Part 26 (1/2)

{Ill.u.s.tration: ALEARDO ALEARDI.}

The revolution of 1848 took place; the Austrians retired from the dominion of Venice, and a provisional republican government, under the presidency of Daniele Manin, was established, and Aleardi was sent as one of its plenipotentiaries to Paris, where he learnt how many fine speeches the friends of a struggling nation can make when they do not mean to help it. The young Venetian republic fell. Aleardi left Paris, and, after a.s.sisting at the ceremony of being bombarded in Bologna, retired to Genoa. He later returned to Verona, and there pa.s.sed several years of tranquil study. In 1852, for the part he had taken in the revolution, he was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress at Mantua, thus fulfilling the destiny of an Italian poet of those times.

All the circ.u.mstances and facts of this arrest and imprisonment are so characteristic of the Austrian method of governing Italy, that I do not think it out of place to give them with some fullness. In the year named, the Austrians were still avenging themselves upon the patriots who had driven them out of Venetia in 1848, and their courts were sitting in Mantua for the trial of political prisoners, many of whom were exiled, sentenced to long imprisonment, or put to death. Aleardi was first confined in the military prison at Verona, but was soon removed to Mantua, whither several of his friends had already been sent. All the other prisons being full, he was thrust into a place which till now had seemed too horrible for use. It was a narrow room, dark, and reeking with the dampness of the great dead lagoon which surrounds Mantua. A broken window, guarded by several gratings, let in a little light from above; the day in that cell lasted six hours, the night eighteen. A mattress on the floor, and a can of water for drinking, were the furniture. In the morning they brought him two pieces of hard, black bread; at ten o'clock a thick soup of rice and potatoes; and nothing else throughout the day. In this dungeon he remained sixty days, without books, without pen or paper, without any means of relieving the terrible gloom and solitude. At the end of this time, he was summoned to the hall above to see his sister, whom he tenderly loved. The light blinded him so that for a while he could not perceive her, but he talked to her calmly and even cheerfully, that she might not know what he had suffered. Then he was remanded to his cell, where, as her retreating footsteps ceased upon his ear, he cast himself upon the ground in a pa.s.sion of despair. Three months pa.s.sed, and he had never seen the face of judge or accuser, though once the prison inspector, with threats and promises, tried to entrap him into a confession. One night his sleep was broken by a continued hammering; in the morning half a score of his friends were hanged upon the gallows which had been built outside his cell.

By this time his punishment had been so far mitigated that he had been allowed a German grammar and dictionary, and for the first time studied that language, on the literature of which he afterward lectured in Florence. He had, like most of the young Venetians of his day, hated the language, together with those who spoke it, until then.

At last, one morning at dawn, a few days after the execution of his friends, Aleardi and others were thrust into carriages and driven to the castle. There the roll of the prisoners was called; to several names none answered, for those who had borne them were dead. Were the survivors now to be shot, or sentenced to some prison in Bohemia or Hungary? They grimly jested among themselves as to their fate. They were marched out into the piazza, under the heavy rain, and there these men who had not only not been tried for any crime, but had not even been accused of any, received the grace of the imperial pardon.

Aleardi returned to Verona and to his books, publis.h.i.+ng another poem in 1856, called Le Citta Italiane Marinare e Commercianti. His next publication was, in 1857, Rafaello e la Fornarina; then followed Un'

Ora della mia Giovinezza, Le Tre Fiume, and Le Tre Fanciulle, in 1858.

The war of 1859 broke out between Austria and France and Italy.

Aleardi spent the brief period of the campaign in a military prison at Verona, where his sympathies were given an ounce of prevention. He had committed no offense, but at midnight the police appeared, examined his papers, found nothing, and bade him rise and go to prison. After the peace of Villafranca he was liberated, and left the Austrian states, retiring first to Brescia, and then to Florence. His publications since 1859 have been a Canto Politico and I Sette Soldati. He was condemned for his voluntary exile, by the Austrian courts, and I remember reading in the newspapers the official invitation given him to come back to Verona and be punished. But, oddly enough, he declined to do so.

II

The first considerable work of Aleardi was Le Prime Storie (Primal Histories), in which he traces the course of the human race through the Scriptural story of its creation, its fall, and its destruction by the deluge, through the Greek and Latin days, through the darkness and glory of the feudal times, down to our own,--following it from Eden to Babylon and Tyre, from Tyre and Babylon to Athens and Rome, from Florence and Genoa to the sh.o.r.es of the New World, full of shadowy tradition and the promise of a peaceful and happy future.

He takes this fruitful theme, because he feels it to be alive with eternal interest, and rejects the well-worn cla.s.sic fables, because

Under the bushes of the odorous mint The Dryads are buried, and the placid Dian Guides now no longer through the nights below Th' invulnerable hinds and pearly car, To bless the Carian shepherd's dreams. No more The valley echoes to the stolen kisses, Or to the tw.a.n.ging bow, or to the bay Of the immortal hounds, or to the Fauns'

Plebeian laughter. From the golden rim Of sh.e.l.ls, dewy with pearl, in ocean's depths The snowy loveliness of Galatea Has fallen; and with her, their endless sleep In coral sepulchers the Nereids Forgotten sleep in peace.

The poet cannot turn to his theme, however, without a sad and scornful apostrophe to his own land, where he figures himself sitting by the way, and craving of the frivolous, heartless, luxurious Italian throngs that pa.s.s the charity of love for Italy. They pa.s.s him by unheeded, and he cries:

Hast thou seen In the deep circle of the valley of Siddim, Under the s.h.i.+ning skies of Palestine, The sinister glitter of the Lake of Asphalt?

Those coasts, strewn thick with ashes of d.a.m.nation, Forever foe to every living thing, Where rings the cry of the lost wandering bird That, on the sh.o.r.e of the perfidious sea, Athirsting dies,--that watery sepulcher Of the five cities of iniquity, Where even the tempest, when its clouds hang low, Pa.s.ses in silence, and the lightning dies,-- If thou hast seen them, bitterly hath been Thy heart wrung with the misery and despair Of that dread vision!

Yet there is on earth A woe more desperate and miserable,-- A spectacle wherein the wrath of G.o.d Avenges him more terribly. It is A vain, weak people of faint-heart old men, That, for three hundred years of dull repose, Has lain perpetual dreamer, folded in The ragged purple of its ancestors, Stretching its limbs wide in its country's sun, To warm them; drinking the soft airs of autumn Forgetful, on the fields where its forefathers Like lions fought! From overflowing hands, Strew we with h.e.l.lebore and poppies thick The way.

But the throngs have pa.s.sed by, and the poet takes up his theme. Abel sits before an altar upon the borders of Eden, and looks with an exile's longing toward the Paradise of his father, where, high above all the other trees, he beholds,

Lording it proudly in the garden's midst, The guilty apple with its fatal beauty.

He weeps; and Cain, furiously returning from the unaccepted labor of the fields, lifts his hand against his brother.

It was at sunset; The air was severed with a mother's shriek, And stretched beside the o'erturned altar's foot Lay the first corse.

Ah! that primal stain Of blood that made earth hideous, did forebode To all the nations of mankind to come

The cruel household stripes, and the relentless Battles of civil wars, the poisoned cup, The gleam of axes lifted up to strike The p.r.o.ne necks on the block.

The fratricide Beheld that blood amazed, and from on high He heard the awful voice of cursing leap, And in the middle of his forehead felt G.o.d's lightning strike....

....And there from out the heart All stained with guiltiness emerged the coward Religion that is born of loveless fears.

And, moved and shaken like a conscious thing, The tree of sin dilated horribly Its frondage over all the land and sea, And with its poisonous shadow followed far The flight of Cain....

.... And he who first By th' arduous solitudes and by the heights And labyrinths of the virgin earth conducted This ever-wandering, lost Humanity Was the Accursed.

Cain pa.s.ses away, and his children fill the world, and the joy of guiltless labor brightens the poet's somber verse.

The murmur of the works of man arose Up from the plains; the caves reverberated The blows of restless hammers that revealed, Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills, The iron and the faithless gold, with rays Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated The beetle's fall, and the unceasing leap Of waters on the paddles of the wheel Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes Upon the borders of the inviolate woods The ax was heard descending on the trees, Upon the odorous bark of mighty pines.