From Addison to Gibbon

Abstract

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.

Could Nature’s bounty satisfy the breast, The sons of Italy were surely blest…But small the bliss that sense alone bestows, And sensual bliss is all the nation knows. In florid beauty groves and fields appear,Man seems the only growth that dwindles here. Contrasted faults through all his manners reign, Though poor, luxurious, though submissive, vain, Though grave, yet trifling, zealous, yet untrue, And even in penance planning sins anew.All evils here contaminate the mind, That opulence departed leaves behind.