Of course the popular movements
affected literature in turn; and I should by no means attempt to
say which had been the greater agency of progress. It is not to be
supposed that a man like Alfieri, with all his tragical eloquence
against tyrants, arose singly out of a perfectly servile society. His
time was, no doubt, ready for him, though it did not seem so; but, on
the other hand, there is no doubt that he gave not only an utterance
but a mighty impulse to contemporary thought and feeling. He was in
literature what the revolution was in politics, and if hardly any
principle that either sought immediately to establish now stands, it
is none the less certain that the time had come to destroy what they
overthrew, and that what they overthrew was hopelessly vicious.
In Alfieri the great literary movement came from the north, and by far
the larger number of the writers of whom I shall have to speak were
northern Italians. Alfieri may represent for us the period of time
covered by the French democratic conquests. The principal poets under
the Italian governments of Napoleon during the first twelve years
of this century were Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo--the former a
Ferrarese by birth and the latter a Greco-Venetian. The literary as
well as the political center was then Milan, and it continued to be so
for many years after the return of the Austrians, when the so-called
School of Resignation nourished there.
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