Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions Part 22

Then the emissary is instructed to make himself center of the party of extremes, and in different companies to pity the country, to laugh at moderate progress as a sham, and to say that the concessions of the local governments are merely _ruses_ to pacify and delude the people,--as in great part they were, though Giusti and his party did not believe so. The instructions to the emissary conclude with the charge to

Scatter republican ideas, and say That all the rich and all the well-to-do Use common people hardly better, nay, Worse, than their dogs; and add some hard words, too: Declare that _bread_'s the question of the day, And that the communists alone are true; And that the foes of the agrarian cause Waste more than half of all by wicked laws.

Then, he tells him, when the storm begins to blow, and the pockets of the people feel its effect, and the mob grows hungry, to contrive that there shall be some sort of outbreak, with a bit of pillage,--

So that the kings down there, pushed to the wall, For congresses and bayonets shall call.

If you should have occasion to spend, spend, The money won't be wasted; there must be Policemen in retirement, spies without end, Shameless and penniless; buy, you are free.

If destiny should be so much your friend That you could shake a throne or two for me, Pour me out treasures. I shall be content; My gains will be at least seven cent, per cent.

Or, in the event the inconstant G.o.ddess frown, Let me know instantly when you are caught; A thunderbolt shall burst upon your crown, And you become a martyr on the spot.

As minister I turn all upside down, Our government disowns you as it ought.

And so the cake is turned upon the fire, And we can use you next as we desire.

In order not to awaken any fear In the post-office, 't is my plan that you Shall always correspond with liberals here; Don't doubt but I shall hear of all you do.

...'s a Republican known far and near; I haven't another spy that's _half_ as true!

You understand, and I need say no more; Lucky for you if you get me up a war!

We get the flavor of this, at least the literary flavor, the satire, and the irony, but it inevitably falls somewhat cold upon us, because it had its origin in a condition of things which, though historical, are so opposed to all our own experience that they are hard to be imagined. Yet we can fancy the effect such a poem must have had, at the time when it was written, upon a people who felt in the midst of their aspirations some disturbing element from without, and believed this to be espionage and Austrian interference. If the poem had also to be pa.s.sed about secretly from one hand to another, its enjoyment must have been still keener; but strip it of all these costly and melancholy advantages, and it is still a piece of subtle and polished satire.

Most of Giusti's poems, however, are written in moods and manners very different from this; there is sparkle and dash in the movement, as well as the thought, which I cannot reproduce, and in giving another poem I can only hope to show something of his varying manner.

Some foreigner, Lamartine, I think, called Italy the Land of the Dead,--whereupon Giusti responded with a poem of that t.i.tle, addressed to his friend Gino Capponi:

THE LAND OF THE DEAD.

'Mongst us phantoms of Italians,-- Mummies even from our birth,-- The very babies' nurses Help to put them under earth.

'T is a waste of holy water When we're taken to the font: They that make us pay for burial Swindle us to that amount.

In appearance we're constructed Much like Adam's other sons,-- Seem of flesh and blood, but really We are nothing but dry bones.

O deluded apparitions, What do _you_ do among men?

Be resigned to fate, and vanish Back into the past again!

Ah! of a perished people What boots now the brilliant story?

Why should skeletons be bothering About liberty and glory?

Why deck this funeral service With such pomp of torch and flower?

Let us, without more palaver, Growl this requiem, of ours.

And so the poet recounts the Italian names distinguished in modern literature, and describes the intellectual activity that prevails in this Land of the Dead. Then he turns to the innumerable visitors of Italy:

O you people hailed down on us From the living, overhead, With what face can you confront us, Seeking health among us dead?

Soon or late this pestilential Clime shall work you harm--beware!

Even you shall likewise find it Foul and poisonous grave-yard air.

O ye grim, sepulchral friars Ye inquisitorial ghouls, Lay down, lay down forever, The ignorant censor's tools.

This wretched gift of thinking, O ye donkeys, is your doom; Do you care to expurgate us, Positively, in the tomb?

Why plant this bayonet forest On our sepulchers? what dread Causes you to place such jealous Custody upon the dead?

Well, the mighty book of Nature Chapter first and last must have; Yours is now the light of heaven, Ours the darkness of the grave.

But, then, if you ask it, We lived greatly in our turn; We were grand and glorious, Gino, Ere our friends up there were born!

O majestic mausoleums, City walls outworn with time, To our eyes are even your ruins Apotheosis sublime!

O barbarian unquiet Raze each storied sepulcher!

With their memories and their beauty All the lifeless ashes stir.

O'er these monuments in vigil Cloudless the sun flames and glows In the wind for funeral torches,-- And the violet, and the rose,

And the grape, the fig, the olive, Are the emblems fit of grieving; 'T is, in fact, a cemetery To strike envy in the living.

Well, in fine, O brother corpses, Let them pipe on as they like; Let us see on whom hereafter Such a death as ours shall strike!

'Mongst the anthems of the function Is not _Dies Irae_? Nay, In all the days to come yet, Shall there be no Judgment Day?

In a vein of like irony, the greater part of Giusti's political poems are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point and the _tang_ of their local expressions. It was the habi the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and originality--and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to demand of a poet--it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to have written dialect, since Tuscan is the Italian language, he gained by these words and phrases the frankness and fineness of dialect.

But Giusti had so much gentleness, sweetness, and meekness in his heart, that I do not like to leave the impression of him as a satirist last upon the reader. Rather let me close these meager notices with the beautiful little poem, said to be the last he wrote, as he pa.s.sed his days in the slow death of the consumptive. It is called

A PRAYER.

For the spirit confused With misgiving and with sorrow, Let me, my Saviour, borrow The light of faith from thee.

O lift from it the burden That bows it down before thee.

With sighs and with weeping I commend myself to thee; My faded life, thou knowest, Little by little is wasted Like wax before the fire, Like snow-wreaths in the sun.

And for the soul that panteth For its refuge in thy bosom, Break, thou, the ties, my Saviour, That hinder it from thee.

FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARO

I

In the month of March, 1848, news came to Rome of the insurrection in Vienna, and a mult.i.tude of the citizens a.s.sembled to bear the tidings to the Austrian Amba.s.sador, who resided in the ancient palace of the Venetian Republic. The throng swept down the Corso, gathering numbers as it went, and paused in the open s.p.a.ce before the Palazzo di Venezia. At its summons, the amba.s.sador abandoned his quarters, and fled without waiting to hear the details of the intelligence from Vienna. The people, incited by a number of Venetian exiles, tore down the double-headed eagle from the portal, and carried it for a more solemn and impressive destruction to the Piazza del Popolo, while a young poet erased the inscription a.s.serting the Austrian claim to the palace, and wrote in its stead the words, "Palazzo della Dieta Italiana."

The sentiment of national unity expressed in this legend had been the ruling motive of the young poet Francesco Dall' Ongaro's life, and had already made his name famous through the patriotic songs that were sung all over Italy. Garibaldi had chanted one of his Stornelli when embarking from Montevideo in the spring of 1848 to take part in the Italian revolutions, of which these little ballads had become the rallying-cries; and if the voice of the people is in fact inspired, this poet could certainly have claimed the poet's long-lost honors of prophecy, for it was he who had shaped their utterance. He had ceased to a.s.sume any other sacred authority, though educated a priest, and at the time when he devoted the Palazzo di Venezia to the idea of united Italy, there was probably no person in Rome less sacerdotal than he.

Francesco Dall' Ongaro was born in 1808, at an obscure hamlet in the district of Oderzo in the Friuli, of parents who were small freeholders. They removed with their son in his tenth year to Venice, and there he began his education for the Church in the Seminary of the Madonna della Salute. The tourist who desires to see the t.i.tians and Tintorettos in the sacristy of this superb church, or to wonder at the cold splendors of the interior of the temple, is sometimes obliged to seek admittance through the seminary; and it has doubtless happened to more than one of my readers to behold many little sedate old men in their teens, lounging up and down the cool, humid courts there, and trailing their black priestly robes over the springing mold. The sun seldom strikes into that sad close, and when the boys form into long files, two by two, and march out for recreation, they have a torpid and melancholy aspect, upon which the daylight seems to smile in vain.

They march solemnly up the long Zattere, with a pale young father at their head, and then march solemnly back again, sweet, genteel, pathetic specters of childhood, and reenter their common tomb, doubtless unenvied by the hungriest and raggedest street boy, who asks charity of them as they pa.s.s, and hoa.r.s.ely whispers "Raven!" when their leader is beyond hearing. There is no reason to suppose that a boy, born poet among the mountains, and full of the wild and free romance of his native scenes, could love the life led at the Seminary of the Salute, even though it included the study of literature and philosophy. From his childhood Dall' Ongaro had given proofs of his poetic gift, and the reverend ravens of the seminary were unconsciously hatching a bird as little like themselves as might be.

Nevertheless, Dall' Ongaro left their school to enter the University of Padua as student of theology, and after graduating took orders, and went to Este, where he lived some time as teacher of belles-lettres.

At Este his life was without scope, and he was restless and unhappy, full of ardent and patriotic impulses, and doubly restricted by his narrow field and his priestly vocation. In no long time he had trouble with the Bishop of Padua, and, abandoning Este, seems also to have abandoned the Church forever. The chief fruit of his sojourn in that quaint and ancient village was a poem ent.i.tled II Venerd Santo, in which he celebrated some incidents of the life of Lord Byron, somewhat as Byron would have done. Dall' Ongaro's poems, however, confess the influence of the English poet less than those of other modern Italians, whom Byron infected so much more than his own nation.