Healing agents in novels by Alessandro Manzoni and Charles Kingsley

Abstract

In accord with their impression that every age has its Zeitgeist, many nineteenth-century Europeans describe that of their own times as diseased. There is the characteristic mal de siecle, diagnosed so influentially at the start of the century in Chateaubriand's Rene. Various strains and mutations of the disease appear thereafter, and in the middle of the century Matthew Arnold observes a pervasive sense of breakdown as a principal symptom. In "The Scholar-Gipsy" he thus addresses nostalgically the legendary Oxford scholar that had lived in the healthy seventeenth century: O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modem Hfe, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife.