Part 15 (1/2)
The princ.i.p.al poem here is called ”Le Fantasie”, and consists of a series of lyrics in which an Italian exile contrasts the Lombards, who drove out Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century, with the Lombards of 1829, who crouched under the power defied of old. It is full of burning reproaches, sarcasms, and appeals; and it probably had some influence in renewing the political agitation which in Italy followed the French revolution of 1830. Other poems of Berchet represent social aspects of the Austrian rule, like one ent.i.tled ”Remorse”, which paints the isolation and wretchedness of an Italian woman married to an Austrian; and another, ”Giulia”, which gives a picture of the frantic misery of an Austrian conscription in Italy.
A very impressive poem is that called ”The Hermit of Mt. Cenis”. A traveler reaches the summit of the pa.s.s, and, looking over upon the beauty and magnificence of the Italian plains, and seeing only their loveliness and peace, his face is lighted up with an involuntary smile, when suddenly the hermit who knows all the invisible disaster and despair of the scene suddenly accosts him with, ”Accursed be he who approaches without tears this home of sorrow!”
At the time the Romantic School rose in Italian literature, say from 1815 till 1820, society was brilliant, if not contented or happy.
In Lombardy and Venetia, immediately after the treaties of the Holy Alliance had consigned these provinces to Austria, there flourished famous _conversazioni_ at many n.o.ble houses. In those of Milan many distinguished literary men of other nations met. Byron and Hobhouse were frequenters of the same _salons_ as Pellico, Manzoni, and Grossi; the Schlegels represented the German Romantic School, and Madame de Stael the sympathizing movement in France. There was very much that was vicious still, and very much that was ign.o.ble in Italian society, but this was by sufferance and not as of old by approval; and it appears that the tone of the highest life was intellectual. It cannot be claimed that this tone was at all so general as the badness of the last century. It was not so easily imitated as that, and it could not penetrate so subtly into all ranks and conditions. Still it was very observable, and mingled with it in many leading minds was the strain of religious resignation, audible in Manzoni's poetry. That was a time when the Italians might, if ever, have adapted themselves to foreign rule; but the Austrians, sofar from having learned political wisdom during the period of their expulsion from Italy, had actually retrograded; from being pa.s.sive authorities whom long sojourn was gradually Italianizing, they had, in their absence, become active and relentless tyrants, and they now seemed to study how most effectually to alienate themselves. They found out their error later, but when too late to repair it, and from 1820 until 1859 in Milan, and until 1866 in Venice, the hatred, which they had themselves enkindled, burned fiercer and fiercer against them. It is not extravagant to say that if their rule had continued a hundred years longer the Italians would never have been reconciled to it. Society took the form of habitual and implacable defiance to them. The life of the whole people might be said to have resolved itself into a protest against their presence.
This hatred was the heritage of children from their parents, the bond between friends, the basis of social faith; it was a thread even in the tie between lovers; it was so intense and so pervasive that it cannot be spoken.
Berchet was the vividest, if not the earliest, expression of it in literature, and the following poem, which I have already mentioned, is, therefore, not only intensely true to Italian feeling, but entirely realistic in its truth to a common fact.
REMORSE.
Alone in the midst of the throng, 'Mid the lights and the splendor alone, Her eyes, dropped for shame of her wrong, She lifts not to eyes she has known: Around her the whirl and the stir Of the light-footing dancers she hears; None seeks her; no whisper for her Of the gracious words filling her ears.
The fair boy that runs to her knees, With a shout for his mother, and kiss For the tear-drop that welling he sees To her eyes from her sorrow's abyss,-- Though he blooms like a rose, the fair boy, No praise of his beauty is heard; None with him stays to jest or to toy, None to her gives a smile or a word.
If, unknowing, one ask who may be This woman, that, as in disgrace, O'er the curls of the boy at her knee Bows her beautiful, joyless face, A hundred tongues answer in scorn, A hundred lips teach him to know-- ”Wife of one of our tyrants, forsworn To her friends in her truth to their foe.”
At the play, in the streets, in the lanes, At the fane of the merciful G.o.d, 'Midst a people in prison and chains, Spy-haunted, at home and abroad-- Steals through all like the hiss of a snake Hate, by terror itself unsuppressed: ”Cursed be the Italian could take The Austrian foe to her breast!”
Alone--but the absence she mourned As widowhood mourneth, is past: Her heart leaps for her husband returned From his garrison far-off at last?
Ah, no! For this woman forlorn Love is dead, she has felt him depart: With far other thoughts she is torn, Far other the grief at her heart.
When the shame that has darkened her days Fantasmal at night fills the gloom, When her soul, lost in wildering ways, Flies the past, and the terror to come-- When she leaps from her slumbers to hark, As if for her little one's call, It is then to the pitiless dark That her woe-burdened soul utters all:
”Woe is me! It was G.o.d's righteous hand My brain with its madness that smote: At the alien's flattering command The land of my birth I forgot!
I, the girl who was loved and adored, Feasted, honored in every place, Now what am I? The apostate abhorred, Who was false to her home and her race!
”I turned from the common disaster; My brothers oppressed I denied; I smiled on their insolent master; I came and sat down by his side.
Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought; Thou hast wrought it--it clingeth to thee, And for all that thou sufferest, naught From its meshes thy spirit can free.
”Oh, the scorn I have tasted! They know not, Who pour it on me, how it burns; How it galls the meek spirit, whose woe not Their hating with hating returns!
Fool! I merit it: I have not holden My feet from their paths! Mine the blame: I have sought in their eyes to embolden This visage devoted to shame!
”Rejected and followed with scorn, My child, like a child born of sin, In the land where my darling was born, He lives exiled! A refuge to win From their hatred, he runs in dismay To my arms. But the day may yet be When my son shall the insult repay, I have nurtured him in, unto me!
”If it chances that ever the slave Snaps the shackles that bind him, and leaps Into life in the heart of the brave The sense of the might that now sleeps-- To which people, which side shall I cleave?
Which fate shall I curse with my own?
To which banner pray Heaven to give The triumph? Which desire o'erthrown?
”Italian, and sister, and wife, And mother, unfriended, alone, Outcast, I wander through life, Over shard and bramble and stone!
Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought; Thou hast wrought it--it clingeth to thee, And for all that thou sufferest, naught From its meshes thy spirit shall free!”
GIAMBATTISTA NICCOLINI
I
The school of Romantic poets and novelists was practically dispersed by the Austrian police after the Carbonari disturbances in 1821-22, and the literary spirit of the nation took refuge under the mild and careless despotism of the grand dukes at Florence.
In 1821 Austria was mistress of pretty near all Italy. She held in her own grasp the vast provinces of Lombardy and Venetia; she had garrisons in Naples, Piedmont, and the Romagna; and Rome was ruled according to her will. But there is always something fatally defective in the vigilance of a policeman; and in the very place which perhaps Austria thought it quite needless to guard, the restless and indomitable spirit of free thought entered. It was in Tuscany, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, reigned over by a family set on the grand-ducal throne by Austria herself, and united to her Hapsburgs by many ties of blood and affection--in Tuscany, right under both noses of the double-headed eagle, as it were, that a new literary and political life began for Italy. The Leopoldine code was famously mild toward criminals, and the Lorrainese princes did not show themselves crueler than they could help toward poets, essayists, historians, philologists, and that cla.s.s of malefactors. Indeed it was the philosophy of their family to let matters alone; and the grand duke restored after the fall of Napoleon was, as has been said, an absolute monarch, but he was also an honest man. This _galantuomo_ had even a minister who successfully combated the Austrian influences, and so, though there were, of course, spies and a censors.h.i.+p in Florence, there was also indulgence; and if it was not altogether a pleasant place for literary men to live, it was at least tolerable, and there they gathered from their exile and their silence throughout Italy.
Their point of union, and their means of affecting the popular mind, was for twelve years the critical journal ent.i.tled the _Antologia_, founded by that Vieusseux who also opened those delightful and beneficent reading-rooms whither we all rush, as soon as we reach Florence, to look at the newspapers and magazines of our native land.