I
The Italian poet who most resembles in theme and treatment the German
romanticists of the second period was nearest them geographically in
his origin. Giovanni Prati was born at Dasindo, a mountain village of
the Trentino, and his boyhood was passed amidst the wild scenes of
that picturesque region, whose dark valleys and snowy, cloud-capped
heights, foaming torrents and rolling mists, lend their gloom and
splendor to so much of his verse. His family was poor, but it was
noble, and he received, through whatever sacrifice of those who
remained at home, the education of a gentleman, as the Italians
understand it. He went to school in Trent, and won some early laurels
by his Latin poems, which the good priests who kept the _collegio_
gathered and piously preserved in an album for the admiration and
emulation of future scholars; when in due time he matriculated at the
University of Padua as student of law, he again shone as a poet,
and there he wrote his “Edmenegarda”, a poem that gave him instant
popularity throughout Italy. When he quitted the university he visited
different parts of the country, “having the need” of frequent change
of scenes and impressions; but everywhere he poured out songs,
ballads, and romances, and was already a voluminous poet in 1840,
when, in his thirtieth year, he began to abandon his Teutonic phantoms
and hectic maidens, and to make Italy in various disguises the heroine
of his song. Whether Austria penetrated these disguises or not, he was
a little later ordered to leave Milan. He took refuge in Piedmont,
whose brave king, in spite of diplomatic remonstrances from his
neighbors, made Prati his _poeta cesareo_, or poet laureate. This was
in 1843; and five years later he took an active part in inciting with
his verse the patriotic revolts which broke out all over Italy. But
he was supposed by virtue of his office to be monarchical in his
sympathies, and when he ventured to Florence, the novelist Guerrezzi,
who was at the head of the revolutionary government there, sent the
poet back across the border in charge of a carbineer. In 1851 he had
the misfortune to write a poem in censure of Orsini's attempt upon the
life of Napoleon III., and to take money for it from the gratified
emperor. He seems to have remained up to his death in the enjoyment of
his office at Turin. His latest poem, if one may venture to speak of
any as the last among poems poured out with such bewildering rapidity,
was “Satan and the Graces”, which De Sanctis made himself very merry
over.
The Edmenegarda, which first won him repute, was perhaps not more
youthful, but it was a subject that appealed peculiarly to the heart
of youth, and was sufficiently mawkish. All the characters of the
Edmenegarda were living at the time of its publication, and were
instantly recognized; yet there seems to have been no complaint
against the poet on their part, nor any reproach on the part of
criticism. Indeed, at least one of the characters was nattered by
the celebrity given him. “So great,” says Prati's biographer, in the
_Gallerìa Nazionale_, “was the enthusiasm awakened everywhere, and in
every heart, by the Edmenegarda, that the young man portrayed in it,
under the name of Leoni, imagining himself to have become, through
Prati's merit, an eminently poetical subject, presented himself to the
poet in the Caffè Pedrocchi at Padua, and returned him his warmest
thanks. Prati also made the acquaintance, at the Caffè Nazionale in
Turin, of his Edmenegarda, but after the wrinkles had seamed the
visage of his ideal, and canceled perhaps from her soul the memory of
anguish suffered.” If we are to believe this writer, the story of a
wife's betrayal, abandonment by her lover, and repudiation by her
husband, produced effects upon the Italian public as various as
profound. “In this pathetic story of an unhappy love was found so much
truth of passion, so much naturalness of sentiment, and so much power,
that every sad heart was filled with love for the young poet, so
compassionate toward innocent misfortune, so sympathetic in form,
in thought, in sentiment. Prom that moment Prati became the poet of
suffering youth; in every corner of Italy the tender verses of the
Edmenegarda were read with love, and sometimes frenzied passion; the
political prisoners of Rome, of Naples, and Palermo found them a
grateful solace amid the privations and heavy tedium of incarceration;
many sundered lovers were reconjoined indissolubly in the kiss of
peace; more than one desperate girl was restrained from the folly of
suicide; and even the students in the ecclesiastical seminaries at
Milan revolted, as it were, against their rector, and petitioned
the Archbishop of Gaisruk that they might be permitted to read the
fantastic romance.”
{Illustration: GIOVANNI PRATI.}
What he was at first, Prati seems always to have remained in character
and in ideals. “Would you know the poet in ordinary of the king of
Sardinia?” says Marc-Monnier. “Go up the great street of the Po, under
the arcades to the left, around the Caffè Florio, which is the center
of Turin. If you meet a great youngster of forty years, with brown
hair, wandering eyes, long visage, lengthened by the imperial,
prominent nose, diminished by the mustache,--good head, in fine, and
proclaiming the artist at first glance, say to yourself that this is
he, give him your hand, and he will give you his. He is the openest of
Italians, and the best fellow in the world. It is here that he lives,
under the arcades. Do not look for his dwelling; he does not dwell,
he promenades. Life for him is not a combat nor a journey; it is a
saunter (_flânerie_), cigar in mouth, eyes to the wind; a comrade whom
he meets, and passes a pleasant word with; a group of men who talk
politics, and leave you to read the newspapers; _puis cà et là, par
hasard, une bonne fortune_; a woman or an artist who understands you,
and who listens while you talk of art or repeat your verses. Prati
lives so the whole year round. From time to time he disappears for a
week or two. Where is he? Nobody knows. You grow uneasy; you ask his
address: he has none. Some say he is ill; others, he is dead; but some
fine morning, cheerful as ever, he re-appears under the arcades. He
has come from the bottom of a wood or the top of a mountain, and he
has made two thousand verses.... He is hardly forty-one years old, and
he has already written a million lines. I have read seven volumes of
his, and I have not read all.”
I have not myself had the patience here boasted by M. Marc-Monnier;
but three or four volumes of Prati's have sufficed to teach me the
spirit and purpose of his poetry. Born in 1815, and breathing his
first inspirations from that sense of romance blowing into Italy with
every northern gale,--a son of the Italian Tyrol, the region where the
fire meets the snow,--he has some excuse, if not a perfect reason, for
being half-German in his feeling. It is natural that Prati should love
the ballad form above all, and should pour into its easy verse the
wild legends heard during a boyhood passed among mountains and
mountaineers. As I read his poetic tales, with a little heart-break,
more or less fictitious, in each, I seem to have found again the sweet
German songs that fluttered away out of my memory long ago. There is
a tender light on the pages; a mistier passion than that of the south
breathes through the dejected lines; and in the ballads we see all our
old acquaintance once more,--the dying girls, the galloping horsemen,
the moonbeams, the familiar, inconsequent phantoms,--scarcely changed
in the least, and only betraying now and then that they have been at
times in the bad company of Lara, and Medora, and other dissipated and
vulgar people. The following poem will give some proof of all this,
and will not unfairly witness of the quality of Prati in most of the
poetry he has written: