The genius of Monti, however, was not that of a tragedian: lyrical and imaginative rhapsodies, rather than the concatenation of a plot and the impersonation of human passion, were the native bent of his mind. The story of "Aristodemo" is eminently simple in its construction; the interest is entirely confined to the principal character, and there is almost no action to support the piece. Aristodemo had, to acquire the popular favour, and his election to the throne of Mycene, resolved to sacrifice his daughter, when some angry god required that the blood of a virgin should be shed on his altar. To save the girl, her lover declares that she has yielded to him, and is about to be a mother. In his fury the father destroys her, and afterwards discovers that she is innocent. To add to his misfortunes he loses his only other child, a little girl of three years old, in a skirmish with the Spartans. Henceforth he is pursued by remorse; the spectacle of his murdered daughter for ever haunts him, and horror and despair darken his soul. The tragedy opens, fifteen years after these events, at the conclusion of a war with Sparta, with the discussion for a treaty of peace, when the prisoners on both sides are to be given up. Among those taken by Aristodemo is a girl, to whom he has attached himself with paternal fondness, and who devotes herself to mitigating his sufferings. She, of course, is discovered to be his long lost daughter; but this is not made known to him till the last scene, when the agonies of remorse, joined to sorrow at losing his last consolation, have driven him to destroy himself. The pure but warm attachment between him and his unknown child is delicately and sweetly described, while his passionate and remorseful ravings, though they rise to sublimity, shock us by going beyond ideal terrors into images palpably disagreeable. From this sketch it may be seen how deficient in action the piece is. Aristodemo comes before us to lament and to rave. Still, despite his woe, he is a hero and a king; and, when the interests of his country require it, he can dismiss his private griefs, and assert the majesty of the crown. His character is conceived in the truth and sublimity of tragic nature; and the interest that hovers over him, the dim but harrowing horrors of his spectral visions, the mingled remorse, terror, and love that tear his heart, and the poetry in which these overpowering passions are expressed, take absolutely from the languor which the want of action might otherwise impart.
The success of "Aristodemo" induced Monti to write another drama. "Galeotto Manfredi" is, however, a failure. It is founded on the passion of jealousy. In his preface the poet mentions that it is wanting in tragic dignity: such is not of necessity the fault of his subject, but it decidedly is of his method of treating it, and there is no poetry to redeem it from the charge of mediocrity.
He married, about this period, the daughter of the celebrated cavaliere Giovanni Pickler, who had died a short time before. It is a singular fact, that he made choice of his wife without having seen her, and not on account of her extraordinary beauty, of which he was ignorant, but from respect for the reputation of her father, and a wish to console his afflicted family; while she accepted him on account of her admiration for the author of "Aristodemo." And now we enter on a new epoch of Monti's life, when he composed his most celebrated poem, and at the same time gave to his productions that political groundwork which, from his vacillation of principle, has not redounded to his honour.
The French revolution was at its height; and the time-worn and absolute governments of every country of Europe were shaken, as by an earthquake, by the mere echo of the Parisian tocsin. The French, drunk with enthusiasm, were eager to call the whole world into a fraternity of liberty and equality; and many were the warm young hearts, long bowed down by the yoke of the continental systems of slavery, that beat responsive to the call. One of the persons sent by the French to spread their revolutionary tenets beyond the Alps was Hugh Basseville. He was the son of a dyer at Abbeville; the talents he early displayed induced his father to wish him to pursue a more dignified career, and he educated him for the church, as the only profession then open to the lowly born. But Basseville studied theology only to find doubts as to his creed; he soon abandoned the clerical profession, and, going to Paris, gave himself up entirely to literature. He here fell in with two Americans, who engaged him as their companion, or tutor, in a journey they made through Germany. At Berlin, Basseville became acquainted with Mirabeau. Leaving his Americans he visited Holland, and wrote a work on the Elements of Mythology, and a volume of amatory poems. When the revolution began, he attached himself to the royal, or rather constitutional, party, and instituted a journal which took that side. He wrote also a "History of the French Revolution," dedicated to La Fayette, with whom he was intimately acquainted; and the views he developes are moderate and rational. He was naturally eloquent, and his manners were agreeable, while he joined to these fascinating qualities the more solid ones of industry, intelligence, and boldness, so that he acquired the confidence and friendship of several of the Girondist leaders. General Demourier named him secretary to the embassy at Naples; and while there he visited Rome, for the purpose of secretly propagating revolutionary doctrines. This imprudence cost him his life. On the night of the 13th of January, 1793, he was assailed by the populace, and received a stab, of which he died thirty-four hours after. In his last moments, it is said that he was induced to regard his conduct, in endeavouring to raise sedition against the pope, as criminal, and to have exclaimed several times that he died the victim of folly.
Monti, who lived in the service of the pope's nephew, and was thus attached to the papal court, and without that ardour for liberty which is so natural to many hearts, and which appears at once senseless and even wicked to those who do not feel independence of thought to be the greatest of human blessings, of course looked on the French revolution as a series of crimes, and saw no redeeming good in the madness that urged a whole nation to so terrific a mixture of heroism and guilt. He was acquainted with Basseville, and, hearing the recantations of his dying moments, celebrated at once the repentance of his friend, and the awful tragedy acted almost at the same moment (Louis XVI. was beheaded on the 19th of January, 1793), in a poem entitled the "Basvilliana." In this he feigns that the great enemy of mankind contended with the angel of God for the soul of the murdered man. His death-bed remorse caused the good spirit to remain triumphant; but as the crime-tainted soul could not, according to the tenets of Catholicism, be received at once into Paradise, the disembodied spirit of Basseville was condemned to visit once more the banks of the Seine, and to view the horrors there perpetrated, as the consequence of his guilty and impracticable theories. The imagination of Monti developed itself in the happiest manner in treating this theme; and the mingled emotions of horror and grief that pervade the poem take a shape at once sublime and pathetic. The soul of Basseville hovers over Paris at the moment that Louis XVI. loses his head by the guillotine. The imagery with which he adorns the scene is original and majestic. Four mighty shadows rush on the scaffold, and hover over the dying monarch; shadows of former regicides, who glory in the companionship of crime. Ravaillac, Ankerstrom, Damiens, and one (the executioner of our Charles I.) who veils his face with his hand, proudly assist in giving the fatal blow. Louis dies, and before his beatified ghost Basseville prostrates himself; but his penance is not got over, and he is forced to view other scenes of greater bloodshed and more frightful violence; but as the poem enters upon these, it breaks off abruptly, and is left unfinished.
The style of this poem does not resemble modern Italian poetry, but is modelled on that of Dante; so faithfully modelled, that many expressions, ideas, and even whole lines are, as it were, transfused, into Monti's verses. It is a singular fact that no poet was ever a greater plagiarist than the author of the "Basvilliana;" but the verses of others, which he thus employs, are framed, as it were, so magnificently by original ones, and are placed with such propriety, and acknowledged with such frankness, that, as an English author observes, "so far from accusing him of plagiarism, we are agreeably surprised by the new aspect which he gives to beauties already familiar to every reader." And thus transfusion expresses his imitations better than the word borrowing: for though the form of expression is the same, a new soul and a new sense—not better, certainly, but different from their former one—are breathed into them. In some sort Dante and Monti resembled each other in the cast of their ideas. They were both painters of the mind's images. Dante was the more faithful, delicate, and heartfelt; but there is a shadowy grandeur joined to a perfection of taste and fire of sentiment in Monti, which renders his poetry highly fascinating and beautiful.
The "Basvilliana" at once raised Monti's reputation higher than that of any poet who had for centuries appeared in Italy; and he might have been considered the laureate of royalty, but that his character was not adorned by that sincere and exalted enthusiasm, without which no man can, with any success, advocate any cause which embraces the interests of human nature.
The tide of French republicanism, checked a little in its first advances, now swelled by Bonaparte's victories, overflowed the Alps and deluged Italy. The Austrians, defeated at Montenotte, Lodi, and Arcoli, were driven from Lombardy: and the Italians hoped to exchange servitude to a foreign power for national independence; forgetting that liberty, when given, may also be withdrawn, and that it is only by force that any real freedom can be acquired. While resistance was made to the French arms, the requisitions of the victor, and the seizure of the finest works of art, might have opened their eyes to the real views of their soi-disant deliverers. Napoleon himself had but one idea with regard to liberty, which was a free scope to the exercise of his own will. When that was given him, he could be generous, magnificent, and useful; but when his measures were obstructed, no tyrant ever exceeded him in the combinations of a despotism which at once crushed a nation, and bore down with an iron hand every individual that composed it. Bonaparte's ambition, however, could only be gratified in France, and the conquest of Italy was but the stepping-stone to the French empire. Still, when all the north of the peninsula was subjected to him, when the pope had submitted to his terms, and the haughty queen of Naples had been induced to enter into a treaty with her sister's destroyers, he could no longer with any grace refuse the shows of freedom so often promised. On the 3d of January, 1797, the Cisalpine republic was erected.
Monti had been before invited to accept a professor's chair in the university of Pavia, which he had refused. In the month of February 1797, general Marmont was sent to Rome on occasion of the treaty of Tolentino, to carry letters from Bonaparte to the pope. Monti became acquainted with him; being then in a bad state of health, and advised to change the air of Rome for that of Tuscany, he accepted Marmont's invitation, who offered him a seat in his carriage, and proceeded to Florence. It may be imagined, that familiar intercourse with one of Napoleon's generals was the foundation of Monti's admiration for the French hero, and the cause of his opening his eyes to the good to be derived from adhering to the new order of things in his native country. At first he entertained the delusive hope that the blessing of liberty had really been conferred on Italy by the French arms, and that his countrymen would rise from chains and slavery to the enjoyment of national independence under national institutions; and yet the extravagant praise of Napoleon, which he indulges in, in all his poems written at this time, does not bear the marks of a sincere patriotism. Besides this, he had to struggle with many personal mortifications. The "Basvilliana" was not forgotten. French exactions and French assumptions had already alienated the minds of the noble born among the Italians. They feared the conqueror, but disdained the masquerade of liberty in which they were invited to play a part: thus the better classes shrunk from forming a part of the new governments, and the offices devolved upon men who had little to lose either in possessions or character. They regarded Monti with envy and aversion, and, instead of receiving him as a convert with open arms, his superior claims as a man of talent caused them to persecute him as an interloper and almost as a spy. The heads of the government, indeed, at first favoured him: he was invited to Milan, and elected central secretary of foreign affairs; but he was soon disturbed by persecutions. "My arrival," he writes several years afterwards, "was hailed by the usual abuse of the republican journals, who censured the directory for employing an enemy of the republic. I loved liberty; but the object of my love was the freedom described in the writings of Cicero and Plutarch: that which was adored on the altars of Milan appeared to me a prostitute, and I refused to worship her. Hence my excommunication,—hence the public burning of the 'Basvilliana.' On this I was obliged to prostrate myself before the idol. I sang her virtues, and became a revolutionary poet: I grew insane with the rest, and my conversion procured me patronage and grace."
It was not without a struggle that he stooped to these abject submissions, and several events first intervened. The hatred of the democrats, then the rulers of the Cisalpine republic, caused them to pass a law which decreed that no one should be permitted to hold any public employment who, since the year 1 of the French republic, had published any books tending to throw odium on democracy. Monti's poem was the principal object of this law; and one of his adversaries exclaimed, "Let us get rid, not of the author of some foolish sonnet in praise of kings, but of those who, with powerful enthusiasm and Dantesque imagination, have inspired a hatred for democracy." This law being passed, Monti lost his situation. He had published other poems since the "Basvilliana;" but even these were not considered sufficiently democratic.