IV
GIOVANNI BERCHET was a poet who alone ought to be enough to take from the Lombard romanticists the unjust reproach of “resignation”. “Where our poetry,” says De Sanctis, “throws off every disguise, romantic or classic, is in the verse of Berchet.... If Giovanni Berchet had remained in Italy, probably his genius would have remained enveloped in the allusions and shadows of romanticism. But in his exile at London he uttered the sorrow and the wrath of his betrayed and vanquished country. It was the accent of the national indignation which, leaving the generalities of the sonnets and the ballads, dramatized itself and portrayed our life in its most touching phases.”
Berchet's family was of French origin, but he was the most Italian of Italians, and nearly all his poems are of an ardent political tint and temperature. Naturally, he spent a great part of his life in exile after the Austrians were reestablished in Milan; he was some time in England, and I believe he died in Switzerland.
I have most of his patriotic poems in a little book which is curiously historical of a situation forever past. I picked it up, I do not remember where or when, in Venice; and as it is a collection of pieces all meant to embitter the spirit against Austria, it had doubtless not been brought into the city with the connivance of the police. There is no telling where it was printed, the mysterious date of publication being “Italy, 1861”, and nothing more, with the English motto: “Adieu, my native land, adieu!”
The principal poem here is called “Le Fantasie”, and consists of a series of lyrics in which an Italian exile contrasts the Lombards, who drove out Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century, with the Lombards of 1829, who crouched under the power defied of old. It is full of burning reproaches, sarcasms, and appeals; and it probably had some influence in renewing the political agitation which in Italy followed the French revolution of 1830. Other poems of Berchet represent social aspects of the Austrian rule, like one entitled “Remorse”, which paints the isolation and wretchedness of an Italian woman married to an Austrian; and another, “Giulia”, which gives a picture of the frantic misery of an Austrian conscription in Italy. A very impressive poem is that called “The Hermit of Mt. Cenis”. A traveler reaches the summit of the pass, and, looking over upon the beauty and magnificence of the Italian plains, and seeing only their loveliness and peace, his face is lighted up with an involuntary smile, when suddenly the hermit who knows all the invisible disaster and despair of the scene suddenly accosts him with, “Accursed be he who approaches without tears this home of sorrow!”
At the time the Romantic School rose in Italian literature, say from 1815 till 1820, society was brilliant, if not contented or happy. In Lombardy and Venetia, immediately after the treaties of the Holy Alliance had consigned these provinces to Austria, there flourished famous conversazioni at many noble houses. In those of Milan many distinguished literary men of other nations met. Byron and Hobhouse were frequenters of the same salons as Pellico, Manzoni, and Grossi; the Schlegels represented the German Romantic School, and Madame de Staël the sympathizing movement in France. There was very much that was vicious still, and very much that was ignoble in Italian society, but this was by sufferance and not as of old by approval; and it appears that the tone of the highest life was intellectual. It cannot be claimed that this tone was at all so general as the badness of the last century. It was not so easily imitated as that, and it could not penetrate so subtly into all ranks and conditions. Still it was very observable, and mingled with it in many leading minds was the strain of religious resignation, audible in Manzoni's poetry. That was a time when the Italians might, if ever, have adapted themselves to foreign rule; but the Austrians, sofar from having learned political wisdom during the period of their expulsion from Italy, had actually retrograded; from being passive authorities whom long sojourn was gradually Italianizing, they had, in their absence, become active and relentless tyrants, and they now seemed to study how most effectually to alienate themselves. They found out their error later, but when too late to repair it, and from 1820 until 1859 in Milan, and until 1866 in Venice, the hatred, which they had themselves enkindled, burned fiercer and fiercer against them. It is not extravagant to say that if their rule had continued a hundred years longer the Italians would never have been reconciled to it. Society took the form of habitual and implacable defiance to them. The life of the whole people might be said to have resolved itself into a protest against their presence. This hatred was the heritage of children from their parents, the bond between friends, the basis of social faith; it was a thread even in the tie between lovers; it was so intense and so pervasive that it cannot be spoken.
Berchet was the vividest, if not the earliest, expression of it in literature, and the following poem, which I have already mentioned, is, therefore, not only intensely true to Italian feeling, but entirely realistic in its truth to a common fact.
REMORSE.
Alone in the midst of the throng,
'Mid the lights and the splendor alone,
Her eyes, dropped for shame of her wrong,
She lifts not to eyes she has known:
Around her the whirl and the stir
Of the light-footing dancers she hears;
None seeks her; no whisper for her
Of the gracious words filling her ears.
The fair boy that runs to her knees,
With a shout for his mother, and kiss
For the tear-drop that welling he sees
To her eyes from her sorrow's abyss,—
Though he blooms like a rose, the fair boy,
No praise of his beauty is heard;
None with him stays to jest or to toy,
None to her gives a smile or a word.
If, unknowing, one ask who may be
This woman, that, as in disgrace,
O'er the curls of the boy at her knee
Bows her beautiful, joyless face,
A hundred tongues answer in scorn,
A hundred lips teach him to know—
“Wife of one of our tyrants, forsworn
To her friends in her truth to their foe.”
At the play, in the streets, in the lanes,
At the fane of the merciful God,
'Midst a people in prison and chains,
Spy-haunted, at home and abroad—
Steals through all like the hiss of a snake
Hate, by terror itself unsuppressed:
“Cursed be the Italian could take
The Austrian foe to her breast!”
Alone—but the absence she mourned
As widowhood mourneth, is past:
Her heart leaps for her husband returned
From his garrison far-off at last?
Ah, no! For this woman forlorn
Love is dead, she has felt him depart:
With far other thoughts she is torn,
Far other the grief at her heart.
When the shame that has darkened her days
Fantasmal at night fills the gloom,
When her soul, lost in wildering ways,
Flies the past, and the terror to come—
When she leaps from her slumbers to hark,
As if for her little one's call,
It is then to the pitiless dark
That her woe-burdened soul utters all:
“Woe is me! It was God's righteous hand
My brain with its madness that smote:
At the alien's flattering command
The land of my birth I forgot!
I, the girl who was loved and adored,
Feasted, honored in every place,
Now what am I? The apostate abhorred,
Who was false to her home and her race!
“I turned from the common disaster;
My brothers oppressed I denied;
I smiled on their insolent master;
I came and sat down by his side.
Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought;
Thou hast wrought it—it clingeth to thee,
And for all that thou sufferest, naught
From its meshes thy spirit can free.
“Oh, the scorn I have tasted! They know not,
Who pour it on me, how it burns;
How it galls the meek spirit, whose woe not
Their hating with hating returns!
Fool! I merit it: I have not holden
My feet from their paths! Mine the blame:
I have sought in their eyes to embolden
This visage devoted to shame!
“Rejected and followed with scorn,
My child, like a child born of sin,
In the land where my darling was born,
He lives exiled! A refuge to win
From their hatred, he runs in dismay
To my arms. But the day may yet be
When my son shall the insult repay,
I have nurtured him in, unto me!
“If it chances that ever the slave
Snaps the shackles that bind him, and leaps
Into life in the heart of the brave
The sense of the might that now sleeps—
To which people, which side shall I cleave?
Which fate shall I curse with my own?
To which banner pray Heaven to give
The triumph? Which desire o'erthrown?
“Italian, and sister, and wife,
And mother, unfriended, alone,
Outcast, I wander through life,
Over shard and bramble and stone!
Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought;
Thou hast wrought it—it clingeth to thee,
And for all that thou sufferest, naught
From its meshes thy spirit shall free!”