out of existence. Trieste had given him all it had to offer; and for once Joyce repaid his debts by paying tribute to the city through the Triestine elements superimposed on his fictional Dublin. Bibliography Antoni, Claudio, ‘A Note on Trieste in Joyce’s Time’, James Joyce Quarterly, 9, 3 (Spring 1972), 318-19. Attridge, Derek, and Marjorie Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Caraher, Brian, ‘Semicolonial Cities and Triestine Joyce: The Cultural Politics of Reading Joyce’s Homeplaces’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38, 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2001), 505-18. Crivelli, Renzo S., James Joyce: Itinerari Triestini; or Triestine Itineraries, trans. by John McCourt (Trieste: MGS Press, 1996). Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce, new and rev. edn with corrections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). ––. ed., Selected Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1975; repr. 1992). Ferrer, Daniel, ‘Between Inventio and Memoria: Locations of “Aeolus”’, in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays, ed. by Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), pp. 190-7.

99 100 101

Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 472. Letter to Ezra Pound, 5 June 1920, in Selected Letters, p. 253. See Tony Kushner’s essay in this collection for an indication of how Italy changed during the inter-war years, particularly its anti-alienism and intolerance of Jews.

‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste

319

Foster, Roy, ‘Tarry Easty’, London Review of Books, 22, 23 (30 November 2000), (accessed 13 February 2009; subscription required). Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman, ‘Ulysses’ Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, 2nd rev. and enlarged edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Hartshorn, Peter, James Joyce and Trieste, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 86 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). Joyce, James, Dubliners, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ––. Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 2000). ––. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ––. Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. by Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). ––. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ––. Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (London: Bodley Head, 1986; repr. 2002). Joyce, Stanislaus, Recollections of James Joyce, trans. by Ellsworth Mason (New York: James Joyce Society, 1950). McCourt, John, ‘“My Second Country”: The Triestine Joyce’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38, 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2001), 309-19. ––. The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Robinson, Richard, ‘A Stranger in the House of Habsburg: Joyce’s Ramshackle Empire’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38, 3-4 (Spring-Summer 2001), 321-39. Rocco-Bergera, Niny, ‘James Joyce and Trieste’, James Joyce Quarterly, 9, 3 (Spring 1972), 342-9. Schneider, Erik, ‘Towards Ulysses: Some Unpublished Joyce Documents from Trieste’, Journal of Modern Literature, 27, 4 (Summer 2004), 1-16, (accessed 13 February 2009; Athens or ProQuest subscription required). Scholes, Robert, and Richard M. Kain, eds., The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965). Svevo, Italo, James Joyce: A Lecture Delivered in Milan in 1927 by his Friend, trans. by Stanislaus Joyce ([Milan: Officine Grafiche ‘Esperia’], 1950).

Mara Cambiaghi The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio ‘Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience’1 The germ of this paper was first sown in Alba in the autumn of 2006, when I taught a short course on ‘Italy in Europe, Europe in Italy’ for the students of an American college on a residential course there2. A long-time expatriate myself, I could not resist the charm of this small old town lying at the foot of the Langhe hills in Piedmont. For many Italians brought-up in the latter part of the 20th century, Alba and its region exude a literary aura intertwined with the names of major Italian writers – Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio and Italo Calvino among them. I soon became absorbed and began to reflect on the destiny of Beppe Fenoglio, whose life was struck short by illness in 1963. He had barely reached the age of 41 and his most important work, Il partigiano Johnny, was left incomplete, untitled and loosely arranged in subsequent versions for which no editorial guidelines had been provided. Furthermore, Fenoglio’s manuscripts were written in a hybrid and experimental language which combined Italian, English and, to a lesser extent, French, Latin and Greek syntax and lexis as well as vernacular forms. As is well-known, the novel appeared posthumously in 1968 in a first edition published by Lorenzo Mondo for Einaudi, who conflated Fenoglio’s first and second version of the novel in a single narrative, incorporating the opening section of the first manuscript, which was missing in the second.3 Maria Corti, who subsequently directed the publication of Fenoglio’s entire œuvre for Einaudi, would judge this first edition as a ‘stupefacente ibrido

1

2

3

Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual’, in Edward Said. A Critical Reader, ed. by Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) pp. 96-120 (p. 98). I thank Jacqueline M. Paskow for her insightful comments on the first version of this paper. This essay was written with a number of people in mind, starting with Alan and Jacqueline Paskow who made my stay in Alba possible in the first instance. I should also like to thank the Centro Studi Beppe Fenoglio and the Centro di Documentazione Beppe Fenoglio for all their help in the subsequent stages of my research, as well as the British Academy Colloquium on Exiles and Emigrés for its kind support. This edition first appeared in English in 1995: Beppe Fenoglio, Johnny the Partisan, trans. by Stuart Wood (London: Quartet Books, 1995). Here, Fenoglio’s original insertions of English words and narrative have been left unaltered and are italicized in the text.

322

Mara Cambiaghi

testuale’ (‘a stunning textual hybrid’).4 A second edition by Maria Antonietta Grignani appeared in 1978 in the five-volume series directed by Corti, comprising the whole of Fenoglio’s extant works and offering both versions of Il Partigiano Johnny in a subsequent but separate order. Most importantly, the series also included that peculiarly hybrid first text known as UrPartigiano Johnny, which Fenoglio had written almost entirely in his idiosyncratic English, a language he knew only from school books and intense literary study. While his use of English abounded in creative neologisms and improbable hybrid terms, critics acknowledged Fenoglio’s passionate involvement in the esoterici misteri di un idioma straniero (‘the esoteric mysteries of a foreign idiom’)5 when the nine-chapter early version of the novel first appeared.6 Bruce Merry, the translator of UrPartigiano Johnny, unmistakably noted that: Fenoglio’s novel is, in sum, a remarkable achievement for one who never left Italy and only spoke to Englishmen in certain periods of his activity as a partisan, and while it is unfair to regard his literary English as the distillation of his favourite English sources, it is nevertheless essential to point out that he read and annotated voluminously from English literature (his library hardly contains Italian texts), and formed his literary personality on the English heritage.7

Similarly, the Times Literary Supplement praised the earlier edition of Il partigiano Johnny in a review published on 18 December 1969, calling upon a tradition of friendship rooted in the rhetoric of the Risorgimento: Beppe Fenoglio is not a name that many people know in this country […] But if ever an Italian novelist deserved to be known, and loved, by the British, it is Fenoglio, whose literary education was made on the English poets […] Fenoglio was indeed a

4

5 6

7

Qtd. in Philip Cooke, Fenoglio’s Binoculars, Johnny’s Eyes. History, Language and Narrative Technique in Fenoglio’s ‘Il Partigiano Johnny’ (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 2. Cooke also provides a clear summary of the complex editorial history of Fenoglio’s work, highlighting the arguments put forward by different critics in the various stages of publication. He does not refer, however, to the third editorial solution contained in the text currenly in print. Maria Antonietta Grignani illustrates the reasons also for this editorial choice in a recent publication: Maria Antonietta Grignani, ‘Fenoglio e il canone del Novecento’, in Alchimie famigliari. Studi su Beppe e Marisa Fenoglio, ed. by Anne Begenat-Neuschäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006) pp. 27-44 (p. 29). Guido Almansi, ‘I maneggi per maritare due lingue’, La Repubblica, 30 August 1978, p. 11. From this early version, chapter 1 is missing, while ch. 3 survives only as a sketchy outline. See Beppe Fenoglio, Opere, ed. by Maria Corti and others (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 1, 1: UrPartigiano Johnny, ed. by John Meddemmen, trans. by Bruce Merry (1978). Bruce Merry, ‘More on Fenoglio: An Unpublished Novel’ in English and an English Source’, Italica, 49.1 (Spring 1972), 3-17 (p. 16).

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

323

Piedmontese à la Cavour, and he looked to Britain as the great Mother of Parliaments and Protector of Exiles, the natural and providential friend of free Italy.8

This excerpt hints at crucial aspects in Fenoglio’s Bildung, placing him in the appropriate historical perspective with a long tradition: obviously, ‘English was a moral and political choice, rather than a literary specialization, for an anti-fascist intellectual’ in the period when he began to write, and I shall return to these issues later.9 UrPartigiano Johnny was edited by John Meddemmen, a colleague of the late Maria Corti at the University of Pavia, in a volume which precedes the two Italian versions of the novel and, in perfect symmetry, also includes Bruce Merry’s parallel Italian translation of Fenoglio’s idiosyncratic English text.10 Finally, a third editorial solution was offered by Dante Isella who merged the initial twenty chapters of the first version of the Italian text with the last eighteen chapters of the second version, thus providing ‘the most extended narrative development’ for Il partigiano Johnny.11 This edition, published by Einaudi-Gallimard in 1992, is also currently in print as a paperback. In all three solutions, however, Fenoglio’s incomplete, magmatic work in progress had to be reconstructed. From these premises, it is evident that anybody wishing to approach Fenoglio’s work has to reckon with its complex history of publication and the various critical responses that accompanied each editorial phase.12 Nonetheless, in this paper I wish to abstain from arguments of a strictly philological nature which have underpinned the history of this editorial epic

8

9 10

11

12

‘An Unfinished epic’, rev. of Johnny the Partisan, by Beppe Fenoglio, Times Literary Supplement, 18 Dec. 1969. Merry, p. 4. Critics normally refer to the two versions of the novel as PJ1 and PJ2, while the title of the preceding English text is abbreviated as UrPJ. See note of introduction to the paperback edition: Beppe Fenoglio, Il partigiano Johnny (Turin: Einaudi, 1994) n. p. For a reconstruction of the chronological and philological debate see: Roberto Bigazzi, ‘La cronologia dei partigiani’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 21 (1980), 85-122. Maria Antonietta Grignani, ‘Virtualità del testo e ricerca della lingua da una stesura all’altra del Partigiano Johnny’, Strumenti critici, 12 (1978), 275-331. Maria Corti, Beppe Fenoglio. Storia di un ‘continuum’ narrativo (Padova: Liviana Editrice, 1980), pp. 9-34, 57-72. ‘Tavola rotonda su la cronologia dei “Partigiani”’, in Fenoglio a Lecce, ed. by Gino Rizzo (Florence: Olschki, 1984), pp. 223-238. Elisabetta Soletti, Beppe Fenoglio (Milano: Mursia, 1987), pp. 139-154. Eduardo Saccone, Fenoglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), pp. 3-96, 148-200. See also the essay by Dante Isella ‘La lingua del partigiano Johnny’ contained in his edition of Fenoglio’s Il partigiano Johnny (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), pp. 481-513, as well as Cooke, pp. 1-20.

324

Mara Cambiaghi

and I wish to reflect instead on the larger issue of Fenoglio’s self-imposed flight into a language and culture other than his own. If his identity as a writer was formed in the aftermath of the world conflict and forged by his memories of the civil war in which he had taken part as a member of the Resistance and as a liaison officer with the Allied Forces in the last phase of the conflict, his love of the English language grew out of a desire to transcend the narrow horizons of a small world straitjacketed by social conformism and oppression in Fascist Italy. More than any other Italian writer perhaps, Fenoglio gave literary expression to the events that befell Italy in the last two years of the war and even though his aims may not have been historical, his work has been frequently acknowledged by historians as testimony. For Paul Ginsborg, for example, Il partigiano Johnny remains ‘the outstanding novel of the Italian Resistance’,13 while Claudio Pavone repeatedly refers to Fenoglio in his monumental study Una guerra civile: commenting on the significance of the moral choice that Italians were called upon to make after the armistice declaration on 8 September 1943 and the subsequent reinstalment of Mussolini’s puppet government at Salò in Northern Italy, Pavone remarks that ‘Fenoglio ha saputo esprimere con forza poetica la congiunzione di libertà e di energia conseguente alla scelta resistenziale’ (‘Fenoglio has been able to give poetic expression to the junction of freedom and energy derived from choosing the Resistance’).14 *** Before turning to the question of the inner exile of Beppe Fenoglio, it may be necessary to say a few words about the time and context in which I happen to be writing. Because conflicting memories continue to stir public debate on the legacy of the war and Fascist rule in Italy, the writings of Fenoglio are acquiring greater significance than when they first entered the canon, occupying a central place in the literature about the Resistance. Italo Calvino, who became Fenoglio’s editor and only personal friend at Einaudi, famously praised Fenoglio’s work in his preface to his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno: thanks to Fenoglio, he wrote, the work of a group of writers has become established, asserting their contribution and giving shape to a whole period.15 However, because Fenoglio never identified himself fully with any of the anti-fascist groups that formed the Resistance movement and did not

13 14

15

Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 16. Claudio Pavone. Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), p. 30. Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Preface (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), pp. 7-24.

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

325

offer a celebratory picture of it, the reception of his work was negative among those who had been responsible for much of the organisation of the movement. The most critical reactions concerned especially his collection of short stories I ventitre giorni della città di Alba (1952), in which the opening story depicts one episode in the war when the Partisans captured the city of Alba on 10 October 1944 and held control of it for 23 days. Critics of the PCI newspaper L’Unità considered Fenoglio’s treatment of this episode as a caricature debunking the moral value of the Resistance. Even Pietro Chiodi, Fenoglio’s friend and former teacher of philosophy, who strongly influenced the reception of Martin Heidegger in Italy, took part in the Resistance and also suffered arrest and deportation to Bolzano and Innsbruck in 1944,16 expressed his reservations on I ventitre giorni della città di Alba.17This polemical aspect has underpinned the reception of Fenoglio’s work in its various phases and has not yet ceased. In a recent interview in one of the main Italian newspapers, for example, Giorgio Bocca disputes Fenoglio’s portrayal of the period. His objections are especially striking since Bocca belongs to the same generation as Fenoglio, originates from the same region and shares with the Piedmontese novelist the experience of active participation in the Partisan movement. Bocca, however, firmly adhered to the group of intellectuals of the Action Party.18 In the interview for the literary supplement of La Stampa he states: Fenoglio della Resistenza non ha capito nulla. Io, di quei venti mesi, ho un’idea politica e storica. So qual è stato il valore della Resistenza, so perché il sogno che la innervava è

16

17

18

Cf. Gino Rizzo, Su Fenoglio tra filologia e critica (Lecce: Edizioni Milella, 1976) pp. 200205. For a detailed account of the issue see Piero Negri Scaglione, Questioni private (Turin: Einaudi, 2006), pp. 156-167. Fenoglio’s response to Chiodi merits a mention here. Objecting that literature had no didactic function, he stated: ‘La libertà e la democrazia ogni generazione se le deve conquistare, e duramente. Non si possono insegnare nei libri’ [Tr.: ‘Every generation must strive hard towards freedom and democracy. They cannot be taught in books’] (Negri Scaglione, p. 162). Unlike that of France and Jugoslavia, the Italian Resistance was held together by political parties. It spanned the full spectrum of political opinion, from communists, through socialists, to Christian Democrats and the intellectuals of the Action Party. The Action Party, which was only founded in 1942, derived its name from Giuseppe Mazzini’s party during the Risorgimento. Its Partisan formations were named the ‘Justice and Liberty’ Brigades, while those of Communist affiliation, comprising more than 70 per cent of the partisans, were called Garibaldi Brigades and those of Socialist inspiration became the Matteotti Brigades. After the declaration of the armistice on 8 September 1943, all of these groups formed in Rome the National Committee of Liberation (CNL) and asked to be joined in the Resistance against Nazi occupation. Cf. Paul Ginsborg, pp. 14-17, 39-59.

326

Mara Cambiaghi

naufragato. Fenoglio è come Pansa. La sua Resistenza è falsa, un teatro di assassini, di cialtroni, di poveracci. Ma GL, Giustizia e Libertà, era l’università di noi provinciali.19 Fenoglio understood nothing of the Resistance. Of those twenty months, I have a political and historical idea. I know what the value of the Resistance is, I know why the dream that pervaded it failed. Fenoglio is like Pansa. His Resistance is false, a theatre of murderers, of scoundrels, of poor devils. But JL, Justice and Liberty, was the university of us provincial intellectuals. [Tr. MC]

Comments of this kind eschew any consideration of literary merit and are therefore reductive. They do not take into account the whole of Fenoglio’s work, which does acknowledge the intrinsic value of the scelta resistenziale, though its tones are not didactic. Fenoglio captures the complexity, contradictions and the fragility of human relations in an ‘age of extremes’ which required unambiguous responses to the urgency of a world conflict. In this paper, I shall argue that it is precisely in the oblique glance cast by Fenoglio on the very traumatic subject of the civil war that lies his distinctive mark as a writer. Because he was driven by a desire to transcend the narrow horizons of a small world threatened by Fascism, social conformism and the empty rhetoric of social rituals at a time of oppression, he sought refuge in an alternative world informed by a radically different culture and a foreign idiom with which, paradoxically, he had very little direct contact. As a critic noted recently, ‘Fenoglio per individuare la figura del difensore e partigiano […] va via dall’Italia, segue un tragitto lungo e diverso, passa per un’altra lingua e un’altra letteratura’ (‘In order to outline the figure of the defender and partisan, Fenoglio leaves Italy, he follows a long and different path, crossing another language and another literature’).20 It is this link between self-imposed inner exile and the Resistance which I wish to explore here. A number of concomitant factors cluster around Fenoglio’s distinct response finding expression in his personal flight into English culture and the English language without, literally, having ever set foot on English soil. There is, first of all, his condition as a writer from a nationalized space in search of autonomy, wishing to mark his dissent from the norms and conventions imposed by Fascist culture and ideology. Other writers would express the same revulsion against the official rhetorics of Fascism in a

19

20

Bruno Quaranta, ‘Com’è falsa la Resistenza di Fenoglio’, Tuttolibri/La Stampa, 31 March 2007, xi. Bocca refers here to the journalist Gianpaolo Pansa, the author of Il sangue dei vinti (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2003). Roberto Galaverni, ‘Lontano da tutto. La nascita di Johnny il Partigiano’, in Scrittura e Resistenza, ed. by Giulio Ferroni, Maria Ida Gaeta, Gabriele Pedullà (Rome: Fahrenheit 451, 2003), pp. 85-105 (p. 103).

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

327

similar manner. In Il sistema periodico (1975), for example, Primo Levi wrote of his Partisan experience prior to his arrest and subsequent deportation in these terms: ‘Dopo la lunga ubriacatura di parole […] e sullo sfondo di un paese disfatto e diviso, siamo scesi in campo per misurarci’ (‘After the long intoxication with words […] and against the background of a ruined and divided country, we took action in order to measure ourselves’ [Tr. MC]).21 In turn, Luigi Meneghello, born in the same year as Fenoglio and sharing with him the same strong dislike of rhetorics as well as a parallel Partisan experience in the Veneto region,22 openly declared his affinity for Fenoglio in two essays, respectively entitled ‘Quanto sale?’ and ‘Il vento delle pallottole’. In the latter he refers to the ‘eccezionale potere di straniamento’ (‘exceptional power of estrangement’) underlying Fenoglio’s use of English, while effectively describing his writing as a kind of ‘ispirato diversiloquio’.23 This personal neologism intersects notions of polyglossia which Michail M. Bakhtin famously discussed in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) in relation to the dialogic nature of the novel, originating on the boundary line between different languages and cultures. Expressions of national allegiance may acquire both positive or negative connotations, depending on the circumstances in which they are spoken. As Donatella Badin points out in her contribution to the present volume, the notion of exile is closely intertwined with the rise of the nation state, degenerating into Fascism and creating the conditions for more homelessness and liminality by the time the refugees discussed by Tony Kushner in this same volume become the target of fierce persecution or, at best, ambivalent

21 22

23

Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), p. 134. Meneghello joined the ranks of the Action Party and, after the war, emigrated to England where he was soon appointed to teach Renaissance studies at the university of Reading. The brief self-portrait he sketched on the back-cover of one of his books gives us a measure of his cross-cultural vocation, of his wit and of a similar mental horizon as Fenoglio’s: ‘My studies, at Vicenza and Padua, were absurdly “brilliant”, but useless and partly damaging. I was exposed, as a youth, to the effects of a fascist education, and then somehow was reeducated during the war and the civil war, under the protective wings of the Partito d’Azione (Party of Action). I expatriated in 1947-48 and settled in England with my wife Katia. We have no children. My encounter with the culture of the English, and the shock of their language, were for me a determining factor.’ Qtd. in Giulio and Laura Lepschy, ‘Luigi Meneghello’ Obituary, The Guardian, 17 August 2007, p. 38. Luigi Meneghello, ‘Il vento delle pallottole’, in Opere scelte, ed. by Giulio Lepschy (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), pp. 1605-1618 (p. 1613, 1615). Cf. also ‘Quanto sale?’ in the same volume (pp. 1101- 1137) where Meneghello offers a retrospective view of his youth experience as a Partisan and his rendering of it in his novel I piccoli maestri (Feltrinelli: Milan, 1964). English tr. The Outlaws (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), German tr. Die kleinen Meister (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1990).

328

Mara Cambiaghi

toleration. The cult of national values during the Risorgimento or at any other time of military confrontation with external forces, may be the only strategy of self-defence available to single countries threatened by a foreign power. On the other hand, the strenuous defence of one’s own group of belonging may stem from mere collective selfishness in peaceful circumstances. As Jean Améry wrote in an essay titled ‘Di quanta patria ha bisogno l’uomo?’, living in one’s home country ‘è una condizione che, se si conosce solo il proprio luogo d’origine, può condurre all’imbarbarimento, all’avvizzimento nel provincialismo’ (‘is a condition, that if only one’s place of origin is known, may lead to barbarism, to withering into provincialism’ [Tr. MC]).24 Conflicting memories continue to stir public debate on the legacy of the war and Fascist rule in Italy. As with all great armed conflicts in history, the Second World War and the experience of a twenty-year dictatorship have left an indelible mark on individual and collective memories, subverting previously acknowledged forms of public consciousness and historical narrative. As historian Filippo Focardi notes in a volume titled La guerra della memoria (2005), it has become customary to speak of ‘unreconciled’ or ‘conflicting’ memories, while official historiography has coined the term ‘shattered memory’ to designate the plurality of memories co-existing in Italy beneath the single narrative of a public memory celebrated after the war by the anti-fascist forces: those of former veterans of Fascist wars fought in Africa, Albania, Greece, Russia and Yugoslavia, of Partisans of different political affiliations, of former adherents to the Fascist Republic of Salò, of prisoners of war, victims of political and racial deportation, of mass murder carried out by Nazifascist troops in the last two years of the conflict, of bombings and rape by the Allied Forces, of the foibe massacres that took place on the Yugoslav border, of the exodus from Dalmatia and Istria, of internment and confinement.25 Recomposing the plurality of these very different memories, which do not have the same ethical status, is proving a most difficult but necessary task which historians and specialists in the human sciences are called upon to foster in the context of a ‘culture of inclusion’ promoting not hostility, but peaceful dialogue and acknowledgment of the past.26

24

25 26

Jean Améry, ‘Di quanta patria ha bisogno l’uomo?’, in Intellettuale a Auschwitz (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1987; repr. 2002), pp. 83-109 (p. 91). Filippo Focardi, La guerra della memoria (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), p. 3. I derive the term ‘culture of inclusion’ from Geoffrey H. Hartman who reflects on the expansion of culture in the contemporary world in The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 165- 203 (p. 182). Further useful observations on the plurality of memories, reconciliation and historical narrative can be found in: Claudio

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

329

Even though historical literature cannot offer a precise account of historical events, it can tell us something about the feelings and sentiments of those who lived through a particular time. As such, it is one of the symbolic forms which can express the affective energy that has become engraved in human memory and we may conveniently speak of a Pathos formula or Leidschatz (‘a cumulative layer of painful experiences’) to describe this kind of affective and symbolic deposit. Both expressions emerge from the current proliferation of discourses on cultural memory, but the term Pathos formula was first coined by the art historian and cultural anthropologist Aby Warburg who had sought to understand the cultural process informing the transmission of symbols and rituals. In his study of ancient cultures and primitive art,27 Warburg understood that ancient terrors re-emerge as sources of energy in forms of cultural expression, and primitive man is like an infant staring at darkness, who transforms the menacing impressions caused by a hostile environment into familiar images. Although Warburg was preoccupied with the survival of archaic rituals in Native American cultures as well as with the relation between antiquity and Renaissance art, his intuitions can be applied to different art forms. Aleida Assmann, for example, elaborates on the concept of Leidschatz, a related term, to describe modern forms of art linked to a cumulative layer of painful experiences.28 There is no doubt that Il Partigiano Johnny qualifies as a Leidschatz, a symbolic receptacle of memories and collective sentiments shared by those who took side against Nazifascism, refusing allegiance to the Republic of Salò. At the same time, it is also a work of literature of great complexity in its own right. However, the polemical statements that exacerbate public debate in Italy and make an instrumental use of history often violate those very sentiments and one can only acknowledge the comments made by Giulio Ferroni in his introduction to a recent collection of essays on Beppe Fenoglio’s novels:

27

28

Pavone, Prima lezione di storia contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007), pp. 65-87. See also Alessandro Cavalli, ‘Memoria e guerra: la ricomposizione delle memorie divise’, in Memoria e saperi. Percorsi transdisciplinari, ed. by Elena Agazzi and Vita Fortunati (Rome: Meltemi, 2007), pp. 67-78. Aby Warburg, Il rituale del serpente (Milan: Adelphi, 1998), pp. 11-66 (61-63). See also Gombrich’s account of Warburg’s theory of social memory: E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), pp. 186, 239-259. Aleida Assmann. Erinnerungsräume (Munich: Beck, 1999), p. 374. It. tr. Ricordare. Forme e mutamenti della memoria culturale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), p. 414.

330

Mara Cambiaghi

Una delle cose che oggi più feriscono nelle discussioni e nelle polemiche sulla storia del Novecento, e in particolare su quelle che riguardano la Resistenza e la guerra partigiana, è l’assoluta indifferenza verso il carattere “tragico” di quegli eventi, l’incapacità di percepire la durezza estrema delle situazioni che allora furono vissute, la mancanza di rispetto verso la sofferenza e l’orrore in cui in quel frangente si trovarono a precipitare tanti esseri umani, in cui furono trascinate tante semplici esistenze.29 One of the things which hurt most in discussions and polemics on the history of the twentieth century, and especially those concerning the Resistance and the Partisan war, is the absolute indifference towards the “tragic” character of those events, the incapacity to perceive the extreme harshness of situations which were experienced then, the lack of respect towards the suffering and horror in which many human beings precipitated, into which many simple lives were driven. [Tr. MC]

The contribution that a literary work can offer, therefore, is that of fostering a measure of ‘critical empathy with events felt and suffered by men and women in diverse spaces and times’.30 Nonetheless, it is paradoxical that an author, whose work was so contested when it first appeared, remains the most effective mediator of an experience which was by no means simple or undivided in its consequences and implications. The novel chronicles well-known historical events, from the signing of the Italian armistice on 8 September 1943 and the civil war that followed to the Liberation. The protagonist is a student from Alba who bears an English name, Johnny, and is haunted by the cult of English literature. After a period of training as an army officer in Rome, September 8 surprises him there. The opening chapters describe his return home and the gradual stages of his Partisan choice as a liminal phase. He reads John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Browning and translates excerpts from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. He also refuses to enlist in the army of the newly established Republic of Salò, hiding on the hills and joining the Resistance. Rapid descriptions of communal life during wartime emerge: the cautious movements and occasional contacts with family and friends while hiding, glimpses of the surrounding countryside and the architecture of the city of Alba caught sideways through the window of his refuge in the hills, an evening spent listening to the Voice of America secretly in the home of a relative. Fenoglio’s power of evocation is striking: The American announcer had a fine voice, fascinating in its dashing vibration – twang – but the news was under his voice. The great landing at Salerno, initiated with the

29 30

Giulio Ferroni, ‘Perché Fenoglio’, in Scrittura e Resistenza, pp. 9-12 (p. 9). I derive the term critical ‘empathy’ from Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1993), p. 337.

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

331

prospect of a swoop on Rome, had become bogged down on the first ridges of the coastal hills. […] There followed a commentary by Fiorello LaGuardia. Who is that? The mayor of New York, just think, his highly up-to-date aunt, who lived only for the Voice of America to come on, informed them. ‘He is an Italian, an immigrant, someone of our age. Imagine how far he had to travel to end up being mayor of New York.’ The voice of La Guardia exploded in the loudspeaker – it was intolerable to Johnny with its coarse Anglo-Sicilian inflections, a repellent hybrid of ravenblack Sicilian sweat and Anglo-Saxon asepsis.31

On the hills, Johnny will become prey to nostalgia for his hometown and to ‘the feeling of exile’ which ‘was oppressive, suffocating, to the point of making him leap to his feet as if to escape from an asphyxiating level’ (p. 128). Indeed, he is confronted with a harsh reality which differs from any epic ideas he had cherished prior to his decision to join the Resistance. Nonetheless, the passage in the novel showing his resolve to do so is frequently quoted in critical comments and is justly famous: He left for the highest hills, the ancestral land which he would help in its unmoving potential,32 in the vortex of the black wind, feeling how great a man is when he is in his normal human dimension. And at the moment when he left he felt himself invested – nor death itself would have been divestiture – in the name of the authentic people of Italy to oppose Fascism in every possible way, to judge and to act, to decide militarily and as a citizen. Such supreme power was intoxicating but infinitely more intoxicating was the consciousness of the legitimate use he would make of it (pp. 45-46).

In this age of globalization, we are less inclined to accept any idea of nation uncritically, but this passage must be read in its historical context. Besides, the novel has an autobiographical basis and Johnny’s refusal to subscribe to the call-up of the Republic of Salò corresponds to what Fenoglio himself did. However, because Johnny lives in an epic world of the imagination, the quality of this description has a mythical aura which Pier Paolo Pasolini, for example, found displeasing.33 Furthermore, the excerpt may have an ironic meaning which can only be understood retrospectively at the end of the novel, as Philip Cooke points out.34

31

32

33

34

For economy of space, I quote here from the English edition of Il Partigiano Johnny translated by Stuart Hood (see n. 2), pp. 5-6. Words in italics are Fenoglio’s original English insertions. Further references to this edition will be incorporated into the text. This passage contains a small but significant error of translation: the orginal edition reads ‘che l’avrebbe aiutato’ (‘which would help him’), i.e. it is Johnny who is sustained by his attachment to the land in which he lives. See end of ch. 4 in the original Italian text. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Fenoglio’, in Descrizioni di descrizioni (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), pp. 229-234 (pp. 229, 233). Cooke, p. 142.

332

Mara Cambiaghi

At any rate, Fenoglio’s character reveals all the marks of a historical and subjective split in which others have recognized themselves. Natalia Ginzburg, for example, has spoken of the significance of siding with the Resistance in these terms: Furono anni in cui molti divennero diversi da ciò che erano stati prima. Diversi e migliori. La sensazione che la gente fosse divenuta migliore circolava nelle strade. Ognuno sentiva di dover dare il meglio di sé. Questo spandeva intorno uno straordinario benessere, e quando ricordiamo quegli anni, ricordiamo il benessere insieme ai disagi, al freddo, alla fame e alla paura, che in quelle giornate non ci lasciavano mai.35 They were years in which many became different from what they had been earlier. Different and better. The feeling that people had become better pervaded the streets. Everyone felt that s/he must express his or her best. This diffused an extraordinary feeling of well-being all round, and when we remember those years, we remember the feeling of well-being, as well as the discomfort, the cold, hunger and fear, which never abandoned us in those days. [Tr. MC]

In the same contex, the critic Lothar Knapp aptly refers to Giaime Pintor’s famous letter to his brother Luigi, written a few days before he was killed in the initial stages of the Partisan war: Senza la guerra io sarei rimasto un intellettuale con interessi prevalentemente letterari: avrei discusso i problemi dell’ordine politico, ma soprattutto avrei cercato nella storia dell’uomo solo le ragioni di un profondo interesse, e l’incontro con una ragazza o un impulso qualunque alla fantasia avrebbero contato per me più di ogni altro partito o dottrina. Altri amici, meglio disposti a sentire immediatamente il fatto politico, si erano dedicati da anni alla lotta contro il fascismo. Pur sentendomi sempre più vicino a loro, non so se mi sarei deciso a impegnarmi totalmente su quella strada: c’era in me un fondo troppo forte di gusti individuali, d’indifferenza e di spirito critico per sacrificare tutto questo a una fede collettiva.36 Without the war, I would have remained an intellectual with interests of a primarily literary kind, I would have discussed problems of a political order, but above all I would have looked into the history of the lonely man for the reasons of a profound interest, and the acquaintance with a young woman or any influence on the imagination would have counted more for me than any political party or doctrine. Other friends, more inclined to understand politics instinctively, had taken up the fight against fascism years before me.

35 36

Qtd. in Pavone, Una guerra civile, p. 30. Giaime Pintor, Letter to his brother Luigi, 28 November 1943. Cf. Lothar Knapp, ‘Beppe Fenoglio e la letteratura sulla Resistenza’, in Alchimie famigliari. Studi su Beppe e Marisa Fenoglio, ed. by Anne Begenat-Neuschäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006) pp. 45-58 (p. 50). For the full text of the letter see: (Accessed 9 February 2009).

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

333

Though I felt closer and closer to them, I do not know whether I would have felt like committing myself on that path: there was too much of a layer of individual taste, of indifference and critical attitude to sacrifice all this for a collective faith. [Tr. MC]

The letter highlights the historical disruption of the old order coinciding with a personal, biographical choice, as Knapp points out. For Fenoglio, however, this split occurs within a different social context and is symptomatic of a radical search for alterity, which is existential and finds expression in the adoption of a foreign culture and a foreign language. Splitting, as psychoanalysis has been telling us since Freud, is always the consequence of conflict which, in the case of Fenoglio, becomes superimposed onto a plurality of different linguistic registers. In Il partigiano Johnny, the splitting of the subject is literalized as a shattering of linguistic and cultural homogeneity in order to subvert the rhetoric and fascist rituals in which Johnny had grown up. His intense affinity for Anglo-Saxon culture and, especially, Elizabethan England, prompts him to identify with the soldiers of Oliver Cromwell’s army, an ongoing phantasy mirroring a deep-seated line of division in his present reality which justifies comparison with the civil wars that affected early 17th century England. Johnny thinks of himself as a puritan and also attributes a puritan trait to some of the Partisans he encounters. In his portrayal of them, the narrator highlights the specificities of each group, the different nuances in their mindset, their personal sentiments as well as the very tangible class divisions which determine their affiliation: Garibaldini or rossi, headed by Biondo, or liberal and monarchists (the azzurri) headed by Nord and loyal to Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Here is an example of this characterization: As for their political badge, the Badoglian commanders were vaguely liberal and decidedly conservative, but their political confession of faith was, one had to recognise, null, it came perilously close to the limbo of agnosticism, and in some of them took the form of simple esprit de bataille. Their anti-Fascism however, more than ever thought of as above all an armed, potent reassertion of taste and restraint as opposed to Fascism’s tragic carnival, was integral, absolutely indubitable. Yet, Johnny noted, almost all the Blue commanders, at least those who, not being regulars, had some historical culture and had at least read and digested a certain amount, would have all declared for Charles in 1681 and two centuries later would have enrolled under the banners of Dixieland. And yet what was visible was a clean, consoling base of fair play in the way they fought within limits without professing a political ideal with ferocious decision, in this unspoken desire to sweep away Fascism so that in a space that had been

334

Mara Cambiaghi

swept clean everyone could try to gain the upper hand – naturally with taste and if possible with style37 (p. 138).

Although Johnny’s sympathies tend more towards the blues than the reds, his ironic glance cannot be mistaken. At the onset of the novel, however, the first Partisan formation he comes across is a group of garibaldini and Johnny realizes that ‘I’m in the wrong sector on the right side’ (55). They are portrayed as a compact energetic group, dressed poorly or inadequately and mostly of lower class extraction, and only too ready to strike up a threatening Bandiera rossa or the Russian version of ‘The wind is whistling, the storm is raging’. Elsewhere, a group of Garibaldini patrolling the city of Alba is cast as ‘feline and tense, splendidly isolated in its redness’ (220). Music is often interspersed throughout the narrative and has a catalyzing function, bringing tegether different characters and emphasizing a particular mood.38 Johnny, at any rate, is attracted by the new sound that can be heard on Radio Londra or the Voice of America. In UrPartigiano Johnny, for example, which is entirely devoted to Johnny’s contacts with the British Mission, a vivid scene describes the intoxicating and vibrant rhythm of jazz: As to Johnny, he literally gaped at the rythm which made the radioset throb. Never a musical tempo had impressed him so much as this new one, never a contemporary tempo appeared to him to be, like this, the tempo of the tempo. And America contributed it, nay, IT WAS AMERICA, an epic and nonchalant tempo ensemble, ensemble a tirteian aphrodisiac to field and fight and in the same time the peana of the already conquered victory. The playing now was at its fullest before cloîture, and enormous was the swell in it of mock, of energy and confidence. […] They had been playing it all the war through and it they would have played on the victory hour and much time after…39

Here, we also read Fenoglio’s original English which, despite its imperfections (‘rythm’, ‘peana’, ‘cloîture’ for cloture, i.e. closure) and hybrid terms (‘tirteian’, It. ‘tirtaico’: from the Greek poet Tyrtaeus, relating to poetry capable of evoking patriotic sentiments), is remarkable not only because of the circumstances in which it was employed, but also because of the energy and determination shown in wishing to cut across cultural barriers. This search for alterity is further confirmed by a conversation of the author with

37

38

39

The translator has added a footnote to suggest that Fenoglio is probably referring to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 in England. On Fenoglio’s handling of music in his novels see: Roberto Carelli, ‘La musica nella struttura e nella lingua dei romanzi di Beppe Fenoglio’, in Alchimie famigliari, pp. 73-92. Beppe Fenoglio, UrPartigiano Johnny, in Opere. Critical edition directed by Maria Corti, 3 vols in 5 tomes (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), I, pp. 91-93.

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

335

his friend and editor Italo Calvino, which is mentioned in Dante Isella’s essay contained in the 1994 paperback edition of Il partigiano Johnny: ‘Adesso ti dirò una cosa che tu non crederai: io prima scrivo in inglese e poi traduco in italiano’ (‘I shall tell you something which you won’t believe: I first write in English and then I translate back into Italian’ [Tr. MC]).40 Despite the significant intrusion of American jazz, however, it is to English culture and literature that Johnny feels mostly indebted and in his openly declared affinity we can detect a measure of that ideal ‘meeting of congenial minds’ which Emma Sutton has already illustrated in this collection of essays with regard to Vernon Lee, albeit following an opposite trajectory. In UrPartigiano Johnny, we learn of Johnny’s idealized image of England, of his desire to identify with English ‘men with something of Lawrence, and something of Raleigh and something of Gordon in them’ and ‘Johnny yearned to be one of them, to be them’.41 As he approaches his first encounter with British officers who are trying to establish contact with members of the Resistance on the Langhe hills, however, Johnny is disoriented because he realizes that, in his solitude, he had built a heroic and idealized picture of the English ‘drawing them out from their history and men-gallery’. He then feels ‘like the lover going to meet at last his lady-love to whom he has so far sent only love-letters, the greatest love-letters in the world’s history’.42 Of all the officers he meets, it is Major Keany whom he feels especially drawn to. He shares with him the same detached and contemplative temperament, as well as a love and knowledge of the English literary past which, however, cannot offer sufficient solace against the immediacy of the historical events they are experiencing. When Keany tells Johnny in ch. 4 of UrPartigiano that before the war he had been attempting to write a historical drama which he had had to abandon, he speaks of a loss of power in his country, which literature cannot heal. More precisely, it is the loss of imperial power and the parallel emergence of American supremacy which overshadow his comments when he states:

40

41

42

Dante Isella, ‘La lingua del Partigiano Johnny’, in Il Partigiano Johnny (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), pp. 481-513 (p. 484). UrPartigiano Johnny, p. 7. It has to be pointed out here that Fenoglio does not have D.H. Lawrence in mind, but rather T.E. Lawrence, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom he read in a 1952 edition. Cf. Fenoglio a Lecce, p. 229. See also Mark Pietralunga, Beppe Fenoglio and English Literature. A Study of the Writer as Translator (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1-3, 175-231 (3). Ibid., p. 5.

336

Mara Cambiaghi

I did see all flowing, all being done for them, and our loss of power, at the end of all […] Had I at least a centesim of Milton’s genius, and I would work an deathless thing of poetry, to console me of the loss of power… As you surely know, something alike has happened to your Dante. What is the Comedy but the raging attempt to erase the loss of power? The German emperor had failed him, King Charles returned home on Milton’s back, and now we are working for U.S.A. up and us down…43

This is Fenoglio’s original English with its imperfections and errors, though this was obviously the language in which he felt sufficiently at home when writing the first drafts of the novel.44 There is something overpowering in Fenoglio’s flight of the imagination which uses the literary past as a screen for reading the historical present. Immersed in the solitude of the Langhe hills, the young Partisan and the English officer communicate through centuries of literary history, and if all heroism has been banned from the way we are now invited to read the history of the Resistance, something heroic or grandiose surely hangs over the mindset of Fenoglio’s fictional characters and their singular exchange. Here, one is reminded of Meneghello’s words with regard to his own experience of the Resistance, described in his novel I piccoli maestri, in which he dismisses any idea of conventional heroes associated with it. ‘This I find offensive’, he says, ‘I was there, and there were no conventional heroes. My concern was to show how much more interesting and sincere it all was’.45 Meneghello, who never knew Fenoglio personally, even tells us in ‘Quanto sale?’ that he once imagined meeting the Piedmontese author on the hill slopes ‘in un tempo che è il tempo di guerra ma fuso un po’ col tempo di oggi, arrivato lassù non so come, vagamente in visita: e di parlargli di guerra, degli inglesi, di noi’ (‘at a time which is wartime but somehow merged with the present time, having arrived there I don’t know how, as if I were visiting: and to speak to him about the war, about the English, about us’ [Tr. MC]).46 In their ideal meeting of congenial minds, exile even takes on the flavour of a return home.

43 44

45

46

Ibid., pp. 49, 51. Calvino, Fenoglio’s editor and only personal friend at Einaudi, would see in Fenoglio’s use of English a private, ‘mental’ language, ‘mediatrice dell’atto creativo’ (‘intermediary of the creative act’). Qtd. in Saccone, p. 59. Author’s note contained in the English edition of I Piccoli Maestri (The Outlaws, 1976). Qtd. in Luigi Meneghello, Opere, ed. by Francesca Caputo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997), p. 883. Meneghello, Opere scelte, pp. 1133-34.

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

337

Bibliography Almansi, Guido, ‘I maneggi per maritare due lingue’, La Repubblica, 30 August 1978, p. 11. Améry, Jean, ‘Di quanta patria ha bisogno l’uomo?’, in Intellettuale a Auschwitz (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1987; repr. 2002), pp. 83-109. Trans. of Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Stuttgart: Klett, 1977). Assmann, Aleida, Erinnerungsräume (Munich: Beck, 1999), It. trans. Ricordare. Forme e mutamenti della memoria culturale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002). Bagenat-Neuschäfer, Anne, ed., Alchimie Famigliari. Studi su Beppe e Marisa Fenoglio (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006). Bigazzi, Roberto, ‘La cronologia dei partigiani’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 21 (1980), 85-122. Bocca, Giorgio, Interview, ‘Com’è falsa la Resistenza di Fenoglio’, by Bruno Quaranta, Tuttolibri/La Stampa, 31 March 2007, xi. Calvino, Italo, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Turin: Einaudi, 1964). Carelli, Roberto, ‘La musica nella struttura e nella lingua dei romanzi di Beppe Fenoglio’, in Alchimie famigliari, ed. by Anne BegenatNeuschäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 73-92. Cavalli, Alessandro, ‘Memoria e guerra: la ricomposizione delle memorie divise’, in Memoria e saperi. Percorsi transdisciplinari, ed. by Elena Agazzi and Vita Fortunati (Rome: Meltemi, 2007), pp. 67-78. Cooke, Philip, Fenoglio’s Binoculars, Johnny’s Eyes. History, Language and Narrative Technique in Fenoglio’s Il Partigiano Johnny (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). Corti, Maria, Beppe Fenoglio. Storia di un ‘continuum’ narrativo (Padova: Liviana Editrice, 1980). Fenoglio, Beppe, Johnny the Partisan, trans. by Stuart Wood, (London: Quartet Books, 1995). Trans. of Il partigiano Johnny, ed. by Lorenzo Mondo, 1st edn. (Turin: Einaudi, 1968). ––. Opere, ed. by Maria Corti and others, 3 vols in 5 tomes (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 1,1: UrPartigiano Johnny, ed. by John Meddemmen, trans. by Bruce Merry (1978), 1,2: Il Partigiano Johnny, ed. by Maria Antonietta Grignani, 2nd edn (1978). ––. Romanzi e racconti, ed. by Dante Isella, La Pléiade (Turin/Paris: EinaudiGallimard, 1992), pbk. repr. of part II: Il partigiano Johnny, 3rd edn (Turin: Einaudi, 1994). Ferroni, Giulio, ‘Perché Fenoglio’, in Scrittura e Resistenza, ed. by Giulio Ferroni, Maria Ida Gaeta, Gabriele Pedullà (Rome: Fahrenheit 451, 2003), pp. 9-12.

338

Mara Cambiaghi

Focardi, Filippo, La guerra della memoria (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005). Galaverni, Roberto, ‘Lontano da tutto. La nascita di Johnny il Partigiano’, in Scrittura e Resistenza, ed. by Giulio Ferroni, Maria Ida Gaeta, Gabriele Pedullà (Rome: Fahrenheit 451, 2003), pp. 85-105. Ginsborg, Paul, A History of Contemporary Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). Gombrich, E.H., Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970). Grignani, Maria Antonietta, ‘Fenoglio e il canone del Novecento’, in Alchimie Famigliari. Studi su Beppe e Marisa Fenoglio, ed. by Anne Bagenat-Neuschäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006), 27-44. ––. ‘Virtualità del testo e ricerca della lingua da una stesura all’altra del Partigiano Johnny’, Strumenti critici, 12 (1978), 275-331. Guillén, Claudio, The Challenge of Comparative Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Hartman, Geoffrey H., The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Isella, Dante, ‘La lingua del partigiano Johnny’, in Il Partigiano Johnny, by Beppe Fenoglio, 3rd edn (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), pp. 481-513. JanMohamed, Abdul R., ‘Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-asHome: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual’, in Edward Said. A Critical Reader, ed. by Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 96-120. Knapp, Lothar, ‘Beppe Fenoglio e la letteratura sulla Resistenza’, in Alchimie famigliari, ed. by Anne Begenat-Neuschäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 45-58. Lepschy, Giulio and Laura Lepschy, ‘Luigi Meneghello’ Obituary, The Guardian, 17 August 2007, p. 38. Levi, Primo, Il sistema periodico, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1994). Meneghello, Luigi, ‘Il vento delle pallottole’, in Opere scelte, ed. by Giulio Lepschy (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), pp. 1605-1618. ––. Opere, ed. by Francesca Caputo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997). Merry, Bruce, ‘More on Fenoglio: An Unpublished Novel in English and an English Source’, Italica, 49.1 (Spring 1972), 3-17. Negri Scaglione, Pietro, Questioni private (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘Fenoglio’ by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Descrizioni di descrizioni (Turin: Einaudi, 1979). Pavone, Claudio, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991). ––. Prima lezione di storia contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007).

The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio

339

Pietralunga, Mark, Beppe Fenoglio and English Literature. A Study of the Writer as Translator (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Pintor, Giaime, Letter to his brother Luigi, 28 November 1943, http://www.ottosettembre.it/testimonianze/Giaime2.asp (accessed 9 February 2009). Rizzo, Gino, ed., Fenoglio a Lecce (Florence: Olschki, 1984). ––. Su Fenoglio tra filologia e critica (Lecce: Edizioni Milella, 1976). Saccone, Eduardo, Fenoglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1988). Soletti, Elisabetta, Beppe Fenoglio (Milan: Mursia, 1987). ‘An Unfinished epic’, rev. of Johnny the Partisan, by Beppe Fenoglio, Times Literary Supplement, 18 Dec. 1969. Warburg, Aby, Il rituale del serpente (Milan: Adelphi, 1998), trans. of ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol 2, 1939 (trans. of Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht, unpublished paper delivered in Kreuzlingen, 21 April 1923).

6. Mobile Aesthetics

Brendan Cassidy Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome The Scots painter, art dealer and antiquarian, Gavin Hamilton, spent most of his life in Rome from c.1744 until his death in 1798.1 As a painter he was a pivotal figure in the development of what conventionally has been called Neoclassical art. As antiquarian and excavator of ancient sites, such as Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, he uncovered countless marbles. And as a dealer in Old Masters he was responsible for exporting to Britain some of the finest pictures now in our public and private collections. The National Gallery, for example, catalogues two of its most important Renaissance works as having passed through his hands: Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna and Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.2 The Leonardo was bought by Hamilton in Milan in 1785 and taken immediately to London, where he sold it to Lord Lansdowne.3 The Raphael, however, was acquired by someone else. Hamilton, in a letter, credits another Scotsman, Colin Morrison, with its acquisition. Morrison, who had also gone to Italy to improve his painting but found dealing and guiding tourists more lucrative, sold it to Lord Robert Spencer after the latter had returned from his Grand Tour in 1767-68. 4 This information is provided in one of the 330 or so letters from Hamilton that survive, most of which are unpublished. Among other things they provide a wealth of information on the fate of Italian art collections as well as individual pictures and on British artistic taste in the second half of the 18th

1

2

3

4

On Hamilton see most recently Julia Lloyd Williams, ‘Hamilton, Gavin (1723-1798)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, (accessed 16 January 2008); and Antonello Cesareo, ‘Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798): ‘A gentleman of probity, knowledge and real taste’’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 26 (2002), 211-322. For the Leonardo see Martin Davies, National Gallery Catalogues. The Earlier Italian Schools, 2nd edn (London: The National Gallery, 1961), p. 270; and for the Raphael, Donal Cooper and Carol Plazzotta, ‘Raphael’s Ansidei Altarpiece in the National Gallery’, Burlington Magazine, 146 (2004), 720-31. See the documents published by Ettore Verga, ‘La vendita della ‘Vergine delle Roccie’ a Gavino Hamilton’, Raccolta Vinciana, 2 (1905-06), 81-83. See Brendan Cassidy, ‘A Note on the Later History of Raphael’s Ansidei Altarpiece’, Burlington Magazine, 150 (2008), 672-75. For Morison see John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 679-82.

344

Brendan Cassidy

century. It was a taste that Hamilton shared and to some extent fostered. His Schola Italica Picturae published in 1773 illustrated in forty engravings what he considered the highest achievements of Italian painting: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, of course, and works by Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese as well as masters of the classical Baroque, especially Guido Reni, Guercino and the Carracci.5 Some of the illustrated works were either owned by Hamilton or had been sold by him to British clients. He was not interested in anything executed earlier than Giovanni Bellini nor later than the 17th century. A picture, reputedly by Annibale Carracci, that had been sent to him and which he did not care for, was dismissed as being almost like a Tiepolo in the capriciousness of its composition.6 For forty-odd years he collected and dealt in Old Master paintings and drawings. He acquired works either by negotiating personally with prospective sellers or through agents and third parties. Great Roman families fallen on hard times provided a steady but irregular supply of pictures for the market. The Boccapaduli collection in 1779, for example, provided Hamilton with nine works including two Poussin landscapes that he sold to Thomas Pitt, later Lord Camelford, and which are now in the National Gallery.7 The Barberini collection, formed in the 17th century by Pope Urban VIII and others, offered particularly rich pickings. The profligate principessa, Cornelia Costanza Barberini-Colonna, addicted to gambling, had regularly to sell works, including the Portland Vase, to pay her debts. And the British were only too keen to unburden her. Hamilton, to begin with, seems to have been a favourite of the princess but by 1766, as he notes ruefully in a letter, he was in competition with other British dealers Colin Morrison, Thomas Jenkins and the sculptor Joseph Nollekens.8 Between them they picked over the Palazzo Barberini like vultures at a kill and Hamilton was not above putting pressure on the lady to get works he was after. His share included Guido

5

6

7

8

Gavin Hamilton, Schola Italica Picturae, sive selectae quaedam summorum e schola italica pictorum tabulae aere incise (Rome: 1773). ‘… il componere è strambolato e pare piu tosto di Tiepolo che del grand Annibale’, Hamilton to Giovanni Maria Sasso in a letter of 16 January 1789, Venice, Biblioteca del Seminario Patriarcale, MS 1144.14. Brendan Cassidy, ‘Gavin Hamilton, Thomas Pitt and Statues for Stowe’, Burlington Magazine, 146 (2004), 806-14. Hamilton’s haul was as nothing compared to that of another Scot, James Byres, who managed to smuggle out of Rome Poussin’s Seven Sacraments, which he sold to the Duke of Rutland for Belvoir Castle. Letter from Hamilton to Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston, of 10 February 1766, University of Southampton, Hartley Library, MS BR12/12; published in Dagmar Grassinger, Antike Marmorskulpturen auf Schloß Broadlands, (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern 1994), pp. 117-18.

Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome

345

Reni’s St Jerome, engraved in the Schola Italica, and now also in the National Gallery.9 One picture that eluded him, however, and which remains in Rome was Guido Reni’s Magdalene.10 Described in extravagant terms by travellers and writers of the time, it was one of the works that tourists felt they had to see and, inevitably, many of them coveted it. Earl Spencer tried to buy it when he was in the city in 1764, acquiring works of art to decorate his new home, Spencer House in London. His offer was declined. When he returned home, however, he wrote to Hamilton to urge him to act on his behalf. Hamilton was confident. In 1766 he reassured the Earl, “[…] your Lordship may depend on having either the Magdalen or a better picture in less than four months”.11 But despite repeated approaches to the Barberini his efforts proved ultimately fruitless. The supply of pictures in Rome was limited, there were too many buyers. Hamilton looked elsewhere. In 1787 he expresses hopes of buying in bulk more than 160 pictures from an unnamed collection in Urbino.12 A year later he records having made, “a considerable purchase of old pictures at Messina among which are several [...] painted in oyle by Polidoro”.13 He went on regular buying trips throughout Italy, either to replenish his stock or to satisfy particular requests from his more important clients. In the spring of 1766 he travelled to Perugia, Cortona, Arezzo, Florence, Bologna, where, he says, he visited all the churches and palaces, then to Cento to see the Guercinos. Accompanying him on the trip was the painter Michelangelo Ricciolini, taken along to provide copies for the owners of pictures he was able to buy.14 Other copyists he employed were the Flemish painter Francois-Louis

9

10

11

12

13 14

D. Stephen Pepper, Guido Reni: a Complete Catalogue of his Works with an Introductory Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 248, no. 160; see also Guido Reni und Europa: Ruhm und Nachruhm, exh. cat. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (1988-89), ed. by Sybille EbertSchifferer, Andrea Emiliani and Erich Schleier (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle and Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1988), pp. 151-53. Ibid., pp. 258-59, 267, nos. 118, 137; and Richard E. Spear, The ‘Divine’ Guido: Religion, Sex Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 163-80. Letter to John, 1st Earl Spencer of 29 January 1766, London, British Library, Add. MS 75686. Letter of 3 February 1787 to John Campbell, 4th Earl of Breadalbane, MS in private collection. Letter of 5 July 1788 to John Campbell, 4th Earl of Breadalbane, MS in private collection. The trip is described in a letter to Georgiana, Countess Spencer of 21 May 1766, London, British Library, Add. MS 75686.

346

Brendan Cassidy

Lonsing and the young Italian Antonio Poggi.15 He returned to Rome from that trip with crates of what he called cabinet pictures. Getting hold of these was easy enough. The acquisition of major paintings was more difficult. Various obstacles had to be overcome. Priests and parishioners were reluctant to see favourite devotional works leave their churches. Successive popes demanded first refusal on the choicest pictures for the Vatican Museums. Negotiations with owners, who might put exorbitantly high prices on their possessions, required patience and diplomacy and could be protracted over many months and even years with everyone involved sworn to secrecy. The 1766 buying spree saw the beginning of negotiations with Senator Zambeccari for Ludovico Carracci’s Conversion of St Paul, “one of the finest altarpieces in Bologna”.16 Hamilton wrote to Lady Spencer: This is my favourite picture & I shall doe my utmost endeavours to cary it off, tho the difficulty’s are great having the laws of the country against me ... My first care must be to gain the Prince of the Accademy with four of the principal directors & to prevail with them to make an attestato that the picture is in a very bad preservation & that on account of the humidity of the place the picture must in a few years go to ruin. This done the Marquiss of Zambeccari proposes to lay it before the senate, with whose permission we hope soon to get the consent of the Bishop [...] of Bologna & afterwards that of the Pope & lastly that of the Friars who are as yet very obstinate.17

In the event the Pope refused a license to export the picture. And the Franciscan friars, reluctant to agree to a sale from which they would gain no benefit, insisted, out of spite says Hamilton, that the Zambeccari family rather than sell the picture should repair the chapel in which it was housed or forfeit their rights of patronage.18 Plans were made to appeal directly to Pope Clement XIII but to no avail, the picture remained and remains still in Bologna. With his failure to secure the Carracci, Hamilton set his sights on Guercino’s marvellous Risen Christ and the Madonna, a painting that had been offered to him by a religious confraternity at Cento.19 Negotiations were

15

16

17

18

19

On Lonsing see Olivier Michel, ‘L’apprentissage romain de Francois-Joseph Lonsing’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Moyen-âge, Temps modernes, 84 (1972), 493-509. The picture is now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, see Alessandro Brogi, Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619), 2 vols, (Ozzana Emilia: Edizione Tipoarte, 2001), I, pp. 132-33, Tav. XIII-XIV; II, figs 60-61. Letter of 21 May 1766 to Georgiana, Countess Spencer, London, British Library, Add MS 75686. Letters of 12 October 1766 and 11 April 1767 to Georgiana, Countess Spencer, London, British Library, Add MS 75686. On the picture see Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino (Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 1988), p. 221, no. 127.

Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome

347

all but concluded when, as Hamilton writes, “the cityzens of Cento hearing of what was passing went in a body to the Archivescovo [...] to advise him of the loss they were likely to sustain if he gave his permission for the sale”.20 The archbishop put a stop to the sale and was not to be persuaded nor bribed, as Hamilton tried to do. However, successes were to be had elsewhere. He managed to acquire from the Locatelli collection in Cesena Guercino’s Sibyl and his King David for Lord Spencer, and both pictures are still at Althorp.21 The frustrations at times became too much for Hamilton. In 1766 he wrote to Viscount Palmerston telling him he was selling his own collection, “one of the finest perhaps ever made by any private person”, because he wanted, as he said, “never to think more of picture dealing as it is attended with too great loss of time and dont by any means turn to account”.22 His dissatisfaction, however, was only temporary brought on by recent disappointments and also by the fact that in the 1760s he had other equally lucrative irons in the fire. His own ambitious paintings based on themes from Homer had attracted aristocratic purchasers at some £300 a time and his work as an excavator and dealer in ancient marbles was also beginning to prove profitable. Much of his time being taken up at one dig or another, he came increasingly to rely on agents in his picture dealing. Some were people in his employ. He sent Ricciolini to a convent at Sutri to assess a picture said to be by Guido Reni. A Mr Paxton in Genoa was exploring the Palazzo Balbi for suitable things. In Bologna Hamilton called upon the services of Signore Marco de Brotis. Other people, knowing Hamilton’s interests, would write him with news of promising pictures. A certain Signore Luca, described by Hamilton as the scopatore (discoverer) of a painting in a Bolognese collection was paid a fee (a regalo) for his trouble. At the same time Hamilton was writing to owners to enquire whether they had anything to sell; or rather he got Italian friends to make overtures for him, either because they were acquainted with the owner or because he felt that prospective vendors might be more responsive to a fellow countryman than to a foreigner. A mathematician friend was enjoined to write to Ancona to enquire after a

20

21

22

Letter of 11 April 1767 to Georgiana, Countess Spencer, London, British Library, Add MS 75686. Both pictures, painted for Giuseppe Locatelli in 1651, were on their way to England by 3 December 1768 (see letter of that date, London, British Library, Add Ms 75686). For the paintings see Salerno, pp. 352-53, nos. 282-83; and Kenneth J. Garlick, ‘A Catalogue of the Pictures at Althorp’, Walpole Society, 45 (1974-76), 34. Letter of 12 April 1766 to Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston, University of Southampton, Hartley Library, MS BR 12/12; published in Grassinger, pp. 118-19.

348

Brendan Cassidy

Guercino in the collection of the Conte Camerata. Back in Britain he also had his agents who would attempt to sell works for him, among whom were the architect Matthew Brettingham in 1763 and the framemaker and gilder Solomon Hudson in London in 1791. Hamilton’s chief source of Venetian paintings from the late 1780s was the artist and dealer Giovanni Maria Sasso, from whom he bought by mail order. A large number of Hamilton’s letters to Sasso survive.23 They document the haemorraghing of paintings from the great Venetian collections in the closing decades of the 18th century and the profiteering and other malpractices that sustained the trade. One of the casualties of this was Veronese’s altarpiece for the Petrobelli altar in Lendinara near Rovigo which, at 4 ½ metres high, was one of the artist’s largest religious works. Fragments of it are now in Ottawa, Edinburgh and Dulwich. The reconstruction (fig. 1) gives some idea of what it would have looked like originally.

Figure 1: Veronese’s altarpiece for the Petrobelli altar in Lendinara

23

Most are in the Biblioteca del Seminario Patriarcale in Venice, MS 1144.14.

Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome

349

Its dissection, as we learn from Hamilton, took place in 1788 and the culprit was a shadowy Venetian dealer, Pietro Concolo. Because it was too large to sell Concolo chopped up the canvas to form smaller pictures, just like meat in a butcher’s shop (“come la carne al macello”) writes Hamilton, and concluding, “povero Paulo, povera pittura”. 24 His outrage at the vandalism, however, did not prevent Hamilton from putting in an offer for the most attractive fragment, that with the figures of St Jerome and a donor (fig. 2).

Figure 2: The figures of St Jerome and a donor

The offer was refused. Concolo wanted Hamilton to take all the pieces but he declined. Negotiations continued and eventually Hamilton got his way, acquiring only the Jerome which he took back to England and sold to one of his regular buyers, Noel Desenfans, from whom it eventually passed to the Dulwich Gallery. Buying by mail order from Sasso was a risky business. It required Hamilton to be fairly specific about what he was after. He wanted paintings in good condition, “Virgin paintings without blemish”, as another of Sasso’s

24

On what follows see Brendan Cassidy, ‘‘Come la carne al macello’: butchering a Veronese’, Burlington Magazine, 149 (2007), 483-85; and now Xavier F. Salomon, ‘Reconstructing Veronese’s Petrobelli Altarpiece ‘, Burlington Magazine, 151 (2009), 4-13.

350

Brendan Cassidy

customers put it.25 He preferred them uncleaned and unrestored. Hamilton generally comes across as a genial, good-natured sort of man; one of the few things, however, that could make him lose his equanimity was evidence of restorers’ handiwork. One, who had spoiled a Titianesque painting, he calls a ‘beast’ responsible for a porcharia (translatable perhaps as a ‘dog’s breakfast’).26 Sasso would send annotated sketches illustrating pictures he had on offer or hoped to acquire from Venetian collections. Unfortunately, none of these appears to have survived. He also sent prints, such as an engraving of a Christ and the Adultress by Veronese in the Soranzo collection (fig 3).

Figure 3: Christ and the Adultress by Veronese

Hamilton decided to buy it, despite the awkwardness of the Adultress’s head, on which he remarked. But he was too late. Another purchaser, a dealer named Barbera, had had his offer accepted and was boasting of his plans to

25

26

The expression is that of Sir Abraham Hume, see Linda Borean, ‘‘Voglio dei dipinti vergini senza macola’ scrive l’inglese al mercante’, Venezialtrove, 3 (2005), 49-65. Letter to Sasso of 27 September 1793 (?), Venice, Biblioteca del Seminario Patriarcale, MS 1144.14.

Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome

351

sell the painting in London at a vast profit. The picture was sent to Russia and ended up eventually in the Château de Montrésor in Touraine, France.27 Veronese was a favourite of Hamilton, but even more than a ‘bel paolo’ he wanted works by Titian and by Giorgione; and Sasso did not disappoint. He dispatched to Rome a number of so-called Giorgiones; so-called because up until the 19th century there was no certain evidence for an assessment of what a genuine Giorgione looked like. His name, as a result, tended to get attached to the most stylistically disparate pictures. 28 One of the reputed Giorgiones that Hamilton received from Sasso excited him enormously. The picture represented the Infant Moses being Tested by Fire and had been acquired by Sasso from the Soranzo family. Hamilton wanted to know more about what he was buying. He did his research. He consulted Carlo Ridolfi’s history of Venetian painting, Le Meraviglie dell’arte (1648). He read Josephus, and other writers, in the hope of finding out something about the peculiar subject. He was delighted when Sasso reported that he had found in the Soranzo library a catalogue of the family pictures from 1602 which listed the painting as a Titian. And he personally restored the work and wrote triumphantly that it was an early masterpiece by Titian, that he never tired of looking at it and would keep it by him always. 29 Most of the other works he acquired, however, he sold on. His clients typically were Scots, Irish and English, aristocrats mainly, whom Hamilton had first met in Rome (e.g. Lords Breadalbane, Palmerston, Shelburne, Spencer and Upper Ossory; Barons Camelford and Scarsdale; Sir James Grant of Grant). Having admired the great Italian collections they returned home with their appetites whetted for pictures and would write to Hamilton with their shopping lists. The more astute would also order one of Hamilton’s own paintings to keep him well disposed towards them. Their requests were various. Earl Spencer was “desirous of the Barberini Magdalene” and was willing to spend 4000 crowns to get it. But he was not always so precise, or fussy, in his demands, at least as regards the artists and pictures he was prepared to buy. He was decorating Spencer House at the

27

28

29

For the engraving see Davide Apolloni, Pietro Monaco e la raccolta di cento dodici stampe di pitture della storia sacra, preface by Adriano Mariuz (Monfalcone: Edizioni della Laguna, 2000). On the painting and its sale see Linda Borean, Lettere artistiche del Settecento veneziano 2. Il carteggio Giovanni Maria Sasso – Abraham Hume (Venice: Fondazione Cini, 2004), pp. 180-81, 277-78; and now, Natacha Pernac, ‘Paolo Veronese: ‘Christo e l’adultera’ Soranzo’, Arte veneta, 64 (2007), 181-95. Charles Hope, Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy (New York: The Council of the Frick Collection, 2003). Letters from Hamilton to Sasso of 7 September 1793, 13 September 1793 and 13 December 1793, Venice, Biblioteca del Seminario Patriarcale, MS 1144.14.

352

Brendan Cassidy

time and was in the market for what might be called ‘wall furniture’. Size, therefore, perhaps even more than artistic excellence, was a major consideration; he wanted pictures of particular dimensions for certain rooms. It is difficult to know whether the Earl of Upper Ossory was ambitious or simply naive in asking for Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno. In any event, what prospective purchasers actually got from Rome was whatever Hamilton had been lucky enough to acquire. He had various ploys to keep them interested and to continue buying from him. He writes to Upper Ossory about his idea “of making your Lordship a collection of one agreable picture of each good master.”30 He mentions to Lord Spencer that he has in prospect important pictures by Guido, Guercino and Pietro da Cortona, none of which ever materialised.31 Instead he sent pictures on spec together with a suitable puff praising the quality, the originality of the work and the reasonableness of the price. Ossory received Guido Cagnacci’s David with Goliath’s Head, “at the price it cost me” says Hamilton.32 He also got a Barocci portrait, which is now in the Italian Embassy in London, and to account for its high price Hamilton told him, “I call it Baroccio’s masterpiece”.33 A Circumcision by Garofalo from the Lancellotti collection was “one of the finest I have seen of the master, & may stand by Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci”.34 It was the

30

31

32

33

34

Letter from Hamilton to John Fitzpatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, 27 September 1769, Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 8012 (iii). Letter to John, 1st Earl Spencer of 29 January 1766, London, British Library, Add. MS 75686. Letter from Hamilton to John Fitzpatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, 11 July 1767, Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 8012 (iii). There are two versions of Cagnacci’s David, one semi-nude in the Kress Collection, Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, and the other clothed in a private collection in Venice. For both see P. G. Pasini, Guido Cagnacci pittore (1601-1663) (Rimini: Luisè, 1986), pp. 263-70; and Guido Cagnacci, exh. cat., Rimini, Museo della Città (1993), ed. by D. Benati and M. B. Castellottti (Milan: Electa, 1993), pp. 156-59. Letter from Hamilton to John Fitzpatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, 7 January 1769, Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 8012 (iii). The portrait, variously identified as Ippolito della Rovere or Federico Bonaventura and signed and dated 1602 by Barocci, was acquired by the Italian State in 1952 and is now in the Italian Embassy in London. See Andrea Emiliani, Federico Barocci (Urbino 1535-1612), 2 vols (Bologna: Alfieri, 1985), II, pp. 342-43; and F. Sangiorgi, ‘Precisazioni su due ritratti di Federico Barocci’, Notizie da Palazzo Albani, 20 (1991), 165-70. Letter from Hamilton to John Fitzpatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, 8 July 1769, Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 8012 (iii). The painting is probably one of the several copies of Garofalo’s Circumcision in the Louvre, see the list in Federico Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, 2 vols (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1976), II, pp. 369-70.

Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome

353

dealer’s sales patter and only the most innocent would have been taken in by it. But how honest was Hamilton? Some of his business associates were unscrupulous rogues. Thomas Jenkins sold fake pictures and antiquities to callow tourists for ludicrous prices. Jospeh Nollekens recalls Jenkins had a team of workers manufacturing fake intaglios and gems inside the Colosseum.35 Hamilton’s reputation, by comparison, seems to have been untarnished. To Nollekens he was ‘a good fellow’ and his letters appear generally to confirm his integrity in his business dealings. He tells the Earl of Ossory, whom he tried to interest in an Adoration of the Magi, that he had bought it from the Sampieri collection in Bologna as a Giorgione but that he thought it was rather to be attributed to the much less collectable Dosso Dossi. And, as a result, the Earl declined to have it.36 However, in 1783 he sold to the Earl of Breadalbane, what he called “two capital pictures of Paul Veronese” representing Geometry and Arithmetic. He claimed that they had come from the Public Library of Venice, having been taken down from the library ceiling around 1773, when, says Hamilton “it is suposed that the late Library keeper [...] made free” with them, (stole them, in other words). Hamilton cautions Breadalbane, “I onely beg that what I have mentioned may be kept a secret, for the sake of peace and quiet”. But Veronese’s originals are still in place on the library ceiling and as far as I have been able to discover were never removed.37 It seems strange that Hamilton would not have known that. It was something that could easily have been checked. Did Hamilton act out of ignorance, perhaps on information relayed to him by Sasso, or was he lying? It is difficult to know. Certainly, the possibility that for two hundred years or so countless historians of Renaissance art have been taken in by copies is scarcely to be contemplated. Sir Archibald Hamilton (later 9th Duke of Hamilton) was less pleased by the service his namesake provided. In 1791 four pictures of Claude-Joseph Vernet and Filippo Lauro’s Stoning of St Stephen were sent to London intended for Sir Archibald’s house in Lancashire (fig. 4). His reaction when he unpacked the pictures is preserved in a letter he drafted to Hamilton. The number of underlinings, insertions and scores through, suggest his agitation when he wrote it.

35

36

37

J. T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times, paperback edn (London: Century Hutchinson, 1986), p. 159. Letter from Hamilton to John Fitzpatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, 27 September 1769, Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 8012 (iii). See Terisio Pignatti, Veronese, 2 vols (Venice: Alfieri, 1976), I, p. 113, no. 62; II, fig. 124.

354

Brendan Cassidy

Figure 4: Filippo Lauro’s Stoning of St Stephen

“The four landscapes appear to me to be four bad copies of very fine designs”, the “St Stephen appears to be copied very carefully [...] but I rather think ye person who copied it never saw ye original [...] it is a poor thin painted thing [...] without any thing to recommend it, in short it appears to me a bad copy and not a very old one”. And he concludes, with wonderful irony, “having now told you my opinion I must beg leave to say that I don’t mean to say anything that may offend you.” He then asks for his money back and for instructions as to what to do with the paintings.38 Hamilton’s sense of hurt and humiliation is apparent in his reply. There were complaints from other customers. Hamilton was by now in his 70s and his faculties were in decline. An English artist who met him in Rome at the Caffe degli Inglesi in 1797 called him ‘exceedingly broken’.39 He died in 1798, since which time he has figured only on the margins of art history. His own paintings, particularly the large and sombre Iliad scenes, while they made a stir in Rome in their day, went largely unappreciated when they arrived in Britain and were either sold on cheaply by their original owners or left to moulder on country house walls. But the last couple of decades have seen a quickening of interest both in his art and his career as a dealer and excavator of ancient sites. The important position he occupied at the very centre of the 18th century Roman antiquities trade is now fully recognized.

38

39

Draft letter of 2 January 1792 from Sir Archibald Hamilton to Gavin Hamilton, MS in private collection. The artist was William Artaud and his letter is quoted in Julia Lloyd Wiliams, Gavin Hamilton 1723-1798 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1994), p. 17.

Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in Old Masters in 18th Century Rome

355

His activities as a dealer in old master paintings and drawings have been less fully explored. And yet sufficient documentation survives to indicate that he was also in this area instrumental in introducing to Britain some of the greatest works of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art.

Bibliography Cassidy, Brendan, ‘A Note on the Later History of Raphael’s Ansidei Altarpiece’, Burlington Magazine, 150 (2008), 672-75. ––. ‘Gavin Hamilton, Thomas Pitt and Statues for Stowe’, Burlington Magazine, 146 (2004), 806-14. ––. ‘‘Come la carne al macello’: butchering a Veronese’, Burlington Magazine, 149 (2007), 483-85. Cesareo, Antonello, ‘Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798): ‘A gentleman of probity, knowledge and real taste’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 26 (2002), 211-322. Hamilton, Gavin, Schola Italica Picturae, sive selectae quaedam summorum e schola italica pictorum tabulae aere incise (Rome: 1773). Ingamells, John, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 17011800 compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). Irwin, David, ‘Gavin Hamilton, Archaeologist, Painter and Dealer’, Art Bulletin, 44 (1962), 87-102. Lloyd Wiliams, Julia, Gavin Hamilton 1723-1798 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1994). ––. ‘Hamilton, Gavin (1723-1798)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition (accessed 16 January 2008).

David Ekserdjian Crowe and Cavalcaselle then and now1 As a rule, the extra-curricular activities of art historians – like their professional occupations – do not exactly brim over with excitements. It was perhaps ever thus, with Anthony Blunt seemingly the supreme odd man out,2 but the lives of the double-act who are the subject of my short paper incontrovertibly demonstrate that he is not the only exception to the rule. Happily, we know a great deal about the biographies of Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-96) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-97), above all because the former published an autobiography entitled Reminiscences of Thirty-five Years of my Life a couple of years before his death.3 What is more, a huge deposit of in the main unpublished working notes, drawings, and the like, most of it divided between the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, represents an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to examine their scholarly collaboration.4 It is the most dramatic episode of Cavalcaselle’s life and its aftermath that makes them eligible for inclusion in a conference dedicated to ‘Exiles and Emigrés’, but Crowe had his moments too, as will be explained shortly. If ever a partnership was willed by fate, it was that of Crowe and Cavalcaselle.

1

2 3

4

I am particularly grateful to my colleague Martin Stannard for involving me in the series of conferences of which ‘Exiles and Emigrés’ formed a part; to Barbara Schaff for her editorial diligence; and of course to a whole variety of other participants for inspiration and support. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Bernardette Archer in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum. For Blunt, see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001). Joseph Archer Crowe, Reminiscences of Thirty-five Years of My Life, second edition (London: John Murray, 1895). The Cavalcaselle papers in the Biblioteca Marciana have been explored by a number of scholars, as will emerge in subsequent references, and I have drawn from their publications for pertinent examples. In contrast, the Crowe papers in the Victoria and Albert Museum are almost wholly terra incognita, which means that I am obliged to refer to visual materials that have never been reproduced and can by no means all be illustrated here. What is more, the references will be to individual boxes, but there is only limited systematic ordering within boxes, predominantly consisting of grouping alphabetically by place, and then by artist: in consequence, anyone interested in following up these references may be obliged to look through the relevant box until they come across the item required. The shining exception to the more general neglect of the Crowe papers in the V & A is Denys Sutton, ‘Crowe and Cavalcaselle’, Apollo, 123 (August 1985), 111-17.

358

David Ekserdjian

Their first meeting took place in the summer of 1847 in a post-carriage between Hamm and Minden, en route to Berlin. Crowe was with his father, and already studying what we would call early Netherlandish painting. Cavalcaselle – and I quote from Crowe’s Reminiscences – ‘had determined to look at those pictures of his countrymen which had found their way out of Italy, and to compare the lost treasures of his country with those which still remained at home.’ On arrival in Berlin after various stops, they went their separate ways, but then met by chance the next morning outside the Museum just before it opened. Crowe persuaded Cavalcaselle to forsake the Italian paintings for the Flemish school, and – in the former’s words – ‘We spent the day together, made closer acquaintance, communicated to each other name, profession, address, and the next day Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, for so he was called, dined with my father at the Hôtel du Nord, and we all went to hear the “Freischütz” together at the opera.’5 They next met in Paris, where Crowe was working as a journalist, in July 1849, when he was ‘accosted by a man in very tattered dress, who asked whether I did not recognise him.’ Crowe then relates how the previous year Cavalcaselle had allied himself to Daniele Manin’s movement for the liberation of Italy, only to be captured by the Austrians under Marshal Radetzky at Piacenza, sentenced to death with three others, and transferred to a chapel in the cathedral there. ‘Into this chapel there came, in about an hour, a party of soldiers, who marched off one of the condemned to execution. An hour elapsed: then the second man, then the third, was removed, leaving Cavalcaselle alone. An hour, two hours, and more passed away. Presently the chapel door was opened – not by Austrians! Radetzky had had time to shoot three of his prisoners: he could not shoot the fourth, being forced suddenly to fall back before the Italian insurgents.’ Cavalcaselle’s troubles were not at an end, however, and after joining Garibaldi and Mazzini’s forces in the defence of Rome in 1849, he was taken prisoner and marched to the French frontier, and ordered to leave France at the earliest opportunity. Crowe helped him reach England, and there their paths would subsequently cross again.6 As for Crowe, he was a man of many parts, a journalist, war correspondent, and diplomat (one of his cartes de visite from his time as British consul-general in Leipzig with pencil sketches front and back is preserved among his papers in the Victoria and Albert Museum),7 but he too

5 6 7

Crowe, pp. 65-66. Ibid., pp. 87-88. Victoria and Albert Museum, Library, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Notes on pictures in continental collections, [ca. 1860-1880]/J.A. Crowe and G.B. Cavalcaselle, 18 boxes + 3 boxes of miscellaneous material (Pressmark 86.ZZ.30-33, 40-41). The carte de visite is in

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

359

– if his account is to be believed – had one supremely dramatic brush with destiny. In 1854, during the Crimean War, he was a witness to the Charge of the Light Brigade, and knew the notorious Captain Nolan (best known to some of us as the character played by David Hemmings in Tony Richardson’s 1968 film, The Charge of the Light Brigade). Crowe writes that in the midst of the battle – ‘Then Nolan came galloping past us, erect, and apparently unhurt, when suddenly his charger swerved and he fell, without any apparent cause. He was dead; had been killed seconds before by a round shot, and rode, dead as he was, with his grip so strong that he only fell when his horse turned.’8 Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s first collaboration was on a book entitled The Early Flemish Painters: Notices of their Lives and Works, which was published in 1857. There followed many volumes on Italian painting, and monographs on Raphael and Titian.9 Cavalcaselle in due course returned to Italy, but they were indivisible as co-authors. Crowe comments: ‘Crowe and Cavalcaselle remained inseparable. The world tried to get at the secret of our collaboration. In Italy people said that Cavalcaselle was nobody; in England many extolled Cavalcaselle and sneered at the ignorance of Crowe.’10 Posterity has taken a different view, with their books – especially in Italy – almost invariably assigned to Cavalcaselle alone, and Crowe generally ignored. The truth seems to be that Crowe wrote the majority of the words, but that the opinions expressed were naturally enough those of both men. What I wish to do for the remainder of this paper is not simply to admire their achievement, but above all to explore how they worked and to ask what lessons they may still have for art historians today. Crowe is scathing about their great precursor Gustav Waagen (‘His face was beyond measure plain. He was near-sighted to such a degree that he could not judge of a picture unless he almost touched it with his nose’, and so on),11 and subsequent authorities, such as Giovannni Morelli and Berenson, were not infrequently at odds with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, yet they all seem like giants to us now. In order to look more closely at what they accomplished, especially with regard to questions of attribution, I will

8 9

10 11

86.ZZ.32 (German Galleries, Box II). The legend upon it is ‘Der Englische Generalkonsul/Mr. J. A. Crowe’, and there is a pencil note upon it referring to an altarpiece of 1512 in Lübeck. Crowe, p. 161. Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, Raphael: his Life and Works, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1882-85), and Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, Titian: his Life and Times, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1877). Crowe, p. 232. Ibid., p. 399.

360

David Ekserdjian

perforce have to be selective, and will devote most of my attention to one city and two artists. The city is Berlin, not only because it was the city where Crowe and Cavalcaselle first looked at pictures together, or because it was the venue of the previous conference in this series, but above all because their records for Berlin are very full, while the two artists are Piero della Francesca and Giorgione. In the papers of Crowe and Cavalcaselle in the V & A and the Marciana, there are numerous documents relating to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum – as it then was – and various private collections in Berlin. The most immediately striking thing about them is that they are full of drawings, because photographs were few and far between. In some instances, such as an example after an Adoration of the Magi by Lo Spagna, the drawing is actually a tracing of a print, an early photograph of which is also preserved in the same box.12 Entirely characteristically, it was Crowe and Cavalcaselle who first attributed the work in question to Lo Spagna, whom they described as ‘The most interesting figure among the Peruginesques, Raphael always excepted’.13 More generally, they reveal a notable willingness to go against prevailing opinions, and this is one of the hallmarks of Crowe and Cavalcaselle. A simple case in point are two panels in Berlin representing Saint Sebastian and Saint Christopher: I know two extant drawings after them, one of which Cavalcaselle has rightly inscribed ‘Mantegna – no – Tura.’14 As one would expect, they are attributed to the latter in their History of Painting in North Italy.15 Crowe and Cavalcaselle are also notable for their

12

13

14

15

V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.32, Box I, for the photograph, and Box II, for the tracing. Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in Italy, ed. by Robert Langton Douglas and Tancred Borenius, 6 vols., V, Umbria, Florence and Siena from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1903-14), p. 422, for the quotation, and pp. 423-25, for the Berlin painting, which is illustrated facing p. 424. See also Filippo Todini, La pittura umbra dal Duecento al primo Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Milan: Longanesi & C., 1989), I, p. 313, and II, figs. 1403-04. V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.32, Box I, for the pen drawing with this quotation, which is by no means the only Cavalcaselle sheet among the Crowe papers. For the second drawing, see Giacinto Marangoni, G.B. Cavalcaselle: Medaglia per 150o anniversario della nascita (Legnano: Fondazione Fioroni, 1969), fig. 9 (unnumbered), for the entire sheet, and Donata Levi, Cavalcaselle: Il pioniere della conservazione dell’arte italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), fig. 8, for the detail of the head of Saint Christopher. Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in North Italy, ed. by Tancred Borenius, 3 vols., II (London: John Murray, 1912), p. 229. See also Stephen Campbell, Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics and the Renaissance City, 14501495 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 79 and 92, Plates 58 and 59.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

361

exemplary attention to detail, which was evidently motivated by the fact that they could not use photographs as aides-mémoires. Crowe claims that ‘We were both of opinion that, if one of us knew a picture well, it was unnecessary that the other should have seen it’,16 yet their note-taking is very different, as is particularly plain when we are able to compare their distinct approaches to a single work. We possess pen drawings by Cavalcaselle and a pencil sketch by Crowe of an altarpiece they both erroneously assumed was by Tura, but correctly realised was by the same hand as another altarpiece in the Brera then said to be by Stefano da Ferrara.17 Both works are now uncontroversially agreed to be by Tura’s fellow-Ferrarese nearcontemporary, Ercole de’ Roberti.18 Cavalcaselle is particularly eager to record exactly what is there, both in terms of things and in terms of the colour scheme. In the more summary overall view (Fig.1), he specifies that the fruit in the foreground is a ‘mela’ (apple), while the close-up (Fig.2) explains that the child, who is characterised as a ‘brutto tipo’ (ugly type) is a ‘Putto che tiene la corda colla quale tiene sospesa la corona sul capo della Madonna.’ (Child holding the string with which he holds the crown suspended over the head of the Madonna).

16 17

18

Crowe, p. 232. V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.32, Box I, for the pencil drawing by Crowe, and for an overall view and a detail study by Cavalcaselle in pen, and Marangoni, fig. 4 (unnumbered), for a variant overall view by Cavalcaselle in the Marciana, which is slightly cropped in Levi, fig. 6. See also Crowe and Cavalcaselle, North Italy, vol. II, pp. 227-28, illustrated facing p. 227, for the Berlin altarpiece, and pp. 239-40, for the one in the Brera. Joseph Manca, The Art of Ercole de’ Roberti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 36-38, and 106-09, cat. no. 6.

362

David Ekserdjian

All images are the author’s photographs of material from the Crowe Papers, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Figure 1 and 2: G.B. Cavalcaselle, Sketches after Ercole de Roberti’s Virgin and Child with Saints (formerly Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).

By contrast, Crowe’s text (Fig.3) is less particularising, and refers to ‘quaint architecture gilding mosaic sculpture & crystal & gold. Note that the flesh light is strong. & whitey the shadows red brown. – The shadows are dark & in strong contrast with cold lights – The forms are searched & galvanic (?) note a curious rigidity papery drapery. Thin lean forms – Mantegnesque study of details’. In the published version, this becomes: ‘The throne is one of the quaintest of structures; it rests on crystal pillars, and has the form of a niche curved in the shape of a cockle-shell; the landscape distance is seen through the crystal pillars, as well as through the arches of the edifice. In lunettes in the background are bas-reliefs of prophets imitating stone, others on the ground imitating gilt metal, representing various scenes from the Genesis and the life of Samson. Nothing can be more striking than this profuse mixture of strange architecture, gilding, mosaic, glass, bronze, and gold; white stony light in the flesh is contrasted with red-brown shadow, and

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

363

there is a metallic rigidity in the lean shapes and papery stiffness in the draperies.’19

Figure 3: J.A. Crowe, Sketches after Ercole de Roberti’s Virgin and Child with Saints (formerly Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).

It might not unreasonably be presumed that all the colour notes – which are also included in the published text – are no longer of interest, but actually they are peculiarly vital: this masterpiece was one of the casualties of the 1945 Flakturm fire that destroyed a whole host of pictures in Berlin, and the authors of the most recent monographic studies of Roberti would have done well not to ignore them.20 For understandable reasons, most of the published drawings of Crowe and Cavalcaselle are relatively finished, but they must often have been racing against time, and there are other sheets that eloquently convey the fact that something is always better than nothing. The Crowe papers in the V & A include a number of extraordinarily schematic scribbles devoted to works in Berlin by Cima da Conegliano (Fig.4).21

19 20 21

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, North Italy, II, pp. 227-28. Manca, pp. 36-38, and 106-09, cat. no. 6, makes no mention of the colour-scheme. V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.32, Box I, for drawings after Cima’s Virgin and Child (destroyed 1945), Virgin and Child with a Donor, Virgin and Child with Saints, Three Female Saints, and Healing of Anianus (for which, see Staatliche Museen Berlin, Die Gemäldegalerie: Die italienischen Meister 13. bis 15. Jahrhundert [Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1930], pp. 32-34).

364

David Ekserdjian

Figure 4: G.B. Cavalcaselle, Sketch after Cima da Conegliano’s Virgin and Child with Saints (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin)

By no means all of these manuscripts are dated, but it is tempting to presume that Crowe’s pencil drawing and elaborate notes about Prince Anthony Radziwill’s Memling of the Annunciation (Fig.5) – seen at his palace in the Wilhelmstrasse, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – were made not only after the first, but possibly even after the second, 1872, edition of The Early Flemish Painters, since the work in question is accorded only the most telegraphic of mentions (‘a picture described by Dr. Waagen, as of very original conception and marvellous delicacy’).22

22

V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.32, Box I, for the drawing, and Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, The Early Flemish Painters: Notices of Their Lives and Works, second edition (London: John Murray, 1872), p. 279. See also Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen (eds.), From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (exh. cat., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998-99), pp. 118-19, cat. no. 12.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

365

Figure 5: J.A. Crowe, Sketch after Hans Memling’s Annunciation (formerly Radziwill Collection Berlin; now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

The material pertaining to a second painting, also in a private collection in Berlin, is revealing of the fact that Crowe and Cavalcaselle must on occasion have relied upon information furnished by others. The reason for saying this is that the drawing in question – for all that I could wish my connoisseurship of their respective hands as draughtsmen were more sure – is palpably by neither of them.23 It depicts a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine attributed to Titian by Georg Gronau and others, and illustrated in the Klassiker der Kunst volume on the artist, which is actually a variant of a painting by Francesco Vecellio in the Royal Collection.24 The colour notes are in German, as is the text on the reverse, which refers to Giorgione’s Tempesta and Graf Usedom, who was the General Director of the Berlin Museums. Another comparable document in the V & A is a letter from one Dottor Guidopieri in Verona dated 3 June 1867, which consists of a meticulous description of Giovanni Maria Falconetto’s Annunciation in the church of

23

24

V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.32, Box I, for the drawing, which is in pen, but has the pencil annotation ‘Berlin Jan 21. 1876’ at the top of the sheet, and the name ‘Reimer’ below the drawing. Oscar Fischel, Klassiker der Kunst: Tizian (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1924), fig. 257, for the ex-Berlin picture, and John Shearman, The Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen: The Early Italian Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 278-80, no. 303, Plate 244.

366

David Ekserdjian

San Giorgietto there.25 Recent scholarship on Vasari has been much fixated on the idea that his Vite involved extensive collaboration: it should come as no surprise if what came to be known as ‘the new Vasari’ did the same every now and then.26 I now want to turn to Piero della Francesca, the Quattrocento artist par excellence whom the early 20th century claimed to have ‘discovered’. In reality, Crowe and Cavalcaselle were not alone in their admiration of Piero, whom they describe as ‘a vast genius who only wanted the quality of selection to be one of the greatest men of his country’,27 since Sir Charles Eastlake, variously the Director of the National Gallery and the President of the Royal Academy, owned both his Baptism and his Saint Michael (which he admittedly thought was by Fra Carnevale) at different times.28 What is most striking, however, about their account of Piero is the sureness of their judgement concerning matters of authorship. Their sense of what is and what is not by Piero is almost unfailingly in accordance with modern opinion, and their scrutiny of his works is characteristically acute. In many cases, they were guided by Vasari himself, who understood Piero particularly well because he was from Arezzo, where the artist’s most ambitious surviving work – the fresco cycle of the Legend of the True Cross – is to be found in the choir chapel of the church of San Francesco, but on other occasions they had to make up their own minds.

25

26

27

28

V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.33, Box VI, for the drawing. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, North Italy, II, pp. 179-80, note 5, refer dismissively to the work as: ‘Lunette fresco, with figures above life-size, representing the Annunciation, surrounded by allegories too childish for description; at the corners two portraits of the patrons, Hans Weineck and Gaspar Künigl.’ Thomas Frangenberg, ‘Bartoli, Giambullari and the Prefaces to Vasari’s Lives (1550)’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 65 (2002), 244-58, with further bibliography. For the term, the ‘new Vasari’, see Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 135-61, p. 149. The Renaissance was first published in 1873, but ‘The School of Giorgione’ is dated 1877, and is a subsequent addition. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Italy, V, p. 5. Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 192, is woefully misguided when she alleges that ‘the poetically beautiful work of Piero della Francesca seemed like a mere historical phenomenon to Crowe and Cavalcaselle’. For more on 19th century attitudes to Piero and extensive bibliography on the subject, see Caroline Elam, Roger Fry and the Re-Evaluation of Piero della Francesca (The Council of the Frick Collection Lecture Series) (New York: The Frick Collection, 2004). David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 194-95, fig. 94, for the Baptism (which had been acquired a couple of years before by the great connoisseur J.C. Robinson for Matthew Uzielli, merchant and railway director), and p. 235, fig. 112, for the Saint Michael.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

367

Numerous records chronicle their interest: one such in the V & A is a sheet of pen sketches, which must have been cut from a larger piece of paper. It is probably the work of Crowe, for all that the colour notes are in Italian, and represents Piero’s fresco of Mary Magdalen in the Duomo at Arezzo.29 The relevant passage from Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s History of Painting in Italy reads as follows: ‘She stands life size in a richly ornamented niche of feigned marble, with the cup in her left hand and the drapery of her mantle in her right; and long locks fall in the usual thorny style to her shoulders. The mass of light and shade is grandly distributed, and thus we have a work worthy of being cited amongst the fine ones of the master.’30 Turning to the Urbino Flagellation, the annotations to Cavalcaselle’s drawings in the Marciana tend to confirm Crowe’s assertion that he wrote the books, since there is no trace of the various acute observations inscribed on the sheets. Cavalcaselle comments: ‘Pare lavoro fiammingo. Si può guardare colla lente e si trova tutte le finezze, anche nelle testine come nelle cose in avanti, senza che disturbi – fino quanto qualunque fiammingo.’ (It seems to be Flemish work. One can look at it with a magnifying glass and find exactly the same seamless refinement, whether in the little heads in the background or in the foreground elements, as one would expect of a Flemish painter.)31 There is at least one counter-example, however: when it comes to the Christ Child in Piero’s Perugia Polyptych, Cavalcaselle’s annotation is clearly the basis for the admittedly somewhat sanitised text of the History of Painting in Italy. The former writes: ‘vedi che ipopotamo, può mai essere Piero della Francesca dopo aver veduto Urbino. Vedi Domenico di Bartolo, Boccati da Camerino, Matteo di Gualdo ecc.’ (look what a hippopotamus, can it really be by Piero della Francesca after one has seen [his works in] Urbino. See Domenico di Bartolo, Boccati da Camerino, Matteo di Gualdo etc.), which becomes ‘nor is the Infant pleasing in its nakedness, because of its excessive fatness and the ugliness of its type; yet this type seems to have served as a model for the Boccati of Camerino, Matteo of Gualdo, and Bartolommeo of Foligno’.32

29

30 31

32

V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.33, Box VI, for the drawing, and Ronald Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (New York, London, Paris, 1992), p. 182, fig. 76, for the fresco. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Italy, V, p. 11. Lino Moretti, G.B. Cavalcaselle: Disegni da antichi maestri (exh. cat., Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 1973), pp. 76-77, figs. 40-41, for the Marciana studies, and Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Italy, V, pp. 20-21, for the painting. Levi, fig. 51, for the drawing and annotation, and Cavalcaselle, Italy, V, p. 25, for the published account.

368

David Ekserdjian

The opposite is true of the schematic diagram of the Arezzo frescoes in the V & A (Fig.6), where a number of Crowe’s turns of phrase are precisely echoed, so that ‘a grand figure in act of speech with left hand up’ and ‘a grand figure hanché much injured’ become ‘The lunette of the end wall is only adorned with two grand figures standing at each side of the window – one to the left gesticulating with his hand as he speaks, the other at rest and haunched, but now much injured.’33 Somewhat confusingly, the initial schematic drawing may have been made by Cavalcaselle, since it is labelled ‘Vedi i miei disegni qui uniti’ (See my drawings assembled here) in what appears to be his hand. Sadly, the sheet in question is now a singleton.

Figure 6: G.B. Cavalcaselle (with additional notes by J.A. Crowe), Sketch of fresco decoration. By Piero della Francesca, choir, San Francesco, Arezzo

My reason for choosing Giorgione alongside Piero is not to prove that Crowe and Cavalcaselle never put a foot wrong, but rather to underline quite how reliable they seem even now. Their account of Giorgione famously spooked Walter Pater because it was so mercilessly reductive, but accords remarkably well with most – but admittedly by no means all – modern conceptions of the extent of his oeuvre.34 I cannot believe in the Trial of Moses and the

33

34

V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.33, Box VI, for the drawing, and Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Italy, V, p. 8. Pater, pp. 135-61.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

369

Judgement of Solomon in the Uffizi, but many still do, while the Allendale Nativity, now in Washington, after which Cavalcaselle executed a fine watercolour, and the National Gallery’s Adoration of the Magi are widely accepted.35 So too are the Castelfranco Altarpiece, for which we have a drawing by Cavalcaselle, the Three Philosophers in Vienna, and the work then in the collection of Girolamo Manfrin known as the Family of Giorgione, but familiar to us as the Tempest in the Accademia in Venice, which was acquired by Prince Giovanelli in 1875, and only passed to the Accademia in 1932.36 The only sins of commission concern the Kingston Lacey Judgement of Solomon, which is generally agreed to be by Sebastiano del Piombo, and the Pitti Concert, which is customarily thought to be by Titian.37 The great sins of omission concern the Dresden Venus and the Judith in the Hermitage: in the case of the former their apparent neglect is misleading, for all that they thought the invention was Titian’s,38 while in the

35

36

37

38

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, North Italy, III, pp. 7-11, and Teresio Pignatti, Giorgione: Complete Edition (London: Phaidon Press, 1971), pp. 97-100, nos. 6-9, for the paintings. See also Levi, Plate II, for a colour reproduction of Cavalcaselle’s watercolour of the Allendale Nativity. Ibid., pp. 11-19, and Pignatti, pp. 96-97, no. 5, pp. 101-102, no. 13, and pp. 105-106, no. 18, for the paintings. See also Levi, fig. 28, for Cavalcaselle’s drawing of the various elements from the Castelfranco Altarpiece. Ibid., pp. 19-21, for the Kingston Lacy Judgement of Solomon, and pp. 25-26, for the Concert. See now Michael Hirst, Sebastiano del Piombo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 13-23, and Plates 13-18, and Filippo Pedrocco, Titian: The Complete Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), pp. 92-93, no. 23. V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, 86.ZZ.32, Box II, for two drawings connected with the Venus, which are after a version in Darmstadt, which Crowe and Cavalcaselle believed to be a ruined original by Titian (see Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, I, pp. 273-75, where the Dresden Venus is listed among the copies after this invention). One, in pencil - by Crowe refers to ‘great beauty of line, while another – by Cavalcaselle – refers to ‘tela grandezza naturale’, and adds various observations: ‘Il fondo ricorda quello del quadro Noli me tangere – ora in Galleria Nazionale di Londra (Tiziano)’, ‘tutto rifatto il cielo venuto scuro – nero’, ‘paese Tiziano’, as well as noting two small figures in front of the farm buildings. This box also contains a pencil copy by Crowe of Valentin Lefebre’s print of a related Venus, albeit in reverse, which is annotated ‘See Darmstadt’. V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, 86.ZZ.32, Box III, includes a drawing in pen by Cavalcaselle after the Dresden Venus, variously annotated by both collaborators: ‘non so se si dice copia da Tiziano’, ‘was given as copy ? by Sassoferrato’, ‘paese variato senza figure’, and ‘amor sitting was removed’. The penultimate observation clearly refers to the Darmstadt version, while it is the final one that leaves no doubt about this being the Dresden picture, which is referred to in the published account in the following terms: ‘This specimen is assigned dubiously to Sassoferrato.’ See also Ivan Lermolieff (i.e. Giovanni Morelli), Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei: Die Galerien zu München und Dresden (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1891), pp. 286-91, for the correct attribution, but also (p. 291) for the unwarranted claim that Crowe and Cavalcaselle

370

David Ekserdjian

case of the latter the phrase ‘Tocco diligente alla Giorgione imitazione come nelle prime opere’ shows how close Cavalcaselle came, before veering off into ‘Bissolo – Catena e forse forestiero – Catena.’39 The accuracy of the ascriptions of the reject Giorgiones is no less impressive, with the exGiorgione Adam and Eve in Braunschweig (Fig.7) being correctly given to Palma Vecchio.40 All in all, Kenneth Clark’s strikingly negative judgement of Crowe and Cavalcaselle on Giorgione seems distinctly unfair.41

Figure 7: J.A. Crowe, Sketch after Palma il Vecchio’s Adam and Eve (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig)

The final point that needs to be made concerning attribution is that all attributions unsupported by signatures, documentary evidence, and the like

39 40

41

considered it to be a copy by Sassoferrato, when it is plain they are reporting an old idea with which they do not concur. Moretti, p. 99, fig. 77, for the Judith. V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, 86.ZZ.32, Box II, for a pen drawing of the painting by Crowe, and Philip Rylands, Palma il Vecchio: L’opera completa (Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori, 1988), p. 226, no. 55. Kenneth Clark (ed.), Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, to which is added the Essay on Raphael from Miscellaneous Studies with an Introduction and Notes by Kenneth Clark (London: Collins, 1961), pp. 126-44, p. 136, for the assertion that ‘The chapter on Giorgione is one of the least satisfactory parts of the book, and the authors’ conclusions are now almost all rejected.’

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

371

remain just that – attributions. That is why I have tried to emphasise the extent to which judgements concerning right and wrong in this area must so often remain provisional. In this context, it is particularly interesting to observe how easy it is for what was once deemed to be wrong now to be considered to be right – and vice versa. When Donata Levi illustrated the Christ Carrying the Cross on slate in the Prado, which Cavalcaselle followed tradition in giving to Sebastiano del Piombo, it was not accepted in the most recent literature on the artist.42 Now it is.43 When Lino Moretti reproduced Cavalcaselle’s drawing after the so-called Manchester Madonna in the National Gallery, a work Cavalcaselle believed to be by Michelangelo, it was widely regarded as being by an anonymous artist christened the Master of the Manchester Madonna.44 Now it is once again an early masterpiece by Michelangelo.45 When the same author included Cavalcaselle’s thumbnail sketch of Botticelli’s Wemyss Madonna among other studies on a composite sheet, it scarcely even still featured in the literature on the artist.46 Now it is one of the great treasures of the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.47 There remains the question of what Crowe and Cavalcaselle still have to teach art historians, and this – I believe – above all concerns what might be described as the art of looking. There is a sense in which we are all inclined to be spoilt by the ubiquity of reproductions, whether they be in learned tomes or at the tweak of a mouse on Google Images. The consequence tends to be that we do not spend enough time looking at original works of art, and that even when we do, we are less good at seeing than our Victorian predecessors. What is more, the twin activities of making drawings and compiling notes both slowed down their practitioners, which meant they lingered longer in front of the works they were studying. All sorts of advances have been achieved through photographs, but at the expense both of

42

43

44 45

46 47

Levi, fig. 1. Before its recent cleaning, Hirst, p. 135, recognised the work’s beauty, but could not accept that it was by Sebastiano, and mistakenly described the support as copper. Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Sebastiano del Piombo y España (exh. cat., Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1995), pp. 106-107, no. 6. The attribution was accepted in both David Ekserdjian, ‘Sebastiano del Piombo’, Apollo, 142 (July 1995), 58-59, and Michael Hirst, ‘Madrid: Sebastiano del Piombo and Spain’, Burlington Magazine, 137 (July 1995), 481-82, where the painting was illustrated in colour as fig. 82. See now Sebastiano del Piombo 1485-1547 (exh. cat., Rome: Palazzo di Venezia and Berlin: Gemäldegalerie, 2008), pp. 236-37, no. 59 (entry by Roberto Contini), for a recent confirmation of the attribution. Moretti, p. 100, fig. 78. Michael Hirst and Jill Dunkerton, The Young Michelangelo: Making and Meaning (exh. cat., London: National Gallery, 1994-95), pp. 36-46, Plate 23. Moretti, pp. 103-104, fig. 82. Timothy Clifford, ‘Botticelli’s Wemyss Madonna’, Apollo, 152 (August 2000), 3-10.

372

David Ekserdjian

concentration and of the cultivation of visual memory. When Cavalcaselle saw, drew, and studied the great Mantegna Christ in Copenhagen,48 or even the Botticelli tondo of the Virgin and Child with Angels, which he deemed ‘bellissimo’, then in the Raczinski Gallery in Berlin, but now in the Gemäldegalerie there,49 he must have felt an overwhelming sense that it might well be a case of now or never. Easyjet and its like have made that sensation harder to achieve, but that is surely how we should always look at pictures. During the previous conference in this series in Berlin, when I suddenly realised that there were gold rays emerging from the Virgin’s nipple in that Botticelli tondo, a fascinating detail which appears not to have been remarked on by scholars, and which is invisible in all the published reproductions of the work with which I am acquainted,50 I felt – at least for a moment – that I was following in the tradition of which Crowe and Cavalcaselle were such eminent exponents. Bibliography Published Sources Ainsworth, Maryan and Keith Christiansen (eds.), From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (exh. cat., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998-99). Campbell, Stephen, Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). Carter, Miranda, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001). Clark, Kenneth (ed.), Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, to which is added the Essay on Raphael from Miscellaneous Studies with an Introduction and Notes by Kenneth Clark (London: Collins, 1961). Clifford, Timothy, ‘Botticelli’s Wemyss Madonna’, Apollo, 152 (August, 2000), 3-10.

48

49 50

Moretti, p. 92, no. 64, for his drawing after it, and Jane Martineau (ed.), Andrea Mantegna (exh. cat., London: Royal Academy of Arts, and New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 243-45, no. 60 (entry by Keith Christiansen). V & A, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Pressmark 86.ZZ.32, Box I. This detail is invisible even in the reproduction in Frank Zöllner, Botticelli (Munich: Prestel, 2005), p. 224.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle

373

Crowe, Joseph Archer, Reminiscences of Thirty-five Years of My Life, second edition (London: John Murray, 1895). –– and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, The Early Flemish Painters: Notices of Their Lives and Works, second edition (London: John Murray, 1872). ––. Titian: his Life and Times, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1877). ––. Raphael: his Life and Works, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1882-85). ––. A History of Painting in Italy, ed. by Robert Langton Douglas and Tancred Borenius, 6 vols., (London: John Murray, 1903-14). ––. A History of Painting in North Italy, ed. by Tancred Borenius, 3 vols., (London: John Murray, 1912). Ekserdjian, David, ‘Sebastiano del Piombo’, Apollo, 142 (July 1995), 58-59. Elam, Caroline, Roger Fry and the Re-Evaluation of Piero della Francesca (The Council of the Frick Collection Lecture Series) (New York: The Frick Collection, 2004). Fischel, Oscar, Klassiker der Kunst: Tizian (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1924). Frangenberg, ‘Thomas, Bartoli, Giambullari and the Prefaces to Vasari’s Lives (1550)’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 65, (2002), 244-58. Hirst, Michael, Sebastiano del Piombo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). ––. ‘Madrid: Sebastiano del Piombo and Spain’, Burlington Magazine, 137 (July 1995), 481-82. –– and Jill Dunkerton, The Young Michelangelo: Making and Meaning (exh. cat., London: National Gallery, 1994-95). Lermolieff, Ivan, (i.e. Giovanni Morelli), Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerie: Die Galerien zu München und Dresden (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1891). Levi, Donata, Cavalcaselle: Il pioniere della conservazione dell’arte italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1988). Lightbown, Ronald, Piero della Francesca (New York, London, Paris, 1992). Manca, Joseph, The Art of Ercole de’Roberti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Marangoni, Giacinto, G.B. Cavalcaselle: Medaglia per 150o anniversario della nascita (Legnano: Fondazione Fioroni, 1969). Martineau, Jane, (ed.), Andrea Mantegna (exh. cat., London: Royal Academy of Arts, and New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992). Mena Marqués, Manuela B., Sebastiano del Piombo y España (exh. cat., Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1995).

374

David Ekserdjian

Moretti, Lino, G.B., Cavalcaselle: Disegni da antichi maestri (exh. cat., Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 1973). Pater, Walter, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1925). Pedrocco, Filippo, Titian: The Complete Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001). Pignatti, Teresio, Giorgione: Complete Edition (London: Phaidon Press, 1971). Robertson, David, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Rylands, Philip, Palma il Vecchio: L’opera completa (Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori, 1988). Sebastiano del Piombo 1485-1547 (exh. cat., Rome: Palazzo di Venezia and Berlin: Gemäldegalerie, 2008). Secrest, Meryle, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). Shearman, John, The Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen: The Early Italian Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Staatliche Museen Berlin, Die Gemäldegalerie: Die italienischen Meister 13. bis 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1930). Sutton, Denys, ‘Crowe and Cavalcaselle’, Apollo, 123 (August 1985), 11117. Todini, Filippo, La Pittura umbra dal Duecento al primo Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Milan: Longanesi & Co., 1989). Unpublished sources Victoria and Albert Museum, Library, MSL/1904/2446-2456, Notes on pictures in continental collections, [ca. 1860-1880]/J.A. Crowe and G.B. Cavalcaselle, 18 boxes + 3 boxes of miscellaneous material (Pressmark 86 ZZ.30-33, 40-41).

Emma Sutton ‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera1 ‘I have simply worshipped pianists – two at a time, sometimes, Harry tells me. I don’t know what it is about them. Perhaps it is that they are foreigners. They all are, ain’t they? Even those that are born in England become foreigners after a time, don’t they? It is so clever of them, and such a compliment to art. Makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn’t it? You have never been to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray? You must come. I can’t afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners’. Lady Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, rev. 1891).2

At the same time Oscar Wilde was satirizing English ‘xenophilia’ for foreign music, his contemporary and acquaintance Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget) was writing repeatedly about English attitudes towards Italian opera. Lee (1856-1935), the author of 43 volumes spanning history, aesthetics, politics, travel writing, fiction and music criticism, was not an exile or émigré by any conventional definitions of the terms. Born in France of Anglo-French parents, she was brought up by German nurses in a variety of French, German and Italian towns, but settled in the 1880s outside Florence where she remained for the rest of her life; Lee’s national displacement was multiple and doesn’t readily fit a model of voluntary or enforced movement from one country to another. As an adult, Lee visited England almost annually, and was published (with the exception of a couple of very early essays) in English, in England; nonetheless, the ambivalence of her national identity has been widely noted. Although she referred to England as her homeland, she was never resident there from choice – indeed she spoke of the impossibility of leaving Continental Europe. Returning to Italy after a visit to England in 1886 she wrote: ‘For all my interest in England, this is my country’3, and in a later letter, ‘It’s funny, though I feel so much more English than anything else (in fact only English) I cannot feel well in body or

1

2 3

I would like to record my thanks to the Carnegie Trust for their generous support which allowed me to work in Lee’s library in the British Institute, Florence. I am very grateful to staff at the Institute, especially Alyson Price, for their help and warm welcome. Thanks are also due to Shafquat Towheed for his thoughtful comments on this paper. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981; 1994), p. 45. VL letter to her mother, 8 September 1886, VL collection, Miller Library, Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine, cited in Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio UP, 2003), p. 2. Emphasis in original.

376

Emma Sutton

mind save on this sufficiently big and sufficiently aired and warmed continent’.4 In an essay of 1914, she asked, ‘Had I ever really cared for any country except Italy?’5 Lee often wrote about the English as if an outsider,6 and her work is full of images of émigrés, travellers and ex-pats, many of them English residents in or visitors to Italy. Many of these Anglo-Italian encounters concern music: British (most often English) encounters with Italian musicians – be they composers or performers – are repeatedly depicted in her essays and fiction. This is almost entirely a one-way traffic; English attitudes towards and consumption of Italian music, rather than vice versa, concern Lee.7 This essay examines a recurring motif in Lee’s work: that of English responses to 18th century Italian opera. These musical encounters are depicted most often in her writing of the 1880s and 1890s, on which this essay concentrates: the essay explores the way in which Lee’s accounts of this musical relationship shaped her conception of national identity, of exile, and of cosmopolitanism. 8

4

5

6

7

8

VL, quoted in Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964) pp. 167-8, cited in Fraser, p. 178. See Hilary Fraser, ‘Vernon Lee: England, Italy & Identity Politics’, in Britannia, Italia, Germania: Taste & Travel in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Carol Richardson and Graham Smith (Edinburgh: VARIE, 2001), pp.175-91. Lee, The Tower of the Mirrors and Other Essays on the Spirit of Places (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1914), p. 153, cited in Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 2003), p. 1. Colby begins her biography with the assertion that Lee was ‘Italian by choice’; though I agree wholeheartedly with Colby’s emphasis on Lee’s evident and enduring love for Italy, this essay aims to suggest that this affection coexisted with skepticism about her own and others’ national loyalties. Hilary Fraser, ‘Vernon Lee: England, Italy & Identity Politics’, in Britannia, Italia, Germania: Taste & Travel in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Carol Richardson and Graham Smith (Edinburgh: VARIE, 2001), p. 178. Portraits of Italian responses to British music in her work are relatively rare, although the research and material for her final work Music and its Lovers (1932) included analysis of the musical tastes of some Italian correspondents. This one-way traffic does, of course, reflect the prevailing historical trend, though my attention here is not to the ‘accuracy’ of Lee’s musicology. Lee represents music, I would suggest, as a synecdoche of broader AngloItalian relations: Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy and Euphorion demonstrate her interest in the reciprocity of Anglo-Italian literary influences, expanding the national affinities articulated in her account of Italian opera. See, for example, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (London: W. Satchell, 1880), p. 3, and Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediæval in the Renaissance, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884), I, pp. 62 and 65. Most criticism on Lee’s extensive critical and fictional writing on this genre has concentrated on her ghost story ‘A Wicked Voice’ and its earlier ‘versions’. See Carlo Caballero, “‘A Wicked Voice”: On Vernon Lee, Wagner, and the Effects of Music’, Victorian Studies, 35 (1992), 386-408; Catherine Maxwell, ‘From Dionysus to “Dionea”: Vernon Lee’s Portraits’, Word & Image, 13 (1997), 253-69; Angela Leighton, ‘Ghosts,

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

377

As Lee’s library demonstrates, she was reading widely in music history, theory and criticism, and in scientific and political studies of national identity and ‘race’, up to and around 1900. Her library includes copies of Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics (1877), Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound (1880), Camille Bellaigue’s Psychologie musicale (1893), Friedrich Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner [und] Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1895), Lucien Arréat’s Memoire et imagination (peintres, musiciens, poètes et orateurs) (1895), Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (ninth edition, 1896), Marie Jaëll’s La musique et la psychophysiologie (1896) and L’intelligence et le rhythme dans les mouvements artistiques (1904), Tolstoy’s Qu’est-ce que l’Art? (1898), Lionel Dauriac’s La psychologie dans l’opera francais (1897) and Essai sur l’esprit musical (1904), C. Hubert H. Parry’s The Evolution of the Art of Music (fourth edition, 1905), and Charles Lalo’s Esquisse d’une esthetique musicale scientifique (1908).9 Many of these texts are extensively annotated, with critical commentary in the margins of the main text and quotations or Lee’s summaries of the argument on and around the title page. Her reading on national identity or racial theory included Henry M. Hyndman’s England for All: The Text-book of Democracy (1881), G. Meale’s Moderna inghilterra: educazione alla vita politica (1888), James Mark Baldwin’s Mental Development in the Child and the Race (second edition, 1903), and ‘Foemina’’s [A. Bulteau’s] L’Ame des Anglais (1910). Furthermore, many of the musical studies she was reading dealt (overtly or implicitly) with the relationship between national identity and music, and her annotations indicate that this relationship was central to her interest.

9

Aestheticism, and “Vernon Lee”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 28 (2000), 1-14; Patricia Pulham, ‘The Castrato and the Cry in Vernon Lee’s Wicked Voices’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30 (2002), 421-37; Catherine Maxwell, ‘Vernon Lee and the Ghosts of Italy’, in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), pp. 201-221; Sergio Durante, ‘Settecento e Ottocento nell’imaggine della musica di Vernon Lee’, in Vernon Lee e Firenze settant’anni doppo, ed. by Serena Cenni e Elisa Bizzotto (Firenze: Gabinetto G.P. Vieusseux, Università degli Studi di Trento e The British Institute of Florence: 2006), 153-160; Sophie Geffroy-Menoux, ‘Les voix maudites de Vernon Lee: du bel canto a mal’aria dans “Winthrop’s Adventure” (1881), “La voix maudite” (1887), “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers”’, Alizés, 22 (2002), 113-34. Cf. Geffroy-Menoux, ‘La musique dans les textes de Vernon Lee’, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 49 (1999), 5770. Christa Zorn’s recent study of Lee’s historicism offers almost no discussion of music, though Vineta Colby provides more analysis of her interest in Italian opera in Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography, 25-42. See also Peter Hoare’s essay in this volume. Lee’s library is now housed in the Harold Acton Library, the British Institute, Florence. The extant collection – which represents approximately half of her original library – also includes an uncut copy of P. Blaserna’s Le son et la musique (fourth edition, 1892).

378

Emma Sutton

Lee’s portraits of the encounters between English and Italian musicians, English and Italian music, express a characteristically forceful resistance to the prevalent late 19th century narrative about Northern and Southern European musical relations.10 This view is unambiguously expressed by Hubert Parry in his 1893 study The Evolution of the Art of Music, a text which Lee knew and annotated:11 As early as the seventeenth century both Germany and England showed the tendencies which are evidently engrained in their musical dispositions, and which have been carried by the Germans to very extreme lengths. The real bent of both nations is the same.12

This point is amplified in his chapter on ‘Folk-music’ where he writes: In more modern German folk-music the influence of harmony becomes strongly apparent. Harmony represents the higher standard of intellectuality in mankind, and the Germans have always had more feeling for it than southern races. […] The folk-tunes of England present much the same features as the German tunes. There is next to no superfluous ornamentation about them, but a simple directness, such as characterises most northern folk–tunes. As in the German tunes, there is an absence both of eccentric intervals and of striking and energetic rhythms. There are plenty of dance tunes, but, like the Germans and Dutch and Scandinavian tunes, they rather imply an equal flow of contented and joyous spirits, than the vehement gestures, the stamping, and the concentration of muscular energy which are represented by the dance tunes of many southern races and of savages.13

For Parry – as for many of his contemporaries – music demonstrates the perceived aesthetic and cultural affinities of the Germans and the British. This affinity is evidenced through the purported ‘intellectualism’ of harmony, an assertion that valorizes the harmonic sophistication of the orchestral and

10

11

12

13

For an introductory discussion, see, Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 186-8. Lee owned the fourth edition, published in 1905; even if she was familiar with the earlier editions, Parry’s study postdates most of the texts discussed in this essay. I quote Parry here because his study amalgamates ideas that were certainly circulating and would have been familiar to Lee in the late nineteenth century, and because of Parry’s prominent role in British composition, musical education and criticism in this period. C. Hubert H. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music, 4th edition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893; 1905). p. 144. Parry, pp.74-5. Lee marks the first part of this quotation with a line and question mark in her own copy: Harold Acton Library, British Institute, Florence, VL 780.9 PAR. In her annotations to this chapter she objected to Parry’s ‘easy talking of Man, & of Races’, stating ‘objectively there are only individuals’. Lee’s annotation in Parry, pp. 80-81. Emphasis in original.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

379

keyboard works of the so-called ‘playing North’ over the lyricism and vocal music of the ‘singing South’. The music of the southern Europeans, including the Italians, is indistinguishable from that of ‘savages’ in Parry’s account. It is painfully evident in Parry’s prose that this is an account not only of Northern European musical affinities, but of Northern European aesthetic supremacy. Through this narrative of Anglo-German affinities, evident in the work of writers from William Morris to Jessie Weston, the English were able to claim ownership of the prestigious traditions of German orchestral and keyboard music. One can see why such a narrative might appeal to English commentators more accustomed, as Wilde’s lines suggest, to hearing their homeland dismissed as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’.14 Even when Parry’s account acknowledges the influence of Italian music on German, it undercuts Italian music and aesthetics. We are told, for example, of the 18th century that: All the German composers undoubtedly learned much of their business from Italian examples: and it is noteworthy that on this occasion, as on many others, the composers who were the most popularly successful adopted altogether Italian principles, merely infusing into their work the firmer grit and greater power of characterisation which comes of the stronger and more deliberate race.15

In case the status of this Italian influence were in any doubt, Parry writes on the following page that, ‘As has been frequently pointed out, the Italians cared very little for expression in the music itself, though they liked to have it put in by the performers’.16 In a passage which Lee described as ‘Parry’s summing up of Italian 18th century music’17 he described Scarlatti as: making patterns with counters of different shapes; […] though the process was a mechanical one, it was the field for the expenditure of a good deal of ingenuity, and one not unprofitable to the musical art, because it necessitated the development of so many varieties of melodic figure and vocal phrase.18

Faint praise indeed. In contrast, Lee’s writing, from her first book Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), demonstrates a very different view of European musical relations and of Italian music. Studies contains the germ of

14

15

16 17 18

There is some debate about the first use of this phrase (the title of a study by Oscar Schmitz [Munich, 1914]), but the sentiment was certainly familiar in the late nineteenth century. Parry, pp. 161-2. Lee marks the whole passage with triple vertical lines and writes in the top margin of p. 161 ‘Germans & Italians’. Ibid., p. 163. Lee marks this sentence and writes in the margin ‘Oh!’. Lee’s annotation in Parry, p. 148. Parry, p. 148.

380

Emma Sutton

her later ideas about European musical relations,19 and it is predicated on Anglo-Italian aesthetic intimacies. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy is a substantial examination of drama and music (especially opera), and it was the work that made Lee’s reputation in England and Italy.20 The longest chapters by far are those on music – ‘The Musical Life’ and ‘Metastasio and the Opera’ – and 18th century Italian music is described as ‘the last great art, of which antiquity had not dreamed, which the Middle Ages had not divined, which the Renaissance had but faintly perceived’.21 Lee discusses the social history of music, performers and performance conditions, changing dramatic principles (principally through her imaginative biography of the dramatist and opera librettist Pietro Metastatio)22 and the music itself, alluding to composers including Jommelli, Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Marcello, Leo and Paisello responsible for the reform and development of Italian opera in the 18th century. She argues that Italian art was uniquely vigorous and original in 18th century Europe: ‘other nations had spontaneous philosophical life’, she writes, ‘but Italy alone had artistic life’.23 Lee’s text celebrates a period of music relatively overlooked by contemporary British and Continental critics; indeed she argued (controversially) that this music had been overlooked by Italian scholars unable to give ‘any definite shape’24 to their antiquarian findings about the 18th century: The very few Italians who do trouble themselves on the subject are either laborious bookworms […] or else they are philosophical historians, who are interested in the eighteenth century only inasmuch as it contains germs of the nineteenth […] who turn aside from with contempt from Metastasio and Carlo Gozzi because they see in them no political

19

20

21 22

23 24

Studies’ attention to the national politics of music and of music history, its emphasis on the special relationship between England and Italy, its resistance to conventional narratives abut the inferiority of Italian or Southern music, and its interest in the way in which national identity is often represented through triangulated opposition (in her work, often the contrast between Italy, Germany and England), recur throughout her later work. An Italian translation was published in 1881 (as Il settecento in Italia) and a second English edition in 1907. Vernon Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (London: W. Satchell, 1880), p. 4. As Vineta Colby explains, Studies developed from Lee’s decision to write a biography of Metastasio to whose work she had been introduced by her Italian friend Giovanni Ruffini, a follower of Mazzini who had been exiled to England in the 1830s for his revolutionary activities. There is a further Anglo-Italian connection: Burney had written a biography of Metastasio (Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio, 1796), one of the sources for Lee’s work. Colby, pp.15-18 and 36. Studies, p. 4. Ibid., p. 2.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

381

forerunners of the present, and are incapable of recognising in them the artistic product of the past.25

Lee’s study begins, then, with the implication that she, as a ‘foreigner’, will succeed where Italian scholars have failed.26 Right from the first of Lee’s major works on aesthetics her role as an English excavator and protector – perhaps even a reviver – of Italian culture is clear. Her account of AngloItalian sympathies springs from a perception of the English musicologist and critic as the champion of Italian music. This claim is fleshed out in the third chapter, ‘The Musical Life’. The chapter begins with an account of Charles Burney’s musical tour through France and Italy in 1770, from which some of the most important English histories of music – Burney’s The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and the History (first volume 1776) – were derived. The eminent music historian’s visit structures the chapter, introducing accounts of various performances, musicians and musical institutions. The musical life of 18th century Italy is thus immediately introduced to us, and persistently mediated, through this English observer and commentator. Burney is quoted repeatedly, and Lee reminds us that his portrait hangs in the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna – a mark of Italian esteem for the English traveller. When Lee writes that, ‘Our fellow-countryman, Dr. Burney, can yet introduce us to some at least of the forgotten musicians around us’ she seems to suggest a specific and a wider meaning – not only that Burney will elucidate the now-forgotten Italian musicians whose portraits hang in the Academy, but also that he will revivify Italian music more generally.27 Burney stands as a precursor to Lee, like her appreciating this music, explaining it to an English audience, and demonstrating a particular English sensibility for this art. The entire chapter on Burney illustrates the appreciation by an English individual for art that the French and the Italians had, Lee argues, overlooked. The chapter characterizes French interest in music as insincere: ‘Burney was perfectly correct in saying that the French never really liked Italian music’; they ‘cared nothing for music itself, but they seized hold of it as a subject for dissertation and dispute’.28 The Italians are described as oscillating between indifference and ecstasy when listening to music, and the Germans rebuked for their tendency to take ‘all their pleasures as duties’.29 Thus the English

25 26 27 28 29

Ibid., pp. 2-3. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., pp. 74 and 75. Ibid., p. 133.

382

Emma Sutton

commentator is presented as uniquely qualified for and uniquely sympathetic to this project. Lee’s long chapter on Burney provides a detailed example of one particular Anglo-Italian musical relationship, implying a long-standing sympathy and mutual appreciation. Burney’s connection with distinguished British literary and artistic circles – he was an apprentice of the English composer Thomas Arne, and a friend of Fulke Greville, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson30 – is noted, underlining Burney’s status as a music historian and the potential diffusion of his interest among distinguished British contemporaries. Since Studies was published in England, and was explicitly addressed to an English readership, Lee suggests that this special relationship continues, through her work and more widely. Throughout this writing on music and literary history it is clear that Lee recognized the revisionary impetus of her account of music history. She makes explicit her challenges to accepted musical history, in particular to narratives of German musical supremacy. Her own copy of Parry’s Evolution of the Art of Music bears the infuriated annotation: ‘It is scarcely unfair to say that when design is German or English, [Parry] considers it paramount, when “emotion” is Southern he treats it as the result of lack of seriousness, & vice versa’.31 The introduction to Studies attacks such narratives, and she objects too to academic music criticism dominated by the ‘critical and theorising’ Germans:32 Does it matter if the nineteenth century, critical and misled by critical theory, fixing its eyes on the people who are the critical and theorising people above all others, fails to perceive the Italian national efflorescence of music in the eighteenth century, and considers as spontaneous German products the works of Handel, and Gluck, and Mozart, although every inch of Germany was colonised by Italian musicians, and although there is not a form of [sic] melody in the works of the great Germans of the eighteenth century which has not its necessary predecessor and its absolute equivalent in the works of their Italian masters and fellow pupils? Are not critical theorists always blinded and misled by critical theorisings? The greatness and supremacy of the Italian music of the eighteenth century did exist nevertheless.33

This is revisionary history with a vengeance. Lee’s loaded vocabulary about the ‘colonisation’ of Germany and the ‘supremacy’ of Italian music make the political undercurrent of her argument obvious, acknowledging the centrality

30 31 32

33

Ibid., p. 69. Lee’s annotation in Parry, p. 145. Emphasis in original as marked. A similar attack on German ‘pedantry’ appears at the start of ‘Amour Dure’, the first story in Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (London: William Heinemann, 1890), p. 4. Studies, p. 5.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

383

of music to accounts of national aesthetic achievement and national identity at the turn of the century. Her use of the present tense emphasizes that this is not a matter merely of antiquarian interest: the perception of German musical supremacy was an enduring one, and was pervasive when Lee was writing. The introduction to Studies deals primarily – and in impassioned terms – with music. It suggests that Lee saw the importance of her work as lying not only in its contribution to an under-researched historical period, but also in its implications for contemporary late 19th century narratives about national aesthetic precedence and national identity. Lee’s work anticipates the current critical ‘orthodoxy’ that music and politics are inextricably entwined.34 In her determination to champion the musical under-dog of 18th century Italian opera and to provoke a reevaluation of the Wagnerian, Romantic tradition, Lee’s writing often invokes national types. But she clearly recognized the dangers of re-inscribing such essentialist terms. Although she returned repeatedly to 18th century Italian opera in essays and fiction, often praising this genre in comparison with the German Romantic tradition, later works express a certain embarrassment about the passionate partisanship expressed in Studies. Her later depictions of English responses to Italian opera in texts including Miss Brown, Belcaro and Juvenilia, suggest not only a reassessment of her youthful enthusiasm, but also a reevaluation of her own conceptions and depictions of national identity. Miss Brown (1884) is set initially among the contemporary British35 community of artists in Florence, and then amid Aesthetic circles in London; although it deals primarily with poets and painters it includes two substantial passages about Italian opera. The novel emphasizes the scale and the long history of British interests – artistic, romantic, and tourist – in Italy; the British mania for all things Italian – including Italian music – is evident throughout the novel. The central protagonist Anne Brown, an ItalianScottish36 servant chosen by Walter Hamlin to become his muse and wife, has been brought up by an English prima donna resident in Italy; the elderly singer, Miss Curzon, has told Anne ‘anecdotes of Landor and Rossini and

34

35

36

See, for example, Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840-1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993; 2001). An allusion to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881) confirms the immediately contemporary setting. The novel explores British, rather than just English, connections: a number of the protagonists, including Anne Brown, are Scots or of Scottish ancestry. Fittingly, for a text deeply concerned with national hybridity, Anne is of Southern Italian and Northern Scottish descent – a product of the symmetrical ‘wildness’ represented by the Scottish Highlands and the Italian Mezzogiorno.

384

Emma Sutton

Malibran’.37 This hint of Anglo-Italian musical relations is expanded in a long scene in the first volume, when Hamlin attends Rossini’s Semiramide (1823) at Lucca with Anne and two children of the ex-pat artist Melton Perry. It is likely that Lee chose this opera not only because its Orientalism and androgynous characters amplify the nature of Hamlin’s interest in Anne, but also because of its affinities with 18th century Italian opera (in the 1887 essay ‘Signior Curiazio’, Rossini’s character Arsace is described as ‘the only surviving scion of the old race of operatic heroes of the 18th century’).38 Lee’s depiction of the performance emphasizes the shabbiness and limitations of this ‘provincial’ performance: the narrator satirizes the feebly mimetic props and sets, the acting, and the technical skill of the singers and small orchestra – there was ‘an incalculable amount of singing out of tune and pummelling one’s chest in moments of passion. No training, no dresses, no scenery, no orchestra’.39 Clichés regarding the ‘natural’ lyricism of the Italians are also undercut at the outset: when the overture begins, the audience ‘immediately set up a kind of confused hum, supposed to be the melody of the piece’.40 The reader is implicitly invited to compare British and Italian performances: we are told, in a conspicuous authorial intervention, that ‘the box on this occasion cost only about half as much as would a single seat in an English playhouse’, and that Hamlin ‘had been bored by Semiramide too often with Tietiens and Trebelli, to find it particularly interesting at the Teatro del Giglio of Lucca’.41 The reference to the famous singers indicates that Hamlin has probably heard performances at one of the large metropolitan opera houses – perhaps Covent Garden, London where the singers had performed since 186842 – and this detail again differentiates the response of the English man from the Italian and ex-pat listeners. The enthusiasm of the children, of Anne and of the residents is contrasted to Hamlin’s jaded response, their

37

38

39 40 41 42

Vernon Lee, Miss Brown: A Novel, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1884), I, p. 133. ‘Signior Curiazio: A Musical Medley’ in Juvenilia, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), II, p. 133. Lee may also have been influenced by the fact that this was the last opera Rossini wrote for the Italian stage before leaving permanently for France; the opera is thus associated with emigration from Italy. Miss Brown, I, pp. 100 and 101-2. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid. pp. 100 and 103-4. Therese Tietjens, the German soprano (1831-1887), and the French alto Zélia Trebelli (1838-1892), were two of the most distinguished singers of their generation; by the 1860s both were performing in London’s theatres, making their debuts at Covent Garden in 1868. At the time of the novel’s publication, they were both singing regularly in London. Semiramide was one of the roles for which Tietjens was famed; Trebelli was celebrated for her ‘travesty’ roles, including Arsace.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

385

enthusiasm characterized both as naïve and as a mark of superior sensibility.43 As the opera unfolds, Hamlin observes Anne: he laughs at her absorption in the plot and is surprised by her emotional response to the music – ‘It seemed to Hamlin as if this were the real Semiramis, the real mysterious king-woman of antiquity – as if the music belonged in some sort of ideal way to her’.44 Whether the music ‘belongs’ to Anne because of her (half Italian) nationality, her exoticism, or her androgyny is a moot point. Hamlin’s observation forces us to assess his ‘consumption’ of Anne, and of Italy, in this episode: Italian art is being displayed to this English commentator to whose subjectivity we are given access. Even as the narrator encourages us to condemn Hamlin’s overtly self-interested and patronizing attitude towards Anne in this scene, some troubling ambiguities in the depiction of Italy and Italians remain. These are evident, most notably, in the depiction of the ‘beauty and charm’ which are emphasized as the opera unfolds: ‘All the realities which money can get, dress, voice, training, accessories, scenery, utterly wanting; but instead, in the midst of pauperism, something which money cannot always get, a certain ideal beauty and charm’.45 Lee’s evocation of the beauty of this performance might be seen simply as antimaterialism; a number of contemporary music critics and composers also championed provincial music making over more ‘commercial’ metropolitan institutions.46 Nonetheless, this scene remains troubling because of the essentialist vocabulary and its similarities to the artists’ relish of ‘picturesque’ Italian poverty (evident from Hamlin’s first desiring view of Anne ironing with bare arms). The opera is described by the narrator as ‘an opera such as only the misery and genius of Italy could produce’, and the ‘beauty and dignity’ of the performance attributed as much to the beauty of the female principals in ‘tawdry robes’ as to their joyous singing and acting.47 For all its admiring evocation of the pleasure and beauty offered by Rossini’s opera and this performance, Lee’s account retains, I would suggest, traces of the stereotypes regarding Italian musical sensibility and the ‘picturesque’

43

44 45 46

47

Musical performances are often used in nineteenth-century fiction to denote the moral status of (female) characters. See, for example, Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Miss Brown, I, p. 105. Ibid., pp. 102-3. Edward Elgar, for example, echoing William Morris’ and Ruskin’s hostility to metropolitan life, praised provincial music-making. I am grateful to Bennett Zon for drawing this to my attention. Miss Brown, I, pp. 100 and 102.

386

Emma Sutton

poverty of Italy. This ambiguity is lessened, however, in the novel’s only other substantial musical episode. The second episode takes place in London, shortly after Anne has arrived in Hammersmith; it is our introduction to Hamlin’s English circle. The two episodes (the only lengthy allusions to music in the novel) are contrasted – the Italian with the English, the professional with the amateur, the public with the domestic, and the provincial with the metropolitan, or at least suburban. Both, however, deal with English consumption of Italian music. The London scene illustrates the aesthetes’ love for 18th century opera: Hamlin’s friend the English artist Cosmo Chough is “‘quite famous for singing all sorts of forgotten old Italian masters’”, and Hamlin shares his musical tastes, being fond of ‘a song of Carissimi’s’.48 Chough explains to Anne that he was inspired to write his long poem the ‘Triumph of Womanhood’ by hearing Jommelli’s Mass:49 ‘“I seemed to have revealed to me a vision of a mystic procession of women going in triumph; I understood, in a sort of flash, the mysterious and real regalness [sic] of Womanhood’”.50 Chough’s absurdly polarized visions of women as angels or femme fatales are the first hint that he may not be a reliable commentator on 18th century opera; this is augmented by his account of Jommelli’s music to Anne: Mr Chough had opened the piano, and began playing, in a masterly way, a fragment of very intricate fugue. “Do you notice that?” he asked: “that sudden modulation there – ta ta ti, la la la – from A minor to E major, – that somehow mysteriously brought home to me one of the figures of that triumphal procession, and her I have tried to describe. […]”’51

The harmonic progression he describes is startlingly – and implausibly – avant garde: a move between such distantly related keys in just six chords would indeed be worthy of comment in a work of this period, but it is more likely Lee is having some fun at Chough’s expense, suggesting his limited understanding of harmony. (Are these strongly contrasting keys perhaps a musical equivalent to his dichotomized views of women?) Chough’s interest

48 49

50 51

Ibid., pp. 285-6 and 267. Nicolò Jommelli (1714-1774) wrote seven Masses; two of the most frequently performed – a Miserere and a Te Deum – date from the period following 1754 when he worked as OberKapellmeister in Stuttgart. As Lee would certainly have known, Jommelli was himself a cosmopolitan in art as in life and his operas are admired for their fusion of Italian, French and German elements. See Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols (London: Macmillan, 1980), IX, pp. 689-695. Even this portrait of an Italian composer may thus be read as a celebration of cosmopolitanism. Miss Brown, I, pp. 283-4. Ibid., p. 284.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

387

in Italian opera is unequivocally linked to his amorous attention to women (he offers to accompany and train Anne), and to limited musical aptitude: although his playing is ‘masterly’ (a telling adverb in this context), his performance of part of Jommelli’s Mass is marked by a blend of technical limitation (‘warbling’ falsetto) and stylistic polish (‘marvellous old-world grace and finish’).52 For these reasons, his attitude towards Italian opera is undermined. The satire is augmented when Anne sings a piece from the same period – an air by Scarlatti. Although she listens inattentively and is unmoved by Chough’s singing, her own performance of similar repertoire is marked by emotional sincerity: She made several false starts, and sang the wrong words almost throughout, for she felt a lump in her chest. Anne had a deep, powerful, rather guttural voice, not improved by singing modern German songs at Coblenz; but the voice was fine, and she had caught something of the manner of her former protectress, Miss Curzon, who had been a great singer in her day.53

Anne’s responsiveness to Italian music is emphasized here as it was in the Semiramide scene: her sincerity is valorized over technical accomplishment, and her attitude towards the music endorsed over Chough’s. It is telling that Miss Curzon, the English singer resident in Italy, is recalled at this point: Anne’s performance is presented as part of an admirable lineage of female Anglo-Italian musicianship, a lineage which includes, symbolically, Lee herself. Taken together these two scenes suggest both Lee’s enduring affection for Italian opera and a satirical undercutting of her own youthful championing of this repertoire. Lee’s portrait of English enthusiasm for Italy and Italian art in this novel is inextricable from her satire of the British Aesthetic movement and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. The entire novel, especially the first volume set in Italy, parodies the Italo-philia of contemporary British Aesthetes; Hamlin is a transparent caricature, for example, of Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) had dealt so influentially with Italian art. As others have noted, Lee’s portraits of English aesthetes in Miss Brown show her desire to distance herself from the Aesthetic movement and its ideology, and the novel articulates an important shift in Lee’s attitude towards Paterian aesthetics of which she had previously been a public supporter. Lee’s reassessment of Aestheticism had a number of causes, but reservation about the Aesthetes’ attitude towards Italy was surely one of

52 53

Miss Brown, I, p. 286. Ibid., p. 287.

388

Emma Sutton

them. Hamlin’s interest in Anne is represented as a microcosm of English interest in Italy – as passages in which he admires her ‘picturesque’ ‘effect’ almost make explicit.54 Fairly or unfairly, Lee depicts the British Aesthetes’ interest in Italy as one which was predominantly colonialist (Anne’s Scottish cousin even warns her that she will become Hamlin’s ‘slave’)55 and imbued with inequalities of gender, class and economics.56 Yet this reassessment of the Aesthetic movement also surely arose from her wish to differentiate her own attitude towards Italy from that of the Aesthetes.57 In so doing, she was also qualifying her own attitude towards and representation of Italy in Studies. The self-referential elements of Miss Brown hint at Lee’s reservation about her earlier – immoderate? – expressions of enthusiasm for Italian music and art.58 A number of characters in the novel – including the aesthetes – express opinions strikingly close to those articulated in Studies: Hamlin, for example, reads extracts of Anne’s letters to his friends, ‘pointing out [the metaphors’] Elizabethan, Webster-like character.’59 Anne’s growing ‘grim pleasure’ in the ‘sordid ugliness’ of London, which ‘jarred upon her much less than the beautiful pictures of Italian scenery which Hamlin hung up at Hammersmith’,60 anticipates the argument and rhetoric of Juvenilia. And Anne’s dislike of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde61 and the aesthetes’ (slightly

54 55 56

57

58

59

60 61

Ibid., pp. 50-1. Ibid., p. 187. The novel twists the conventional narrative of feminine Italy ‘seduced’ or ‘conquered’ by England: Anne’s marriage to Hamlin at the end of the novel could be read as Lee’s reforming of English Aestheticism (Hamlin) through marriage to the Anglo-Italian. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, eds., Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 14. Francis O’Gorman’s account of Lee’s ‘reconstruction of Italy against Ruskin’ (91) is pertinent here: Lee’s interest in Italian opera may be a response in part to a genre and a period devalued by Ruskin. In ‘Ruskinism: The Would-be Study of a Conscience’, she makes only a brief reference to his interest in music (Belcaro, 213). See Francis O’Gorman, ‘Ruskin, Vernon Lee, and the Cultural Possession of Italy’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 7 (2002), 81-107. Later works also suggest that Lee perceived an acquisitive aspect to her own early interest in Italian music: in ‘The Immortality of the Maestro Galuppi’ she writes of musical scores ‘furtively fingered by enthusiasts’ (5) and, in triumphant terms, the first person narrator relishes being the only individual familiar with some music of this period (17). Miss Brown, I, p. 225. Hamlin’s ancestry is a further autobiographical touch: Lee’s mother’s family had also been Jamaican planters. The autobiographical elements in Anne have been widely noted but Hamlin, the most obvious target of the satire, also contains elements of self-portraiture. Miss Brown, II, p. 217. Ibid., III, p. 290. The vocabulary in which the opera is described is very similar to that used elsewhere by Lee.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

389

implausible)62 admiration for 18th century Italian opera are further selfreferential elements which suggest the target of the parody is as much her own earlier attitudes as the Aesthetes themselves. Miss Brown illustrates Lee’s reassessment of her own enthusiasm for Italian opera and the terms in which she had articulated her enthusiasm for Italy,63 a reassessment made explicit in her 1882 collection of essays, Belcaro. Belcaro opens with a substantial, and prominently placed, reflection on Studies,64 the tone veering between amused self-mockery and harsher selfappraisal: When, two summers since, I wrote the last pages of my first book, it was, in a way, as if I had been working out the plans of another dead individual. The myself who had, almost as a child, been insanely bewitched by the composers and singers, the mask actors and pedants, and fine ladies and fops, the whole ghostly turn-out of the Italian 18th century; who had, for years, in the bustle of self-culture, I might almost say, of childish education, never let slip an opportunity of adding a new miscrospic [sic] dab of colour to the beloved, quaint, and ridiculous and pathetic century-portrait which I carried in my mind; this myself, thus smitten with the Italian 18th century, had already ceased to exist. […] to care for one particular historical moment, to study the details of one particular civilization, to worry about finding out the exact when and how of any definite event; above all, to feel (as I felt) any desire to teach any specified thing to anybody; all this has become unintelligible to my sympathies of today.65

In this extraordinary passage, Lee represents her own attitude towards 18th century Italian music not only as childish, but also as irrational, selfimportant and obsessive. She subverts, too, the amorousness of her intellectual pursuits, characterizing her younger self (in a term we might well apply to Hamlin) as ‘smitten’ with the 18th century. Most striking, perhaps, is the depiction of her self first as the ‘dead individual’, then as an ‘extinct individuality’66 – an image given emphasis by the grammatically awkward allusion to ‘the myself’. This drastic image of self-alienation suggests an absolute divide between the writer and student of 1880 and that of May 1881,

62

63

64 65

66

Aesthetic interest in early music more typically concentrated on chamber music (including vocal music), often of an earlier period. This is not to say that the novel disavows the possibility of ideal Anglo-Italian relations: the character Melton Perry, for instance, shows a less selfish attitude towards Italy and the Italians that contrasts with the other Aesthetes’ attitudes, and his reappearance at the end of the novel is heralded as ‘the ringing of the bell, the orchestral flourish, which ends a piece as it has begun it’ (III, p. 194). The second edition of Studies (1907) includes a similar account. See Leighton, pp. 3-4. ‘The Book and its Title’, in Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (London: W. Satchell and Co., [1882]), pp. 4-5. Belcaro, p. 4.

390

Emma Sutton

the date with which the essay concludes; it is an extreme and disturbing image of maturation. This ‘natural’ ‘mental growth’ casts the older Lee as the ‘heir’ not of the younger, but of the critical ‘task’, which is undertaken with ‘a sort of filial piety’.67 The continuity between the young Lee and the writer of Belcaro is thus characterized as practical rather than psychological. That such a disjunctive image arises in the context of her discussion of the 18th century, and specifically of Italian music, is suggestive. What was it about her earlier work and attitude towards this material that Lee, by 1881, found so alien? As the latter part of the quotation and the passage that follows indicate, it was in part her historicist and didactic impulses which she disavowed: she is now, she says, ‘a student of aesthetics’ rather than ‘professorially self-important’.68 But it is surely the fervor of her aestheticism that most troubles her: Lee’s enthusiasm now appears to her immoderate, embarrassing, perhaps un-self-censored and self-revealing. It is not the material but the genesis, the excess and the tone of Studies that now seem alien. In Belcaro the ‘mature’ Lee’s admiration for Italian art and music persists and is evident throughout the essays,69 but her enthusiasm is renounced as childish. Passionate Italo-philia is more appropriate, it seems, to the child than the mature aesthete.70 By the publication of Juvenilia in 1887, Lee expresses reservation not only about her earlier enthusiasm for Italian music but also about national loyalties themselves. The collection is dedicated and the Introduction addressed to her Italian-Mexican friend Carlo Placci,71 an accomplished musician and music critic, resident in Florence, who she describes as ‘emerging from […] intellectual boyhood’;72 Lee positions herself as the older advisor who has outgrown her youthful, inadequate, aesthetic tenets.

67 68 69

70

71

72

Belcaro, pp. 5 and 4. Ibid., p. 5. ‘Cherubino: A Psychological Art Fancy’, for example, discusses the character from Mozart’s Italianate Marriage of Figaro, and there are passing references to the eighteenthcentury opera composers Michele Mortellari (who settled in London in 1785) and Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli (a Roman patriot) in ‘Chapelmaster Kriesler: A Study of Musical Romanticists’. Elsewhere in her work Lee also associates her interest in Italian music of this period with childhood: see, for example, ‘Rococo’, in Juvenilia, which comments on her love for Italian opera at length. Furthermore, in ‘A Wicked Voice’ Magnus feels a ‘childish rage’ when listeners praise his compositions which resemble eighteenth-century Italian music. Magnus is to some extent, as Carlo Caballero has ably discussed, a self-portrait: he is punished for his ‘study’ of this music and, like Lee, knows his Burney. See Sybille Pantazzi, ‘Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: Their Letters and their Friends’, English Miscellany, 12 (1961), pp. 97-122. Juvenilia, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), I, p. 5.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

391

The Introduction explicitly characterizes Lee’s early, Paterian, aesthetics as products of immaturity and inexperience.73 Carlo’s growing interest in social justice, and in the relation between aesthetics, politics and society, is commended: his intellectual development follows Lee’s own. It is a visit to England – symbolically, an expansion of national sympathies or knowledge – which has prompted this change in Carlo. England has, in Lee’s narrative, ‘matured’ Carlo (‘while Italy makes one think of the past; England, inevitably, leads one to speculate upon the future’),74 and those with knowledge of both countries are presented as the adult aesthetes. Lee then describes her own recent visit to England, underlining her alienation from the English landscape (the ‘infernal’ river Tyne at Newcastle) and her status as a visitor: writing from the position of an ex-pat, an outsider, Lee describes England to her English readers. In this overtly autobiographical Introduction, and similarly in the following essay ‘The Lake of Charlemagne’, she underlines the ambiguity of her own national identity, articulating her ‘mature’ ideology from the position of an exile or an outsider.75 In both essays, Lee associates severance from (the maternal figures of) childhood with severance from unilateral national loyalties. To become an adult, she suggests, one must become alienated from one’s younger self and one’s homeland: exile is linked to the necessary dividuation of the child. In Juvenilia, Lee presents exile, or at least the shedding of national loyalties, as a necessary step towards her own – and others’ – intellectual maturity. It is notable that in Juvenilia Lee champions the concept of cosmopolitanism, and ‘the cosmopolitan’ becomes her image of the ideal aesthete in this period. In its strict sense, ‘cosmopolitanism’ means not just catholic tastes, an interest in the arts of other nations and cultures, but ‘free[dom] from national limitations or attachments’.76 The cosmopolitan has neither the blinkered affection of a patriot, nor a marked bias towards another single nation or culture, nor the ‘xenophilia’ of a Lady Henry Wotton or a

73

74 75

76

Lee notes, in language resonant with musical overtones, that good appears to the young, as it does in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, ‘temperate, harmonious, perfect’. Juvenilia, I, p. 9. Juvenilia, I, p. 13. A similar argument about the necessary abandonment of national loyalties is evident in her account of her German childhood. The autobiographical narrator debunks her reveries of ‘that imaginary Rhineland of my childhood’ in violent terms. ‘The Lake of Charlemagne. An Apology of Association’, in Juvenilia, I, p. 42. The argument and imagery invite psychoanalytic interpretation: see Pulham, ‘The Castrato and the Cry’ for discussion of childhood imagery elsewhere in Lee’s writing on music. OED, ‘Cosmopolitan’.

392

Emma Sutton

Cosmo Chough.77 The term implies ease, self-confidence about one’s own identity, an urbanity more likely to be found in the adult than the child, perhaps. The introduction to Juvenilia emphasizes the internationalism of the narrator and of contemporary aesthetes – people ‘with whom we can sympathize vastly about Wagner, and Swinburne, and Whistler, and Venetian sunsets’.78 And in Baldwin, published the year before Juvenilia, we find Lee praising the ostentatiously autobiographical protagonist Baldwin as a cosmopolite, a ‘citizen of the world’, a term that was revived and dynamic in the 19th century. The ‘accident of family circumstances, carrying him from country to country, has made this very English Briton see questions of all sorts through variously tinted cosmopolitan glasses.’79 There are many similarly self-referential details, including the fact that Baldwin, aged eighteen, was ‘possessed by a frenzy of enthusiasm, nay, rather madness, for all things musical, especially of the 18th century, with which he contrived to infect me’.80 Lee’s commitment to cosmopolitanism and ‘pan-European’ identity has been widely noted; what I wish to emphasize here is that her championing of these principles arose, at least in part, from reassessment of her own attitudes towards Italian music as a young woman. A third of the essays in Juvenilia deal entirely or largely with music; the two which deal extensively with 18th century Italian opera further illustrate the relationship between her conceptions of cosmopolitanism, exile and music. The first of these essays, which opens the second volume, reflects on the reputation of the great Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi, returning to Lee’s interest in British-Italian musical relations via the music historian Charles Burney (and also, implicitly, via Robert Browning whose ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ was published in Men and Women in 1855). The depictions of Burney’s aestheticism, and of nationalism, have shifted substantially, however, from their earlier versions in Studies. Although Lee’s love for 18th century Italian opera remains clear, and she repeats a narrative of AngloItalian special relations, her perspective has modulated. The opening vignette describes the meeting in 1770 between the elderly Galuppi and the admiring Burney. The ‘enthusiastic Dr. Burney’ is ushered into Galuppi’s study where the composer states, “‘This is where I dirty paper”’; the narrator imagines the laughter ‘of the English enthusiast’ and the ‘ceremonious antics’, the

77

78 79

80

Chough’s absurd xenophilia is evident in his affected allusions to France as his “‘real country”’, for example. Miss Brown, I, p. 283. Juvenilia, I, pp. 16-17. ‘Introduction’, Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1886), p. 5. Ibid., p. 7.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

393

compliments and deference, which characterize the meeting. It is, she writes, a ‘whole little comedy of enthusiasm and modesty’. ‘Enthusiasm’, or its variants, occur three times in these two brief paragraphs, and the adjective ‘little’ is repeated; before the essay becomes more plangent, Burney’s eager aestheticism is gently debunked. So too is the pride of the ‘Venetian admirers’ in their local composer: the narrator notes that they have attended similar scenes and ‘heard that modest little joke many times and oft.’ 81 Venetian pride in the local musician is further undercut as the essay goes on to describe the ‘festivities’ on the Venetian island of Burano to mark the hundred and eightieth anniversary of Galuppi’s birth: Capital speeches have been made; a capital banquet will be given, with capital toasts; telegrams will be sent out in all directions – to Venice, to Rome, to the Minister of Public Instruction, to the Maestro Verdi, to everybody and anybody.82

Lee mocks the nationalist sentiments of this episode not only by emphasizing the institutionalization of Galuppi’s memory, but also by the reference to Verdi, which explicitly associates the commemoration of Galuppi with nationalist sentiment in the aftermath of Italian unification.83 By the 19th century Galuppi has been incorporated into narratives about the Italian nation state as he was, in his own time, into narratives about pride in the independent Venetian state.84 Given that the essay begins with Burney’s enthusiasm, Lee suggests the interdependence of this form of aestheticism and nationalist loyalties; both, she suggests, are touching, but childish. The term ‘enthusiast’ emphasizes the individual, the non-professional, aspects of aestheticism. It suggests an individual’s rather than collective or institutionalized tastes, possibly even an unconventional or minority taste.85 It implies an affectionate, intimate, benevolent attitude of aesthete towards the artist or art works they admire. The ‘enthusiast’ is also, by implication, differentiated from contemporary terms describing more acquisitive attitudes towards art – the ‘consumer’, for example.86 Above all, it implies an

81 82 83

84

85 86

‘The Immortality of the Maestro Galuppi’, in Juvenilia, II, pp. 3-4. ‘Galuppi’, p. 11. Earlier in the essay she states that ‘municipal councillors [sic] and mayors, are always friendly to genius’ (5). Galuppi’s birthdate indicates that this episode is set in 1886, twenty years after Venetian liberation from Austrian rule. The OED also notes the more negative connotation of a ‘visionary, self-deluded person’. The terms ‘enthusiast’ and ‘aesthete’ (the professional or trained counterpart to the enthusiast) both denote attitudes towards art rather than relationships of possession, and may therefore be compared to the ‘consumer’ and the ‘connoisseur’. See Sutton, pp. 138-9.

394

Emma Sutton

amateur,87 self-taught admirer, one in sharp contrast to the professionalized, highly trained ‘aesthete’, who was often a public arbiter of taste rather than a ‘private’ admirer.88 Even from its first use, Lee’s term ‘enthusiast’ had an old-fashioned ring, appropriate perhaps to the historical period which she was describing. The cosmopolitan, in contrast, had deliberately contemporary connotations in Lee’s work. The contrast between the ‘enthusiasm’ of the scene from Anglo-Italian musical history, and the ‘mature’ cosmopolitanism evoked in the Introduction and in ‘The Lake of Charlemagne’, endorses the viewpoint of the exiles, the alienated observers, over the benevolent but childlike enthusiast. ‘The Immortality of the Maestro Galuppi’ suggests that Lee perceived an intrinsic relationship between music, exile and mortality. Noting that Galuppi’s music (as opposed to his reputation) is now known only to a few, Lee meditates on the ease with which music can fall out of performance, describing it as the ‘most ephemeral’ art.89 She argues that music can only truly be experienced through performance and listening, not simply through the preservation of texts and reputations: music is therefore intimately dependent on individual practitioners and listeners. In her account, music is a fundamentally ghostly art that evokes the performers’ and our own mortality: Galuppi’s and other melodies ‘have ceased to exist along with the recollection of the men and women in whose mind they had their sole real existence’.90 ‘The other arts’, she writes, ‘remain; besides they are always, so to speak, external to our life. Music alone exists absolutely in us who listen; nay, it has no existence apart from ours; and hence it is that music, like ourselves, must die.’91 She imagines the ‘forgotten melodies’ of earlier composers in a spatial image: they are ‘Gone, disappeared. And whither?’92 The essay recounts the first-person narrator’s departure from Burano twice, before and after the sections dealing with the commemorative activities and the transience of music; the changing light in the descriptions indicates that

87

88

89 90 91 92

Lee was of course well aware of the potential ‘amorousness’ implicit – at least etymologically – in amateur aestheticism: Angela Leighton, among others, has noted the physicality of Lee’s depictions of aestheticism. See Leighton, 3-4, and Catherine Anne Wiley, ‘“Warming Me Like a Cordial”: The Ethos of the Body in Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics’, in Vernon Lee, ed. by Maxwell and Pulham, pp. 58-74. For a discussion of the nuanced meanings of the term ‘aesthete’ in this period, see Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990). ‘Galuppi’, p. 5. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 12.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

395

two stages in the same journey are being described, one earlier and one later in the afternoon. Through this sleight of hand, it is not immediately apparent that the narrator has absented herself from the commemorative events on Burano, and is in fact describing them not as an observer or participant but from imagination. Furthermore, the essay ends with the narrator in the lagoon between the two locations of Venice and Burano, a spatial image of the cosmopolitan or exile. As in ‘The Lake of Charlemagne’, the mature aesthete, unlike the enthusiasts, finds themself in a position of departure, if not exile, from the aesthetic past and from nationalist sentiment. The essay’s concluding image emphasizes the geographical isolation and ambiguous national loyalties of the ‘true’ aesthete, whose solitary knowledge of one of Galuppi’s melodies is juxtaposed to the collective national pride of the Italians. Lee’s depiction of music as an art which evokes our mortality may suggest why music is so frequently associated with national displacement in her work: music perhaps evokes, for Lee, the ‘dead individual’ of her younger self as well as ‘the death also of so many men and women who knew and loved those songs’.93 Juvenilia repeatedly underscores the passing of childhood, and the related distance from simplistic national loyalties. The longest essay in Juvenilia, ‘Signior Curiazio. A Musical Medley’, returns to Italian opera to explore the contrasts between Cimarosa’s opera Gli Orazi ed i Curiazi (1797) (and, by extension, Italian neo-classical aesthetics) and Wagner’s Tristan (1865) (and, by extension, German Romanticism). Here Lee juxtaposes these two traditions, to the benefit of Italian music; despite the juxtaposition, she does not comment explicitly on national identity and only briefly on Anglo-Italian relations. What she does say, however, is suggestive. The early pages of the essay foreground its autobiographical aspects: ‘I read [Cimarosa’s opera] years ago, when I had a great craze for all manner of 18th century concerns, especially musical.’94 Once again, Lee is characterized as the reviver and excavator of Italian opera, whose prose will evoke the splendours of this overlooked music: forgotten as is now the music of the Horatii, nay, inaccessible in musical archives, I must attempt, though it can never be satisfactorily done in words, to give some approximate notion, by means of much comparison and metaphor, of the musical peculiarities which made this part of Curiatius such a masterpiece of utter dramatic incongruity and insanity.95

93 94 95

‘Galuppi’, p. 15. ‘Signior Curiazio. A Musical Medley’, in Juvenilia, II, p. 106. Ibid., p. 133.

396

Emma Sutton

English affection for Italian opera is also evoked through her reference to Cimarosa’s minor character Curiazio as ‘Prince Charming’ – an English name for the Roman character which associates him with that most English of dramatic genres, pantomine.96 Reflecting on her indifference to the fate of Wagner’s tragic protagonists, and her interest in Curiazio despite the incongruities of his characterization, she concludes that Wagner’s characters lack ‘individuality’.97 Unexpectedly asserting that Wagner’s music has much in common with Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli (c.1555), she writes: ‘despite the infinite difference in the ways and means which have produced them, the mass by Palestrina and the opera by Wagner leave the same sort of impression; they are both of them music of the infinite, music about nothing at all, music without personality.’98 Significantly, Palestrina’s mass was a work to which Lee listened in ‘childish wonder’ as ‘a thin and long-legged little savage of twelve, amidst the crowd in the Pope’s chapel’. Listening to the work again as an adult, it ‘seemed as if those many years had never been, as if that might still be the selfsame performance uninterrupted since I was a child.’99 What this suggests, of course, is that one reason why Lee finds Wagner’s music troubling is because, like Palestrina’s, it returns her to childhood, to aesthetic wonder and bafflement rather than mature critical assurance. The most fraught account of an encounter with 18th century Italian opera, and the one with which I conclude, is Lee’s ghost story ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890). As Carlo Caballero and others have ably discussed, the protagonist’s ultimately debilitating fascination with Italian opera can be read as an allegory of Lee’s own absorption with this music and its singers and also as an attack on Wagner’s music and aesthetics, with which Italian opera is repeatedly contrasted. ‘A Wicked Voice’ recounts the humiliating erasure of Wagner’s music and the German Romantic tradition for which it stands by Italian opera; it is one of the most loaded of Lee’s many depictions of triangulated Italian-German-English relations. I concentrate here, though, on the story’s earlier ‘version’, ‘A Culture-Ghost: Or, Winthrop’s Adventure’ of 1881. In this earlier story, the autobiographical source – a visit which Lee and John Singer Sargent paid to the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna – is

96

97 98 99

Ibid., p. 162; a further hint of Anglo-Italian exchanges is provided in the detail that the vain eighteenth-century primo uomo wears ‘top-boots and leathern breeches which denote his admiration for English institutions.’ (p. 114). Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., pp. 150-51. Ibid., pp. 146 and 147.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

397

more evident,100 and the story consequently deals overtly with Anglo-Italian musical encounters. In ‘A Wicked Voice’, not only has the protagonist become a Scandinavian (thus a representative of ‘Northern’ cultures) rather than English, but the minor characters also are Italians and American tourists in Italy rather than, as in the earlier story, English tourists and ex-pats; Anglo-Italian relations are erased from the surface of the later text. The protagonist of ‘A Culture-Ghost’ is Julian Winthrop, whose name first appears unequivocally – even ostentatiously – English but includes in the forename an Italianate resonance; a suitable proxy for Lee herself. Winthrop is a regular visitor to Florence where he stays with the ‘great musician’ the Countess S__, a figure whose vocabulary and numerous English friends suggest she is English but who has married an Italian.101 The story opens with the Countess’ performance of an aria by ‘“a very forgotten composer of the name of Barbella, who lived somewhere about the year 1780”’.102 Winthrop finds her performance of the air agitating, and enquires whether anything is known of the text or the composer: in a phrase that echoes that of the narrator in ‘Galuppi’, the Countess states that she is probably the “‘sole possessor”’ of the air, which “‘exists in no musical archives in Italy or in Paris’”.103 This performance prompts Winthrop’s first-person account of his own fascination with the portrait of an opera singer Rinaldi, and his increasingly desperate attempts to hear and learn more about the aria associated with this singer – the aria which the Countess sang. Winthrop’s narrative introduces a colourful world of amateur and professional scholars, dealers in music books, scores, and instruments, and obsessive collectors, emphasizing the commodification of musical texts and memorabilia and the acquisitive passion of the central collector ‘Maestro Fa Diesis’ (‘Master F-Sharp’) who cares ‘not a jot [for music], and regarded it as useful only inasmuch as it had produced the objects of his passion, the things which he could spend all his life in dusting, labelling, counting, and cataloguing’.104 We may be tempted to conclude that ‘Maestro Fa Diesis’’s activities resemble an exaggerated version of those undertaken by the young Lee, but his barren collecting and indifference to the

100 101

102 103 104

See Colby, pp. 27-9. [Vernon Lee], ‘A Culture-Ghost: Or, Winthrop’s Adventure’, Fraser’s Magazine, N.S. 23 (January 1881), 1-29 (p. 2). Other versions of the story, and information on its publication in Appleton’s Journal in 1881, are discussed in Leighton (4), and Pulham, ‘The Castrato and the Cry’, 436. ‘A Wicked Voice’ has recently been republished in an annotated edition of Hauntings: Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, eds., Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Ontario: Broadview, 2006). ‘A Culture-Ghost’, p. 3. Ibid., pp. 4 and 3. Ibid., p. 7.

398

Emma Sutton

music itself is contrasted with that of the Englishman Winthrop who longs to hear the music and Rinaldi’s voice. Given that this story was published just a year after Studies, it is more likely, perhaps, that the Maestro is a caricature of the Italian ‘laborious bookworms’ of Studies’ Introduction and Winthrop the immoderately enthusiastic young Lee. The earlier sections of the story, in which Lee dwells on Italian and English scholarship and collecting, are absent from ‘A Wicked Voice’, and it is the final section, in which Winthrop believes that he is hearing the ghostly performance of the aria by Rinaldi in the house where he was murdered, which most closely resembles ‘A Wicked Voice’. In a particularly grotesque example of the Maestro’s collecting, we are told that he has ‘contempt for singers, regarding them as poor creatures, who were of no good, since they left nothing behind them that could be collected, except indeed in the case of Madame Banti, one of whose lungs he possessed in spirits of wine’.105 This detail, which evokes both the physicality of opera and vocal music, and its insubstantiality and transience (it leaves ‘nothing behind’), suggests the concerns crystallized in this story: the difference between scholarship which embalms and that which revives musical performance; the difference between Italian and English scholars or admirers of the music; and the spectrum of emotions elicited by Italian opera. Fittingly, for this final example of Lee’s self-referential and often playful allusions to 18th century opera, the ‘very forgotten’ composer to whom the story refers evokes another Chinese box of associations. Emanuele Barbella (1718-77) was a violinist and composer, a pupil of Leo, who worked in Naples and whose music had some success in Paris and London. He was not ‘forgotten’ in 1881 – at least, not by English music historians. Barbella, who may have visited England in the 1760s, became a friend of Burney, supplying an autobiographical sketch for Burney’s history of Italian music. Lee certainly knew Burney’s account and her depiction of Barbella’s music is surely informed by Burney, who had described Barbella’s playing as ‘sweet’ in tone but lacking animation, and his harmony as displaying ‘a tincture of not disagreeable madness’. His operatic arias were, as she suggests, rarities: Grove states that only one opera (Elmira generosa, 1753) is known, and that it survives only in manuscript in Naples.106 In the absence of evidence to demonstrate whether or not Lee knew (of) this manuscript, it is suggestive that she based her story around a rare text (his only opera, and an unpublished work) if not a fictitious one, and that the Countess S__ dates the aria to 1780, after Barbella’s death: this ghostly text is likely to induce

105 106

Ibid., p. 9. Grove, II, pp. 132-3.

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

399

‘madness’ for more than one reason. Whether or not readers recognized that Barbella’s life and work illustrated another series of Anglo-Italian professional, aesthetic and personal exchanges, they could be in no doubt that Anglo-Italian relations are at the heart of Lee’s story. As these fin-de-siècle texts demonstrate, music was central to Lee’s understanding of national identity, not because she perceived music as an ‘ungeographical and unhistoric’ art107 (though many of her contemporaries had characterized (absolute) music as non-representational and thus apolitical or ahistorical), nor because she was tempted to exaggerate the internationalism of performance practice, but because of her own reservations about her youthful enthusiasm for Italian opera. Lee’s reassessment of the ‘Italo-philia’ of Studies, her mature perception that she had perhaps championed the music of one nation in immoderate terms, led her to associate individual and national maturation and dividuation. Furthermore, Lee associated music and exile not only because of her own aesthetic development and her sense of self-alienation from youthful enthusiasm but also because of what she saw as music’s intrinsically ghostly and ephemeral qualities. Bibliography Primary Sources Allen, Grant, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1877). Arréat, Lucien, Memoire et imagination (peintres, musiciens, poètes et orateurs) (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895). Baldwin, James Mark, Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes, 2nd edn (New York and London: Macmillan, 1903 [1895]). Bellaigue, Camille, Psychologie musicale (Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1893). P. Blaserna, Le son et la musique, 4th edn (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1892 [1875]). Browning, Robert, Men and Women, [1855], in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, ed. by Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983 - 1995), V (1995). Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: or the Journal of a Tour through those Countries, undertaken to collect

107

‘Apollo the Fiddler: A Chapter on Artistic Anachronism’, Juvenilia, I, p. 207.

400

Emma Sutton

materials for a General History of Music (London: Printed for T. Becket and Co., 1771). ––. A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, to which is prefixed, a dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, 4 vols (London: Printed for the author, 1776-89). ––. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio, 3 vols (London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson, 1796). Dauriac, Lionel, La psychologie dans l’opéra francais: (Auber-RossiniMeyerbeer) cours libre professé a la Sorbonne (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1897). ––. Essai sur l’esprit musical (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904). ‘Foemina’ [A. Bulteau], L’Ame des Anglais (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1910). Gurney, Edmund, The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880). Hanslick, Eduard, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 9th edn (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1896 [1854]). Hyndman, Henry M., England for All: The Text-book of Democracy (London: E.W. Allen, 1881). Jaëll, Marie, La musique et la psychophysiologie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896). ––. L’intelligence et le rhythme dans les mouvements artistiques (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904). Lalo, Charles, Esquisse d’une esthetique musicale scientifique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908). Lee, Vernon [Violet Paget], Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (London: W. Satchell, 1880). ––. ‘A Culture-Ghost: Or, Winthrop’s Adventure’, Fraser’s Magazine, N.S. 23 (January 1881), 1-29. ––. Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (London: W. Satchell and Co., [1882]). ––. Euphorion: Being studies of the Antique and the Mediæval in the Renaissance, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884). ––. Miss Brown: A Novel, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1884). ––. Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886). ––. Juvenilia, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887). ––. Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (London: William Heinemann, 1890). ––. Music and its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1932). ––. Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Ontario: Broadview, 2006). Meale, G., Moderna inghilterra: educazione alla vita politica (Torino: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1888).

‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera

401

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Der Fall Wagner [und] Nietzsche Contra Wagner (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1895). Parry, C. Hubert H., The Evolution of the Art of Music, 4th edn (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905 [1893]). Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986 [1873]). Tolstoï, Léon, Qu’est-ce que l’Art?, trans. by Teodor de Wyzewa (Paris: Librairie Académique Didier, 1898). Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981; 1994 [1890, rev. 1891]). Secondary Sources Caballero, Carlo, “‘A Wicked Voice”: On Vernon Lee, Wagner, and the Effects of Music’, Victorian Studies, 35 (1992), 386-408. Colby, Vineta, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 2003). Durante, Sergio, ‘Settecento e Ottocento nell’imaggine della musica di Vernon Lee’, in Vernon Lee e Firenze settant’anni doppo, ed. by Serena Cenni e Elisa Bizzotto (Firenze: Gabinetto G.P. Vieusseux, Università degli Studi di Trento e The British Institute of Florence, 2006), pp. 153160. Fraser, Hilary, ‘Vernon Lee: England, Italy & Identity Politics’, in Britannia, Italia, Germania: Taste & Travel in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Carol Richardson and Graham Smith (Edinburgh: VARIE, 2001), pp.175-91. Freedman, Jonathan, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990). Geffroy-Menoux, Sophie, ‘La musique dans les textes de Vernon Lee’, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 49 (1999), 57-70. ––. ‘Les voix maudites de Vernon Lee: du bel canto a mal’aria dans “Winthrop’s Adventure” (1881), “La voix maudite” (1887), “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers”’, Alizés, 22 (2002), 113-34. Gunn, Peter, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964). Hughes, Meirion and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840-1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001 [1993]). Leighton, Angela, ‘Ghosts, Aestheticism, and “Vernon Lee”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 28 (2000), 1-14.

402

Emma Sutton

Maxwell, Catherine, ‘From Dionysus to “Dionea”: Vernon Lee’s Portraits’, Word & Image, 13 (1997), 253-69. ––. ‘Vernon Lee and the Ghosts of Italy’, in Unfolding the South: Nineteenthcentury British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), pp. 201221. –– and Patricia Pulham, eds., Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). O’Gorman, Francis, ‘Ruskin, Vernon Lee, and the Cultural Possession of Italy’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 7 (2002), 81-107. Pantazzi, Sybille, ‘Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: Their Letters and their Friends’, English Miscellany, 12 (1961), 97-122. Pulham, Patricia, ‘The Castrato and the Cry in Vernon Lee’s Wicked Voices’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30 (2002), 421-37. Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols (London: Macmillan, 1980). Sutton, Emma, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002). Weliver, Phyllis, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Zorn, Christa, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio UP, 2003).

Notes on Contributors DONATELLA ABBATE BADIN is Professor of English Literature at Turin University, Italy. She has published on English, Irish and American authors (in particular on G. M. Hopkins, Charles Dickens, Thomas Kinsella, Sean O' Faolain, Lady Morgan ) and is presently working on representations of the Other, and especially of the Italian Other, in English and Irish literature. Her interest in travel literature and the Grand Tour belongs to this line of research. She has edited Lady Morgan’s Italy for Pickering and Chatto (2010) and has published several essays and a book about that same text: Lady Morgan’s Italy: Anglo–Irish Sensibilities and Italian Realities in PostRestoration Italy (Bethesda MD: Academica Press 2007 ). SIMONETTA BERBEGLIA teaches English Language in a secondary school in Arezzo, Italy. She is the co-author of Afterword, the Truth Behind the Franceschini Murder Case (with Michael Meredith, 2004). She has contributed to BSN. Her research interests lie mainly in the 19th century Anglo-Florentine community on which she has published articles and has given papers at Nottingham Trent University and Malta University. MARA CAMBIAGHI is currently teaching at Liceo Classico G. Carducci in Milan. From 2003 to 2008 she taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz. A former graduate of both Birkbeck College and University College London where she was also employed, she completed a second degree at the University of Milan with a dissertation on A.S. Byatt’s Possession. She has written separately on Beppe and Marisa Fenoglio and on E.L. Doctorow, and has published several articles on the fiction of A.S. Byatt. Her research interests include cultural memory, a transnational analysis of the 1968 movement as portrayed in literature and the fictional autobiography of Christine Brooke-Rose. BRENDAN CASSIDY was awarded his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, after which he worked at the Warburg Institute. From 1987 to 1995 he was Director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University and since 1996 has taught art history at the University of St Andrews. A specialist in latemedieval Italian art he has recently published Politics, Civic Ideals and Sculpture in Italy c.1240-1400 (London 2007) and is also interested in art and the Grand Tour. XAVIER CERVANTES is professor in the English department at the University of Toulouse (France). His research focuses on the cultural relations between England and Italy in the 18th century, especially in the

404

Notes on Contributors

fields of music, painting, and aesthetics. He has published about thirty papers in various journals and conference proceedings, as well as four books as author, co-author, or co-editor. TOBIAS DÖRING is Professor of English at the University of Munich, specializing in Early Modern Literature and Postcolonial Studies. His books include Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (Routledge 2002), Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Culture (Palgrave 2006) and Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (Klett 2008). DAVID EKSERDJIAN has been Professor of the History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester since 2004. Currently a Trustee of the National Gallery and of Tate, and a Member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, he is the author of numerous publications, including Correggio (1997), Parmigianino (2006), and Alle Origini della Natura Morta (2007). In 2004 he was made an Honorary Citizen of the town of Correggio. RALF HERTEL is Juniorprofessor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University Hamburg, prior to which he was a member of the project “Early modern Anglo-Ottoman Encounters” at the research centre “Performative Cultures” at the Free University Berlin. His main interests are the contemporary novel, the sensuousness of reading, and early modern theatre and culture and its relation to an emerging national identity. His publications include Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (2005) and Tanztexte und Texttänze: Der Tanz im Gedicht der europäischen Moderne (2002). He has co-edited Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions (2008) and has published essays on English visions of the East in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, on Shakespeare’s history plays and his depiction of Italy in Cymbeline, and contemporary novelists. Currently, he is working on a study of the impact of Elizabethan drama on national identity in early modern England. PETER HOARE was University Librarian at the University of Nottingham 1978-93, and is now chairman of the Historic Libraries Forum, working as an advisor on historic libraries and in the field of library history generally. He is the general editor of the three-volume Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. (2006). TONY KUSHNER is Marcus Sieff Professor of Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the Parkes Institute and History Department, University of Southampton. His most recent work is Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, Locality and

Notes on Contributors

405

Memory (Manchester University Press, 2009). He is co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and is currently writing a study of the history and memory of migration to Britain. GABY MAHLBERG is a historian and journalist. She completed her PhD in Early Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and has taught at the UEA, Queen Mary and Goldsmiths Colleges, London, and Humboldt University, Berlin. She is currently Assistant Professor in the English Department at Potsdam University, Germany and recently published Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game (MUP, 2009). She also writes for various German media. MAURIZIO MASETTI holds a degree in Foreign Languages and English Literature from the University of Florence. He teaches English Language and Literature at Liceo Ginnasio "Dante" in Florence. In 2002 he published The Florence of the Brownings (Chegai Editore) and in March 2003 he gave a paper on the Anglo- Florentine Community in the XIX century at the British Institute Library in Florence. In September 2005 he was speaker-organizer at the Vallombrosa conference: "Our Italians: Anglo-Italian Relationships 184565", where he gave the paper "Lost in Translation:'The Italian in England' .", published in Browning Society Notes, n. 32, March 2007. FABIENNE MOINE is a lecturer at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense where she teaches business English, translation and tourism. She is the author of a doctoral thesis on ‘The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: heritage, palimpsests and transitions’ and since then has written various articles on Barrett Browning as well as other Victorian women poets from England and Scotland. Her research interests include 19th century women’s studies and poetics. She is interested in exploring the identity of the 19th century women poets in general and is focusing on the various aspects of poetical communities. She has just completed a book on 19th century women poets and the manipulations of genre and gender. WILLIAM ROSSITER is Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool Hope University, prior to which he taught early modern and late medieval literature at the universities of Liverpool and Manchester. His monograph, Chaucer and Petrarch, is published by Boydell and Brewer Press in 2010. He has previously published articles on the works of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer and Lydgate, and is currently carrying out research into Sir Thomas Wyatt' s translations.

406

Notes on Contributors

BARBARA SCHAFF is Professor of English Literature and Culture at Göttingen University. She has previously taught at the Universities of Munich, Tübingen, Vienna and Bochum and has been a research fellow at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leeds. She has co-edited books on authorship, bi-textuality, English fantasies of Venice, and published on travel literature, travel guidebooks, war literature, fakes and forgeries, and female authorship. EMMA SUTTON is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her publications include articles on Henry James, Mark Twain, Victorian poetry, nineteenth-century music, and Virginia Woolf; her first book, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s, was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. She is currently editing The Voyage Out for Cambridge University Press and is completing a book on Woolf and music. PETER VASSALLO is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Malta where he was Head of the English Department from 1998 to 2006. He is also Chair of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies in this University. His publications include Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (MacMillan 1984) and Byron and the Mediterranean (1986).He has published extensively in the field of Anglo-Italian Literary Relations in which he has specialized. He is General Editor of the Journal of AngloItalian Studies and has also edited the Bibliography of Anglo-Italian Literary Criticism (1880-1990) compiled by Alfonso Sammut. He has recently completed a study of Romantic Narrative verse for the Oxford Guide to Romanticism edited by Nicholas Roe. He is currently President of the International Association of University Professors of English. STEFANO VILLANI is assistant professor at the University of Pisa. In his thesis ‘Uomini, idee, notizie tra l’Inghilterra della Rivoluzione e l’Italia della Controriforma’, he investigated the reactions of Italian culture and society to the English civil wars. He has worked extensively on Quaker missionary activities in the Mediterranean. His publications include Tremolanti e Papisti. Missioni quacchere nell’Italia del Seicento (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1996); Il calzolaio quacchero e il finto cadì (Palermo, Sellerio, 2001); and an edition of A True Account of the great Tryals and Cruel Sufferings undergone by those two faithful servants of God Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers: La vicenda di due quacchere prigioniere dell’inquisizione di Malta (Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, 2003). He has published widely on the religious history of the English community of Livorno and is currently preparing a monograph on that subject.

Notes on Contributors

407

CHRISTOPHER WHALEN is researching a doctorate on ‘Palimpsesting in James Joyce’ at Hertford College, Oxford, where he also completed his BA and MSt degrees in English Language and Literature. He is chief research assistant on Charlotte Brewer’s Examining the OED project . OWAIN WRIGHT has taught widely within the fields of history, politics, Italian culture and European studies while completing his thesis on British diplomatic and consular representation in Italy at Lancaster University. He is currently working on a portfolio of publications on British political and cultural relations with Italy and co-editing Locating Italy: East and West in British-Italian Cultural Transactions, the proceedings of the recent British Academy-funded In Medias Res colloquium held in Paris in 2009. MICHAEL WYATT holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Stanford University and is a former fellow of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence. He is the Associate Director of the Stanford Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and works on the cultural histories of Italy, England, and France in the early modern period. His publications include The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation, Cambridge University Press 2005 and the co-edited volume Writing Relations, American Scholars in Italian Archives, Florence: Olschki, 2008. He is currently editing the interdisciplinary Cambridge Companion Guide to the Italian Renaissance; co-editing a further volume of essays, ‘Devils Incarnate or Saints Angelifide’? Anglo-Italian Transactions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; and working on a second monograph, John Florio and the Circulation of Stranger Cultures in Stuart England.