Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

gentleman, no little officer of militia, who was not mortally offended if you styled him, by mistake, very celebrated and excellent; (chiarissimo e excellentissimo) when he claimed "the most illustrious," (l'illustrissimo.) No people are more addicted than the Italians to personal finery and the affectation of expense, or more in the habit of trenching upon private comforts to make a figure in public.

Our countryman is in an error if he supposes that a headlong impetuosity of spirit, fierce and unbridled passions, are favourable to ingenuousness of character in the true sense. This precious trait can be habitual only with temperate and retiring natures. The dissimulation, perfidy, caprice, deliberate vindictiveness-all directly opposite features-which are charged upon the southern nations of Europe, have a close connexion with the complexional vehemence of their passions. We must confess that we should prefer, with a view to dignity as well as morality, a system of society even repressive of "the more exalted virtues," to one giving unbounded license to the gratification and exhibition of the worst propensities. If, as our author will have it, love is in France, a cold, calculating sentiment, the creature of social convenience, we cannot help viewing it still, with more favour than the same passion, in the shapes which he assigns to it in Italy" a devouring flame that bursts from the restraints of decency;-a tremendous divinity stained with human gore, &c." He certainly does not exaggerate in this description; nor does Forsyth in the following passage which we extract from his account of Naples, in order to put France upon a higher vantage ground in the comparison. "That secret devotion of the heart, that exclusion of mankind, that pure, incorporeal tenderness, which enters into the composition of love in our climates, all pass for mere fables in a society like this, where every object is referred to direct pleasure, and where quantity of pleasure becomes a matter of calculation. Here gallantry enjoys all the privileges that a rake can desire. Even neighbourhoods convey rights of this kind. I have seen ladies gesticulating love up and down the streets, to the gentlemen residing within a certain distance from their windows, and new settlers, if handsome, are soon admitted to the benefit."

Our American traveller observes, that" the abandon de soi meme, the forgetfulness of one's self, which is so often met with in Italy, is a stranger to the higher circles of France, and that, hence, the Italians have been accused of a want of shame." The quotation which he makes from Dupaty in illustration, is certainly not happy. If there be no scandal attached in Italy to the dancing of the priests with the young girls, no particular modes of dress, no bienseance to distinguish and separate the sexes, classes and ages, it is a state of things which few at a distance will admire. We have never known the higher circles of France taxed, before, with prudery, and had always thought that they were justly chargeable with the re

[blocks in formation]

verse, both under the old and new regime.* Yet they do not carry the easy and natural quite so far as it is pushed in Italy, as the following extract from Forsyth's account of Florentine manners will testify. "An Englishman arriving here fresh from the delicacies of decorum which he left at home, will be apt to stare on his first introduction to the ladies. In England, the reserves of education, and perhaps, a certain cleanliness of thinking, tend to throw an elegant drapery over the female mind; but here it appears in all the nakedness of honest nature. Indeed, the female character is, in every country, half the work of men, and where gentlemen require no delicacy in the sex, ladies of course affect none. The fair Florentines still persist in habits which have been long banished from English society. You will see very elegant women take snuff, spit on the floor, blow their resounding noses in dirty handkerchiefs, clap gentlemen on the thigh, keep conversation continually fluttering on the brink of obscurity and often pass the line. The awful region of the anatomical preparations, which should be sacred to men of science, is open to all. The very apartment where the gravid uterus and its processes lie unveiled, is a favourite lounge of the ladies, who criticize aloud all the mysteries of the sex. Cecisbeism, though perhaps as general, is not so formally legalized here as at Naples, where the right of keeping a gallant is often secured by the marriage contract. Yet here no lady can appear in fashionable company or before God without such an attendant. She leaves her husband and children at home, while her professed adulterer conducts her to church, as if purposely to boast before heaven the violation of its own laws. This connexion is generally ludicrous, where it is not wicked. The cecisbeo seems vain of the servilities which his mistress studies to impose on him. I once saw a lady bid her Signor Cavaliere stir up her fire. 'Attizzate il mio fuoco.' At the word of command, he put his hand under her petticoat, removed the chafing-dish; stirred the coals with a small silver shovel which he kept in his pocket, replaced the pan and re-adjusted her dress. Let no man tell me that Italian manners should not be tried by English laws. Virtue is of no country. Infidelity is every where vice; nor will its frequency excuse individuals, for individuals have made it universal."

This is sound doctrine, and we would say in like manner that delicacy in civilized life is of no country: it is something positive; it can be relative only in a slight degree. We may be squeamish and old-fashioned, but we hardly conceive, in regard to female manners, when it can deserve the epithet false. It is, for women of the higher ranks particularly, a real ornament and a necessary

*On this point we would refer, for the old régime, to the correspondence of De Grimm, and the Memoirs of Madame D'Epinay;-and for the new, to the experience of all who have lived in Paris since the beginning of the revolution.

defence. In truth, the settled respects-the peculiar observances in appearance and demeanor, which distinguish sex, age and condition-the command, not forgetfulness of one's self-the comprehensive decorum, which prevail in the social systems opposed to the Italian, are more or less essential to virtue and social order. They are to them what certain political forms are to liberty; and we no more expect to see a permanently moral and respectable community without such accessories, than a permanently free one without checks and balances.

Our countryman does not, we believe, mean to condemn the exterior decencies;' but he might be misunderstood when he discources slightly of artificial restraints. The Count de Stendhall corrobates in 1817 all that Forsyth relates; but he speaks of the Italian abandon and the opposite order of things, quite in the spirit of a Parisian moralist, liberalized by southern travel. It is instructive to listen to him.

"At Milan they laugh and joke with the most perfect tone of bonhommie; at Venice, every thing is gayety and lightness of heart. The son of the Doge is no less gay than the gondolier; his amours are no less public. Any one in giving news of another, never fails to mention the lady whom he serves. When a party is mentioned, which took place, perhaps ten years ago, to Fuzina or elsewhere, the speakers never fail, even in the presence of the husband, to commemorate that the Pepina was there served by such an one, that it was at the time when Marietta was jealous of Priuli. Venice and at Boston, the gayety and happiness are in the inverse ratio to the goodness of the government." ***

At

"The prudery of the women at Geneva is incredible and truly ridiculous. Nothing can be more curious than to see how the face is drawn up, if, by chance, an observation is introduced, coming spontaneously from the heart and perfectly natural. I found that I had been guilty of a breach of their decorum, when I spoke of love abstracted from marriage. The women are handsome, though this incredible prudery is to be traced even in the expression of their countenances. I readily believe the numerous virtues ascribed to Geneva; it is the town of all others in Europe, in which I am fully convinced there are the fewest husbands deceived; but, nevertheless, I would not, for all the gold in the city, take a wife from it. In spite of my horror, at the state of morals in Naples, I prefer it to Geneva; it is, at least, more natural. Indecency is only a relative term. What is only amiable at Paris, is indecent at Geneva; this depends entirely on habit."

The Count informs us also that you might pillage all the sentiment possessed by all the ladies of Paris and London, yet not form such a character as a young Italian woman of the heroical order: and that the sensibility that reigns in Italy seems an absolute absurdity to the inhabitants of the North. God preserve us from such a race of heroines, and from the natural manners with which that sensibility

so incomprehensible to northern dullness, is appropriately accompanied! Whoever wishes to understand it, as it rages in the men of Italy, should peruse the life of Alfieri, her great dramatic poet, written by himself. We know not that we were more ashamed of human nature in reading the confessions of Rousseau, than the tale of the extravagancies of the other madman; and to neither can we consent to extend any indulgence, let their genius and their works, (to the merits of which we are no strangers,) be as admirable as they may.

Nothing, we should think, can be more evidently just than the accusation of a want of shame preferred against the Italians. It is the necessary correlative of the absence of an overruling public opinion, and betrays itself in many particulars besides those which we have noticed. Of the Neapolitans, Forsyth says, "they are, perhaps, the only people on earth that do not pretend to virtue. On their own stage they suffer the Neapolitan of the drama to be always a rogue.* If detected in theft, a lazzarone will ask you with impudent surprise, how you could possibly expect a poor man to be an angel." Numerous instances to the same effect could be quoted from this author with respect to the other parts of the Peninsula, Florence particularly. The following anecdote from de Stendhall, is also in point. "The driver of my sediola from Parma, entertained me on our route by relating without the least shame, that he got the twenty-seven Napoleons with which he purchased the carriage and horse, by the trade of a robber. We passed three spots where he told me with the utmost simplicity, as if there was no harm in the thing, that he had stopped travellers."

[ocr errors]

We are informed by the American traveller himself, and he is vouched by others, that the peasantry of the ecclesiastical states, not unfrequently mix with troops of banditti, and after a season resume the character and occupations of peaceful villagers. Assassination," says Sismondi, "is, indeed, no longer imposed by public opinion, as a duty in the case of an affront, but it is not a disgrace. It is an idea with which every one is incessantly familiar; and which all view more in the light of a misfortune than of a crime." What the same writer calls the redoubtable science of poisons-la redoubtable science des poisons-is still openly professed.

Under all circumstances then, and admitting even that the licentiousness of the Parisian society is, though more disguised, as profound as that of Italy; yet we cannot comprehend how our countryman could assert it as a proposition not to be denied, that the nations, the Italian and French, are equally advanced in corruption. Some doubt on this point may be produced, by the quotations which we have already made, and more will grow out of

This trait is not altogether peculiar to the Neapolitans. The Scotch, very different in character, not only bear, but are delighted, with Sir Pertinax M'Sycophant, on the stage of Edinburgh.

those which we propose to make in the sequel. But there are general features in the social and political institutions of Italy, which would conduct us, a priori, to the conclusion of her being in a much "lower deep" of depravity than France. We shall notice only two as the most obvious. The first is cecisbeism, of which Forsyth has given our readers a faint idea,-a monstrous bigamy, not merely tolerated, but honoured and caressed, throughout the whole Peninsula. Gallantry may be common in France, out of Paris; but it wears no form there which can be compared with this fashionable one of Italy, as a source of immorality, and domestic misery, and general degradation. Sismondi, who is perhaps, more deeply versed than any man living in the history and concerns of Italy, describes cecisbeism as one of the great public calamities which she has to deplore; as being, for her, the principal memento of the seventeenth century in which it took its rise; as the most universal cause of the private sufferings of all her families; as the main instrument of the enervation of her genius and the prostration of her national spirit. He admits that libertinism and adulterous intrigue were by no means unknown in the time of the republics; but denies that common disorders of this kind could exert the same pernicious influence over the general morals and national character. "It was not because some women had lovers, but because no woman could appear in public without her lover, that the Italians ceased to be men."*

Another fatal innovation of the seventeenth century, was the establishment of a rigid law of primogeniture and entail, by which the younger sons and daughters of the higher classes were cut off from any share in the parental estate. The younger sons had assured to them, only the piatto, or subsistence at the family table.† Poverty and pride condemned them to idleness and celibacy, and there was thus created a host of parasites whom the want of occupation, and the sense of debasement almost forced into habitual dissoluteness. As a sort of compensation to this pestilent class, and in order to amuse the leisure of a new nobility and body of courtiers, as well as to facilitate the complete subjection of the nation to their yoke, the foreigners who had erected their dominion over her, devised, according to Sismondi, "the absurd rights and duties of cavalieri serventi."

We must not overlook the circumstance that this scourge, cecisbeism, had for its elements, two maxims adopted as laws by the beau-monde; that no woman could, with propriety, appear alone in public; that no husband could, without ridicule, attend on his wife.

[ocr errors]

* Histoire des Républiques Italiennes du Moyen age. Vol. 16. c cxxiv. Forsyth says, speaking of the neighbourhood of Sienna, the villages are necessarily large to accommodate the swarm of bachelors which must result from the system established among the nobility. In general the uncles and brothers of the heir, inherit, as their patrimony, a right to board and lodge in every house belonging to the family.'

« ÎnapoiContinuă »