Modern Italian Poets. William Dean Howells
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took place, that armies of French democrats overran all these languid lordships and drowsy despotisms, and awakened their subjects, more or less willingly or unwillingly, to a sense of the rights of man, as Frenchmen understood them, and to the approach of the nineteenth century. The whole of Italy fell, directly or indirectly, under French sway; the Piedmontese and Neapolitan kings were driven away, as were the smaller princes of the other states; the Republic of Venice ceased to be, and the Pope became very much less a prince, if not more a priest, than he had been for a great many ages. In due time French democracy passed into French imperialism, and then French imperialism passed altogether away; and so after 1815 came the Holy Alliance with its consecrated contrivances for fettering mankind. Lombardy, with all Venetia, was given to Austria; the dukes of Parma, of Modena, and Tuscany were brought back and propped up on their thrones again. The Bourbons returned to Naples, and the Pope's temporal glory and power were restored to him. This condition of affairs endured, with more or less disturbance from the plots of the Carbonari and many other ineffectual aspirants and conspirators, until 1848, when, as we know, the Austrians were driven out, as well as the Pope and the various princes small and great, except the King of Sardinia, who not only gave a constitution to his people, but singularly kept the oath he swore to support it. The Pope and the other princes, even the Austrians, had given constitutions and sworn oaths, but their memories were bad, and their repute for veracity was so poor that they were not believed or trusted. The Italians had then the idea of freedom and independence, but not of unity, and their enemies easily broke, one at a time, the power of states which, even if bound together, could hardly have resisted their attack. In a little while the Austrians were once more in Milan and Venice, the dukes and grand-dukes in their different places, the Pope in Rome, the Bourbons in Naples, and all was as if nothing had been, or worse than nothing, except in Sardinia, where the constitution was still maintained, and the foundations of the present kingdom of Italy were laid. Carlo Alberto had abdicated on that battle-field where an Austrian victory over the Sardinians sealed the fate of the Italian states allied with him, and his son, Victor Emmanuel, succeeded him. As to what took place ten years later, when the Austrians were finally expelled from Lombardy, and the transitory sovereigns of the duchies and of Naples flitted for good, and the Pope's dominion was reduced to the meager size it kept till 1871, and the Italian states were united under one constitutional king—I need not speak.
In this way the governments of Italy had been four times wholly changed, and each of these changes was attended by the most marked variations in the intellectual life of the people; yet its general tendency always continued the same.
III
The longing for freedom is the instinct of self-preservation in literature; and, consciously or unconsciously, the Italian poets of the last hundred years constantly inspired the Italian people with ideas of liberty and independence. Of course the popular movements affected literature in turn; and I should by no means attempt to say which had been the greater agency of progress. It is not to be supposed that a man like Alfieri, with all his tragical eloquence against tyrants, arose singly out of a perfectly servile society. His time was, no doubt, ready for him, though it did not seem so; but, on the other hand, there is no doubt that he gave not only an utterance but a mighty impulse to contemporary thought and feeling. He was in literature what the revolution was in politics, and if hardly any principle that either sought immediately to establish now stands, it is none the less certain that the time had come to destroy what they overthrew, and that what they overthrew was hopelessly vicious.
In Alfieri the great literary movement came from the north, and by far the larger number of the writers of whom I shall have to speak were northern Italians. Alfieri may represent for us the period of time covered by the French democratic conquests. The principal poets under the Italian governments of Napoleon during the first twelve years of this century were Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo—the former a Ferrarese by birth and the latter a Greco-Venetian. The literary as well as the political center was then Milan, and it continued to be so for many years after the return of the Austrians, when the so-called School of Resignation nourished there. This epoch may be most intelligibly represented by the names of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, and Tommaso Grossi—all Lombards. About 1830 a new literary life began to be felt in Florence under the indifferentism or toleration of the grand-dukes. The chiefs of this school were Giacomo Leopardi; Giambattista Niccolini, the author of certain famous tragedies of political complexion; Guerrazzi, the writer of a great number of revolutionary romances; and Giuseppe Giusti, a poet of very marked and peculiar powers, and perhaps the greatest political satirist of the century. The chief poets of a later time were Aleardo Aleardi, a Veronese; Giovanni Prati, who was born in the Trentino, near the Tyrol; and Francesco Dall Ongaro, a native of Trieste. I shall mention all these and others particularly hereafter, and I have now only named them to show how almost entirely the literary life of militant Italy sprang from the north. There were one or two Neapolitan poets of less note, among whom was Gabriele Rossetti, the father of the English Rossettis, now so well known in art and literature.
IV
In dealing with this poetry, I naturally seek to give its universal and aesthetic flavor wherever it is separable from its political quality; for I should not hope to interest any one else in what I had myself often found very tiresome. I suspect, indeed, that political satire and invective are not relished best in free countries. No danger attends their exercise; there is none of the charm of secrecy or the pleasure of transgression in their production; there is no special poignancy to free administrations in any one of ten thousand assaults upon them; the poets leave this sort of thing mostly to the newspapers. Besides, we have not, so to speak, the grounds that such a long-struggling people as the Italians had for the enjoyment of patriotic poetry. As an average American, I have found myself very greatly embarrassed when required, by Count Alfieri, for example, to hate tyrants. Of course I do hate them in a general sort of way; but having never seen one, how is it possible for me to feel any personal fury toward them? When the later Italian poets ask me to loathe spies and priests I am equally at a loss. I can hardly form the idea of a spy, of an agent of the police, paid to haunt the steps of honest men, to overhear their speech, and, if possible, entrap them into a political offense. As to priests—well, yes, I suppose they are bad, though I do not know this from experience; and I find them generally upon acquaintance very amiable. But all this was different with the Italians: they had known, seen, and felt tyrants, both foreign and domestic, of every kind; spies and informers had helped to make their restricted lives anxious and insecure; and priests had leagued themselves with the police and the oppressors until the Church, which should have been kept a sacred refuge from all the sorrows and wrongs of the world, became the most dreadful of its prisons. It is no wonder that the literature of these people should have been so filled with the patriotic passion of their life; and I am not sure that literature is not as nobly employed in exciting men to heroism and martyrdom for a great cause as in the purveyance of mere intellectual delights. What it was in Italy when it made this its chief business we may best learn from an inquiry that I have at last found somewhat amusing. It will lead us over vast meadows of green baize enameled with artificial flowers, among streams that do nothing but purl. In this region the shadows are mostly brown, and the mountains are invariably horrid; there are tumbling floods and sighing groves; there are naturally nymphs and swains; and the chief business of life is to be in love and not to be in love; to burn and to freeze without regard to the mercury. Need I say that this region is Arcady?
ARCADIAN SHEPHERDS
One day, near the close of the seventeenth century, a number of ladies and gentlemen—mostly poets and poetesses according to their thinking were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of Rome. As they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and picturesque as they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an ode with the sweet patience of their race,—for they were all Italians,—it occurred to the most conscious man among them that here was something uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had been flattered. There had been reading and praising of odes and sonnets the whole blessed afternoon, and now he cried out to the complaisant, canorous company, “Behold Arcadia revived in us!”
This struck everybody at once