Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions Part 23

From Este, Dall' Ongaro went to Trieste, where he taught literature and philosophy, wrote for the theater, and established a journal in which, for ten years, he labored to educate the people in his ideas of Italian unity and progress. That these did not coincide with the ideas of most Italian dreamers and politicians of the time may be inferred from the fact that he began in 1846 a course of lectures on Dante, in which he combated the clerical tendencies of Gioberti and Balbo, and criticised the first acts of Pius IX. He had as profound doubt of Papal liberality as Niccolini, at a time when other patriots were fondly cherishing the hope of a united Italy under an Italian pontiff; and at Rome, two years later, he sought to direct popular feeling from the man to the end, in one of the earliest of his graceful Stornelli.

PIO NONO.

Pio Nono is a name, and not the man Who saws the air from yonder Bishop's seat; Pio Nono is the offspring of our brain, The idol of our hearts, a vision sweet; Pio Nono is a banner, a refrain, A name that sounds well sung upon the street.

Who calls, "Long live Pio Nono!" means to call, Long live our country, and good-will to all!

And country and good-will, these signify That it is well for Italy to die; But not to die for a vain dream or hope, Not to die for a throne and for a Pope!

During these years at Trieste, however, Dall' Ongaro seems to have been also much occupied with pure literature, and to have given a great deal of study to the sources of national poetry, as he discovered them in the popular life and legends. He had been touched with the prevailing romanticism; he had written hymns like Manzoni, and, like Carrer, he sought to poetize the traditions and superst.i.tions of his countrymen. He found a richer and deeper vein than the Venetian poet among his native hills and the neighboring mountains of Slavonia, but I cannot say that he wrought it to much better effect. The two volumes which he published in 1840 contain many ballads which are very graceful and musical, but which lack the fresh spirit of songs springing from the popular heart, while they also want the airy and delicate beauty of the modern German ballads. Among the best of them are two which Dall' Ongaro built up from mere lines and fragments of lines current among the people, as in later years he more successfully restored us two plays of Menander from the plots and a dozen verses of each. "One may imitate," he says, "more or less fortunately, Manzoni, Byron, or any other poet, but not the simple inspirations of the people. And 'The Pilgrim who comes from Rome,' and the 'Rosettina,' if one could have them complete as they once were, would probably make me blush for my elaborate variations." But study which was so well directed, and yet so conscious of its limitations, could not but be of great value; and Dall' Ongaro, no doubt, owed to it his gift of speaking so authentically for the popular heart. That which he did later showed that he studied the people's thought and expression _con amore_, and in no vain sentiment of dilettanteism, or antiquarian research, or literary patronage.

It is not to be supposed that Dall' Ongaro's literary life had at this period an altogether objective tendency. In the volumes mentioned, there is abundant evidence that he was of the same humor as all men of poetic feeling must be at a certain time of life. Here are pretty verses of occasion, upon weddings and betrothals, such as people write in Italy; here are stanzas from alb.u.ms, such as people used to write everywhere; here are didactic lines; here are bursts of mere sentiment and emotion. In the volume of Fantasie, published at Florence in 1866, Dall' Ongaro collected some of the ballads from his early works, but left out the more subjective effusions.

I give one of these in which, under a fantastic name and in a fantastic form, the poet expresses the tragic and pathetic interest of the life to which he was himself vowed.

THE SISTER OF THE MOON.

Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy pensive light Be faithful unto me: I have a sister in the lonely night When I commune with thee.

Alone and friendless in the world am I, Sorrow's forgotten maid, Like some poor dove abandoned to die By her first love unwed.

Like some poor floweret in a desert land I pa.s.s my days alone; In vain upon the air its leaves expand, In vain its sweets are blown.

No loving hand shall save it from the waste, And wear the lonely thing; My heart shall throb upon no loving breast In my neglected spring.

That trouble which consumes my weary soul No cunning can relieve, No wisdom understand the secret dole Of the sad sighs I heave.

My fond heart cherished once a hope, a vow, The leaf of autumn gales!

In convent gloom, a dim lamp burning low, My spirit lacks and fails.

I shall have prayers and hymns like some dead saint Painted upon a shrine, But in love's blessed power to fall and faint, It never shall be mine.

Born to entwine my life with others, born To love and to be wed, Apart from all I lead my life forlorn, Sorrow's forgotten maid.

Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy tender light Be faithful unto me: Speak to me of the life beyond the night I shall enjoy with thee.

II

It will here satisfy the strongest love of contrasts to turn from Dall' Ongaro the sentimental poet to Dall' Ongaro the politician, and find him on his feet and making a speech at a public dinner given to Richard Cobden at Trieste, in 1847. Cobden was then, as always, the advocate of free trade, and Dall' Ongaro was then, as always, the advocate of free government. He saw in the union of the Italians under a customs-bond the hope of their political union, and in their emanc.i.p.ation from oppressive imposts their final escape from yet more galling oppression. He expressed something of this, and, though repeatedly interrupted by the police, he succeeded in saying so much as to secure his expulsion from Trieste.

Italy was already in a ferment, and insurrections were preparing in Venice, Milan, Florence, and Rome; and Dall' Ongaro, consulting with the Venetian leaders Manin and Tommaseo, retired to Tuscany, and took part in the movements which wrung a const.i.tution from the Grand Duke, and preceded the flight of that prince. In December he went to Rome, where he joined himself with the Venetian refugees and with other Italian patriots, like D'Azeglio and Durando, who were striving to direct the popular mind toward Italian unity. The following March he was, as we have seen, one of the exiles who led the people against the Palazzodi Venezia. In the mean time the insurrection of the glorious Five Days had taken place at Milan, and the Lombard cities, rising one after another, had driven out the Austrian garrisons. Dall' Ongaro went from Rome to Milan, and thence, by advice of the revolutionary leaders, to animate the defense against the Austrians in Friuli; one of his brothers was killed at Palmanuova, and another severely wounded. Treviso, whither he had retired, falling into the hands of the Germans, he went to Venice, then a republic under the presidency of Manin; and here he established a popular journal, which opposed the union of the struggling republic with Piedmont under Carlo Alberto.

Dall' Ongaro was finally expelled and pa.s.sed next to Ravenna, where he found Garibaldi, who had been banished by the Roman government, and was in doubt as to how he might employ his sword on behalf of his country. In those days the Pope's moderately liberal minister, Rossi, was stabbed, and Count Pompeo Campello, an old literary friend and acquaintance of Dall' Ongaro, was appointed minister of war. With Garibaldi's consent the poet went to Rome, and used his influence to such effect that Garibaldi was authorized to raise a legion of volunteers, and was appointed general of those forces which took so glorious a part in the cause of Italian Independence. Soon after, when the Pope fled to Gaeta, and the Republic was proclaimed, Dall' Ongaro and Garibaldi were chosen representatives of the people. Then followed events of which it is still a pang keen to read: the troops of the French Republic marched upon Rome, and, after a defense more splendid and heroic than any victory, the city fell. The Pope returned, and all who loved Italy and freedom turned in exile from Rome. The cities of the Romagna, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venetia had fallen again under the Pope, the Grand Duke, and the Austrians, and Dall' Ongaro took refuge in Switzerland.

{Ill.u.s.tration: FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARA}

Without presuming to say whether Dall' Ongaro was mistaken in his political ideas, we may safely admit that he was no wiser a politician than Dante or Petrarch. He was an anti-Papist, as these were, and like these he opposed an Italy of little princ.i.p.alities and little republics. But his dream, unlike theirs, was of a great Italian democracy, and in 1848-49 he opposed the union of the Italian patriots under Carlo Alberto, because this would have tended to the monarchy.

III

But it is not so much with Dall' Ongaro's political opinions that we have to do as with his poetry of the revolutionary period of 1848, as we find in it the little collection of lyrics which he calls "Stornelli." These commemorate nearly all the interesting aspects of that epoch; and in their wit and enthusiasm and aspiration, we feel the spirit of a race at once the most intellectual and the most emotional in the world, whose poets write as pa.s.sionately of politics as of love. Arnaud awards Dall' Ongaro the highest praise, and declares him "the first to formulate in the common language of Italy patriotic songs which, current on the tongues of the people, should also remain the patrimony of the national literature.... In his popular songs," continues this critic, "Dall' Ongaro has given all that const.i.tutes true, good, and--not the least merit--novel poetry.

Meter and rhythm second the expression, imbue the thought with harmony, and develop its symmetry.... How enviable is that perspicuity which does not oblige you to re-read a single line to evolve therefrom the latent idea!" And we shall have no less to admire the perfect art which, never pa.s.sing the intelligence of the people, is never ign.o.ble in sentiment or idea, but always as refined as it is natural.

I do not know how I could better approach our poet than by first offering this lyric, written when, in 1847, the people of Leghorn rose in arms to repel a threatened invasion of the Austrians.

THE WOMAN OF LEGHORN.

Adieu, Livorno! adieu, paternal walls!

Perchance I never shall behold you more!

On father's and mother's grave the shadow falls.

My love has gone under our flag to war; And I will follow him where fortune calls; I have had a rifle in my hands before.

The ball intended for my lover's breast, Before he knows it my heart shall arrest; And over his dead comrade's visage he Shall pitying stoop, and look whom it can be.

Then he shall see and know that it is I: Poor boy! how bitterly my love will cry!

The Italian editor of the "Stornelli" does not give the closing lines too great praise when he declares that "they say more than all the lament of Tancred over Clorinda." In this little flight of song, we pa.s.s over more tragedy than Messer Torquato could have dreamed in the conquest of many Jerusalems; for, after all, there is nothing so tragic as fact. The poem is full at once of the grand national impulse, and of purely personal and tender devotion; and that fluttering, vehement purpose, thrilling and faltering in alternate lines, and breaking into a sob at last, is in every syllable the utterance of a woman's spirit and a woman's nature.

Quite as womanly, though entirely different, is this lament, which the poet attributes to his sister for their brother, who fell at Palmanuova, May 14, 1848.

THE SISTER.

(Palma, May 14, 1848.)

And he, my brother, to the fort had gone, And the grenade, it struck him in the breast; He fought for liberty, and death he won, For country here, and found in heaven rest.

And now only to follow him I sigh; A new desire has taken me to die,-- To follow him where is no enemy, Where every one lives happy and is free.

All hope and purpose are gone from this woman's heart, for whom Italy died in her brother, and who has only these artless, half-bewildered words of regret to speak, and speaks them as if to some tender and sympathetic friend acquainted with all the history going before their abrupt beginning. I think it most pathetic and natural, also, that even in her grief and her aspiration for heaven, her words should have the tint of her time, and she should count freedom among the joys of eternity.

Quite as womanly again, and quite as different once more, is the lyric which the reader will better appreciate when I remind him how the Austrians ma.s.sacred the unarmed people in Milan, in January, 1848, and how, later, during the Five Days, they murdered their Italian prisoners, sparing neither s.e.x nor age.{1}

Note {1}: "Many foreigners," says Emilie Dandolo, in his restrained and temperate history of "I Volontarii e Bersaglieri Lombardi", "have cast a doubt upon the incredible ferocity of the Austrians during the Five Days, and especially before evacuating the city. But, alas! the witnesses are too many to be doubted. A Croat was seen carrying a babe transfixed upon his bayonet. All know of those women's hands and ears found in the haversacks of the prisoners; of those twelve unhappy men burnt alive at Porta Tosa; of those nineteen buried in a lime-pit at the Castello, whose scorched bodies we found. I myself, ordered with a detachment, after the departure of the enemy, to examine the Castello and neighborhood, was horror-struck at the sight of a babe nailed to a post."

THE LOMBARD WOMAN.

(Milan, January, 1848.)

Here, take these gaudy robes and put them by; I will go dress me black as widowhood; I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry Of him that struck and him that vainly sued.

Henceforth no other ornament will I But on my breast a ribbon red as blood.

And when they ask what dyed the silk so red, I'll say, The life-blood of my brothers dead.

And when they ask how it may cleansed be, I'll say, O, not in river nor in sea; Dishonor pa.s.ses not in wave nor flood; My ribbon ye must wash in German blood.

The repressed horror in the lines,

I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry Of him that struck and him that vainly sued,

is the sentiment of a picture that presents the scene to the reader's eye as this shuddering woman saw it; and the heart of woman's fierceness and hate is in that fragment of drama with which the brief poem closes. It is the history of an epoch. That epoch is now past, however; so long and so irrevocably past, that Dall' Ongaro commented in a note upon the poem: "The word 'German' is left as a key to the opinions of the time. Human brotherhood has been greatly promoted since 1848. German is now no longer synonymous with enemy. Italy has made peace with the peoples, and is leagued with them all against their common oppressors."