GIOVANNI BERCHET was a poet who alone ought to be enough to take from
the Lombard romanticists the unjust reproach of “resignation”. “Where
our poetry,” says De Sanctis, “throws off every disguise, romantic
or classic, is in the verse of Berchet.... If Giovanni Berchet had
remained in Italy, probably his genius would have remained enveloped
in the allusions and shadows of romanticism. But in his exile at
London he uttered the sorrow and the wrath of his betrayed and
vanquished country. It was the accent of the national indignation
which, leaving the generalities of the sonnets and the ballads,
dramatized itself and portrayed our life in its most touching phases.”
Berchet's family was of French origin, but he was the most Italian of
Italians, and nearly all his poems are of an ardent political tint and
temperature. Naturally, he spent a great part of his life in exile
after the Austrians were reestablished in Milan; he was some time in
England, and I believe he died in Switzerland.
I have most of his patriotic poems in a little book which is curiously
historical of a situation forever past. I picked it up, I do not
remember where or when, in Venice; and as it is a collection of pieces
all meant to embitter the spirit against Austria, it had doubtless not
been brought into the city with the connivance of the police. There is
no telling where it was printed, the mysterious date of publication
being “Italy, 1861”, and nothing more, with the English motto: “Adieu,
my native land, adieu!”
The principal poem here is called “Le Fantasie”, and consists of a
series of lyrics in which an Italian exile contrasts the Lombards,
who drove out Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century, with the
Lombards of 1829, who crouched under the power defied of old. It is
full of burning reproaches, sarcasms, and appeals; and it probably
had some influence in renewing the political agitation which in Italy
followed the French revolution of 1830. Other poems of Berchet
represent social aspects of the Austrian rule, like one entitled
“Remorse”, which paints the isolation and wretchedness of an Italian
woman married to an Austrian; and another, “Giulia”, which gives a
picture of the frantic misery of an Austrian conscription in Italy.
A very impressive poem is that called “The Hermit of Mt. Cenis”. A
traveler reaches the summit of the pass, and, looking over upon the
beauty and magnificence of the Italian plains, and seeing only their
loveliness and peace, his face is lighted up with an involuntary
smile, when suddenly the hermit who knows all the invisible disaster
and despair of the scene suddenly accosts him with, “Accursed be he
who approaches without tears this home of sorrow!”
At the time the Romantic School rose in Italian literature, say from
1815 till 1820, society was brilliant, if not contented or happy.
In Lombardy and Venetia, immediately after the treaties of the Holy
Alliance had consigned these provinces to Austria, there flourished
famous _conversazioni_ at many noble houses. In those of Milan many
distinguished literary men of other nations met. Byron and Hobhouse
were frequenters of the same _salons_ as Pellico, Manzoni, and Grossi;
the Schlegels represented the German Romantic School, and Madame de
Staël the sympathizing movement in France. There was very much that
was vicious still, and very much that was ignoble in Italian society,
but this was by sufferance and not as of old by approval; and it
appears that the tone of the highest life was intellectual. It cannot
be claimed that this tone was at all so general as the badness of the
last century. It was not so easily imitated as that, and it could not
penetrate so subtly into all ranks and conditions. Still it was very
observable, and mingled with it in many leading minds was the strain
of religious resignation, audible in Manzoni's poetry. That was a time
when the Italians might, if ever, have adapted themselves to foreign
rule; but the Austrians, sofar from having learned political wisdom
during the period of their expulsion from Italy, had actually
retrograded; from being passive authorities whom long sojourn was
gradually Italianizing, they had, in their absence, become active and
relentless tyrants, and they now seemed to study how most effectually
to alienate themselves. They found out their error later, but when too
late to repair it, and from 1820 until 1859 in Milan, and until 1866
in Venice, the hatred, which they had themselves enkindled, burned
fiercer and fiercer against them. It is not extravagant to say that
if their rule had continued a hundred years longer the Italians would
never have been reconciled to it. Society took the form of habitual
and implacable defiance to them. The life of the whole people might be
said to have resolved itself into a protest against their presence.
This hatred was the heritage of children from their parents, the bond
between friends, the basis of social faith; it was a thread even in
the tie between lovers; it was so intense and so pervasive that it
cannot be spoken.
Berchet was the vividest, if not the earliest, expression of it in
literature, and the following poem, which I have already mentioned,
is, therefore, not only intensely true to Italian feeling, but
entirely realistic in its truth to a common fact.