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“The Englishman in Italy”: Free Trade as a Principle of Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert Viscusi
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Dante Alighieri, whom Chaucer could read with pleasure and Byron with delight or even identification, has not always been so well-met in England. Horace Walpole found him “absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in bedlam.” The line is often cited as an example of how limited were the literary tastes of the eighteenth century. But I must confess that Walpole's reaction does not seem strange to me. Whether one may sympathize with it or not, I expect, depends upon the degree of one's experience with Christian zealots. D. H. Lawrence, in his depressing book Apocalypse, draws a vivid picture of the gleeful ease with which such persons come to employ the millenarian poetry of the New Testament. To consign one's enemies to immortal tortures while reserving for one's heroes all the delights of a tropical resort constructed largely out of diamonds and emeralds is not a subtle pleasure. Its appeal can reach the crudest minds. So urbane and elegant a fellow as Walpole, confronted by the self-righteous hymn-singing disciples of John Wesley, not only recoiled in disgust but quite properly recognized in the scheme of the Commedia something of the same primitive spirit. In every age, there will be persons to whom the blunt simplicity of this arrangement, say what you will for the profundities and revisions in Dante's handling of it, will be repulsive. Nowadays, perhaps, we are so hermeneutically splintered, so historically well-nourished, that we can entertain sympathies for Dante and for Walpole, for Byron and for Chaucer, for Eliot and even for Pound, all at the same time, always keeping in mind that our understanding of the one sets some kind of boundary

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 12 , Spring 1984 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1. Cited in De Sua, William, Dante into English, 1750–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), p. 8.Google Scholar

2. Lawrence, D. H., Apocalypse (1931, rpt. New York: Viking Press, 1966).Google Scholar

3. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, ed. Kintner, Elvan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1, 50 (30 April 1845).Google Scholar

4. Dearest Isa, ed. McAleer, Edward C. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), pp. 238–39 (19 May 1866).Google Scholar

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6. Irvine, William, in Irvine, William and Honan, Park, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 415Google Scholar, inclines to a version of the bad-morning explanation. Referring to the same letter without citing the offensive passages, he excuses Browning on grounds of creative stress: “His problem as he saw it was to transmute history into poetry, to cause once-living Italians to speak for themselves again within his own gigantic, revitalizing, blank-verse framework. If The Ring and the Book was composed consecutively, as he later claimed, he had just finished resurrecting Giacinto de Arcangeli and Giovanni-Battista Bottini. His weary letter to Isa is filled with exasperation for Italians, both dead and living.” In its tacit admission that there is indeed something here to explain away, perhaps this is preferable to Jack's comment.

7. The assertions in this paragraph, breezy as they may seem, rest upon a very considerable amount of scholarly endeavor. The reader interested in the large subject of English literary relations with Italy should consult, first among all, the one classic on this theme: Praz, Mario, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969)Google Scholar. Also of use are Sells, A. Lytton, The Italian Influence in English Poetry (1955; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Marshall, Roderick, Italy in English Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934)Google Scholar; and Churchill, Kenneth, Italy and English Literature, 1764–1930 (London: Macmillan, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. See Praz, , pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

9. On the history of italic type, see Carter, Harry, “Supplement on Italic,” in A View of Early Typography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 117–26.Google Scholar

10. See Korg, Jacob, Browning and Italy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983), p. 18.Google Scholar See also Holmes, Stewart W., “The Sources of Browning's Sordello,” Studies in Philology, 34 (07 1937). 467–96.Google Scholar Korg's painstaking survey and Barbara Melchiori's exemplary article “Browning in Italy” (see below, n. 16) have been of the greatest use to me in preparing to write this essay.

11. Carter, , p. 125.Google Scholar

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13. Woolf, Virginia, The Waves (London: Hogarth Press, 1931).Google Scholar

14. Sound surveys of this territory can be found in Churchill, , Italy and English LiteratureGoogle Scholar, and in Marshall, , Italy in English Literature (see above, n. 7).Google Scholar

15. Miller, Betty, Robert Browning: A Portrait (New York: Scribner's, 1972)Google Scholar is so bold a book that subsequent biographers seem never to tire of arguing with its lapidary assessments of Browning's contradictions; Melchiori, Barbara, Browning's Poetry of Reticence (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968)Google Scholar, and “Browning in Italy,” in Robert Browning, ed. Armstrong, Isobel (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), pp. 168–83Google Scholar, along with Ward, Maisie, Robert Browning and His World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar and Maynard, John, Browning's Youth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, have been the works most to my purpose in compiling the list which follows.

16. ‘Browning in Italy,’ pp. 170–71.Google Scholar

17. See, for this, two extraordinary recent essays. Alaya, Flavia, “The Ring, the Rescue, and the Risorgimento: Reunifying the Brownings' Italy,” in Browning Institute Studies, 6 (1978), 1–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, opens anew with brilliance and elegance the whole question of the political groundwork of the Brownings' poetry. Gilbert, Sandra M., “From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento,” PMLA, 99 (03 1984), 194–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar, offers itself as a continuation of Alaya's initial inquiry, focusing particularly on the gender politics so thoroughly inwoven in nineteenth-century discussion and imaging of Italy.

18. See Ward, Maisie, The Tragi Comedy of Pen Browning (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1972).Google Scholar

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20. Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. Shields, Currin V. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 116.Google Scholar

21. On Liberty, pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

22. On Liberty, p. 16.Google Scholar

23. On Liberty, p. 116.Google Scholar

24. On Liberty, p. 115.Google Scholar

25. On Liberty, pp. 115–16.Google Scholar

26. Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Milligan, Martin, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 103–04.Google Scholar

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29. Chesterton, , p. 173.Google Scholar

30. Browning, Robert, The Ring and the Book, ed. Altick, Richard D. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), I, 1–7.Google Scholar

31. See The Ring and the Book, 1, 18–31Google Scholar; see also Cundiff, Paul A., “The Clarity of Browning's Ring Metaphor,” PMLA, 43 (1948), 1267–12.Google Scholar

32. So vividly does this person intrude himself that Harrald, William E., The Variance and the Unity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973), p. 118Google Scholar, with excellent results compares him with the “host for a diorama, pointing-pole in hand, ready to guide his audience through the exciting scenes and action.”

33. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Kaufman, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 196, 198.Google Scholar

34. Browning's Poetry of Reticence, p. 71.Google Scholar

35. The Book, the Ring, and the Poet, p. 409.Google Scholar

36. Citations will be from the text in Browning: Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. Jack, Ian (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 421–29.Google Scholar For dates of composition and publication, see DeVane, William C., A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), pp. 157–59.Google Scholar

37. See Harrald, , pp. 67–77.Google Scholar

38. Cited in DeVane, , p. 158.Google Scholar

39. Harrald, , p. 69.Google Scholar

40. Citations from text in Browning: Poetical Works, pp. 432–35.Google Scholar On this poem, its relationship in time to “The Englishman in Italy,” and the history of its misunderstandings, see Korg, ,. 58–62.Google Scholar