Part 2 (1/2)
She seemed to call, while from the gilded vaults Compa.s.sionate Echo answered her again, And from their cloistral bas.e.m.e.nts in dismay The servants rushed, and from the upper rooms The pallid maidens trembling flew; all came.
Thy lady's face was with reviving essence Sprinkled, and she awakened from her swoon.
Anger and grief convulsed her still; she cast A lightning glance upon the guilty menial, And thrice with languid voice she called her pet, Who rushed to her embrace and seemed to invoke Vengeance with her shrill tenor. And revenge Thou hadst, fair poodle, darling of the Graces.
The guilty menial trembled, and with eyes Downcast received his doom. Naught him availed His twenty years' desert; naught him availed His zeal in secret services; for him In vain were prayer and promise; forth he went, Spoiled of the livery that till now had made him Enviable with the vulgar. And in vain He hoped another lord; the tender dames Were horror-struck at his atrocious crime, And loathed the author. The false wretch succ.u.mbed With all his squalid brood, and in the streets With his lean wife in tatters at his side Vainly lamented to the pa.s.ser-by.
It would be quite out of taste for the lover to sit as apathetic as the husband in the presence of his lady's guests, and he is to mingle gracefully in the talk from time to time, turning it to such topics as may best serve to exploit his own accomplishments. As a man of the first fas.h.i.+on, he must be in the habit of seeming to have read Horace a little, and it will be a pretty effect to quote him now; one may also show one's acquaintance with the new French philosophy, and approve its skepticism, while keeping clear of its pernicious doctrines, which insidiously teach--
That every mortal is his fellow's peer; That not less dear to Nature and to G.o.d Is he who drives thy carriage, or who guides The plow across thy field, than thine own self.
But at last the lady makes a signal to the cavalier that it is time to rise from the table:
Spring to thy feet The first of all, and drawing near thy lady Remove her chair and offer her thy hand, And lead her to the other rooms, nor suffer longer That the stale reek of viands shall offend Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites The grateful odor of the coffee, where It smokes upon a smaller table hid And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums That meanwhile burn sweeten and purify The heavy atmosphere, and banish thence All lingering traces of the feast.--Ye sick And poor, whom misery or whom hope perchance Has guided in the noonday to these doors, Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng, With mutilated limbs and squalid faces, In litters and on crutches, from afar Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils Drink in the nectar of the feast divine That favorable zephyrs waft to you; But do not dare besiege these n.o.ble precincts, Importunately offering her that reigns Within your loathsome spectacle of woe!
--And now, sir, 'tis your office to prepare The tiny cup that then shall minister, Slow sipped, its liquor to thy lady's lips; And now bethink thee whether she prefer The boiling beverage much or little tempered With sweet; or if perchance she like it best As doth the barbarous spouse, then, when she sits Upon brocades of Persia, with light fingers The bearded visage of her lord caressing.
With the dinner the second part of the poem, ent.i.tled The Noon, concludes, and The Afternoon begins with the visit which the hero and his lady pay to one of her friends. He has already thought with which of the husband's horses they shall drive out; he has suggested which dress his lady shall wear and which fan she shall carry; he has witnessed the agonizing scene of her parting with her lap-dog,--her children are at nurse and never intrude,--and they have arrived in the palace of the lady on whom they are to call:
And now the ardent friends to greet each other Impatient fly, and pressing breast to breast They tenderly embrace, and with alternate kisses Their cheeks resound; then, clasping hands, they drop Plummet-like down upon the sofa, both Together. Seated thus, one flings a phrase, Subtle and pointed, at the other's heart, Hinting of certain things that rumor tells, And in her turn the other with a sting a.s.sails. The lovely face of one is flushed With beauteous anger, and the other bites Her pretty lips a little; evermore At every instant waxes violent The anxious agitation of the fans.
So, in the age of Turpin, if two knights Ill.u.s.trious and well cased in mail encountered Upon the way, each cavalier aspired To prove the valor of the other in arms, And, after greetings courteous and fair, They lowered their lances and their chargers dashed Ferociously together; then they flung The splintered fragments of their spears aside, And, fired with generous fury, drew their huge, Two-handed swords and rushed upon each other!
But in the distance through a savage wood The clamor of a messenger is heard, Who comes full gallop to recall the one Unto King Charles, and th' other to the camp Of the young Agramante. Dare thou, too, Dare thou, invincible youth, to expose the curls And the toupet, so exquisitely dressed This very morning, to the deadly shock Of the infuriate fans; to new emprises Thy fair invite, and thus the extreme effects Of their periculous enmity suspend.
Is not this most charmingly done? It seems to me that the warlike interpretation of the scene is delightful; and those embattled fans--their perfumed breath comes down a hundred years in the verse!
The cavalier and his lady now betake them to the promenade, where all the fair world of Milan is walking or driving, with a punctual regularity which still distinguishes Italians in their walks and drives. The place is full of their common acquaintance, and the carriages are at rest for the exchange of greetings and gossip, in which the hero must take his part. All this is described in the same note of ironical seriousness as the rest of the poem, and The Afternoon closes with a strain of stately and grave poetry which admirably heightens the desired effect:
Behold the servants Ready for thy descent; and now skip down And smooth the creases from thy coat, and order The laces on thy breast; a little stoop, And on thy snowy stockings bend a glance, And then erect thyself and strut away Either to pace the promenade alone,-- 'T is thine, if 't please thee walk; or else to draw Anigh the carriages of other dames.
Thou clamberest up, and thrustest in thy head And arms and shoulders, half thyself within The carriage door. There let thy laughter rise So loud that from afar thy lady hear, And rage to hear, and interrupt the wit Of other heroes who had swiftly run Amid the dusk to keep her company While thou wast absent. O ye powers supreme, Suspend the night, and let the n.o.ble deeds Of my young hero s.h.i.+ne upon the world In the clear day! Nay, night must follow still Her own inviolable laws, and droop With silent shades over one half the globe; And slowly moving on her dewy feet, She blends the varied colors infinite, And with the border of her mighty garments Blots everything; the sister she of Death Leaves but one aspect indistinct, one guise To fields and trees, to flowers, to birds and beasts, And to the great and to the lowly born, Confounding with the painted cheek of beauty The haggard face of want, and gold with tatters.
Nor me will the blind air permit to see Which carriages depart, and which remain, Secret amidst the shades; but from my hand The pencil caught, my hero is involved Within the tenebrous and humid veil.
The concluding section of the poem, by chance or by wise design of the author, remains a fragment. In this he follows his hero from the promenade to the evening party, with an account of which The Night is mainly occupied, so far as it goes. There are many lively pictures in it, with light sketches of expression and att.i.tude; but on the whole it has not so many distinctly quotable pa.s.sages as the other parts of the poem. The perfunctory devotion of the cavalier and the lady continues throughout, and the same ironical reverence depicts them alighting from their carriage, arriving in the presence of the hostess, sharing in the gossip of the guests, supping, and sitting down at those games of chance with which every fas.h.i.+onable house was provided and at which the lady loses or doubles her pin-money. In Milan long trains were then the mode, and any woman might wear them, but only patricians were allowed to have them carried by servants; the rich plebeian must drag her costly skirts in the dust; and the n.o.bility of our hero's lady is honored by the flunkeys who lift her train as she enters the house. The hostess, seated on a sofa, receives her guests with a few murmured greetings, and then abandons herself to the arduous task of arranging the various partners at cards. When the cavalier serves his lady at supper, he takes his handkerchief from his pocket and spreads it on her lap; such usages and the differences of costume distinguished an evening party at Milan then from the like joy in our time and country.
IV
The poet who sings this gay world with such mocking seriousness was not himself born to the manner of it. He was born plebeian in 1729 at Bosisio, near Lake Pusiano, and his parents were poor. He himself adds that they were honest, but the phrase has now lost its freshness. His father was a dealer in raw silk, and was able to send him to school in Milan, where his scholars.h.i.+p was not equal to his early literary promise. At least he took no prizes; but this often happens with people whose laurels come abundantly later. He was to enter the Church, and in due time he took orders, but he did not desire a cure, and he became, like so many other accomplished abbati, a teacher in n.o.ble families (the great and saintly family Borromeo among others), in whose houses and in those he frequented with them he saw the life he paints in his poem. His father was now dead, and he had already supported himself and his mother by copying law-papers; he had, also, at the age of twenty-three, published a small volume of poems, and had been elected a shepherd of Arcadia; but in a country where one's copyright was good for nothing across the border--scarcely a fair stone's-throw away--of one's own little duchy or province, and the printers everywhere stole a book as soon as it was worth stealing, it is not likely that he made great gains by a volume of verses which, later in life, he repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in London, where he had seen the prosperity of ”the trade of an author”
in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed with open disgust the abject state of authors.h.i.+p in his own country.
So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become a _maestro in casa_. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes that he came to despise the great world with the same scorn that shows in his poem; but probably he regarded it quite as much with the amused sense of the artist as with the moralist's indignation; some of his contemporaries accused him of a sn.o.bbish fondness for the great, but certainly he did not flatter them, and in one pa.s.sage of his poem he is at the pains to remind his n.o.ble acquaintance that not the smallest drop of patrician blood is microscopically discoverable in his veins.
His days were rendered more comfortable when he was appointed editor of the government newspaper,--the only newspaper in Milan,--and yet easier when he was made professor of eloquence in the Academy of Fine Arts. In this employment it was his hard duty to write poems from time to time in praise of archdukes and emperors; but by and by the French Revolution arrived in Milan, and Parini was relieved of that labor.
The revolution made an end of archdukes and emperors, but the liberty it bestowed was peculiar, and consisted chiefly in not allowing one to do anything that one liked. The altars were abased, and trees of liberty were planted; for making a tumult about an outraged saint a mob was severely handled by the military, and for ”insulting” a tree of liberty a poor fellow at Como was shot. Parini was chosen one of the munic.i.p.al government, which, apparently popular, could really do nothing but register the decrees of the military commandant. He proved so little useful in this government that he was expelled from it, and, giving his salary to his native parish, he fell into something like his old poverty. He who had laughed to scorn the insolence and folly of the n.o.bles could not enjoy the insolence and folly of the plebeians, and he was unhappy in that wild ferment of ideas, hopes, principles, sentiments, which Milan became in the time of the Cisalpine Republic. He led a retired life, and at last, in 1799, having risen one day to studies which he had never remitted, he died suddenly in his arm-chair.
Many stories are told of his sayings and doings in those troubled days when he tried to serve the public. At the theater once some one cried out, ”Long live the republic, death to the aristocrats!” ”No,”
shouted Parini, who abhorred the abominable bloodthirstiness of the liberators, ”long live the republic, death to n.o.body!” They were going to take away a crucifix from a room where he appeared on public business. ”Very well,” he observed; ”where Citizen Christ cannot stay, I have nothing to do,” and went out. ”Equality doesn't consist in dragging me down to your level,” he said to one who had impudently given him the _thou_, ”but in raising you to mine, if possible. You will always be a pitiful creature, even though you call yourself Citizen; and though you call me Citizen, you can't help my being the Abbate Parini.” To another, who reproached him for kindness to an Austrian prisoner, he answered, ”I would do as much for a Turk, a Jew, an Arab; I would do it even for you if you were in need.” In his closing years many sought him for literary counsel; those for whom there was hope he encouraged; those for whom there was none, he made it a matter of conscience not to praise. A poor fellow came to repeat him two sonnets, in order to be advised which to print; Parini heard the first, and, without waiting further, besought him ”Print the other!”
VITTORIO ALFIERI
Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Ta.s.so, and who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct dramatic power, not surpa.s.sed if equaled since, is scarcely more than a name to most English readers. He was born in the year 1749, at Asti, a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he belonged by birth to a n.o.bility which is still the proudest in Europe.
”What a singular country is ours!” said the Chevalier Nigra, one of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. ”In Paris they admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;” and if this was true in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.