I
As I have noted, nearly all the poets of the Romantic School were
Lombards, and they had nearly all lived at Milan under the censorship
and espionage of the Austrian government. What sort of life this must
have been, we, born and reared in a free country, can hardly imagine.
We have no experience by which we can judge it, and we never can do
full justice to the intellectual courage and devotion of a people who,
amid inconceivable obstacles and oppressions, expressed themselves in
a new and vigorous literature. It was not, I have explained, openly
revolutionary; but whatever tended to make men think and feel was a
sort of indirect rebellion against Austria. When a society of learned
Milanese gentlemen once presented an address to the Emperor, he
replied, with brutal insolence, that he wanted obedient subjects
in Italy, nothing more; and it is certain that the activity of the
Romantic School was regarded with jealousy and dislike by the
government from the first. The authorities awaited only a pretext for
striking a deadly blow at the poets and novelists, who ought to have
been satisfied with being good subjects, but who, instead, must needs
even found a newspaper, and discuss in it projects for giving the
Italians a literary life, since they could not have a political
existence. The perils of contributing to the _Conciliatore_ were such
as would attend house-breaking and horse-stealing in happier countries
and later times. The government forbade any of its employees to write
for it, under pain of losing their places; the police, through whose
hands every article intended for publication had to pass, not only
struck out all possibly offensive expressions, but informed one of
the authors that if his articles continued to come to them so full of
objectionable things, he should be banished, even though those things
never reached the public. At last the time came for suppressing this
journal and punishing its managers. The chief editor was a young
Piedmontese poet, who politically was one of the most harmless and
inoffensive of men; his literary creed obliged him to choose Italian
subjects for his poems, and he thus erred by mentioning Italy; yet
Arnaud, in his “Poeti Patriottici”, tells us he could find but two
lines from which this poet could be suspected of patriotism, and he
altogether refuses to class him with the poets who have promoted
revolution. Nevertheless, it is probable that this poet wished Freedom
well. He was indefinitely hopeful for Italy; he was young, generous,
and credulous of goodness and justice. His youth, his generosity, his
truth, made him odious to Austria. One day he returned from a visit
to Turin, and was arrested. He could have escaped when danger first
threatened, but his faith in his own innocence ruined him. After a
tedious imprisonment, and repeated examinations in Milan, he was taken
to Venice, and lodged in the famous _piombi_, or cells in the roof of
the Ducal Palace. There, after long delays, he had his trial, and was
sentenced to twenty years in the prison of Spielberg. By a sort of
poetical license which the imperial clemency sometimes used, the
nights were counted as days, and the term was thus reduced to ten
years. Many other young and gifted Italians suffered at the same time;
most of them came to this country at the end of their long durance;
this Piedmontese poet returned to his own city of Turin, an old and
broken-spirited man, doubting of the political future, and half a
Jesuit in religion. He was devastated, and for once a cruel injustice
seemed to have accomplished its purpose.
Such is the grim outline of the story of Silvio Pellico. He was
arrested for no offense, save that he was an Italian and an
intellectual man; for no other offense he was condemned and suffered.
His famous book, “My Prisons”, is the touching and forgiving record of
one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated.
Few have borne wrong with such Christlike meekness and charity as
Pellico. One cannot read his _Prigioni_ without doing homage to his
purity and goodness, and cannot turn to his other works without the
misgiving that the sole poem he has left the world is the story of
his most fatal and unmerited suffering. I have not the hardihood to
pretend that I have read all his works. I must confess that I found it
impossible to do so, though I came to their perusal inured to drought
by travel through Saharas of Italian verse. I can boast only of having
read the _Francesca da Rimini_, among the tragedies, and two or three
of the canticles,--or romantic stories of the Middle Ages, in blank
verse,--which now refuse to be identified. I know, from a despairing
reference to his volume, that his remaining poems are chiefly of a
religious cast.