Modern Italian Poets | Page 3

in their
different places, the Pope in Rome, the Bourbons in Naples, and all was
as if nothing had been, or worse than nothing, except in Sardinia, where
the constitution was still maintained, and the foundations of the present
kingdom of Italy were laid. Carlo Alberto had abdicated on that
battle-field where an Austrian victory over the Sardinians sealed the
fate of the Italian states allied with him, and his son, Victor Emmanuel,
succeeded him. As to what took place ten years later, when the
Austrians were finally expelled from Lombardy, and the transitory
sovereigns of the duchies and of Naples flitted for good, and the Pope's
dominion was reduced to the meager size it kept till 1871, and the
Italian states were united under one constitutional king--I need not
speak.
In this way the governments of Italy had been four times wholly
changed, and each of these changes was attended by the most marked
variations in the intellectual life of the people; yet its general tendency
always continued the same.
III
The longing for freedom is the instinct of self-preservation in literature;
and, consciously or unconsciously, the Italian poets of the last hundred
years constantly inspired the Italian people with ideas of liberty and
independence. Of course the popular movements affected literature in
turn; and I should by no means attempt to say which had been the
greater agency of progress. It is not to be supposed that a man like
Alfieri, with all his tragical eloquence against tyrants, arose singly out
of a perfectly servile society. His time was, no doubt, ready for him,

though it did not seem so; but, on the other hand, there is no doubt that
he gave not only an utterance but a mighty impulse to contemporary
thought and feeling. He was in literature what the revolution was in
politics, and if hardly any principle that either sought immediately to
establish now stands, it is none the less certain that the time had come
to destroy what they overthrew, and that what they overthrew was
hopelessly vicious.
In Alfieri the great literary movement came from the north, and by far
the larger number of the writers of whom I shall have to speak were
northern Italians. Alfieri may represent for us the period of time
covered by the French democratic conquests. The principal poets under
the Italian governments of Napoleon during the first twelve years of
this century were Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo--the former a
Ferrarese by birth and the latter a Greco-Venetian. The literary as well
as the political center was then Milan, and it continued to be so for
many years after the return of the Austrians, when the so-called School
of Resignation nourished there. This epoch may be most intelligibly
represented by the names of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, and Tommaso
Grossi--all Lombards. About 1830 a new literary life began to be felt in
Florence under the indifferentism or toleration of the grand-dukes. The
chiefs of this school were Giacomo Leopardi; Giambattista Niccolini,
the author of certain famous tragedies of political complexion;
Guerrazzi, the writer of a great number of revolutionary romances; and
Giuseppe Giusti, a poet of very marked and peculiar powers, and
perhaps the greatest political satirist of the century. The chief poets of a
later time were Aleardo Aleardi, a Veronese; Giovanni Prati, who was
born in the Trentino, near the Tyrol; and Francesco Dall Ongaro, a
native of Trieste. I shall mention all these and others particularly
hereafter, and I have now only named them to show how almost
entirely the literary life of militant Italy sprang from the north. There
were one or two Neapolitan poets of less note, among whom was
Gabriele Rossetti, the father of the English Rossettis, now so well
known in art and literature.
IV
In dealing with this poetry, I naturally seek to give its universal and
aesthetic flavor wherever it is separable from its political quality; for I
should not hope to interest any one else in what I had myself often

found very tiresome. I suspect, indeed, that political satire and
invective are not relished best in free countries. No danger attends their
exercise; there is none of the charm of secrecy or the pleasure of
transgression in their production; there is no special poignancy to free
administrations in any one of ten thousand assaults upon them; the
poets leave this sort of thing mostly to the newspapers. Besides, we
have not, so to speak, the grounds that such a long-struggling people as
the Italians had for the enjoyment of patriotic poetry. As an average
American, I have found myself very greatly embarrassed when required,
by Count Alfieri, for example, to hate tyrants. Of course I do hate them
in a general sort of way; but having never seen one,