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Cooper was the first American to produce a significant fictional treatment of Italy. In many ways Cooper, who spent two years in Italy, from 1828 to 1830, which he described in his Excursions in Italy (1838), might have been considered in the earlier chapter on the treatment of Italy by English novelists in the 1830s. The novels we shall mention were, in fact, first published in England and only subsequently in America; and it was from English literary models that Cooper built his own picture of Italy. His novel The Bravo. A Venetian Story (1831) developes the kind of literary material we have encountered in Lewis’s Bravo of Venice, to become the most vivid example in prose of the Byronic attitude to Venice.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century studies of Italian Renaissance art and history had flowed increasingly from the press. Not only in England, but all over Europe, a massive effort had been devoted to the elucidation and evaluation of the achievement of Italy between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries: the footnotes to Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy provide an extensive bibliography. It was on the Continent that the really significant work had been done. In Paris Michelet had excitingly discovered the very concept of the Renaissance as a coherent historical phenomenon of the first importance,1 and in Basel Burckhardt had laid the foundation for all subsequent work on that period of Italian history with his Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860; translated into English in 1878). But in England works on the Renaissance period had characteristically been either of specialist or of purely journalistic interest, with neither pretension nor title to literary esteem; rare indeed among their pages are those qualities which give a piece of writing a distinctive lasting value independent of changes of attitude towards its subject. One of the features of the last four decades of the century, however, was the appearance of a succession of studies of Italian cultural history of considerable literary quality and importance.

The most significant English novelist to write on Italy in the 1870s was Ouida. After occasionally using purely conventional Italian scenery in a very minor way in some of her earlier novels (Chandos, 1866; Idalia, 1867; and Puck, 1870), she fell in love with the country on her first visit there in 1871, settled in Florence, and thereafter looked constantly to Italy for her literary material.

The pathos which characterised English poetic treatments of Italy in the 1820s was also a feature of the ‘Italian’ novel in the same period. Though they had the example of Byron before them, the tendency of the novelists’ exploration of Italy in these years was towards a feeling that any such creative relationship with Italy as Byron had achieved was purely exceptional, and that the more general truth lay rather in the direction of Madame de Stael’s finding, that the life-values represented by Italy were tragically unattainable to the northern spirit, however great its yearning for them.

In half a century, then, and particularly in the twenty years since the opening of the Continent after Waterloo, the range of response to Italy in English literature had been considerably extended, and the dominant image of Italy in contemporary writing radically changed. The next major revaluation of Italy by English writers came around the mid-century, notably in the works of Ruskin and the Brownings, rejecting Romantic sensationalism, and seeking new modes of experiencing Italy, more relevant to the needs of a rapidly changing society. The available picture of Italy, however, by no means remained static between Lytton’s Pompeii and Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and before going on to consider Ruskin’s importance to our subject we must consider three very different contributions to the developing apprehension of the South: those of Landor, Turner and George Sand.

These lines are from Goldsmith’s The Traveller, published in 1764, a convenient focal year for the commencement of our study. Quoted thus in isolation, the passage epitomises the contemptuous attitude of the English Grand Tourists to what they supposed to be the modern Italian character. From Chaucer to Milton contemporary Italy had been a recurrent stimulus to English poetic achievement, whether it was the stimulus of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, of the sensationally ‘Machiavellian’ Italy of the dramatists, or of the exciting intellectual activity which Milton found in Italy in 1938–9.1 But in the century following the Restoration Italian influence, supplanted by the French, was at its nadir.2 The Grand Tourists followed each other over their well-trodden paths from year to year with a disappointing monotony and lack of inspiration. Recoiling from contact with contemporary Italian life, they contemned its apparent poverty and squalor as a pitiful contrast with the former greatness of Rome, a greatness to which they felt themselves, the British ruling classes, to be the rightful and magnificent heirs.

In the period between the publication of The Decline and Fall and Byron’s adoption of Italy as the country of his exile the major growth point in the development of literary attitudes to Italy was in the novel, and it was the novelistic image of Italy which provided the immediate literary background to Byron’s own poetic exploration of the country. Little advance, indeed, was made in the poetic treatment of Italy between the mid eighteenth century and the height of the Romantic period; but the work of one small group of minor poets, and particularly the one remarkable volume in which they collaborated, does demand attention.