A Man of Letters, page 37
Manzoni’s reformed Catholicism – that old desire to do without the Jesuits and the temporal power – is a greater obstacle to Protestants, one often suspects, than the ultramontane. Manzoni’s religion is, in tendency, liberal and democratic, but it is also melancholy and pessimistic. In The Betrothed our ancestors would miss what they so much admired in the English novel – the high-minded woodenness of the exemplary characters. The chief victims of tyranny and evil in the story – the two peasant lovers who are forcibly separated by the lawless Don Rodrigo – are passive sufferers who do little to help themselves and are, in fact, finally rescued not by their own efforts but through the aid of a remarkable priest and the sudden conversion of the chief villain. There is no Protestant suggestion of an aggressive worth or a self-reliance that depends on direct access to God; on the contrary there is an ironical recognition of the hapless drama of Fate and of the painful need for selfless love. It is true that the wicked are destroyed by the plague which comes to Milan at the end of the book – this is a magnificent episode – and that the good lovers are quietly rewarded; but the lasting impressions are not of righteous success but of inexplicable luck – the luck in catching the mysterious eye of the Almighty. One is reading a benign, spacious and melancholy fable of the most tender moral sensibility, an epic of understatement; whereas the English novelist of the nineteenth century – and the eighteenth century, too – commonly provided his readers with a number of obvious statues to socially estimable Virtue and the reader admired them because he hoped, if only in his own eyes, to become a statue himself.
Changed times and a translation which is closer to our idiom make The Betrothed immediately sympathetic to the contemporary reader, once he allows for old-fashioned methods of narration and apostrophe. We turn with recognition to other times of chaos, as Manzoni himself transposed the upheaval of the French revolution into the material of the religious wars of the seventeenth century. Manzoni is the novelist of those who expose themselves but cannot take sides. They belong, where humanity abides, to the spiritual third force. His personal history was of the kind that makes the psychologist, the man whose thought and feeling are finely meshed; an aristocrat, a Voltairian and militant anti-Catholic, he married a Protestant woman and was reconverted by the Capucines to a profound if ambiguous faith. He writes with the gentleness, the irony, the anxiety and love of one who has passed through a deep personal crisis. His texture is rich, his variety is great; we enter a world of innumerable meanings and contrasts. Beside the account of the plague, which recalls the curious realistic precision of Defoe, must be put very different things, like an abduction to a brigand’s castle or a flight to a convent. In contrast again with these, there are comic scenes like the famous one where the peasant lovers try to trick the timid priest into marrying them, which is at the height of Italian buffoonery; the portraits of politicians have the flowering malice of Proust; the historical reflections are wise, subtle and dyed with experience, and in every episode there are psychological perceptions that have the fineness of the French novelists without their often wounding vanity in their own effects. Manzoni was devoid of the intellectual’s self-admiration. His grave manner removes the sickliness from piety and restores to it the strength of nature.
I will quote two examples of Manzoni’s kind of perception to which the reader of Proust will at once respond.
One is taken from the colloquy between the neurotic and tragic nun and the peasant girl who has found sanctuary with her.
[The peasant] also tried to avoid replying to Gertrude’s inquisitive questions about her story before her engagement. But here the reason was not prudence. It was because to the poor innocent girl this story seemed a thornier and more difficult one to describe than anything which she had heard or thought she was likely to hear from the Signora. Those dealt with tyranny, treachery and suffering – ugly, painful things, yet things which could be expressed but hers was pervaded by a feeling, a word, which she felt she could not possibly pronounce, and for which she would never be able to find a substitute that would not seem shameless – the word love.
Put this beside a very different situation, an innkeeper putting his drunken guest to bed. He covers the snoring drunk and
Then, drawn by the kind of attraction that sometimes makes us regard an object of our dislike as attentively as an object of our love, and which is only the desire to know what it is that affects our sensibility so strongly, he paused a moment to gaze at this irksome guest, raising the lamp over his face, and shading it with his hand so that the light fell on him, almost in the attitude in which Psyche was painted as she gazed stealthily at the features of her unknown spouse.
In all the meetings of his characters, in the strong situations and in the neutral, there is this watchful, instinctive, animal awareness of the other person, a seeking of the meaning of their relationship. To compare the innkeeper to a spouse is not grotesque: the drunk man has already involved the innkeeper with the secret police, there is the marriage of two fears. Fear and love are, in fact, Manzoni’s subjects.
The story of The Betrothed is a strong one. The hired bravoes hold up the cowardly priest. There is murder on the road. There are bread riots in Milan – Manzoni is an excellent narrative writer unencumbered by picturesque baggage – there are flights and pursuits, tremendous confrontations of the tyrannous and the good. The immunity of the priests gives them boldness. There are political intrigue, invasion and looting by foreign armies, the plague. Manzoni is as brilliant as a diplomat in recomplicating the moral issues; the brigand’s sudden conversion, for example, frees the girl from her dangers and seems to guarantee her happiness but, perversely and in her terror, she now vows herself to the Virgin! To the obstacle of wickedness is added the obstacle of faith. That delicate tangle of faith and desire and pride has to be undone. The characters are not thrown on in crude, romantic strokes but are put together precisely by a writer who has understood their pattern and the point at which they will behave unexpectedly or feel the insinuations of time, fate and mood. There is not a stock character anywhere; nor can a too gifted author be seen bursting through these figures. The skill in the change of mood or in anticlimax is wonderful.
When Manzoni described how the notion of writing The Betrothed came to him – I quote from Mr Colquhoun – he said:
The memoirs of that period [the Counter Reformation] show a very extraordinary state of society; the most arbitrary government combined with feudal and popular anarchy; legislation that is amazing in the way it exposes a profound, ferocious, pretentious ignorance; classes with opposed interests and maxims; some little-known anecdotes, preserved in trust-worthy documents; finally a plague which gives full rein to the most consummate and shameful excesses, to the most absurd prejudices, and to the most touching virtues.
With this stuff he did fill his book. The contemporary reader must reflect that this is exactly the kind of material which has, in our time, become degenerate in the novel. The great, even the extensive subjects, have fallen into inferior hands. They have become the fodder of the middlebrow novelist. Is it really true that this kind of material can no longer attract the best minds in the novel? Has it exhausted itself? Clearly Manzoni, like Scott and Balzac, had the excitement of doing something new and they had the tremendous intellectual and emotional force of the Romantic movement behind them. But they were more than capable inventors, copyists, historians or story-tellers who comfortably relied on a commonly accepted language and values. Indeed, although it is generally said that our lack of these common symbols is the central difficulty for contemporary artists, I wonder whether Manzoni’s situation was as different from ours as it seems to be. He is a singular example of the artist, who, finding no common basis for himself and a disjointed society, sets laboriously to make one. His religion was uncharacteristic for a man of advanced ideas; as far as its elusive quality can be discerned, it seems to have connected the ideas of Pascal with those of liberalism and this profound change of spirit led him to seek an equally important change of language. He wished to find a language in which all men communicate with one another and to abandon literary language. Problems of belief raise at once problems of style: in both Manzoni was revolutionary. His case somewhat resembles Tolstoy’s though, with Manzoni, conversion was not a mutilation of the artist but his fulfilment. He succeeded (where the English Protestant novelists on the whole failed) in creating characters who were positively good yet his ‘message’ that love above all, self-sacrifice, courage, long-suffering and charity are the only, and not necessarily successful answers to tyranny and injustice, is not introduced as a sort of pious starch into the narrative, but is native to it. One is undermined rather than incited by this teaching, as in one or two of the Russian writers; and the very pessimism of Manzoni, by which he continually moves the rewards of the righteous just a little beyond their fingertips with a gentle scepticism, is like that of Cervantes.
(1951)
List of Books
Books referred to
LAURENCE STERNE
Four Portraits by Peter Quennell.
LORD BYRON
A Heart For Every Fate by Leslie A. Marchand.
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK
Graphic Works of George Cruikshank selected and with an introduction and notes by Richard A. Vogler.
R. S. SURTEES
Horses, Hounds and Humans by Aubrey Noakes.
CHARLES DICKENS
Oliver Twist. Introduction by Graham Greene.
LEWIS CARROLL
Letters selected by Professor Morton N. Cohen.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Anthony Trollope by A. O. J. Cockshut.
FORD MADOX FORD
Ford Madox Ford by Richard Cassell.
Ford Madox Ford’s Novels by John Meixner.
Novelist of Three Worlds by Paul Wiley.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Vol. V, 1936-41 edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. Ill, 1925–1930 edited by Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie.
MAX BEERBOHM
Max: Sir Max Beerbohm by Lord David Cecil.
A Peep into the Past. Introduction by Rupert Hart-Davis.
The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm’s Parody and Caricature by John Felstiner.
JOSEPH CONRAD
Conrad: A Reassessment by Douglas Hewitt.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir by David Pryce-Jones.
The Selected Essays of Cyril Connolly edited by Peter Quennell.
Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly.
The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly).
The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly.
HENRY JAMES
Letters edited by Leon Edel.
S. J. PERELMAN
The Most of S. J. Perelman by Dorothy Parker.
GEORGE SAND
George Sand: A Biography by Curtis Cate.
Mauprat. Introduction by Diane Johnson.
Lelia translated and with an introduction by Maria Espinosa.
The Companion of the Tour of France translated by Francis George Shaw.
The Haunted Pool translated by Frank Hunter Potter.
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
Adolphe edited by Gustave Rudler.
Le Cahier Rouge
STENDHAL
A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal by Robert Alter, in collaboration with Carol Cosman.
MARCEL PROUST
Marcel Proust: Selected Letters (1880–1903) edited by Philip Kolb, translated by Ralph Manheim, with an introduction by J. M. Cocking.
ALBERT CAMUS
Camus by Patrick McCarthy.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
A Catalogue of the Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford by Richard Brettell and Christopher Lloyd.
Pissarro: His Life and Work by Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper.
FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE GOYA
Goya in the Democratic Tradition by Francis Klingender.
Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art by Fred Licht.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lectures on Don Quixote edited by Fredson Bowers, with a preface by Reynolds Price and an introduction by Guy Davenport.
EÇA DE QUEIROZ
The Mandarin and Other Stories translated by Richard Franko Goldman.
The City and the Mountains translated by Roy Campbell.
The Illustrious House of Ramires translated by Ann Stevens.
MACHADO DE ASSIS
The Psychiatrist translated by William Grossman and Helen Caldwell.
Epitaph for a Small Winner translated by William Grossman.
Dom Casmurro translated by Helen Caldwell.
Esau and Jacob translated by Helen Caldwell.
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary by John Bayley.
Alexander Pushkin: Complete Prose Fiction edited and translated by Paul Debreczeny.
The Other Pushkin by Paul Debreczeny.
MIKHAIL YUREVICH LERMONTOV
A Hero of Our Time translated by Eden and Cedar Paul.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Dostoevsky: Reminiscences by Anna Dostoevsky. Translated and edited by Beatrice Stillman, with an introduction by Helen Muchnic.
ALESSANDRO MANZONI
I Promessi Sposi translated and with an introduction by Archibald Colquhoun.
For My Wife
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Copyright © V. S. Pritchett 1985
First published in 1985 by Chatto & Windu
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V.S. Pritchett, A Man of Letters
