As it was, he had trouble enough with the censors. His first published
articles appeared in the _Indicatore Genovese_, a commercial paper
issuing at Genoa, whose editor was persuaded to admit short notices of
recent books, which gradually swelled into literary essays. Among his
later contributions were an article on the historical novel and
reviews of Friedrich Schlegel's History of Literature and Guerrazzi's
Battle of Benevento. They do not read very well. They are juvenile and
exaggerated, and it is amusing to find the twenty-three years' old
author telling his coeval Guerrazzi, the young Leghorn novelist, that
he had not drunk enough of the cup of life to be a pessimist. The
_Indicatore_ gradually became a literary paper, and for a few months
the censorship did not see what it was tending to. At the end of 1828,
however, about a year after Mazzini began to write in it, it was
suppressed. Mazzini easily transferred his energies. Guerrazzi had
founded another paper at Leghorn much on the same lines, the
_Indicatore Livornese_, and asked Mazzini to send contributions.
Mazzini readily responded; he wrote, besides minor papers, an article
on Faust, and attacked the defects of the Romanticist School in an
essay on _Some Tendencies of European Literature_. His writing is
still effusive, and generally dogmatic and sententious, but the style
has improved. The censorship was comparatively lenient in Tuscany,
and though the young writers were barred from direct reference to
politics, they were able to make the political allusions sufficiently
transparent. But the paper grew too daring even for the somnolent
Tuscan censors, and, like its predecessor, it was snuffed out after a
year of life. Mazzini and Guerrazzi parted, to go on very different
ways, and meet again nineteen years later when both were famous.
In the meantime Mazzini had with some difficulty got a footing on the
_Antologia_, the one Italian review of the time that ranked among the
great European periodicals. It had been founded some ten years before,
in the hope that it might become an Italian Edinburgh Review, by Gino
Capponi, the blind Florentine noble who traced his race from the
Capponi who bearded Charles VIII., and Vieusseux, a Swiss bookseller
who had settled at Florence and opened the one circulating library of
any note in Italy. Most of the leading Italian writers of the day
contributed to it; and though its aim was avowedly nationalist, and in
a sense Liberal, it had succeeded so far, thanks probably to its
influential patrons, in eluding the censor's ban. Mazzini wrote for it
three articles _On the Historical Drama_ and another _On a European
Literature_. His work had rapidly matured, and there is no trace now
of the juvenilities of his earlier efforts. Every page has the mark of
the strong, original thought, which made him one of the greatest
critics of the century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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