I
Giuseppe Giusti, who is the greatest Italian satirist of this century,
and is in some respects the greatest Italian poet, was born in 1809 at
Mossummano in Tuscany, of parentage noble and otherwise distinguished;
one of his paternal ancestors had assisted the liberal Grand Duke
Pietro Leopoldo to compile his famous code, and his mother's father
had been a republican in 1799. There was also an hereditary taste for
literature in the family; and Giusti says, in one of his charming
letters, that almost as soon as he had learned to speak, his father
taught him the ballad of Count Ugolino, and he adds, “I have always
had a passion for song, a passion for verses, and more than a passion
for Dante.” His education passed later into the hands of a priest,
who had spent much time as a teacher in Vienna, and was impetuous,
choleric, and thoroughly German in principle. “I was given him to be
taught,” says Giusti, “but he undertook to tame me”; and he remembered
reading with him a Plutarch for youth, and the “Lives of the Saints”,
but chiefly was, as he says, so “caned, contraried, and martyred” by
him, that, when the priest wept at their final parting, the boy could
by no means account for the burst of tenderness. Giusti was then going
to Florence to be placed in a school where he had the immeasurable
good fortune to fall into the hands of one whose gentleness and wisdom
he remembered through life. “Drea Francioni,” he says, “had not time
to finish his work, but he was the first and the only one to put into
my heart the need and love of study. Oh, better far than stuffing the
head with Latin, with histories and with fables! Endear study, even if
you teach nothing; this is the great task!” And he afterward dedicated
his book on Tuscan proverbs, which he thought one of his best
performances, to this beloved teacher.
He had learned to love study, yet from this school, and from others
to which he was afterward sent, he came away with little Latin and no
Greek; but, what is more important, he began life about this time as a
poet--by stealing a sonnet. His theft was suspected, but could not be
proved. “And so,” he says of his teacher and himself, “we remained, he
in his doubt and I in my lie. Who would have thought from this ugly
beginning that I should really have gone on to make sonnets of my
own?... The Muses once known, the vice grew upon me, and from my
twelfth to my fifteenth year I rasped, and rasped, and rasped, until
finally I came out with a sonnet to Italy, represented in the usual
fashion, by the usual matron weeping as usual over her highly
estimable misfortunes. In school, under certain priests who were more
Chinese than Italian, and without knowing whether Italy were round or
square, long or short, how that sonnet to Italy should get into my
head I don't know. I only know that it was found beautiful, and I was
advised to hide it,”--that being the proper thing to do with patriotic
poetry in those days.
After leaving school, Giusti passed three idle years with his family,
and then went to study the humanities at Pisa, where he found the
_café_ better adapted to their pursuit than the University, since
he could there unite with it the pursuit of the exact science of
billiards. He represents himself in his letters and verses to have led
just the life at Pisa which was most agreeable to former governments
of Italy,--a life of sensual gayety, abounding in the small
excitements which turn the thought from the real interests of the
time, and weaken at once the moral and intellectual fiber. But how
far a man can be credited to his own disgrace is one of the unsettled
questions: the repentant and the unrepentant are so apt to over-accuse
themselves. It is very wisely conjectured by some of Giusti's
biographers that he did not waste himself so much as he says in the
dissipations of student life at Pisa. At any rate, it is certain that
he began there to make those sarcastic poems upon political events
which are so much less agreeable to a paternal despotism than almost
any sort of love-songs. He is said to have begun by writing in the
manner of Béranger, and several critics have labored to prove the
similarity of their genius, with scarcely more effect, it seems to us,
than those who would make him out the Heinrich Heine of Italy, as they
call him. He was a political satirist, whose success was due to his
genius, but who can never be thoroughly appreciated by a foreigner,
or even an Italian not intimately acquainted with the affairs of his
times; and his reputation must inevitably diminish with the waning
interest of men in the obsolete politics of those vanished kingdoms
and duchies. How mean and little were all their concerns is scarcely
credible; but Giusti tells an adventure of his, at the period, which
throws light upon some of the springs of action in Tuscany. He had
been arrested for a supposed share in applause supposed revolutionary
at the theater; he boldly denied that he had been at the play. “If
you were not at the theater, how came your name on the list of the
accused?” demanded the logical commissary. “Perhaps,” answered Giusti,
“the spies have me so much in mind that they see me where I am not....
Here,” he continues, “the commissary fell into a rage, but I remained
firm, and cited the Count Mastiani in proof, with whom the man often
dined,”--Mastiani being governor in Pisa and the head of society. “At
the name of Mastiani there seemed to pass before the commissary a long
array of stewed and roast, eaten and to be eaten, so that he instantly
turned and said to me, 'Go, and at any rate take this summons for a
paternal admonition.'” Ever since the French Revolution of 1830, and
the sympathetic movements in Italy, Giusti had written political
satires which passed from hand to hand in manuscript copies, the
possession of which was rendered all the more eager and relishing by
the pleasure of concealing them from spies; so that for a defective
copy a person by no means rich would give as much as ten scudi. When a
Swiss printed edition appeared in 1844, half the delight in them was
gone; the violation of the law being naturally so dear to the human
heart that, when combined with patriotism, it is almost a rapture.
But, in the midst of his political satirizing, Giusti felt the sting
of one who is himself a greater satirist than any, when he will,
though he is commonly known for a sentimentalist. The poet fell in
love very seriously and, it proved, very unhappily, as he has recorded
in three or four poems of great sweetness and grace, but no very
characteristic merit. This passion is improbably believed to have
had a disastrous effect upon Giusti's health, and ultimately to have
shortened his life; but then the Italians always like to have their
poets _agonizzanti_, at least. Like a true humorist, Giusti has
himself taken both sides of the question; professing himself properly
heart-broken in the poems referred to, and in a letter written late
in life, after he had encountered his faded love at his own home in
Pescia, making a jest of any reconciliation or renewal of the old
passion between them.
“Apropos of the heart,” says Giusti in this letter, “you ask me about
a certain person who once had mine, whole and sound, roots and all. I
saw her this morning in passing, out of the corner of my eye, and I
know that she is well and enjoying herself. As to our coming together
again, the case, if it were once remote, is now impossible; for you
can well imagine that, all things considered, I could never be such a
donkey as to tempt her to a comparison of me with myself. I am
certain that, after having tolerated me for a day or two for simple
appearance' sake, she would find some good excuse for planting me a
yard outside the door. In many, obstinacy increases with the ails
and wrinkles; but in me, thank Heaven, there comes a meekness, a
resignation, not to be expressed. Perhaps it has not happened
otherwise with her. In that case we could accommodate ourselves, and
talk as long as the evening lasted of magnesia, of quinine, and of
nervines; lament, not the rising and sinking of the heart, but of the
barometer; talk, not of the theater and all the rest, but whether it
is better to crawl out into the sun like lizards, or stay at home
behind battened windows. 'Good-evening, my dear, how have you been
to-day?' 'Eh! you know, my love, the usual rheumatism; but for the
rest I don't complain.' 'Did you sleep well last night?' 'Not so bad;
and you?' 'O, little or none at all; and I got up feeling as if all my
bones were broken.' 'My idol, take a little laudanum. Think that when
you are not well I suffer with you. And your appetite, how is it?' 'O,
don't speak of it! I can't get anything down.' 'My soul, if you don't
eat you'll not be able to keep up.' 'But, my heart, what would you do
if the mouthfuls stuck in your throat?' 'Take a little quassia; ...
but, dost thou remember, once--?' 'Yes, I remember; but once was
once,' ... and so forth, and so forth. Then some evening, if a priest
came in, we could take a hand at whist with a dummy, and so live on
to the age of crutches in a passion whose phases are confided to the
apothecary rather than to the confessor.”
{Illustration: GIUSEPPE GIUSTI.}
Giusti's first political poems had been inspired by the revolutionary
events of 1830 in France; and he continued part of that literary force
which, quite as much as the policy of Cavour, has educated Italians
for freedom and independence. When the French revolution of 1848 took
place, and the responsive outbreaks followed all over Europe, Tuscany
drove out her Grand Duke, as France drove out her king, and, still
emulous of that wise exemplar, put the novelist Guerrazzi at the head
of her affairs, as the next best thing to such a poet as Lamartine,
which she had not. The affair ended in the most natural way; the
Florentines under the supposed popular government became very tired
of themselves, and called back their Grand Duke, who came again with
Austrian bayonets to support him in the affections of his subjects,
where he remained secure until the persuasive bayonets disappeared
before Garibaldi ten years later.
Throughout these occurrences the voice of Giusti was heard whenever
that of good sense and a temperate zeal for liberty could be made
audible. He was an aristocrat by birth and at heart, and he looked
upon the democratic shows of the time with distrust, if not dislike,
though he never lost faith in the capacity of the Italians for an
independent national government. His broken health would not let him
join the Tuscan volunteers who marched to encounter the Austrians in
Lombardy; and though he was once elected member of the representative
body from Pescia, he did not shine in it, and refused to be chosen
a second time. His letters of this period afford the liveliest and
truest record of feeling in Tuscany during that memorable time of
alternating hopes and fears, generous impulses, and mean derelictions,
and they strike me as among the best letters in any language.
Giusti supported the Grand Duke's return philosophically, with a
sarcastic serenity of spirit, and something also of the indifference
of mortal sickness. His health was rapidly breaking, and in March,
1850, he died very suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs.