Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions

by William Dean Howells

Immersed in suppers and balls,
A martyr in yellow gloves,

sings of Italy, of the people, of progress, with the rhetoricalities of the modern Arcadians; and he has a poem called “The Ball”, which must fairly, as it certainly does wittily, represent one of those anomalous entertainments which rich foreigners give in Italy, and to which all sorts of irregular aliens resort, something of the local aristocracy appearing also in a ghostly and bewildered way. Yet even in this poem there is a political lesson.

I suppose, in fine, that I shall most interest my readers in Giusti, if I translate here the pieces that have most interested me. Of all, I like best the poem which he calls “St. Ambrose”, and I think the reader will agree with me about it. It seems not only very perfect as a bit of art, with its subtly intended and apparently capricious mingling of satirical and pathetic sentiment, but valuable for its vivid expression of Italian feeling toward the Austrians. These the Italians hated as part of a stupid and brutal oppression; they despised them somewhat as a torpid-witted folk, but individually liked them for their amiability and good nature, and in their better moments they pitied them as the victims of a common tyranny. I will not be so adventurous as to say how far the beautiful military music of the Austrians tended to lighten the burden of a German garrison in an Italian city; but certainly whoever has heard that music must have felt, for one base and shameful moment, that the noise of so much of a free press as opposed his own opinions might be advantageously exchanged for it. The poem of “St. Ambrose”, written in 1846, when the Germans seemed so firmly fixed in Milan, is impersonally addressed to some Italian, holding office under the Austrian government, and, therefore, in the German interest.

ST. AMBROSE.
Your Excellency is not pleased with me
Because of certain jests I made of late,
And, for my putting rogues in pillory,
Accuse me of being anti-German. Wait,
And hear a thing that happened recently:
When wandering here and there one day as fate
Led me, by some odd accident I ran
On the old church St. Ambrose, at Milan.
My comrade of the moment was, by chance,
The young son of one Sandro{1}—one of those
Troublesome heads—an author of romance—
Promessi Sposi—your Excellency knows
The book, perhaps?—has given it a glance?
Ah, no? I see! God give your brain repose;
With graver interests occupied, your head
To all such stuff as literature is dead.
I enter, and the church is full of troops:
Of northern soldiers, of Croatians, say,
And of Bohemians, standing there in groups
As stiff as dry poles stuck in vineyards,—nay,
As stiff as if impaled, and no one stoops
Out of the plumb of soldierly array;
All stand, with whiskers and mustache of tow,
Before their God like spindles in a row.
I started back: I cannot well deny
That being rained down, as it were, and thrust
Into that herd of human cattle, I
Could not suppress a feeling of disgust
Unknown, I fancy, to your Excellency,
By reason of your office. Pardon! I must
Say the church stank of heated grease, and that
The very altar-candles seemed of fat.
But when the priest had risen to devote
The mystic wafer, from the band that stood
About the altar came a sudden note
Of sweetness over my disdainful mood;
A voice that, speaking from the brazen throat
Of warlike trumpets, came like the subdued
Moan of a people bound in sore distress,
And thinking on lost hopes and happiness.
'T was Verdi's tender chorus rose aloof,—
That song the Lombards there, dying of thirst,
Send up to God, “Lord, from the native roof.”
O'er countless thrilling hearts the song has burst,
And here I, whom its magic put to proof,
Beginning to be no longer I, immersed
Myself amidst those tallowy fellow-men
As if they had been of my land and kin.
What would your Excellency? The piece was fine,
And ours, and played, too, as it should be played;
It drives old grudges out when such divine
Music as that mounts up into your head!
But when the piece was done, back to my line
I crept again, and there I should have staid,
But that just then, to give me another turn,
From those mole-mouths a hymn began to yearn:
A German anthem, that to heaven went
On unseen wings, up from the holy fane;
It was a prayer, and seemed like a lament,
Of such a pensive, grave, pathetic strain
That in my soul it never shall be spent;
And how such heavenly harmony in the brain
Of those thick-skulled barbarians should dwell
I must confess it passes me to tell.
In that sad hymn, I felt the bitter sweet
Of the songs heard in childhood, which the soul
Learns from beloved voices, to repeat
To its own anguish in the days of dole;
A thought of the dear mother, a regret,
A longing for repose and love,—the whole
Anguish of distant exile seemed to run
Over my heart and leave it all undone:
When the strain ceased, it left me pondering
Tenderer thoughts and stronger and more clear;
These men, I mused, the self-same despot king,
Who rules in Slavic and Italian fear,
Tears from their homes and arms that round them cling.
And drives them slaves thence, to keep us slaves here;
From their familiar fields afar they pass
Like herds to winter in some strange morass.
To a hard life, to a hard discipline,
Derided, solitary, dumb, they go;
Blind instruments of many-eyed Rapine
And purposes they share not, and scarce know;
And this fell hate that makes a gulf between
The Lombard and the German, aids the foe
Who tramples both divided, and whose bane
Is in the love and brotherhood of men.
Poor souls! far off from all that they hold dear,
And in a land that hates them! Who shall say
That at the bottom of their hearts they bear
Love for our tyrant? I should like to lay
They've our hate for him in their pockets! Here,
But that I turned in haste and broke away,
I should have kissed a corporal, stiff and tall,
And like a scarecrow stuck against the wall.

Note {1}: Alessandro Manzoni.

I could not well praise this poem enough, without praising it too much. It depicts a whole order of things, and it brings vividly before us the scene described; while its deep feeling is so lightly and effortlessly expressed, that one does not know which to like best, the exquisite manner or the excellent sense. To prove that Giusti was really a fine poet, I need give nothing more, for this alone would imply poetic power; not perhaps of the high epic sort, but of the kind that gives far more comfort to the heart of mankind, amusing and consoling it. “Giusti composed satires, but no poems,” says a French critic; but I think most will not, after reading this piece, agree with him. There are satires and satires, and some are fierce enough and brutal enough; but when a satire can breathe so much tenderness, such generous humanity, such pity for the means, at the same time with such hatred of the source of wrong, and all with an air of such smiling pathos, I say, if it is not poetry, it is something better, and by all means let us have it instead of poetry. It is humor, in its best sense; and, after religion, there is nothing in the world can make men so conscious, thoughtful, and modest.

A certain pensiveness very perceptible in “St. Ambrose” is the prevailing sentiment of another poem of Giusti's, which I like very much, because it is more intelligible than his political satires, and because it places the reader in immediate sympathy with a man who had not only the subtlety to depict the faults of the time, but the sad wisdom to know that he was no better himself merely for seeing them. The poem was written in 1844, and addressed to Gino Capponi, the life-long friend in whose house Giusti died, and the descendant of the great Gino Capponi who threatened the threatening Frenchmen when Charles VIII occupied Florence: “If you sound your trumpets,” as a call to arms against the Florentines, “we will ring our bells,” he said.

Giusti speaks of the part which he bears as a spectator and critic of passing events, and then apostrophizes himself:

Who art thou that a scourge so keen dost bear
And pitilessly dost the truth proclaim,
And that so loath of praise for good and fair,
So eager art with bitter songs of blame?
Hast thou achieved, in thine ideal's pursuit,
The secret and the ministry of art?
Did'st thou seek first to kill and to uproot
All pride and folly out of thine own heart
Ere turning to teach other men their part?

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