Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions Part 8

Thou mirror of veracious speech sublime, What I am like in soul and body, show: Red hair,--in front grown somewhat thin with time; Tall stature, with an earthward head bowed low; A meager form, with two straight legs beneath; An aspect good; white skin with eyes of blue; A proper nose; fine lips and choicest teeth; Face paler than a throned king's in hue; Now hard and bitter, yielding now and mild; Malignant never, pa.s.sionate alway, With mind and heart in endless strife embroiled; Sad mostly, and then gayest of the gay.

Achilles now, Thersites in his turn: Man, art thou great or vile? Die and thou 'lt learn!

VINCENZO MONTI AND UGO FOSCOLO

I

The period of Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo is that covered in political history by the events of the French revolution, the French invasion of Italy and the Napoleonic wars there against the Austrians, the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic and of the kingdom of Italy, the final overthrow of the French dominion, and the restoration of the Austrians. During all these events, the city of Milan remained the literary as well as the political center of Italy, and whatever were the moral reforms wrought by the disasters of which it was also the center, there is no doubt that intellectually a vast change had taken place since the days when Parini's satire was true concerning the life of the Milanese n.o.bles. The transformation of national character by war is never, perhaps, so immediate or entire as we are apt to expect. When our own war broke out, those who believed that we were to be purged and enn.o.bled in all our purposes by calamity looked for a sort of total and instant conversion. This, indeed, seemed to take place, but there was afterward the inevitable reaction, and it appears that there are still some small blemishes upon our political and social state. Yet, for all this, each of us is conscious of some vast and inestimable difference in the nation.

It is instructive, if it is not enn.o.bling, to be moved by great and n.o.ble impulses, to feel one's self part of a people, and to recognize country for once as the supreme interest; and these were the privileges the French revolution gave the Italians. It shed their blood, and wasted their treasure, and stole their statues and pictures, but it bade them believe themselves men; it forced them to think of Italy as a nation, and the very tyranny in which it ended was a realization of unity, and more to be desired a thousand times than the shameless tranquillity in which it had found them. It is imaginable that when the revolution advanced upon Milan it did not seem the greatest and finest thing in life to serve a lady; when the battles of Marengo and Lodi were fought, and Mantua was lost and won, to court one's neighbor's wife must have appeared to some gentlemen rather a waste of time; when the youth of the Italian legion in Napoleon's campaign perished amidst the snows of Russia, their brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers, must have found intrigues and operas and fas.h.i.+ons but a poor sort of distraction. By these terrible means the old forces of society were destroyed, not quickly, but irreparably. The cavaliere servente was extinct early in this century; and men and women opened their eyes upon an era of work, the most industrious age that the world has ever seen.

The change took place slowly; much of the material was old and hopelessly rotten; but in the new generation the growth towards better and greater things was more rapid.

Yet it would not be well to conjure up too heroic an image of Italian revolutionary society: we know what vices fester and pa.s.sions rage in war-time, and Italy was then almost constantly involved in war.

Intellectually, men are active, but the great poems are not written in war-time, nor the highest effects of civilization produced. There is a taint of insanity and of instability in everything, a mark of feverishness and haste and transition. The revolution gave Italy a chance for new life, but this was the most the revolution could do.

It was a great gift, not a perfect one; and as it remained for the Italians to improve the opportunity, they did it partially, fitfully, as men do everything.

II

The poets who belong to this time are numerous enough, but those best known are Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo. These men were long the most conspicuous literati in the capital of Lombardy, but neither was Lombard. Monti was educated in the folds of Arcadia at Rome; Foscolo was a native of one of the Greek islands dependent on Venice, and pa.s.sed his youth and earlier manhood in the lagoons. The accident of residence at Milan brought the two men together, and made friends of those who had naturally very little in common. They can only be considered together as part of the literary history of the time in which they both happened to be born, and as one of its most striking contrasts.

In 1802, Napoleon bestowed a republican const.i.tution on Lombardy and the other provinces of Italy which had been united under the name of the Cisalpine Republic, and Milan became the capital of the new state.

Thither at once turned all that was patriotic, hopeful, and ambitious in Italian life; and though one must not judge this phase of Italian civilization from Vincenzo Monti, it is an interesting comment on its effervescent, unstable, fict.i.tious, and partial nature that he was its most conspicuous poet. Few men appear so base as Monti; but it is not certain that he was of more fickle and truthless soul than many other contemplative and cultivated men of the poetic temperament who are never confronted with exigent events, and who therefore never betray the vast difference that lies between the ideal heroism of the poet's vision and the actual heroism of occasion. We all have excellent principles until we are tempted, and it was Monti's misfortune to be born in an age which put his principles to the test, with a prospect of more than the usual prosperity in reward for servility and compliance, and more than the usual want, suffering, and danger in punishment of candor and constancy.

He was born near Ferrara in 1754; and having early distinguished himself in poetry, he was conducted to Rome by the Cardinal-Legate Borghesi. At Rome he entered the Arcadian fold of course, and piped by rule there with extraordinary acceptance, and might have died a Shepherd but for the French Revolution, which broke out and gave him a chance to be a Man. The secretary of the French Legation at Naples, appearing in Rome with the tri-color of the Republic, was attacked by the foolish populace, and killed; and Monti, the petted and caressed of priests, the elegant and tuneful young poet in the train of Cardinal Borghesi, seized the event of Ugo Ba.s.sville's death, and turned it to epic account. In the moment of dissolution, Ba.s.sville, repenting his republicanism, receives pardon; but, as a condition of his acceptance into final bliss, he is shown, through several cantos of _terza rima_, the woes which the Revolution has brought upon France and the world. The bad people of the poem are naturally the French Revolutionists; the good people, those who hate them. The most admired episode is that descriptive of poor Louis XVI.'s ascent into heaven from the scaffold.

{Ill.u.s.tration: VINCENZO MONTI.}

There is some reason to suppose that Monti was sincerer in this poem than in any other of political bearing which he wrote; and the Dantesque plan of the work gave it, with the occasional help of Dante's own phraseology and many fine turns of expression picked up in the course of a multifarious reading, a dignity from which the absurdity of the apotheosis of priests and princes detracted nothing among its readers. At any rate, it was received by Arcadia with rapturous acclaim, though its theme was _not_ the Golden Age; and on the _Ba.s.svilliana_ the little that is solid in Monti's fame rests at this day. His lyric poetry is seldom quoted; his tragedies are no longer played, not even his _Galeoto Manfredi_, in which he has stolen almost enough from Shakespeare to vitalize one of the characters.

After a while the Romans wearied of their idol, and began to attack him in politics and literature; and in 1797 Monti, after a sojourn of twenty years in the Papal capital, fled from Rome to Milan. Here he was a.s.sailed in one of the journals by a fanatical Neapolitan, who had also written a _Ba.s.svilliana_, but with celestial powers, heroes and martyrs of French politics, and who now accused Monti of enmity to the rights of man. Monti responded by a letter to this poet, in which he declared that his _Ba.s.svilliana_ was no expression of his own feelings, but that he had merely written it to escape the fury of Ba.s.sville's murderers, who were incensed against him as Ba.s.sville's friend! But for all this the _Ba.s.svilliana_ was publicly burnt before the cathedral in Milan, and Monti was turned out of a government place he had got, because "he had published books calculated to inspire hatred of democracy, or predilection for the government of kings, of theocrats and aristocrats." The poet was equal to this exigency; and he now reprinted his works, and made them praise the French and the revolutionists wherever they had blamed them before; all the bad systems and characters were depicted as monarchies and kings and popes, instead of anarchies and demagogues. Bonaparte was exalted, and poor Louis XVI., sent to heaven with so much ceremony in the _Ba.s.svilliana_, was abased in a later ode on Superst.i.tion.

Monti was amazed that all this did not suffice "to overcome that fatal combination of circ.u.mstances which had caused him to be judged as the courtier of despotism." "How gladly," he writes, "would I have accepted the destiny which envy could not reach! But this scourge of honest men clings to my flesh, and I cannot hope to escape it, except I turn scoundrel to become fortunate!" When the Austrians returned to Milan, the only honest man unhanged in Italy fled with other democrats to Paris, whither the fatal combination of circ.u.mstances followed him, and caused him to be looked on with coldness and suspicion by the republicans. After Bonaparte was made First Consul, Monti invoked his might against the Germans in Italy, and carried his own injured virtue back to Milan in the train of the conqueror. When Bonaparte was crowned emperor, this democrat and patriot was the first to hail and glorify him; and the emperor rewarded the poet's devotion with a chair in the University of Pavia, and a pension attached to the place of Historiographer. Monti accepted the honors and emoluments due to long-suffering integrity and inalterable virtue, and continued in the enjoyment of them till the Austrians came back to Milan a second time, in 1815, when his chaste muse was stirred to a new pa.s.sion by the charms of German despotism, and celebrated as "the wise, the just, the best of kings, Francis Augustus", who, if one were to believe Monti, "in war was a whirlwind and in peace a zephyr." But the heavy Austrian, who knew he was nothing of the kind, thrust out his surly under lip at these blandishments, said that this muse's favors were mercenary, and cut off Monti's pension. Stung by such ingrat.i.tude, the victim of his own honesty retired forever from courts, and thenceforward sang only the merits of rich persons in private station, who could afford to pay for spontaneous and incorruptible adulation.

He died in 1826, having probably endured more pain and rungreater peril in his desire to avoid danger and suffering than the bravest and truest man in a time when courage and truth seldom went in company.

It is not probable that he thought himself despicable or other than unjustly wretched.

Perhaps, after all, he was not so greatly to blame. As De Sanctis subtly observes: "He was always a liberal. How not be liberal in those days when even the reactionaries shouted for liberty--of course, _true_ liberty, as they called it? And in that name he glorified all governments.... And it was not with hypocrisy.... He was a man who would have liked to reconcile the old and the new ideas, all opinions, yet, being forced to choose, he clung to the majority, with no desire to play the martyr. So he became the secretary of the dominant feeling, the poet of success. Kindly, tolerant, sincere, a good friend, a courtier more from necessity and weakness than perversity or wickedness; if he could have retired into his own heart, he might have come out a poet." Monti, in fact, was always an _improvvisatore_, and the subjects which events cast in his way were like the themes which the improvvisatore receives from his audience. He applied his poetic faculty to their celebration with marvelous facility, and, doubtless, regarded the results as rhetorical feats. His poetry was an art, not a principle; and perhaps he was really surprised when people thought him in earnest, and held him personally to account for what he wrote. "A man of sensation, rather than sentiment," says Arnaud, "Monti cared only for the objective side of life. He poured out melodies, colors, and chaff in the service of all causes; he was the poet-advocate, the Siren of the Italian Parna.s.sus." Of course such a man instinctively hated the ideas of the Romantic school, and he contested their progress in literature with great bitterness. He believed that poetry meant feigning, not making; and he declared that "the hard truth was the grave of the beautiful." The latter years of his life were spent in futile battle with the "audacious boreal school" and in noxious revival of the foolish old disputes of the Italian grammarians; and Emiliani-Giudici condemns him for having done more than any enemy of his country to turn Italian thought from questions of patriotic interest to questions of philology, from the unity of Italy to the unity of the language, from the usurpations and tyranny of Austria to the a.s.sumptions of Della Crusca. But Monti could scarcely help any cause which he espoused; and it seems to me that he was as well employed in disputing the claims of the Tuscan dialect to be considered the Italian language as he would have been in any other way. The wonderful facility, no less than the unreality, of the man appears in many things, but in none more remarkably than his translation of Homer, which is the translation universally accepted and approved in Italy. He knew little more than the Greek alphabet, and produced his translation from the preceding versions in Latin and Italian, submitting the work to the correction of eminent scholars before he printed it. His poems fill many volumes; and all display the ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore. From a fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which he presented them as new. The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great. He is a cla.s.sic of those cla.s.sics common to all languages--dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to the air.

III

From the _Ba.s.svilliana_ I have translated the pa.s.sage descriptive of Louis XVI.'s ascent to heaven; and I offer this, perhaps not quite justly, in ill.u.s.tration of what I have been saying of Monti as a poet. There is something of his curious verbal beauty in it, and his singular good luck of phrase, with his fortunate reminiscences of other poets; the collocation of the different parts is very comical, and the application of it all to Louis XVI. is one of the most preposterous things in literature. But one must remember that the poor king was merely a subject, a theme, with the poet.

As when the sun uprears himself among The lesser dazzling substances, and drives His eager steeds along the fervid curve,--

When in one only hue is painted all The heavenly vault, and every other star Is touched with pallor and doth veil its front,

So with sidereal splendor all aflame Amid a thousand glad souls following, High into heaven arose that beauteous soul.

Smiled, as he pa.s.sed them, the majestical, Tremulous daughters of the light, and shook Their glowing and dewy tresses as they moved,

He among all with longing and with love Beaming, ascended until he was come Before the triune uncreated life;

There his flight ceases, there the heart, become Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled, And all the urgence of desire is lost;

There on his temples he receives the crown Of living amaranth immortal, on His cheek the kiss of everlasting peace.

And then were heard consonances and notes Of an ineffable sweetness, and the orbs Began again to move their starry wheels.

More swiftly yet the steeds that bore the day Exulting flew, and with their mighty tread, Did beat the circuit of their airy way.

In this there are three really beautiful lines; namely, those which describe the arrival of the spirit in the presence of G.o.d:

There his flight ceases, there the heart, become Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled, And all the urgence of desire is lost;

Or, as it stands in the Italian:

Ivi queta il suo voi, ivi s'appunta In tre sguardi beata, ivi il cor tace, E tutta perde del desio la punta.

It was the fortune of Monti, as I have said, to sing all round and upon every side of every subject, and he was governed only by knowledge of which side was for the moment uppermost. If a poem attacked the French when their triumph seemed doubtful, the offending verses were erased as soon as the French conquered, and the same poem unblus.h.i.+ngly exalted them in a new edition;--now religion and the Church were celebrated in Monti's song, now the G.o.ddess of Reason and the reign of liberty; the Pope was lauded in Rome, and the Inquisition was attacked in Milan; England was praised whilst Monti was in the anti-French interest, and as soon as the poet could turn his coat of many colors, the sun was urged to withdraw from England the small amount of light and heat which it vouchsafed the foggy island; and the Rev. Henry Boyd, who translated the _Ba.s.svilliana_ into our tongue, must have been very much dismayed to find this eloquent foe of revolutions a.s.sailing the hereditary enemy of France in his next poem, and uttering the hope that she might be surrounded with waves of blood and with darkness, and shaken with earthquakes. But all this was nothing to Monti's treatment of the shade of poor King Louis XVI. We have seen with how much ceremony the poet ushered that unhappy prince into eternal bliss, and in Mr. Boyd's translation of the _Ba.s.svilliana_, we can read the portents with which Monti makes the heavens recognize the crime of his execution in Paris.

Then from their houses, like a billowy tide, Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified.

Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed By wheels, by feet of horses and of men; The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest; Like distant thunder's roar, scarce within ken, Like the hoa.r.s.e murmurs of the midnight surge, Like the north wind rus.h.i.+ng from its far-off den.

Through the dark crowds that round the scaffold flock The monarch see with look and gait appear That might to soft compa.s.sion melt a rock; Melt rocks, from hardest flint draw pity's tear,-- But not from Gallic tigers; to what fate, Monsters, have ye brought him who loved you dear?

It seems scarcely possible that a personage so flatteringly attended from the scaffold to the very presence of the Trinity, could afterward have been used with disrespect by the same master of ceremonies; yet in his Ode on Superst.i.tion, Monti has later occasion to refer to the French monarch in these terms:

The tyrant has fallen. Ye peoples Oppressed, rise! Nature breathes freely.

Proud kings, bow before them and tremble; Yonder crumbles the greatest of thrones!

(_Repeat_.) There was stricken the vile perjurer Capet,

(He will only give Louis his family name!)

Who had worn out the patience of G.o.d!

In that pitiless blood dip thy fingers, France, delivered from fetters unworthy!

'T is blood sucked from the veins of thy children Whom the despot has cruelly wronged!

O freemen to arms that are flying, Bathe, bathe in that blood your bright weapons, Triumph rests 'mid the terror of battle Upon swords that have smitten a king!

This, every one must allow, was a very unhandsome way of treating an ex-martyr, but at the time Monti wrote he was in Milan, in the midst of most revolutionary spirits, and he felt obliged to be rude to the memory of the unhappy king. After all, probably it did not hurt the king so much as the poet.

IV