From the _Bassvilliana_ I have translated the passage descriptive of
Louis XVI.'s ascent to heaven; and I offer this, perhaps not quite
justly, in illustration of what I have been saying of Monti as a
poet. There is something of his curious verbal beauty in it, and his
singular good luck of phrase, with his fortunate reminiscences of
other poets; the collocation of the different parts is very comical,
and the application of it all to Louis XVI. is one of the most
preposterous things in literature. But one must remember that the poor
king was merely a subject, a theme, with the poet.
As when the sun uprears himself among
The lesser dazzling substances, and drives
His eager steeds along the fervid curve,--
When in one only hue is painted all
The heavenly vault, and every other star
Is touched with pallor and doth veil its front,
So with sidereal splendor all aflame
Amid a thousand glad souls following,
High into heaven arose that beauteous soul.
Smiled, as he passed them, the majestical,
Tremulous daughters of the light, and shook
Their glowing and dewy tresses as they moved,
He among all with longing and with love
Beaming, ascended until he was come
Before the triune uncreated life;
There his flight ceases, there the heart, become
Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,
And all the urgence of desire is lost;
There on his temples he receives the crown
Of living amaranth immortal, on
His cheek the kiss of everlasting peace.
And then were heard consonances and notes
Of an ineffable sweetness, and the orbs
Began again to move their starry wheels.
More swiftly yet the steeds that bore the day
Exulting flew, and with their mighty tread,
Did beat the circuit of their airy way.
In this there are three really beautiful lines; namely, those which
describe the arrival of the spirit in the presence of God:
There his flight ceases, there the heart, become
Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,
And all the urgence of desire is lost;
Or, as it stands in the Italian:
Ivi queta il suo voi, ivi s'appunta
In tre sguardi beata, ivi il cor tace,
E tutta perde del desio la punta.
It was the fortune of Monti, as I have said, to sing all round
and upon every side of every subject, and he was governed only by
knowledge of which side was for the moment uppermost. If a poem
attacked the French when their triumph seemed doubtful, the offending
verses were erased as soon as the French conquered, and the same poem
unblushingly exalted them in a new edition;--now religion and the
Church were celebrated in Monti's song, now the goddess of Reason and
the reign of liberty; the Pope was lauded in Rome, and the Inquisition
was attacked in Milan; England was praised whilst Monti was in the
anti-French interest, and as soon as the poet could turn his coat of
many colors, the sun was urged to withdraw from England the small
amount of light and heat which it vouchsafed the foggy island; and the
Rev. Henry Boyd, who translated the _Bassvilliana_ into our tongue,
must have been very much dismayed to find this eloquent foe of
revolutions assailing the hereditary enemy of France in his next poem,
and uttering the hope that she might be surrounded with waves of blood
and with darkness, and shaken with earthquakes. But all this was
nothing to Monti's treatment of the shade of poor King Louis XVI. We
have seen with how much ceremony the poet ushered that unhappy
prince into eternal bliss, and in Mr. Boyd's translation of the
_Bassvilliana_, we can read the portents with which Monti makes the
heavens recognize the crime of his execution in Paris.
Then from their houses, like a billowy tide,
Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast
Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified.
Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed
By wheels, by feet of horses and of men;
The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest;
Like distant thunder's roar, scarce within ken,
Like the hoarse murmurs of the midnight surge,
Like the north wind rushing from its far-off den.
* * * * *
Through the dark crowds that round the scaffold flock
The monarch see with look and gait appear
That might to soft compassion melt a rock;
Melt rocks, from hardest flint draw pity's tear,--
But not from Gallic tigers; to what fate,
Monsters, have ye brought him who loved you dear?
It seems scarcely possible that a personage so flatteringly attended
from the scaffold to the very presence of the Trinity, could afterward
have been used with disrespect by the same master of ceremonies; yet
in his Ode on Superstition, Monti has later occasion to refer to the
French monarch in these terms:
The tyrant has fallen. Ye peoples
Oppressèd, rise! Nature breathes freely.
Proud kings, bow before them and tremble;
Yonder crumbles the greatest of thrones!
(_Repeat_.) There was stricken the vile perjurer Capet,
(He will only give Louis his family name!)
Who had worn out the patience of God!
In that pitiless blood dip thy fingers,
France, delivered from fetters unworthy!
'T is blood sucked from the veins of thy children
Whom the despot has cruelly wronged!
O freemen to arms that are flying,
Bathe, bathe in that blood your bright weapons,
Triumph rests 'mid the terror of battle
Upon swords that have smitten a king!
This, every one must allow, was a very unhandsome way of treating an
ex-martyr, but at the time Monti wrote he was in Milan, in the midst
of most revolutionary spirits, and he felt obliged to be rude to the
memory of the unhappy king. After all, probably it did not hurt the
king so much as the poet.