In the first quarter of the century was born a poet, in the village of
San Giorgio, near Verona, of parents who endowed their son with the
magnificent name of Aleardo Aleardi. His father was one of those small
proprietors numerous in the Veneto, and, though not indigent, was by
no means a rich man. He lived on his farm, and loved it, and tried to
improve the condition of his tenants. Aleardo's childhood was spent in
the country,--a happy fortune for a boy anywhere, the happiest fortune
if that country be Italy, and its scenes the grand and beautiful
scenes of the valley of the Adige. Here he learned to love nature with
the passion that declares itself everywhere in his verse; and hence he
was in due time taken and placed at school in the Collegio {note:
Not a college in the American sense, but a private school of a high
grade.} of Sant' Anastasia, in Verona, according to the Italian
system, now fallen into disuse, of fitting a boy for the world by
giving him the training of a cloister. It is not greatly to Aleardi's
discredit that he seemed to learn nothing there, and that he drove his
reverend preceptors to the desperate course of advising his removal.
They told his father he would make a good farmer, but a scholar,
never. They nicknamed him the _mole_, for his dullness; but, in the
mean time, he was making underground progress of his own, and he came
to the surface one day, a mole no longer, to everybody's amazement,
but a thing of such flight and song as they had never seen before,--in
fine, a poet. He was rather a scapegrace, after he ceased to be a
mole, at school; but when he went to the University at Padua, he
became conspicuous among the idle, dissolute students of that day for
temperate life and severe study. There he studied law, and learned
patriotism; political poetry and interviews with the police were the
consequence, but no serious trouble.
One of the offensive poems, which he says he and his friends had the
audacity to call an ode, was this:
Sing we our country. 'T is a desolate
And frozen cemetery;
Over its portals undulates
A banner black and yellow;
And within it throng the myriad
Phantoms of slaves and kings:
A man on a worn-out, tottering
Throne watches o'er the tombs:
The pallid lord of consciences,
The despot of ideas.
Tricoronate he vaunts himself
And without crown is he.
In this poem the yellow and black flag is, of course, the Austrian,
and the enthroned man is the pope, of whose temporal power our
poet was always the enemy. “The Austrian police,” says Aleardi's
biographer, “like an affectionate mother, anxious about everything,
came into possession of these verses; and the author was admonished,
in the way of maternal counsel, not to touch such topics, if he would
not lose the favor of the police, and be looked on as a prodigal son.”
He had already been admonished for carrying a cane on the top of which
was an old Italian pound, or lira, with the inscription, Kingdom of
Italy,--for it was an offense to have such words about one in any way,
so trivial and petty was the cruel government that once reigned over
the Italians.
In due time he took that garland of paper laurel and gilt pasteboard
with which the graduates of Padua are sublimely crowned, and returned
to Verona, where he entered the office of an advocate to learn the
practical workings of the law. These disgusted him, naturally enough;
and it was doubtless far less to the hurt of his feelings than of his
fortune that the government always refused him the post of advocate.
In this time he wrote his first long poem, Arnaldo, which was
published at Milan in 1842, and which won him immediate applause. It
was followed by the tragedy of Bragadino; and in the year 1845 he
wrote Le Prime Storie, which he suffered to lie unpublished for twelve
years. It appeared in Verona in 1857, a year after the publication of
his Monte Circellio, written in 1846.
{Illustration: ALEARDO ALEARDI.}
The revolution of 1848 took place; the Austrians retired from the
dominion of Venice, and a provisional republican government, under the
presidency of Daniele Manin, was established, and Aleardi was sent as
one of its plenipotentiaries to Paris, where he learnt how many fine
speeches the friends of a struggling nation can make when they do not
mean to help it. The young Venetian republic fell. Aleardi left Paris,
and, after assisting at the ceremony of being bombarded in Bologna,
retired to Genoa. He later returned to Verona, and there passed
several years of tranquil study. In 1852, for the part he had taken
in the revolution, he was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress at
Mantua, thus fulfilling the destiny of an Italian poet of those times.
All the circumstances and facts of this arrest and imprisonment are so
characteristic of the Austrian method of governing Italy, that I do
not think it out of place to give them with some fullness. In the year
named, the Austrians were still avenging themselves upon the patriots
who had driven them out of Venetia in 1848, and their courts were
sitting in Mantua for the trial of political prisoners, many of whom
were exiled, sentenced to long imprisonment, or put to death. Aleardi
was first confined in the military prison at Verona, but was soon
removed to Mantua, whither several of his friends had already been
sent. All the other prisons being full, he was thrust into a place
which till now had seemed too horrible for use. It was a narrow room,
dark, and reeking with the dampness of the great dead lagoon which
surrounds Mantua. A broken window, guarded by several gratings, let in
a little light from above; the day in that cell lasted six hours,
the night eighteen. A mattress on the floor, and a can of water for
drinking, were the furniture. In the morning they brought him two
pieces of hard, black bread; at ten o'clock a thick soup of rice and
potatoes; and nothing else throughout the day. In this dungeon he
remained sixty days, without books, without pen or paper, without any
means of relieving the terrible gloom and solitude. At the end of this
time, he was summoned to the hall above to see his sister, whom he
tenderly loved. The light blinded him so that for a while he could not
perceive her, but he talked to her calmly and even cheerfully, that
she might not know what he had suffered. Then he was remanded to his
cell, where, as her retreating footsteps ceased upon his ear, he cast
himself upon the ground in a passion of despair. Three months passed,
and he had never seen the face of judge or accuser, though once the
prison inspector, with threats and promises, tried to entrap him into
a confession. One night his sleep was broken by a continued hammering;
in the morning half a score of his friends were hanged upon the
gallows which had been built outside his cell.
By this time his punishment had been so far mitigated that he had
been allowed a German grammar and dictionary, and for the first time
studied that language, on the literature of which he afterward
lectured in Florence. He had, like most of the young Venetians of his
day, hated the language, together with those who spoke it, until then.
At last, one morning at dawn, a few days after the execution of his
friends, Aleardi and others were thrust into carriages and driven to
the castle. There the roll of the prisoners was called; to several
names none answered, for those who had borne them were dead. Were the
survivors now to be shot, or sentenced to some prison in Bohemia or
Hungary? They grimly jested among themselves as to their fate. They
were marched out into the piazza, under the heavy rain, and there
these men who had not only not been tried for any crime, but had not
even been accused of any, received the grace of the imperial pardon.
Aleardi returned to Verona and to his books, publishing another poem
in 1856, called Le Città Italiane Marinare e Commercianti. His next
publication was, in 1857, Rafaello e la Fornarina; then followed Un'
Ora della mia Giovinezza, Le Tre Fiume, and Le Tre Fanciulle, in 1858.
The war of 1859 broke out between Austria and France and Italy.
Aleardi spent the brief period of the campaign in a military prison at
Verona, where his sympathies were given an ounce of prevention. He had
committed no offense, but at midnight the police appeared, examined
his papers, found nothing, and bade him rise and go to prison. After
the peace of Villafranca he was liberated, and left the Austrian
states, retiring first to Brescia, and then to Florence. His
publications since 1859 have been a Canto Politico and I Sette
Soldati. He was condemned for his voluntary exile, by the Austrian
courts, and I remember reading in the newspapers the official
invitation given him to come back to Verona and be punished. But,
oddly enough, he declined to do so.