Art. 12.-UGO FOSCOLO. 1. Opere di Ugo Foscolo. 12 vols. Florence, 1850-90. 2. La Vita di Ugo Foscolo. By Giuseppe Chiarini. Florence, 1910. 3. La Poesia di Ugo Foscolo. By Giuseppe Citanna. Bari: Laterza, 1920. 4. Studi Foscoliani. Laterza, 1921. By Giuseppe Manacorda. Bari: 5. Ugo Foscolo pensatore, critico, poeta. By E. Donadoni. Milan Sandron, 1910. ON Sept. 10, 1827, Ugo Foscolo died at Turnham Green, the first and the greatest, with the possible exception of Mazzini, of the Italian men of letters who have taken refuge in these islands for political reasons. The life of a poet is, as a rule, of little importance, except in so far as it affects his work; but this is not the case with Foscolo. His stormy career reflects the vicissitudes through which his country passed during the troubled years of the Napoleonic era more closely, and certainly more nobly, in spite of his faults, even vices, than that of almost any other Italian of equal eminence and activity in his day. The circles in which he moved in London, the terms on which he was at once received in them, and the efforts of his friends to help him to the last, in spite of himself, are proof of the respect in which he was held. Few Italians have more right to exclaim with Baretti, 'English friends for me.' Foscolo's body was removed to S. Croce in Florence, of which he sings so nobly in Dei Sepolcri,' in 1871; but there is a local tradition in Chiswick that the tomb in the churchyard which Hudson Gurney raised for him, the last of many acts of generosity, is always warm. And the legend is certainly true symbolically, for few hearts have beaten more passionately than did that of the boy born at Zante in January 1778. His father was an Italian doctor who died young and left his family in poverty, his mother a Greek, and though he came to Venice as a child, his early years in the birthplace he was never to see again made upon his sensitive imagination an impression that always kept its fresh ness. He was proud of his Greek blood, and this fact may have fired him to make himself one of the best Greek scholars among the Italian poets. It is to Greece rather than to Rome that he looked for inspiration. Homer was always the poet of poets for him. As a boy, he tells us, he was 'slow and obstinate, often out of health from melancholy, and at times fierce and insane from rage'; and he remained nervously illbalanced for the rest of his days. His character and abilities soon made a mark, and his old green coat and shock of red hair became familiar features in the cafés and salons of Venice, where he showed his sensitiveness by boasting of his poverty. The success of his tragedy 'Tieste,' written on strictly Alfierian lines, won him a recognised position in the world of letters. He had a good deal in common with Alfieri, the haughty individualist, the hater of tyrants, who was not a little of a tyrant himself, and the times in which he lived tended to foster these characteristics. Foscolo was too violent a republican and revolutionary to be quite comfortable in Venice, so he went to Bologna, then in the Cispadane Republic, where he wrote the 'Oda a Bonaparte Liberatore,' the first of his poems to show a distinct individuality. He returned to Venice on the establishment of popular rule, becoming one of the secretaries of the Republic. The treaty of Campoformio, which ceded Venice to Austria, was a terrible blow. He is said to have proposed to burn the city rather than yield. He withdrew to Milan, the capital of the Cisalpine Republic, completely disillusioned. His novel, Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis,' is not merely the book of the period, wherein the generation that lived through the tragic years that shattered its hopes of freedom saw itself mirrored; it is also the book in which Foscolo seeks to draw himself. 'I shall perhaps write better as author, but the man will never write again as in that book,' he says in a letter. Apart from his art and his desire for fame, Foscolo had two master passions, his love of country and his love for women. Love was, indeed, a chronic state with him, affair succeeding affair in unending succession. The novel owes a good deal to 'Werther,' but the tragedy of Ortis is a double tragedy, the loss of country and the loss of Teresa. At least two ladies are thought to have contributed to Teresa; the 'divina fanciulla,' the lovely fair-haired girl, Isabella Roncioni, betrothed to a man for whom she did not care, quite different from the married women who had hitherto captivated Foscolo; and her successor, Antonietta Fagnani-Arese, who was as temperamental as himself. His affair with Antonietta lasted two years (1801-3), during which time he was putting Ortis' into its final form. His letters to her are a speaking picture of Foscolo in love, with his exaggerated hopes and despairs, his violence and egotism, and the final dignified, hurt farewell. In love he admits that he was born, to his misfortune, quixotically tragic; and by this time he had a pretty clear idea of the course his passion would follow. But while it lasted he was always very much his own Ortis. In England he would tear out his hair from rage when he lost a game of chess. This double passion of love and patriotism may injure the book artistically, but to it are due its originality, and its truth to Foscolo himself and the times in which he lived. Not that it cured Foscolo as Werther' helped to cure Goethe. He often toyed with the idea of suicide: his brother died by his own hand; but, he tells us ; 'Che se pur sorge di morir consiglio, His intense vitality and his active life as a soldier were sufficient antidote to any such morbid tendencies. For Foscolo remained in the army, even after Marengo. He had fought bravely against the advancing Austrians and Russians, being wounded and made prisoner, and he served with distinction under Massena in besieged Genoa. He still saw in Napoleon the one hope of freedom for Italy; but he never flattered him or concealed his opinion of him. During the siege he republished his ode with a fresh dedication, in which he says that his object is not to tickle his ear with praise, but to bring home to him the misery of Italy, justly awaiting the restoration of her liberty at the hands of the man to whom she first owed it. The tone of his eloquent 'Orazione a Bonaparte pel Congresso di Lione' is hardly less pronounced. During 1804-6 he was with the Italian division of Napoleon's army for the invasion of England at Boulogne and St Omer, where by an English woman he became the father of a daughter, Floriana, who tended him devotedly in his last years. Here, too, he learnt English and began the free version of the Sentimental Journey,' which has made the 'Viaggio Sentimentale di Yorrick' a household word in Italy, as it has the pseudonym of its translator, Didimo Chierico, which Foscolo was to use more than once. It did not leave his fastidious hands till 1813. In 1808 Foscolo was appointed Professor of Italian Eloquence in the University of Pavia. The chair was suppressed almost immediately, but not before he had given a taste of his quality as a critic, notably in his introductory lecture, which shows the influence of Vico by his tracing his subject back to its earliest origins. Foscolo was a man of real learning, a scholar and thinker, as he showed in his discourses on Catullus's 'Coma Berenices,' which he professed to regard as a skit on the erudition that was so absurdly over-prized at this time, or in his essays on the text of Dante and the critical work on Italian literature which belongs to his years in England. As De Sanctis puts it, 'Foscolo is the first of Italian critics to consider a work of art as a psychological phenomenon, and look for its source in the mind of the writer and in the atmosphere of the period in which he was born'— that is to say, he was the first modern critic in Italy, though he wrote to John Murray that he considered criticism a sort of literary quackery.' It is characteristic of him that he made over the pension he received on the suppression of the Chair to his mother, to whom he was always a devoted son. In 1812 he was back in Florence, a frequent and welcome visitor at the rather dreary assemblies of the Countess of Albany, with whom he long corresponded. Now it was that he met the 'donna gentile,' Quirina Mocenni-Magiotti. Sensible and good-hearted, she was hardly calculated, in spite of her good looks, to inspire one of his temperament with a violent passion; but she possessed all the qualities that he needed in a friend, and such she remained, true and self-sacrificing, to the end, asking nothing better than to be able to help him and in no way affected by his constant infidelities. These months in Florence when he was living up at Bellosguardo, busy upon Le Grazie,' with a circle of charming lady friends, must have been among the happiest in his life. After the fall of Napoleon Foscolo again showed his greatness as a man, in spite of, it may be even because of, his weaknesses. For perhaps it was the consciousness of his own worth, which found expression in his insisting on living in a certain style, whatever his income might be, that raised him above the politicians of the day, who submitted to each government in turn, accepting the change with a shrug, possibly in all good faith believing that they were thus serving the best interests of their country. The poet Monti has become their scapegoat, because, unlike them, he has not sunk into oblivion; it is noticeable that what is perhaps the best, the most spontaneous of his poems, for it shows real feeling, is the ode on his return to Italy after Marengo. Foscolo's note to Monti on their final break is well known. Monti mio, we shall both go down to the grave; you certainly more lauded and I, perhaps, far more regretted: in your epitaph praise will speak, and on mine, I am sure, it will be read that I, having been born and grown up with many evil passions, have yet always kept my pen clean of falsehood." Foscolo, who had refused to flatter even Napoleon, was inclined to welcome the return of the Austrians. He saw that Italy needed peace and he knew that they had been the most enlightened rulers in the peninsula in the old days. Naturally they were only too eager to win him, offering him the editorship of a review. He thought of accepting till he found that, as an officer of Napoleon, he would be required to take an oath. Pecchio relates that one morning in Milan he told him frankly that, if he continued to play with the Austrians, he would be regarded as a spy by his friends. This news came like a thunderclap and he fled to Switzerland the next day. By this act Ugo Foscolo gave Italy a new institution, exile,' says Carlo Cattaneo. His farewell letter to his family is among the noblest he ever wrote. Characteristically, when his baggage mule fell, filling the air with fragrance from the broken bottles of his scents and |