SIG SENATOR'S NEPHEW. IGNORA had journeyed away with her husband; I was become a scholar in the school of the Jesuits; new occupations engrossed me; new acquaintances presented themselves; the dramatical portion of my life begins to unfold itself. Here years compress themselves together; every hour is rich in change, a whole cycle of pictures, which, now seen from a distant point of view, melt together into one great painting my SCHOOL-LIFE. As it is to the stranger who for the first time ascends the mountains, and now looks down from above over a sea of clouds and mist, which, by degrees, raises itself or separates, so that now a mountain-top with a city peeps forth; now the sun-illumined part of a valley reveals itself. Thus comes forward and changes the world of my mind. Lands and cities, about which I had never dreamed, lay hid behind the mountains which bounded the Campagna : history peopled every portion of the earth for me, and sang to me strange legends and adventures; every flower, every plant, contained a meaning; but most beautiful to me appeared my father-land, the glorious Italia! I was proud of being a Roman; every point in my native city was dear and interesting to me; the broken capitals, which were thrown down as corner-stones in the narrow streets, were to me holy relics Memnon's pillars, which sang strangely to my heart. The reeds by the Tiber whispered to me of Romulus and Remus ; triumphal arches, pillars, and statues, impressed upon me yet more deeply the history of my father-land. I lived in its classical antiquity, and the present time, that will speak for itself: my teacher of history gave me praise and honor for it. Every society, the political as well as the spiritual, assem blies in the taverns, and the elegant circles around the cardtables of the rich, all have their harlequin; he bears now a mace, orders, or ornaments: a school has him no less. The young eyes easily discover the butt of their jests. We had ours, as well as any other club, and ours was the most solemn, the most grumbling, growling, preaching of harlequins, and, on that account, the most exquisite. The Abbé Habbas Dahdah, an Arab by descent, but educated from his earliest childhood in the papal jurisdiction, was at this time the guide and director of our taste, the æsthetical head of the Jesuit school, nay, of the Academia Tiberina. In later years I have often reflected on poetry, that singular, divine inspiration. It appears to me like the rich gold ore in the mountains; refinement and education are the wise workmen who know how to purify it. Sometimes purely unmixed ore-dust is met with, the lyrical improvisation of the poet by nature. One vein yields gold, another silver; but there are also tin, and even more ordinary metals found, which are not to be despised, and which sometimes can, with polishing and adorning, be made to look like gold and silver. According to these various metals I now rank my poets, as golden, silver, copper, and iron men. But after these comes a new class, who only work in simple potters' clay- the poetasters - yet who desire as much to be admitted to the true guild. Habbas Dahdah was one of these, and had just ability sufficient to make a sort of ware, which with a kind of poetical facility he overwhelmed people, with whom, as regarded deep feeling and poetical spirit, he could not measure himself. Easy, flexile verses, and the artistical formation of them, so that they only brought before the eye existences, hearts, and other such things, obtained from him admiration and applause. It might be, therefore, perhaps only the very peculiar melody of Petrarch's sonnets that attracted him to this poet. Perhaps, also, only fashion, or a fixed idea, a bright gleam in the sickliness of his views, for Petrarch and Habbas Dahdah were extremely different beings. He compelled us to learn by heart almost a fourth part of the long epic poem, Africa," where salt tears and blows rained down in honor of Scipio.1 66 1 In order to immortalize himself and the Scipios, Petrarch wrote an The profoundness of Petrarch was daily impressed upon us. "Superficial poets," said he, "those who only paint with water-colors, children of fancy, are the very spawn of corruption; and among the very greatest of these that Dante, who set heaven, earth, and hell, in movement to obtain immortality, which Petrarch has already won by a single little sonnet -is disgusting, very disgusting! To be sure he could write verse! It is these billows of sound which carry his Tower of Babel to the latest age. If he had only followed his first plan, and had written in Latin, he would have shown study; but that was inconvenient to him, and so he wrote in the vulgate which we now have. 'It is a stream,' says Boccaccio, 'through which a lion can swim, and a lamb may walk.' I find not this depth and this simplicity. There is in him no right foundation, an eternal swaying between the past and the present! But Petrarch, that apostle of the truth, did not exhibit his fury with the pen by placing a dead pope or emperor in hell; he stood in his time like the Chorus in the Greek tragedy, a male Cassandra, warning and blaming popes and princes. Face to face he dared to say to Charles the Fourth, 'One can see in thee that virtues are not heritable!' When Rome and Paris wished to offer him the garland, he turned to his contemporaries with a noble self-consciousness, and bade them to declare aloud whether he were worthy to be crowned as a poet. For three days he submitted to an examination as if he were a regular school-boy like you, before he would ascend the Capitol, where the King of Naples hung around him the purple mantle, and the Roman senate gave to him the laurel crown which Dante never obtained." Such was every oration which he made, to elevate Petrarch and depreciate Dante, instead of placing the noble pair side by side, like the fragrant night-violet and the blooming rose. We had to learn all his sonnets by heart. Of Dante we read not a word; and I only learned through the censure of Habbas Dahdah that he had occupied himself with heaven, purgatory, and hell, three elements which attracted me in the epic poem called Africa which is now forgotten in the glory of his melodious sonnets to Laura, which he himself did not set any high value upon. · Author's Note. highest degree, and inspired me with the greatest desire to become acquainted with his works. But this could only be done in secret; Habbas Dahdah would never have forgiven me meddling with this forbidden fruit. One day as I was walking on the Piazzo Navone, among the piled-up oranges, and the iron wares which lay on the ground, among the old clothes, and all that chaos of rags which this place exhibits, I came upon a table of old books and prints. There lay caricatures of maccaroni-swallowers, Madonnas with the sword in the bleeding heart, and such like highly dissimilar things. A single volume of Metastasio drew my attention; I had a paolo in my pocket- a great sum for me, and the last remains of the scudi which Excellenza had given me half a year before for pocket-money. I was willing to expend a few bajocci1 on Metastasio, but I could not separate myself from my whole paolo. The bargain was nearly closed, when my eyes caught a title-page, "Divina Commedia di Dante my forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! I threw down Metastasio and seized the other; but the price of this was too high for me; three paoli I could not raise. I turned the money in my hand till it burned like fire, but it would not double itself, and I could only beat down the seller to that price. This was the best book in Italy the first poetical work in the world, he said; and a stream of eloquence over Dante, the depreciated Dante of Habbas Dahdah, poured from the lips of the honest man. "Every leaf," said he, "is as good as a sermon. He is a prophet of God, under whose guidance one passes through the flames of hell, and through the eternal paradise. You do not know him, young gentleman! or otherwise you would immediately give the price if I asked a scudi for him! For your whole life long you have then the most beautiful book of the father-land, and that for two poor paoli!" Ah! I would willingly have given three if I had but had them, but now it was with me as with the fox and the sour grapes; I also would show my wisdom, and retailed a part of Habbas Dahdah's oration against Dante, whilst I exalted Petrarch. 1 A scudi contains ten paoli, and a paolo ten bajocci; these last are copper coins, the other silver. - Author's Note. "Yes, yes!" said the bookseller, after he had vindicated his poet with much violence and warmth, "you are too young, and I am too much of a layman to be able to judge such people. They may both be very good in their way! You have not read him! you cannot ! A young, warm fellow cannot cherish bitterness against a world's prophet!" As I now honestly confessed to him that my opinion was merely founded upon the judgment of my teacher, out of inspiration for his poet's works he seized the book and threw it to me, demanding only, in return for the paolo short, that I would now read it, and not condemn the pride of Italy, her beloved, divine Dante. O how happy that book made me! It was now my own, my own forever. I had always cherished a doubt of the bitter judgment of Habbas Dahdah; my curiosity and the warmth of the bookseller excited me in the highest degree, so that I could hardly wait for the moment when, unseen by others, I could begin the book. A new life was now opened to me; my imagination found in Dante an undiscovered America, where nature operated on a larger and more luxuriant scale than I had before seen, where were more majestic mountains, a richer pomp of color. I took in the great whole, and suffered and enjoyed with the immortal singer. The inscription over the entrance to hell rung within me, during my wandering with him below, like the tolling for the last judgment: "Through me ye enter the abode of woe; Through me to endless sorrow are ye brought; By highest wisdom, and by primal love." 1 I saw in that air, ever black, like the sand of the desert which is whirled by the tempest, the race of Adam falling like leaves in autumn, whilst lamenting spirits howled in the torrent of air. Tears filled my eyes at the sight of noble, lofty beings who, unparticipants of Christianity, had here their abode. Homer, Socrates, Brutus, Virgil, and many others, 1 Wright's Dante. |