Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

6. The Unbroken Charm: Margaret Fuller, G. S. Hillard, and the American Tradition of Travel Writing on Italy

The earliest American tradition of travel writing on Italy was actually a New England tradition, and it grew out of the fact that so many New Englanders followed one another to Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century, leaving a wealth of journals, letters, travelogues, newspaper articles, aesthetic commentaries, poems, fiction, and anecdotes. On a spring day of 1833 Emerson counted fifteen Bostonians in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. In 1852 fourteen Lowells were visiting Rome; James Russell Lowell said he was “going abroad to become acquainted with his family.”1 Many travelers aimed to recover the lessons of an old country for the purpose of educating a young one. With their eclectic intellectual roots in the quasi-aristocratic, neoclassical eighteenth century as well as in the neoromantic, broadly bourgeois tradition of selfculture , they placed instruction above entertainment, though they knew their message of cultural improvement had a better chance of success if it were leavened with pleasure. Washington Allston followed up his studies at Harvard with a long period in Italy (1804–8), gathering impressions and deepening his knowledge of the classical world. He would write the first novel by an 124 6 The Unbroken Charm Margaret Fuller, G. S. Hillard, and the American Tradition of Travel Writing on Italy    American with an Italian setting (Monaldi, 1822; pub. 1841); “profoundly influenced by his experience there, Allston more than any other American may be said to have introduced that country [to Americans].”2 Though in 1814 George Ticknor complained of being unable to locate a single Italian grammar in Boston, the Boston Anthology Club was stimulating interest in Italian studies through its Monthly Anthology (1803–11). The founding of the Boston Athenaeum in 1807 furthered these goals; its holdings of Italian travel books would become so extensive that shelf sections would be labeled by individual cities and towns, a proud reminder of Italophilic Boston in the past two centuries. The first issue of the North American Review in 1815 contained a spirited defense of the Italian language against the Abbé Prévost’s attack.3 Jared Sparks, the future president of Harvard, lamented the exclusion of Italian “from the catalogue of acquirements necessary for an accomplished scholar” and promoted it over French: the Italian language is “vastly better adapted to every species of composition, than the French . . . it has more dignity and strength, a greater felicity of expression, and infinitely more sweetness and harmony.”4 The North American Review from its first issue in 1815 to 1850 and the American Quarterly Review in its brief career (1827–37) published more essays and reviews on Italy than on any other European country except England. George Bancroft and William H. Prescott were in Italy between 1817 and 1821, not as Grand Tourists, but as students of its culture. Doubtless Italy impressed them with a sense of sweeping historical panoramas, which would inform their own monumental works. Epitomizing the tradition up through the 1850s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton are the Big Three against whom Margaret Fuller and G. S. Hillard may be compared and contrasted. Essentially, the Big Three pose a series of structural oppositions between Italy and America: aristocratic, hierarchical, traditionalist culture vs. modern, democratic, industrial society; Catholicism vs. Protestantism; individuality vs. Tocquevillian leveling; the free, spontaneous, expressively theatrical, and anarchic vs. the artificial, the socially imposed, and the increasingly rationalized and administered (under the guise of capitalist freedom); female vs. male; leisure or (indolence ) vs. work (and time keeping); past vs. future.5 In their definition of the natural, they assign a high value to pleasure, anticipating by several generations the harsh critique of the “genteel tradition” in American culture by George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks.6 “There are always The Unbroken Charm 125 two aspects of Italy,—” writes Norton in a classic statement on the conflict ; “the one which makes its appeal to the poetic imagination”: this is the land of smiling nature and magnificent art, of “splendour” and “poetic and historic associations which add a deeper charm to the beauty of the scene.” The other Italy captures our “immediate sympathies, with a sense of the pathos of the lives” of the people, with the “squalor” in its towns and cities, and with a culture in intellectual and social decline. The two Italies “conflict with each other” but, he adds, “each intensifying the other.”7 The antitheses stood out...