Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions

by William Dean Howells

Perhaps, after all, he was not so greatly to blame. As De Sanctis subtly observes: “He was always a liberal. How not be liberal in those days when even the reactionaries shouted for liberty—of course, true liberty, as they called it? And in that name he glorified all governments.... And it was not with hypocrisy.... He was a man who would have liked to reconcile the old and the new ideas, all opinions, yet, being forced to choose, he clung to the majority, with no desire to play the martyr. So he became the secretary of the dominant feeling, the poet of success. Kindly, tolerant, sincere, a good friend, a courtier more from necessity and weakness than perversity or wickedness; if he could have retired into his own heart, he might have come out a poet.” Monti, in fact, was always an improvvisatore, and the subjects which events cast in his way were like the themes which the improvvisatore receives from his audience. He applied his poetic faculty to their celebration with marvelous facility, and, doubtless, regarded the results as rhetorical feats. His poetry was an art, not a principle; and perhaps he was really surprised when people thought him in earnest, and held him personally to account for what he wrote. “A man of sensation, rather than sentiment,” says Arnaud, “Monti cared only for the objective side of life. He poured out melodies, colors, and chaff in the service of all causes; he was the poet-advocate, the Siren of the Italian Parnassus.” Of course such a man instinctively hated the ideas of the Romantic school, and he contested their progress in literature with great bitterness. He believed that poetry meant feigning, not making; and he declared that “the hard truth was the grave of the beautiful.” The latter years of his life were spent in futile battle with the “audacious boreal school” and in noxious revival of the foolish old disputes of the Italian grammarians; and Emiliani-Giudici condemns him for having done more than any enemy of his country to turn Italian thought from questions of patriotic interest to questions of philology, from the unity of Italy to the unity of the language, from the usurpations and tyranny of Austria to the assumptions of Della Crusca. But Monti could scarcely help any cause which he espoused; and it seems to me that he was as well employed in disputing the claims of the Tuscan dialect to be considered the Italian language as he would have been in any other way. The wonderful facility, no less than the unreality, of the man appears in many things, but in none more remarkably than his translation of Homer, which is the translation universally accepted and approved in Italy. He knew little more than the Greek alphabet, and produced his translation from the preceding versions in Latin and Italian, submitting the work to the correction of eminent scholars before he printed it. His poems fill many volumes; and all display the ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore. From a fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which he presented them as new. The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great. He is a classic of those classics common to all languages—dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to the air.

III

From the Bassvilliana I have translated the passage descriptive of Louis XVI.'s ascent to heaven; and I offer this, perhaps not quite justly, in illustration of what I have been saying of Monti as a poet. There is something of his curious verbal beauty in it, and his singular good luck of phrase, with his fortunate reminiscences of other poets; the collocation of the different parts is very comical, and the application of it all to Louis XVI. is one of the most preposterous things in literature. But one must remember that the poor king was merely a subject, a theme, with the poet.

As when the sun uprears himself among
The lesser dazzling substances, and drives
His eager steeds along the fervid curve,—
When in one only hue is painted all
The heavenly vault, and every other star
Is touched with pallor and doth veil its front,
So with sidereal splendor all aflame
Amid a thousand glad souls following,
High into heaven arose that beauteous soul.
Smiled, as he passed them, the majestical,
Tremulous daughters of the light, and shook
Their glowing and dewy tresses as they moved,
He among all with longing and with love
Beaming, ascended until he was come
Before the triune uncreated life;
There his flight ceases, there the heart, become
Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,
And all the urgence of desire is lost;
There on his temples he receives the crown
Of living amaranth immortal, on
His cheek the kiss of everlasting peace.
And then were heard consonances and notes
Of an ineffable sweetness, and the orbs
Began again to move their starry wheels.
More swiftly yet the steeds that bore the day
Exulting flew, and with their mighty tread,
Did beat the circuit of their airy way.

In this there are three really beautiful lines; namely, those which describe the arrival of the spirit in the presence of God:

There his flight ceases, there the heart, become
Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,
And all the urgence of desire is lost;

Or, as it stands in the Italian:

Ivi queta il suo voi, ivi s'appunta
In tre sguardi beata, ivi il cor tace,
E tutta perde del desio la punta.

It was the fortune of Monti, as I have said, to sing all round and upon every side of every subject, and he was governed only by knowledge of which side was for the moment uppermost. If a poem attacked the French when their triumph seemed doubtful, the offending verses were erased as soon as the French conquered, and the same poem unblushingly exalted them in a new edition;—now religion and the Church were celebrated in Monti's song, now the goddess of Reason and the reign of liberty; the Pope was lauded in Rome, and the Inquisition was attacked in Milan; England was praised whilst Monti was in the anti-French interest, and as soon as the poet could turn his coat of many colors, the sun was urged to withdraw from England the small amount of light and heat which it vouchsafed the foggy island; and the Rev. Henry Boyd, who translated the Bassvilliana into our tongue, must have been very much dismayed to find this eloquent foe of revolutions assailing the hereditary enemy of France in his next poem, and uttering the hope that she might be surrounded with waves of blood and with darkness, and shaken with earthquakes. But all this was nothing to Monti's treatment of the shade of poor King Louis XVI. We have seen with how much ceremony the poet ushered that unhappy prince into eternal bliss, and in Mr. Boyd's translation of the Bassvilliana, we can read the portents with which Monti makes the heavens recognize the crime of his execution in Paris.

Then from their houses, like a billowy tide,
Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast
Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified.
Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed
By wheels, by feet of horses and of men;
The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest;
Like distant thunder's roar, scarce within ken,
Like the hoarse murmurs of the midnight surge,
Like the north wind rushing from its far-off den.