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, how is it possible for me to feel any personal
fury toward them? When the later Italian poets ask me to loathe spies
and priests I am equally at a loss. I can hardly form the idea of a
spy, of an agent of the police, paid to haunt the steps of honest
men, to overhear their speech, and, if possible, entrap them into a
political offense. As to priests--well, yes, I suppose they are bad,
though I do not know this from experience; and I find them generally
upon acquaintance very amiable. But all this was different with the
Italians: they had known, seen, and felt tyrants, both foreign and
domestic, of every kind; spies and informers had helped to make
their restricted lives anxious and insecure; and priests had leagued
themselves with the police and the oppressors until the Church, which
should have been kept a sacred refuge from all the sorrows and wrongs
of the world, became the most dreadful of its prisons. It is no wonder
that the literature of these people should have been so filled with
the patriotic passion of their life; and I am not sure that literature
is not as nobly employed in exciting men to heroism and martyrdom for
a great cause as in the purveyance of mere intellectual delights. What
it was in Italy when it made this its chief business we may best learn
from an inquiry that I have at last found somewhat amusing. It will
lead us over vast meadows of green baize enameled with artificial
flowers, among streams that do nothing but purl. In this region the
shadows are mostly brown, and the mountains are invariably horrid;
there are tumbling floods and sighing groves; there are naturally
nymphs and swains; and the chief business of life is to be in love
and not to be in love; to burn and to freeze without regard to the
mercury. Need I say that this region is Arcady?