This is when he is about to consider a poem in which the Lombard
nobility are satirized--if it was satire to paint them to the life. He
says that he would be at a loss what passages to quote from it, but
fortunately “an unanimous posterity has done Parini due honor”; and he
supposes “now there is no man, of whatever sect or opinion, but has
read his immortal poem, and has its finest scenes by heart.” It is
this fact which embarrasses me, however, for how am I to rehabilitate
a certain obsolete characteristic figure without quoting from Parini,
and constantly wearying people with what they know already so well?
The gentle reader, familiar with Parini's immortal poem----
_The Gentle Reader._--His immortal poem? What _is_ his immortal poem?
I never heard even the name of it!
Is it possible? But you, fair reader, who have its finest scenes by
heart----
_The Fair Reader._--Yes, certainly; of course. But one reads so many
things. I don't believe I half remember those striking passages
of----what is the poem? And who did you say the author was?
Oh, madam! And is this undying fame? Is this the immortality for which
we waste our time? Is this the remembrance for which the essayist
sicklies his visage over with the pale cast of thought? Why, at this
rate, even those whose books are favorably noticed by the newspapers
will be forgotten in a thousand years. But it is at least consoling
to know that you have merely forgotten Parini's poems, the subject of
which you will at once recollect when I remind you that it is called
The Day, and celebrates The Morning, The Noon, The Evening, and The
Night of a gentleman of fashion as Milan knew him for fifty years in
the last century.
This gentleman, whatever his nominal business in the world might
be, was first and above all a cavaliere servente, and the cavaliere
servente was the invention, it is said, of Genoese husbands who had
not the leisure to attend their wives to the theater, the promenade,
the card-table, the _conversazione_, and so installed their nearest
idle friends permanently in the office. The arrangement was found so
convenient that the cavaliere servente presently spread throughout
Italy; no lady of fashion was thought properly appointed without one;
and the office was now no longer reserved to bachelors; it was not at
all good form for husband and wife to love each other, and the husband
became the cavalier of some other lady, and the whole fine world was
thus united, by a usage of which it is very hard to know just how far
it was wicked and how far it was only foolish; perhaps it is safest to
say that at the best it was apt to be somewhat of the one and always
a great deal of the other. In the good society of that day, marriage
meant a settlement in life for the girl who had escaped her sister's
fate of a sometimes forced religious vocation. But it did not matter
so much about the husband if the marriage contract stipulated that
she should have her cavaliere servente, and, as sometimes happened,
specified him by name. With her husband there was a union of fortunes,
with the expectation of heirs; the companionship, the confidence, the
faith, was with the cavalier; there could be no domesticity, no family
life with either. The cavaliere servente went with his lady to church,
where he dipped his finger in the holy-water and offered it her to
moisten her own finger at; and he held her prayer-book for her when
she rose from her knees and bowed to the high altar. In fact, his
place seems to have been as fully acknowledged and honored, if not by
the Church, then by all the other competent authorities, as that of
the husband. Like other things, his relation to his lady was subject
to complication and abuse; no doubt, ladies of fickle minds changed
their cavaliers rather often; and in those days following the
disorder of the French invasions, the relation suffered deplorable
exaggerations and perversions. But when Giuseppe Parini so minutely
and graphically depicted the day of a noble Lombard youth, the
cavaliere servente was in his most prosperous and illustrious state;
and some who have studied Italian social conditions in the past bid
us not too virtuously condemn him, since, preposterous as he was, his
existence was an amelioration of disorders at which we shall find it
better not even to look askance.
Parini's poem is written in the form of instructions to the hero for
the politest disposal of his time; and in a strain of polished irony
allots the follies of his day to their proper hours. The poet's
apparent seriousness never fails him, but he does not suffer his
irony to become a burden to the reader, relieving it constantly with
pictures, episodes, and excursions, and now and then breaking into a
strain of solemn poetry which is fine enough. The work will suggest to
the English reader the light mockery of “The Rape of the Lock”, and in
less degree some qualities of Gray's “Trivia”; but in form and manner
it is more like Phillips's “Splendid Shilling” than either of these;
and yet it is not at all like the last in being a mere burlesque of
the epic style. These resemblances have been noted by Italian critics,
who find them as unsatisfactory as myself; but they will serve to make
the extracts I am to give a little more intelligible to the reader
who does not recur to the whole poem. Parini was not one to break a
butterfly upon a wheel; he felt the fatuity of heavily moralizing upon
his material; the only way was to treat it with affected gravity, and
to use his hero with the respect which best mocks absurdity. One
of his arts is to contrast the deeds of his hero with those of his
forefathers, of which he is so proud,--of course the contrast is to
the disadvantage of the forefathers,--and in these allusions to the
past glories of Italy it seems to me that the modern patriotic poetry
which has done so much to make Italy begins for the first time to feel
its wings.
Parini was in all things a very stanch, brave, and original spirit,
and if he was of any school, it was that of the Venetian, Gasparo
Gozzi, who wrote pungent and amusing social satires in blank verse,
and published at Venice an essay-paper, like the “Spectator”, the
name of which he turned into _l'Osservatore_. It dealt, like the
“Spectator” and all that race of journals, with questions of letters
and manners, and was long honored, like the “Spectator”, as a model of
prose. With an apparent prevalence of French taste, there was in fact
much study by Italian authors of English literature at this time,
which was encouraged by Dr. Johnson's friend, Baretti, the author of
the famous _Frusta Letteraria_ (Literary Scourge), which drew blood
from so many authorlings, now bloodless; it was wielded with more
severity than wisdom, and fell pretty indiscriminately upon the bad
and the good. It scourged among others Goldoni, the greatest master of
the comic art then living, but it spared our Parini, the first part of
whose poem Baretti salutes with many kindly phrases, though he cannot
help advising him to turn the poem into rhyme. But when did a critic
ever know less than a poet about a poet's business?