Chapter V

It is doubtful whether this poem, which Giudici calls the sublimest lyrical composition modern literature has produced, will stir the English reader to enthusiastic admiration. The poem is of its age--declamatory, ambitious, eloquent; but the ideas do not seem great or new, though that, perhaps, is because they have been so often repeated since. De Sanctis declares it the “earliest lyrical note of the new literature, the affirmation of the rehabilitated conscience of the new manhood. A law of the Republic--“the French Republic”-- prescribed the equality of men before death. The splender of monuments seemed a privilege of the nobles and the rich, and the Republicans contested the privilege, the distinction of classes, even in this form ... This revolutionary logic driven to its ultimate corollaries clouded the poetry of life for him.... He lacked the religious idea, but the sense of humanity in its progress and its aims, bound together by the family, the state, liberty, glory--from this Foscolo drew his harmonies, a new religion of the tomb.”....

He touches in it on the funeral usages of different times and peoples, with here and there an episodic allusion to the fate of heroes and poets, and disquisitions on the aesthetic and spiritual significance of posthumous honors. The most-admired passage of the poem is that in which the poet turns to the monuments of Italy's noblest dead, in the church of Santa Croce, at Florence:

The urnèd ashes of the mighty kindle
The great soul to great actions, Pindemonte,
And fair and holy to the pilgrim make
The earth that holds them. When I saw the tomb
Where rests the body of that great one,{1} who
Tempering the scepter of the potentate,
Strips off its laurels, and to the people shows
With what tears it doth reek, and with what blood;
When I beheld the place of him who raised
A new Olympus to the gods in Rome,{2}--
Of him{3} who saw the worlds wheel through the heights
Of heaven, illumined by the moveless sun,
And to the Anglian{4} oped the skyey ways
He swept with such a vast and tireless wing,--
O happy!{5} I cried, in thy life-giving air,
And in the fountains that the Apennine
Down from his summit pours for thee! The moon,
Glad in thy breath, laps in her clearest light
Thy hills with vintage laughing; and thy vales,
Filled with their clustering cots and olive-groves,
Send heavenward th' incense of a thousand flowers.
And thou wert first, Florence, to hear the song
With which the Ghibelline exile charmed his wrath,{6}
And thou his language and his ancestry
Gavest that sweet lip of Calliope,{7}
Who clothing on in whitest purity
Love in Greece nude and nude in Rome, again
Restored him unto the celestial Venus;--
But happiest I count thee that thou keep'st
Treasured beneath one temple-roof the glories
Of Italy,--now thy sole heritage,
Since the ill-guarded Alps and the inconstant
Omnipotence of human destinies
Have rent from thee thy substance and thy arms,
Thy altars, country,--save thy memories, all.
Ah! here, where yet a ray of glory lingers,
Let a light shine unto all generous souls,
And be Italia's hope! Unto these stones
Oft came Vittorio{8} for inspiration,
Wroth to his country's gods. Dumbly he roved
Where Arno is most lonely, anxiously
Brooding upon the heavens and the fields;
Then when no living aspect could console,
Here rested the Austere, upon his face
Death's pallor and the deathless light of hope.
Here with these great he dwells for evermore,
His dust yet quick with love of country. Yes,
A god speaks to us from this sacred peace,
That nursed for Persians upon Marathon,
Where Athens gave her heroes sepulture,
Greek ire and virtue. There the mariner
That sailed the sea under Euboea saw
Flashing amidst the wide obscurity
The steel of helmets and of clashing brands,
The smoke and lurid flame of funeral pyres,
And phantom warriors, clad in glittering mail,
Seeking the combat. Through the silences
And horror of the night, along the field,
The tumult of the phalanxes arose,
Mixing itself with sound of warlike tubes,
And clatter of the hoofs of steeds, that rushed
Trampling the helms of dying warriors,--
And sobs, and hymns, and the wild Parcae's songs!{9}

Notes:

{1} Question of Machiavelli. Whether “The Prince” was written in earnest, with a wish to serve the Devil, or in irony, with a wish to serve the people, is still in dispute.

{2} Michelangelo.

{3} Galileo.

{4} Newton.

{5} Florence.

{6} It is the opinion of many historians that the _Divina Commedia_ was commenced before the exile of Dante.--_Foscolo_.

{7} Petrarch was born in exile of Florentine parents.--_Ibid_.

{8} Alfieri. So Foscolo saw him in his last years.

{9} The poet, quoting Pausanias, says: “The sepulture of the Athenians who fell in the battle took place on the plain of Marathon, and there every night is heard the neighing of the steeds, and the phantoms of the combatants appear.”

The poem ends with the prophecy that poetry, after time destroys the sepulchers, shall preserve the memories of the great and the unhappy, and invokes the shades of Greece and Troy to give an illusion of sublimity to the close. The poet doubts if there be any comfort to the dead in monumental stones, but declares that they keep memories alive, and concludes that only those who leave no love behind should have little joy of their funeral urns. He blames the promiscuous burial of the good and bad, the great and base; he dwells on the beauty of the ancient cemeteries and the pathetic charm of English churchyards. The poem of _I Sepolcri_ has peculiar beauties, yet it does not seem to me the grand work which the Italians have esteemed it; though it has the pensive charm which attaches to all elegiac verse. De Sanctis attaches a great political and moral value to it. “The revolution, in the horror of its excesses, was passing. More temperate ideas prevailed; the need of a moral and religious restoration was felt. Foscolo's poem touched these chords ... which vibrated in all hearts.”

The tragedies of Foscolo are little read, and his unfinished but faithful translation of Homer did not have the success which met the facile paraphrase of Monti. His other works were chiefly critical, and are valued for their learning. The Italians claim that in his studies of Dante he was the first to reveal him to Europe in his political character, “as the inspired poet, who availed himself of art for the civil regeneration of the people speaking the language which he dedicated to supreme song”; and they count as among their best critical works, Foscolo's “exquisite essays on Petrarch and Boccaccio”. His romance, “The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis”, is a novel full of patriotism, suffering, and suicide, which found devoted readers among youth affected by “The Sorrows of Werther”, and which was the first cry of Italian disillusion with the French. Yet it had no political effect, De Sanctis says, because it was not in accord with the popular hopefulness of the time. It was, of course, wildly romantic, of the romantic sort that came before the school had got its name, and it was supposed to celebrate one of Foscolo's first loves. He had a great many loves, first and last, and is reproached with a dissolute life by the German critic, Gervinius.

He was made Professor of Italian Eloquence at the University of Pavia in 1809; but, refusing to flatter Napoleon in his inaugural address, his professorship was abolished. When the Austrians returned to Milan, in 1815, they offered him the charge of their official newspaper; but he declined it, and left Milan for the last time. He wandered homeless through Switzerland for a while, and at last went to London, where he gained a livelihood by teaching the Italian language and lecturing on its literature; and where, tormented by homesickness and the fear of blindness, he died, in 1827. “Poverty would make even Homer abject in London,” he said.

One of his biographers, however, tells us that he was hospitably welcomed at Holland House in London, and “entertained by the most illustrious islanders; but the indispensable etiquette of the country, grievous to all strangers, was intolerable to Foscolo, and he soon withdrew from these elegant circles, and gave himself up to his beloved books.” Like Alfieri, on whom he largely modeled his literary ideal, and whom he fervently admired, Foscolo has left us his portrait drawn by himself, which the reader may be interested to see.

A furrowed brow, with cavernous eyes aglow;
Hair tawny; hollow cheeks; looks resolute;
Lips pouting, but to smiles and pleasance slow;
Head bowed, neck beautiful, and breast hirsute;
Limbs shapely; simple, yet elect, in dress;
Rapid my steps, my thoughts, my acts, my tones;
Grave, humane, stubborn, prodigal to excess;
To the world adverse, fortune me disowns.
Shame makes me vile, and anger makes me brave,
Reason in me is cautious, but my heart
Doth, rich in vices and in virtues, rave;
Sad for the most, and oft alone, apart;
Incredulous alike of hope and fear,
Death shall bring rest and honor to my bier.

{Illustration: UGO FOSCOLO.}

Cantù thinks that Foscolo succeeded, by imitating unusual models, in seeming original, and probably more with reference to the time in which he wrote than to the qualities of his mind, classes him with the school of Monti. Although his poetry is full of mythology and classic allusion, the use of the well-worn machinery is less mechanical than in Monti; and Foscolo, writing always with one high purpose, was essentially different in inspiration from the poet who merchandised his genius and sold his song to any party threatening hard or paying well. Foscolo was a brave man, and faithfully loved freedom, and he must be ranked with those poets who, in later times, have devoted themselves to the liberation of Italy. He is classic in his forms, but he is revolutionary, and he hoped for some ideal Athenian liberty for his country, rather than the English freedom she enjoys. But we cannot venture to pronounce dead or idle the Greek tradition, and we must confess that the romanticism which brought into literary worship the trumpery picturesqueness of the Middle Ages was a lapse from generous feeling.

ALESSANDRO MANZONI