who survives. Anacreon lives; but the poets who appealed to their
Ionian fellow-citizens as men and brethren, and lectured them upon
their servility and their habits of wine-bibbing and of basking away
the dearest rights of humanity in the sun, who ever heard of them? I
do not mean to say that Giusti ever lectured his generation; he was
too good an artist for that; but at least one Italian critic forebodes
that the figure he made in the patriotic imagination must diminish
rapidly with the establishment of the very conditions he labored to
bring about. The wit of much that he said must grow dim with the
fading remembrance of what provoked it; the sting lie pointless and
painless in the dust of those who writhed under it,--so much of the
poet's virtue perishing in their death. We can only judge of all this
vaguely and for a great part from the outside, for we cannot pretend
to taste the finest flavor of the poetry which, is sealed to a
foreigner in the local phrases and racy Florentine words which Giusti
used; but I think posterity in Italy will stand in much the same
attitude toward him that we do now. Not much of the social life of his
time is preserved in his poetry, and he will not be resorted to as
that satirist of the period to whom historians are fond of alluding in
support of conjectures relative to society in the past. Now and then
he touches upon some prevailing intellectual or literary affectation,
as in the poem describing the dandified, desperate young poet of
fashion, who,
Immersed in suppers and balls,
A martyr in yellow gloves,
sings of Italy, of the people, of progress, with the rhetoricalities
of the modern Arcadians; and he has a poem called “The Ball”, which
must fairly, as it certainly does wittily, represent one of those
anomalous entertainments which rich foreigners give in Italy, and to
which all sorts of irregular aliens resort, something of the local
aristocracy appearing also in a ghostly and bewildered way. Yet even
in this poem there is a political lesson.
I suppose, in fine, that I shall most interest my readers in Giusti,
if I translate here the pieces that have most interested me. Of all,
I like best the poem which he calls “St. Ambrose”, and I think the
reader will agree with me about it. It seems not only very perfect
as a bit of art, with its subtly intended and apparently capricious
mingling of satirical and pathetic sentiment, but valuable for its
vivid expression of Italian feeling toward the Austrians. These
the Italians hated as part of a stupid and brutal oppression; they
despised them somewhat as a torpid-witted folk, but individually liked
them for their amiability and good nature, and in their better moments
they pitied them as the victims of a common tyranny. I will not be
so adventurous as to say how far the beautiful military music of the
Austrians tended to lighten the burden of a German garrison in an
Italian city; but certainly whoever has heard that music must have
felt, for one base and shameful moment, that the noise of so much of
a free press as opposed his own opinions might be advantageously
exchanged for it. The poem of “St. Ambrose”, written in 1846, when the
Germans seemed so firmly fixed in Milan, is impersonally addressed
to some Italian, holding office under the Austrian government, and,
therefore, in the German interest.