Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (review)

This is a most interesting — indeed at times fascinating — book that focuses on a neglected aspect of Byron Studies. Specifically, Arnold Schmidt undertakes to determine what footprint, if any, Byron, after his seven years' residence in Italy, left on the course of Italian nationalism. In addressing this issue, the book adds yet another layer to Byron's already complicated persona, namely his recognisable italianità — the ability to understand Italian feelings and absorb the essential Italian spirit. Schmidt persuasively demonstrates how Byron's work and life permeated deeply into nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italian literature, with an enormous number of Italian writers, intellectuals and politicians using Byron and Byronissimo to suit their own purposes. The author, who learned Italian to pursue this book, has identified a prodigious body of Italian works expressly dealing with Byron as a subject or adopting Byron's words and perceived ideas. In short, this work is packed with new information about Byron and his impact on Italian literature and politics.

The book does, however, have one major deficiency. Like much literary scholarship that has focused on Byron's views on foreign and domestic politics, Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism lacks a solid foundation in political theory, especially the concept of nationalism. Schmidt claims, for example, that 'Italians thought about nationhood in two ways. One view suggested that nations exist among people of shared blood and culture, while another view [...] held that a nation arose when its people voted and decided to form one.' Had Schmidt consulted Sir Isaiah Berlin's famous 1979 essay on 'Nationalism' he might have presented a more complex and nuanced account of the formation of Italian nationalism. Berlin describes nationalism as something

definite, ideologically important and dangerous: namely the conviction [...] that men belong to a particular human group [...] that the characters of the individuals who compose the group are shaped by and cannot be understood apart from those of the group, defined in terms of common territory, customs, laws, memories, beliefs, language, artistic and religious expression, social institutions [...] to which some add heredity, kinship [and] racial characteristics.

Berlin then identifies four characteristics that he believes were present 'at the origins of European nationalism as a state of mind': the overriding need for men to belong to a nation; the idea that the life of a society is similar to a 'biological organism' in which 'the essential human unit in which man's nature is fully realised is not the individual, or a voluntary association which can be dissolved [...] at will, but the nation'; the belief in the value of a nation solely because it is 'our' nation; the conviction that if 'our' nation's beliefs 'turn out to be incompatible with [...] other groups, I, or the society to which I indissolubly belong, have no choice but to compel them to yield, if need be by force'. Throughout his writings, Berlin recognises that many of the nationalist movements that grew out of Romanticism led directly to 'German chauvinism, French integralism, and Italian sacro egoismo', which in turn led directly to Mussolini's fascism and the barbarism of the twentieth century.

Whether Berlin's ideas are right or wrong, they make it clear that nationalism is a discrete aspect of political philosophy that has engendered well over two hundred years of study and debate. Each nationalistic movement is conditioned by different circumstances, and Schmidt's failure to isolate the circumstances informing the bloody forty year struggle to create the Italian nation makes it difficult to identify those critical areas in which Byron had the most impact and those areas on which he may have had little or no impact.

Despite this, the work presents many invaluable and new aspects of Byron's relations with and attitudes towards Italian history, culture and politics. Early on, for instance, Schmidt states that Byron's ability 'to read and speak the Tuscan and Venetian dialects' allowed him 'to know the Italian...