The poet who sings this gay world with such mocking seriousness was
not himself born to the manner of it. He was born plebeian in 1729 at
Bosisio, near Lake Pusiano, and his parents were poor. He himself adds
that they were honest, but the phrase has now lost its freshness. His
father was a dealer in raw silk, and was able to send him to school
in Milan, where his scholarship was not equal to his early literary
promise. At least he took no prizes; but this often happens with
people whose laurels come abundantly later. He was to enter the
Church, and in due time he took orders, but he did not desire a cure,
and he became, like so many other accomplished abbati, a teacher in
noble families (the great and saintly family Borromeo among others),
in whose houses and in those he frequented with them he saw the life
he paints in his poem. His father was now dead, and he had already
supported himself and his mother by copying law-papers; he had, also,
at the age of twenty-three, published a small volume of poems, and
had been elected a shepherd of Arcadia; but in a country where one's
copyright was good for nothing across the border--scarcely a fair
stone's-throw away--of one's own little duchy or province, and the
printers everywhere stole a book as soon as it was worth stealing, it
is not likely that he made great gains by a volume of verses which,
later in life, he repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in
London, where he had seen the prosperity of “the trade of an author”
in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed
with open disgust the abject state of authorship in his own country.
So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become a _maestro in
casa_. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their
company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes
that he came to despise the great world with the same scorn that shows
in his poem; but probably he regarded it quite as much with the amused
sense of the artist as with the moralist's indignation; some of his
contemporaries accused him of a snobbish fondness for the great, but
certainly he did not flatter them, and in one passage of his poem he
is at the pains to remind his noble acquaintance that not the smallest
drop of patrician blood is microscopically discoverable in his veins.
His days were rendered more comfortable when he was appointed editor
of the government newspaper,--the only newspaper in Milan,--and yet
easier when he was made professor of eloquence in the Academy of Fine
Arts. In this employment it was his hard duty to write poems from time
to time in praise of archdukes and emperors; but by and by the French
Revolution arrived in Milan, and Parini was relieved of that labor.
The revolution made an end of archdukes and emperors, but the liberty
it bestowed was peculiar, and consisted chiefly in not allowing one
to do anything that one liked. The altars were abased, and trees of
liberty were planted; for making a tumult about an outraged saint a
mob was severely handled by the military, and for “insulting” a tree
of liberty a poor fellow at Como was shot. Parini was chosen one of
the municipal government, which, apparently popular, could really do
nothing but register the decrees of the military commandant. He proved
so little useful in this government that he was expelled from it, and,
giving his salary to his native parish, he fell into something like
his old poverty. He who had laughed to scorn the insolence and
folly of the nobles could not enjoy the insolence and folly of the
plebeians, and he was unhappy in that wild ferment of ideas, hopes,
principles, sentiments, which Milan became in the time of the
Cisalpine Republic. He led a retired life, and at last, in 1799,
having risen one day to studies which he had never remitted, he died
suddenly in his arm-chair.
Many stories are told of his sayings and doings in those troubled days
when he tried to serve the public. At the theater once some one cried
out, “Long live the republic, death to the aristocrats!” “No,”
shouted Parini, who abhorred the abominable bloodthirstiness of the
liberators, “long live the republic, death to nobody!” They were
going to take away a crucifix from a room where he appeared on public
business. “Very well,” he observed; “where Citizen Christ cannot stay,
I have nothing to do,” and went out. “Equality doesn't consist in
dragging me down to your level,” he said to one who had impudently
given him the _thou_, “but in raising you to mine, if possible. You
will always be a pitiful creature, even though you call yourself
Citizen; and though you call me Citizen, you can't help my being the
Abbate Parini.” To another, who reproached him for kindness to an
Austrian prisoner, he answered, “I would do as much for a Turk, a
Jew, an Arab; I would do it even for you if you were in need.” In his
closing years many sought him for literary counsel; those for whom
there was hope he encouraged; those for whom there was none, he made
it a matter of conscience not to praise. A poor fellow came to repeat
him two sonnets, in order to be advised which to print; Parini heard
the first, and, without waiting further, besought him “Print the
other!”