Ugo Foscolo and Some Englishmen

UGO FOSCOLO AND SO.ME ENGLISHMEN· A. S. NoAD "AT some house where we \vere dining in London, .fi I forget with whom, Ugo Foscolo, the poet, was one of the party. He was extremely excitable and irritable, and when some one spoke of a translation of Dante as being perfect, 'Impossible', shouted Foscolo, starting up in great excitement, at the same time tossing his cup full of coffee into the air, cup and all, regardless · of the china and the ladies' dresses." This is what Mary SomerviJle says of Foscolo in her Personal Recollections . All she can remember of one of the most fascinating conversationalists of his age is that he threw: his coffee-cup into the air when excited. But then, Foscolo, besides being a poet and a talker, was a foreigner, and such queer actions are typical of foreigners, and deserve to be recalled. In the light of this reference, we must picture the strange appearance of the Italian. Above the middle height, but stooped from much reading, his powerful body was stirmounted by a singularly ugly, yet attractive, face. Its long hollow: cheeks; half-covered by straggling sandy whiskers, and its sensuous mouth, were more than redeemed by a magnificent forehead, and eyes that have been variously .described as "magnetic", ''electric'\ and "blazing". When we imagine this figure set down in the English drawing-room of one hundred years ago, and moving with spasmodic vigour at the promptings of a phenomenally active mind, we can form some idea of why Foscolo affected our.forefathers as he did. On September I I, 1816, Ugo Foscolo arrived at 105 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO .QUARTERLY London, to be received with open arms as an illustrious exile. He died there in the autumn of I 827 after having passed through almost every .possible vicissitude of fortune, exhausted the patience of all but a very few faithful friends, and made numerous enemies in all walks of life. During those eleven years Foscolo was continually writing, and if he then produced no such romances as 'Jacopo Ortis, no such poems as I Sepolcr£, his critical . con tributions to English periodicals rank with the very finest of their titne. His literary admirers, and they numbered among them a good many who expressed their detestation of his personal character, were unanimous in praising his essays for a depth of psychological study and a breadth of cultural background unattain_ed even by Hazlitt and Macaulay. .· But after his death, Foscolo was almost forgotten in England. His essays were never collected and reprinted; not all of them have been identified; and it has been left to Italian students in modern times. to bring out the full significance of his work. Certainly these have performed their task \Vith thoroughness. The critical literature about Foscolo is enormous. Scarcely a week goes by 1n which a newspaper or magazine article does not appear dealing \Vith some aspect of his life or writings, while the number of books devoted to such subjects runs into the hundreds. And since every event in Foscolo's career and almost every line he wrote in I talian have been discussed with loving attention, it is not surprising to find a great deal of notice given to that stormy decade in England which closed his life. All the well-known accounts of Foscolo speak at length of the years 1816-I827, and there is one very complete and painstaking study of them alone, Viglione's Ugo Foscolo in lnghilterra. The monumental four-volume ro6 UGO ·FOSCOLO AND SOME ENGLISHMEN biography by Antona-Traversi and Otto1ini allots a whole volurne to ''The Exile''. Naturally, the character- of the English as a race and the ·characters of individual Englishmen enter pretty frequently into these discussions. Foscolo had dealings with most of the men of letters writing at London, particularly those interested in reviewing. Rogers, Campbell, and John Cam Hobhouse (Byron's friend) kne·w him well; Crabbe and Moore were among his acquaintances. Students of Italian literature and history, like Roscoe, William Stewart Rose, Frere, and the Wiffens, turned to him for literary counsel and criticism on more than o~e occasion. Younger men and women, ·just making...