The Great Italian Novel

THE BETROTHED (591 pp.) -- Alessandro Manzoni (translated by Archibald Colquhoun]--Dutton ($5).

Legend has it that Sir Walter Scott once met Alessandro Manzoni and fervently congratulated him on his historical novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). Manzoni replied modestly that the book owed everything to Scott. "In that case," said Sir Walter, "this is my finest work."

Literary compliments aside, The Betrothed is a far more ambitious work than any Scott ever attempted. It is an adventure that pried into hearts as well as history; a long irony on men and politics that stung liberal Italians of a hundred years ago into a passion against the petty governments that divided their country. It has gone through more than 500 editions, and Italians rank it second only to Dante's Divine Comedy.

In the U.S., The Betrothed has been almost unknown, and for several good reasons: 1) its plot is as melodramatically involved as a Ponchielli opera, 2) it is stuffed with figures of villainy that most Americans have forgotten ever existed, and 3) it has been more traduced than translated into English. The newest English version, the work of a British writer named Archibald Colquhoun, is a happy improvement on the earlier ones, and should establish Manzoni's virtues with curious U.S. readers as well as any translation is ever likely to.

Vengeance, Fate, Evil. The betrothed of Manzoni's title are two young Italian peasants, Renzo and Lucia, who lived near Milan in the time of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). In the very choice of such a hero & heroine, Manzoni kicked over the elegant traces that had bound Italian writers to the creaky old chariot of classicism. Free of that dead weight, his story tears off on a wild, romantic ride.

Renzo's marriage is forestalled by a dastardly nobleman who, all of a licker for Lucia, intimidates the village priest and tries to kidnap the proud young beauty. A friendly Capuchin spirits her through all his snares to a distant convent. Meanwhile, heartbroken Renzo, breathing smoke and vengeance, flees to Milan. No sooner is he there than he is caught up in a bread riot and turned in to the police by an informer. Lucia, poor thing, falls into the power of an evil nun, who hands the girl over to the nun's own lover, who in turn delivers her to a master criminal known only as the Unnamed.

So it goes, hound after hare, with the jaws of fate snapping just too late at least every other chapter, until the plague of 1630 almost takes them all. Beneath all this activity, the conventional apparatus of the romantic novel, lies the real action of Manzoni's story: the inner feeling of his people. And in this Manzoni shows himself a psychologist to stand firmly with the finest novelists of his century.

The village priest, Don Abbondio, for example, is no stock cleric of the sort Balzac rolled off his nib, but the full-length portrait of a weak, well-meaning man of the world, truckling where he has to, lording it where he can, glad to do a kindness if you'll wait till after supper, parish-wise and heaven-foolish all day long. The wicked nun is not simply wicked, but a believable wretch who got that way partly through her own vanity, partly because she was hideously tricked by her father into a life she had no call for. Manzoni's novel has sizable literary faults, e.g., the narrative is clogged, especially toward the end, with long passages of unabsorbed history. But his humanity has touched generations of Europeans. Said Goethe after reading The Betrothed: "Everything which is of the poet's heart is perfect."

Saint of the Risorgimento. Born in 1785, the son of wealthy Milanese parents, Manzoni spent his early 20s in Paris, became a political liberal and a skeptic. But back in Italy, he returned to the church he had abandoned, and the rest of his life was a parable of the compatibility of Christianity and freedom.

In The Betrothed, published when he was 42, Manzoni gave the divided Italians a declaration of national character to which freedom-minded men could rally. Though he never wrote another novel, and in fact did little of later importance, he found himself worshiped as the saint of the Risorgimento. Garibaldi and Cavour paid him homage. And at his death in 1873, Giuseppe Verdi set to work on his great memorial, the "Manzoni" Requiem, and in heartfelt words spoke for his countrymen: "With him ends the purest, holiest, and highest of our glories."

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