King’s College London
“The Greeks neither deserved their indepen- dence nor acquired it themselves. The real sig- nificance of the event lies not in their character or achievement, but in the motives and the con- sequences of the European intervention.” Writ- ing in March 1862, some months before the fall of King Otto, and while he was obsessed – even in the midst of the American Civil War – with the continuing Greek crisis, the greatest his- torical thinker of the nineteenth century, Acton, formulated the uncompromising view quoted above. Nothing, on the face of it, could seem further from the fervent conviction of Andreas Kalvos’ Greek odes of 1824–1826 – yet Kalvos, long resident once again in England, could have read Acton’s words, and with we know not what reflections of his own. There is always a danger that, not just historical developments, but also the nature of those writers who con- tributed to them, commemorated them, and are in turn commemorated today for their own contribution, may harden into received opinion, and that the flux of ideas may be simply and
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195 to the Kalvos letters published by Vitti in 1963.
The answer is, in an oblique way, a good deal. So much of the discussion of Kalvos has been of a romantic nature (whether that relates to his love life or to his peregrinations) that it is welcome to be plunged back into the medi- ocrity of his Italian circle in England. And that means that readers who skip straight to p. 149, at which point Kalvos first comes in for extend- ed discussion, will be missing out on an am- ple and largely convincing contextualisation for his first English period.
Arvanitakis’ decision to begin with the de- tailed analysis of L’Ape’s contributors, rele- gating general discussion of nation formation and the post-Napoleonic context till much lat- er (217–63), has the merit of avoiding a long general discussion at the outset. It does not entirely avoid the problem of potted summa- ry in the early discussion (notably 29–56): the back-story of English-Italian literary relations is rather more complex than presented here; and in particular key figures such as Thom- as Gray, whose “The Progress of Poesy” was a key influence on Kalvos’ ode “To the Mus- es”, are absent from the discussion. Nor is there quite enough emphasis on the role of the only English poet whose Italian verse has been admired in Italy, Milton (who is absent from the discussion on pp. 209–10, where Kalvos’ metrical theory is discussed). Overall, the presentation of the English context here is rather less rich than that of the Italian, with more reliance on secondary sources, some not of the newest. (In one extreme case, reli- ance on Italian sources produces a nonexis- tent figure, a geologist “Carl Lyell” on p. 126.) By contrast, the reader learns much about the climate Kalvos worked in from the com- plex ideological vagaries of, especially, Filippo Pananti: these are treated with some sympa- thy and in a way which is genuinely illumi- nating about the younger man. Arvanitakis is, crassly monumentalised. The enigmatic figure
of Kalvos has suffered more than most mod- ern Greek authors from this tendency: in this patient and deeply researched study, Dimitris Arvanitakis, by contrast, takes an unexpected and illuminating route into the circles, of men as well as ideas, that formed the young Kalvos and his motives. All readers will endorse the praise given to this book in the preface by the pioneering Kalvos scholar, Mario Vitti: the pres- ent review seeks, while broadly accepting Ar- vanitakis’ picture, to point to a number of addi- tional aspects which might repay further study. The trigger for the book was something which would make the most hardened foes of tech- nology think again: Arvanitakis lit upon what is perhaps the only surviving run of the short- lived periodical, L’Ape Italiana (just twelvea
numbers, between 15 April–30 September 1819) through an internet link to Belton House, a provincial English country house now the property of the National Trust. It was a good scholarly instinct to suspect that, though no actual contributions by the young Kalvos ap- pear in that periodical, it might yet supply some idea of what Hazlitt in 1825 was to pop- ularise as The Spirit of the Age. What Arvanita- kis has set out to do is to reopen the fashion- able question of nation formation through an analysis, prosopographical and ideological, of the journal in question, as a contribution to the study of Kalvos in the formative years 1816– 1820. The bulk of the book, and its composite title, indicates that there are multiple agendas here, and this results in a certain awkward- ness of structure; but one of its most salutary contributions is to remind us that there was a kind of Italian émigré circle rather different from (and, Arvanitakis concedes, less talented than) Foscolo’s more celebrated group. Of course, most Greek readers are likely to come to such a book in search of what it adds
again, careful not to identify L’Ape and its cir- cle with the Carbonari or to insist on Kalvos’ membership at that stage – though his mem- bership of a Masonic lodge seems probable. An important, and related, aspect, left hang- ing here – inevitably perhaps, given the lack of unambiguous documentation – is that of Kalvos’ adhesion to the Church of England (on p. 16 Vitti takes this as certain for a lat- er period). I read this as perhaps as nominal as that of George Washington or other De- ists of the time, and this is doubtless what Su- san Ridout was seeking to probe in her let- ter quoted in translation on pp. 172–3 (where the word “proud” in “our proud desire of fath- oming the Almighty” should read “alazoni-
ke” rather than “perephane”). The exploration
here is intriguing, and might with profit have been linked to the term Foscolo later used of Kalvos, “Didimo Laico” (discussed on pp. 359– 60), for which the most natural interpretation is that Kalvos is an agonised Doubting Thom- as when it comes to the Christian revelation. One important line of thought present in the book, especially in relation to Luigi Angeloni, relates to the Italian language question: here the Italian movement for purismo (see, in particular, 142, 243–4) may indeed have had greater relevance for the autodidact Kalvos as a rallying cry than the details of Korais’ lin- guistic programme. Arvanitakis re-empha- sises, and rightly, that Kalvos came to London “as an ‘Italian’” (155). By the time we reach the open discussion of these questions in Chapter 5, we have a much more refined sense from this book of the formation of Kalvos, which re- wards the reader who has persevered to this point: that being so, the attacks on the work of Dimiroulis add little to the discussion.
For a work which dwells considerably and rightly on matters of close detail, this is a well-
written one. More repetition occurs in some of the discussion than is necessary (while, as mentioned above, some further contextual- ising of the English literary milieu would not have come amiss); and, as the book goes on, the reader can weary of the number of rhetor- ical or hypothetical questions which are being asked. (See, for example, the speculations on p. 129.) If, as is to be hoped, a second edition appears, the English of the references, which contain many errors of transcription or trans- literation, will need to be corrected; and the lack of a full Roman-alphabet index makes the book hard to navigate at times. Such criti- cisms by no means undermine the value of this thoughtful, subtle and valuable book. It might of course, as readily have been given the title In the Footsteps of Napoleon as the forward-looking title it bears. Kalvos and his
confrères, whatever their motives in 1819,
had little inkling of how either Italian or Greek nationalism would play out – a point which this book richly establishes.
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