Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  As one dead among the dead!

  The relentless stone he tries

  With his utmost strength to move;

  Fails, and in his fury cries,

  Smiting his hands, that those above,

  If any shall be passing there,

  Hear his blasphemy, or his prayer.

  And at last he seems to hear

  Light feet overhead go by;

  “O, whoever passes near

  Where I am, the Duke am I!

  All my states and all I have

  To him that takes me from this grave.”

  There is no one that replies;

  Surely, some one seemed to come!

  On his brow the cold sweat lies,

  As he waits an instant dumb;

  Then he cries with broken breath,

  “Save me, take me back from death!”

  “Where thou liest, lie thou must,

  Prayers and curses alike are vain:

  Over thee dead Gismond’s dust —

  Whom thy pitiless hand hath slain —

  On this stone so heavily

  Rests, we cannot set thee free.”

  From the sepulcher’s thick walls

  Comes a low wail of dismay,

  And, as when a body falls,

  A dull sound; — and the next day

  In a convent the Duke’s wife

  Hideth her remorseful life.

  Of course, Carrer wrote much poetry besides his ballads. There are idyls, and romances in verse, and hymns; sonnets of feeling and of occasion; odes, sometimes of considerable beauty; apologues, of such exceeding fineness of point, that it often escapes one; satires and essays, or sermoni, some of which I have read with no great relish. The same spirit dominates nearly all — the spirit of pensive disappointment which life brings to delicate and sensitive natures, and which they love to affect even more than they feel. Among Carrer’s many sonnets, I think I like best the following, of which the sentiment seems to me simple and sweet, and the expression very winning:

  I am a pilgrim swallow, and I roam

  Beyond strange seas, of other lands in quest,

  Leaving the well-known lakes and hills of home,

  And that dear roof where late I hung my nest;

  All things beloved and love’s eternal woes

  I fly, an exile from my native shore:

  I cross the cliffs and woods, but with me goes

  The care I thought to abandon evermore.

  Along the banks of streams unknown to me,

  I pipe the elms and willows pensive lays,

  And call on her whom I despair to see,

  And pass in banishment and tears my days.

  Breathe, air of spring, for which I pine and yearn,

  That to his nest the swallow may return!

  The prose writings of Carrer are essays on Aesthetics and morals, and sentimentalized history. His chief work is of the latter nature. “I Sette Gemme di Venezia” are sketches of the lives of the seven Venetian women who have done most to distinguish the name of their countrywomen by their talents, or misfortunes, or sins. You feel, in looking through the book, that its interest is in great part factitious. The stories are all expanded, and filled up with facile but not very relevant discourse, which a pleasant fancy easily supplies, and which is always best left to the reader’s own thought. The style is somewhat florid; but the author contrives to retain in his fantastic strain much of the grace of simplicity. It is the work of a cunning artist; but it has a certain insipidity, and it wearies. Carrer did well in the limit which he assigned himself, but his range was circumscribed. At the time of his death, he had written sixteen cantos of an epic poem called “La Fata Vergine”, which a Venetian critic has extravagantly praised, and which I have not seen. He exercised upon the poetry of his day an influence favorable to lyric naturalness, and his ballads were long popular.

  IV

  GIOVANNI BERCHET was a poet who alone ought to be enough to take from the Lombard romanticists the unjust reproach of “resignation”. “Where our poetry,” says De Sanctis, “throws off every disguise, romantic or classic, is in the verse of Berchet.... If Giovanni Berchet had remained in Italy, probably his genius would have remained enveloped in the allusions and shadows of romanticism. But in his exile at London he uttered the sorrow and the wrath of his betrayed and vanquished country. It was the accent of the national indignation which, leaving the generalities of the sonnets and the ballads, dramatized itself and portrayed our life in its most touching phases.”

  Berchet’s family was of French origin, but he was the most Italian of Italians, and nearly all his poems are of an ardent political tint and temperature. Naturally, he spent a great part of his life in exile after the Austrians were reestablished in Milan; he was some time in England, and I believe he died in Switzerland.

  I have most of his patriotic poems in a little book which is curiously historical of a situation forever past. I picked it up, I do not remember where or when, in Venice; and as it is a collection of pieces all meant to embitter the spirit against Austria, it had doubtless not been brought into the city with the connivance of the police. There is no telling where it was printed, the mysterious date of publication being “Italy, 1861”, and nothing more, with the English motto: “Adieu, my native land, adieu!”

  The principal 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 entitled “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 pass, 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 noble 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 Sta�l the sympathizing movement in France. There was very much that was vicious still, and very much that was ignoble 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 passive 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 enkindle
d, 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 God,

  ‘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 God’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 class 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 censorship 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 entitled 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. The Antologia had at last the misfortune to offend the Emperor of Russia, and to do that prince a pleasure the Tuscan government suppressed it: such being the international amenities when sovereigns really reigned in Europe. After the Antologia there came another review, published at Leghorn, but it was not so successful, and in fact the conditions of literature gradually grew more irksome in Tuscany, until the violent liberat
ion came in ‘48, and a little later the violent re�nslavement.

  Giambattista Niccolini, like nearly all the poets of his time and country, was of noble birth, his father being a cavaliere, and holding a small government office at San Giuliano, near Pistoja. Here, in 1782, Niccolini was born to very decided penury. His father had only that little office, and his income died with him; the mother had nothing — possibly because she was descended from a poet, the famous Filicaja. From his mother, doubtless, Niccolini inherited his power, and perhaps his patriotism. But little or nothing is known of his early life. It is certain, merely, that after leaving school, he continued his studies in the University of Pisa, and that he very soon showed himself a poet. His first published effort was a sort of lamentation over an epidemic that desolated Tuscany in 1804, and this was followed by five or six pretty thoroughly forgotten tragedies in the classic or Alfierian manner. Of these, only the Medea is still played, but they all made a stir in their time; and for another he was crowned by the Accademia della Crusca, which I suppose does not mean a great deal. The fact that Niccolini early caught the attention and won the praises of Ugo Foscolo is more important. There grew up, indeed, between the two poets such esteem that the elder at this time dedicated one of his books to the younger, and their friendship continued through life.

  When Elisa Bonaparte was made queen of Etruria by Napoleon, Niccolini became secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, and professor of history and mythology. It is said that in the latter capacity he instilled into his hearers his own notions of liberty and civic virtue. He was, in truth, a democrat, and he suffered with the other Jacobins, as they were called in Italy, when the Napoleonic governments were overthrown. The benefits which the French Revolution conferred upon the people of their conquered provinces when not very doubtful were still such as they were not prepared to receive; and after the withdrawal of the French support, all the Italians through whom they had ruled fell a prey to the popular hate and contumely. In those days when dynasties, restored to their thrones after the lapse of a score of years, ignored the intervening period and treated all its events as if they had no bearing upon the future, it was thought the part of the true friends of order to resume the old fashions which went out with the old r�gime. The queue, or pigtail, had always been worn, when it was safe to wear it, by the supporters of religion and good government (from this fashion came the famous political nickname codino, pigtail-wearer, or conservative, which used to occur so often in Italian talk and literature), and now whoever appeared on the street without this emblem of loyalty and piety was in danger of public outrage. A great many Jacobins bowed their heads to the popular will, and had pigtails sewed on them — a device which the idle boys and other unemployed friends of legitimacy busied themselves in detecting. They laid rude hands on this ornament singing,