Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 shores 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 classic 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 twanging bow, or to the bay

  Of the immortal hounds, or to the Fauns’

  Plebeian laughter. From the golden rim

  Of shells, 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 pass the charity of love for Italy. They pass him by unheeded, and he cries:

  Hast thou seen

  In the deep circle of the valley of Siddim,

  Under the shining skies of Palestine,

  The sinister glitter of the Lake of Asphalt?

  Those coasts, strewn thick with ashes of damnation,

  Forever foe to every living thing,

  Where rings the cry of the lost wandering bird

  That, on the shore of the perfidious sea,

  Athirsting dies, — that watery sepulcher

  Of the five cities of iniquity,

  Where even the tempest, when its clouds hang low,

  Passes 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 God

  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 hellebore and poppies thick

  The way.

  But the throngs have passed 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 prone 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

  God’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 passes 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.

  Over the imminent upland’s utmost brink

  The blonde wild-goat stretched forth his neck to meet

  The unknown sound, and, caught with sudden fear,

  Down the steep bounded, and the arrow cut

  Midway the flight of his aerial foot.

  So all the wild earth was tamed to the hand of man, and the wisdom of the stars began to reveal itself to the shepherds,

  Who, in the leisure of the argent nights,

  Leading their flocks upon a sea of meadows,

  turned their eyes upon the heavenly bodies, and questioned them in their courses. But a taint of guilt was in all the blood of Cain, which the deluge alone could purge.

  And beautiful beyond all utterance

  Were the earth’s first-born daughters. Phantasms these

  That now enamor us decrepit, by

  The light of that prime beauty! And the glance

  Those ardent sinners darted had beguiled

  God’s angels even, so that the Lord’s command

  Was weaker than the bidding of their eyes.

  And there were seen, descending from on high,

  His messengers, and in the tepid eyes

  Gathering their flight about the secret founts

  Where came the virgins wandering sole to stretch

  The nude pomp of their perfect loveliness.

  Caught by some sudden flash of light afar,

  The shepherd looked, and deemed that he beheld

  A fallen star, and knew not that he saw

  A fallen angel, whose distended wings,

  All tremulous with voluptuous delight,

  Strove vainly to lift him to the skies again.

  The earth with her malign embraces blest

  The heavenly-born, and they straightway forgot

  The joys of God’s eternal paradise

  For the brief rapture of a guilty love.

  And from these nuptials, violent and strange,

  A strange and violent race of giants rose;

  A chain of sin had linked the earth to heaven;

  And God repented him of his own work.

  The destroying rains descended,

  And the ocean ro
se,

  And on the cities and the villages

  The terror fell apace. There was a strife

  Of suppliants at the altars; blasphemy

  Launched at the impotent idols and the kings;

  There were embraces desperate and dear,

  And news of suddenest forgivenesses,

  And a relinquishment of all sweet things;

  And, guided onward by the pallid prophets,

  The people climbed, with lamentable cries,

  In pilgrimage up the mountains.

  But in vain;

  For swifter than they climbed the ocean rose,

  And hid the palms, and buried the sepulchers

  Far underneath the buried pyramids;

  And the victorious billow swelled and beat

  At eagles’ Alpine nests, extinguishing

  All lingering breath of life; and dreadfuller

  Than the yell rising from the battle-field

  Seemed the hush of every human sound.

  On the high solitude of the waters naught

  Was seen but here and there unfrequently

  A frail raft, heaped with languid men that fought

  Weakly with one another for the grass

  Hanging about a cliff not yet submerged,

  And here and there a drowned man’s head, and here

  And there a file of birds, that beat the air

  With weary wings.

  After the deluge, the race of Noah repeoples the empty world, and the history of mankind begins anew in the Orient. Rome is built, and the Christian era dawns, and Rome falls under the feet of the barbarians. Then the enthusiasm of Christendom sweeps toward the East, in the repeated Crusades; and then, “after long years of twilight”, Dante, the sun of Italian civilization, rises; and at last comes the dream of another world, unknown to the eyes of elder times.

  But between that and our shore roared diffuse

  Abysmal seas and fabulous hurricanes

  Which, thought on, blanched the faces of the bold;

  For the dread secret of the heavens was then

  The Western world. Yet on the Italian coasts

  A boy grew into manhood, in whose soul

  The instinct of the unknown continent burned.

  He saw in his prophetic mind depicted

  The opposite visage of the earth, and, turning

  With joyful defiance to the ocean, sailed

  Forth with two secret pilots, God and Genius.

  Last of the prophets, he returned in chains

  And glory.

  In the New World are the traces, as in the Old, of a restless humanity, wandering from coast to coast, growing, building cities, and utterly vanishing. There are graves and ruins everywhere; and the poet’s thought returns from these scenes of unstoried desolation, to follow again the course of man in the Old World annals. But here, also, he is lost in the confusion of man’s advance and retirement, and he muses:

  How many were the peoples? Where the trace

  Of their lost steps? Where the funereal fields

  In which they sleep? Go, ask the clouds of heaven

  How many bolts are hidden in their breasts,

  And when they shall be launched; and ask the path

  That they shall keep in the unfurrowed air.

  The peoples passed. Obscure as destiny,

  Forever stirred by secret hope, forever

  Waiting upon the promised mysteries,

  Unknowing God, that urged them, turning still

  To some kind star, — they swept o’er the sea-weed

  In unknown waters, fearless swam the course

  Of nameless rivers, wrote with flying feet

  The mountain pass on pathless snows; impatient

  Of rest, for aye, from Babylon to Memphis,

  From the Acropolis to Rome, they hurried.

  And with them passed their guardian household gods,

  And faithful wisdom of their ancestors,

  And the seed sown in mother fields, and gathered,

  A fruitful harvest in their happier years.

  And, ‘companying the order of their steps

  Upon the way, they sung the choruses

  And sacred burdens of their country’s songs,

  And, sitting down by hospitable gates,

  They told the histories of their far-off cities.

  And sometimes in the lonely darknesses

  Upon the ambiguous way they found a light, —

  The deathless lamp of some great truth, that Heaven

  Sent in compassionate answer to their prayers.

  But not to all was given it to endure

  That ceaseless pilgrimage, and not on all

  Did the heavens smile perennity of life

  Revirginate with never-ceasing change;

  And when it had completed the great work

  Which God had destined for its race to do,

  Sometimes a weary people laid them down

  To rest them, like a weary man, and left

  Their nude bones in a vale of expiation,

  And passed away as utterly forever

  As mist that snows itself into the sea.

  The poet views this growth of nations from youth to decrepitude, and, coming back at last to himself and to his own laud and time, breaks forth into a lament of grave and touching beauty:

  Muse of an aged people, in the eve

  Of fading civilization, I was born

  Of kindred that have greatly expiated

  And greatly wept. For me the ambrosial fingers

  Of Graces never wove the laurel crown,

  But the Fates shadowed, from my youngest days,

  My brow with passion-flowers, and I have lived

  Unknown to my dear land. Oh, fortunate

  My sisters that in the heroic dawn

  Of races sung! To them did destiny give

  The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness

  Of their land’s speech; and, reverenced, their hands

  Ran over potent strings. To me, the hopes

  Turbid with hate; to me, the senile rage;

  To me, the painted fancies clothed by art

  Degenerate; to me, the desperate wish,

  Not in my soul to nurse ungenerous dreams,

  But to contend, and with the sword of song

  To fight my battles too.

  Such is the spirit, such is the manner, of the Prime Storie of Aleardi. The merits of the poem are so obvious, that it seems scarcely profitable to comment upon its picturesqueness, upon the clearness and ease of its style, upon the art which quickens its frequent descriptions of nature with a human interest. The defects of the poem are quite as plain, and I have again to acknowledge the critical acuteness of Arnaud, who says of Aleardi: “Instead of synthetizing his conceptions, and giving relief to the principal lines, the poet lingers caressingly upon the particulars, preferring the descriptive to the dramatic element. Prom this results poetry of beautiful arabesques and exquisite fragments, of harmonious verse and brilliant diction.”

  Nevertheless, the same critic confesses that the poetry of Aleardi “is not academically common”, and pleases by the originality of its very mannerism.

  III.

  Like Primal Histories, the Hour of my Youth is a contemplative poem, to which frequency of episode gives life and movement; but its scope is less grand, and the poet, recalling his early days, remembers chiefly the events of defeated revolution which give such heroic sadness and splendor to the history of the first third of this century. The work is characterized by the same opulence of diction, and the same luxury of epithet and imagery, as the Primal Histories, but it somehow fails to win our interest in equal degree: perhaps because the patriot now begins to overshadow the poet, and appeal is often made rather to the sympathies than the imagination. It is certain that art ceases to be less, and country more, in the poetry of Aleardi from this time. It could scarcely be otherwise; and had it been otherwise, the poet would have become despicable, not gre
at, in the eyes of his countrymen.

  The Hour of my Youth opens with a picture, where, for once at least, all the brilliant effects are synthetized; the poet has ordered here the whole Northern world, and you can dream of nothing grand or beautiful in those lonely regions which you do not behold in it.

  Ere yet upon the unhappy Arctic lands,

  In dying autumn, Erebus descends

  With the night’s thousand hours, along the verge

  Of the horizon, like a fugitive,

  Through the long days wanders the weary sun;

  And when at last under the wave is quenched

  The last gleam of its golden countenance,

  Interminable twilight land and sea

  Discolors, and the north-wind covers deep

  All things in snow, as in their sepulchers

  The dead are buried. In the distances

  The shock of warring Cyclades of ice

  Makes music as of wild and strange lament;

  And up in heaven now tardily are lit

  The solitary polar star and seven

  Lamps of the Bear. And now the warlike race

  Of swans gather their hosts upon the breast

  Of some far gulf, and, bidding their farewell

  To the white cliffs, and slender junipers,

  And sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song

  Of parting, and a sad metallic clang

  Send through the mists. Upon their southward way

  They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet

  Flamy volcanoes, and the seething founts

  Of Geysers, and the melancholy yellow

  Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying,

  Their lily wings amid the boreal lights,

  Journey away unto the joyous shores

  Of morning.

  In a strain of equal nobility, but of more personal and subjective effect, the thought is completed:

  So likewise, my own soul, from these obscure