II

The first political tragedy of Niccolini was the _Nebuchadnezzar_,

which was printed in London in 1819, and figured, under that

Scriptural disguise, the career of Napoleon. After that came his

_Antonio Foscarini_, in which the poet, who had heretofore been a

classicist, tried to reconcile that school with the romantic by

violating the sacred unities in a moderate manner. In his subsequent

tragedies he seems not to have regarded them at all, and to have been

romantic as the most romantic Lombard of them all could have asked.

Of course, his defection gave exquisite pain to the lovers of Italian

good taste, as the classicists called themselves, but these were

finally silenced by the success of his tragedy. The reader of it

nowadays, we suspect, will think its success not very expensively

achieved, and it certainly has a main fault that makes it strangely

disagreeable. When the past was chiefly the affair of fable, the

storehouse of tradition, it was well enough for the poet to take

historical events and figures, and fashion them in any way that served

his purpose; but this will not do in our modern daylight, where a

freedom with the truth is an offense against common knowledge, and

does not charm the fancy, but painfully bewilders it at the best,

and at the second best is impudent and ludicrous. In his tragedy,

Niccolini takes two very familiar incidents of Venetian history: that

of the Foscari, which Byron has used; and that of Antonio Foscarini,

who was unjustly hanged more than a hundred years later for privity

to a conspiracy against the state, whereas the attributive crime of

Jacopo Foscari was the assassination of a fellow-patrician. The poet

is then forced to make the Doge Foscari do duty throughout as the

father of Foscarini, the only doge of whose name served out his term

very peaceably, and died the author of an extremely dull official

history of Venetian literature. Foscarini, who, up to the time of his

hanging, was an honored servant of the state, and had been ambassador

to France, is obliged, on his part, to undergo all of Jacopo Foscari's

troubles; and I have not been able to see why the poet should have

vexed himself to make all this confusion, and why the story of the

Foscari was not sufficient for his purpose. In the tragedy there is

much denunciation of the oligarchic oppression of the Ten in Venice,

and it may be regarded as the first of Niccolini's dramatic appeals to

the love of freedom and the manhood of the Italians.

It is much easier to understand the success of Niccolini's subsequent

drama, _Lodovico il Moro_, which is in many respects a touching and

effective tragedy, and the historical truth is better observed in

it; though, as none of our race can ever love his country with that

passionate and personal devotion which the Italians feel, we shall

never relish the high patriotic flavor of the piece. The story is

simply that of Giovan-Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, whose uncle,

Lodovico, on pretense of relieving him of the cares of government, has

usurped the sovereignty, and keeps Galeazzo and his wife in virtual

imprisonment, the young duke wasting away with a slow but fatal

malady. To further his ambitious schemes in Lombardy, Lodovico has

called in Charles VIII. of France, who claims the crown of Naples

against the Aragonese family, and pauses, on his way to Naples, at

Milan. Isabella, wife of Galeazzo, appeals to Charles to liberate

them, but reaches his presence in such an irregular way that she is

suspected of treason both to her husband and to Charles. Yet the king

is convinced of her innocence, and he places the sick duke under the

protection of a French garrison, and continues his march on Naples.

Lodovico has appeared to consent, but by seeming to favor the popular

leaders has procured the citizens to insist upon his remaining in

power; he has also secretly received the investiture from the Emperor

of Germany, to be published upon the death of Galeazzo. He now,

therefore, defies the French; Galeazzo, tormented by alternate hope

and despair, dies suddenly; and Lodovico, throwing off the mask of a

popular ruler, puts the republican leaders to death, and reigns the

feudatory of the Emperor. The interest of the play is almost entirely

political, and patriotism is the chief passion involved. The main

personal attraction of the tragedy is in the love of Galeazzo and

his wife, and in the character of the latter the dreamy languor of a

hopeless invalid is delicately painted.

The _Giovanni da Procida_ was a further advance in political

literature. In this tragedy, abandoning the indirectly liberal

teachings of the Foscarini, Niccolini set himself to the purpose

of awakening a Tuscan hatred of foreign rule. The subject is the

expulsion of the French from Sicily; and when the French ambassador

complained to the Austrian that such a play should be tolerated by

the Tuscan government, the Austrian answered, “The address is to the

French, but the letter is for the Germans.” The Giovanni da Procida

was a further development of Niccolini's political purposes in

literature, and at the time of its first representation it raised the

Florentines to a frenzy of theater-going patriotism. The tragedy

ends with the terrible Sicilian Vespers, but its main affair is with

preceding events, largely imagined by the poet, and the persons are in

great part fictitious; yet they all bear a certain relation to fact,

and the historical persons are more or less historically painted.

Giovanni da Procida, a great Sicilian nobleman, believed dead by

the French, comes home to Palermo, after long exile, to stir up the

Sicilians to rebellion, and finds that his daughter is married to the

son of one of the French rulers, though neither this daughter Imelda

nor her husband Tancredi knew the origin of the latter at the time of

their marriage. Precida, in his all-absorbing hate of the oppressors,

cannot forgive them; yet he seizes Tancredi, and imprisons him in his

castle, in order to save his life from the impending massacre of the

French; and in a scene with Imelda, he tells her that, while she was a

babe, the father of Tancredi had abducted her mother and carried

her to France. Years after, she returned heart-broken to die in her

husband's arms, a secret which she tries to reveal perishing with her.

While Imelda remains horror-struck by this history, Procida receives

an intercepted letter from Eriberto, Tancredi's father, in which

he tells the young man that he and Imelda are children of the same

mother. Procida in pity of his daughter, the victim of this awful

fatality, prepares to send her away to a convent in Pisa; but a French

law forbids any ship to sail at that time, and Imelda is brought back

and confronted in a public place with Tancredi, who has been rescued

by the French.

He claims her as his wife, but she, filled with the horror of what she

knows, declares that he is not her husband. It is the moment of the

Vespers, and Tancredi falls among the first slain by the Sicilians. He

implores Imelda for a last kiss, but wildly answering that they are

brother and sister, she swoons away, while Tancredi dies in this

climax of self-loathing and despair. The management of a plot so

terrible is very simple. The feelings of the characters in the hideous

maze which involves them are given only such expression as should come

from those utterly broken by their calamity. Imelda swoons when she

hears the letter of Eriberto declaring the fatal tie of blood that

binds her to her husband, and forever separates her from him. When she

is restored, she finds her father weeping over her, and says:

Ah, thou dost look on me

And weep! At least this comfort I can feel

In the horror of my state: thou canst not hate

A woman so unhappy....

... Oh, from all

Be hid the atrocity! to some holy shelter

Let me be taken far from hence. I feel

Naught can be more than my calamity,

Saving God's pity. I have no father now,

Nor child, nor husband (heavens, what do I say?

He is my brother now! and well I know

I must not ask to see him more). I, living, lose

Everything death robs other women of.

By far the greater feeling and passion are shown in the passages

describing the wrongs which the Sicilians have suffered from the

French, and expressing the aspiration and hate of Procida and his

fellow-patriots. Niccolini does not often use pathos, and he is on

that account perhaps the more effective in the use of it. However this

may be, I find it very touching when, after coming back from his long

exile, Procida says to Imelda, who is trembling for the secret of her

marriage amidst her joy in his return:

Daughter, art thou still

So sad? I have not heard yet from thy lips

A word of the old love....

... Ah, thou knowest not

What sweetness hath the natal spot, how many

The longings exile hath; how heavy't is

To arrive at doors of homes where no one waits thee!

Imelda, thou may'st abandon thine own land,

But not forget her; I, a pilgrim, saw

Many a city; but none among them had

A memory that spoke unto my heart;

And fairer still than any other seemed

The country whither still my spirit turned.

In a vein as fierce and passionate as this is tender, Procida relates

how, returning to Sicily when he was believed dead by the French, he

passed in secret over the island and inflamed Italian hatred of the

foreigners:

I sought the pathless woods,

And drew the cowards thence and made them blush,

And then made fury follow on their shame.

I hailed the peasant in his fertile fields,

Where, 'neath the burden of the cruel tribute,

He dropped from famine 'midst the harvest sheaves,

With his starved brood: “Open thou with thy scythe

The breasts of Frenchmen; let the earth no more

Be fertile to our tyrants.” I found my way

In palaces, in hovels; tranquil, I

Both great and lowly did make drunk with rage.

I knew the art to call forth cruel tears

In every eye, to wake in every heart

A love of slaughter, a ferocious need

Of blood. And in a thousand strong right hands

Glitter the arms I gave.

In the last act occurs one of those lyrical passages in which

Niccolini excels, and two lines from this chorus are among the most

famous in modern Italian poetry:

Perchè tanto sorriso del cielo

Sulla terra del vile dolor?

The scene is in a public place in Palermo, and the time is the moment

before the massacre of the French begins. A chorus of Sicilian poets

remind the people of their sorrows and degradation, and sing:

The wind vexes the forest no longer,

In the sunshine the leaflets expand:

With barrenness cursed be the land

That is bathed with the sweat of the slave!

On the fields now the harvests are waving,

On the fields that our blood has made red;

Harvests grown for our enemy's bread

From the bones of our children they wave!

With a veil of black clouds would the tempest

Might the face of this Italy cover;

Why should Heaven smile so glorious over

The land of our infamous woe?

All nature is suddenly wakened,

Here in slumbers unending man sleeps;

Dust trod evermore by the steps

Of ever-strange lords he lies low!

{Illustration: Giambattista Niccolini.}

“With this tragedy,” says an Italian biographer of Niccolini, “the

poet potently touched all chords of the human heart, from the most

impassioned love to the most implacable hate.... The enthusiasm rose

to the greatest height, and for as many nights of the severe winter of

1830 as the tragedy was given, the theater was always thronged by the

overflowing audience; the doors of the Cocomero were opened to the

impatient people many hours before the spectacle began. Spectators

thought themselves fortunate to secure a seat next the roof of the

theater; even in the prompter's hole {Note: On the Italian stage the

prompter rises from a hole in the floor behind the foot-lights, and is

hidden from the audience merely by a canvas shade.} places were

sought to witness the admired work.... And whilst they wept over the

ill-starred love of Imelda, and all hearts palpitated in the touching

situation of the drama,--where the public and the personal interests

so wonderfully blended, and the vengeance of a people mingled

with that of a man outraged in the most sacred affections of the

heart,--Procida rose terrible as the billows of his sea, imprecating

before all the wrongs of their oppressed country, in whatever

servitude inflicted, by whatever aliens, among all those that had

trampled, derided, and martyred her, and raising the cry of resistance

which stirred the heart of all Italy. At the picture of the abject

sufferings of their common country, the whole audience rose and

repeated with tears of rage:

“Why should heaven smile so glorious over

The land of our infamous woe?”

By the year 1837 had begun the singular illusion of the Italians, that

their freedom and unity were to be accomplished through a liberal and

patriotic Pope. Niccolini, however, never was cheated by it, though he

was very much disgusted, and he retired, not only from the political

agitation, but almost from the world. He was seldom seen upon the

street, but to those who had access to him he did not fail to express

all the contempt and distrust he felt. “A liberal Pope! a liberal

Pope!” he said, with a scornful enjoyment of that contradiction in

terms. He was thoroughly Florentine and Tuscan in his anti-papal

spirit, and he was faithful in it to the tradition of Dante, Petrarch,

Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Alfieri, who all doubted and combated

the papal influence as necessarily fatal to Italian hopes. In 1843 he

published his great and principal tragedy, _Arnaldo da Brescia_, which

was a response to the ideas of the papal school of patriots. In due

time Pius IX. justified Niccolini, and all others that distrusted him,

by turning his back upon the revolution, which belief in him, more

than anything else, had excited.

The tragedies which succeeded the Arnaldo were the _Filippo Strozzi_,

published in 1847; the _Beatrice_ _Cenci_, a version from the English

of Shelley, and the _Mario e i Cimbri_.

A part of the Arnaldo da Brescia was performed in Florence in 1858,

not long before the war which has finally established Italian freedom.

The name of the Cocomero theater had been changed to the Teatro

Niccolini, and, in spite of the governmental anxiety and opposition,

the occasion was made a popular demonstration in favor of Niccolini's

ideas as well as himself. His biographer says: “The audience now

maintained a religious silence; now, moved by irresistible force,

broke out into uproarious applause as the eloquent protests of the

friar and the insolent responses of the Pope awakened their interest;

for Italy then, like the unhappy martyr, had risen to proclaim the

decline of that monstrous power which, in the name of a religion

profaned by it, sanctifies its own illegitimate and feudal origin,

its abuses, its pride, its vices, its crimes. It was a beautiful and

affecting spectacle to see the illustrious poet receiving the

warm congratulations of his fellow-citizens, who enthusiastically

recognized in him the utterer of so many lofty truths and the prophet

of Italy. That night Niccolini was accompanied to his house by the

applauding multitude.” And if all this was a good deal like the honors

the Florentines were accustomed to pay to a very pretty _ballerina_

or a successful _prima donna_, there is no doubt that a poet is much

worthier the popular frenzy; and it is a pity that the forms of

popular frenzy have to be so cheapened by frequent use. The two

remaining years of Niccolini's life were spent in great retirement,

and in a satisfaction with the fortunes of Italy which was only marred

by the fact that the French still remained in Rome, and that the

temporal power yet stood. He died in 1861.