The poets who belong to this time are numerous enough, but those best
known are Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo. These men were long the
most conspicuous literati in the capital of Lombardy, but neither was
Lombard. Monti was educated in the folds of Arcadia at Rome; Foscolo
was a native of one of the Greek islands dependent on Venice, and
passed his youth and earlier manhood in the lagoons. The accident of
residence at Milan brought the two men together, and made friends
of those who had naturally very little in common. They can only be
considered together as part of the literary history of the time in
which they both happened to be born, and as one of its most striking
contrasts.
In 1802, Napoleon bestowed a republican constitution on Lombardy and
the other provinces of Italy which had been united under the name of
the Cisalpine Republic, and Milan became the capital of the new state.
Thither at once turned all that was patriotic, hopeful, and ambitious
in Italian life; and though one must not judge this phase of Italian
civilization from Vincenzo Monti, it is an interesting comment on its
effervescent, unstable, fictitious, and partial nature that he was its
most conspicuous poet. Few men appear so base as Monti; but it is not
certain that he was of more fickle and truthless soul than many other
contemplative and cultivated men of the poetic temperament who are
never confronted with exigent events, and who therefore never betray
the vast difference that lies between the ideal heroism of the poet's
vision and the actual heroism of occasion. We all have excellent
principles until we are tempted, and it was Monti's misfortune to be
born in an age which put his principles to the test, with a prospect
of more than the usual prosperity in reward for servility and
compliance, and more than the usual want, suffering, and danger in
punishment of candor and constancy.
He was born near Ferrara in 1754; and having early distinguished
himself in poetry, he was conducted to Rome by the Cardinal-Legate
Borghesi. At Rome he entered the Arcadian fold of course, and piped
by rule there with extraordinary acceptance, and might have died a
Shepherd but for the French Revolution, which broke out and gave him
a chance to be a Man. The secretary of the French Legation at Naples,
appearing in Rome with the tri-color of the Republic, was attacked by
the foolish populace, and killed; and Monti, the petted and caressed
of priests, the elegant and tuneful young poet in the train of
Cardinal Borghesi, seized the event of Ugo Bassville's death, and
turned it to epic account. In the moment of dissolution, Bassville,
repenting his republicanism, receives pardon; but, as a condition of
his acceptance into final bliss, he is shown, through several cantos
of _terza rima_, the woes which the Revolution has brought upon France
and the world. The bad people of the poem are naturally the French
Revolutionists; the good people, those who hate them. The most admired
episode is that descriptive of poor Louis XVI.'s ascent into heaven
from the scaffold.
{Illustration: VINCENZO MONTI.}
There is some reason to suppose that Monti was sincerer in this
poem than in any other of political bearing which he wrote; and the
Dantesque plan of the work gave it, with the occasional help of
Dante's own phraseology and many fine turns of expression picked up
in the course of a multifarious reading, a dignity from which the
absurdity of the apotheosis of priests and princes detracted nothing
among its readers. At any rate, it was received by Arcadia with
rapturous acclaim, though its theme was _not_ the Golden Age; and on
the _Bassvilliana_ the little that is solid in Monti's fame rests at
this day. His lyric poetry is seldom quoted; his tragedies are no
longer played, not even his _Galeoto Manfredi_, in which he has stolen
almost enough from Shakespeare to vitalize one of the characters.
After a while the Romans wearied of their idol, and began to attack
him in politics and literature; and in 1797 Monti, after a sojourn of
twenty years in the Papal capital, fled from Rome to Milan. Here he
was assailed in one of the journals by a fanatical Neapolitan, who had
also written a _Bassvilliana_, but with celestial powers, heroes and
martyrs of French politics, and who now accused Monti of enmity to the
rights of man. Monti responded by a letter to this poet, in which
he declared that his _Bassvilliana_ was no expression of his own
feelings, but that he had merely written it to escape the fury of
Bassville's murderers, who were incensed against him as Bassville's
friend! But for all this the _Bassvilliana_ was publicly burnt before
the cathedral in Milan, and Monti was turned out of a government place
he had got, because “he had published books calculated to inspire
hatred of democracy, or predilection for the government of kings, of
theocrats and aristocrats.” The poet was equal to this exigency; and
he now reprinted his works, and made them praise the French and the
revolutionists wherever they had blamed them before; all the bad
systems and characters were depicted as monarchies and kings and
popes, instead of anarchies and demagogues. Bonaparte was exalted,
and poor Louis XVI., sent to heaven with so much ceremony in the
_Bassvilliana_, was abased in a later ode on Superstition.
Monti was amazed that all this did not suffice “to overcome that fatal
combination of circumstances which had caused him to be judged as
the courtier of despotism.” “How gladly,” he writes, “would I have
accepted the destiny which envy could not reach! But this scourge of
honest men clings to my flesh, and I cannot hope to escape it, except
I turn scoundrel to become fortunate!” When the Austrians returned to
Milan, the only honest man unhanged in Italy fled with other democrats
to Paris, whither the fatal combination of circumstances followed him,
and caused him to be looked on with coldness and suspicion by the
republicans. After Bonaparte was made First Consul, Monti invoked his
might against the Germans in Italy, and carried his own injured virtue
back to Milan in the train of the conqueror. When Bonaparte was
crowned emperor, this democrat and patriot was the first to hail and
glorify him; and the emperor rewarded the poet's devotion with a chair
in the University of Pavia, and a pension attached to the place of
Historiographer. Monti accepted the honors and emoluments due to
long-suffering integrity and inalterable virtue, and continued in the
enjoyment of them till the Austrians came back to Milan a second time,
in 1815, when his chaste muse was stirred to a new passion by the
charms of German despotism, and celebrated as “the wise, the just, the
best of kings, Francis Augustus”, who, if one were to believe Monti,
“in war was a whirlwind and in peace a zephyr.” But the heavy
Austrian, who knew he was nothing of the kind, thrust out his surly
under lip at these blandishments, said that this muse's favors were
mercenary, and cut off Monti's pension. Stung by such ingratitude,
the victim of his own honesty retired forever from courts, and
thenceforward sang only the merits of rich persons in private station,
who could afford to pay for spontaneous and incorruptible adulation.
He died in 1826, having probably endured more pain and rungreater
peril in his desire to avoid danger and suffering than the bravest and
truest man in a time when courage and truth seldom went in company.
It is not probable that he thought himself despicable or other than
unjustly wretched.
Perhaps, after all, he was not so greatly to blame. As De Sanctis
subtly observes: “He was always a liberal. How not be liberal in those
days when even the reactionaries shouted for liberty--of course,
_true_ liberty, as they called it? And in that name he glorified all
governments.... And it was not with hypocrisy.... He was a man who
would have liked to reconcile the old and the new ideas, all opinions,
yet, being forced to choose, he clung to the majority, with no desire
to play the martyr. So he became the secretary of the dominant
feeling, the poet of success. Kindly, tolerant, sincere, a good
friend, a courtier more from necessity and weakness than perversity or
wickedness; if he could have retired into his own heart, he might have
come out a poet.” Monti, in fact, was always an _improvvisatore_, and
the subjects which events cast in his way were like the themes which
the improvvisatore receives from his audience. He applied his poetic
faculty to their celebration with marvelous facility, and, doubtless,
regarded the results as rhetorical feats. His poetry was an art, not a
principle; and perhaps he was really surprised when people thought him
in earnest, and held him personally to account for what he wrote. “A
man of sensation, rather than sentiment,” says Arnaud, “Monti cared
only for the objective side of life. He poured out melodies, colors,
and chaff in the service of all causes; he was the poet-advocate, the
Siren of the Italian Parnassus.” Of course such a man instinctively
hated the ideas of the Romantic school, and he contested their
progress in literature with great bitterness. He believed that poetry
meant feigning, not making; and he declared that “the hard truth was
the grave of the beautiful.” The latter years of his life were spent
in futile battle with the “audacious boreal school” and in noxious
revival of the foolish old disputes of the Italian grammarians; and
Emiliani-Giudici condemns him for having done more than any enemy
of his country to turn Italian thought from questions of patriotic
interest to questions of philology, from the unity of Italy to the
unity of the language, from the usurpations and tyranny of Austria to
the assumptions of Della Crusca. But Monti could scarcely help any
cause which he espoused; and it seems to me that he was as well
employed in disputing the claims of the Tuscan dialect to be
considered the Italian language as he would have been in any other
way. The wonderful facility, no less than the unreality, of the
man appears in many things, but in none more remarkably than his
translation of Homer, which is the translation universally accepted
and approved in Italy. He knew little more than the Greek alphabet,
and produced his translation from the preceding versions in Latin and
Italian, submitting the work to the correction of eminent scholars
before he printed it. His poems fill many volumes; and all display the
ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore. From a
fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his
vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which
he presented them as new. The commonplace Italians long continued to
speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind
regards everything established as great. He is a classic of those
classics common to all languages--dead corpses which retain their
forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed
to the air.