I PROMESSI SPOSI
His masterpiece is, of course, “I Promessi Sposi,”〖See Harvard Classics, vol. xxi.〗 which, begun as we have seen in 1821, occupied Manzoni for some six years with its composition and its printing; yet, hardly had it appeared when, faithful to his belief that the Florentine speech was the correct language of cultured Italians, he set to work to eliminate the dialectisms and Gallicisms in it, and the result was that in pure Tuscan the novel appeared, after seventy-five reprints of the first edition had been made, in the perfected form of 1842. Its main plot is simple; for the central story is that of the long-deferred marriage of two peasants, Lorenzo and his beloved Lucia. A tyrannical local potentate, aided by the proverbial Italian bravos, forbids their nuptials, because his own evil fancy has fallen upon the girl, and her parish priest, whose duty it is to perform the marriage ceremony irrespective of all exterior influences, avoids doing so through terror of the tyrant, Don Rodrigo, and his bloodthirsty satellites. Eventually a pest carries away Don Rodrigo, and the union of the lovers is effected. They are married by their own timid parish priest, Don Abbondio, who has, in the meantime, been taught his duty by his noble superior, the saintly Cardinal Carlo Borromeo.
Following Sir Walter Scott, whom he expressly acknowledges as his model for his methods, Manzoni gave to his novel an historical setting, adapting it to the Romantic sentiments then dominating the literary world. He chose for the period of action the three years between 1628 and 1631, during the Spanish supremacy at Milan, when a terrible famine and pestilence made desolate that part of Italy, and he confined operations between Lake Como, which he knew so well, and the city of Milan. Before undertaking the writing of his great work he made a serious study of works dealing with the pestilence and with administrative affairs of the time in which it occurred. Then, with the intuition of the true artist, having the historical and social conditions well in mind, and possessing the power to analyze the most delicate of human feelings, he assembled a number of characters of divers sorts, through the play of which he presents us with a vivid picture of Lombardy in the early seventeenth century. 6Next to Dante and Ariosto, Manzoni is, perhaps, the greatest of Italian authors, the most universal in appeal. His worth was quickly acknowledged abroad, by Goethe in Germany, by Chateaubriand in France, by Scott in the British Empire, and the last named was proud to have provoked imitation on the part of a genius of so high an order.