Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Monti was amazed that all this did not suffice “to overcome that fatal combination of circumstances 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 circumstances 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 passion 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 ingratitude, 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 Parnassus.” 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 assumptions 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 classic of those classics 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 Bassvilliana I have translated the passage descriptive of Louis XVI.’s ascent to heaven; and I offer this, perhaps not quite justly, in illustration 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 passed 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 God:

  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 unblushingly exalted them in a new edition; — now religion and
the Church were celebrated in Monti’s song, now the goddess 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 Bassvilliana into our tongue, must have been very much dismayed to find this eloquent foe of revolutions assailing 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 Bassvilliana, 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 hoarse murmurs of the midnight surge,

  Like the north wind rushing 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 compassion 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 Superstition, Monti has later occasion to refer to the French monarch in these terms:

  The tyrant has fallen. Ye peoples

  Oppress�d, 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 God!

  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

  The troubled life of Ugo Foscolo is a career altogether wholesomer than Monti’s to contemplate. There is much of violence, vanity, and adventure in it, to remind of Byron; but Foscolo had neither the badness of Byron’s heart nor the greatness of his talent. He was, moreover, a better scholar and a man of truer feeling. Coming to Venice from Zante, in 1793, he witnessed the downfall of a system which Venetians do not yet know whether to lament or execrate; and he was young and generous enough to believe that Bonaparte really meant to build up a democratic republic on the ruins of the fallen oligarchy. Foscolo had been one of the popular innovators before the Republic perished, and he became the secretary of the provisional government, and was greatly beloved by the people. It is related that they were so used to his voice, and so fond of hearing it, that one day, when they heard another reading in his place, they became quite turbulent, till the president called out with that deliciously caressing Venetian familiarity, Popolo, ste cheto; Foscolo xe rochio! “People, be quiet; Foscolo is hoarse.” While in this office, he brought out his first tragedy, which met with great success; and at the same time Napoleon played the cruel farce with which he had beguiled the Venetians, by selling them to Austria, at Campo-Formio. Foscolo then left Venice, and went to Milan, where he established a patriotic journal, in which a genuine love of country found expression, and in which he defended unworthy Monti against the attacks of the red republicans. He also defended the Latin language, when the legislature, which found time in a season of great public peril and anxiety to regulate philology, fulminated a decree against that classic tongue; and he soon afterward quitted Milan, in despair of the Republic’s future. He had many such fits of disgust, and in one of them he wrote that the wickedness and shame of Italy were so great, that they could never be effaced till the two seas covered her. There was fighting in those days, for such as had stomach for it, in every part of Italy; and Foscolo, being enrolled in the Italian Legion, was present at the battle of Cento, and took part in the defense of Genoa, but found time, amid all his warlike occupations, for literature. He had written, in the flush of youthful faith and generosity, an ode to Bonaparte Liberator; and he employed the leisure of the besieged in republishing it at Genoa, affixing to the verses a reproach to Napoleon for the treaty of Campo-Formio, and menacing him with a Tacitus. He returned to Milan after the battle of Marengo, but his enemies procured his removal to Boulogne, whither the Italian Legion had been ordered, and where Foscolo cultivated his knowledge of English and his hatred of Napoleon. After travel in Holland and marriage with an Englishwoman there, he again came back to Milan, which he found full as ever of folly, intrigue, baseness, and envy. Leaving the capital, says Arnaud, “he took up his abode on the hills of Brescia, and for two weeks was seen wandering over the heights, declaiming and gesticulating. The mountaineers thought him mad. One morning he descended to the city with the manuscript of the Sepoleri. It was in 1807. Not Jena, not Friedland, could dull the sensation it imparted to the Italian republic of letters.”

  V

  It is doubtful whether this poem, which Giudici calls the sublimest lyrical composition modern literature has produced, will stir the English reader to enthusiastic admiration. The poem is of its age — declamatory, ambitious, eloquent; but the ideas do not seem great or new, though that, perhaps, is because they have been so often repeated since. De Sanctis declares it the “earliest lyrical note of the new literature, the affirmation of the rehabilitated conscience of the new manhood. A law of the Republic— “the French Republic” — prescribed the equality of men before death. The splender of monuments seemed a privilege of the nobles and the rich, and the Republicans contested the privilege, the distinction of classes, even in this form ... This revolutionary logic driven to its ultimate corollaries clouded the poetry of life for him.... He lacked the religious idea, but the sense of humanity in its progress and its aims, bound together by the family, the state, liberty, glory — from this Foscolo drew his harmonies, a new religion of the tomb.”....

  He touches in it on the funeral usages of different times and peoples, with here and there an episodic allusion to the fate of heroes and poets, and disquisitions on the aesthetic and spiritual significance of posthumous honors. The most-admired passage of the poem is that in which the poet turns to the monuments of Italy’s noblest dead, in the church of Santa Croce, at Florence:

  The urn�d ashes of the mighty kindle

  The great soul to great actions, Pindemonte,

  And fair and holy to the pilgrim make

  The earth that holds them. When I saw the tomb

  Where rests the body of that great one, who

  Tempering the scepter of the potentate,

  Strips off its laurels, and to the people shows

  Wi
th what tears it doth reek, and with what blood;

  When I beheld the place of him who raised