A history of Italian literature

Name: A history of Italian literature
Author: Garnett, Richard

Garnett, Richard

Italian literature -- History and criticism

of your rights and more of your duties” is the burden of much ethical
admonition addressed, especially during his later years, to the
working classes, and containing some of the noblest and most dignified
teaching to be found in the world. Mazzini had little sympathy with
some of the more recent developments of democracy; his life had been
one of disinterested privation for great ends, and he thought little,
perhaps too little, of merely material ameliorations. His mysticism,
his austere magnanimity, and his deeply religious feeling find their
most perfect expression in his noble epistle to the members of the
Œcumenical Council of 1869, which, along with President Lincoln’s
oration on the battlefield of Gettysburg, crowns the public eloquence
of our time; nor needs the age which has produced two such deliverances
to envy in this respect the age of Pericles.

Time has worked and is working for Mazzini; the fanaticism and unreason
of one side of his character, having produced no permanent ill effect,
fall more and more into oblivion, or are recognised as the necessary
conditions of his unique gifts. His failings were the failings of
a prophet: little as he was qualified to guide the movement he had
evoked, none but such an one as he could have brought about the
national resurrection truly described by Mr. Swinburne in the poem
where he as truly hails in Mazzini the third Italian prophet after
Dante and Michael Angelo:

      _And the third prophet standing by her grave,
        Stretched forth his hand and touched her, and her eyes
        Opened as sudden suns in heaven might rise,
      And her soul caught from his the faith to save:
      Faith above creeds, faith beyond records, born
      Of the pure, naked, fruitful, awful morn._

There is an ancient story of a princess carried off by a dragon and
confined on a desert island in the most remote recesses of the ocean,
who owed her deliverance to the joint exertions of three most eminent
brothers, none of whom could have accomplished anything without the
other two. One, an astrologer, discovered the place of her captivity;
the second, a mechanician, made a winged horse; upon which the third, a
soldier, proceeded to the spot and slew the dragon. In the liberation
of Italy the part of the astrologer fell to Mazzini, that of the
mechanician to Cavour, and that of the soldier to Garibaldi.


                              FOOTNOTES:

[22] There is a lively portrait of him in Ruffini’s _Lorenzo Benoni_,
where he is introduced as “Fantasio.”




                              CHAPTER XXV
                 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY--MIDDLE PERIOD

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Opening the text

A history of Italian literatureGarnett, Richard

History

A history of Italian literature

Garnett, Richard

Italian literature -- History and criticism

of your rights and more of your duties” is the burden of much ethical
admonition addressed, especially during his later years, to the
working classes, and containing some of the noblest and most dignified
teaching to be found in the world. Mazzini had little sympathy with
some of the more recent developments of democracy; his life had been
one of disinterested privation for great ends, and he thought little,
perhaps too little, of merely material ameliorations. His mysticism,
his austere magnanimity, and his deeply religious feeling find their
most perfect expression in his noble epistle to the members of the
Œcumenical Council of 1869, which, along with President Lincoln’s
oration on the battlefield of Gettysburg, crowns the public eloquence
of our time; nor needs the age which has produced two such deliverances
to envy in this respect the age of Pericles.

Time has worked and is working for Mazzini; the fanaticism and unreason
of one side of his character, having produced no permanent ill effect,
fall more and more into oblivion, or are recognised as the necessary
conditions of his unique gifts. His failings were the failings of
a prophet: little as he was qualified to guide the movement he had
evoked, none but such an one as he could have brought about the
national resurrection truly described by Mr. Swinburne in the poem
where he as truly hails in Mazzini the third Italian prophet after
Dante and Michael Angelo:

      _And the third prophet standing by her grave,
        Stretched forth his hand and touched her, and her eyes
        Opened as sudden suns in heaven might rise,
      And her soul caught from his the faith to save:
      Faith above creeds, faith beyond records, born
      Of the pure, naked, fruitful, awful morn._

There is an ancient story of a princess carried off by a dragon and
confined on a desert island in the most remote recesses of the ocean,
who owed her deliverance to the joint exertions of three most eminent
brothers, none of whom could have accomplished anything without the
other two. One, an astrologer, discovered the place of her captivity;
the second, a mechanician, made a winged horse; upon which the third, a
soldier, proceeded to the spot and slew the dragon. In the liberation
of Italy the part of the astrologer fell to Mazzini, that of the
mechanician to Cavour, and that of the soldier to Garibaldi.


                              FOOTNOTES:

[22] There is a lively portrait of him in Ruffini’s _Lorenzo Benoni_,
where he is introduced as “Fantasio.”




                              CHAPTER XXV
                 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY--MIDDLE PERIOD

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

A history of Italian literature

A history of Italian literature

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