Modern Italian Poets by W. D. HowellsEssays and Versions (page 4)

Glitter the arms I gave.

In the last act occurs one of those lyrical passages in which Niccolini excels, and two lines from this chorus are among the most famous in modern Italian poetry:

Perche tanto sorriso del cielo
Sulla terra del vile dolor?

The scene is in a public place in Palermo, and the time is the moment before the massacre of the French begins. A chorus of Sicilian poets remind the people of their sorrows and degradation, and sing:

The wind vexes the forest no longer, In the sunshine the leaflets expand:
With barrenness cursed be the land That is bathed with the sweat of the slave!

On the fields now the harvests are waving, On the fields that our blood has made red; Harvests grown for our enemy’s bread
From the bones of our children they wave!

With a veil of black clouds would the tempest Might the face of this Italy cover;
Why should Heaven smile so glorious over The land of our infamous woe?

All nature is suddenly wakened,
Here in slumbers unending man sleeps; Dust trod evermore by the steps
Of ever-strange lords he lies low!

[Illustration: Giambattista Niccolini.]

“With this tragedy,” says an Italian biographer of Niccolini, “the poet potently touched all chords of the human heart, from the most impassioned love to the most implacable hate…. The enthusiasm rose to the greatest height, and for as many nights of the severe winter of 1830 as the tragedy was given, the theater was always thronged by the overflowing audience; the doors of the Cocomero were opened to the impatient people many hours before the spectacle began. Spectators thought themselves fortunate to secure a seat next the roof of the theater; even in the prompter’s hole [Note: On the Italian stage the prompter rises from a hole in the floor behind the foot-lights, and is hidden from the audience merely by a canvas shade.] places were sought to witness the admired work…. And whilst they wept over the ill-starred love of Imelda, and all hearts palpitated in the touching situation of the drama,–where the public and the personal interests so wonderfully blended, and the vengeance of a people mingled with that of a man outraged in the most sacred affections of the heart,–Procida rose terrible as the billows of his sea, imprecating before all the wrongs of their oppressed country, in whatever servitude inflicted, by whatever aliens, among all those that had trampled, derided, and martyred her, and raising the cry of resistance which stirred the heart of all Italy. At the picture of the abject sufferings of their common country, the whole audience rose and repeated with tears of rage:

“Why should heaven smile so glorious over The land of our infamous woe?”

By the year 1837 had begun the singular illusion of the Italians, that their freedom and unity were to be accomplished through a liberal and patriotic Pope. Niccolini, however, never was cheated by it, though he was very much disgusted, and he retired, not only from the political agitation, but almost from the world. He was seldom seen upon the street, but to those who had access to him he did not fail to express all the contempt and distrust he felt. “A liberal Pope! a liberal Pope!” he said, with a scornful enjoyment of that contradiction in terms. He was thoroughly Florentine and Tuscan in his anti-papal spirit, and he was faithful in it to the tradition of Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Alfieri, who all doubted and combated the papal influence as necessarily fatal to Italian hopes. In 1843 he published his great and principal tragedy, _Arnaldo da Brescia_, which was a response to the ideas of the papal school of patriots. In due time Pius IX. justified Niccolini, and all others that distrusted him, by turning his back upon the revolution, which belief in him, more than anything else, had excited.

The tragedies which succeeded the Arnaldo were the _Filippo Strozzi_, published in 1847; the _Beatrice_ _Cenci_, a version from the English of Shelley, and the _Mario e i Cimbri_.

A part of the Arnaldo da Brescia was performed in Florence in 1858, not long before the war which has finally established Italian freedom. The name of the Cocomero theater had been changed to the Teatro Niccolini, and, in spite of the governmental anxiety and opposition, the occasion was made a popular demonstration in favor of Niccolini’s ideas as well as himself. His biographer says: “The audience now maintained a religious silence; now, moved by irresistible force, broke out into uproarious applause as the eloquent protests of the friar and the insolent responses of the Pope awakened their interest; for Italy then, like the unhappy martyr, had risen to proclaim the decline of that monstrous power which, in the name of a religion profaned by it, sanctifies its own illegitimate and feudal origin, its abuses, its pride, its vices, its crimes. It was a beautiful and affecting spectacle to see the illustrious poet receiving the warm congratulations of his fellow-citizens, who enthusiastically recognized in him the utterer of so many lofty truths and the prophet of Italy. That night Niccolini was accompanied to his house by the applauding multitude.” And if all this was a good deal like the honors the Florentines were accustomed to pay to a very pretty _ballerina_ or a successful _prima donna_, there is no doubt that a poet is much worthier the popular frenzy; and it is a pity that the forms of popular frenzy have to be so cheapened by frequent use. The two remaining years of Niccolini’s life were spent in great retirement, and in a satisfaction with the fortunes of Italy which was only marred by the fact that the French still remained in Rome, and that the temporal power yet stood. He died in 1861.

III

The work of Niccolini in which he has poured out all the lifelong hatred and distrust he had felt for the temporal power of the popes is the Arnaldo da Brescia. This we shall best understand through a sketch of the life of Arnaldo, who is really one of the most heroic figures of the past, deserving to rank far above Savonarola, and with the leaders of the Reformation, though he preceded these nearly four hundred years. He was born in Brescia of Lombardy, about the year 1105, and was partly educated in France, in the school of the famous Abelard. He early embraced the ecclesiastical life, and, when he returned to his own country, entered a convent, but not to waste his time in idleness and the corruptions of his order. In fact, he began at once to preach against these, and against the usurpation of temporal power by all the great and little dignitaries of the Church. He thus identified himself with the democratic side in politics, which was then locally arrayed against the bishop aspiring to rule Brescia. Arnaldo denounced the political power of the Pope, as well as that of the prelates; and the bishop, making this known to the pontiff at Rome, had sufficient influence to procure a sentence against Arnaldo as a schismatic, and an order enjoining silence upon him. He was also banished from Italy; whereupon, retiring to France, he got himself into further trouble by aiding Abelard in the defense of his teachings, which had been attainted of heresy. Both Abelard and Arnaldo were at this time bitterly persecuted by St. Bernard, and Arnaldo took refuge in Switzerland, whence, after several years, he passed to Rome, and there began to assume an active part in the popular movements against the papal rule. He was an ardent republican, and was a useful and efficient partisan, teaching openly that, whilst the Pope was to be respected in all spiritual things, he was not to be recognized at all as a temporal prince. When the English monk, Nicholas Breakspear, became Pope Adrian IV., he excommunicated and banished Arnaldo; but Arnaldo, protected by the senate and certain powerful nobles, remained at Rome in spite of the Pope’s decree, and disputed the lawfulness of the excommunication. Finally, the whole city was laid under interdict until Arnaldo should be driven out. Holy Week was drawing near; the people were eager to have their churches thrown open and to witness the usual shows and splendors, and they consented to the exile of their leader. The followers of a cardinal arrested him, but he was rescued by his friends, certain counts of the Campagna, who held him for a saint, and who now lodged him safely in one of their castles. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, coming to Rome to assume the imperial crown, was met by embassies from both parties in the city. He warmly favored that of the Pope, and not only received that of the people very coldly, but arrested one of the counts who had rescued Arnaldo, and forced him to name the castle in which the monk lay concealed. Arnaldo was then given into the hands of the cardinals, and these delivered him to the prefect of Rome, who caused him to be hanged, his body to be burned upon a spit, and his ashes to be scattered in the Tiber, that the people might not venerate his relics as those of a saint. “This happened,” says the priest Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, of Brescia, whose Life, published in 1790, I have made use of–“this happened in the year 1155 before the 18th of June, previous to the coronation of Frederick, Arnaldo being, according to my thinking, fifty years of age. His eloquence,” continues Guadagnini, “was celebrated by his enemies themselves; the exemplarity of his life was superior to their malignity, constraining them all to silence, although they were in such great number, and it received a splendid eulogy from St. Bernard, the luminary of that century, who, being strongly impressed against him, condemned him first as a schismatic, and then for the affair of the Council of Sens (the defense of Abelard), persecuted him as a heretic, and then had finally nothing to say against him. His courage and his zeal for the discipline of the Church have been sufficiently attested by the toils, the persecutions, and the death which he underwent for that cause.”

IV

The scene of the first act of Niccolini’s tragedy is near the Capitoline Hill, in Rome, where two rival leaders, Frangipani and Giordano Pierleone, are disputing in the midst of their adherents. The former is a supporter of the papal usurpations; the latter is a republican chief, who has been excommunicated for his politics, and is also under sentence of banishment; but who, like Arnaldo, remains in Rome in spite of Church and State. Giordano withdraws to the Campidoglio with his adherents, and there Arnaldo suddenly appears among them. When the people ask what cure there is for their troubles, Arnaldo answers, in denunciation of the papacy:

Liberty and God.
A voice from the orient,
A voice from the Occident,
A voice from thy deserts,
A voice of echoes from the open graves, Accuses thee, thou shameless harlot! Drunk Art thou with blood of saints, and thou hast lain With all the kings of earth. Ah, you behold her! She is clothed on with purple; gold and pearls And gems are heaped upon her; and her vestments Once white, the pleasure of her former spouse, That now’s in heaven, she has dragged in dust. Lo, is she full of names and blasphemies, And on her brow is written _Mystery!_
Ah, nevermore you hear her voice console The afflicted; all she threatens, and creates With her perennial curse in trembling souls Ineffable pangs; the unhappy–as we here Are all of us–fly in their common sorrows To embrace each other; she, the cruel one, Sunders them in the name of Jesus; fathers She kindles against sons, and wives she parts From husbands, and she makes a war between Harmonious brothers; of the Evangel she Is cruel interpreter, and teaches hate Out of the book of love. The years are come Whereof the rapt Evangelist of Patmos
Did prophesy; and, to deceive the people, Satan has broken the chains he bore of old; And she, the cruel, on the infinite waters Of tears that are poured out for her, sits throned. The enemy of man two goblets places
Unto her shameless lips; and one is blood, And gold is in the other; greedy and fierce She drinks so from them both, the world knows not If she of blood or gold have greater thirst…. Lord, those that fled before thy scourge of old No longer stand to barter offerings
About thy temple’s borders, but within Man’s self is sold, and thine own blood is trafficked, Thou son of God!

The people ask Arnaldo what he counsels them to do, and he advises them to restore the senate and the tribunes, appealing to the glorious memories of the place where they stand, the Capitoline Hill:

Where the earth calls at every step, “Oh, pause, Thou treadest on a hero!”

They desire to make him a tribune, but he refuses, promising, however, that he will not withhold his counsel. Whilst he speaks, some cardinals, with nobles of the papal party, appear, and announce the election of the new Pope, Adrian. “What is his name?” the people demand; and a cardinal answers, “Breakspear, a Briton.” Giordano exclaims:

Impious race! you’ve chosen Rome for shepherd A cruel barbarian, and even his name
Tortures our ears.

_Arnaldo._ I never care to ask
Where popes are born; and from long suffering, You, Romans, before heaven, should have learnt That priests can have no country….
I know this man; his father was a thrall, And he is fit to be a slave. He made
Friends with the Norman that enslaves his country; A wandering beggar to Avignon’s cloisters He came in boyhood and was known to do All abject services; there those false monks He with astute humility cajoled;
He learned their arts, and ‘mid intrigues and hates He rose at last out of his native filth A tyrant of the vile.

The cardinals, confounded by Arnaldo’s presence and invectives, withdraw, but leave one of their party to work on the fears of the Romans, and make them return to their allegiance by pictures of the desolating war which Barbarossa, now approaching Rome to support Adrian, has waged upon the rebellious Lombards at Rosate and elsewhere. Arnaldo replies:–

Romans,
I will tell all the things that he has hid; I know not how to cheat you. Yes, Rosate A ruin is, from which the smoke ascends. The bishop, lord of Monferrato, guided The German arms against Chieri and Asti, Now turned to dust; that shepherd pitiless Did thus avenge his own offenses on
His flying flocks; himself with torches armed The German hand; houses and churches saw Destroyed, and gave his blessing on the flames. This is the pardon that you may expect From mitered tyrants. A heap of ashes now Crowneth the hill where once Tortona stood; And drunken with her wine and with her blood, Fallen there amidst their spoil upon the dead, Slept the wild beasts of Germany: like ghosts Dim wandering through the darkness of the night, Those that were left by famine and the sword, Hidden within the heart of thy dim caverns, Desolate city! rose and turned their steps Noiselessly toward compassionate Milan. There they have borne their swords and hopes: I see A thousand heroes born from the example Tortona gave. O city, if I could,
O sacred city! upon the ruins fall Reverently, and take them in my loving arms, The relics of thy brave I’d gather up
In precious urns, and from the altars here In days of battle offer to be kissed!
Oh, praise be to the Lord! Men die no more For chains and errors; martyrs now at last Hast thou, O holy Freedom; and fain were I Ashes for thee!–But I see you grow pale, Ye Romans! Down, go down; this holy height Is not for cowards. In the valley there Your tyrant waits you; go and fall before him And cover his haughty foot with tears and kisses. He’ll tread you in the dust, and then absolve you.

_The People._ The arms we have are strange and few, Our walls Are fallen and ruinous.

_Arnaldo._ Their hearts are walls Unto the brave….
And they shall rise again, The walls that blood of freemen has baptized, But among slaves their ruins are eternal.

_People._ You outrage us, sir!

_Arnaldo._ Wherefore do ye tremble Before the trumpet sounds? O thou that wast Once the world’s lord and first in Italy, Wilt thou be now the last?

_People._ No more! Cease, or thou diest!

Arnaldo, having roused the pride of the Romans, now tells them that two thousand Swiss have followed him from his exile; and the act closes with some lyrical passages leading to the fraternization of the people with these.

The second act of this curious tragedy, where there may be said to be scarcely any personal interest, but where we are aware of such an impassioned treatment of public interests as perhaps never was before, opens with a scene between the Pope Adrian and the Cardinal Guido. The character of both is finely studied by the poet; and Guido, the type of ecclesiastical submission, has not more faith in the sacredness and righteousness of Adrian, than Adrian, the type of ecclesiastical ambition, has in himself. The Pope tells Guido that he stands doubting between the cities of Lombardy leagued against Frederick, and Frederick, who is coming to Rome, not so much to befriend the papacy as to place himself in a better attitude to crush the Lombards. The German dreams of the restoration of Charlemagne’s empire; he believes the Church corrupt; and he and Arnaldo would be friends, if it were not for Arnaldo’s vain hope of reestablishing the republican liberties of Rome. The Pope utters his ardent desire to bring Arnaldo back to his allegiance; and when Guido reminds him that Arnaldo has been condemned by a council of the Church, and that it is scarcely in his power to restore him, Adrian turns upon him:

What sayest thou?
I can do all. Dare the audacious members Rebel against the head? Within these hands Lie not the keys that once were given to Peter? The heavens repeat as ‘t were the word of God, My word that here has power to loose and bind. Arnaldo did not dare so much. The kingdom Of earth alone he did deny me. Thou
Art more outside the Church than he.

_Guido_ (_kneeling at Adrian’s feet_). O God, I erred; forgive! I rise not from thy feet Till thou absolve me. My zeal blinded me. I’m clay before thee; shape me as thou wilt, A vessel apt to glory or to shame.

Guido then withdraws at the Pope’s bidding, in order to send a messenger to Arnaldo, and Adrian utters this fine soliloquy:

At every step by which I’ve hither climbed I’ve found a sorrow; but upon the summit All sorrows are; and thorns more thickly spring Around my chair than ever round a throne. What weary toil to keep up from the dust This mantle that’s weighed down the strongest limbs! These splendid gems that blaze in my tiara, They are a fire that burns the aching brow, I lift with many tears, O Lord, to thee! Yet I must fear not; He that did know how To bear the cross, so heavy with the sins Of all the world, will succor the weak servant That represents his power here on earth. Of mine own isle that make the light o’ the sun Obscure as one day was my lot, amidst
The furious tumults of this guilty Rome, Here, under the superb effulgency
Of burning skies, I think of you and weep!

The Pope’s messenger finds Arnaldo in the castle of Giordano, where these two are talking of the present fortunes and future chances of Rome. The patrician forebodes evil from the approach of the emperor, but Arnaldo encourages him, and, when the Pope’s messenger appears, he is eager to go to Adrian, believing that good to their cause will come of it. Giordano in vain warns him against treachery, bidding him remember that Adrian will hold any falsehood sacred that is used with a heretic. It is observable throughout that Niccolini is always careful to make his rebellious priest a good Catholic; and now Arnaldo rebukes Giordano for some doubts of the spiritual authority of the Pope. When Giordano says:

These modern pharisees, upon the cross, Where Christ hung dying once, have nailed mankind,

Arnaldo answers:

He will know how to save that rose and conquered;

And Giordano replies:

Yes, Christ arose; but Freedom cannot break The stone that shuts her ancient sepulcher, For on it stands the altar.

Adrian, when Arnaldo appears before him, bids him fall down and kiss his feet, and speak to him as to God; he will hear Arnaldo only as a penitent. Arnaldo answers:

The feet
Of his disciples did that meek One kiss Whom here thou representest. But I hear Now from thy lips the voice of fiercest pride. Repent, O Peter, that deniest him,
And near the temple art, but far from God!

* * * * *

The name of the king
Is never heard in Rome. And if thou are The vicar of Christ on earth, well should’st thou know That of thorns only was the crown he wore.

_Adrian._ He gave to me the empire of the earth When this great mantly I put on, and took The Church’s high seat I was chosen to; The word of God did erst create the world, And now mine guides it. Would’st thou that the soul Should serve the body? Thou dost dream of freedom, And makest war on him who sole on earth Can shield man from his tyrants. O Arnaldo, Be Wise; believe me, all thy words are vain, Vain sound that perish or disperse themselves Amidst the wilderness of Rome. I only
Can speak the words that the whole world repeats.

_Arnaldo_. Thy words were never Freedom’s; placed between The people and their tyrants, still the Church With the weak cruel, with the mighty vile, Has been, and crushed in pitiless embraces That emperors and pontiffs have exchanged. Man has been ever.

* * * * *

Why seek’st thou empire here, and great on earth Art mean in heaven? Ah! vainly in thy prayer Thou criest, “Let the heart be lifted up!” ‘T is ever bowed to earth.

* * * * *

Now, then, if thou wilt,
Put forth the power that thou dost vaunt; repress The crimes of bishops, make the Church ashamed To be a step-mother to the poor and lowly. In all the Lombard cities every priest Has grown a despot, in shrewd perfidy
Now siding with the Church, now with the Empire. They have dainty food, magnificent apparel, Lascivious joys, and on their altars cold Gathers the dust, where lies the miter dropt, Forgotten, from the haughty brow that wears The helmet, and no longer bows itself
Before God’s face in th’ empty sanctuaries; But upon the fields of slaughter, smoking still, Bends o’er the fallen foe, and aims the blows O’ th’ sacrilegious sword, with cruel triumph Insulting o’er the prayers of dying men. There the priest rides o’er breasts of fallen foes, And stains with blood his courser’s iron heel. When comes a brief, false peace, and wearily Amidst the havoc doth the priest sit down, His pleasures are a crime, and after rapine Luxury follows. Like a thief he climbs Into the fold, and that desired by day He dares amid the dark, and violence
Is the priest’s marriage. Vainly did Rome hope That they had thrown aside the burden vile Of the desires that weigh down other men. Theirs is the ungrateful lust of the wild beast, That doth forget the mother nor knows the child. … On the altar of Christ,
Who is the prince of pardon and of peace, Vows of revenge are registered, and torches That are thrown into hearts of leaguered cities Are lit from tapers burning before God. Become thou king of sacrifice; ascend
The holy hill of God; on these perverse Launch thou thy thunderbolts; and feared again And great thou wilt be. Tell me, Adrian, Must thou not bear a burden that were heavy Even for angels? Wherefore wilt thou join Death unto life, and make the word of God, That says, “My kingdom is not of this world,” A lie? Oh, follow Christ’s example here In Rome; it pleased both God and her
To abase the proud and to uplift the weak. I’ll kiss the foot that treads on kings!

_Adrian._ Arnaldo,
I parley not, I rule; and I, become On earth as God in heaven, am judge of all, And none of me; I watch, and I dispense Terrors and hopes, rewards and punishments, To peoples and to kings; fountain and source Of life am I, who make the Church of God One and all-powerful. Many thrones and peoples She has seen tost upon the madding waves Of time, and broken on the immovable rock Whereon she sits; and since one errless spirit Rules in her evermore, she doth not rave For changeful doctrine, but she keeps eternal The grandeur of her will and purposes. … Arnaldo,
Thou movest me to pity. In vain thou seek’st To warm thy heart over these ruins, groping Among the sepulchers of Rome. Thou’lt find No bones to which thou canst say, “Rise!” Ah, here Remaineth not one hero’s dust. Thou thinkest That with old names old virtues shall return? And thou desirest tribunes, senators,
Equestrian orders, Rome! A greater glory Thy sovereign pontiff is who doth not guard The rights uncertain of a crazy rabble; But tribune of the world he sits in Rome, And “I forbid,” to kings and peoples cries. I tell thee a greater than the impious power That thou in vain endeavorest to renew Here built the dying fisherman of Judea. Out of his blood he made a fatherland
For all the nations, and this place, that once A city was, became a world; the borders That did divide the nations, by Christ’s law Are ta’en away, and this the kingdom is For which he asked his Father in his prayer. The Church has sons in every race; I rule, An unseen king, and Rome is everywhere!

_Arnaldo_. Thou errest, Adrian. Rome’s thunderbolts Wake little terror now, and reason shakes The bonds that thou fain would’st were everlasting. … Christ calls to her
As of old to the sick man, “Rise and walk.” She ‘ll tread on you if you go not before. The world has other truth besides the altar’s. It will not have a temple that hides heaven. Thou wast a shepherd: be a father. The race Of man is weary of being called a flock.

Adrian’s final reply is, that if Arnaldo will renounce his false doctrine and leave Rome, the Pope will, through him, give the Lombard cities a liberty that shall not offend the Church. Arnaldo refuses, and quits Adrian’s presence. It is quite needless to note the bold character of the thought here, or the nobility of the poetry, which Niccolini puts as well into the mouth of the Pope whom he hates as the monk whom he loves.

Following this scene is one of greater dramatic force, in which the Cardinal Guido, sent to the Campidoglio by the Pope to disperse the popular assembly, is stoned by the people and killed. He dies full of faith in the Church and the righteousness of his cause, and his body, taken up by the priests, is carried into the square before St. Peter’s. A throng, including many women, has followed; and now Niccolini introduces a phase of the great Italian struggle which was perhaps the most perplexing of all. The subjection of the women to the priests is what has always greatly contributed to defeat Italian efforts for reform; it now helps to unnerve the Roman multitude; and the poet finally makes it the weakness through which Arnaldo is dealt his death. With a few strokes in the scene that follows the death of Guido, he indicates the remorse and dismay of the people when the Pope repels them from the church door and proclaims the interdict; and then follow some splendid lyrical passages, in which the Pope commands the pictures and images to be veiled and the relics to be concealed, and curses the enemies of the Church. I shall but poorly render this curse by a rhymeless translation, and yet I am tempted to give it:

_The Pope._ To-day let the perfidious Learn at thy name to tremble,
Nor triumph o’er the ruinous
Place of thy vanished altars.
Oh, brief be their days and uncertain; In the desert their wandering footsteps, Every tremulous leaflet affright them!

_The Cardinals._ Anathema, anathema, anathema!

_Pope._ May their widows sit down ‘mid the ashes On the hearths of their desolate houses, With their little ones wailing around them.

_Cardinals._ Anathema, anathema, anathema!

_Pope._ May he who was born to the fury Of heaven, afar from his country
Be lost in his ultimate anguish.

_Cardinals._ Anathema, anathema, anathema!

_Pope._ May he fly to the house of the alien oppressor That is filled with the spoil of his brothers, with women Destroyed by the pitiless hands that defiled them; There in accents unknown and derided, abase him At portals ne’er opened in mercy, imploring A morsel of bread.

_Cardinals._ Be that morsel denied him!

_Pope._ I hear the wicked cry: I from the Lord Will fly away with swift and tireless feet; His anger follows me upon the sea;
I’ll seek the desert; who will give me wings? In cloudy horror, who shall lead my steps? The eye of God maketh the night as day. O brothers, fulfill then
The terrible duty;
Throw down from the altars
The dim-burning tapers;
And be all joy, and be the love of God In thankless hearts that know not Peter, quenched, As is the little flame that falls and dies, Here in these tapers trampled under foot.

In the first scene of the third act, which is a desolate place in the Campagna, near the sea, Arnaldo appears. He has been expelled from Rome by the people, eager for the opening of their churches, and he soliloquizes upon his fate in language that subtly hints all his passing moods, and paints the struggle of his soul. It appears to me that it is a wise thing to make him almost regret the cloister in the midst of his hatred of it, and then shrink from that regret with horror; and there is also a fine sense of night and loneliness in the scene:

Like this sand
Is life itself, and evermore each path Is traced in suffering, and one footprint still Obliterates another; and we are all
Vain shadows here that seem a little while, And suffer, and pass. Let me not fight in vain, O Son of God, with thine immortal word, Yon tyrant of eternity and time,
Who doth usurp thy place on earth, whose feet Are in the depths, whose head is in the clouds, Who thunders all abroad, _The world is mine!_ Laws, virtues, liberty I have attempted To give thee, Rome. Ah! only where death is Abides thy glory. Here the laurel only Flourishes on the ruins and the tombs. I will repose upon this fallen column
My weary limbs. Ah, lower than this ye lie, You Latin souls, and to your ancient height Who shall uplift you? I am all weighed down By the great trouble of the lofty hopes Of Italy still deluded, and I find
Within my soul a drearer desert far Than this, where the air already darkens round, And the soft notes of distant convent bells Announce the coming night…. I cannot hear them Without a trembling wish that in my heart Wakens a memory that becomes remorse…. Ah, Reason, soon thou languishest in us, Accustomed to such outrage all our lives. Thou know’st the cloister; thou a youth didst enter That sepulcher of the living where is war,– Remember it and shudder! The damp wind Stirs this gray hair. I’m near the sea. Thy silence is no more; sweet on the ear Cometh the far-off murmur of the floods In the vast desert; now no more the darkness Imprisons wholly; now less gloomily
Lowers the sky that lately threatened storm. Less thick the air is, and the trembling light O’ the stars among the breaking clouds appears. Praise to the Lord! The eternal harmony Of all his work I feel. Though these vague beams Reveal to me here only fens and tombs, My soul is not so heavily weighed down By burdens that oppressed it….
I rise to grander purposes: man’s tents Are here below, his city is in heaven. I doubt no more; the terror of the cloister No longer assails me.

Presently Giordano comes to join Arnaldo in this desolate place, and, in the sad colloquy which follows, tells him of the events of Rome, and the hopelessness of their cause, unless they have the aid and countenance of the Emperor. He implores Arnaldo to accompany the embassy which he is about to send to Frederick; but Arnaldo, with a melancholy disdain, refuses. He asks where are the Swiss who accompanied him to Rome, and he is answered by one of the Swiss captains, who at that moment appears. The Emperor has ordered them to return home, under penalty of the ban of the empire. He begs Arnaldo to return with them, but Arnaldo will not; and Giordano sends him under a strong escort to the castle of Ostasio. Arnaldo departs with much misgiving, for the wife of Ostasio is Adelasia, a bigoted papist, who has hitherto resisted the teaching to which her husband has been converted.

As the escort departs, the returning Swiss are seen. One of their leaders expresses the fear that moves them, when he says that the Germans will desolate their homes if they do not return to them. Moreover, the Italian sun, which destroys even those born under it, drains their life, and man and nature are leagued against them there. “What have you known here!” he asks, and his soldiers reply in chorus:

The pride of old names, the caprices of fate, In vast desert spaces the silence of death, Or in mist-hidden lowlands, his wandering fires; No sweet song of birds, no heart-cheering sound, But eternal memorials of ancient despair, And ruins and tombs that waken dismay
At the moan of the pines that are stirred by the wind. Full of dark and mysterious peril the woods; No life-giving fountains, but only bare sands, Or some deep-bedded river that silently moves, With a wave that is livid and stagnant, between Its margins ungladdened by grass or by flowers, And in sterile sands vanishes wholly away. Out of huts that by turns have been shambles and tombs, All pallid and naked, and burned by their fevers, The peasant folk suddenly stare as you pass, With visages ghastly, and eyes full of hate, Aroused by the accent that’s strange to their ears. Oh, heavily hang the clouds here on the head! Wan and sick is the earth, and the sun is a tyrant.

Then one of the Swiss soldiers speaks alone:

The unconquerable love of our own land Draws us away till we behold again
The eternal walls the Almighty builded there. Upon the arid ways of faithless lands
I am tormented by a tender dream
Of that sweet rill which runs before my cot. Oh, let me rest beside the smiling lake, And hear the music of familiar words,
And on its lonely margin, wild and fair, Lie down and think of my beloved ones.

There is no page of this tragedy which does not present some terrible or touching picture, which is not full of brave and robust thought, which has not also great dramatic power. But I am obliged to curtail the proof of this, and I feel that, after all, I shall not give a complete idea of the tragedy’s grandeur, its subtlety, its vast scope and meaning.

There is a striking dialogue between a Roman partisan of Arnaldo, who, with his fancy oppressed by the heresy of his cause, is wavering in his allegiance, and a Brescian, whom the outrages of the priests have forever emancipated from faith in their power to bless or ban in the world to come. Then ensues a vivid scene, in which a fanatical and insolent monk of Arnaldo’s order, leading a number of soldiers, arrests him by command of Adrian. Ostasio’s soldiers approaching to rescue him, the monk orders him to be slain, but he is saved, and the act closes with the triumphal chorus of his friends. Here is fine occasion for the play of different passions, and the occasion is not lost.

With the fourth act is introduced the new interest of the German oppression; and as we have had hitherto almost wholly a study of the effect of the papal tyranny upon Italy, we are now confronted with the shame and woe which the empire has wrought her. Exiles from the different Lombard cities destroyed by Barbarossa meet on their way to seek redress from the Pope, and they pour out their sorrows in pathetic and passionate lyrics. To read these passages gives one a favorable notion of the liberality or the stupidity of the government which permitted the publication of the tragedy. The events alluded to were many centuries past, the empire had long ceased to be; but the Italian hatred of the Germans was one and indivisible for every moment of all times, and we may be sure that to each of Niccolini’s readers these mediaeval horrors were but masks for cruelties exercised by the Austrians in his own day, and that in those lyrical bursts of rage and grief there was full utterance for his smothered sense of present wrong. There is a great charm in these strophes; they add unspeakable pathos to a drama which is so largely concerned with political interests; and they make us feel that it is a beautiful and noble work of art, as well as grand appeal to the patriotism of the Italians and the justice of mankind.

When we are brought into the presence of Barbarossa, we find him awaiting the arrival of Adrian, who is to accompany him to Rome and crown him emperor, in return for the aid that Barbarossa shall give in reducing the rebellious citizens and delivering Arnaldo into the power of the papacy. Heralds come to announce Adrian’s approach, and riding forth a little way, Frederick dismounts in order to go forward on foot and meet the Pope, who advances, preceded by his clergy, and attended by a multitude of his partisans. As Frederick perceives the Pope and quits his horse, he muses:

I leave thee,
O faithful comrade mine in many perils, Thou generous steed! and now, upon the ground That should have thundered under thine advance, With humble foot I silent steps must trace. But what do I behold? Toward us comes, With tranquil pride, the servant of the lowly, Upon a white horse docile to the rein
As he would kings were; all about the path That Adrian moves on, warriors and people Of either sex, all ages, in blind homage, Mingle, press near and fall upon the ground, Or one upon another; and man, whom God Made to look up to heaven, becomes as dust Under the feet of pride; and they believe The gates of Paradise would be set wide To any one whom his steed crushed to death. With me thou never hast thine empire shared; Thou alone hold’st the world! He will not turn On me in sign of greeting that proud head, Encircled by the tiara; and he sees,
Like God, all under him in murmured prayer Or silence, blesses them, and passes on. What wonder if he will not deign to touch The earth I tread on with his haughty foot! He gives it to be kissed of kings; I too Must stoop to the vile act.

Since the time of Henry II. it had been the custom of the emperors to lead the Pope’s horse by the bridle, and to hold his stirrup while he descended. Adrian waits in vain for this homage from Frederick, and then alights with the help of his ministers, and seats himself in his episcopal chair, while Frederick draws near, saying aside:

I read there in his face his insolent pride Veiled by humility.

He bows before Adrian and kisses his foot, and then offers him the kiss of peace, which Adrian refuses, and haughtily reminds him of the fate of Henry. Frederick answers furiously that the thought of this fate has always filled him with hatred of the papacy; and Adrian, perceiving that he has pressed too far in this direction, turns and soothes the Emperor:

I am truth,
And thou art force, and if thou part’st from me, Blind thou becomest, helpless I remain. We are but one at last….
Caesar and Peter,
They are the heights of God; man from the earth Contemplates them with awe, and never questions Which thrusts its peak the higher into heaven. Therefore be wise, and learn from the example Of impious Arnaldo. He’s the foe
Of thrones who wars upon the altar.

But he strives in vain to persuade Frederick to the despised act of homage, and it is only at the intercession of the Emperor’s kinsmen and the German princes that he consents to it. When it is done in the presence of all the army and the clerical retinue, Adrian mounts, and says to Frederick, with scarcely hidden irony:

In truth thou art
An apt and ready squire, and thou hast held My stirrup firmly. Take, then, O my son, The kiss of peace, for thou hast well fulfilled All of thy duties.

But Frederick, crying aloud, and fixing the sense of the multitude upon him, answers:

Nay, not all, O Father!–
Princes and soldiers, hear! I have done homage To Peter, not to him.

The Church and the Empire being now reconciled, Frederick receives the ambassadors of the Roman republic with scorn; he outrages all their pretensions to restore Rome to her old freedom and renown; insults their prayer that he will make her his capital, and heaps contempt upon the weakness and vileness of the people they represent. Giordano replies for them:

When will you dream,
You Germans, in your thousand stolid dreams,– The fume of drunkenness,–a future greater Than our Rome’s memories? Never be her banner Usurped by you! In prison and in darkness Was born your eagle, that did but descend Upon the helpless prey of Roman dead,
But never dared to try the ways of heaven, With its weak vision wounded by the sun. Ye prate of Germany. The whole world conspired, And even more in vain, to work us harm, Before that day when, the world being conquered, Rome slew herself.
… Of man’s great brotherhood
Unworthy still, ye change not with the skies. In Italy the German’s fate was ever
To grow luxurious and continue cruel.

The soldiers of Barbarossa press upon Giordano to kill him, and Frederick saves the ambassadors with difficulty, and hurries them away.

In the first part of the fifth act, Niccolini deals again with the _role_ which woman has played in the tragedy of Italian history, the hopes she has defeated, and the plans she has marred through those religious instincts which should have blest her country, but which through their perversion by priestcraft have been one of its greatest curses. Adrian is in the Vatican, after his triumphant return to Rome, when Adelasia, the wife of that Ostasio, Count of the Campagna, in whose castle Arnaldo is concealed, and who shares his excommunication, is ushered into the Pope’s presence. She is half mad with terror at the penalties under which her husband has fallen, in days when the excommunicated were shunned like lepers, and to shelter them, or to eat and drink with them, even to salute them, was to incur privation of the sacraments; when a bier was placed at their door, and their houses were stoned; when King Robert of France, who fell under the anathema, was abandoned by all his courtiers and servants, and the beggars refused the meat that was left from his table–and she comes into Adrian’s presence accusing herself as the greatest of sinners. The Pope asks:

Hast thou betrayed
Thy husband, or from some yet greater crime Cometh the terror that oppresses thee? Hast slain him?

_Adelasia._ Haply I ought to slay him.

_Adrian._ What?

_Adelasia._ I fain would hate him and I cannot.

_Adrian._ What
Hath his fault been?

_Ad._ Oh, the most horrible
Of all.

_Adr._ And yet is he dear unto thee?

_Ad._ I love him, yes, I love him, though he’s changed From that he was. Some gloomy cloud involves That face one day so fair, and ‘neath the feet, Now grown deformed, the flowers wither away. I know not if I sleep or if I wake,
If what I see be a vision or a dream. But all is dreadful, and I cannot tell The falsehood from the truth; for if I reason, I fear to sin. I fly the happy bed
Where I became a mother, but return In midnight’s horror, where my husband lies Wrapt in a sleep so deep it frightens me, And question with my trembling hand his heart, The fountain of his life, if it still beat. Then a cold kiss I give him, then embrace him With shuddering joy, and then I fly again,– For I do fear his love,–and to the place Where sleep my little ones I hurl myself, And wake them with my moans, and drag them forth Before an old miraculous shrine of her, The Queen of Heaven, to whom I’ve consecrated, With never-ceasing vigils, burning lamps. There naked, stretched upon the hard earth, weep My pretty babes, and each of them repeats The name of Mary whom I call upon;
And I would swear that she looks down and weeps. Then I cry out, “Have pity on my children! Thou wast a mother, and the good obtain Forgiveness for the guilty.”

Adrian has little trouble to draw from the distracted woman the fact that her husband is a heretic–that heretic, indeed, in whose castle Arnaldo is concealed. On his promise that he will save her husband, she tells him the name of the castle. He summons Frederick, who claims Ostasio as his vassal, and declares that he shall die, and his children shall be carried to Germany. Adrian, after coldly asking the Emperor to spare him, feigns himself helpless, and Adelasia too late awakens to a knowledge of his perfidy. She falls at his feet:

I clasp thy knees once more, and I do hope Thou hast not cheated me!… Ah, now I see Thy wicked arts! Because thou knewest well My husband was a vassal of the empire, That pardon which it was not thine to give Thou didst pretend to promise me. O priest, Is this thy pity? Sorrow gives me back My wandering reason, and I waken on
The brink of an abyss; and from this wretch The mask that did so hide his face drops down And shows it in its naked hideousness
Unto the light of truth.

Frederick sends his soldiers to secure Arnaldo, but as to Ostasio and his children he relents somewhat, being touched by the anguish of Adelasia. Adrian rebukes his weakness, saying that he learned in the cloister to subdue these compassionate impulses. In the next scene, which is on the Capitoline Hill, the Roman Senate resolves to defend the city against the Germans to the last, and then we have Arnaldo a prisoner in a cell of the Castle of St. Angelo. The Prefect of Rome vainly entreats him to recant his heresy, and then leaves him with the announcement that he is to die before the following day. As to the soliloquy which follows, Niccolini says: “I have feigned in Arnaldo in the solemn hour of death these doubts, and I believe them exceedingly probable in a disciple of Abelard. This struggle between reason and faith is found more or less in the intellect of every one, and constitutes a sublime torment in the life of those who, like the Brescian monk, have devoted themselves from an early age to the study of philosophy and religion. None of the ideas which I attribute to Arnaldo were unknown to him, and, according to Mueller, he believed that God was all, and that the whole creation was but one of his thoughts. His other conceptions in regard to divinity are found in one of his contemporaries.” The soliloquy is as follows:

Aforetime thou hast said, O King of heaven, That in the world thou wilt not power or riches. And can he be divided from the Church
Who keeps his faith in thine immortal word, The light of souls? To remain in the truth It only needs that I confess to thee
All sins of mine. O thou eternal priest, Thou read’st my heart, and that which I can scarce Express thou seest. A great mystery
Is man unto himself, conscience a deep Which only thou canst sound. What storm is there Of guilty thoughts! Oh, pardon my rebellion! Evil springs up within the mind of man, As in its native soil, since that day Adam Abused thy great gift, and created guilt. And if each thought of ours became a deed, Who would be innocent? I did once defend The cause of Abelard, and at the decree Imposing silence on him I, too, ceased. What fault in me? Bernard in vain inspired The potentates of Europe to defend
The sepulcher of God. Mankind, his temple, I sought to liberate, and upon the earth Desired the triumph of the love divine, And life, and liberty, and progress. This, This was my doctrine, and God only knows How reason struggles with the faith in me For the supremacy of my spirit. Oh,
Forgive me, Lord. These in their war are like The rivers twain of heaven, till they return To their eternal origin, and the truth Is seen in thee, and God denies not God. I ought to pray. Thinking on thee, I pray. Yet how thy substance by three persons shared, Each equal with the other, one remains, I cannot comprehend, nor give in thee
Bounds to the infinite and human names. Father of the world, that which thou here revealest Perchance is but a thought of thine; or this Movable veil that covers here below
All thy creation is eternal illusion That hides God from us. Where to rest itself The mind hath not. It palpitates uncertain In infinite darkness, and denies more wisely Than it affirms. O God omnipotent!
I know not what thou art, or, if I know, How can I utter thee? The tongue has not Words for thee, and it falters with my thought That wrongs thee by its effort. Soon I go Out of the last doubt unto the first truth. What did I say? The intellect is soothed To faith in Christ, and therein it reposes As in the bosom of a tender mother
Her son. Arnaldo, that which thou art seeking With sterile torment, thy great teacher sought Long time in vain, and at the cross’s foot His weary reason cast itself at last.
Follow his great example, and with tears Wash out thy sins.

We leave Arnaldo in his prison, and it is supposed that he is put to death during the combat that follows between the Germans and Romans immediately after the coronation of Frederick. As the forces stand opposed to each other, two beautiful choruses are introduced–one of Romans and one of Germans. And, just before the onset, Adelasia appears and confesses that she has betrayed Arnaldo, and that he is now in the power of the papacy. At the same time the clergy are heard chanting Frederick’s coronation hymn, and then the battle begins. The Romans are beaten by the number and discipline of their enemies, and their leaders are driven out. The Germans appear before Frederic and Adrian with two hundred prisoners, and ask mercy for them. Adrian delivers them to his prefect, and it is implied that they are put to death. Then turning to Frederick, Adrian says:

Art thou content? for I have given to thee More than the crown. My words have consecrated Thy power. So let the Church and Empire be Now at last reconciled. The mystery
That holds three persons in one substance, nor Confounds them, may it make us here on earth To reign forever, image of itself,
In unity which is like to that of God.

V

So ends the tragedy, and so was accomplished the union which rested so heavily ever after upon the hearts and hopes, not only of Italians, but of all Christian men. So was confirmed that temporal power of the popes, whose destruction will be known in history as infinitely the greatest event of our greatly eventful time, and will free from the doubt and dread of many one of the most powerful agencies for good in the world; namely, the Catholic Church.

I have tried to give an idea of the magnificence and scope of this mighty tragedy of Niccolini’s, and I do not know that I can now add anything which will make this clearer. If we think of the grandeur of its plan, and how it employs for its effect the evil and the perverted good of the time in which the scene was laid, how it accords perfect sincerity to all the great actors,–to the Pope as well as to Arnaldo, to the Emperor as well as to the leaders of the people,–we must perceive that its conception is that of a very great artist. It seems to me that the execution is no less admirable. We cannot judge it by the narrow rule which the tragedies of the stage must obey; we must look at it with the generosity and the liberal imagination with which we can alone enjoy a great fiction. Then the patience, the subtlety, the strength, with which each character, individual and typical, is evolved; the picturesqueness with which every event is presented; the lyrical sweetness and beauty with which so many passages are enriched, will all be apparent to us, and we shall feel the esthetic sublimity of the work as well as its moral force and its political significance.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI

I

In the year 1798, at Recanati, a little mountain town of Tuscany, was born, noble and miserable, the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who began even in childhood to suffer the malice of that strange conspiracy of ills which consumed him. His constitution was very fragile, and it early felt the effect of the passionate ardor with which the sickly boy dedicated his life to literature. From the first he seems to have had little or no direction in his own studies, and hardly any instruction. He literally lived among his books, rarely leaving his own room except to pass into his father’s library; his research and erudition were marvelous, and at the age of sixteen he presented his father a Latin translation and comment on Plotinus, of which Sainte-Beuve said that “one who had studied Plotinus his whole life could find something useful in this work of a boy.” At that age Leopardi already knew all Greek and Latin literature; he knew French, Spanish, and English; he knew Hebrew, and disputed in that tongue with the rabbis of Ancona.

The poet’s father was Count Monaldo Leopardi, who had written little books of a religious and political character; the religion very bigoted, the politics very reactionary. His library was the largest anywhere in that region, but he seems not to have learned wisdom in it; and, though otherwise a blameless man, he used his son, who grew to manhood differing from him in all his opinions, with a rigor that was scarcely less than cruel. He was bitterly opposed to what was called progress, to religious and civil liberty; he was devoted to what was called order, which meant merely the existing order of things, the divinely appointed prince, the infallible priest. He had a mediaeval taste, and he made his palace at Recanati as much like a feudal castle as he could, with all sorts of baronial bric-a-brac. An armed vassal at his gate was out of the question, but at the door of his own chamber stood an effigy in rusty armor, bearing a tarnished halberd. He abhorred the fashions of our century, and wore those of an earlier epoch; his wife, who shared his prejudices and opinions, fantastically appareled herself to look like the portrait of some gentlewoman of as remote a date. Halls hung in damask, vast mirrors in carven frames, and stately furniture of antique form attested throughout the palace “the splendor of a race which, if its fortunes had somewhat declined, still knew how to maintain its ancient state.”

In this home passed the youth and early manhood of a poet who no sooner began to think for himself than he began to think things most discordant with his father’s principles and ideas. He believed in neither the religion nor the politics of his race; he cherished with the desire of literary achievement that vague faith in humanity, in freedom, in the future, against which the Count Monaldo had so sternly set his face; he chafed under the restraints of his father’s authority, and longed for some escape into the world. The Italians sometimes write of Leopardi’s unhappiness with passionate condemnation of his father; but neither was Count Monaldo’s part an enviable one, and it was certainly not at this period that he had all the wrong in his differences with his son. Nevertheless, it is pathetic to read how the heartsick, frail, ambitious boy, when he found some article in a newspaper that greatly pleased him, would write to the author and ask his friendship. When these journalists, who were possibly not always the wisest publicists of their time, so far responded to the young scholar’s advances as to give him their personal acquaintance as well as their friendship, the old count received them with a courteous tolerance, which had no kindness in it for their progressive ideas. He lived in dread of his son’s becoming involved in some of the many plots then hatching against order and religion, and he repressed with all his strength Leopardi’s revolutionary tendencies, which must always have been mere matters of sentiment, and not deserving of great rigor.

He seems not so much to have loved Italy as to have hated Recanati. It is a small village high up in the Apennines, between Loreto and Macerata, and is chiefly accessible in ox-carts. Small towns everywhere are dull, and perhaps are not more deadly so in Italy than they are elsewhere, but there they have a peculiarly obscure, narrow life indoors. Outdoors there is a little lounging about the _caffe_, a little stir on holidays among the lower classes and the neighboring peasants, a great deal of gossip at all times, and hardly anything more. The local nobleman, perhaps, cultivates literature as Leopardi’s father did; there is always some abbate mousing about in the local archives and writing pamphlets on disputed points of the local history; and there is the parish priest, to help form the polite society of the place. As if this social barrenness were not enough, Recanati was physically hurtful to Leopardi: the climate was very fickle; the harsh, damp air was cruel to his nerves. He says it seems to him a den where no good or beautiful thing ever comes; he bewails the common ignorance; in Recanati there is no love for letters, for the humanizing arts; nobody frequents his father’s great library, nobody buys books, nobody reads the newspapers. Yet this forlorn and detestable little town has one good thing. It has a preeminently good Italian accent, better even, he thinks, than the Roman,–which would be a greater consolation to an Italian than we can well understand. Nevertheless it was not society, and it did not make his fellow-townsmen endurable to him. He recoiled from them more and more, and the solitude in which he lived among his books filled him with a black melancholy, which he describes as a poison, corroding the life of body and soul alike. To a friend who tries to reconcile him to Recanati, he writes: “It is very well to tell me that Plutarch and Alfieri loved Chaeronea and Asti; they loved them, but they left them; and so shall I love my native place when I am away from it. Now I say I hate it because I am in it. To recall the spot where one’s childhood days were passed is dear and sweet; it is a fine saying, ‘Here you were born, and here Providence wills you to stay.’ All very fine! Say to the sick man striving to be well that he is flying in the face of Providence; tell the poor man struggling to advance himself that he is defying heaven; bid the Turk beware of baptism, for God has made him a Turk!” So Leopardi wrote when he was in comparative health and able to continue his studies. But there were long periods when his ailments denied him his sole consolation of work. Then he rose late, and walked listlessly about without opening his lips or looking at a book the whole day. As soon as he might, he returned to his studies; when he must, he abandoned them again. At such a time he once wrote to a friend who understood and loved him: “I have not energy enough to conceive a single desire, not even for death; not because I fear death, but because I cannot see any difference between that and my present life. For the first time _ennui_ not merely oppresses and wearies me, but it also agonizes and lacerates me, like a cruel pain. I am overwhelmed with a sense of the vanity of all things and the condition of men. My passions are dead, my very despair seems nonentity. As to my studies, which you urge me to continue, for the last eight months I have not known what study means; the nerves of my eyes and of my whole head are so weakened and disordered that I cannot read or listen to reading, nor can I fix my mind upon any subject.”

[Illustration: GIACOMO LEOPARDI]

At Recanati Leopardi suffered not merely solitude, but the contact of people whom he despised, and whose vulgarity was all the greater oppression when it showed itself in a sort of stupid compassionate tenderness for him. He had already suffered one of those disappointments which are the rule rather than the exception, and his first love had ended as first love always does when it ends fortunately–in disappointment. He scarcely knew the object of his passion, a young girl of humble lot, whom he used to hear singing at her loom in the house opposite his father’s palace. Count Monaldo promptly interfered, and not long afterward the young girl died. But the sensitive boy, and his biographers after him, made the most of this sorrow; and doubtless it helped to render life under his father’s roof yet heavier and harder to bear. Such as it was, it seems to have been the only love that Leopardi ever really felt, and the young girl’s memory passed into the melancholy of his life and poetry.

But he did not summon courage to abandon Recanati before his twenty-fourth year, and then he did not go with his father’s entire good-will. The count wished him to become a priest, but Leopardi shrank from the idea with horror, and there remained between him and his father not only the difference of their religious and political opinions, but an unkindness which must be remembered against the judgment, if not the heart, of the latter. He gave his son so meager an allowance that it scarcely kept him above want, and obliged him to labors and subjected him to cares which his frail health was not able bear.

From Recanati Leopardi first went to Rome; but he carried Recanati everywhere with him, and he was as solitary and as wretched in the capital of the world as in the little village of the Apennines. He despised the Romans, as they deserved, upon very short acquaintance, and he declared that his dullest fellow-villager had a greater share of good sense than the best of them. Their frivolity was incredible; the men moved him to rage and pity; the women, high and low, to loathing. In one of his letters to his brother Carlo, he says of Rome, as he found it: “I have spoken to you only about the women, because I am at a loss what to say to you about literature. Horrors upon horrors! The most sacred names profaned, the most absurd follies praised to the skies, the greatest spirits of the century trampled under foot as inferior to the smallest literary man in Rome. Philosophy despised; genius, imagination, feeling, names–I do not say things, but even names–unknown and alien to these professional poets and poetesses! Antiquarianism placed at the summit of human learning, and considered invariably and universally as the only true study of man!” This was Rome in 1822. “I do not exaggerate,” he writes, “because it is impossible, and I do not even say enough.” One of the things that moved him to the greatest disgust in the childish and insipid society of a city where he had fondly hoped to find a response to his high thoughts was the sensation caused throughout Rome by the dress and theatrical effectiveness with which a certain prelate said mass. All Rome talked of it, cardinals and noble ladies complimented the performer as if he were a ballet-dancer, and the flattered prelate used to rehearse his part, and expatiate upon his methods of study for it, to private audiences of admirers. In fact, society had then touched almost the lowest depth of degradation where society had always been corrupt and dissolute, and the reader of Massimo d’Azeglio’s memoirs may learn particulars (given with shame and regret, indeed, and yet with perfect Italian frankness) which it is not necessary to repeat here.

There were, however, many foreigners living at Rome in whose company Leopardi took great pleasure. They were chiefly Germans, and first among them was Niebuhr, who says of his first meeting with the poet: “Conceive of my astonishment when I saw standing before me in the poor little chamber a mere youth, pale and shy, frail in person, and obviously in ill health, who was by far the first, in fact the only, Greek philologist in Italy, the author of critical comments and observations which would have won honor for the first philologist in Germany, and yet only twenty-two years old! He had become thus profoundly learned without school, without instructor, without help, without encouragement, in his father’s house. I understand, too, that he is one of the first of the rising poets of Italy. What a nobly gifted people!”

Niebuhr offered to procure him a professorship of Greek philosophy in Berlin, but Leopardi would not consent to leave his own country; and then Niebuhr unsuccessfully used his influence to get him some employment from the papal government,–compliments and good wishes it gave him, but no employment and no pay.

From Rome Leopardi went to Milan, where he earned something–very little–as editor of a comment upon Petrarch. A little later he went to Bologna, where a generous and sympathetic nobleman made him tutor in his family; but Leopardi returned not long after to Recanati, where he probably found no greater content than he left there. Presently we find him at Pisa, and then at Florence, eking out the allowance from his father by such literary work as he could find to do. In the latter place it is somewhat dimly established that he again fell in love, though he despised the Florentine women almost as much as the Romans, for their extreme ignorance, folly, and pride. This love also was unhappy. There is no reason to believe that Leopardi, who inspired tender and ardent friendships in men, ever moved any woman to love. The Florentine ladies are darkly accused by one of his biographers of having laughed at the poor young pessimist, and it is very possible; but that need not make us think the worse of him, or of them either, for that matter. He is supposed to have figured the lady of his latest love under the name of Aspasia, in one of his poems, as he did his first love under that of Sylvia, in the poem so called. Doubtless the experience further embittered a life already sufficiently miserable. He left Florence, but after a brief sojourn at Rome he returned thither, where his friend Antonio Ranieri watched with a heavy heart the gradual decay of his forces, and persuaded him finally to seek the milder air of Naples. Ranieri’s father was, like Leopardi’s, of reactionary opinions, and the Neapolitan, dreading the effect of their discord, did not take his friend to his own house, but hired a villa at Capodimonte, where he lived four years in fraternal intimacy with Leopardi, and where the poet died in 1837.

Ranieri has in some sort made himself the champion of Leopardi’s fame. He has edited his poems, and has written a touching and beautiful sketch of his life. Their friendship, which was of the greatest tenderness, began when Leopardi sorely needed it; and Ranieri devoted himself to the hapless poet like a lover, as if to console him for the many years in which he had known neither reverence nor love. He indulged all the eccentricities of his guest, who for a sick man had certain strange habits, often not rising till evening, dining at midnight, and going to bed at dawn. Ranieri’s sister Paolina kept house for the friends, and shared all her brother’s compassion for Leopardi, whose family appears to have willingly left him to the care of these friends. How far the old unkindness between him and his father continued, it is hard to say. His last letter was written to his mother in May, 1837, some two weeks before his death; he thanks her for a present of ten dollars,–one may imagine from the gift and the gratitude that he was still held in a strict and parsimonious tutelage,–and begs her prayers and his father’s, for after he has seen them again, he shall not have long to live.

He did not see them again, but he continued to smile at the anxieties of his friends, who had too great reason to think that the end was much nearer than Leopardi himself supposed. On the night of the 14th of June, while they were waiting for the carriage which was to take them into the country, where they intended to pass the time together and sup at daybreak, Leopardi felt so great a difficulty of breathing–he called it asthma, but it was dropsy of the heart–that he begged them to send for a doctor. The doctor on seeing the sick man took Ranieri apart, and bade him fetch a priest without delay, and while they waited the coming of the friar, Leopardi spoke now and then with them, but sank rapidly. Finally, says Ranieri, “Leopardi opened his eyes, now larger even than their wont, and looked at me more fixedly than before. ‘I can’t see you,’ he said, with a kind of sigh. And he ceased to breathe, and his pulse and heart beat no more; and at the same moment the Friar Felice of the barefoot order of St. Augustine entered the chamber, while I, quite beside myself, called with a loud voice on him who had been my friend, my brother, my father, and who answered me nothing, and yet seemed to gaze upon me…. His death was inconceivable to me; the others were dismayed and mute; there arose between the good friar and myself the most cruel and painful dispute, … I madly contending that my friend was still alive, and beseeching him with tears to accompany with the offices of religion the passing of that great soul. But he, touching again and again the pulse and the heart, continually answered that the spirit had taken flight. At last, a spontaneous and solemn silence fell upon all in the room; the friar knelt beside the dead, and we all followed his example. Then after long and profound meditation he prayed, and we prayed with him.”

In another place Ranieri says: “The malady of Leopardi was indefinable, for having its spring in the most secret sources of life, it was like life itself, inexplicable. The bones softened and dissolved away, refusing their frail support to the flesh that covered them. The flesh itself grew thinner and more lifeless every day, for the organs of nutrition denied their office of assimilation. The lungs, cramped into a space too narrow, and not sound themselves, expanded with difficulty. With difficulty the heart freed itself from the lymph with which a slow absorption burdened it. The blood, which ill renewed itself in the hard and painful respiration, returned cold, pale, and sluggish to the enfeebled veins. And in fine, the whole mysterious circle of life, moving with such great effort, seemed from moment to moment about to pause forever. Perhaps the great cerebral sponge, beginning and end of that mysterious circle, had prepotently sucked up all the vital forces, and itself consumed in a brief time all that was meant to suffice the whole system for a long period. However it may be, the life of Leopardi was not a course, as in most men, but truly a precipitation toward death.”

Some years before he died, Leopardi had a presentiment of his death, and his end was perhaps hastened by the nervous shock of the terror produced by the cholera, which was then raging in Naples. At that time the body of a Neapolitan minister of state who had died of cholera was cast into the common burial-pit at Naples–such was the fear of contagion, and so rapidly were the dead hurried to the grave. A heavy bribe secured the remains of Leopardi from this fate, and his dust now reposes in a little church on the road to Pozzuoli.

II

“In the years of boyhood,” says the Neapolitan critic, Francesco de Sanctis, “Leopardi saw his youth vanish forever; he lived obscure, and achieved posthumous envy and renown; he was rich and noble, and he suffered from want and despite; no woman’s love ever smiled upon him, the solitary lover of his own mind, to which he gave the names of Sylvia, Aspasia, and Nerina. Therefore, with a precocious and bitter penetration, he held what we call happiness for illusions and deceits of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the internal colloquies render more bitter and intense the affections which have returned to the heart for want of nourishment in the world. Mournful colloquies and yet pleasing, where man is the suicidal vulture perpetually preying upon himself, and caressing the wound that drags him to the grave…. The first cause of his sorrow is Recanati: the intellect, capable of the universe, feels itself oppressed in an obscure village, cruel to the body and deadly to the spirit…. He leaves Recanati; he arrives in Rome; we believe him content at last, and he too believes it. Brief illusion! Rome, Bologna, Milan, Florence, Naples, are all different places, where he forever meets the same man, himself. Read the first letter that he writes from Rome: ‘In the great things I see I do not feel the least pleasure, for I know that they are marvelous, but I do not feel it, and I assure you that their multitude and grandeur wearied me after the first day.’… To Leopardi it is rarely given to interest himself in any spectacle of nature, and he never does it without a sudden and agonized return to himself…. Malign and heartless men have pretended that Leopardi was a misanthrope, a fierce hater and enemy of the human race!… Love, inexhaustible and almost ideal, was the supreme craving of that angelic heart, and never left it during life. ‘Love me, for God’s sake,’ he beseeches his brother Carlo; ‘I have need of love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life.’ And in truth it may be said that pain and love form the twofold poetry of his life.”

Leopardi lived in Italy during the long contest between the Classic and Romantic schools, and it may be said that in him many of the leading ideas of both parties were reconciled. His literary form was as severe and sculpturesque as that of Alfieri himself, whilst the most subjective and introspective of the Romantic poets did not so much color the world with his own mental and spiritual hue as Leopardi. It is not plain whether he ever declared himself for one theory or the other. He was a contributor to the literary journal which the partisans of the Romantic School founded at Florence; but he was a man so weighed upon by his own sense of the futility and vanity of all things that he could have had little spirit for mere literary contentions. His admirers try hard to make out that he was positively and actively patriotic; and it is certain that in his earlier youth he disagreed with his father’s conservative opinions, and despised the existing state of things; but later in life he satirized the aspirations and purposes of progress, though without sympathizing with those of reaction.

The poem which his chief claim to classification with the poets militant of his time rests upon is that addressed “To Italy”. Those who have read even only a little of Leopardi have read it; and I must ask their patience with a version which drops the irregular rhyme of the piece for the sake of keeping its peculiar rhythm and measure.

My native land, I see the walls and arches, The columns and the statues, and the lonely Towers of our ancestors,
But not their glory, not
The laurel and the steel that of old time Our great forefathers bore. Disarmed now, Naked thou showest thy forehead and thy breast! O me, how many wounds,
What bruises and what blood! How do I see thee, Thou loveliest Lady! Unto Heaven I cry, And to the world: “Say, say,
Who brought her unto this?” To this and worse, For both her arms are loaded down with chains, So that, unveiled and with disheveled hair, She crouches all forgotten and forlorn, Hiding her beautiful face
Between her knees, and weeps.
Weep, weep, for well thou may’st, my Italy! Born, as thou wert, to conquest,
Alike in evil and in prosperous sort! If thy sweet eyes were each a living stream, Thou could’st not weep enough
For all thy sorrow and for all thy shame. For thou wast queen, and now thou art a slave. Who speaks of thee or writes,
That thinking on thy glory in the past But says, “She was great once, but is no more.” Wherefore, oh, wherefore? Where is the ancient strength, The valor and the arms, and constancy? Who rent the sword from thee?
Who hath betrayed thee? What art, or what toil, Or what o’erwhelming force,
Hath stripped thy robe and golden wreath from thee? How did’st thou fall, and when,
From such a height unto a depth so low? Doth no one fight for thee, no one defend thee, None of thy own? Arms, arms! For I alone Will fight and fall for thee.
Grant me, O Heaven, my blood
Shall be as fire unto Italian hearts! Where are thy sons? I hear the sound of arms, Of wheels, of voices, and of drums;
In foreign fields afar
Thy children fight and fall.
Wait, Italy, wait! I see, or seem to see, A tumult as of infantry and horse,
And smoke and dust, and the swift flash of swords Like lightning among clouds.
Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close? For what, in yonder fields,
Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods, For other lands Italian swords are drawn! Oh, misery for him who dies in war,
Not for his native shores and his beloved, His wife and children dear,
But by the foes of others
For others’ cause, and cannot dying say, “Dear land of mine,
The life thou gavest me I give thee back.”

This suffers, of course, in translation, but I confess that in the original it wears something of the same perfunctory air. His patriotism was the fever-flame of the sick man’s blood; his real country was the land beyond the grave, and there is a far truer note in this address to Death.

And thou, that ever from my life’s beginning I have invoked and honored, Beautiful Death! who only Of all our earthly sorrows knowest pity: If ever celebrated
Thou wast by me; if ever I attempted To recompense the insult
That vulgar terror offers
Thy lofty state, delay no more, but listen To prayers so rarely uttered:
Shut to the light forever,
Sovereign of time, these eyes of weary anguish!

I suppose that Italian criticism of the present day would not give Leopardi nearly so high a place among the poets as his friend Ranieri claims for him and his contemporaries accorded. He seems to have been the poet of a national mood; he was the final expression of that long, hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his governments, and the reestablishment of all the little despots, native and foreign, throughout the peninsula. In this time there was unrest enough, and revolt enough of a desultory and unorganized sort, but every struggle, apparently every aspiration, for a free political and religious life ended in a more solid confirmation of the leaden misrule which weighed down the hearts of the people. To such an apathy the pensive monotone of this sick poet’s song might well seem the only truth; and one who beheld the universe with the invalid’s loath eyes, and reasoned from his own irremediable ills to a malign mystery presiding over all human affairs, and ordering a sad destiny from which there could be no defense but death, might have the authority of a prophet among those who could find no promise of better things in their earthly lot.

Leopardi’s malady was such that when he did not positively suffer he had still the memory of pain, and he was oppressed with a dreary ennui, from which he could not escape. Death, oblivion, annihilation, are the thoughts upon which he broods, and which fill his verse. The passing color of other men’s minds is the prevailing cast of his, and he, probably with far more sincerity than any other poet, nursed his despair in such utterances as this:

TO HIMSELF.

Now thou shalt rest forever,
O weary heart! The last deceit is ended, For I believed myself immortal. Cherished Hopes, and beloved delusions,
And longings to be deluded,–all are perished! Rest thee forever! Oh, greatly,
Heart, hast thou palpitated. There is nothing Worthy to move thee more, nor is earth worthy Thy sighs. For life is only
Bitterness and vexation; earth is only A heap of dust. So rest thee!
Despair for the last time. To our race Fortune Never gave any gift but death. Disdain, then, Thyself and Nature and the Power
Occultly reigning to the common ruin: Scorn, heart, the infinite emptiness of all things!

Nature was so cruel a stepmother to this man that he could see nothing but harm even in her apparent beneficence, and his verse repeats again and again his dark mistrust of the very loveliness which so keenly delights his sense. One of his early poems, called “The Quiet after the Storm”, strikes the key in which nearly all his songs are pitched. The observation of nature is very sweet and honest, and I cannot see that the philosophy in its perversion of the relations of physical and spiritual facts is less mature than that of his later work: it is a philosophy of which the first conception cannot well differ from the final expression.

… See yon blue sky that breaks
The clouds above the mountain in the west! The fields disclose themselves,
And in the valley bright the river runs. All hearts are glad; on every side
Arise the happy sounds
Of toil begun anew.
The workman, singing, to the threshold comes, With work in hand, to judge the sky,
Still humid, and the damsel next, On his report, comes forth to brim her pail With the fresh-fallen rain.
The noisy fruiterers
From lane to lane resume
Their customary cry.
The sun looks out again, and smiles upon The houses and the hills. Windows and doors Are opened wide; and on the far-off road You hear the tinkling bells and rattling wheels Of travelers that set out upon their journey.

Every heart is glad;
So grateful and so sweet
When is our life as now?

* * * * *

O Pleasure, child of Pain,
Vain joy which is the fruit
Of bygone suffering overshadowed
And wrung with cruel fears
Of death, whom life abhors;
Wherein, in long suspense,
Silent and cold and pale,
Man sat, and shook and shuddered to behold Lightnings and clouds and winds,
Furious in his offense!
Beneficent Nature, these,
These are thy bounteous gifts:
These, these are the delights
Thou offerest unto mortals! To escape From pain is bliss to us;
Anguish thou scatterest broadcast, and our woes Spring up spontaneous, and that little joy Born sometimes, for a miracle and show, Of terror is our mightiest gain. O man, Dear to the gods, count thyself fortunate If now and then relief
Thou hast from pain, and blest
When death shall come to heal thee of all pain!

“The bodily deformities which humiliated Leopardi, and the cruel infirmities that agonized him his whole life long, wrought in his heart an invincible disgust, which made him invoke death as the sole relief. His songs, while they express discontent, the discord of the world, the conviction of the nullity of human things, are exquisite in style; they breathe a perpetual melancholy, which is often sublime, and they relax and pain your soul like the music of a single chord, while their strange sweetness wins you to them again and again.” This is the language of an Italian critic who wrote after Leopardi’s death, when already it had begun to be doubted whether he was the greatest Italian poet since Dante. A still later critic finds Leopardi’s style, “without relief, without lyric flight, without the great art of contrasts, without poetic leaven,” hard to read. “Despoil those verses of their masterly polish,” he says, “reduce those thoughts to prose, and you will see how little they are akin to poetry.”

I have a feeling that my versions apply some such test to Leopardi’s work, and that the reader sees it in them at much of the disadvantage which this critic desires for it. Yet, after doing my worst, I am not wholly able to agree with him. It seems to me that there is the indestructible charm in it which, wherever we find it, we must call poetry. It is true that “its strange sweetness wins you again and again,” and that this “lonely pipe of death” thrills and solemnly delights as no other stop has done. Let us hear it again, as the poet sounds it, figuring himself a Syrian shepherd, guarding his flock by night, and weaving his song under the Eastern moon:

O flock that liest at rest, O blessed thou That knowest not thy fate, however hard, How utterly I envy thee!
Not merely that thou goest almost free Of all this weary pain,–
That every misery and every toil
And every fear thou straightway dost forget,– But most because thou knowest not ennui When on the grass thou liest in the shade. I see thee tranquil and content,
And great part of thy years
Untroubled by ennui thou passest thus. I likewise in the shadow, on the grass. Lie, and a dull disgust beclouds
My soul, and I am goaded with a spur, So that, reposing, I am farthest still From finding peace or place.
And yet I want for naught,
And have not had till now a cause for tears. What is thy bliss, how much,
I cannot tell; but thou art fortunate.

* * * * *

Or, it may be, my thought
Errs, running thus to others’ destiny; May be, to everything,
Wherever born, in cradle or in fold, That day is terrible when it was born.

It is the same note, the same voice; the theme does not change, but perhaps it is deepened in this ode:

ON THE LIKENESS OP A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN CARVEN UPON HER TOMB.

Such wast thou: now under earth
A skeleton and dust. O’er dust and bones Immovably and vainly set, and mute,
Looking upon the flight of centuries, Sole keeper of memory
And of regret is this fair counterfeit Of loveliness now vanished. That sweet look, Which made men tremble when it fell on them, As now it falls on me; that lip, which once, Like some full vase of sweets,
Ran over with delight; that fair neck, clasped By longing, and that soft and amorous hand, Which often did impart
An icy thrill unto the hand it touched; That breast, which visibly
Blanched with its beauty him who looked on it– All these things were, and now
Dust art thou, filth, a fell
And hideous sight hidden beneath a stone. Thus fate hath wrought its will
Upon the semblance that to us did seem Heaven’s vividest image! Eternal mystery Of mortal being! To-day the ineffable
Fountain of thoughts and feelings vast and high, Beauty reigns sovereign, and seems
Like splendor thrown afar
From some immortal essence on these sands, To give our mortal state
A sign and hope secure of destinies Higher than human, and of fortunate realms, And golden worlds unknown.
To-morrow, at a touch,
Loathsome to see, abominable, abject, Becomes the thing that was
All but angelical before;
And from men’s memories
All that its loveliness
Inspired forever faults and fades away.

Ineffable desires
And visions high and pure
Rise in the happy soul,
Lulled by the sound of cunning harmonies Whereon the spirit floats,
As at his pleasure floats
Some fearless swimmer over the deep sea; But if a discord strike
The wounded sense, to naught
All that fair paradise in an instant falls.

Mortality! if thou
Be wholly frail and vile,
Be only dust and shadow, how canst thou So deeply feel? And if thou be
In part divine, how can thy will and thought By things so poor and base
So easily be awakened and quenched?

Let us touch for the last time this pensive chord, and listen to its response of hopeless love. This poem, in which he turns to address the spirit of the poor child whom he loved boyishly at Recanati, is pathetic with the fact that possibly she alone ever reciprocated the tenderness with which his heart was filled.

TO SYLVIA.

Sylvia, dost thou remember
In this that season of thy mortal being When from thine eyes shone beauty,
In thy shy glances fugitive and smiling, And joyously and pensively the borders Of childhood thou did’st traverse?

All day the quiet chambers
And the ways near resounded
To thy perpetual singing,
When thou, intent upon some girlish labor, Sat’st utterly contented,
With the fair future brightening in thy vision. It was the fragrant month of May, and ever Thus thou thy days beguiledst.

I, leaving my fair studies,
Leaving my manuscripts and toil-stained volumes, Wherein I spent the better
Part of myself and of my young existence, Leaned sometimes idly from my father’s windows, And listened to the music of thy singing, And to thy hand, that fleetly
Ran o’er the threads of webs that thou wast weaving. I looked to the calm heavens,
Unto the golden lanes and orchards, And unto the far sea and to the mountains; No mortal tongue may utter
What in my heart I felt then.

O Sylvia mine, what visions,
What hopes, what hearts, we had in that far season! How fair and good before us
Seemed human life and fortune!
When I remember hope so great, beloved, An utter desolation
And bitterness o’erwhelm me,
And I return to mourn my evil fortune. O Nature, faithless Nature,
Wherefore dost thou not give us
That which thou promisest? Wherefore deceivest, With so great guile, thy children?

Thou, ere the freshness of thy spring was withered. Stricken by thy fell malady, and vanquished, Did’st perish, O my darling! and the blossom Of thy years sawest;
Thy heart was never melted
At the sweet praise, now of thy raven tresses, Now of thy glances amorous and bashful; Never with thee the holiday-free maidens Reasoned of love and loving.

Ah! briefly perished, likewise,
My own sweet hope; and destiny denied me Youth, even in my childhood!
Alas, alas, beloved,
Companion of my childhood!
Alas, my mourned hope! how art thou vanished Out of my place forever!
This is that world? the pleasures, The love, the labors, the events, we talked of, These, when we prattled long ago together? Is this the fortune of our race, O Heaven? At the truth’s joyless dawning,
Thou fellest, sad one, with thy pale hand pointing Unto cold death, and an unknown and naked Sepulcher in the distance.

III

These pieces fairly indicate the range of Leopardi, and I confess that they and the rest that I have read leave me somewhat puzzled in the presence of his reputation. This, to be sure, is largely based upon his prose writings–his dialogues, full of irony and sarcasm–and his unquestionable scholarship. But the poetry is the heart of his fame, and is it enough to justify it? I suppose that such poetry owes very much of its peculiar influence to that awful love we all have of hovering about the idea of death–of playing with the great catastrophe of our several tragedies and farces, and of marveling what it can be. There are moods which the languid despair of Leopardi’s poetry can always evoke, and in which it seems that the most life can do is to leave us, and let us lie down and cease. But I fancy we all agree that these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life, though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain with an appeal or apostrophe to death–not the real death, that comes with a sharp, quick agony, or “after long lying in bed”, after many days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and medicines that cease even to relieve at last; not this death, that comes in all the horror of undertaking, but a picturesque and impressive abstraction, whose business it is to relieve us in the most effective way of all our troubles, and at the same time to avenge us somehow upon the indefinitely ungrateful and unworthy world we abandon–if a poet will do this, we are very apt to like him. There is little doubt that Leopardi was sincere, and there is little reason why he should not have been so, for life could give him nothing but pain.

De Sanctis, whom I have quoted already, and who speaks, I believe, with rather more authority than any other modern Italian critic, and certainly with great clearness and acuteness, does not commit himself to specific praise of Leopardi’s work. But he seems to regard him as an important expression, if not force or influence, and he has some words about him, at the close of his “History of Italian Literature”, which have interested me, not only for the estimate of Leopardi which they embody, but for the singularly distinct statement which they make of the modern literary attitude. I should not, myself, have felt that Leopardi represented this, but I am willing that the reader should feel it, if he can. De Sanctis has been speaking of the Romantic period in Italy, when he says:

“Giacomo Leopardi marks the close of this period. Metaphysics at war with theology had ended in this attempt at reconciliation. The multiplicity of systems had discredited science itself. Metaphysics was regarded as a revival of theology. The Idea seemed a substitute for providence. Those philosophies of history, of religion, of humanity, had the air of poetical inventions…. That reconciliation between the old and new, tolerated as a temporary political necessity, seemed at bottom a profanation of science, a moral weakness…. Faith in revelation had been wanting; faith in philosophy itself was now wanting. Mystery re-appeared. The philosopher knew as much as the peasant. Of this mystery, Giacomo Leopardi was the echo in the solitude of his thought and his pain. His skepticism announced the dissolution of this theologico-metaphysical world, and inaugurated the reign of the arid True, of the Real. His songs are the most profound and occult voices of that laborious transition called the nineteenth century. That which has importance is not the brilliant exterior of that century of progress, and it is not without irony that he speaks of the progressive destinies of mankind. That which has importance is the exploration of one’s own breast, the inner world, virtue, liberty, love, all the ideals of religion, of science, and of poetry–shadows and illusions in the presence of reason, yet which warm the heart, and will not die. Mystery destroys the intellectual world; it leaves the moral world intact. This tenacious life of the inner world, despite the fall of all theological and metaphysical worlds, is the originality of Leopardi, and gives his skepticism a religious stamp. … Every one feels in it a new creation. The instrument of this renovation is criticism…. The sense of the real continues to develop itself; the positive sciences come to the top, and cast out all the ideal and systematic constructions. New dogmas lose credit. Criticism remains intact. The patient labor of analysis begins again…. Socialism re-appears in the political order, positivism in the intellectual order. The word is no longer liberty, but justice. … Literature also undergoes transformation. It rejects classes, distinctions, privileges. The ugly stands beside the beautiful; or rather, there is no longer ugly or beautiful, neither ideal nor real, neither infinite nor finite…. There is but one thing only, the Living.”

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI

I

Giuseppe Giusti, who is the greatest Italian satirist of this century, and is in some respects the greatest Italian poet, was born in 1809 at Mossummano in Tuscany, of parentage noble and otherwise distinguished; one of his paternal ancestors had assisted the liberal Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo to compile his famous code, and his mother’s father had been a republican in 1799. There was also an hereditary taste for literature in the family; and Giusti says, in one of his charming letters, that almost as soon as he had learned to speak, his father taught him the ballad of Count Ugolino, and he adds, “I have always had a passion for song, a passion for verses, and more than a passion for Dante.” His education passed later into the hands of a priest, who had spent much time as a teacher in Vienna, and was impetuous, choleric, and thoroughly German in principle. “I was given him to be taught,” says Giusti, “but he undertook to tame me”; and he remembered reading with him a Plutarch for youth, and the “Lives of the Saints”, but chiefly was, as he says, so “caned, contraried, and martyred” by him, that, when the priest wept at their final parting, the boy could by no means account for the burst of tenderness. Giusti was then going