{Illustration: GIOVANNI PRATI.}
What he was at first, Prati seems always to have remained in character and in ideals. “Would you know the poet in ordinary of the king of Sardinia?” says Marc-Monnier. “Go up the great street of the Po, under the arcades to the left, around the Caff� Florio, which is the center of Turin. If you meet a great youngster of forty years, with brown hair, wandering eyes, long visage, lengthened by the imperial, prominent nose, diminished by the mustache, — good head, in fine, and proclaiming the artist at first glance, say to yourself that this is he, give him your hand, and he will give you his. He is the openest of Italians, and the best fellow in the world. It is here that he lives, under the arcades. Do not look for his dwelling; he does not dwell, he promenades. Life for him is not a combat nor a journey; it is a saunter (fl�nerie), cigar in mouth, eyes to the wind; a comrade whom he meets, and passes a pleasant word with; a group of men who talk politics, and leave you to read the newspapers; puis c� et l�, par hasard, une bonne fortune; a woman or an artist who understands you, and who listens while you talk of art or repeat your verses. Prati lives so the whole year round. From time to time he disappears for a week or two. Where is he? Nobody knows. You grow uneasy; you ask his address: he has none. Some say he is ill; others, he is dead; but some fine morning, cheerful as ever, he re-appears under the arcades. He has come from the bottom of a wood or the top of a mountain, and he has made two thousand verses.... He is hardly forty-one years old, and he has already written a million lines. I have read seven volumes of his, and I have not read all.”
I have not myself had the patience here boasted by M. Marc-Monnier; but three or four volumes of Prati’s have sufficed to teach me the spirit and purpose of his poetry. Born in 1815, and breathing his first inspirations from that sense of romance blowing into Italy with every northern gale, — a son of the Italian Tyrol, the region where the fire meets the snow, — he has some excuse, if not a perfect reason, for being half-German in his feeling. It is natural that Prati should love the ballad form above all, and should pour into its easy verse the wild legends heard during a boyhood passed among mountains and mountaineers. As I read his poetic tales, with a little heart-break, more or less fictitious, in each, I seem to have found again the sweet German songs that fluttered away out of my memory long ago. There is a tender light on the pages; a mistier passion than that of the south breathes through the dejected lines; and in the ballads we see all our old acquaintance once more, — the dying girls, the galloping horsemen, the moonbeams, the familiar, inconsequent phantoms, — scarcely changed in the least, and only betraying now and then that they have been at times in the bad company of Lara, and Medora, and other dissipated and vulgar people. The following poem will give some proof of all this, and will not unfairly witness of the quality of Prati in most of the poetry he has written:
THE MIDNIGHT RIDE.
I.
Ruello, Ruello, devour the way!
On your breath bear us with you, O winds, as ye swell!
My darling, she lies near her death to-day, —
Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!
That my spurs have torn open thy flanks, alas!
With thy long, sad neighing, thou need’st not tell;
We have many a league yet of desert to pass, —
Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!
Hear’st that mocking laugh overhead in space?
Hear’st the shriek of the storm, as it drives, swift and fell?
A scent as of graves is blown into my face, —
Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!
Ah, God! and if that be the sound I hear
Of the mourner’s song and the passing-bell!
O heaven! What see I? The cross and the bier? —
Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!
Thou falt’rest, Ruello? Oh, courage, my steed!
Wilt fail me, O traitor I trusted so well?
The tempest roars over us, — halt not, nor heed! —
Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!
Gallop, Ruello, oh, faster yet!
Good God, that flash! O God! I am chill, —
Something hangs on my eyelids heavy as death, —
Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!
II.
Smitten with the lightning stroke,
From his seat the cavalier
Fell, and forth the charger broke,
Rider-free and mad with fear, —
Through the tempest and the night,
Like a winged thing in flight.
In the wind his mane blown back,
With a frantic plunge and neigh, —
In the shadow a shadow black,
Ever wilder he flies away, —
Through the tempest and the night,
Like a winged thing in flight.
From his throbbing flanks arise
Smokes of fever and of sweat, —
Over him the pebble flies
From his swift feet swifter yet, —
Through the tempest and the night,
Like a winged thing in flight.
From the cliff unto the wood,
Twenty leagues he passed in all;
Soaked with bloody foam and blood,
Blind he struck against the wall:
Death is in the seat; no more
Stirs the steed that flew before.
III.
And the while, upon the colorless,
Death-white visage of the dying
Maiden, still and faint and fair,
Rosy lights arise and wane;
And her weakness lifting tremulous
From the couch where she was lying
Her long, beautiful, loose hair
Strives she to adorn in vain.
“Mother, what it is has startled me
From my sleep I cannot tell thee:
Only, rise and deck me well
In my fairest robes again.
For, last night, in the thick silences, —
I know not how it befell me, —
But the gallop of Ruel,
More than once I heard it plain.
“Look, O mother, through yon shadowy
Trees, beyond their gloomy cover:
Canst thou not an atom see
Toward us from the distance start?
Seest thou not the dust rise cloudily,
And above the highway hover?
Come at last! ‘T is he! ‘t is he!
Mother, something breaks my heart.”
Ah, poor child! she raises wearily
Her dim eyes, and, turning slowly,
Seeks the sun, and leaves this strife
With a loved name in her breath.
Ah, poor child! in vain she waited him.
In the grave they made her lowly
Bridal bed. And thou, O life!
Hast no hopes that know not death?
Among Prati’s patriotic poems, I have read one which seems to me rather vivid, and which because it reflects yet another phase of that great Italian resurrection, as well as represents Prati in one of his best moods, I will give here:
THE SPY.
With ears intent, with eyes abased,
Like a shadow still my steps thou hast chased;
If I whisper aught to my friend, I feel
Thee follow quickly upon my heel.
Poor wretch, thou fill’st me with loathing; fly!
Thou art a spy!
When thou eatest the bread that thou dost win
With the filthy wages of thy sin,
The hideous face of treason anear
Dost thou not see? dost thou not fear?
Poor wretch, thou fill’st me with loathing; fly!
Thou art a spy!
The thief may sometimes my pity claim;
Sometimes the harlot for her shame;
Even the murderer in his chains
A hidden fear from me constrains;
But thou only fill’st me with loathing; fly!
Thou art
a spy!
Fly, poor villain; draw thy hat down,
Close be thy mantle about thee thrown;
And if ever my words weigh on thy heart,
Betake thyself to some church apart;
There, “Lord, have mercy!” weep and cry:
“I am a spy!”
Forgiveness for thy great sin alone
Thou may’st hope to find before his throne.
Dismayed by thy snares that all abhor,
Brothers on earth thou hast no more;
Poor wretch, thou fill’st me with loathing; fly!
Thou art a spy!
ALEARDO ALEARDI
I.
In the first quarter of the century was born a poet, in the village of San Giorgio, near Verona, of parents who endowed their son with the magnificent name of Aleardo Aleardi. His father was one of those small proprietors numerous in the Veneto, and, though not indigent, was by no means a rich man. He lived on his farm, and loved it, and tried to improve the condition of his tenants. Aleardo’s childhood was spent in the country, — a happy fortune for a boy anywhere, the happiest fortune if that country be Italy, and its scenes the grand and beautiful scenes of the valley of the Adige. Here he learned to love nature with the passion that declares itself everywhere in his verse; and hence he was in due time taken and placed at school in the Collegio {note: Not a college in the American sense, but a private school of a high grade.} of Sant’ Anastasia, in Verona, according to the Italian system, now fallen into disuse, of fitting a boy for the world by giving him the training of a cloister. It is not greatly to Aleardi’s discredit that he seemed to learn nothing there, and that he drove his reverend preceptors to the desperate course of advising his removal. They told his father he would make a good farmer, but a scholar, never. They nicknamed him the mole, for his dullness; but, in the mean time, he was making underground progress of his own, and he came to the surface one day, a mole no longer, to everybody’s amazement, but a thing of such flight and song as they had never seen before, — in fine, a poet. He was rather a scapegrace, after he ceased to be a mole, at school; but when he went to the University at Padua, he became conspicuous among the idle, dissolute students of that day for temperate life and severe study. There he studied law, and learned patriotism; political poetry and interviews with the police were the consequence, but no serious trouble.
One of the offensive poems, which he says he and his friends had the audacity to call an ode, was this:
Sing we our country. ‘T is a desolate
And frozen cemetery;
Over its portals undulates
A banner black and yellow;
And within it throng the myriad
Phantoms of slaves and kings:
A man on a worn-out, tottering
Throne watches o’er the tombs:
The pallid lord of consciences,
The despot of ideas.
Tricoronate he vaunts himself
And without crown is he.
In this poem the yellow and black flag is, of course, the Austrian, and the enthroned man is the pope, of whose temporal power our poet was always the enemy. “The Austrian police,” says Aleardi’s biographer, “like an affectionate mother, anxious about everything, came into possession of these verses; and the author was admonished, in the way of maternal counsel, not to touch such topics, if he would not lose the favor of the police, and be looked on as a prodigal son.” He had already been admonished for carrying a cane on the top of which was an old Italian pound, or lira, with the inscription, Kingdom of Italy, — for it was an offense to have such words about one in any way, so trivial and petty was the cruel government that once reigned over the Italians.
In due time he took that garland of paper laurel and gilt pasteboard with which the graduates of Padua are sublimely crowned, and returned to Verona, where he entered the office of an advocate to learn the practical workings of the law. These disgusted him, naturally enough; and it was doubtless far less to the hurt of his feelings than of his fortune that the government always refused him the post of advocate.
In this time he wrote his first long poem, Arnaldo, which was published at Milan in 1842, and which won him immediate applause. It was followed by the tragedy of Bragadino; and in the year 1845 he wrote Le Prime Storie, which he suffered to lie unpublished for twelve years. It appeared in Verona in 1857, a year after the publication of his Monte Circellio, written in 1846.
{Illustration: ALEARDO ALEARDI.}
The revolution of 1848 took place; the Austrians retired from the dominion of Venice, and a provisional republican government, under the presidency of Daniele Manin, was established, and Aleardi was sent as one of its plenipotentiaries to Paris, where he learnt how many fine speeches the friends of a struggling nation can make when they do not mean to help it. The young Venetian republic fell. Aleardi left Paris, and, after assisting at the ceremony of being bombarded in Bologna, retired to Genoa. He later returned to Verona, and there passed several years of tranquil study. In 1852, for the part he had taken in the revolution, he was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress at Mantua, thus fulfilling the destiny of an Italian poet of those times.
All the circumstances and facts of this arrest and imprisonment are so characteristic of the Austrian method of governing Italy, that I do not think it out of place to give them with some fullness. In the year named, the Austrians were still avenging themselves upon the patriots who had driven them out of Venetia in 1848, and their courts were sitting in Mantua for the trial of political prisoners, many of whom were exiled, sentenced to long imprisonment, or put to death. Aleardi was first confined in the military prison at Verona, but was soon removed to Mantua, whither several of his friends had already been sent. All the other prisons being full, he was thrust into a place which till now had seemed too horrible for use. It was a narrow room, dark, and reeking with the dampness of the great dead lagoon which surrounds Mantua. A broken window, guarded by several gratings, let in a little light from above; the day in that cell lasted six hours, the night eighteen. A mattress on the floor, and a can of water for drinking, were the furniture. In the morning they brought him two pieces of hard, black bread; at ten o’clock a thick soup of rice and potatoes; and nothing else throughout the day. In this dungeon he remained sixty days, without books, without pen or paper, without any means of relieving the terrible gloom and solitude. At the end of this time, he was summoned to the hall above to see his sister, whom he tenderly loved. The light blinded him so that for a while he could not perceive her, but he talked to her calmly and even cheerfully, that she might not know what he had suffered. Then he was remanded to his cell, where, as her retreating footsteps ceased upon his ear, he cast himself upon the ground in a passion of despair. Three months passed, and he had never seen the face of judge or accuser, though once the prison inspector, with threats and promises, tried to entrap him into a confession. One night his sleep was broken by a continued hammering; in the morning half a score of his friends were hanged upon the gallows which had been built outside his cell.
By this time his punishment had been so far mitigated that he had been allowed a German grammar and dictionary, and for the first time studied that language, on the literature of which he afterward lectured in Florence. He had, like most of the young Venetians of his day, hated the language, together with those who spoke it, until then.
At last, one morning at dawn, a few days after the execution of his friends, Aleardi and others were thrust into carriages and driven to the castle. There the roll of the prisoners was called; to several names none answered, for those who had borne them were dead. Were the survivors now to be shot, or sentenced to some prison in Bohemia or Hungary? They grimly jested among themselves as to their fate. They were marched out into the piazza, under the heavy rain, and there these men who had not only not been tried for any crime, but had not even been accused of any, received the grace of the imperial pardon.
Aleardi returned to Verona and to his books, publishin
g another poem in 1856, called Le Citt� Italiane Marinare e Commercianti. His next publication was, in 1857, Rafaello e la Fornarina; then followed Un’ Ora della mia Giovinezza, Le Tre Fiume, and Le Tre Fanciulle, in 1858.
The war of 1859 broke out between Austria and France and Italy. Aleardi spent the brief period of the campaign in a military prison at Verona, where his sympathies were given an ounce of prevention. He had committed no offense, but at midnight the police appeared, examined his papers, found nothing, and bade him rise and go to prison. After the peace of Villafranca he was liberated, and left the Austrian states, retiring first to Brescia, and then to Florence. His publications since 1859 have been a Canto Politico and I Sette Soldati. He was condemned for his voluntary exile, by the Austrian courts, and I remember reading in the newspapers the official invitation given him to come back to Verona and be punished. But, oddly enough, he declined to do so.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1402