Modern Italian Poets | Page 9

that gallant society hardly survived the eighteenth
century. Perhaps the greatest wonder about it is that it could have lasted
so long as it did. Its end was certainly not delayed for want of satirists
who perceived its folly and pursued it with scorn. But this again only
brings one doubt, often felt, whether satire ever accomplished anything
beyond a lively portraiture of conditions it proposed to reform.
It is the opinion of some Italian critics that Italian demoralization began
with the reaction against Luther, when the Jesuits rose to supreme
power in the Church and gathered the whole education of the young
into the hands of the priests. Cesare Cantù, whose book on Parini ed il
suo Secolo may be read with pleasure and instruction by such as like to
know more fully the time of which I speak, was of this mind; he
became before his death a leader of the clerical party in Italy, and may
be supposed to be without unfriendly prejudice. He alleges that the
priestly education made the Italians literati rather than citizens;
Latinists, poets, instead of good magistrates, workers, fathers of
families; it cultivated the memory at the expense of the judgment, the
fancy at the cost of the reason, and made them selfish, polished, false; it
left a boy "apathetic, irresolute, thoughtless, pusillanimous; he flattered
his superiors and hated his fellows, in each of whom he dreaded a spy."
He knew the beautiful and loved the grandiose; his pride of family and
ancestry was inordinately pampered. What other training he had was in
the graces and accomplishments; he was thoroughly instructed in so
much of warlike exercise as enabled him to handle a rapier perfectly
and to conduct or fight a duel with punctilio.
But he was no warrior; his career was peace. The old medieval Italians
who had combated like lions against the French and Germans and
against each other, when resting from the labors and the high
conceptions which have left us the chief sculptures and architecture of
the Peninsula, were dead; and their posterity had almost ceased to know
war. Italy had indeed still remained a battle-ground, but not for Italian
quarrels nor for Italian swords; the powers which, like Venice, could
afford to have quarrels of their own, mostly hired other people to fight
them out. All the independent states of the Peninsula had armies, but
armies that did nothing; in Lombardy, neither Frenchman, Spaniard,
nor Austrian had been able to recruit or draft soldiers; the flight of

young men from the conscription depopulated the province, until at last
Francis II. declared it exempt from military service; Piedmont, the
Macedon, the Boeotia of that Greece, alone remained warlike, and
Piedmont was alone able, when the hour came, to show Italy how to do
for herself.
Yet, except in the maritime republics, the army, idle and unwarlike as it
was in most cases, continued to be one of the three careers open to the
younger sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were the
other two. In Genoa, nobles had engaged in commerce with equal
honor and profit; nearly every argosy that sailed to or from the port of
Venice belonged to some lordly speculator; but in Milan a noble who
descended to trade lost his nobility, by a law not abrogated till the time
of Charles IV. The nobles had therefore nothing to do. They could not
go into business; if they entered the army it was not to fight; the civil
service was of course actually performed by subordinates; there were
not cures for half the priests, and there grew up that odd, polite rabble
of abbati, like our good Frugoni, priests without cures, sometimes
attached to noble families as chaplains, sometimes devoting themselves
to literature or science, sometimes leading lives of mere leisure and
fashion; they were mostly of plebeian origin when they did anything at
all besides pay court to the ladies.
In Milan the nobles were exempt from many taxes paid by the
plebeians; they had separate courts of law, with judges of their own
order, before whom a plebeian plaintiff appeared with what hope of
justice can be imagined. Yet they were not oppressive; they were at
worst only insolent to their inferiors, and they commonly used them
with the gentleness which an Italian can hardly fail in. There were
many ties of kindness between the classes, the memory of favors and
services between master and servant, landlord and tenant, in relations
which then lasted a life-time, and even for generations. In Venice,
where it was one of the high privileges of the patrician to spit from his
box at the theater upon the heads of the people in the pit, the familiar
bond of patron and client so endeared the