... The movement was the same revolution as before, mastered by
experience and self-disciplined.... Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor
Hugo, Lamennais, Manzoni, Grossi, Pellico, were liberal no less
than Voltaire and Rousseau, Alfieri and Foscolo.... The religious
sentiment, too deeply offended, vindicated itself; yet it could
not escape from the lines of the revolution ... it was a reaction
transmuted into a reconciliation."
The literary movement was called Romantic as against the old
Classicism; medieval and Christian, it made the papacy the hero of its
poetry; it abandoned Greek and Roman antiquity for national antiquity,
but the modern spirit finally informed Romanticism as it had informed
Classicism; Parini and Manzoni were equally modern men. Religion is
restored, but, "it is no longer a creed, it is an artistic motive....
It is not enough that there are saints, they must be beautiful; the
Christian idea returns as art.... Providence comes back to the world,
the miracle re-appears in story, hope and prayer revive, the
heart softens, it opens itself to gentle influences.... Manzoni
reconstructs the ideal of the Christian Paradise and reconciles it
with the modern spirit. Mythology goes, the classic remains; the
eighteenth century is denied, its ideas prevail.
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