The passage is significant, not because it expresses Manzoni’s personal opinion on the subject, but rather because it projects and blocks out a world of a determinate structure, a world in which moral essences exercise an active power at distance, in which character-emanation becomes a causal convention as plausible in this narrative as the magical curse or supernatural possession of oral tales. In such a world, we come to admit the baleful spell exuded by the Gothic fortress of l’Innominato, which broods over the landscape like the very promise of evil, and to believe in the healing power of
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