ITALY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

Transcription

1 ITALY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

2 ITALY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE Kenneth Churchill M MACMILLAN

3 Kenneth Churchill 1980 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1980 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1980 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD HoundmiIls, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Reprinted 1993

4 Contents Preface Vll 1 From Addison to Gibbon 2 Between Gibbon and Byron IO 3 Byron 30 4 Shelley; and the Minor Romantics 44 5 Italy in English Fiction, Developments in the 1830S 65 7 Ruskin "77 8 Browning 89 9 The other Victorian Poets 98 IO The Victorians and the Renaissance Italy and the English Novel in the Mid-Century The American Novelists in Italy Italy and the English Novel, I D. H. Lawrence 182 Italy 116 Bibliography 212 Index v

5 Preface This book began one morning in Rome in front of the statute of Byron in the Villa Borghese gardens. A sympathy with Byron's description of Rome as 'my country! city of the sou!!' led to thinking of what other English writers had made of Italy; to pondering particularly on the total reversal of attitudes to ancient Rome between Gibbon and Lawrence and wondering whether there was an organic development of English literary attitudes to Italy between these two extremes. If one traced the appearance of! taly in English literature chronologically through two centuries, would one be able to examine in detail the working ofa literary tradition; and see how each writer develops out of, and contributes to, the available picture of Italy? Would the study ofliterary change in this local case offer suggestive perspectives onto the overall movement of English literature in the period? Would it offer a means of arguing the quality of writers who seem commonly underrated (Byron, Ruskin) and many of whose strengths were particularly associated with Italy; or a new way of looking at the work of others, notably Lawrence? And would an historical examination of the growth of some of the assumptions about Italy that we normally assimilate synchronically from our literature help analyse one's own feelings for the endless fascination of Italy and its perennial imaginative necessity to the northerner? In doing this work my own answers to all these questions have been positive, and I hope that the reader who bears the questions in mind while reading the book may share the feeling that just as so many English writers found sources of vitality in Italy so we can find stimulating patterns in their work by exploring in it part of our inherited creative debt to Italy. In seeking to establish these patterns the main emphasis is naturally on those English writers who have written most interestingly about Italy. The works oflesser writers have been mentioned when they serve to illustrate conventional attitudes from (or against) which more important work developed; a great many vii

6 V 111 Priface works do not merit even this degree of attention, and are listed in the bibliography for the reader who wishes to explore further these particular byways ofliterature. Foreign writers, and workers in the other arts, are included only when their work contributed so significantly to the English literary apprehension of Italy that the picture would be incomplete without them. In its first form this book was a Ph.D. thesis in the University of Cambridge, and I am most grateful to Professor Graham Hough for his clear yet kindly supervision of its progress. An earlier version of the chapter on Byron appeared in The Literary Half-Yearly (Mysore) and I am grateful to the editor, Professor H. H. Anniah Gowda for his permission to reprint it here. The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd for the extracts from A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster; Oxford University Press for the extracts from Browning's '\1ajor Poetry by Ian Jack; and Laurence Pollinger Ltd and Viking Penguin Inc, on behalf of the Estate of the late Mrs Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, for extracts from The Rainbow, Sea and Sardinia, Aaron's Rod, The Lost Girl, Twilight in Italy, Etruscan Places, Phoenix, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence and The Collected Leiters of D. H. Lawrence. April 1979 K. G. CHURCHILL