In a vein as fierce and passionate as this is tender, Procida relates how, returning to Sicily when he was believed dead by the French, he passed in secret over the island and inflamed Italian hatred of the foreigners:
I sought the pathless woods,
And drew the cowards thence and made them blush,
And then made fury follow on their shame.
I hailed the peasant in his fertile fields,
Where, 'neath the burden of the cruel tribute,
He dropped from famine 'midst the harvest sheaves,
With his starved brood: “Open thou with thy scythe
The breasts of Frenchmen; let the earth no more
Be fertile to our tyrants.” I found my way
In palaces, in hovels; tranquil, I
Both great and lowly did make drunk with rage.
I knew the art to call forth cruel tears
In every eye, to wake in every heart
A love of slaughter, a ferocious need
Of blood. And in a thousand strong right hands
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:
Perchè 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.