Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the stranger's
fresh and alien sense of its signal significance; a phrase that is its
own essential possession, and yet is dearer to the speaker of other
tongues. Easily--shall I say cheaply?--spiritual, for example, was the
nation that devised the name _anima pellegrina_, wherewith to crown a
creature admired. "Pilgrim soul" is a phrase for any language, but
"pilgrim soul!" addressed, singly and sweetly to one who cannot be over-
praised, "pilgrim-soul!" is a phrase of fondness, the high homage of a
lover, of one watching, of one who has no more need of common flatteries,
but has admired and gazed while the object of his praises visibly
surpassed them--this is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into an
Italian heaven.
It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this impetuous,
sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a sentence of life
passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and the modern editor had
thought it necessary to explain the exclamation by a note. It was, he
said, poetical.
_Anima pellegrina_ seems to be Italian of no later date than
Pergolese's airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the more
modern love-song suited the day of Bellini. But it is only Italian,
bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any other European
nation, but only of this.
To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of
those buoyant words:-
Felice chi vi mira,
Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!
And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be
but a property of the turn of speech. It is rather the profounder
advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very
language keeps in store. In another tongue you may sing, "happy who
looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other tongue shall the little
meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an
antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram? Yet it is not
worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather be
glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase _is_
intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should thankfully for the
occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.
I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm
may still be unknown to Englishmen--"_piuttosto bruttini_." See what
an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but
tolerant and familiar. You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art
of several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should they
be condemned. _Brutto_--ugly--is the word of justice, the word for any
language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged
internationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of the
European concert. But _bruttino_ is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive
that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence,
and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the
rear--"rather than not." "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way
that we need say few words about--the fewer the better;" nay, this
paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the printed
and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go no
further. After the sound of it, the European concert seems to be
composed of brass instruments.
How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into which
a traveller hither has to enter! Do we possess anything here more
essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany) than our
particle "un"? Poor are those living languages that have not our use of
so rich a negative. The French equivalent in adjectives reaches no
further than the adjective itself--or hardly; it does not attain the
participle; so that no French or Italian poet has the words "unloved",
"unforgiven." None such, therefore, has the opportunity of the gravest
and the most majestic of all ironies. In our English, the words that are
denied are still there--"loved," "forgiven": excluded angels, who stand
erect, attesting what is not done, what is undone, what shall not be
done.
No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain of
loss, or so much outer darkness, or so much barred beatitude in sight.
All-present, all-significant, all-remembering, all-foretelling is the
word, and it has a plenitude of knowledge.
We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, proper to
character and thought, and by no means only an accident of untransferable
speech. And it is impossible for a reader, who is a lover of languages
for their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, proper to
their own garden enclosed, without recognition. Never may they be
disregarded or confounded with the universal stock. If I would not so
neglect _piuttosto bruttini_, how much less a word dominating
literature! And of such words of ascendancy and race there is no great
English author but has abundant possession. No need to recall them. But
even writers who are not great have, here and there, proved their full
consciousness of their birthright. Thus does a man who was hardly an
author, Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights. He has
incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at that
time he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood, and the
head he studied was, he says, full of "power and grief."
This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a local
rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an intellectual
place--_Felice chi vi mira_--or the art-critic's phrase--_piuttosto
bruttini_--of easy, companionable, and equal contempt.
As for French, if it had no other sacred words--and it has many--who
would not treasure the language that has given us--no, not that has given
us, but that has kept for its own--_ensoleille_? Nowhere else is the sun
served with such a word. It is not to be said or written without a
convincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come light and
radiation. The unaccustomed north could not have made it, nor the
accustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-south; therefore
neither England nor Italy can rival it. But there needed also the senses
of the French--those senses of which they say far too much in every
second-class book of their enormous, their general second-class, but
which they have matched in their time with some inimitable words. Perhaps
that matching was done at the moment of the full literary consciousness
of the senses, somewhere about the famous 1830. For I do not think
_ensoleille_ to be a much older word--I make no assertion. Whatever its
origin, may it have no end! They cannot weary us with it; for it seems
as new as the sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hill-side,
vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the word, the air
is light, and white things passing blind the eyes--a woman's linen, white
cattle, shining on the way from shadow to shadow. A word of the sense of
sight, and a summer word, in short, compared with which the paraphrase is
but a picture. For _ensoleille_ I would claim the consent of all
readers--that they shall all acknowledge the spirit of that French. But
perhaps it is a mere personal preference that makes _le jour
s'annonce_ also sacred.
If the hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," was written in Latin, this could be
only that it might in time find its true language and incomparable phrase
at last--that it might await the day of life in its proper German. I
found it there (and knew at once the authentic verse, and knew at once
for what tongue it had been really destined) in the pages of the prayer-
book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck church, and in the accents of her
voice.